Satellite of Love. Christa Maurice
lot of Mama Lena’s. The place was jammed. Great, now he had to use his fame to pull a few strings for a table, blowing his cover, or stand around like a jerk waiting for one. “Here we are.”
“Wow, they’re busy tonight.” She checked her watch. “Let’s hope the theater at the mall has a showing time soon so we don’t have to wait long. I don’t know about you, but I’m starved.”
Oh yeah, she would expect to wait for a table. She wouldn’t be disappointed when he couldn’t magically make one open up for her. Man, he was so out of practice for this regular dating thing.
She climbed out without waiting for him to open her door and strode toward the restaurant, giving him the chance to fall back and check out the rear view, what he could see of it above and below her black raincoat. Her calves were slender and well shaped, practically insuring fantastic legs. The three-inch heels she wore put a beautiful glide in her stride. Her hair clip wasn’t a bow or flowers. It was a gold Mickey Mouse. Mickey freakin’ Mouse. This woman was so real, she was surreal.
He pulled open the door. Nobody lingered in the tiny waiting area and a blonde in a white t-shirt and black pants with a little red waitress’s apron wrapped around her waist bounded over before the door even fell shut.
“Hi, Miss Donnelly, you need a table? Benny’s clearing one now.” The waitress’s gaze shifted over Maureen’s shoulder and her eyes went wide. He had about ten seconds before his cover went up in hysteria.
“Thanks, Tara. How’s your sister doing?” Maureen scanned the restaurant. When she returned to the waitress, the girl’s gaze pinged back to her, still wide eyed.
“My sister? Um, Ellie’s fine. Um... I’ll, um...check on Benny.” The waitress spun around and all but sprinted for the back of the restaurant. Probably headed for the kitchen where she would tell the entire staff he was here.
“Tara’s little sister was in my class two years ago.” Maureen turned and frowned. “You have grease on your face.”
“I do?” Bear watched over her shoulder for the kitchen staff to come boiling through the swinging doors to check out the visiting celebrity.
“Yeah. Do you want a Kleenex?” She dug in her purse.
“No, I’ll just go wash it off in the bathroom.” He lunged past her in the direction the waitress had gone, crossed the dining room without touching the floor and burst into the kitchen.
The entire staff huddled around Tara. They turned as a unit to stare at him. All of them in Touchstone’s target audience range.
“I told you!” Tara shrieked.
“Hush,” an older man hissed. The only one not in the crowd. “The customers will hear you.”
“Listen, I just want to have a nice quiet dinner.” Bear held up his hands. “I’ll sign all the autographs you want in here, but out there I’d really appreciate it if you treated me like anybody else.”
“But you’re not anybody else,” a girl with black hair and black rimmed glasses whimpered. “You’re Bear D’Amato from Touchstone.”
“You know Brian Ellis,” another girl said.
“And Jason Callisto.”
That broke their spell and they rushed him, order tablets out for autographs, babbling about how much they liked the album and the single and were they going to be doing a show anyplace close? He started signing. “I’m going to be in town for a few more days and I really want to keep it quiet. I just want to have dinner like anybody else. If everyone could just keep this between us until I leave, maybe I can talk the band into swinging by here while we’re on tour. But seriously, if there’s a breath of a rumor that I’m here, I can’t promise anything.”
The whole group gasped, exchanging conspiratorial glances. Hopefully, it would be as easy to arrange as it had been to promise. Sandy was going to murder him.
Tara stood in front of him with bright eyes. “Are you dating Miss Donnelly?”
“I’m having dinner with Miss Donnelly.” Eventually. If he ever managed to get back to her. He’d been gone a really long time and still had grease on his face.
“I bet she doesn’t even know who you are.” Tara clutched her autograph to her chest. “She’s so tragically unhip. I’ll go seat her.”
“Not a word,” he cautioned as she scooted through the door. Now he was lying. Flat out, no doubt, lying.
But if he told her, she’d either run screaming or latch on tighter for all the wrong reasons. He just wanted one night. Not even the whole night. For the next three hours, he wanted to be nobody special.
2
By the time he parked in her driveway, Maureen had been wrestling with the idea of coffee for five minutes. If she invited him in, he might take it to mean something more than the offer of a hot beverage on a chill night. Worse, she wasn’t sure if she didn’t mean it to be something more, which was completely out of character.
Dinner had been nice. Weird, but nice. Michael could recite whole episodes of The Simpsons with voices. He’d claimed he was working on the movie, but hadn’t had time to study it yet. That made up for the fact that the entire wait staff had gone crazy.
Tara hung around the table so much, Maureen had no idea how much soda she’d drunk. Every time her glass dropped below two thirds full, Tara swooped in to refill it. Jenny Riggs argued with a customer over their check until she was screaming and Joe had to come out to settle things. Jenny had stood in the middle of the dining room clutching her glasses in her fist so she could rub tears out of her eyes with both hands. Odder still, it appeared they hadn’t been arguing over the price, but the paper it was written on. Then Benny tripped over the jukebox power cord, unplugging it, and no one bothered to plug it back in.
“This the place?” Michael asked.
“I know it’s not much to look at.” What did he see when he looked at her tiny house? A one story yellow brick box on a postage stamp lawn? But hers, all hers. “I had a nice time tonight.”
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
“What?”
He turned in his seat, leaning toward her. “What are you doing tomorrow?”
Why was he asking about tomorrow? “Well, I was thinking about doing some laundry.”
He reached for her, but instead of stopping at her hand like she expected, he ran his fingers up her arm, over her shoulder and around the back of her neck. The electric sensation continued down her spine causing her thighs to clench and her nipples to tighten in sympathy. So out of character. “That sounds like one of those excuses,” he murmured.
“It’s not. I can’t really go anywhere. No car, remember?” She tried to draw a breath, but her lungs didn’t seem interested.
“I’ll take you anywhere you want.” Michael brushed his lips across her cheek.
A whimper escaped her. “Anywhere? What if I said Paris?”
“I’d take you to Paris. Get your passport.” He kissed the corner of her mouth.
“I have to be back on Monday for school.”
“The Concorde is really fast.”
“The Concorde doesn’t fly anymore.”
He pressed his lips to hers.
Maureen closed her eyes. Her fingers clutched his leather jacket. This was not like her at all. First dates ended with a chaste kiss at the door followed by a minimum one week interval before the second date. Michael was so unlike any man she’d ever dated. Something about him made her feel like she was standing at the edge of a volcano, considering hopping in to test the temperature of the lava.
His