Sets Appeal. Virginia Taylor
do I. How did you plan to get there?”
“My date would have driven me.” With wide-eyed mock innocence, he pressed his lips together and leaned back, watching her face, having finished at least half his full plate of bacon and eggs.
Trying not to smile, she gave him a cool, so-that’s-why-you-want-me glance, which she wished she had given to Tim. “Do you only ask women who own cars to be your dates?”
“It’s cheaper than getting taxis.” He lowered his chin and gazed at her. And he gave her that creased, almost dimpled, smile again.
She laughed. If she checked the paints and brushes today, she would know what she needed tomorrow when she planned to buy her supplies.
Since nothing had happened last night, she could put aside the episode. Today she and JD could be the workmates they should be. Probably.
Chapter 3
Rustic and picturesque, the massive old corrugated iron shed was sited in one of the small streets on the perimeter of the city of Adelaide. Because of Vix’s insistence on stopping at her own house to change her clothes, and consequently being late, Jay gave a regal wave through the car’s window to the construction team, who sat propped against a wall rusty with copper streaks.
For twenty minutes, he had sprawled in her car, which she had driven to Walkerville, a small, exclusive suburb between his not-so-classy suburb, Port Adelaide, and the city. After she had parked on a street with wide green verges and big shady street trees, she had disappeared behind the brushwood fence that hid her house. His wait was not unrewarded. She looked as delicious in her tight designer jeans and yellow loafers as she did in her red suit last night, though perhaps a little less self-conscious.
She pulled up her luxurious Mercedes sedan in the designated car park, surfaced with cracked concrete and plastered with dried mud from the rain last week.
“Was your girlfriend going to play volleyball?” she asked after a quick glance at the four-man, three-woman team, who needed Jay’s key to get inside the building.
“Careful. Too much more questioning and I’ll suspect you want more than a one condom fling.” Seeing he had embarrassed her, he relented. “Lonny’s not my girlfriend. She and I have known each other since we were five.”
“And she is also part of your construction team?”
“No. I just take her out when she has nothing else to do.” The waiting look on her face wanted him to continue, but he didn’t have anything else to say.
She opened her door after a wry little twist of her lips. “I’ll look at the paint supplies first. The production budget is generous and I can buy whatever I need, but I don’t know what I need until I see what’s here.”
He nodded, opened his door, and stepped out. The guys had casual, noncommittal expressions on their faces, which meant they would put him through a bit of hard-line questioning about Vix.
“This is Vix, guys,” he said, hoping he could preempt a grilling as he strode past everyone to the door. He shoved the key in the lock. “She’s the set painter.”
“Hi, Vix,” Sherry, his brother Luke’s wife, said, trying not to look too interested. “I’ll introduce you to everyone, since JD seems to have forgotten our names.”
“She met Trent and Steve last night.” Jay leaned on the double-height door, which creaked open. The space inside was light-filled, courtesy of a large, dusty glass panel in the roof. Sparkling motes floated from there to the floor. The flats and cutouts of old sets covered the walls, some hung high, most left around for recycling.
“Of course,” Vix said, apparently recognizing the two grinning guys he’d been with before she’d arrived at the party and been whisked away by Jay. “I didn’t realize you were set builders, too.”
“And this is Luke, my man and JD’s brother.” Sherry wrinkled her little snub nose at Jay. She was pretty, dark haired, and dark eyed, a contrast to Luke, who was stocky, red haired, and freckled. “So is Kellen, who brought two dates today, in case JD needed one. Lonny doesn’t always turn up.”
Jay’s middle brother, Kellen, dark and dangerous, had a groupie addiction and chose his girls in batches, though how he decided which one he would keep for the night Jay never quite understood. Perhaps The Killer kept both. They looked the same, willing and able, with long straight hair, and he might not realize he had two instead of one. Jay nodded and smiled generally, trying to not look possessive of classy Vix, while he suppressed the urge to smack the calculation off Steve’s and Trent’s faces.
Dropping a guiding hand onto her hip, he turned her in the direction of the shed within a shed, where the paint supplies were kept by the company who owned the warehouse and employed Jay to make various sets for various stage shows. “You can look over your stuff away from these prying eyes.”
For a moment, she watched Steve and Trent as they found the posts for the net. “How many do you have on a volleyball team?”
“Two, minimum, but it depends on how many turn up to play.”
A couple of years ago, he had needed to use the volleyball game to warm up and relax the guys. These days, now expecting work from them, he used the volleyball game for mere enjoyment. After the game finished, they would pull apart old flats and reclaim whatever wood or composite sheeting was reclaimable. Most of the backing lengths had been used three or four times. With his job pricing, the lower the costs, the higher the wages.
He opened the paint-room door and steered Vix inside a space stacked with cans, dirty, paint-dried brushes, old tins, a plastic bucket, empty ice cream containers, rope, and a broken chair. “Sorry about the mess.”
She lifted a can from on top of an unsettling pile of four. “Someone seems to have been trying to save money. This is house paint, probably found in the cheap bins, and the colors have been premixed.” If a nose could curl, hers did. “They’re no use other than to the painter who bought them.”
“Put them in a pile and I’ll get rid of them. I’ll leave you to it.” Determined to keep his working relationship with her professional, he went to help tie the net to the poles.
“Lonny always said you were a cocksman,” Steve said in an undertone, shifting a couple of flats to make more room for the game. A little shorter than Jay, he was solid muscle. Every month or so, he added another tattoo to his sleeves of ink. “I’m beginning to believe it.”
“She never said you were.” Trent, tall and bony, with his fair hair shaved at the sides, punched the face of the grinning woman inked onto Steve’s tricep.
Steve considered his reply. “She said you didn’t have one.”
Jay sighed. “Give it a rest.”
Both men, part of his old gang from school days, had left dead-end construction work to help him start his set-building business, and from there, they’d moved ahead in leaps and bounds. Each had branched out into more specialized building jobs, Trent recently qualifying as a bricklayer and Steve as a plasterer, but both rejoined him as extra labor whenever he needed them.
Luke, his youngest brother, normally a plumber, helped out when his employers went into recess over summer, needing steady money to support his ever-growing family. At the age of twenty-six, he had three kids and had only started being responsible after the birth of the first. Kellen, Jay’s uneven-tempered middle brother, was a cabinetmaker.
And neither Jay, nor Kellen, nor Luke, had ever had sex with Ilona, the first two being too young for her, and Jay more interested in being a protector than a predator, unlike every other guy who had taken advantage of Ilona’s need to prove how attractive she was.
“Did you order the wood for the frames?” Steve kicked a few short lengths out of the way.
“What do you think?”
“So, it’ll be full-on tomorrow?”