Maggie Duncan’s fourth decade on earth sped along at warp speed as she clung to its coattails, widowed, childless, and unattached.
Currently seated in the eat-in kitchen of an attractive townhouse, she considered the wine glass her host, a man called Stavros, set before her. The balloon-shaped bowl on a long fragile stem looked half as wide and approximately as deep as that big zero in Florida’s abdomen known as Lake Okeechobee.
“So, your name is Stavros.” Maggie’s blunt tipped finger rimmed the glass. She’d met him by chance at a convenience store only an hour before. “Just Stavros?”
He nodded.
“Mysterious.” She took a tentative sip. The wine coated her tongue and slid down her throat. The merlot’s warmth wrapped second thoughts about her reckless acceptance of his invitation into a snug blanket and Maggie surrendered to the moment’s spell. She gazed into mesmerizing eyes as dark and shiny as moonlit water. What color were they? Dark…brown. No, actually, they were green and as dark as malachite.
He chuckled. “Call me Stav, if you prefer.” The man of Mediterranean heritage filled his glass, but offered no last name or details. Maggie wondered if the name was real, or created just for her. She didn’t normally engage in pick ups, in fact never before, but wandering the dateless desert for some time prompted Maggie to know if she could attract a man as magnetic as the man sitting across the table.
“Excellent wine, no?” Stav’s voice settled on her eardrums like a zephyr. The resonant timbre, such that any pied piper would envy, seduced her into tagging along with Stav after she’d purchased bottled water following a long bike ride.
“Very good,” Maggie replied. Even she tasted the difference of this wine compared to the swill in her pantry, boxed in four-packs, used primarily for cooking. She plucked away a strand of hair that strayed to her blue dress while clandestinely studying Stavros. It was then Maggie noticed gray in his hair, too, and age creases on his forehead.
Wait. Wasn’t wine supposed to dull reality? She took another sip, then another, and finally one bold gulp for good measure.
Stav reached for her hand and held it. Maggie didn’t object. He’d already charmed her out of her common sense. So, what could he charm her into? Taking into account the lap-pool capacity of the glass, how warm her hand felt in his and her current emotional vulnerability, probably a lot.
Maggie shed her usual cloak of caution when she came here and no longer cared about the wisdom of her actions. Let the good times role, baby. Her hand felt good in his but no major sparks revved her pulse. Maybe that would come later.
The sudden click of a key turning in a door lock beyond their vision visibly alarmed Stavros. His charming manner evaporated. He jumped up. His eyes went wild, looking from her to the doorway leading to the other rooms then back to her.
His sexy tone went from purr to snarl, “Go, Maggie. Now.” He jerked her up by a wrist and tugged her toward a French door a few feet away.
“Hey, watch it.” She reacted to his minor manhandling by taking back her arm. Stavros’ words registered but didn’t connect. “Go?” She rubbed her forearm though it was merely warm, not sore. “Why?” she blurted, spewing droplets of wine-soaked saliva onto his glass-topped rattan table. “We just got here,” she protested, stubbornly anchored near the table, unwilling to forego the ambiance of the Tuscany yellow walls, craving another sip of that good stuff, imported from someplace other than California.
“Something’s wrong. Only I should have a key.” He started to rush away.
Wine-befuddled, Maggie envisioned a brewing domestic storm with her at the center. The specter of an angry wife and chagrined husband circled her like the vortex of an imaginary emotional cyclone. She challenged, “You didn’t fib about your matrimonial status, did you? That’s not your wife, is it?”
He jerked to a stop and looked aghast, moving his hand to his hip. “Certainly not,” he said then he left.
Maggie’s feet, mired in sticky disbelief at the sudden change in circumstances, finally reacted to voices that rose and fell in indecipherable rants beyond the kitchen wall. Shrieks ensued in a foreign language; glass shattered and rained down on tile.
“Maybe I should go.” She scrambled to the French door, exited, and rapidly descended the steps. Near the bottom, her Nine West sling back pumps with tiny kitten heels balked. Her forward momentum continued, allowing her left shin to get up close and personal with a stair lip.
Sprawled on the walkway, she picked herself up and took a tentative step. A growing goose egg caused her to limp. High humidity and eighty plus degrees in a late October day in Palm Beach County hardly aided breathing. Neither had eight pounds she couldn’t shed, or that adrenaline-induced sprint down the stairs.
“Oh, no. My purse,” Maggie wailed to the purple haze of a rapidly descending dusk offering little solace for forgotten tan Coach Bags or burst romantic bubbles.
Upstairs, slumped on cool ivory floor tiles, was her find from a consignment store. In it were her cell phone plus all identification, and a photograph of her mother, dead only a year. A beloved photograph in an antique locket sans chain she always carried on her keychain.
Now, she had nothing: no ID, no phone, and no money, not even change for a pay phone, if she could find one. Desire for that precious memento spurred her to act.
Okay. She would proceed to Stavros’ front door, confront him, and reclaim her things before heading home, head high, on her bike.
Alas, when she rounded the building, her bike was gone.
Parked at the curb was a dark Taurus sedan. It hadn’t been there before, she didn’t think, not that she remembered much, having been enthralled by Stavros’ sexy, confident demeanor. A peek inside the vehicle revealed rumpled paper floor mats bearing a rental car company logo. Maybe the rental car was his, or belonged to whoever had “dropped by”.
She hobbled up the townhouse stairs, no easy feat as there were an even dozen to climb. Pumping up her flagging ego, she fumed as she rang the bell. “Who does that Greek bearing wine goblets thinks he is to toss me out like that?”
The bell brought no response. Sobering up, and getting madder by the minute, Maggie pounded on the door. When it opened, it wasn’t Stavros who greeted her but some aging Goth, an Amazon, dressed head to foot in black-including extreme leather pumps that accounted for four inches of her six-foot height. Neither of them, Maggie suspected, would threaten a GenXer female.
“Yes?” Goth Gal puffed on her long, slim, brown cigarette.
For the moment, Maggie played nice. “May I please speak to Stavros?”
“Who?”
Maggie offered a tight, “come off it” grin. “Male, 50’s, tan, green eyes, blue polo, fab-u-lous voice.”
“What do you want?”
At first, Maggie dismissed the cigarette-waving arrogance as Continental snobbery but Goth Gal’s tone sounded slightly menacing.
“My purse, for one thing.” Appealing to the woman’s sentimentality, Maggie said, “Inside is an irreplaceable photo-of my mother. My dead mother.” Then, she remembered her bike. “And my bike is gone, too.”
“I know nothing of any handbag or bicycle.” Euro-chick gestured to glass shards on the floor. “Perhaps you can explain the broken tabletop? And—” she tossed her head raising a startling strong jaw-“the wine glass on the kitchen table brandishing lip marks in the exact shade of lipstick you’re wearing?”
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