Chapter 5
Amanda
Why was it taking me so long to catch my breath? Standing close to Calvin had happened before, but my heart had never raced like that around a guy. So wrong! Calvin was still the womanizing twerp I’d always known him to be. Nothing had changed just because we’d flown in a plane to the South Seas.
Or had it?
“Let me take those.” Mr. Unexpected Gentleman moves appeared again out of nowhere. He carried my suitcases up the two flights of stairs. He put the key in my hotel room door.
I stared at him with dreamy eyes. A little haze formed around him, like I was in a movie, and I might have let out a stupid sigh.
“I have the adjoining room.” He hoisted my luggage onto the bed like it was nothing, and my eyes may have lingered on his biceps. Sure enough, he’d been working out. They bulged against the fabric.
“Should we meet for dinner?” he asked. After I managed a mute uh-huh, he disappeared into the other room with his one reasonably sized bag.
I fingered my Galadriel crown and gazed at the door between our rooms beside the fireplace. Calvin was on the other side. Changing. Showering.
I shook myself free.
Minutes later, the hot water pounded over my shoulders, clearing pond-guck from my hair and crevices. Had Calvin honestly dressed up for Halloween as a warrior elf—more than once? That couldn’t be true! But if it were, the idea definitely tripped a wire inside me, setting my love alarms a-screaming. I’d better pull the plug on them, tout de suite.
Speaking of—what the heck? He spoke French, too? In my wildest— No, I didn’t want to acknowledge that a man speaking French was my other Achilles heel, crush-wise. I’d been a goner ever since I saw that movie where the teenage girls go to France and fall in love with the rich French guys. Speak français to me, baby. I’d even vacationed in Paris in hopes of my own romance, but never expected that Calvin Turner could be …
No. No, no, nope. Every single one of those breadcrumbs marked a trail to Shallow-ville. Calvin was a one-note flirt. The guy had charmed his way up the ranks of SolutionX, even flirting with Georgia. He didn’t work, he schmoozed.
We were nothing alike in any other respect, either. For one, he was a total sports guy, part of Reedsville’s tedious rhinoceros cult. For another, he didn’t care about art or history. He didn’t paint fantastic pictures in his mind about faraway places. Calvin didn’t dream in color—unless those colors were team colors or the colors of lipstick and bikinis his harem wore.
Plus, he’d spent plenty of time bagging on the hobbit quote picture at my desk.
Why? When he obviously went through his own Tolkien phase? He might try to hide it, but a fan was obvious to another fan.
Fine. Maybe there was one Calvin Mystery to solve. I dried off from my shower and selected something to wear.
Okay, maybe there were a lot of mysteries to solve, one of them being what my hormones’ problem was when it came to Calvin. They should absolutely get in line with my logic, which shouted that the guy was all wrong for us—for all the parts of us.
Now, for what to wear to irritate him most at dinner. I rifled through my suitcase and came up with the perfect thing.
“Calvin?” I knocked on his door once my hair was tamed and my dress adjusted. “You ready for dinner?”
He appeared at our adjoining door wearing—oh, my lands.
“You look …” I spluttered. He looked like he was posing for one of those magazines featuring men who cared about fashion. Although, I’m pretty sure women bought most of the copies at the check stands. “Wow.”
“Too much for an engagement send-off dinner on the SS Earnshaw? They said fancy.” He looked up from a folded pamphlet featuring a steamship on its cover and looked at me for the first time. “Oh, Amanda.”
“Right?” I spun in a circle, my deep blue velvet maxi dress with bell sleeves—of course. Always the Celtic-style bell sleeves. “You like it, eh?”
“I mean …”
Oh, good! He hated it. It took everything in me not to cackle with delight. “You assume that no one in Middle Earth is dressing like I am, but you watch. It’s actually a perfect choice.” I clung to his arm. “Now, take your Serious Girlfriend to dinner.”
We descended the grand staircase. “There’s nothing I can take seriously about you, girlfriend-status most of all, in that outfit,” he muttered.
I linked my arm through his, clinging tightly. Mmm, his cologne, which I was totally ignoring.
Down at the lake’s large dock, the old steamship was harbored. “It’s cool.” I hadn’t been expecting something so authentic.
“The brochure says it’s a hundred-year-old Edwardian-era twin-screw steamer. It is also the only remaining commercial passenger-carrying coal-fired steamship in the southern hemisphere.”