Free Vixen by Jillian Larkin Page A

nimbly. And all without music.
    Unfortunately, they’d been interrupted by Miss Wilma before Violet could finish. “Girls! That’s not what I call a water break!” she hollered. “Stop that immoral writhing and give me twenty jumping jacks.”
    Now Lorraine was trying to re-create Violet’s moves and show Gloria what the Charleston was all about. “Here’s how you do it,” she instructed, kicking out her legs and trying not to fall on the floor. Around her, dozens of other flappers were doing the very same dance, only slightly more naturally than she was. From a few feet away, Marcus watched them and laughed.
    “I don’t know,” Gloria said doubtfully. “You look a little … spasmodic.”
    “Oh, please! I’m doing it perfectly.” Lorraine threw her arms up into the air and shouted, “Who’s dry now, Chicago?” It was what she imagined a true flapper would say, a sticking-it-to-the-drys who supported the Prohibition.
    “I think I’m going to take a break from the Charleston,” Gloria said, still watching Lorraine. “At least until I can figure out how to do it right.”
    “Right, shmight,” Lorraine said, out of breath. “It’s all about having fun.”
    Marcus came forward and hooked his arm through Gloria’s. “Come with me, Glo, so we can have a toast to our girl Clara’s new look.”
    Gloria snatched a teacup from a waiter walking by, downing its contents without missing a beat. “You two go have fun. I think I’m going to watch the band for a while,” she said, drifting away from Marcus and Lorraine.
    Gloria had been acting noticeably strange since the night began. Lorraine had attributed it to nerves, but usually when Gloria was nervous, she talked a mile a minute; tonight, however, she’d barely uttered a word.
    Either way, there was no time to worry about Gloria now. This was Lorraine’s moment to have Marcus alone. She took his hand and pushed through the gaggles of flappers until they landed at the bar. Marcus immediately ordered them both martinis. There was something innately seductive when a man ordered a drink for you—Marcus
had
to be interested in her on some subliminal level.
    Except for the fact that he had his eye on a willowy blonde at the end of the bar.
    “I feel as if I’m on the beach in Cuba,” Lorraine shouted over the music. She held her cool glass up to his cheek.
    “What are you doing?”
    “It looked as if you needed to cool down,” Lorraine said.
That sounded seductive, right?
    Marcus smirked, clearly not picking up on her flirtatious vamping. Did he not see that she was wearing her “naked dress”—the flesh-toned one that ended in shimmery layers like a mermaid’s tail, leaving very little to the imagination? He was acting as if she were dressed in a potato sack. She needed to say something,
anything
to draw his attention.
    “So, Marcus, what do you think the speakeasy scene will be like when we get to New York?”
    This time she caught him. His head snapped around. “We?”
    She hadn’t meant to let it slip. Not here, not now. But according to Freud’s
Psychopathology of Everyday Life
—which she had self-consciously listed as her favorite book on her Barnard admissions application—perhaps it was her subconscious kicking in. What better time to plant the seed in his mind: the two of them, Chicago castaways, together in New York.
    She leaned in closer. “I have a secret to tell you.”
    Marcus raised an eyebrow. “I
love
a good secret.”
    Just as Raine was about to reveal to him what no one else besides her parents knew, someone rammed into her from behind, sending her tumbling into Marcus’s arms. She looked up into his deep blue gaze, their faces millimetresapart, and she couldn’t stop herself: She leaned in and kissed him.
    Their lips barely touched before Marcus pulled away. “What are you doing?”
    “Oh, I …,” she mumbled, mortified. She hadn’t expected such a reaction. “The gin must have gone to my head