Free One Unforgettable Evening by Dusty Miller

One Unforgettable
Evening
     
    Dusty Miller
     
     
    This Smashwords edition copyright 2014
Dusty Miller and Long Cool One Books
     
    Design: J. Thornton
     
    ISBN 978-1-927957-04-2
     
     
    The following is a work of fiction. Any
resemblance to any person living or deceased, or to any places or
events, is purely coincidental. Names, places, settings, characters
and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. The
author’s moral right has been asserted.
     
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    Table of Contents
     
    Scene One
     
    Scene Two
     
    Scene Three
     
    About the Author
     
     
     
    One Unforgettable
Evening
     
     
    Dusty Miller
     
     
    Scene One

     
    “ Hello. I hope you will
forgive my intrusion.”
    “ Huh?” Leon looked at his
wife as if to ask, ‘Do you know this
guy?’
    Adelia was shaking her
head.
    The stranger was tall, aquiline, with
jet-black hair raked back in long lines and held down with mousse.
He stood beside their table, where the pair had been having a
standard-issue anniversary dinner. He was very
good-looking.
    It was their seventeenth anniversary.
It was a number which, as Leon had pointed out earlier, didn’t call
for anything special.
    “ Pardon me, sir?” Adelia
was a little bit intrigued, if nothing else, by the question of how
to make this guy go away.
    They needed to make an
escape.
    She just wanted to get it
over and done with by this point, chalk it up to experience and go
home. The dress she had picked out of her closet, which looked fine
in the bedroom mirror at home, was somewhat frumpy and a little out
of place compared to the chic and expensive frocks she was seeing
all around her. Her shoes were a little too flat and and maybe a
little too sensible, and her hair was all wrong, and what did she expect
anyways?
    She was a married woman.
    Leon looked completely underwhelming
in grey slacks and a golf shirt that didn’t cost him nine dollars,
and that ill-fitting dark blue jacket, now that he wouldn’t let
Adelia shop for him anymore. You couldn’t pay Leon to wear a tie
these days.
    It was company branding and all that.
They said it was working out, though.
    “ I couldn’t help myself.
It’s just that I was struck by your wife’s timeless, ephemeral
beauty, sir, and I simply had to congratulate the happy couple on
their anniversary.”
    Adelia’s eyebrows rose. She’d never
heard the like. His eyes swept over her and then he turned back to
Leon.
    “ My name is Thomas
Darban.” Leon rose and they shook hands. “May I send some champagne
over? It would be my privilege.”
    Leon’s mouth opened but no sound came
out.
    He raised a hand and the
waist-coated waiters, with puffy white sleeves and red pants if you
can believe it, scuttled forward with glasses and a bottle in a
bucket of ice. Leon scuttled a grin, but he’d never taken the
intangibles, the ambience, all that seriously. Not here, anyways.
    Leon settled back into his
chair. Sometimes silence is golden. But he had to say something.
    “ Mister and Missus Leon de
Marco. This is Adelia, my wife. I’m Leon—obviously.” This was said
with his customary grin. “Pleased to meet you.”
    “ Mister Darban.” Adelia’s
voice was unusually low, husky, even.
    Like she had something in her
throat.
    “ Dom Perignon.
Enjoy.”
    Darban nodded pleasantly at Leon and
took another assessing glance at Adelia, blushing and suddenly
looking very pretty in the scintillating light of the
chandeliers.
    Leon wasn’t exactly blind
to it, inept might be a better word.
    And then the fellow bowed,