Dominic came back into the room in the middle of Helen's conversation with herself. He carried a tray, which he sat down on a coffee table. Helen thought about Mark’s stir-fry and examined what Dominic had created. There was a glass dish with shrimp and cocktail sauce, three different kinds of cheeses on a plate, and a myriad of sliced fruit organized on a different plate. Yeah, he definitely knew how to cut.
“I’ve missed the last thing,” he said blithely as he quickly returned to the kitchen. He came back with a bottle of tonic water and two Champagne flutes. “Did I get your tastes right?” he asked as he unscrewed the top of the tonic water.
Helen smiled and searched the tray for crackers. Noticing there weren’t any and she found the nerve to complain. “Don’t rich people eat crackers?” she asked, picking up a piece of cheese and putting it in her mouth.
“Of course,” Dominic laughed. “How thoughtless of me. I’ll be right back.”
Apparently, he thought her demanding a cracker was adorable, and Helen wondered if she could do anything that would turn Dominic off. Well, once both of them spilled their guts, he would see how poorly the two of them matched up. Helen would have bet her falsies on it.
When he came back, they began eating together. Dominic sat on the floor with his back to an armchair. That way, the light from the fireplace illuminated one half of his face and the other half was left in shadow. Maybe it was intentional. He also undid the top two buttons on his shirt. Maybe his collar was choking him... maybe.
“I said I wanted to tell you my motivation behind making you a model. You must be able to guess one of the reasons,” he said simply.
Helen couldn’t forget he had interrupted her date with Mark no less than an hour ago so that Laura could spend some quality time with her object of desire. “Naturally, you haven’t squared things off with Laura, so you’re still doing her bidding.”
“Yes.”
“Care to explain why you owe her?”
“She wouldn’t like that,” he said before biting into a shrimp and ripping off the tail.
“Besides, that has nothing to do with our current situation.”
“Fine,” Helen agreed, sounding like cool-headed ‘Vera,' even though she was dressed like ‘Helen.' “She likes Mark and for some reason she will be content with no other man. You are willing to help her because she’s blackmailing you and so you casually offer me five hundred dollars to leave his apartment—which you still haven’t paid me,” she reminded him casually.
“I’ll pay you when I drop you off,” Dominic said. He even looked impressed that she hadn’t forgotten about the money. “Yes, Laura is quite crazy about Mark. I can’t see the reason myself, but—”
“She isn’t going to get him,” Helen interrupted.
“You’re going to get in the way?” Dominic asked, looking intrigued.
“No,” Helen said shortly. “She’s still assuming I’m the barrier stopping her. In reality, it has nothing to do with me. He may have used me as a scapegoat to explain his waning interest, but it’s nothing but a pretense. It won’t matter how many of his girlfriends you dispose of. He’s not interested in her.”
“Well,” Dominic said, raising his eyebrows. “What can we do to make him interested in her?”
“What? You can’t seriously be asking me how to get him to fall for her.”
“Why not? I think you have the skills to teach her how to to turn his head.”
“Even if I do, it's not like she would take advice from me!” Helen rolled her eyes.
“I wasn’t thinking you’d give her hints directly. You’d give them to me and I’d relay them to her—”
“Without telling her where they came from,” she finished for him.
“Basically.”
A brief silence passed before Helen said, “Look, it’s too late. He already has established ideas about Laura and her personality. Meaning, he knows her. More than a surface ‘I met her at a party’. He knows her. He knows how her brain works, her habits, and he knows that her lack of charm is part of her character. There’s no chance for a first impression or the thrill of meeting someone new. If she started using feminine wiles on him at this point, it would look gruesomely obvious. He would know something was up. He’s just not interested. I think your time would be better spent trying to get her to land someone new.”
Dominic cleared his throat and said stiffly, “You think I haven’t tried that? It’s Mark or it’s no one.”
“Well, what have you tried, besides repeatedly buying me? To be honest, I think you’re backing into this from the wrong angle—probably because it’s more fun for you.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, just think. Has Laura ever been romanced? Has a man ever treated her the way I treated you on Valentine’s Day? Has anyone ever gone out of their way to make her feel special and sexy?”
“I don’t know,” he answered slowly.
“If I were you, I’d hire a male escort for her, tell her it’s a blind date, and give the escort specific instructions on how to treat her.”
“That’s no good. What if she falls in love with the escort?”
Helen sighed. “That’s not the issue. The escort would merely be a transition man to get her heart off Mark. If she notices how the escort treats her compared to Mark (who doesn’t do her any favors), then maybe she’ll break out of her shell and start to think about other men. Ever think about that? And on the plus side, if charming Mark happens to see her with another man and experiences a twinge of jealousy then maybe your job will be over and she’ll get him in the end anyway." Helen couldn’t read the expression on Dominic’s face, but the more she thought about it the more she thought it was a good idea. “I think it would work even better if you hired more than one escort for more than one date. Give her a whole string of men and instruct each of them to act slightly differently toward her. After a few dates, she'll believe there's a whole world of men out there she's never known about. With a bit of luck, she'll get a little daring and find herself a new man without wanting any more help from you.”
“That’s an interesting idea,” Dominic said as he flicked his hair away from his eyes.
“Except I don’t really have the time to set all that up. Do you think you could help me?”