Ronan grinned and dragged his fingers through his hair.
“Well, that was fun,” he said, no longer slurring. “Wasn’t it? Ahh.”
Ronan was composed and coherent once more. It was as if the red carpet were haunted and he’d been possessed for a dozen or so stairs. I raised my hands at my sides to try to express my incomprehension.
“Care to explain what the fucking, goddamn hell just happened?” I asked in a low whisper, glancing at the fine ladies and gentlemen streaming into the hotel.
Ronan wiggled loose another button on his white silk shirt and glanced down at me with a frown.
“What?” was all he said.
“What?” I repeated, nearing exacerbation. “What do you mean ‘what?’? It was like an entirely different person got out of the car.”
Ronan grinned and patted my cheek. “Exactly.”
He slipped past me and walked straight in the shadows only to stumble into the light like I’d shoved him. I hurried after, my skirt brushing against my legs with the noise of wind through the trees. I caught up with Ronan beneath a crystal chandelier.
“You’re acting like you’re shit-faced,” I whispered, my heels clicking and clacking on the marble floors beside him.
“I am drunk,” Ronan said, winking at an old woman in a high-necked lace gown who scowled and looked away.
“You haven’t had a drop and you know it.”
Ronan stopped and moved me around so our shoulders were squared with one another’s.
“Drunk on life, Delaney,” he said, eyes darting around us. “Kiss me.”
I frowned. “What?”
“Kiss me.”
“No.”
“Kiss me.”
“No.”
“Fine.”
Before I could stop him, Ronan swiped his thumb along my bottom lip and then smeared my deep berry-coloured lipstick along his throat.
“Thanks, love.”
Before I got over my shock, Ronan slipped past me and disappeared into the crowd.
I could still hear him, though, hollering over the hushed conversations. “Who, pray tell, can direct me to the nearest tequila?”
Dammit. I couldn’t just leave the idiot alone.
I weaved my way through the crowd of raised pinkies and upturned noses and scanned the faces for Ronan’s. The ornate ceiling was painted with an angelic fresco interrupted only by the flicker of candlelight from five gold chandeliers. Pale pink velvet curtains covered tall, narrow windows on one wall, and floor-to-ceiling mirrors on the other doubled the glimmer of crystal goblets on white linen-covered tables, diamond necklaces on perfumed décolletage, and gleaming teeth on politely nodding faces. A harpist played in one corner and staff in long-tailed suits slipped expertly through the guests with trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres held aloft.
Finding Ronan turned out to be quite easy as he was the only tall man with a boyish cowlick ruffled up at the back of his head instead of smoothed down and refined with gel and, you know, a comb.
I found Ronan holding up a server with an array of olives on a tray balanced on his shoulder as he popped a black olive on his middle finger to match the ones already on his pinkie and ring finger.
“—just snazzy, you know?” I heard him explaining to the waiter. “Ladies get jewels, but we should be able to look snazzy, too, you know?”
“Can I talk to you?” I asked, grabbing Ronan’s hand as he went for another olive.
I smiled at the server, who gladly took his leave, happy for the excuse to disappear.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “You’re not acting like yourself.”
Ronan laughed as he examined his olive fingers in the same way a woman admires a fresh manicure.
“Of course not,” he said before craning his neck to see if he could spy where the server with the olives went.
I stared up at Ronan and then said, crossing my arms over my chest, “I don’t understand.”
Ronan checked that nobody was paying the two of us any particular attention and then sighed as he leaned down to talk to me in a low voice. “Have you really learned nothing so far?”
My eyes darted between his, trying and failing to understand. I let my silence speak for itself. Ronan scanned the crowd as he explained, “Your job isn’t to be who you are. Your job is to be who they think you are, who they want you to be. I get what I want because I’m not a threat to anyone, because they see me as an inconsequential fly, because my behaviour is always dismissed as just being ‘me’. But none of it is me; it’s just a fine-tuned construction of me.”
Ronan’s eyes found mine with a self-satisfied grin.
“I don’t like it,” I said. “I don’t like