The Complete Where Dreams - Volume 2 of 2

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2

Two-thirty. Damn the woman! Five more minutes and Bill was going to Jervis and make sure he didn’t send the contract to this damned woman. He’d tear it up himself if he had to.

It wasn’t like the day had been off to a good start to begin with. The kids had been in rare form, Tamara showed all the signs of having read a book until the middle of the night. She was lethargic, grumpy, and had snapped at Jaspar. He in turn had added salt to his sister’s cereal when she wasn’t looking. Bill actually had to snap at them before they pummeled each other, or even worse, messed up their school clothes ten minutes before he had to drop them off.

Then he’d spent the morning finding out that the costumes weren’t his only problem. The set designer had been timely, thorough, and innovative in his scenic design. He’d also shown absolutely no concept of what it would cost to build, to move about the stage, or store between productions. Then his lead scenic painter had broken her wrist… Bill ground his teeth and tried to beat down his e-mail that had decided today was the day everything should be labeled urgent.

At two-thirty-three, past the limit of his patience, Bill went to hunt down Wilson to fire this Williams woman before she signed any damned contract. His office was empty.

The old office building had been built into a hillside, with rooftop parking and a flight of stairs descending to the top story where the main offices were. They were a labyrinth of white-painted concrete rooms chopped up with open-plan cubicles. It had once been a moving company’s storage facility. The towering storage racks had been removed and the tall ceiling lowered with dropped T-bar and acoustic tiles. The result had been a nice enough office environment with inexplicably long flights of stairs between the tall stories. Rising from the industrial-gray carpet, the walls were magnificent with large production photos of every opera performed over the last forty years by Emerald City Opera.

Timothy, the Production Manager, had seen Wilson about an hour earlier. No one since, not Marci, Consuela, or Chloe. Where had the damn man wandered off to? Bill swung by the front desk where Nia reigned as the eyes and ears of the organization.

As he was asking, he felt someone come in through the front doors. He turned around part way to see if it was Wilson or his missing designer, then forgot how to breathe when he saw the apparition entering the small lobby from the stairs.

The woman who had walked in wasn’t the costume designer, but she was an incredible sight to behold.

He heard Nia gasp behind him, but he couldn’t turn to gauge her reaction. He couldn’t even gauge his own. He’d been slapped by a gestalt vision that his brain was now having to unravel.

Amazingly, it was Perrin Williams—yet it couldn’t be.

In place of the crazy-clothed blond waif, he now faced a towering woman of power and majesty. Her hair was the darkest, purest black, except for a stripe of her original coloring. A pale-blond stripe started at her right temple in a three-inch wide band and disappeared behind her head in a sloping spiral. It reappeared on the other side, just meeting the tips of her hair at her left shoulder.

From there, in fabric, the white stripe was picked up and continued its downward swirl across her gown, widening as it went. The dark purples and blues of her second drawing from yesterday had been incorporated. The thin white stripe of hope on her “tragic noble” was now a blazing banner. The white transitioned, by an exceptional job of hand-dying, into a gold of true glory. If he remembered correctly, every place that had been blood red in her drawing of the Prince had been turned golden in this dress.

She was hope embodied. But its message didn’t stop there.

The left shoulder extended to a tall collar encasing her neck right up under her chin and down to the clavicle. But the right shoulder was bare, a line of flesh was exposed down her ribs and that opening too extended around the side reappearing at the far hip.

A thigh-high side slit revealed even more skin in long legs of startling perfection. Every muscle enhanced and accented by the knee-tall, high-heel boots of the dark destroyer sketch. In the boots she was an inch or so taller than he was.

It was a dramatic statement that would play as well from the back of the house as it did from ten feet away. She was joy and hope and immense power all wound together.

And beauty. Gods, she was incredible. Her slender frame had been shifted from waif to sleek by the design. Every womanly shape and curve was accented by the design until her gender struck such a hard slap in the face that it left him reeling.

“Well, I guess that worked.” She sounded very pleased with herself.

Bill blinked hard. “Huh? What worked?”

She twirled on one foot proving that the look was as powerful from behind as it was from the front, and at the same time totally destroying the persona. The swirl of her hair and girlish laugh matched the crazed designer of yesterday.

“The look on your face. It so totally worked.” She did a little stomping victory dance in her high-heel boots.

He heard a laugh beside him and turned to see Nia nodding in agreement.

“What worked?” He knew he was repeating himself like a child, and not a very smart one. He couldn’t help himself, as he turned once more to admire the woman before him. She was breathtaking.