A Beauteous Flower

Chapter 11 - The Command Performance

With her point made, Mrs. Selene turned to Kelly.

"Be a dear and give her a hand, would you, Kelly girl. There's a pretty one."

Mrs. Selene's dismissal left no room for anything except compliance and Cassidy and Kelly wandered off for the lady's room to "freshen up" Cassidy's tape job. Mrs. Selene saw them off with a benign look before she turned back to Deva and Madison with a gleaming smile.

"Best of luck, ladies. The night is still young."

After Mrs. Selene left, the silent spell of her presence, which smelled like her perfume, lingered in the air. Finally, Deva spoke up.

"I say we stick to the dance floor," Deva said with a champagne toast toward the dance floor. There the dancers ebbed and flowed like a school of fish in time with the beat. All the men there were tall and heavily muscled, like a pack of Grecian statues come to life. They were gorgeous and cocky and predatory, and they cruised around the dance floor in search of a likely female target. They all had good looks and a good number of zeros on the right side of the balances in their bank accounts. Madison knew intuitively that a girl could do a lot worse than to select a boyfriend from that bunch. "High value" were the watchwords of the night, it seemed.

"He might not be gay," Deva conceded.  "But he's certainly a weirdo and why waste time on a weirdo when there is that magnificent herd of beef to choose from."

Madison's mind tripped on that word, weirdo. It gave her an uncomfortable pause as the shadow of a memory played in her head. She had heard that word before, but then she shrugged and put her glass down on the bar. Deva was right. There were plenty of gorgeous men around so why waste time on him? Why give up every woman's dream of a hot, rich young husband for a weirdo? Sure, he was an oddly attractive man with a dark gaze that made her keenly aware of her nakedness under her dress and sparked sexy little fantasies in her mind before she even knew his name, but still a weirdo.  There was no reason to choose him over these other men. Right?

Fortified with champagne, Madison and Deva hit the dance floor and blended into the school of dancers that swirled and flowed with the predatory slashes of hormonal attraction. To Madison's left Adalina pranced and flashed glimpses of red panties under her blue mini dress with energetic steps to attract her customary clump of hopefuls. Her energy and laughter kept everyone on time with the music and helped everyone amp up to true party levels. To the right, Ivy cut a likely candidate out of the herd and made him the focus of several sultry hip rolls. The man did his best to keep up, but due to the hypnotic distraction of Ivy's lurid lobo eye contact he couldn't keep time with the music. Very soon he simply gave up and stared as Ivy slithered and shimmied ever closer to him, like a cobra might enchant its prey.

Cassidy and Kelly reappeared from the bathroom with Cassidy's dress securely affixed to her breasts. Lured by the appearance of so many pretty women in one place, more men homed in on them and, in short order, each woman had their choice of several of the most eligible men in the room. Madison danced with several good prospects and did her best to encourage them while she remained noncommittal, but she couldn't quite shake a sense of distraction. In the back of her mind, she knew he was still out there, clandestine and shadowed, and from time to time, in unguarded moments, she searched the crowd for him like she might search for something lost. Unfortunately, he seemed to have disappeared, so Madison energetically went through the expected motions of attraction and did her best to convince herself she was where she needed and expected to be. After all, the best men were all here on the dance floor. Right?

After two solid hours of champagne cocktails in high heel pumps on a hardwood dance floor, Madison's vision felt a swimmy, and her feet hurt. She knew from experience that this was the time of night when a tired and lonely girl full of booze could make a mistake. Already some women had allowed themselves to disappear into the night with strange men for what most likely would turn out to be an ill-considered encounter. A few of those, which included Adalina, returned to the dance floor with slightly skewed dresses and slightly smudged makeup as evidence of one of those ill-considered encounters and, a very few of those, maybe now or later, might harbor a secret regret about those ill-considered encounters.