She blinked at him. Writing? Seriously?
He must have seen her shock, because he said, “You can’t defeat the power of the book. But you can make it work for you.”
“You think I should write about being an evil stepmother?”
“Why not? It worked for the Wicked Witch of the West.” He grabbed a book off the shelf with a green witch on the cover. “She’s got her own sympathetic Broadway play now and it’s going to be a movie or so I hear, and she has her own soundtrack, not that horrible thing from the Wizard of Oz, and—”
“Me?” she said. “Write?”
“If you can’t,” he said, “I’m sure there are a lot of writers here who’ll write the book for you.”
“They’d do that?” she asked.
“For the right amount of money,” he said.
“You’re playing some kind of joke on me, right?’
“No,” he said. “Ask anyone.”
So she did. She started walking down the hall, asking people about vampires. She got a lot of opinions. Older people thought they were evil, but the younger ones talked about how sexy they were, and some even tried to shove vampire novels in her hands.
After a while, Charming showed up beside her with cloth bags covered in logos. As people shoved books at her, he took them and put them in the bags.
“Study materials,” he said to her very softly.
“They give this stuff away?” she asked.
“Only to people they consider influential,” he said. “Like me.”
“So they know you’re a Charming?” she asked.
He waved the badge at her. “I’m a bookseller. We’re more important than any prince.”
She tilted her head at him. “I really don’t understand this place.”
“I know,” he said. “Why don’t you let me show it to you?”
He slung the book bags over his shoulder and tucked her hand in the crook of his arm. Together they walked through the exhibition hall. She saw vampires, vampires, and more vampires, followed by werewolves and even a few zombies as romantic leads, no matter how fictitious they were.
And she saw people talking about books and arguing about them. Occasionally Charming would join them. He didn’t seem like a prince. More like a really nice man.
A man who didn’t believe in happily ever after.
But then again, neither did she.
Although she did like learning a thing or two.
And he had a lot to teach her about the Greater World. And books. And transforming wicked stepmothers into romantic heroines.
Sexy heroines.
Women who deserved their own princes charming, even if those princes were a little older, a little balder, and a whole lot nerdier than expected.
“The Charming Way” by Kristine Grayson was first published in 2010 by WMG Publishing.
Geeks Bearing Gifts
Kristine Grayson
Bethanne Dupree did not know a lot about mythology. In fact, what she knew, prior to what she later called The Event, her employees called The Incident, and her customers called The Class Action Suit, were a handful of names. Venus, Jupiter, and Zeus were the ones she could recite, not realizing that two were different names for the same guy.
On the day that the Event/Incident/Class Action Suit started, she had no idea that gods existed outside of musty textbooks and yummy Brad Pitt movies. She didn’t know that gods got bored. And she had no idea that bored gods used humans.
She certainly didn’t expect to be the victim of those gods.
And when she found out that she was, she knew she didn’t have a defense that would stand up in court.
In fact, she didn’t have a defense at all.
***
The whole mess started on an ordinary day at Eros (dot) com. All days were ordinary at Eros (dot) com. Eros (dot) com wasn’t the largest internet dating service, nor was it the smallest. It wasn’t the oldest nor the most famous.
But it had started back in the days when the internet was young. Bethanne’s then-boyfriend, Larry, wrote a program to help his geek friends find the perfect mate.
Larry named the service Eros (dot) com, figuring anyone who didn’t know the name Eros wasn’t smart enough to find a mate on Eros (dot) com. Bethanne never told him that she didn’t know who Eros was. She just quietly—and unobtrusively—looked up Eros in the dictionary. And found that Eros was what the Greeks called that cherubic half-naked boy with the bow and arrows, whom most of the known world called Cupid.
She never liked the name Eros (dot) com and she wasn’t that fond of the business, but by the time Larry’s friends had all hooked up with potential mates (and Larry realized that the girl of his dreams was actually a guy), Eros (dot) com did 2.5 million dollars a year, had sixteen employees, and a web network of over 10 million lovelorn souls.
Whatever Bethanne was (and she’d been called a lot of things), she wasn’t the kind of woman to walk away from millions, no matter how bogus she thought the company actually was.
There were a lot of desperate people out there, all willing to pay $25 per month for a standard subscription to Eros, whose best promotional campaign had claimed that you could actually trust Geeks Bearing Gifts.
Bethanne paid Larry $200,000 for the whole company with a promise that he’d get an extra 20K every time he upgraded the program—money she earned back in the first month alone. Fortunately for her, Larry, for all his brilliance, cared less about money than he did about code.
Fast forward ten years, through the dotcom crisis (which she weathered by never trying to go public) into the Bush era and beyond. Eros (dot) com still wasn’t the big gun or even, really, a small gun. It was just a bet-hedger for the desperate daters, the ones who didn’t care if their date weighed 350 pounds, so long as he could carry on a decent conversation and earn a pretty good living.
Which was why the Greek God’s arrival at the office was so very stunning.
First of all, he wasn’t calling himself a Greek god. The staff started calling him a Greek god from the moment they saw him. He called himself Ray.
He came to the office’s front door. Some clients did that. The website did say that clients could come to the office to make their initial video blog if they so chose. Most did not so choose. After all, Eros (dot) com had been designed for and still catered to the geek, and most geeks figured they could make a better v-log than some random employee at an internet dating service.
What the geeks didn’t know—and probably didn’t care about—was that Bethanne kept some make-up artists on hand. These people were supposed to make even the ugliest client look passable. Sometimes that was easier said than done. But she did keep before and after pictures, just to prove that an improvement had been made.
The office’s front door opened onto a side street near the company parking lot. Bethanne had installed a lot of security, since occasionally Eros (dot) com had to protect itself from dissatisfied clients.
Dissatisfied clients weren’t really upset with the service—they were upset with the date. They hadn’t read the fine print, which said that Eros (dot) com wasn’t responsible for the experience or really, the match. It just facilitated a meeting while—to the best of its ability—trying to screen out anyone with a criminal record.
But that didn’t stop dissatisfied customers from occasionally pounding on the door. Some hated their dates. Some hated the marriages born of the dates. And some just plain hated everything and needed someone to blame.
So Bethanne had installed a state-of-the-art security system, complete with cameras. The cameras showed a 360-degree view of the person at the door, as well as scanned for weaponry and (although she’d never admit it to the cops) used a scanning system that was similar to (but more sophisticated than) the ones airports used to see bombmaking material hidden under the clothes.
All of this meant that the moment the Greek god knocked, someone got to see a 360 degree (mostly naked) view of one of the handsomest men of all time.
/> What did one of the handsomest men of all time look like? Well, he was Greek after all, which meant he had a slight accent—although no one noticed that for a good half hour. His eyes were the startling blue of a sun-dappled sea, his skin a Mediterranean olive that accented his black-black hair.
He had broad shoulders and narrow hips (and, Bethanne thought privately as she reviewed the footage later, the best ass she’d seen on a man in her entire life). His lashes were long, his lips delicate, and his cheekbones high.
His eyes sparkled with an intelligence that might have seemed higher than normal simply because it was attached to such an astonishing face.
He – quite literally—glowed. The glow was an amazing special effect, almost as if he were lit from the inside.
“What’s he doing here?” Rachel Vadder, who was monitoring the door that day, asked to no one in particular. But her question brought Anna Cummings, the security chief, and Stuart Robinson, the IT guy in charge of facial recognition over to Rachel’s screen at a run.
“I’m sorry,” she said as they crowded around her, wanting to know what the problem was. “I didn’t mean ‘what’s he doing here?’ as in ‘oh, no! Not that guy again!’ but as in ‘What the hell is he doing here?’ As in ‘What’s wrong with him that he feels he needs us?’ I mean, really. I’ll go out with him now and he hasn’t said a word to me.”
“With that body, he doesn’t have to,” Anna said, leaning closer to the monitor.
“He can stand there for hours,” Stuart said. Stuart was another of Larry’s love-’em-and-leave-’em conquests who stayed at Eros (dot) com. “I really won’t mind.”
“You’re supposed to be looking at his face,” Rachel said tightly, even though she was the one who had just implied that this man didn’t need to be vetted.
“I…am…did…am…looking at his face,” Stuart stammered.
“I certainly am,” said Anna. “Not to mention the rest of him.”
“I don’t think we should mention the rest of him.” Bethanne spoke from behind the group.
They jumped as a unit, but didn’t turn away from the screen.
Bethanne had come to see what the commotion was all about and had found three of her most trusted employees drooling over a man standing outside the office door. A man who appeared mostly naked, at least on the computer screen. A man who appeared mostly naked on that screen without his permission.
“In fact,” Bethanne said as calmly as she could, “I think we should let him in before we violate his privacy even farther.”
“Yeah, right, sure,” Rachel said, and was about to press the enter button when Bethanne leaned forward and caught her hand.
“Follow procedure, Rachel,” Bethanne said.
“Oh, yeah, right,” Rachel said, her cheeks turning bright red. “I…I…I’m…”
She was probably trying to say she was sorry, but she couldn’t seem to finish the sentence. So Bethanne swept her employees aside and slipped into a nearby chair.
As she scooted that chair closer to the screen, she finally saw the man who would soon identify himself as Ray Greco, and her breath literally caught in her throat. Her heart sped up and her hand started to shake.
A man had never ever made her forget what she was about to do next, but this guy did. Finally, she understood all the romance novel clichés—love at first sight, so beautiful that it was impossible to see anything but him, so appealing that all she wanted to do was…
She got a grip on herself and her mental process. Then she pressed the intercom button.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, sir,” she said. “This is Eros (dot) com. Please state your business.”
He looked around until he saw one of the tiny cameras. Then he smiled at it.
Bethanne was stunned that the camera didn’t explode from the sheer wattage behind that smile. She’d never seen anything quite that powerful before.
She heard herself gasp audibly, glad she hadn’t kept the intercom button pressed, so that the only people who heard her indiscrete little reaction to that unbelievable handsome man were her three employees.
“Hi,” the Greek God said. “Your website says that I can make a video blog here if, um, you know, I want to be a client. And I do want to be a client.”
Bethanne had to replay his words in her head twice before she understood them. Because, when she first heard them, she simply reacted to the timbre of his voice. Then she thought about it, and found herself distracted by the word “timbre.” Was his voice like Gregory Peck’s? Or like Hugh Jackman’s? Both had that rich baritone that could delve into bass or rise to tenor if need be. But each had a slightly different quality, a different take on that theatrical warmth—
She had to shake off that thought too before she could replay the words one final time in her head. He wanted to be a client. He wanted to do a v-log.
If he liked making v-logs, he could come to the office every week and update. She could look on his beautiful face every week.
“I’m sorry to keep you waiting, Mr.—?”
“Greco,” he said.
“Mr. Greco.” Bethanne prided herself on her professional tone. Only she knew how hard-won it was. “Of course you can make a v-log here. If you wait near the entrance, one of our employees will get you and take you to processing, where you’ll fill out the information forms and make your first v-log.”
“Okay,” he said, but she cut off the word mid-way through the “O” and the “K.”
Her hand was still shaking.
“See?” Rachel asked, still clinging to her chair. “Why is he here? Shouldn’t he be—I don’t know—dating a supermodel or something?”
“Maybe he’s so deep in the closet that his dates with women never go well,” said Stuart in a wistful tone that Bethanne had never heard before. “Maybe he needs to find a man who—”
“Or,” Bethanne said, not wanting to hear the extent of Stuart’s fantasies, “maybe he’s shy.”
“Oh,” Anna breathed. “Imagine if he’s shy. I do so love shy men.”
“Especially if they look like Greek gods,” Stuart said.
Bethanne rolled her eyes. Before she dealt with this crew—and the still naked-appearing man outside—she had to think of someone in processing who was male and straight. Very, very straight. So straight that he might not notice a good-looking man unless the man bit him in the ass. And then he’d punch said good-looking man without a single qualm.
Everyone in this room would never punch Mr. Greco, even if he deserved it. After all, they wouldn’t want to mar his lovely skin.
She pressed a different button on the intercom.
“Craig,” she said to the straightest, most macho man who worked at Eros (dot) com, a manly man who made the Marlboro man seem like a gun-toting wimp. “Get down to the main entrance pronto. We have a potential client who has been waiting much too long to go to processing.”
“Got it,” Craig growled and signed off.
She trusted Craig to get Greco to the right department. What happened after the man arrived would be anyone’s guess. She might have to supervise that as well, given everyone’s reaction to the man (including hers).
But she would think about that in a minute. First, she had another matter to take care of.
“Your behavior,” she said to the three beside her, “was extremely unprofessional. And if Mr. Greco ever finds out about our security scanning—which is supposed to take place in less than 20 seconds—you could open us up for a lawsuit. What do you have to say for yourselves?”
Anna bowed her head. “I’m sorry.”
“I was looking at his face,” Stuart said, in a tone so defensive that he probably never really saw the man’s face at all.
“C’mon, Bethanne,” Rachel said. She’d been at Eros (dot) com for nearly fifteen years, through ups, downs, and Bethanne’s rather ugly break-up with Larry. “You saw him. We’ve never had a great beauty from either gender. He was worth staring at.”
“He’s a
client,” Bethanne said. “We’re professionals. Let’s act that way.”
Then she stomped back to her office, hoping that she could remain professional along the way.
***
Professional was hard. Professional was very hard when you were single, pushing forty, and concentrating on helping not-so-attractive people find their soulmates each and every day.
Bethanne’s office had become her refuge. She had created it during a particularly bad stretch in her life. She had broken up with Larry (over, of all people, Stuart), had bought the business, and then had been sued by six different clients who all alleged failures in the Eros (dot) com system. One client believed her new boyfriend was a stalker, another’s new boyfriend got arrested (and later convicted!) for rape, and a third had married a man who had four other wives. The remaining three cases were simple cases of buyer’s remorse—the three men claimed that the women they dated weren’t the same as the way the women had been presented on Eros (dot) com’s website.
So Bethanne had hired a big name law firm who made all of the cases go away and then redesigned the company’s disclosure forms to better protect Eros (dot) com, its owners, and its employees. Bethanne soon realized it was cheaper to hire an in-house counsel and pay an exorbitant salary for prevention than it was to keep the big name law firm on retainer.
But in the course of winning these cases, preventing future cases, and figuring out how to save herself some money, Bethanne nearly had a nervous breakdown. The shrink she’d hired (and later fired) recommended a bit of feng shui at the office, just to help Bethanne calm down.
Bethanne didn’t want to spend another fortune redesigning the Eros (dot) com offices which, in those days, were in a dying strip mall on the outskirts of town. So she bought the warehouse that became Eros (dot) com’s current offices and built a loft on the top floor.
That loft became her office. Actually, it was her office suite. The kind of office suite that most people in corporate America could only dream of. It had three sections: the reception area, where she greeted her guests and often met with them; her private working office, with her files, her various computers, and her various desks; and the apartment, complete with built-in kitchen, full-size bathroom (with a shower built for five—not that she had ever shared it with anyone), a full-size closet with enough clothes that she wouldn’t have to go home for the rest of her life, and a bedroom with a queen-sized bed and a wide-screen television hooked up to every single cable channel her provider had.
Geek Romance: Stories of Love Amidst the Oddballs Page 4