by Megan Mulry
“Of course I am not quitting, Sarah!” Carrie sat back down in the chair she had been using for the conference call, straightened her pad on her lap, and looked up at Sarah. “It’s just, you seem a little… distracted… since you got back from the London trip.”
Great. Distracted. You have no idea, thought Sarah. “Well,” she continued carefully, “I… it was a lot to do in a short amount of time and I think I’m having a hard time shaking the jet lag.”
“Jet lag, hmm?”
Sarah wasn’t inclined to confide much of anything to anyone, and she certainly wasn’t going to reveal her newfound (and seemingly boundless) lust to her executive vice president. Carrie Schmidt was everything that Sarah was not. She had gone to all the right Ivy League schools and had worked at three of the top luxury shoe companies in the world. When Sarah was headhunting for a seasoned MBA to run the business with her, she was almost too intimidated to hire her. Carrie was thirty-two and had confidence beyond anything Sarah could ever hope to muster. It wasn’t arrogance exactly, but Carrie didn’t take shit from anyone.
Even now, three years into their working relationship and with Sarah’s obvious seniority—she signed her paychecks, after all—the two of them still had a somewhat stilted relationship. Sarah was far more comfortable with her executive director in New York and chalked up her awkwardness with Carrie to the older woman’s blistering intelligence. Sarah didn’t need to be her confidante; she needed to be her boss.
“It’s just exhaustion, I think,” Sarah said. “I’m eager to get back to New York and start in on next year’s fall designs. I feel like I can’t get any really creative work done here.” She hoped that didn’t sound like the complete fabrication it was.
Carrie stared at her a second longer, then shrugged and stood up. “Okay then. Let me know if there’s anything you need from me.”
“Everything looks great for the board meeting. I think we’re all set. Thanks for doing all that.” Sarah went back to double-check the orders that she’d just confirmed from Bergdorf’s as Carrie headed back to her own office. The past year had been her highest in terms of gross income, but her net was slipping. She stared at the spreadsheet and continued making more speculative calculations far into the night.
Later that night, she was thinking maybe she should return to New York for the weekend, just to shake whatever it was that was dogging her. She spent hours at her drafting table and couldn’t think of a single new design. She stared at spreadsheets for hours and ended up seeing a swimming sea of numbers and no solution as to why certain cost centers refused to turn a profit. She tried to convince herself that the lush comforts of home were causing her to relive her steamy weekend of hot sex with the best man (ugh! she was such a cliché!), and if she just got back to the grit and pace of Manhattan, she’d be back to her normal, competent self.
There was really nothing for it; she started masturbating. Of course, she had done it before, a few times now and again, but it had never felt like this sort of necessary remedy to something… pressing. And a person could only take so many brisk walks along Lake Michigan (especially a person as non-brisk as herself).
Friday morning at seven, her cell phone rang and woke her from a convoluted (needless to say erotic) dream.
“Hello,” she croaked.
“Sarah James, please.”
Male. British. Official.
“Speaking.” She forced herself awake and got into a sitting position against the padded headboard; her heart started to hammer.
“I know we haven’t seen each other in quite some time, almost an entire sennight, but I was hoping you might recall a weekend we spent together a while back? My name is Devon Heyworth, in case it may have slipped your mind.”
Sarah couldn’t talk, her speech having been robbed by the warring demons of lust and shame. She wanted him so terribly, she kind of hated him for it. She took a deep breath and tried to sound nonchalant. “I think I vaguely remember meeting you. At a wedding, maybe? But I just woke up and I’m all… disheveled… and would you mind telling me a little bit more about yourself?” She could almost feel his smile through the phone line.
“I’m more interested in this dishevelment you speak of.”
Sarah’s body was shrieking: Enough of your feeble attempts to satisfy me! Call in the professional! Do it now!
“Is this phone sex?” she blurted.
“Oh my, you really are the archetype of subtlety, Sarah.” A crackling loudspeaker announcement came through the phone, almost drowning him out when he said her name.
“Where are you? There’s some sort of interference.”
“I’m at Heathrow. I have to be in Chicago on business for a few days. Are you already back in New York?”
Her heart, which had slowed to a steady, animated trot, leapt back to a full gallop. “Uh, no, I am still in Chicago. What brings you to Chicago? I am ashamed to confess I don’t even know what you do for a living. I had just assumed you were a dilettante… or a part-time race car driver.”
“Both, actually. But when not being dilettantish or popping bottles of champagne after a win at Le Mans, I work for an architectural firm here in London.” There was a brief silence in which Devon had a very fleeting and very unpleasant desire to be legitimate.
“An architect… really. How curious,” Sarah said in that throaty, sleepy voice that was making him crazy.
“I’m not an architect, so don’t get your hopes up. I just work in the back office, tracking projects, bureaucratic ducks in a row, that sort of thing. Very unglamorous.” Since when did he downplay his own glamour, especially when trying way too hard to seduce a woman?
He could practically hear her smile through her words. “It is difficult in the extreme for me to imagine you as unglamorous—”
“Do you imagine me?”
She caught her breath. “I was saying, it’s hard to imagine someone as anything but glamorous when the only two times you’ve seen him, he’s been wearing a velvet dinner jacket one night and a bespoke tuxedo the next. I look forward to meeting this unglamorous Devon Heyworth.”
“Would you look forward to meeting him for dinner tonight?”
She paused again, not wanting to let him hear the near-panting enthusiasm that accompanied her internal response. “Yes.”
The loudspeaker at Heathrow started blasting again. He waited until it was finished, then continued, “So, do I need to pretend to check into a hotel?”
She looked at her chintz duvet cover, then up and around her almost painfully elegant bedroom with new eyes and was inexplicably terrified. Not inexplicable, on second thought. No man had ever been in this bedroom, much less a strapping, larger-than-life British one who bent her over bedposts. “Uh…”
“Enough said,” he interrupted cheerfully. “I will check into the Four Seasons. My plane lands around five this afternoon, local time, maybe an hour to get into town, you think?”
“Uh… that sounds about right.”
“Okay. Give me an hour to shower and change and I’ll pick you up at, say, half past seven tonight?”
“So… sure… that sounds great. Shall I make a dinner reservation or anything?”
“No, let’s just play it by ear. That’s the final call for my flight. See you tonight, love.”
Click.
That little “love” at the end of that sentence. That little throwaway bit. That was the thing.
Sarah turned her phone off and put it back on her bedside table. She tried to stay composed and then just threw her face into one of the large square down pillows and simply screamed with joy. She pounded her feet up and down into the mattress like a toddler, then fisted her hands and pounded them too. Her body started to tingle with desire and she happily dismissed the demanding pull and jumped from bed. Someone else will soon take care of that, she thought with anticipatory glee. She went into the bathroom and turned on the sound system that ran through the house from her iPhone app. She cranked “Beautiful Day” then turned on
the shower. A few minutes later, Bono was screaming and so was Sarah.
She scrubbed her body with masochistic fervor. She wanted to force her tingling skin to calm down, but quickly realized that Bono’s sexy voice and the hot, soapy water were doing nothing to reduce her physical awareness.
Quite the opposite.
She rinsed off with freezing water, dried off matter-of-factly, and tried to think of some unsexy music. She tied a towel firmly around her chest, trying to bind her desire, then put another towel up into a tight turban on her head and switched the music to a Bach harpsichord invention that could have been played in a convent. Much better. As long as it wasn’t some throaty Celt going on about touching her and showing her the way.
The rest of the day passed in a blur of happy, busy work. By Friday afternoon, Carrie and Stephanie had put everything together for Monday’s board meeting and Sarah even reined in her prurient imagination long enough to make a few tentative sketches for next year’s fall line.
Around four that afternoon, her office phone rang and a few seconds later, Stephanie poked her head in to let Sarah know her stepmother Jane was on the line. Sarah walked over to her desk, but remained standing when she picked up the phone, hoping the conversation would not go on for too long.
“Hi, Jane. How are you?”
“Fine thanks. Great news! I got you a date tonight with the most eligible bachelor—”
Make that the second most eligible bachelor, Sarah thought with a happy grin, but said, “Jane, I already have plans tonight.” Big. Plans.
“What do you mean you have plans tonight? You told me that I could set you up. Your exact words were ‘cream of the crop’ if I recall correctly. And this young man is certainly the cream of the crop, Sarah. He’s only in town for a few days visiting his parents and I won’t—”
“Jane, I absolutely cannot change my plans.”
“Well. You’ve put me in quite an awkward position.”
“I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but you might have called to check with me a little bit sooner.”
“You made it sound like you were going to be holed up in your store all week getting ready for the board meeting, so I didn’t think I needed to check with you. Oh, this is all so unpleasant. I try to do something nice and it always turns into something… else.”
“Please. Don’t let it turn into anything else. I am really glad you went to the trouble, but it just cannot be helped. I have a friend who called me just this morning and will be in town unexpectedly. We are meeting tonight at seven thirty.”
“All right, then. Fair enough. Perhaps it would have seemed a bit grasping if you were available on such short notice in any case. I will reschedule for tomorrow night. Do you want to go to Charlie Trotter’s or Spiaggia? We were thinking the later seating, say nine o’clock. Meet for drinks at eight. Does that work for you?”
“Wait. Are you and Dad coming?”
“Well, we had planned on it. Eliot’s parents are business friends of your father’s and I’ve never met them, and we thought it might be fun if we all got together. That way it wouldn’t feel so forced.”
Right. Not forced. “Um, Jane. I don’t know if I’ll be free tomorrow night either. My friend is probably going to be here for the weekend and I’d really like to clear my schedule just in case.”
“Who is this friend, anyway?!”
Sarah started to answer, trying to figure how much longer she could refer to said friend without having to refer to said friend’s gender.
“No! Forget I asked. I don’t want to pry.”
Of course you do, Sarah thought.
Jane pressed on. “Look, this clearly has not turned out the way I’d intended. Casual, fun, family friends. You have turned it into something more akin to an annoyance and I think I will just let the Cranbrooks know it is not going to work out.”
“Eliot Cranbrook?” Sarah had started to glance down at some drawings she’d tossed on her desk and her attention flew back to the phone.
“Why? Do you know him?”
“Yes. Not really. I mean, I have heard of him.”
“Really, Sarah. You are usually so levelheaded, but lately you seem a bit distracted.”
“You are the second person in as many days to point that out.” Sarah tried to contain a sigh—was she really so transparent? But Eliot Cranbrook was not to be dismissed lightly. He was a powerful, transformative leader at one of the top luxury conglomerates in Europe. Devon had to understand if she didn’t have every minute of the whole weekend spread out before her like the Gobi Desert. Maybe a preexisting lunch or dinner date with someone else might even spice things up a bit with a British rake.
“Oh, well. Now you’ll just think I am being mercenary, Jane, but I would really love to meet Eliot Cranbrook. I have admired what Danieli-Fauchard has done with Moratelli, the Italian leather company they acquired last year—”
“Sarah! This is not a business dinner! If you have any inclination whatsoever to grill the poor man about mergers and that sort of thing, I will definitely retract the invitation. He is here visiting his parents unexpectedly. You will not—”
“Fine.” Sarah laughed at herself. She hated to admit that Jane was right. “Okay, you win. I was sort of thinking along those lines, but I would still really like to meet him. Do you think you can finagle the kitchen table at Charlie Trotter’s for tomorrow night? I know you are a magician with things like that.” A compliment that also happened to be true. Sarah could picture Jane preening on the other end of the line.
“Well, I’ll see what I can do, but you are going to have to be flexible. You have to promise me that you will be available for either the six o’clock or the nine o’clock seating.”
“Of course.”
“Don’t say ‘of course’ just like that. I mean it: no last-minute business emergencies, no friends in town. I don’t know the Cranbrooks yet and I am not going to stick my neck out—”
“Jane!” Sarah laughed again. “I promise! I will be utterly and completely at your disposal for dinner tomorrow night.”
“Okay, then. Sorry to have been churlish before.” Jane prattled on about a few more details and Sarah thought how her stepmother was good about things like that. She didn’t allow little grudges to fester, and she always tried to clear things up right away. It was a relief that she was able to recover her dignity (and allow others to recover theirs), but Sarah wondered about why the woman always seemed to be in need of mending fences in the first place.
It was almost five. Sarah tried to pretend that it was the same as the approach of every other five o’clock, every other day of the week. No big deal. Apparently, the occasional transatlantic plane touched down at five. Whatever.
Sarah held out until ten after. She left her office and asked Stephanie if there were any items outstanding before the board meeting Monday morning.
“The printouts are already done; I’ve called and emailed all the board members to reconfirm the time and location. I spoke to the Drake and we are all set with the conference room.” Stephanie was standing in front of her desk holding a flip-pad and ticking off her item list with the tip of a pen. She looked up at Sarah and smiled. “Do you want to touch base over the weekend or Monday morning, or shall we meet at the hotel Monday at ten?”
“You are perfectly on top of everything as usual, so let’s meet at the hotel at ten. We can make sure everything is in order before everyone else gets there at eleven. Thanks again, Steph. Have a great weekend.”
“Thanks. You too.” Stephanie smiled again, and Sarah wondered if there was a bit of mischief in it. Stephanie was a no-nonsense workaholic who was getting her MBA in the evening program at DePaul. She rarely cracked a smile, much less a suggestive one.
“See you Monday, then.” Sarah was glad the workweek was over and she didn’t have to worry about her goofy looks undermining her professionalism for another minute.
Sarah poked her head into Carrie’s office to tell her about the dinner with Elio
t Cranbrook. Carrie silently waved her in and finished the call she was on.
“Terrific. We will speak about the particulars next week. Bye.” Then to Sarah, “What’s up?”
“I just got a call from my stepmother, and she’s put together a little dinner party tomorrow night.”
“Lucky you.” Carrie smirked.
“Turns out it actually is lucky for once! It’s a table for six with my parents, a business associate of my father’s and his wife, and their son… drumroll please… Eliot Cranbrook.”
Carrie widened her eyes in atypical enthusiasm. “Not the Eliot Cranbrook? He’s like the wizard of the luxury goods market. How have you never met him before if he’s a friend of the family and all?”
“You know the drill. My family is not exactly the close-knit variety. I know about as much as the man on the street about the corporate climate at Simpson-James. You know how hard I’ve tried to stay as far away from my father’s business as possible.” Sarah shrugged.
It had been a point of dispute between them ever since they’d started working together. Carrie had argued that Sarah’s connections to the department store world of her father did not need to reek of nepotism. Sarah, despite being totally intimidated by Carrie’s forceful nature, refused to budge on that particular point. She refused to allow even a whiff of the misconception that her father had played some silent partner role in Sarah James Shoes.
Carrie narrowed her gaze and pinned Sarah with that same penetrating look from yesterday. “I must say, and don’t take this the wrong way—”
“I hate that expression because I can’t help but think, okay, here it comes!”
They both laughed, but it felt a little forced.
Carrie continued, “No, it’s a compliment. I was going to say, from a business standpoint, your timing is ideal, because you are looking particularly, I don’t even know how to describe it, but you are somehow more accessible. If Cranbrook has any intention of making overtures to acquire the company, he’s going to act on it when he sees you in your new and improved receptive state.”
Sarah tried to stare her down, but Carrie was not having one bit of it.