More Lipstick Chronicles
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Touched for the Very First Time - EMILY CARMICHAEL
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Nothing Between Them - VIVIAN LEIBER
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Taking Care of Business - KATHRYN SHAY
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Praise for The Lipstick Chronicles
“Plenty of camaraderie and romance lighting up the DC skies . . . a delight for romance readers . . . a warm tale of friendship and love.” —Midwest Book Review
And more praise for the Lipstick women and their novels:
Emily Carmichael
“A fresh, funny charmer of a romance. I howled with laughter.”
—The New York Times
“You are guaranteed the unexpected from Emily Carmichael.”
—Romantic Times
“Carmichael has created yet another wonderfully written romance.” —Booklist
Vivian Leiber
“Touching romance.” —Affaire de Coeur
“Great fun to read, high humor at its finest.”
—The Romance Reader
Kathryn Shay
“Kathryn Shay is a master at her craft.”
—New York Times bestselling author Catherine Anderson
“Kathryn Shay never disappoints.”
—New York Times bestselling author Lisa Gardner
“Refreshing contemporary romance.” —Midwest Book Review
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume responsibility for author or third-party websites.
MORE LIPSTICK CHRONICLES
A Berkley Sensation Book / published by arrangement with Lark Productions, LLC
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / May 2004
Berkley Sensation mass-market edition / March 2007
Copyright © 2004 by Lark Productions, LLC.
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eISBN : 978-0-425-21498-5
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Touched for the Very First Time
EMILY CARMICHAEL
Chapter 1
For the past few weeks, days at the Allheart offices in Georgetown were more peaceful and productive if writer Dana Boyle worked from home, and since Dana had been nursing an on-and-off flu for the last month, that happy situation occurred more often than not. On the other hand, things were definitely more interesting if she did show up at the office, as was the case on this dank December day. Interesting as in eventful, tumultuous and distracting. Interesting was never as productive as peaceful, but it did keep the Allheart staff from a case of the winter blahs.
On this morning, after a two-day absence trying to drown the flu bug in Tylenol and DayQuil, Dana had stormed through the reception area with barely a nod, thundered down the hallway to her office and shut the door firmly behind her. The closed door was no impediment to her coworkers, however. The executive staff at Allheart, all creative, on-the-go women with their feet firmly set on life’s fast track, were more like family than mere professional colleagues. They cared, worried, nagged, supported, argued and meddled like sisters. They were interested in each other’s lives. They were concerned. In short, they were snoopy.
So when normally amiable Dana Boyle (no slouch in the meddling snoop department herself) had started her Jekyll and Hyde act, her coworkers were naturally curious. When her signature sunny smile had turned into a curled lip, her creative juices turned to vinegar and her enthusiastic energy wilted to weary plodding, her friends worried. But so far, no amount of friendly prying had inspired Dana to confide in anyone. She scarcely talked at all, in fact, as if all her words were bottled up inside. Downright scary, that was, for Dana, the queen of words. Allheart’s maven of greeting card copy, she wrote the snappy greetings, the clever rejoinders and the heartfelt romance that made Allheart.com’s online greeting cards so special. But she had no words to confide in her friends. And naturally, her reluctance to spill her guts made them even more curious.
The Allheart trio that gathered in the vicinity of Dana’s firmly closed door puckered their brows, gave each other knowing glances and shook their heads.
“I remember when Dana used to walk into this office like a ray of sunshine,” graphic designer Alix Harris said with a sigh. Of all the women, Alix worked the most closely with Dana.
“I wouldn’t exactly say she was ever a ray of sunshine,” Carole Titus commented.
“Well, at least she wasn’t an ugly storm cloud.” This from Robyn Barrett, young assistant to Elyssa Wentworth, Allheart’s CEO. “Scary, you know? Spitting lightning and all that. That’s what I meant.”
A loud thump from inside the office sounded like something might have been thrown against the wall. A second thump made the snoopers flinch.
“Ouch!” Robyn said.
Alix speculated, “Snow boots.”
“Transformed into missiles,” Robyn added.
A nasal epithet carried though the barrier of the door.
Carole turned motherly. “She
still has the flu, poor thing.”
“She has more than the flu,” Alix drawled. “I wish we knew what’s been turning her into Miss Cranky of the Millennium. We might be able to help.”
“Why don’t you try talking to her, Alix?” Carole suggested.
“Right. I’d just as soon try to pull a thorn from a lion’s paw.”
Robyn grinned. “Maybe it would turn the lion into a pussycat.”
“Or turn the thorn-puller into raw meat. Why don’t you give it a try, Carole? You’re the one with the housemother gene.”
Carole raised her hands in denial. “Me? No. You’re closest to Dana, Alix. You’re the one it’s gotta be.”
Unintelligible words from inside made them perk up their ears. Robyn, younger and somewhat less inhibited by good manners, went so far as to glue her ear to the door.
“Oooooh. Very bad words. I think the lion has its tail in a knot. I can just imagine the card copy she’s going to come up with today.”
“Excuse me?” said a voice that brought the trio of busy-bodies to attention. Elyssa Wentworth stepped out of her office and regarded them with meaningfully narrowed eyes. “Good morning, ladies. Did someone declare today a holiday?”
Elyssa was the dynamo founder and fearless leader of Allheart.com. She was a good-hearted slave driver, but a slave driver just the same. At least according to her staff.
“Dana’s in there,” Alix told Elyssa.
“Bravo,” she replied, just the hint of an edge to her voice. “It’s nice to have her in the office for a change.”
Robyn rolled her eyes. “That’s a matter of opinion!” Elyssa gave her a sharp look, but Robyn ignored it. Robyn had a talent for ignoring such things. “We need an intervention,” she said with all the wisdom of her twenty-four years.
“I’ll admit that being in one’s office working seems to be deviant behavior around here,” Elyssa commented sharply. “Perhaps we should have the intervention for those who loiter in the halls listening at doors where people are presumably trying to start on the day’s work. Robyn, please call the building management and tell them the temperature in my office is still hovering around zero, and Carole, I would like to talk to you about the chocolate account.”
“Fannie May?”
“That’s the one. Who came up with the idea for their Valentine’s Day ads, anyway?”
“They’re lame, but we have plenty of time to work on it.”
“Not if we don’t get on it we don’t. It may only be December, but February is rather close to December, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
The little crowd dispersed, but not before Carole tossed Alix a look and jerked her head toward Dana’s door. Someone has to do it, was the silent message. Alix grimaced, heaved a martyred sigh and raised her fist to knock. The “Come in” that answered her hesitant knock was just a grumble.
“Hiya, Dana,” Alix ventured as she walked in.
“Mmmmmmph!” Dana’s head was on her desk, facedown.
Red hair tumbled over a disorganized jumble of files, computer disks, notepads, and an old issue of Glamour magazine. One silky red strand narrowly missed a dunking in an unpleasantly crusted coffee cup.
“Dana!”
“What!” The head came up, the face puckered in a frown. A yellow Post-it note was improbably stuck to red bangs.
“I wish I had a camera,” Alix said. “You look like a poster girl for Monday mornings.”
“It’s not Monday. Is it? God! What day is it?”
“Wednesday.”
“Unnhhhh.” The head dropped back to the desk.
“Girl, what is wrong with you?”
“Nothing.”
“Yeah, right, nothing.” Alix raised a perfectly arched mahogany brow. “The office staff has a pool going about when you’re going to go into complete meltdown, and another pool on how long before Elyssa fires your butt.”
The head came up again. This time the green eyes snapped with indignation. “That’s ridiculous.”
“You don’t believe me? Ask Malcolm. He’s running the pools.”
“That goofy intern?” Dana half rose from her chair. “I’ll show him whose butt’s on the line.”
“Slow down, girl. I didn’t mean to set a match to the fuse. But you know, we’d all like to know what’s going on.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t bullshit a master bullshitter, girl. You’ve been out of the office as much as you’re here, and when you’re here, you’re like a troll lurking in your lair. As a matter of fact, this office looks kind of like a troll’s lair.” Alix glanced around the office with a grimace. Size eight snow boots lay by the wall against which Dana had thrown them. The crumpled heaps of fur and leather looked like dead creatures of some sort. The windowsill had become a storage shelf for dirty plastic cups. The smell bore witness to at least two weeks’ worth of petrified coffee. Dana’s winter coat, a vintage Chanel creation that she had once dearly treasured, lay heaped in a chair. The desk was the true disgrace, however. It looked as though a waste bin had been emptied on top of it. Alix suspected the mess was a reflection of the current state of Dana’s mind.
“Girl, we need to have lunch together and you can spill your guts to your good friend Alix. It’ll make you feel way better.”
Dana groaned. “Alix, no offense, but butt out.”
“I can’t. I’m your friend.”
“Just leave me alone.”
Just then the door cracked open and Carole’s head poked in. “Alix, E wants to talk to you about the graphics on the Easter cards.”
Alix grimaced. “The boss calls. I’ll be back, though.”
Carole poked the rest of her body through the door. She stood looking around Dana’s office with the air of a mother viewing a teenage daughter’s bedroom. “Did a tornado come through?”
“Can it, please,” Dana warned.
“You’d better pray that Mother Superior doesn’t cruise through here.”
“Why are you guys ganging up on me? I’m in no mood to be ganged-up on.”
“What’s that on your monitor?” Carole’s instincts unerringly homed in on the trouble spots on her colleagues’ horizons, no matter how subtle or well hidden. This trouble spot was neither. “Are you developing a new line here?”
Both of Dana’s uninvited visitors descended upon the computer monitor, which pulsed brightly with the text Dana had neglected to delete. Carole read the copy out loud, her voice catching somewhere between laughter and horror.
“ ‘Life sucks through a straw; get over it.’ ‘Love bites; learn to bite back.’ ‘The ideal companion on the road of life comes with a leash and flea powder.’ ”
Alix nearly choked. “Dana! What is this?”
“Reality cards,” Dana replied with a flip smile. “It’s a line we ought to develop.”
Carole and Alix exchanged a meaningful look, and Alix fixed Dana with a steely eye. “Lunch, girl! We are definitely going to have a heart-to-heart over lunch.”
Because she was too weary to protest, Dana allowed Alix to drag her to Cafemyth.com, a cyber café that was one of the Allheart gang’s favorite Georgetown lunch hangouts. Over baba ghanoush and a good white zinfandel, she mollified Alix by spilling, if not all her guts, at least some of them. Her colleagues were going to hound her until she gave them some morsel to chew on, and a good whine was always a mood lifter—something she sorely needed. Paul, her man of the month, had dumped her with the complaint that there just wasn’t anything between them but sex—probably the first time in history a man had complained of that! And then she had suffered the ultimate humiliation: During Thanksgiving dinner, her younger sister smugly announced her engagement to a resident in orthopedics at Georgetown University Medical Center. Her mother was ecstatic, of course. Doctors were still very high on most mothers’ list of whom they wanted their daughters to marry. The fact that Dana was a major player in an up-and-coming dot-com company didn’t count for nearly as many brownie points
as marrying a doctor.
Not that Dana wanted to get married. Did she? Or maybe she just didn’t know what she wanted, Dana admitted. At twenty-seven, shouldn’t she know exactly what she wanted and how she was going to get it?
Alix was as sympathetic as any whiner could wish, nodding, murmuring and sighing in all the right places. She even offered Dana her place at a meditation and stress management seminar that she’d signed up for then decided not to attend. Dana was halfway interested until she learned she’d have to go halfway across the world, almost. The seminar was at a resort in Arizona, of all places. Cowboy boots weren’t her style, she laughed, and told Alix not to worry so. She could manage her life without some yogi chanting over her. New Age crystal gazers and redneck cowboys—what a combination. And people said DC was bad! Sweet offer, but no thank you.
Dana went back to the Allheart offices in an improved frame of mind. She hoped whining to Alix might serve as a catharsis and lighten her mood, but within a couple of hours, the cheering effect of a good whine had worn off. Her mother called with the news that her sister Lara had chosen lavender and cream to be her wedding colors. Dana wondered if Lara had chosen lavender specifically because it somehow made her older and unmarried sister look jaundiced and sunburned at the same time. That alone was enough to blacken the rest of the day, but her mother also reported seeing a news story about the many dot-coms that were going under in the tumultuous technology industry. Couldn’t Dana get a job with a real company, or get married like her little sister?
That managed to send Dana over the top. The Valentine’s Day copy she was writing turned into verse that could have been written by Freddy Kruger.
The next morning she tried hard to be cheerful. She really did. But midmorning Paul e-mailed her. Hunky “we never talk” and “there’s got to be something more” Paul. He didn’t want her to take what he’d said on their last date the wrong way. No hard feelings, he explained. She was a great gal, and there was no reason they couldn’t see each other every once in a while. (When he was horny, Dana interpreted.) In fact that very night he happened to be free. (Couldn’t get a date, Dana thought.) And he remembered that great club where Dana knew the manager. (Another guy she’d dated three or four times before they’d given each other the mutual heave-ho.) Maybe Dana would like to go there this very night? (Paul knew he couldn’t get into the club without her connections, even on a dreary Wednesday night.)