More Lipstick Chronicles

by Emily Carmichael

  “Well, maybe we did have a few sparks flying, but we didn’t so much as kiss.”

  “Oh, darn!” Robyn groaned.

  “You can cover a lot of territory without kissing,” Elyssa observed sagely.

  Dana flashed her a look, and Elyssa flashed right back.

  “He did something to put that glow in your eyes and make your mind float off on clouds every time it gets a chance.”

  “It would have been very unethical for him to put the moves on a student,” Dana said stiffly.

  “Then maybe he’ll fly out here to put the moves on you when you’re not a student,” Robyn said hopefully. Since hooking up again with Steve, the girl was an incurable romantic.

  “We could start an office pool,” Carole suggested. “How long will it take for Dana’s guru to fly east and claim his enraptured love?”

  “I like that,” Alix said. “Enraptured. Very good.”

  “I think she is enraptured,” Robyn agreed. “Look at the way her face glows whenever someone says his name.”

  “That’s embarrassment,” Alix informed her.

  “If she’s embarrassed when someone says his name, then she’s enraptured,” Robyn said with a sniff.

  “You guys are impossible!” Dana told them. “Here come our sandwiches. Stuff those into your mouths and stop giving me a hard time.”

  They did. But Dana’s high color didn’t fade when she tucked into her turkey sandwich. Kieran did travel all the time. He’d told her so himself. Had that been a message that he might, just might, drop by her neck of the woods and give her a call? What would she do if he did?

  The image that leapt into Dana’s imagination almost made her choke. Robyn didn’t have the market cornered on a dirty mind.

  Dana’s Adams-Morgan sublet was tiny—one small bedroom, a galley kitchen, a closet-sized bathroom, and a dinky living room with a dining alcove crowded by her midget dining table. It was too small for her, but she’d taken it because she loved the neighborhood, a trendy, international-flavored district with plenty of clubs, unique cafés and interesting shops.

  Yet on this first day back after her ride in Spaceship Sedona, coming home after work was a letdown. A January wind made the evening seem colder than it was, and the onset of night was simply a darkening of the gray that had reigned the entire day. The streets were empty. Everyone had taken shelter from the cold. The world seemed very lonely for some reason.

  That was wrong, Dana decided as she turned on the lights in her own little apartment. The world wasn’t lonely. The world was just fine. Dana was the lonely one. It was her own fault. Robyn had invited her to go to Deep Blue, the club where her heartthrob, Steve, was playing the piano, but Dana couldn’t face an evening of watching Robyn melt all over Steve. Not that she had anything against Steve. Steve Rood was definitely hot, and he was perfect for flighty, good-hearted Robyn. But watching the two of them mushing over each other would have just reminded Dana that her own love life was in a state of suspension. A couple of days away from Kieran and her inner tigress was already straining at the leash. Poor kitty didn’t know exactly where she wanted to go, but she did want to go.

  Why was she doing this? Dana wondered as she shrugged out of her Chanel coat and shed her dress, a long-sleeved, scoop-necked, calf-length knit. The dress had cost her a week’s paycheck, but it was worth every penny. It made her feel sleek and sexy—not that looking sexy did her any good these days. But it was good to be back in a place where women actually dressed to look like women. Clothes had always been an important part of Dana’s life.

  Her inner eye caught Kieran tilting his head in her direction, gentle admonition in his expression.

  “Clothes are very important!” she said to the man who wasn’t there. “They have a lot to do with how you feel inside. So there!”

  Hard to believe that jeans and sweaters had been almost her entire fashion statement in Sedona. Scary.

  During some of the most important moments of your life you aren’t wearing clothes at all.

  “Who said that?” Dana demanded of the empty bedroom. The voice had sounded like Kieran’s. She was going insane. And even worse, she was thinking about sex again. Sex with Kieran. And it was true, she didn’t have a stitch of clothing on in that particular fantasy.

  Defiantly, she donned a baggy T-shirt and sweatpants—the most sexless outfit she could devise—poured herself a glass of Chardonnay and settled under the covers of her queen-sized bed with Oprah’s latest reading recommendation. The book held her attention for about five minutes, when she decided that Oprah was looking for social edification, not entertainment. Dana’s eyes kept wandering off the page to another book sitting on her bedside table. Kieran’s book. Opening it would be tantamount to inviting the author to come out and play. Wasn’t he already plaguing her enough?

  Temptation was too great. She closed her novel and tossed it to the foot of the bed. From the back cover of Finding Strength in Meditation, Kieran watched her with knowing eyes.

  “Quit bugging me,” she warned him. “This is ridiculous.”

  But she opened to the first chapter and read. Within a few minutes she decided that she should have done the reading when Kieran had assigned it. He had something to say, and he said it very well.

  She could almost hear the sound of Kieran’s voice, deep, mellow, laughing one moment and contemplative the next. She relived the delicious shiver that had traveled from head to toe the first time he had touched her in the garden, one of his hands pushing her back straight and the other on her stomach, urging her to breathe. An innocent encounter? Or had his heart jumped, too, when he laid his hands upon her?

  Dana closed her eyes, wanting suddenly to preserve all those feelings and carve them in the stone of her memory. The massage—how could a man be so sensuously wicked at the same time he refused to trespass beyond a single forbidden boundary. Had Kieran known all the while how his touch scorched its way through to her very soul?

  In the dark privacy of her own mind, Dana relived every stroke, every caress. If she could have worked up the courage that night, could they have ended up lovers? Could she have taken his warm, oh-so-skillful hands and guided them beneath the sheet, where the ache of her body had nothing to do with the day’s overexertion? Would he have denied her? Could he have resisted? And could anything have come of it other than one night’s passion?

  Dana grimaced and opened her eyes. One night’s passion would have been a start, at least.

  “Damn!” she muttered to herself, contemplating a cold shower.

  Kieran recommended meditation to calm an agitated mind and body, but what did he know? Every time she tried to find her center through meditation, she found him instead, waiting for her with a slow burn in his dark eyes and a welcoming smile on his sensuous mouth.

  Just what would Master Kieran prescribe to cure that?

  Chapter 5

  The January skies stayed gray for the next week, and Dana found herself actually missing the scarlet sunrises of Sedona, even missing Tamara’s warbling praise of them at the time of morning when normal people were barely alive. She wondered how Tamara was doing at the commune, wondered if her old roommate had made the acquaintance of Sheila, the goat that she had milked with Kieran so close at her back. She wondered if Tamara got to see Kieran every day, talk to him, bask in his smile, laugh at his sometimes wry observations about the universe and the people in it.

  Or had Kieran left on one of his lecture tours? Would he call her if he ever traveled through DC? Did he ever think of her, dream about her, grow distracted at his work from thoughts of her creeping in upon his mind? Was she insane to fixate on the man? She’d known him for only a handful of days. They hadn’t so much as kissed, much less anything heavier. Quite the contrary of trying to maneuver her into bed—which was pretty standard male behavior among the single set—he’d advised her to find her lost purity. Crazy notion! The fact that she’d bought it just showed how badly he knocked about her common sense. Perhaps Kier
an handed out that advice because he thought she was a slut. Could he think she was a slut? Maybe she should have given him a piece of her mind when she had the chance.

  These thoughts and others kept Dana distracted both at work and at home. Despite cold, dreary weather, lack of a love life and periodic calls from her gloatingly engaged sister, her depression didn’t return. How could she be depressed when she was so busy being frustrated? Everything reminded her of Kieran. He lounged in her subconscious, waiting for her to sleep so he could torment her with erotic dreams. How often had they lain together beside a musically rippling Oak Creek, her naked body intimately cradling his, the warm sun beating down upon their bare skin? And just as Kieran started to thoroughly prove he was as good a lover as a talker, Dana always woke up, sensuously entangled with nothing more exciting than her pillow.

  During the daytime, Dana’s creative inspiration blossomed anew. Innovative copy for the upcoming Valentine’s Day cards flooded her mind. But her creativity was a weed growing out of control. Her imagination was equally creative in spinning a web of daydreams and fantasies starring guess who? She couldn’t step into the shower, go to bed, drink her morning coffee or fry an egg without thinking about Kieran. Her one evening out with her friends had been a disaster. All those couples happily dancing had nearly reduced her to tears, and Robyn’s touchy-feely teasing with Steve Rood made her want to get up and walk out, just because it wasn’t Dana Boyle larking about with a man who loved her.

  Even worse, Joe Monteigne visited the office during their weekly staff meeting. Joe was the drop-dead gorgeous venture capitalist who, along with his partners, was pouring money into Allheart.com. He was also Elyssa’s lover. They were always very properly professional when in the office, but nothing could disguise the warm looks, the smiles, the surreptitious touching of hands that marked them as something more than mere business partners. The small exchanges would only be noticed by someone insanely obsessed with romance and sex—Dana, for instance. Watching them, such a wave of envy choked Dana that she had to plead sick and leave the meeting.

  That same night Dana faced herself in the mirror and gave herself a good talking-to.

  “What are you?” she asked the face that stared back at her. “Are you a thirteen-year-old with a hot crush?”

  No, she was a twenty-seven-year-old with a hot crush. Or maybe it was more than a crush.

  “No matter, Dana, you twit. You and Kieran are ships that passed sailing opposite directions, and when you met, he didn’t even board you. There are plenty of other ships in the same sea, kiddo, and they’re sailing a lot closer to shore than Kieran, with all his talk of meditation and an inner self and born-again virginity. Sheesh!”

  That was telling herself!

  “So will you just pull yourself together and start living your life again? You are a with-it lady, and with-it ladies don’t obsess over men who have no real place in their lives. Dating them is one thing. But you don’t daydream, night-dream and wet dream yourself into a tizzy. Got it, girl?”

  She got it. She believed it. But could she help it? Dana marched away from the mirror with firm resolve but little hope.

  Kieran was too much a fixture in Dana’s apartment for Dana to begin her new resolve closeted with him there. His book occupied the bedside table, and she couldn’t quite work up the determination to move it. Kieran himself seemed to lounge on her bed. He was in her living room and kitchen as well. The man just wouldn’t leave her alone—an invisible stalker. So she decided to begin her new resolve by the most distracting activity a woman can engage in—shopping. In truth, she needed a new outfit or two. Her week in Sedona without hamburgers and liquor had left her a half size smaller. Besides, there was absolutely nothing better for boosting a woman’s morale than new clothes.

  But even in the mall Kieran walked beside her. She found a Moschino dress and three-inch-heeled sandals that made her look like a Cosmo model—almost. But the sandals pinched a bit. And the dress was short enough and snug enough that bending over would definitely be a mistake. Dana couldn’t help but smile at the memory of Kieran un-snapping her jeans, telling her that comfort was necessary to peace of mind. Fashion, she reminded herself, wasn’t supposed to be comfortable. It was supposed to be chic. These shoes weren’t meant to walk in; they were meant to show off sexy legs.

  But she didn’t buy the ensemble.

  The day was Thursday. One day after hump day, and the week was winding down, as much as Elyssa ever allowed it to wind down at Allheart’s offices. Dana had been in the office a full hour before even Elyssa came in, working on an idea that had occurred to her in between dreams about the Gardens of Oak Creek.

  Elyssa glanced into Dana’s office on the way to her own. One graceful brow inched upward. “You are in early, Dana. I thought you didn’t feel well yesterday.”

  “I’m better. I’m working on a great new idea.”

  “Excellent. Are you ready to pitch it? Joe is coming in a bit later. I’m sure he’d like to hear about it, too.”

  “It’s an innovation, E. You and Joe are going to have to keep your corporate minds open.”

  “I think we can manage that,” she said dryly. “Just let me redo my hair bun and find a place for my pitchfork.”

  “I didn’t mean you were stodgy.” Dana laughed as she grabbed her coffee cup and headed for the pot in the reception area. “But this idea is out there a bit. In a nice way.”

  “Whoa!” Elyssa whistled. “So is what you’re wearing. New?”

  “Went shopping last night.”

  “That’s sort of a departure for you, isn’t it?”

  Robyn walked through the front door, fifteen minutes late. It was earlier than she usually showed up. Sweet satisfaction with Steve hadn’t ended her ongoing morning battle with the alarm clock.

  “Hey, Dana! Great outfit! New look!”

  By now Dana was beginning to feel self-conscious. “It’s not that different. I was shopping last night.”

  “It is different.” Alix stepped out of her office to join the conversation. “You’re usually all sleek and slinky. But I like the flowing trousers and drapey jacket. Very feminine.”

  “Very now!” Robyn gushed.

  “Kieran thinks confining clothes stifle creativity,” Dana admitted.

  Robyn snickered. “I’ve heard of tight Jockey shorts stifling a man’s creativity.”

  “Not that kind of creativity, you twit.”

  “Trust Robyn to bring the conversation back to animal basics.” Alix laughed.

  Elyssa cleared her throat meaningfully. “I hate to break up this little fashion confab, but all this talk of creativity reminds me of work. Lovely as it is to huddle around the coffee machine and admire Dana’s new look, we do have a business to run.”

  Robyn rolled her eyes, but promptly assumed a meek demeanor before Elyssa caught her. Alix filled her tankard-size cup and headed back to her office, and Elyssa raised a finger for Dana’s attention.

  “Carole’s going to be in late this morning. She has a dentist appointment. When she comes in, why don’t all of us get together, along with Joe, and you can pitch this new idea of yours. Are you ready?”

  “I can present the basic concept.”

  “Good. You might even get with Alix and see if she has any ideas for graphics that might go along with what you have. You know these moneymen. When it comes to the creative stuff, sometimes you have to hit them over the head with four-color glossy.”

  “You got it.”

  Elyssa turned for her office, but over her shoulder she threw Dana a smile. “And I really do like the new look, Dana, even if it was a fellow in a guru toga who gave you the idea.”

  “Kieran doesn’t wear a toga!” Dana said to Elyssa’s disappearing back.

  Elyssa waggled her hand in a dismissive wave. “Whatever.”

  Dana pulled a face. She heard the snicker in Elyssa’s voice. The good-hearted razzing would never end. At least not until something more interesting came along to
divert her friends’ attention. They would get a good laugh out of the new line of cards Dana was going to propose.

  As it turned out, the staff did get a good laugh, and Joe Monteigne’s brows shot so high they almost disappeared into his hairline. But Elyssa, always the businesswoman, took a serious look at Dana’s proposal after joining the others in a round of chuckles.

  “You may have something here, Dana. This New Age stuff may be bunk, but it has caught on in quite a few places. In California it’s huge, I understand.”

  “In California,” Carole said, “every crazy thing is huge.”

  “Not just in California,” Dana told them. “I have a friend who lives in the Chicago area, and just down the street from her is a shop that sells crystals, pendulums, incense and books on everything from reincarnation to finding your spirit guide.”

  “I like this line,” Alix joined in. “It’s cute. I’ll show you my soul if you’ll show me yours. We were picturing maybe the old-fashioned shot of two kids looking shy but sidling up to each other.”

  Elyssa tapped her finger on the proposal Dana had handed out. “This is nice. May the peace of the universe give you comfort in your time of need. This New Age copy could not only be a separate line, but we could incorporate this orientation as an expansion of some of our other lines.”

  Joe gave a noncommittal “Hmm.”

  Elyssa flashed him a look. “Don’t be an old stodge, Joe. Whether or not you think the New Age movement is bunk, this is a lively, growing market that we haven’t tapped.”

  “Besides,” Carole told him, “plenty of respectable people buy into this. High-profile people, too. And several mainstream churches have recognized the legitimacy of some of the New Age-style philosophies. I think there’s a possibility of advertising accounts that would be drawn in by this. In some parts of the country, this is big business.”

  Robyn laughed. “I can picture a banner across the top of the screen. Your personal crystal: Don’t leave home without it.”

  Alix was becoming enthusiastic. “I like this one: The energy of Creation shines forth from your eyes. So romantic. That’s a great one, Dana. I could do some wonderful graphics with that.”