The Sexiest Man Alive

by Sandra Marton

  Peter muttered something out in the hall, but Susannah paid no attention. She was going to be late. Later than late, and on this, the first day of the rest of her life.

  Well, it was.

  She was holding the very first meeting she’d ever called at CHIC, the first she’d oversee as its editor-in-chief. That was the good news. The bad was that the meeting might be her last, unless this morning’s brainstorming session ended in some wild and wonderful idea that would make the brass from Update Publications decide their latest acquisition was worth keeping alive. Otherwise, CHIC and the biggest chance she’d ever had in her career, along with all the magazine’s staffers, were going to be flushed out to sea.

  Susannah threw another harried glance at her watch as she pulled on her jeans.

  Seven twenty-four. If she got out of here in the next ten minutes—make that eight minutes—she had a chance. All she had to do was put on a shirt, her sneakers, find the notes she’d worked on all weekend, dump them into her handbag…

  Peter yelled.

  All she had to do was finish dressing, get her stuff together, give Peter his breakfast, and she’d be on her way.

  She yanked a Beethoven’s Got the Beat T-shirt over her head. Droplets of water flew from her short black curls. She shrugged impatiently and tunneled her fingers through her hair. Forget about the luxury of blow-drying. Forget about toast, or even coffee. Forget about everything but the meeting. Assuming the subway trains weren’t running late, assuming the construction mess around Third Avenue had been cleaned up, assuming all was right with the world, maybe, maybe, she could make it into the office on time.

  She had to.

  On Friday, she’d laid down the rules for today’s conference. She’d done it not by E-mail or interoffice memo—it was too important for that. Instead, she’d told her secretary to phone each person in the CHIC organization, from Eddie the mail-room boy…

  “Eddie, the mail-room intern,” Pam had said, raising her eyebrows.

  “I don’t care if he’s Eddie, the mail-room CEO,” Susannah had answered. “Just make sure he and everybody else knows I want them assembled in the boardroom today at ten minutes to five.”

  They’d straggled in, which she’d expected. CHIC was casual when it came to dress, something that was pretty common in the publishing world, but now, thanks to the revolving-door editor-in-chief policy, some of the staff had an attitude of indifference that verged on apathy. Her staffers had crowded into the room with their containers of coffee, their cans of diet cola, and once they were all there, Susannah held up her hands for quiet.

  “Here’s the deal,” she’d said briskly. “It’s just a matter of time before this Update outfit decides to take a closer look at us. When they do, we’d better be ready to dazzle ’em with facts and figures and plans for the future so they leave thinking that CHIC is an eagle, ready to fly—instead of a dying swan that needs to be shot to put it out of its misery.”

  “I don’t think they do that to swans,” the features editorial assistant had said, but she was shushed to silence.

  “I want you all to go home and think about what we need to do to kick start this magazine into the twenty-first century,” Susannah had continued. “And then I want you to show up here Monday morning, ready with innovative projects that will work, not just ideas that are impractical and expensive. And I want you all here promptly at eight.”

  There were grumbles and protests, but Susannah had stood firm.

  “Look at it this way, people,” she’d said. “If we’re not ready with an A-number-one plan when Update comes in, we might as well figure on convening our next meeting at the unemployment office.”

  That had stopped the protests. CHIC’s staffers had filed out of the boardroom looking unhappy but determined.

  “Eight sharp,” Claire had said, and Susannah had nodded.

  “Exactly,” she’d replied.

  The big hand on the twelve. The little hand on the eight. Eight exactly. Not eight oh-five, or eight-ten. Eight.

  Susannah puffed out her breath. There was nothing like setting a good example for the troops.

  Okay. Zip up the jeans. Fluff up the hair one more time so maybe it wouldn’t dry plastered to her head. Pull on socks, tuck feet into sneakers, tie laces…

  Tear lace on right sneaker in half.

  Easy. She had to stay calm. There had to be another pair of laces somewhere in the room. In the dresser drawers. In the closet…

  There wasn’t. Susannah said a word that would have made her grandmother blush. She grabbed two safety pins from the top drawer, hooked them through the eyelets on the sneaker, linked them together and closed them.

  Then she stood and looked in the mirror.

  Oh, boy.

  No makeup. A hairdo that would have brought tears to the eyes of her hairdresser. A T-shirt that had a bleach spot on the sleeve and jeans that had really seen better days.

  There was no sense even thinking about the safety pins and the sneaker.

  Nevertheless, she was ready, and wasn’t it a good thing that CHIC was so casual, because if she’d had to put on panty hose and iron a blouse, pick out a suit, buff a pair of pumps, put on makeup and jewelry and fix her hair, it would be noon before she got herself out the door.

  As it was, Mickey was already pointing his white-gloved hand at…

  Oh, hell.

  Susannah raced from the bedroom and nearly collided with Peter, who was waiting for her in the middle of the hall. He opened his mouth, but she didn’t give him the chance to say anything.

  “I know, I know. You’re starved. You’re famished. And you’re incapable of doing a thing about it without my help.”

  Peter sat down, his green eyes fixed on her as she banged open the cabinet over the stove.

  “Sardine Soufflé,” she said. “How’s that sound?”

  Peter yawned.

  “Salmon Surprise? Bacon Bordelaise? Mmm, mmm, good.”

  Peter scratched his ribs.

  “Tuna,” Susannah said through her teeth. “You love tuna, Petey. You know you do.”

  Peter looked toward the window. Susannah could have sworn she heard him whistling.

  “All right,” she said grimly. “You win. Lobster and Shrimp Ragout, and you’d better remember this moment, Peter, because now you owe me one.”

  Peter turned and looked at her. “Meowr,” he said in the sweetest voice any Persian pussycat had ever possessed. He jumped gracefully onto the counter and butted his furry head against Susannah’s chin.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Susannah said wearily, but she smiled and kissed him right between his silky ears.

  Whatever else happened today, at least she had Peter to come home to.

  * * *

  The view from Matthew Romano’s suite in the new and elegant Manhattan Towers Hotel was, the concierge had assured him on checking in, spectacular.

  “Spe-tac-u-lair, Monsieur Romano,” was actually what the guy had said, in a gurgling French accent Matthew suspected to be about as legitimate as the Rolex watches hawked on the sidewalk a couple of streets over, but Matthew had nodded politely and said he was delighted to hear it.

  The truth was, he didn’t much care about the view. A man who’d built what the experts had taken to calling an empire in less than ten years was a man who spent a lot of time in hotel rooms. The rooms had improved as the Romano holdings had grown, but a hotel was still a hotel. Spe-tac-u-lair views, chilled Dom Pérignon, baskets of flowers and gold-plated bathroom fixtures couldn’t change that one whit.

  Whatever a whit might be, Matthew thought, as he stood gazing out the window of his sitting room. It was still early, just a little past seven, but traffic already clogged Fifth Avenue. Back home in San Francisco, most people would still be asleep…most people, but not the ones who earned their living from the sea.

  There were times he was still amazed that he wasn’t one of them. It was an honest way to make a buck but, even as a boy, he’d always suspected th
ere was more to life. He hadn’t wanted to begin his day while the rest of San Francisco slept or to pull on clothes that smelled of crabs and fish and sweat no matter how many times you washed them. And he sure as hell hadn’t wanted to work his butt off for barely enough money to pay the bills.

  It was what his father had done, and his grandfather. It was what he’d been expected to do, too.

  The smile vanished. Matthew straightened, thrust his fingers through his dark hair and turned his back to the window and to the memories.

  All that was years behind him. He worked his butt off, yes, but he loved every minute of what he did. Someday, maybe, he’d want more. A wife. A family.

  But not yet.

  When he was ready, he’d find himself a wife. He knew exactly the kind of woman she’d be. Beautiful, of course, and serene. Eager to please. He could see himself coming home to her at night, kissing her, leaving behind the rough-and-tumble of business as he settled into his easy chair.

  His wife would be a calm haven in the stormy seas he sailed.

  He’d said as much once, to his grandmother. Nonna had rolled her eyes and reminded him that even though he towered over her now, that wouldn’t stop her from whacking him across the backside if he needed it. A calm haven? Mama mia, what was he? A rowboat? Such a woman would bore him to tears in a month.

  “A woman who can stand up to your Sicilian temper is what you need,” Nonna had said.

  Matthew grinned at the memory. His Nonna was right about most things, but she was wrong about this. Who knew what kind of woman he needed better than the man himself?

  “And you’re never going to meet the right woman if you don’t look for her,” Nonna had added, stamping her cane on the floor for good measure.

  Well, he was looking. Slowly, maybe, but still, he was looking.

  Matthew whistled as he strolled into the marble bathroom and turned on the shower.

  Why rush something so pleasurable?

  He shucked the boxer briefs he’d slept in, stepped into the stall, pressed his palms flat against the wall and bent his head. The water felt good, beating down on his neck and shoulders, and gave him time to think about the morning’s agenda.

  He smiled thinly. And what an agenda it was.

  He was really looking forward to his meeting with the definitely snide and probably incompetent Susan Something-or-other. Madison? Washington? Coolidge? A President’s name. Not that it mattered. Once it was on a severance check, Susan Whatever and her clever office memos would be history.

  What sort of woman wrote stuff like that about a man she didn’t even know? What sort of woman played games with one man and sent love and kisses to another?

  A woman who thought the sexual revolution meant she could have the best of both worlds. Susan Hoover figured she could make the kinds of cracks about men that she’d undoubtedly condemned men for making about women, but she saw nothing wrong with insisting on gender neutrality when the situation suited her.

  Matthew shut off the shower and reached for a towel. Oh, yeah. He had this broad figured out right down to the dotted line.

  He strode into the bedroom and put on a pair of white briefs and navy socks. Then he opened the wall-to-wall mirrored closet and reached for a pale blue shirt.

  The woman had made the most incredibly sexist comments about him, then done a one-eighty and blithely assumed she’d been passed over for promotion because she was female. And that was wrong. Dead wrong. Matthew had done a little research into CHIC. It had given him everything the company had about her, and from what he could see, Susan Whatever was about as qualified to head a magazine as she was to write material for a stand-up comic.

  Which was why she had to go.

  His eyes narrowed as he zipped the fly of his custom-tailored gray trousers and slipped on the matching jacket.

  His decision had nothing to do with the stuff she’d said about him, that the women he dated were dumb or for calling him studly and brainless. Or for saying he figured he was the sexiest man alive.

  He wasn’t a vindictive man. It didn’t mean a thing to him that half his team had read the woman’s comments, that he’d heard the choked-back laughter at the next couple of meetings, that even now somebody on his staff would look at him and bite back a grin.

  “It doesn’t bother me in the slightest,” Matthew said briskly to his reflection.

  He snatched up his black leather briefcase, marched to the door, opened it and stepped into the hotel corridor.

  “Damned right, it doesn’t,” he muttered, and slammed the door after him, so hard that it rattled.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IN HER college days, before Susannah had centered her studies on English lit, she’d taken a very popular philosophy course.

  Professor Wheeler had made the round of all the talk shows with his theory of how to achieve happiness. Your successes and failures in life, he said, were dependent upon unwritten rules. Not the rules of physics, he’d add, with a condescending little smile, the ones that kept the earth from flying off into the sun or the polar ice caps from draining into the seas. The rules he referred to were very personal. Once you identified them, you could go through life secure in the knowledge that you had a Direction and a Purpose.

  The best part was that you didn’t have to wait, like Isaac Newton, and get conked on the head by an apple to discover them. Your Very Own Rules, according to Professor Wheeler, found you.

  Six years had passed since then, and some of Susannah’s personal rules had, indeed, discovered her. Unfortunately, as far as she could see, they had nothing to do with either Direction or Purpose—unless she planned to star in a low-budget sitcom.

  Rule number one. White silk dresses worn to Italian restaurants meant the lasagna would fall into your lap. Rule number two. PMS was not an advertising gimmick dreamed up by Madison Avenue. Rule number three. Fat-free ice cream was.

  Now, on a clear, chilly fall morning, she’d found not one more rule to add to her list but two.

  Never trust an alarm clock on a day that could change your life.

  Nobody but Superman could get from Greenwich Village to midtown Manhattan in less than twenty minutes during rush hour.

  Sandwiched between an oversize woman who must have breakfasted on Garlic Krispies and a man who defended his eight inches of personal space with elbows that should have been classified as lethal weapons, Susannah rode the subway toward her destination.

  Sardines had it better than this.

  The train, packed with humanity, rumbled, rolled and rocked from side to side. Metal wheels screeched against the tracks. It was the ride from hell, but her fellow travelers, New York stoics all, showed no reaction. Susannah didn’t, either. What was the point? She was trapped, she was late, she was going to make an entrance into the staff-filled boardroom with all the aplomb of a runaway tram.

  Susannah winced. Talk about bad images. Still, it was accurate. Why hadn’t she planned the morning better? She should have set a backup alarm. She should have had extra shoelaces tucked away in the drawer. Forget the shoelaces. She had to set the standards now. She should have appeared at this meeting dressed in something that would have impressed everybody with her control and confidence.

  If only she had a clever plan to toss on the table, maybe—just maybe—she could redeem herself. She’d spent the weekend on statistics. Why hadn’t she spent it on ideas?

  The train jolted to a halt. Susannah glanced out the window. The next station was hers. Her heart thumped. One more stop, then a four-block walk, and she’d be there.

  “I need an idea,” she whispered. “Just one idea.”

  “You need a head doctor,” the fat woman said indignantly, through waves of garlic-scented breath.

  Susannah nodded mournfully “Maybe so,” she said.

  The train hurtled into the station. She fought her way to the door, across the platform and up the crowded stairs.

  Out on the street, she began to run.

  * * *

>   The taxi carrying Matthew Romano pulled to the curb outside the building that housed the CHIC offices.

  Matthew paid the driver, collected his black leather briefcase from the seat beside him and stepped from the cab. A surprisingly cool wind sliced down the concrete canyon, and he turned up the collar of his raincoat as he took his first look at the CHIC building.

  It was old, for New York. Matthew figured it dated back to the thirties, when Art Deco was all the rage. Grime coated the exterior and dulled the bronze doors, but he could still see the building’s handsome lines beneath the dirt. He’d expected as much, considering that some of the brightest names in publishing had once been on the Elerbee Publications roster.

  Matthew strode through the lobby to the elevators. He’d already decided to keep CHIC’s office space after he disposed of the magazine, but now he thought it might be worthwhile to check into the building itself. Elerbee owned it, didn’t he?

  Matthew reached into the inside breast pocket of his suit, took out a computerized recorder the size of a credit card and brought it to his lips.

  “CHIC building,” he said quietly. “Possible purchase?” The elevator doors whisked open. Matthew put the recorder into his pocket and stepped into the car.

  After this morning, CHIC was finished. His accountants would breathe a deep sigh of relief. Normally, he’d have put the magazine out of its misery as quickly and humanely as possible, but Susan Lincoln had made that impossible.

  Not that he was vindictive, Matthew reminded himself as the elevator doors shut.

  Not in the slightest.

  * * *

  Susannah came pounding around the corner.

  The office was just ahead. She was in the home stretch. A minute to the lobby, another in the elevator…five minutes, max, she’d be at her desk. And then all she’d need was another few seconds to make a quick note about the absolutely incredible idea she’d come up with as she raced down the street from the subway.

  She really had to start carrying a notebook. Or one of those little recorders.

  But not today.

  Susannah darted into the lobby and pounded the elevator call button. Her reflection stared at her from the bronze doors, and she shuddered.