“Oh.” She swallowed her disappointment. “Well, that’s no problem. It really wouldn’t be so awful if I checked out the other restaurants—” alone, she’d been going to say, but the word stuck in her throat “—if I checked them out with someone not connected to CHIC.”
He swung toward her, his face suddenly harsh in the lamplight.
“Peter?” he said.
Peter? she thought. Peter? And then she remembered.
“Peter, yes,” she said, and smiled brilliantly. “He‘s—he’s really got excellent taste in—in fine dining. I’m sure he’d—” Her words died away. They stood looking at each other. Tell me you don’t want me to go out with Peter, Susannah thought suddenly, say it...
“Or Sam,” Matthew said, with a glittering smile.
“Well, no. Sam’s on—”
“Cape Cod. With Mama.” A muscle danced in his cheek. He took her arm and hurried her toward his Porsche, unlocked the door and motioned her inside. “Take anyone you want,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
Twenty minutes later, after they’d said a polite good-night, Susannah stood inside her dark apartment.
“It doesn’t matter to me, either,” she said into the silence.
She’d check out the rest of the restaurants alone. Matthew was wrong. She didn’t need him with her. No more evenings wasted, no more senseless small talk…
Something silky and soft wound gently around her ankles.
“Mrrow?” said Peter.
Susannah smiled and scooped the cat into her arms
“Why on earth would it matter?” she said.
And then, for no reason whatsoever, she buried her face in Peter’s fur and wept.
CHAPTER EIGHT
IT WAS late in the day, and the CHIC team was gathered in the boardroom for a brainstorming session.
They sat around a conference table heaped with photos, notepads and computer printouts. A coffee urn, packets of artificial sweetener and an open jar of powdered creamer stood on the sideboard, flanked by half-empty boxes of rapidly aging bagels and pastries from Doughnuts Deelishus.
People, deep in thought, sat tilted back in their chairs, slumped over the table or staring into space, waiting for that elusive killer of an idea to spring into their brains.
Susannah’s brain, unfortunately, seemed to have died. As far as she could tell, there wasn’t a clever idea in it.
She reached for her coffee, then hesitated. Maybe the problem was too much artificial sweetener. Or too much caffeine. Wasn’t it caffeine that was supposed to give cancer to laboratory rats? She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember much of anything, not after the last couple of weeks.
Everybody at CHIC was exhausted.
The world’s sexiest restaurant issue had just hit the stands, and it was a smash hit. The distributors said they couldn’t stock shelves fast enough to meet the demand, and advertising space was being sold at a premium for the next issue. But if they didn’t capitalize on their momentum by making that next issue bigger and better, CHIC would slide right back downhill.
The hot-button feature for the next issue—the world’s sexiest getaway—was ready to go. The editorial staff had chosen three incredible places. They’d photographed all of them, and now they were ready to declare one the winner, with an extra-special photo spread to be shot on its romantic premises.
And that would take them to the February issue. The sexiest man alive.
What had started almost as a gag had turned into the feature of the year. Distributors, readers, newspaper columns, even TV shows, were giving the sexiest man terrific publicity.
CHIC, of course, was doing more than its part.
“Just wait until you see us for Valentine’s Day,” the current magazine gushed, “when we’ll bring you The Sexiest Man Alive. Yummy! You’ll drown in his gorgeous eyes, meet him up close and personal, complete with a no-holds-barred, pull-out centerfold.”
The copy made Susannah groan, but she knew it would sell lots of magazines. Actually, it already had. Readers had sent in nominations by the carload, and Susannah’s staff had narrowed the list to four finalists.
Bart Fitt, whose bare buns of gold had given new meaning to the words camera close-ups on a highly rated, late-night TV soap.
Alejandro Rio, the handsome male model for Cotton Puffs underwear, whose glorious male assets bulged in the briefest pair of briefs on a billboard above Times Square.
Zeke McCool, the smoky-voiced lead singer for a hot new band, who pranced around onstage with his shirt off so that his impressive abs had millions of women begging to do his laundry.
And Stefan Zyblos, a writer with a whiskey voice and a steamy smile, whose highly anticipated first novel was said to be so erotic it was going to be sold with oven mitts.
“Something for everyone,” Claire had sighed, after a day spent narrowing the choices, “and, by golly, studly to the bone.”
Susannah had smiled in agreement and wished she’d never used the silly word.
“But no studlier than our Mr. Romano,” Claire had added, with a quick look at Susannah, who’d pretended not to hear.
Why would she? She didn’t think about Matthew anymore. Not in any way that mattered. Not so that she felt the foolish, almost overwhelming sadness she’d felt the night he’d walked out of her life, or the days and the nights after.
Susannah frowned, let her chair fall forward so that the legs hit hard against the floor and went to get another doughnut. It tasted like cardboard, but she chewed and swallowed methodically until she’d finished the last crumb. Then she licked the powdered sugar from her fingertips.
Artificial sweeteners, caffeine, sugar be damned.
So what if she was on chemical overload? She had work to do and she needed the energy. That her thoughts had drifted off the subject and onto a dead issue like Matthew only proved it. He’d disappeared as soon as he’d decided that bedding her wasn’t a prize worth pursuing, and a day didn’t go by that she didn’t breathe a sigh of relief. She had nothing at all to do with him. Joe Romano was her contact now. When she needed an okay for something that crept beyond her budget, he was the man she got in touch with.
Joe was easy to deal with. Helpful, too. He loved the sexiest getaway and the sexiest man stuff. In fact, he’d been the one who’d suggested they feature all four of the sexiest man finalists in the Valentine’s Day issue, not just the winner.
“Pose the winning guy in nothing but a jockstrap,” Joe had E-mailed, “and we’ll sell out in an hour.”
Susannah thought he was probably right. The issue wasn’t shaping up as she’d imagined it—sex was battling it out with romantic, and sex was winning—but hey, that’s how it was in real life, too. Just look at what had happened with Matthew. A romantic evening, her in a gown, him in a tux, a romantic restaurant, and what had happened? She’d revealed more of herself than she should have, that was what, and it had scared him off.
And a good thing, too. Who wanted somebody like that hanging around?
Why was she wasting time thinking about him? Matthew was the past. CHIC’s February issue was the future—assuming she ever managed to get it on the stands.
Not so long ago, she and her staff had been short on ideas. Now what they needed was time. Time to cover the sexiest getaways, pick a winner, send a team to photograph it. Time to interview the sexiest man finalists. Time to choose one guy as the sexiest man alive, to arrange for the centerfold shot. Time to make the next two issues absolute winners.
Time, she thought, and sighed.
She’d sent out a memo called Solving Our Logistics Problem, and now here they were, her entire staff, pegging out on doughnuts, overdosing on coffee…and getting nowhere.
“It’s impossible,” Marcy from marketing said as she reached for her umpteenth cup of coffee.
“Impossible,” Amy from fashion agreed, and bit into a buttered bagel.
“Impossible or not,” Susannah said, trying to sound upbeat and perky, “we have t
o find a way to deliver.”
“Absolutely,” Marcy said.
The room feel silent.
“We could always chain the sexiest finalists to our desks,” Amy said.
There was a ripple of halfhearted laughter.
“Or ship them off for a weekend at the getaway finalists,” Marcy said. “The old two birds with one stone thing.”
Another ripple of laughter rang hollow in the room.
“There’s got to be a solution,” Claire said. “We just haven’t thought of it yet.”
Susannah nodded along with all the others. She trusted her team. They were sharp. She’d learned to let them brainstorm and to stay out of the early discussions as much as possible.
“Plus another great cover,” Amy said, “every bit as hot as the current one.”
There was a murmur of agreement. Susannah sighed, leaned her arms on the table and cradled her head. Her gaze drifted past Amy to the huge blowup of the December cover, which hung on the boardroom wall.
It was an interior shot of the Gilded Carousel. Candles, snowy-white napery, glittering wine goblets and a sexy couple from the modeling agency gazing into each other’s eyes across a platter of hors d’oeuvres.
“Oh, sexy,” Claire had sighed when she’d seen the proofs from the shoot. “That guy’s probably thinking about his boyfriend, but from here, he looks as if he’s ready to grab her hand and leap into bed.”
“You think it’ll sell?” Susannah had asked.
“Like crazy. Although they could just as well have taken a shot of you and our sexy publisher. Now, there’s a man who wouldn’t have any trouble getting me to jump between the sheets.”
Susannah had busied herself with arranging the proofs into a neat stack.
“That’s because you didn’t have to sit across a table from him, pretending you were having a good time.”
“Pretending? How could a woman not have a good time, out on a dinner date with that gorgeous hunk?”
“He did not take me on a date. He accompanied me on assignments for the magazine. And I don’t really see why you’d call him a gorgeous hunk.”
“Wrong adjective? Sorry. A studly hunk.” Claire had grinned “Come on, Suze, you can’t deny that just thinking about the guy is a turn-on.”
“For you, maybe,” Susannah had said, with a smile that said she was above such foolishness. “I don’t think of him at all.”
It was, of course, a lie.
“Suze?”
Susannah blinked and sat up straight Everybody was looking at her, their expressions expectant.
“Suze? You agree that it sounds good?”
People were smiling and nodding. Well, what the heck. Susannah smiled and nodded, too. Then she picked up her pencil, pulled a notepad toward her and made what she hoped were convincing doodles on the page.
She did think about Matthew. A lot. And the more she did, the more angry she became.
All that stuff about staying in New York to oversee the magazine had been nonsense. He’d never given a damn about CHIC. Why would he? Its failure would be a dent in the Romano empire. Its success would be a barely noticeable blip.
The truth was that he’d stayed so he could set things up for what she thought of now as the Big Seduction Scene.
And wasn’t it just too bad she’d spoiled it? First she’d told him something about herself, when anyone could see that he was not a man interested in exchanging cozy confidences with whatever woman he’d set his sights on. She’d sensed that from the first day she saw him on Cape Cod with a blonde. What he wanted was sex, the same as all CHIC’s readers, busily plunking down their two ninety-eight for the current issue. Not that there was anything wrong with wanting sex. It was just that her interests were elsewhere. She didn’t need them diverted from the one meaningful goal…
Success.
Susannah sighed and worked the tip of the pencil across the page.
No, she certainly hadn’t wanted any involvement with Matthew. Still, it was a good thing for her pride that she’d let him think there was already a man in her life and in her bed. A man named Peter.
Peter… Katz.
Susannah’s lips twitched. How come she’d never thought of it before? Peter Katz, her companion in bed. Peter Katz, sitting across from her at the kitchen table, wearing a tux.
She laughed, and Claire let out a shriek that almost started Susannah out of her skin.
“You like it,” Claire said. “Oh, wow, Suze, you like it!”
“What?” Susannah asked, staring at the smiling faces around the table while her heartbeat fell back toward normal.
Claire looked at everybody one by one. “Be honest, guys. Didn’t you all think we were going to have to push this one on our fearless leader?”
Heads nodded in eager agreement. Susannah felt a tingle of alarm. What were they all excited about? What had she just implied she was excited about, too?
“I wasn’t sure how you’d react, you know, Suze? After all, it’s a little bit—”
“Crazy,” Amy said, and giggled.
“Right,” Claire said, “crazy, and probably expensive as heck—well, not when you realize all the incredible benefits.”
Susannah looked around. Head bobbing seemed to have become the action of the hour.
“And the time problem,” Marcy chirped. “The logistics thing. All taken care of, right?”
“Well,” Susannah said, “well…”
“Nobody’s ever done this before,” Amy said. “You agree, Suze?”
Claire laughed as she looked at Susannah’s face. “She’s having second thoughts. You are, aren’t you, Suze?”
“No. I mean, well, maybe. I mean…”
“I know. You’re worried the Romanos won’t approve.”
“The Romanos,” Susannah said, feeling like the only person at a party who didn’t know the secret sign “Yes, well—”
“Joe will go for it. It’s a bundle of money, but he’ll see that it’s going to be well spent.” Claire frowned. “Will he have to get Matthew’s approval, do you think?”
Susannah cleared her throat. “I don’t—actually, I don’t think we—”
“That’s true. If he needs Matthew’s approval, it’s Joe’s problem, not ours. Although I can’t imagine Matthew would give us the thumbs-down, either. How will you pitch it, Suze?”
Everyone looked at Susannah, who cleared her throat again.
“Tell you what, Claire. Since it’s, ah, your plan, and you know the details better than any of us, why don’t you try pitching it to me?”
Claire wrinkled her brow. “I just did.”
“Oh, of course you did.” Susannah laughed so gaily that she could almost see the Ha, ha, ha’s spilling from her lips. “What I meant was, why don’t you try pitching it as if you were me pitching it to Joe Romano? It would be a huge help.”
Claire nodded, shut her eyes, took a deep breath, then looked at Susannah “Mr. Romano,” she said.
Everyone smiled.
“Mr. Romano, here’s what we want to do.” Claire pushed back her chair and got to her feet. “We’ve had enormous success with the current CHIC issue, and it’s vital we stay on a roll.” She stepped behind her chair, curled her hands around its top rung and looked seriously at Susannah. “This is our proposal, sir. We’ve narrowed our choice of sexiest getaways to one.”
Susannah blinked “We have?”
“Yes,” Claire said impatiently, “remember? That’s part of the plan. Eliminate that hotel in the Pocono Mountains, the lodge on Lake Michigan, the island in Seattle. They’re all great, but they can’t compare to Paris.”
“Paris?” Susannah asked, sitting bolt upright. “As in Paris, France? I didn’t even know we had a Paris contender.”
“We didn’t. I mean, we did. I mean, when you first told us about the sexiest getaway, you mentioned a weekend in Paris for a prize.”
“Yes, but I still don’t remember anybody nominating a place in—”
“It
was Amy’s idea.”
Amy smiled modestly. “Jimmy and I went there on our honeymoon.” She blushed. “We had a suite in this hotel—”
“We send you to that hotel, Suze,” Claire said, while Amy sat back and sighed. “Along with a photographer, a makeup guy, a stylist…the works.”
“Me?” Susannah’s voice squeaked. “What for?”
“So we can photograph you,” Claire said. “Honestly, Suze, weren’t you paying attention?”
“I, ah, I must have misunderstood. Claire, this is silly. Photograph me? Why would our readers want to see—”
“Because,” Claire said, as if she were explaining things to a somewhat backward five-year-old, “because, Suze, you are their personalized connection to CHIC, and to the life-style CHIC stands for, remember? That was your idea.”
“Yes. Well, sure, but—”
“Well, what could be more personal, more romantic, more sexy, than Susannah Madison in Paris?”
“You’re kidding.
“Susannah,” half a dozen voices said, all of them fraught with exasperation.
“Susannah,” Claire said, shaking her head, “you haven’t been listening. Didn’t I say this was an incredible idea? That it would save time? That it would make history?”
“Claire, you haven’t been listening. There’s nothing time-saving about photographing me in a Paris hotel, and the only thing incredible about it would be all our readers, shaking their heads and saying, well, there she is, a woman spending a weekend all by herself in the world’s most romantic—”
“The world’s sexiest—”
“The world’s sexiest city,” Susannah said, nodding at the Greek chorus that corrected her. She sat back, folded her arms and looked at Claire. “Right?”
Claire folded her arms and looked back. “Not all by herself,” she said smugly. “You’ll be in that suite with four, count ’em, four gorgeous studs.”
Susannah blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“We send you to Paris,” Marcy said excitedly, “with our sexiest guys. They wine you. They dine you. They take you dancing. You pose in the arms of every last one. You interview them. And Jimmy gets the pictures he needs for the getaway issue and for the Valentine’s Day issue at the same time, with January leading straight into February. Ta da, we end up in the winner’s circle.”
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