by Barbara Daly
"Pick you up tomorrow at five."
"Five o'clock? In the afternoon?" Even Maybelle faded from her mind. Hope did her best work after five.
"Lots of traffic on Friday. Long way to Connecticut. Party starts at seven. Can't be late."
She thought about it. "Okay, then. Pick me up at the office."
He was silent for a second. "It's black tie."
"No problem," said Hope.
"Five."
"The 48th Street entrance."
"I'll be there."
It was sort of a relief knowing she could delay coming home tomorrow. What was it with this apartment? What was it with Maybelle and all that tsk-tsking?
"Sorry for the interruption," she said, settling down again and feeling relieved when Maybelle followed suit. "Let's see, we'd gotten past the bull…"
"Yeah. Anyhoo," Maybelle said, picking up the thread without difficulty, "I got right bored that first winter after he was gone, what with nobody to fight with and only three channels on the television. But one morning I was watching this arithmetic program, Ge-ometry, they call it—"
Hope's eyes widened.
"You know, one of them college courses they do on TV? Anyway, right after that they was advertising these University of Texas—" She pronounced it "Tegzis." "—correspondence courses and I sent off for the catalog. Whoo-ee, what a lot of junk you could learn without setting foot off the ranch!"
Hope felt her brain whirling in slow ellipses. Getting a little closer to Earth, then spinning way out into space. "So you sent off for a Geometry course."
"Calculus. I'd pretty much gotten the hang of Geometry and the catalog said take Calculus next."
"Oh."
"Then a course in lit-tra-chure."
"Contemporary American literature?"
"Nope, Mid-yeeval. You know, them sexy Canterbury Tales? Whoo-ee, they sure made me wish I had Hadley back for a long weekend. Then I said to myself, 'Girl, your hands are way more bored than your head.' And that was the truth, what with the ranch hands doing the outside work and their wives coming in to clean and cook. So I took a beautician course."
"A correspondence course in hairdressing?" The ellipse lengthened dramatically.
"Yeah. Well, that was a bust, with nobody but the sheep to practice on. The ranch hands' wives wouldn't let me get anywhere close to them with my shears. But I can do my own hair real good," she said cheerfully. "Saved me many a penny, let me tell you."
"I can see that," Hope murmured. "How long did it take you to finish all those courses."
"Almost six months! Them courses was hard!" Maybelle's gaze shot over her shoulder, then flitted from one corner of the room to the other. "Honey," she said suddenly, "have you got an extry mirror I could hang over there on that wall?"
"Mirror? Well, no, all the mirrors are sort of attached to things, or doing their various…"
"No matter. I'll bring some by tomorrow." She frowned. "Don't want to wait long, though. Anyways, next thing I did was try my hand at making dishes and stuff. Old man Abernathy brung the kiln out to the ranch in his big truck and I did that until the ladies got to complaining about dusting all the new crockery. Then landscape design, but I couldn't get nuthin' much to grow out there in West Texas but cactus. This place sure could use some greenery," she added.
Hope wondered if Maybelle could be trying to hypnotize her. This was the most outrageous—at least the most different—face it, the most interesting conversation she'd had in ages. And she didn't have to say a word, just listen to Maybelle's chirping voice, which went so well with her chicken-like appearance. She could listen to Maybelle and think about Sam Sharkey. She was going out with Sam tomorrow night. No, not really going out with Sam, just accompanying Sam, protecting him from the boss's wife, but still…
"…feng shui," she heard Maybelle say.
Hope switched gears.
"And I said what the heck is that? So naturally I had to find out. And you know what I found out?" The question was clearly rhetorical, because Maybelle forged on. "If I'd known all that stuff before, Hadley and me might of got along a sight better."
"How." It wasn't a question, just a polite murmur. How could anybody get along with this idiot savant? Poor Hadley must have thought he'd died and gone to everlasting steam heat turned way up by the time the honeymoon was over. He'd apparently been desperate enough to engage in combat with a bull. Didn't that say something about the mood the man was in?
"That's what I'm going to show you, hon," Maybelle said with another of those abrupt softenings of her usual shrillness. She shot up out of the armchair, shouldered a brown leather purse that reminded Hope of a feedbag and got the Stetson twirling on one finger. "Can I have the run of the house for a coupla weeks?"
Absolutely not! Hope got up, too. "First I really do insist on having an—"
"—estimate. Budget." Maybelle sighed. "Honest to gosh, if you yuppies could get your minds off money for a split second…"
She was moving rapidly toward the door with Hope in her wake. "…and credentials," Hope said firmly. "Was the correspondence course the end of your professional training?"
Maybelle spun. "Lands no! I spent two years in Chiner and lap-pan learning everything they had to teach me, then I come up here and got me the kind of degree you young folks understand. The Parsons School of Design. So don't you worry none about my credentials."
"Well. Okay, here's a key." The voice that uttered those utterly reckless words was strange, yet familiar. It was her own voice. That's why she recognized it.
Hope promised herself she'd call the insurance company first thing in the morning. Have an art appraiser out. Determine the current value of the African head and the glass bowl. Adjust the insurance accordingly. And when this nonsense was over, she'd hire a proper Manhattan decorating firm to undo the damage.
She would never see Sheila again.
And tomorrow night she was going out with Sam Sharkey.
A little thrill shot straight down through the center of her body just thinking about it.
* * *
Sam guessed he'd been looking for a brown-haired woman with green eyes and a face to match.
As he stepped out of the luxurious Lincoln he'd hired for the evening, he scanned the crowd surging through the doors of the office building into the blustery wind of December and didn't find anyone who fit that description. The woman who waved and stepped briskly toward the limo was something else again.
"Hope?"
She smiled. "Am I late?"
"Right on time."
First thing, her face wasn't green. Of course he hadn't really expected it to be. He wasn't prepared, though, for creamy skin or full, glistening lips, for the even thicker, darker lashes that framed her eyes—still green, thank God. And her hair. Why had he thought it was brown? Must have been wet. This woman had hair the color of copper pipe.
Maybe she'd dyed it to match her product.
Under a thick, soft-looking cape, she was wearing a tuxedo. So was he, but the only similarity was their satin lapels. Hers had a short skirt, for one thing, and some kind of low-necked black-lace top under the jacket instead of a white shirt and bow tie. And the jacket poofed out at the top and in at the waist in a way that almost made him forget the reason she was with him in the first place.
For a second he felt like somebody had gut-punched him.
He slid into the car first and let the driver help Hope in beside him. He helped her shrug off the cape—cashmere, by its feel—and pretty soon she was showing him a pair of long, long legs with smooth, slender knees in sheer black stockings. Something bubbled up inside him that was supposed to simmer, covered, for another five years or so, until he really got his feet on the legal ground.
The next thing she was showing him was a laptop. "I hope you don't mind," she said, perching it carefully on top of those pretty knees. "I was into something important when I realized it was time to change jackets."
"Be my—" he paused to clear his throat
"—guest. I brought work along, too."
Even before he got to that last line he was looking at her profile, at a big emerald earring on a really cute ear that had a thick bunch of shiny hair tucked behind it, at slim hands with long fingernails painted a sort of ginger-peachy color that matched her lipstick, fingernails that went tap-tap, tap-tap-tap on the computer keys.
Wondering if this had been a really bad idea instead of a really inspired one, Sam reached down for his briefcase.
For a time they rode—sat absolutely still, rather, in the cross-town traffic—in silence except for her taps and the rustle of the brief he was scanning.
Hope knew it was a brief because she'd let her gaze stray once too often in his direction, sweep up and down the considerable length of him. Lord help her, he was glorious in black tie! Black tux, onyx studs in the buttonholes of a dazzling white shirt, black hair, black lashes … she wouldn't mind having a brief of her own to fan herself with.
She'd set up her laptop at once in order to have something to focus on besides him, but she wasn't getting a lot done. For one thing, she was concentrating on hitting the laptop keys with the pads of her fingers, not her nails. Clear polish was definitely the way to go, and that's the way she usually went, but for some reason she'd wanted to look especially, well, pretty tonight.
But only because she wanted to be sure she left the right impression with the boss's wife. Lick your lower lip at somebody else. He's mine!
"How do you want me to act tonight?" she said. She'd been thinking about it, but she hadn't meant to say it aloud.
"Oh, I don't know." Sam rolled the brief a little in his hands and frowned. "Like a girlfriend, I guess."
Wonder how a girlfriend acts. I haven't been one since…
She couldn't remember since when. That was pathetic. Her sophomore year in college, she thought, when she'd dated a pimply philosopher.
"Like … smile up at you, and…"
"We should use terms of endearment," Sam said. "You know, 'Sam, darling, would you fetch me one of those adorable caviar canapés.' That kind of thing."
"I take it I can put 'that kind of thing' in my own words," she said, giving him a sidelong glance.
"Whatever makes you comfortable."
Comfortable? She was already not comfortable and she hadn't even begun acting yet. "We shouldn't try to pretend we've been together a long time," she said to get back on track. "I'm popping up for the first time, and these people know you. You'd have said something about having a girlfriend."
The thoughtful look that crossed his face told her that maybe he would've, maybe he wouldn't. What he said was, "Could we claim love at first sight?"
"What about—" she did little quotation marks with her fingers "—fourth or fifth date, but we feel this really strong attraction?"
He nodded. "That's the attitude. The overdone 'how can I make you happy' stuff, like 'are you cold, here's your cape, are you hot, let's go out on the balcony, are you thirsty, I'll get you a drink.'"
"Very good," Hope said. "Then we do the sudden looks of appreciation at discovering something new about each other we'd never known before, like 'you sail? Oh, my goodness gracious! I simply lo-ve sailing.'"
"That'd be you," he said, looking uncertain for the first time, "saying 'my goodness gracious, I simply lo-ve…'"
"Probably not," said Hope. "But better me than you, now that I think of it. Incidentally, is there something you do that I should know about?"
"I work."
"Well, yes, but…"
"That's it. I work. Just say 'he works.' Anybody you're talking to will know we're well-acquainted."
There was a faint bitterness in his tone, or had she imagined it. Must have, because almost immediately he turned to her with a quick, flashing grin. "Then there's the 'isn't she wonderful' face," he said. "For me, that'd be a sappy smile." He demonstrated.
"Yuck. You look like a lovesick gander. For me," she said, "it would be a sort of parted lips, widened eyes kind of thing." She demonstrated, embellishing her act by pouting out her lower lip as if it were swollen with lust.
He cleared his throat again. She hoped he wasn't getting a cold. "By George, I think we've got it."
"Sorry I interrupted your work," Hope said.
"No problem," he said.
She returned to her laptop and he returned to his brief. But first he had to flatten it out, he'd had it rolled up so tightly.
* * *
"Charlene." Sam bowed slightly. "Phil. This is Hope Sumner."
"I'm sorry about the circumstances that brought us here," Hope said, looking properly funereal, "but thanks for letting us join you at the last minute. Sam has told me so much about you."
Sam gave her a look. Where did she learn to do that, get all the right words into one receiving-line sentence?
"We're delighted that you were willing to join us on such short notice," said Charlene. A pair of huge blue eyes shot daggers in Hope's direction, then Cupid arrows at Sam. He pretended not to notice, but it was hard not to notice that Charlene's dress went down to here and came up to there, and that she was as voluptuous here as she was slender there.
Silicone at the top and liposuction at the bottom? He'd ask Hope what she thought.
"Please come in," Charlene went on. "Make yourselves comfortable. You know almost everybody."
"Yes, yes," Phil murmured. "Sad time for all of us, but I know Thaddeus would have wanted us to go on with our— Harry!" he said, putting a manicured hand forward. "Great to see you. How's the golf?"
Sam gripped Hope's elbow and propelled her forward into the Carrolls' magnificent reception room, a marble-floored space with twenty-foot ceilings and fifteen-foot windows. They ran directly into Cap Waldstrum. "Cap," he said heartily. "This is Hope Sumner." He paused. "You remember Hope."
"No," Cap said, "and I promise you I would have." The caressing gaze of Sam's colleague—his opposite number in the Corporate Department, the man who might edge Sam out of the partnership—slid down to Hope's cleavage. This drew Sam's gaze in the same direction, toward creamy breasts just barely peeking out above the lace.
He had a brief, satisfying daydream of socking Cap in the jaw. And not merely because Cap was apparently an early invitee to this dinner party while he, Sam, was just filling in. This was bad news.
He'd decided to try bluffing Cap about Hope, but as direct as lawyers were, subtlety was out of the question. He'd have to hit Cap over the head with the message to back off.
"I'll get you a drink, darling," he said.
"I'd love some sparkling water, angel," she answered him, giving him the sappy smile he'd thought he was supposed to use. "With lime. I do better if I start out slowly," she was explaining to Cap as Sam made a beeline for the bar, "especially during the holidays."
The bar being a mano-a-mano scene, he barely got back to Hope in time to hear her say, "Pipe. I'm in pipe."
"Not Palmer," Cap said, sounding amazed. "What a coincidence. Our firm—"
"She knows," Sam said abruptly. "Small world, huh?"
"So how did you two meet?" Cap was looking increasingly interested.
"I met Sam through…" Hope began.
"…mutual friends," Sam interjected smoothly. "And for once, the friends had heads on their shoulders." He gave Hope a replay of the sappy grin she'd blatantly stolen from the script they'd agreed on.
"Well, so nice to meet you." Cap The Snake slithered off into the crowd to offer his apple to someone more vulnerable. Sam The Shark decided to let him go … this time.
"Two down," Hope hissed. "Who's next?"
"Not a new player," he hissed back. "Charlene's coming back for a second match."
"Sam," Charlene purred, "you're my dinner partner this evening. Your friend…"
"Hope," Sam supplied. "Hope Sumner."
"Hope Sumner," Charlene said, "will sit across from you between Cap—you've met Cap—" her gaze flitted briefly in Hope's direction "—and Ed Benbow."
"So it's tim
e to go in to dinner?" Sam said, relieved that Charlene hadn't yet invited him to dally with her in some "private" location until the soup was on.
She gave him a mischievous look. "Soon, you impatient boy. Ed," she said, "come and meet…"
"Hope," said Hope.
"Sumner," said Sam.
"Sad occasion we've got here," said Ed. He did some appropriately lugubrious head shaking.
Hope turned suddenly to Sam, "Darling, I didn't ever meet…"
"Thaddeus," Sam supplied.
"Fine man," Ed rumbled. "Salt of the earth."
Sam slid a possessive arm around Hope's shoulders. "We poured him into our opponents' wounds," he murmured.
It was important, of course, to behave as if he and Hope were lovers. About to be lovers, at least. But when she leaned into him, when he felt her shiver of pleasure, he wondered if putting his arm around her and whispering so directly into her ear, a small, very pretty ear, had been a good idea. That shiver had been disquieting, had awakened the sleeping monster inside him again. Except it wasn't inside him. It was right out there in front for all the world to see. And for all he knew, Hope was just ticklish.
"How long have you known our boy Sam?" Ed asked Hope.
"Just a few weeks." Hope smiled prettily. "Long enough to know all he does is work."
"That's Sam, all right," Ed agreed.
Sam had let his hand begin to move against Hope's shoulder in the most natural lover-like way—just testing for signs of response from her—when to his annoyance he felt something tugging at his other arm.
"Sam," Charlene said, "I want to show you my new orchid." She dug her spiky little heels into the floor and tightened her death grip on his elbow. "We can give Ed and…"
"Hope," said Sam, sending a desperate glance in her direction as he slid away from her.
"Hope a chance to get acquainted."
"I'd love to see your orchids," Hope said warmly. "You, too, Ed? You interested in orchids?"
"My wife is," Ed said. "Tanya?"
A stunning blonde half Ed's age left the group she was visiting with and came over to him. "What, honey? Hi," she said, holding out her hand to Hope, "I'm Tanya Benbow. Hey, Shark! What's up?"
"We're going to see Charlene's orchids," Ed said. "Knew you wouldn't want to miss that."