Start Me Up

by Maggie Riley

  There are a lot of gentle women who get used like this, and it makes me mad. Well, we’re going to fix things, and right now. Call me the Fixer. Except don’t, because I’m pretty sure that was already a TV show.

  “Sounds good to me. Sounds like you caught his eye.” The way her face lights up makes me smile.

  “Really?” The fidgeting stops. Confidence, baby. You only need a little.

  “Really. So, here’s what we’re going to do.” I slide her a paper I’ve been scribbling on while we talked. It’s got a few rules on it. “First thing you do, go buy yourself a nice bath bomb. Light some candles at home, enjoy a sensual bath, and feel comfortable in your own skin.”

  Amy giggles. God, she actually giggles. This woman is sunshine and sweetness.

  “I mean it. Feeling good about your femininity, and feeling sexy, it makes all the difference. Next thing, do you know when he’s coming back?”

  “He—that is, Dan—he always comes in on Saturdays for a couple of hours. He uses one of our private reading rooms.” She all but sighs when she says it.

  Saturday’s tomorrow. Perfect. She won’t have time to analyze and second guess and generally psych herself out.

  “When you come to work tomorrow, wear something that’s appropriate but makes you feel beautiful. Do up your hair. Put on your best makeup. If they don’t hurt, wear some wedge sandals or something. Nice blouse and skirt. The works. The point isn’t to be what he wants so much as it’s to wear what makes you feel desirable.” When women feel confident, they project outwards. I’ve seen men who would never give a certain girl a second look suddenly turn around, their eyes wide, to watch her walk by after a minimal transformation. Beauty’s in the mind as much as in the body.

  Amy’s taking notes, bless her. “Okay. Then what?”

  “When he comes in, engage on what he’s studying. Talk about it. Here’s the most important part: try to get him to be the one to ask you out.” This is part of my Commandments for Dating, which is sort of like the Ten Commandments except it’s Xeroxed and not in stone. Also, instead of ten, it’s like, four. Also, God didn’t give them to me; in fact, he’s probably up there somewhere taking notes. I give very good advice, what can I say?

  Dating rule 1: Get the man to make the first move.

  I’ll admit I’m not thrilled that it’s my first tip, but it’s a tried and true one. I’ve definitely seen women ask men out and it ends up being perfectly fine, but there’s something about the “traditional” (in hard air quotes) arrangement that tends to work more often. I recognize people’s behavior patterns real fast, and the evidence mounts up when you pay attention. Mom always said I was too intuitive for my own good, normally after a couple of Mint Juleps and listening to Barry Manilow’s greatest hits for an hour.

  I have no idea why Barry Manilow, but it was another pattern.

  “How do I get him to make the first move?” Amy bites her lip.

  “If he’s into you—and it sounds like he is—he will. If he sees you looking and feeling pretty, and if you’re interested in him and enjoying the conversation, he’ll want more time with you. Mention how much you like a new bar or restaurant, or how you’re going to swing over and grab some coffee on your break and there’s a great new shop you want to try.” Generally, women can get away with being a little less than subtle, especially if the guy is bookish as well.

  “So if Dan asks me out, what do I do then?”

  “Well, what would Jane Austen say?” I feel a little book talk can only be good for a lady in her line of work. And besides, who doesn’t love a bit of Regency romance in the day to day?

  “Early or latter Austen?” Amy frowns, suddenly consumed by the task. “Something more like the lessons learned by the archetypal characters in Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility? By which I mean, overcoming the one key character flaw to become a whole person? Or along the lines of Persuasion, where the journey is learning from the mistakes of the past?”

  I mean, I was honestly thinking more Colin Firth jumping into a pond in a studly fashion. But then again, that’s why she’s the librarian and I carry chocolate covered fruit with me everywhere I go.

  “Whichever works best for you. Point is, Jane would probably have you over for tea and give you this same list of the four golden rules.”

  Dating rule 2: Make sure the man pays for the first date.

  Dating rule 3: Never have sex on the first date.

  Dating rule 4: Play hard to get, but not too well.

  I know, I know, some of these seem a little old fashioned. Sue me, but it works. Like I said, I’m built to see patterns. I’m like a mini…pattern…seer…that way. But people like to play by the rules, so it’s important to know what the rules are.

  I have to suppress a shudder as I remember living life before I had a million ironclad rules. I was a mess, literally and figuratively. When I was younger, the world and its endless possibilities were thrilling to me. I wanted to do everything, be everywhere. But that unbridled enthusiasm, that YES! tattoo on my forehead (figuratively speaking, although I was very close to a literal tattoo once) came with some unpleasant consequences. Mom used to be in the principal’s office day in and out, worrying over my grades, my messy locker, my inability to concentrate. They put me on a million different pills, worried that there was something really wrong with me. With maturity, and enough hard lessons under my belt, I took matters into my own tentacles, got a daily planner, and forced life into line.

  It’s worked ever since.

  Amy reads over the notes, biting her lip and fidgeting again. Uh oh, this is a little information overload. I offer the blueberries, which do the trick.

  “Look, these are things to have in mind while on your first date. Within them, there’s a broad range of things you can do.” Like holding hands and kissing, but no oral. That’s good for two and a half dates in, in my book. Also, if he likes the same Marvel TV shows you do, you can shave off that half a date. Chances are if he’s into Jessica Jones, you should marry him and bear his children.

  Then my phone starts buzzing, playing the oh-so-subtle song my friend Chelsea programmed, It’s Raining Men. On the nose? You bet, but Chelsea really likes to screw with me. It’s one of the reasons I love her. I’m a sucker for pain.

  Also, she bakes excellent cranberry scones. I would not do Best Friend Afternoon Tea with anyone else.

  Crap, Men means my alarm, which means that I needed to be at my apartment putting on makeup and changing five minutes ago. I’ve got an event for another client tonight, and being late sets a bad precedent.

  “How do I pay you?” Amy asks when I start putting my books and papers into my admittedly overlarge purse. I’m pretty sure I could fit a baby and a golden retriever inside if I ever wanted to try. If I become a mom, I’ll keep that in mind.

  “The first consultation is always free. You start paying me once he asks you out.” I wink at her while hiking my bag up my shoulder. “We can arrange that tomorrow.”

  “You really think he’ll ask me tomorrow?” The bloom of panic’s spreading across her face. “What if he doesn’t?”

  “That’ll give you a week to perfect your sensual bath and fabulous outfit routine.” I know Amy’s type, and I’ve worked with it before. She thinks that because things haven’t worked out by now, they never will. So any step forward is just another reminder of how she’ll screw it up. This part of the process is as much about rewiring her as it is getting him to say and do all the right things.

  And speaking of the right things, the right thing for me right now will include getting an Uber and plunging into the back of it while it takes off at high speed. Finally, I get the chance to live all my B-movie car chase dreams. There are about five of them.

  I say goodbye and good luck to Amy, then race out of the library. The Anderson Center for Child Development is having a splashy dinner tonight, and my client needs to make a, well, splash.

  Which she will. I’ve got every step planned out, afte
r all.

  Dating the Billionaire is available now! Find it on Amazon here!

  Roommate Romance

  Thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed Start Me Up, keep reading for an excerpt of my first book, ROOMMATE ROMANCE.

  Chapter 1

  ALLIE

  My best friend Liz always said that on my best day, my singing voice sounded like an off-tune cat being strangled. She wasn’t wrong. Which was why I was strictly a shower singer, tormenting only myself. It was also the reason I hadn’t had a roommate since college. I wouldn’t put someone through that. It was too cruel.

  Because there were just some days when a girl needed to sing in the shower. And today was one of those days.

  Everything had started out going exactly to plan. Because that’s what I did. I planned. I was Allie Lawson, wrangler of schedules and queen of to-do lists. My phone had at least five different list-making apps and at any given time I was usually working from two dozen separate lists. And that didn’t include my master lists. Lists like: Allie’s Favorite On-Road Snacks (chocolate-covered pretzels and gummy worms), or Allie’s Top Ten Reasons to Always Carry Duct Tape (need an emergency hem? Duct tape that sucker!), or Allie’s Celebrities She Would Never Meet But Would Totally Bone (Channing Tatum, Channing Tatum, Channing Tatum).

  I never did anything without a list. Without several lists. This current life change had come after several weeks and several dozen lists. I had weighed the pros and cons, I had ranked my personal and professional needs, and I had reminded myself of all of the reasons I missed New York. Bagels had ranked high on the pros list.

  My ex-boyfriend had never liked my lists. At first I had thought it was because he was someone who liked to go with the flow, liked to live in the now. It turned out, he just didn’t want me to be in control.

  It had been three years since I had lived in New York. Three years since I had lived anywhere for longer than a week. And while living life out of a suitcase was manageable—especially if you were organized, which obviously I was, I couldn’t deny that I had begun to crave stability. And bagels.

  Plus, there was nowhere for me to go in my job. Right out of college I got a job as an assistant stage manager with a tour of Cats. I had jumped around from production to production and ended up as the stage manager for the official touring company for Wicked. And I was damn good at it. Needless to say, my ex didn’t think much of it. He told me time and time again that no one liked being bossed around by a girl, that I should move into the ‘creative’ side of theater where I could relax and where less responsibility would rest on my shoulders. But I didn’t want to relax. I thrived on wresting order out of chaos, lived for the adrenaline high of opening night. In the end, I kept the job and got rid of him. Though I hated to admit it, part of the reason I was so driven to succeed now was to prove to him (and anyone else who doubted me) that I was born to do this job. Lists and all.

  But I was tired of traveling. And I wanted to stage manage a Broadway show. On Broadway. I was twenty-five. I was ready. So armed with my to-do lists, I made plans. I saved up a safety net, set up several interviews with potential shows, and—as if it was a sign that I was making the right decision—Liz agreed to let me sublet her apartment for cheap when she got cast in a show in Connecticut.

  Everything would work out perfectly. Because the universe and I had come to an understanding. If I had a list, I was in control. Things would be fine.

  Except they weren’t fine. Despite my lists and my planning, the last twenty-four hours had been a complete and utter disaster.

  I got to the airport two and a half hours before my flight. That always gave me enough time to get to my gate and find a seat near the outlet. Some people (cough, cough, Liz) felt that getting there five seconds before the gate closed was a perfectly acceptable alternative. She was wrong.

  But this morning, the airport was crazy busy and delayed flights had crammed everyone into terminals like sweaty, exhausted sardines. You might ask: if I was such a good planner, how had I not known about the delays? I did! Of course I did. My flight was originally set for the night before, but I had checked ahead of time and managed to spend the evening in my hotel room instead of in the airport.

  However, when I called in the morning to check on the status on my flight, the woman on the other end—who I have to assume was drunk—assured me that there would be no problems with the new schedule.

  Instead, I spent the next eight hours waiting for my flight. A flight which was then re-routed to Dallas—the opposite direction of where I was going. Then I spent six hours in the middle of the night in Dallas (where everything was closed and I couldn’t get anything to eat) before getting on the next flight out to New York. A flight which should have landed at JFK. Instead, it went to La Guardia, the most inconvenient of all airports. Number three on my list of good New York airports.

  One bus and two subway transfers later in the middle of rush hour, I finally arrived at Liz’s Brooklyn apartment, dragging the duffel with all my worldly possessions up three flights of stairs because the elevator was out of order. At that point, my plans had been revised so many times that my favorite list-making app had actually quit on me twice and had required me to restart my phone.

  I was exhausted, starving, and covered in the grime of the thousands of New Yorkers I had rubbed elbows with on the subway. All I wanted was a nap, a pizza, and a shower. Not in that order.

  Liz’s apartment was a typical Brooklyn one-bedroom. I had braced myself for a messy whirlwind, as was my best friend’s general state of being, but found the place to be surprisingly neat. There weren’t any clothes on the floor or overflowing recycling bins. It actually looked like it had been recently cleaned.

  But besides the lack of mess, it looked exactly like Liz’s room had looked when we shared a place in college. The walls were covered with theatre posters, the bookshelf stuffed full of scripts and playbills. There was a small TV and a lumpy sofa and lots of twinkly lights decorating the window frames and door frames. It looked like the home of an eccentric fairy.

  The apartment itself was nice, but small. Tiny kitchen (not as if I was going to use it to cook, but one needed a place to store take-out food and menus), decent-sized living room with most of the furniture likely rescued from the curb, and, most importantly, a bedroom with a queen-sized bed.

  I wanted to faceplant on it. But while on the subway, I had revised today’s plan (for the seventeenth time) and determined that while I was so tired I almost fell asleep on some strange guy’s shoulder, I knew I would feel much better if I showered first. So that was the plan. Shower, sleep, eat.

  So I stripped off my clothes, shoved them into my duffel with the rest of my dirty laundry, and headed off to the shower to serenade myself. Rock concert: party of one.

  SHANE

  I walked into the apartment and was greeted by the sound of someone murdering a chicken. The shower was running, but the water was not loud enough to drown out the sound of someone positively butchering that song from The Bodyguard.

  “And I-ee-i-ee-i will always love yooooooooo-ou-ou.”

  Christ.

  If I had a glass in my hand, I was pretty sure it would have shattered on that note.

  And while I could appreciate the enthusiasm behind the singing—and there was plenty of it—the last thing I wanted to do at the moment was deal with the fact that there was a stranger in my shower. A tone-deaf stranger.

  Pulling out my phone, I dialed Liz’s number. Of course, it went directly to voicemail. Not that I should have been surprised. I should have known my scatterbrained tenant wouldn’t have left town without leaving some sort of problem behind. She was like the world’s tiniest, blondest hurricane, always leaving disaster in her wake.

  And I’d had the pleasure of meeting more of Liz’s friends. They were like her—actresses—which often meant they were beautiful, but flaky as hell. The last thing I wanted right now was to deal with some flighty actress-type who didn’t have her shit t
ogether. I had a hard enough time managing my own life, I wasn’t in the mood to figure someone else’s out.

  I should have known this whole situation was too good to be true. When I found out that Liz was going to be out of town for a few months, I had jumped at the opportunity to stay in the building again. Even though I owned it and used the bottom floor as my studio, the place hadn’t had any vacancy since I moved out, and it wasn’t right to clear out an apartment just so I could be closer to my workshop.

  Besides, up until this point, I couldn’t have lived here even if there was a vacancy. I had been taking care of my younger sister, Megan, since she was fourteen, which had meant moving upstate until she finished high school. Her wellbeing had been my priority, and even though I had been a stupid twenty-two-year-old who had no idea how to talk to his teen sister, let alone become her guardian and stand-in parent, I somehow managed to make it through those years without killing her. It was currently my proudest accomplishment.

  Now Megan was starting her first semester at NYU, and it made sense to move back to Brooklyn where I would be able to start up my furniture-making business again and stay close to my sister. But not close enough that I would be “cramping her style.”

  Liz had agreed to let me stay in her apartment—which had been my apartment before I moved out—and for the past twenty-four hours it had been nothing short of heaven. It had been so long since I had any kind of privacy, and I had already been making plans to take advantage of that. Plans involving women. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been on a date, let alone the last time I’d been able to have some quality naked time with a woman.

  And when I thought about the quality naked time I was looking forward to, it didn’t involve listening to someone warbling off-key in my shower. Pulling my damp shirt away from my chest, I eyed the closed bathroom door with longing. I had spent the entire afternoon downstairs in my workshop, hauling lumber and cutting pieces down. I was tired, sore, and, despite the fall chill in the air, sweating like a pig. The last thing I wanted to deal with was a housing crisis. Especially with someone who was clearly making it her life’s mission to make sure I would never, ever want to watch a Kevin Costner movie again.