“Yes. This project is really important to the magazine. You’re on a tight deadline And you’re new to this. I’m sure you can understand that Joe and I discussed this and decided we’d feel better if one of us were on-site with you in Paris.”
Susannah cocked her head again. He knew she was trying to decide whether or not to believe him, but what could she do even if she didn’t? She was here. He was here. That, therefore, was that.
“Then why did you come? Why not your brother?”
“Joe’s in Miami. On business.” That much was true. It wouldn’t serve any point to add that Joe’s business involved a much-deserved two weeks of sun and fun with his latest redhead. “I, on the other hand, was able to free up the next few days.” Matthew smiled ingratiatingly. “So here I am.”
Susannah nodded. So here he was, she thought. Here he was, and she still wasn’t sure if she’d wanted to throw herself into his arms that first minute or if she’d wanted to have one of the Sexiests shove him into the corridor so she could slam the door in his face and pretend she’d never seen him.
Her throat constricted.
Who was she trying to kid? The only thing she was certain of was that her heart had gone into overdrive when Matthew stepped into the room. She’d missed him. Oh, how she’d missed him…
“Susannah?”
She looked around. Zeke had come sidling up behind her. He was looking at Matthew as if Matthew were some strange species no one had ever seen before.
“Yes?”
“Is this guy who he says he is?” Zeke asked out of the side of his mouth. “’Cause, if he isn’t, you just say the word and—”
“He is,” Susannah said quickly. She smiled and put her hand on Zeke’s arm. “He’s definitely who he says he is. Let me introduce you. Everybody? This is my boss, Matthew Romano. Mr. Romano—Matthew, this is Zeke McCool, Stefan Zyblos, Bart Fitt and Alejandro Rio.”
The Sexiests stepped up, one by one, and gripped Matthew’s hand. He wondered if it were deliberate, the hard press of fingers and flesh, decided it was, and gave back as good as he got.
“Delighted,” he said, and smiled.
“You came close, Romano,” Alejandro Rio said.
“Close?”
Rio flashed Susannah a hot, dark and dangerous smile. “We weren’t going to let you push our lady around, were we, compadres?”
Matthew smiled, too. “I’m sure you weren’t.” He stepped forward and slipped an arm around Susannah’s shoulders. He felt her stiffen, but she stood her ground. “And I’m happy to know that my lady was so well-cared for in my absence.”
Susannah swung toward him. “Your lady?” she spluttered.
The warning was clear. Matthew heard it in her voice, saw it in the sudden blaze of anger in her eyes, felt it in the way she tried, suddenly, to pull free of his arm. But he’d gone too far to stop now, and besides, he didn’t want to stop. Not with all the testosterone floating in the air.
“Susie, sweetheart,” he said softly, “I know we’ve always agreed on the importance of discretion, but these—gentlemen—are entitled to the truth, don’t you think? Besides, this is Paris. The city of lovers. Why should we pretend, hmm?”
And, still smiling, he bent his head and kissed her.
CHAPTER TEN
SUSANNAH sat at a table at the sidewalk café just outside Le Grand Palais, sipping what remained of a cup of café Americaine.
Two tables away, Matthew was putting Bart and Alejandro, Zeke and Stefan through their paces. It was an amazing sight. Any minute now, she expected the four Sexiests to roll over, sit and stay on command, and why?
Susannah’s eyes glittered with tightly suppressed anger.
Because Matthew Romano ordered it, that was why.
What ill wind had blown him back into her life? A few hours ago, Matthew had been the Unseen Publisher. Now he was in her space. In her hair. In her way. Just remembering the performance he’d put on in the suite made her want to shriek with fury.
“How dare you kiss me?” she’d hissed as soon as they’d had a moment alone, and he’d given her a look of schoolboy innocence and explained that he’d assessed the situation and immediately realized that instead of focusing their energies on the camera, the Sexiests would focus it on her unless they realized she was already spoken for.
“That’s ridiculous,” she’d snapped, and Matthew had patted her cheek indulgently, smiled and said she just didn’t understand.
It was, he said, a male thing.
A male thing, indeed, she thought sourly. It was a macho thing, was what he’d meant. With that one kiss, he’d established himself as the man in charge. Suddenly, he was an expert on photography, on style, on what would attract readers and what wouldn’t. And everybody believed him, from the Sexiests to the makeup guy. Even Claire had joined the enemy camp, judging by the way she sighed as she slipped into the chair alongside Susannah’s.
“He’s so creative, Suze,” she whispered “Isn’t it amazing?”
Susannah gave her a disgusted look. “Amazing.”
“And so handsome!”
“Is he? I hadn’t noticed.”
“And so sexy!”
Enough was enough. Susannah glared at Claire.
“How can you let him take you in?” she demanded. “The man’s a conceited, arrogant, insufferable egomaniac. And he’s about as sexy as an—an eggplant, compared to Alejandro and Bart and Zeke and—”
“Susannah?”
Susannah looked up. The arrogant, insufferable egomaniac himself was standing over her. If he’d overheard what she’d just said, he wasn’t letting it show. He looked as deep in creative thought as a Broadway director on a busy day.
“Are you talking to me?” she asked politely.
“Jimmy’s pointed out that we haven’t had you in any of the photographs.”
Susannah smiled with all her teeth. “Is that right?”
“I know you’d planned things differently.”
“Well, yes. Yes, we had. We’d spent days and days organizing what you’ve managed to tear apart in an afternoon…but don’t let that bother you, Mr. Romano. You are, after all, God.”
“Suze,” Claire whispered, and put her hand on Susannah’s arm, but Susannah shook off both the hand and the warning.
“So don’t worry about me not being in any of the photos. Don’t concern yourself with the hours of time that went into setting up this weekend. And, most especially, don’t bother yourself with how our readers will want to see me as their link to the four Sexiests. Please empty your mind of all concerns.” She smiled again, even more brilliantly. “You do have a mind, don’t you, Mr. Romano?”
It was, she was pleased to see, a direct hit. Claire made a sound like someone trying to swallow a whale, and Matthew…oh, yes. Matthew’s carefully assumed look of creative angst collapsed like an ice sculpture under the unwelcome attentions of a blowtorch, revealing the man beneath—a man whose eyes snapped with anger.
“She didn’t mean that,” Claire said quickly.
“She did.” Matthew’s voice was a study in control. “But I can understand her pique.”
“You can?”
“Of course Miss Madison planned this—this exercise with the greatest care.”
“Oh, she did,” Claire babbled, “she definitely did.”
Matthew’s jaw tightened. “A weekend in Paris with four—what was the word Miss Madison used to describe our finalists?”
“Sexiests,” Claire supplied. “We call them the four—”
“Sexiests. A charming description, especially for Miss Madison, who would have had a hotel suite, complete with her very own stag line, all expenses paid by me.”
“Paid out of my budget,” Susannah said hotly, “all of it necessary for CHIC and, just to remind you, Miss Madison does not appreciate being discussed in the third person.”
“Necessary?” Matthew asked with a smirk.
“Necessary,” Susannah said, kicking back her chair and standing to confront h
im. “We’ve been promoting this weekend and the sexiest man alive for some time. How you can manage to make this sound like—like some half-baked scheme I’ve come up with for my own amusement is beyond me!”
It was beyond him, too. Matthew stared into the enraged, beautiful face of his editor-in-chief. She was right on all counts, and he knew it This wasn’t a weekend. of fun and games, it was work. Hard work. He’d reminded himself of that as the CHIC crew had trooped from one shooting location to another, reminded himself of it as he’d watched Susannah have her hair fixed and her nose powdered…
Reminded himself of it as he’d watched the photographer pose her with the four hunks of muscle.
Oh, yeah, he surely had watched that, long enough so the images were probably forever burned into his brain.
Susannah on the steps of L’Opera, smiling for the camera as the four Sexiests gathered around her like piranhas in a feeding frenzy.
Susannah at a metro stop, laughing as Alejandro lifted her in his arms and whirled her in a circle.
Susannah in the lobby of Le Grand Palais, caught between Zeke and Bart as they each pressed a kiss to her blushing cheeks.
“Oh, you’re all such sweethearts,” she’d said, at which point Matthew had made a decision.
He could watch Susannah laugh and smile and have a good time with the four overgrown, overmuscled, oversexed pretty boys and end up in a straitjacket, or he could rationally, reasonably and intelligently point out that the layout, as they’d planned it, just wasn’t going to work.
And so he’d called them all together, sat them down in Susannah’s suite—the corporate suite, as he now referred to it—and he’d explained, with the same touch of concern in his voice he used when he explained things to the worried executives of failing corporations, that CHIC had made a mistake.
“I know,” he’d said gently, “that you think this is going to work. Letting your readers experience this weekend through Susannah, I mean.”
“Well, sure,” Claire had said, and Matthew had sighed, looked to the ceiling, and shaken his head with regret.
“I’m afraid not.”
Susannah hadn’t spoken. She’d sat across from him, her face giving nothing away. Claire, however, had leaped to her feet.
“Of course it’ll work. Maybe Suze hasn’t explained it completely. She’s…how can I put it? She’s our readers’ surrogate, Matthew. She’s their conduit to pleasure.”
The picture that artful phrase had put into his head had been enough to make him want to abduct Susannah and hide her away forever. Instead, he’d spouted some nonsense about how readers would feel if Susannah, their dear friend and guide to sexy pleasures, turned out to be the focus of the finalists’ attentions.
“They’ll feel cheated,” he’d said solemnly. “As if someone had stolen their fantasy.”
There’d been a silence. Claire had looked at Susannah, Susannah had looked at Claire, they’d both looked at the photographer…
“He’s right,” the photographer had said. “It’s like that ad campaign for Lollapalooza Lipsticks, you know? Where they shot the movie star and his latest love? The company figured every woman in the world would buy their stuff, but it didn’t work out Chicks took one look at the guy’s lady and thought, well, if she’s got him, what hope is there for me?”
“But this isn’t like that,” Susannah said, and then, all at once, everybody was talking, even the hairdresser, all of them looking at Matthew as if he’d just discovered the cure for the common cold, and what could she say that wouldn’t have sounded as if she were upset about being shut out of the photos? And, dammit, it had nothing to do with that. If anything, Matthew’s pronouncement had come as a relief.
She hadn’t stopped to think what it would be like, having the camera focus on her, having Jimmy telling her to smile, to flirt, to tilt her head. The Sexiests were turning out to be nice guys, nicer than she’d expected, but they were accustomed to the flash of the camera. She wasn’t.
In fact, she’d found that she hated it.
And yet, she didn’t hate the camera half as much as she hated Matthew. Oh, he’d given her an explanation for his being here, but she didn’t buy it. What was the real reason? He’d trusted her with CHIC until now, so what had changed? Was he really so convinced she’d mess up that he’d felt it necessary to come marching onto her turf? Or was he simply determined to do what he’d sworn not to do—to undermine her authority?
She wasn’t about to ask him. And she wasn’t going to knuckle under. She would be a constant, silent, critical presence.
At least, that had been her intention.
Now, glowering at him over the circumference of a tiny, glass-topped table, her resolve was slipping.
“You’re making a mistake,” she said icily. “You can bark out all the orders you want, but you’re doing this all wrong.”
Everyone fell silent and stared at her.
“Now, wait just a minute, Madison…”
“No. No, you wait, Romano.” And then, because business was business and anger was anger and the two had nothing to do with each other, she tossed him a bone. “All right. Maybe you were right about readers not wanting to see me with the Sexiests.”
Matthew’s brows lifted. “Maybe?”
“But they’ll want to see something. Someone. Some girl dancing with Zeke or looking into Bart’s eyes.”
Matthew frowned. “You know, you just might be right.”
For a moment, she thought he might be about to apologize. Instead, he turned toward Claire.
“Do we have contacts at any French modeling agencies?”
“French modeling…” Claire frowned. “Yes. Yes, we do. I’ve dealt with this one place.”
“Call them. Ask them to send over…” Matthew looked at the four Sexiests, who were trying to look inconspicuous. “Fellas? Blonde? Brunette? Redhead? If you have preferences, sing out now.”
“One of each,” Zeke said, with a grin.
Everybody but Susannah laughed.
“You heard the man,” Matthew said. “Only make it two of each, so we can be sure we get only the best.”
* * *
Night was falling over Paris.
Susannah stood at the window in her sitting room. She’d showered, washed her hair, put on a long, pink silk robe, and now she was toasting the sun as it set behind the chimney-pot rooftops.
“Cheers,” she said softly, and lifted her glass of diet cola to the sight.
It had been one hell of a long, terrible day, but now it was over. Tomorrow morning, her finalists and the French models would head for Versailles and the first of six photo shoots. She’d never been there, but she’d seen pictures of the palace. It was magnificent. The Sexiests would do it proud.. and so would the girls Matthew had hired.
He had certainly put himself into his work.
Susannah frowned and took another sip.
“You do the interviewing, Madison,” he’d said, with a pompous, aren’t-I-generous smile.
“Don’t be silly, Mr. Romano,” she’d said, with a smile that more than matched his. “You do it. You’re the expert on blondes, but I’m sure you can handle redheads and brunettes if you put your mind to it. I’ll just sit here and take notes.”
The bastard hadn’t had the good sense to know she was insulting him. He’d simply shrugged, said they’d do it whatever way she liked and told Claire to send in the first girl.
The first was a DB. No surprise there.
“And what is your name, mademoiselle?” Matthew had asked, purring.
“Yvette, monsieur.” Yvette had giggled. “And I understand it would please you to have me be of some service.”
Service, indeed, Susannah had thought.
Matthew had given her a sexy grin. “Just hold that thought, Yvette,” he’d said.
There was more give-and-take, but Susannah had tuned out. Why listen to a man make an ass of himself over a woman? Why pay attention to a woman making a fool of herself over a man
?
Yvonne followed Yvette, Clara followed Claudette, blah, blah, blah. Susannah had participated by yawning. Matthew was in charge. Let him pick the winners.
Or let the winners pick him.
“I am late for an appointment, monsieur,” a blonde with big violet eyes had whispered in a bad mutation of Marilyn Monroe. “Perhaps we could conduct the rest of this interview this evening…if monsieur should be interested, that is.”
And she’d bent low over the desk, low enough so her breasts had threatened to bounce out of her dress, and handed Matthew a card with her address scrawled across it.
Susannah paced away from the window.
That was probably where he was now. Celebrating in his own fashion. Everyone else had gone out to dinner. Claire had phoned to ask her to join them.
“You don’t have to worry about clashing with Matthew, either,” she’d added. “He begged off.”
Of course, he’d begged off. Why would he choose to spend an evening battling with her when he could be out dancing with Claudette or Yvonne? Or not dancing. Maybe they were sipping champagne. Maybe they were dining by candlelight. Maybe they were—maybe they were…
“Stop it,” Susannah whispered angrily.
What did it matter? Matthew could do what he liked, where he liked, with whom he liked. She certainly didn’t care. He was her employer, and business didn’t mix with pleasure.
Tears blurred her vision. She shook her head, wiped her hand across her eyes. What was there to cry about? She’d made wonderful progress in her career. Her life was going exactly the way she wanted it.
There was a knock at the door. Susannah sighed. It had to be Claire. She meant well, but she just wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“Just a minute,” she yelled.
Quickly, she detoured into the bathroom, snatched a tissue from the vanity and dabbed at her eyes. She ran her hands through her hair, fixed what she hoped would be a passable smile to her lips and hurried to the door.
“Claire,” she said, as she opened it, “really, I don’t feel—”
But it wasn’t Claire. It was Matthew. Matthew, looking heart-stoppingly handsome in a dark suit and with a bouquet of flowers in his hand.
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