Operation Sizzle

by Darcy Lundeen

  Rob let out a hoot of laughter and slumped into a chair at the other side of the table. “And those are her good points.”

  Matt nodded emphatically as he polished off the last of the casaba. “Got that right.”

  Rob abandoned his laughter and turned serious. “No, got it completely wrong. That’s not Betsy. She’s usually a sweetheart. What happened to make her that way? She never answered my message.”

  Matt shrugged. “Far as I can make out, some guy named Tyler happened, and now she’s pissed as hell with anybody unlucky enough to be cursed with XY chromosomes, especially you.”

  “Me? Why me?”

  “You convinced her to take the job where she met Tyler.”

  Rob frowned. “Sure, I told her to take the job. It’s a good company. But I didn’t tell her to take the guy along with it.” He shook his head, looking truly misunderstood. “In fact, after I met him, I clearly remember warning her to watch out. He just seemed a little too smooth and charming, you know?” He made an unpleasant sound. “Never trust that type.”

  “Well, she apparently did. And now she’s paying the price. And so are you.”

  Rob groaned. “Hell, I’d better get over there and let the poor girl vent. I won’t mention Arlen, though. When your own love life has tanked, you don’t need to hear about someone who just met the perfect match.”

  “At least until next month.”

  Rob ignored Matt’s snarky comment and whipped out his phone, punching a single key.

  “Bets,” he said a second later, with a smile in his voice. Then he obviously realized that wasn’t appropriate when the person at the other end wanted your head on a platter, and he ditched it in favor of brotherly concern. “It’s Rob. I hear you’re a little upset. Look, sweetie, I’m coming over now. We’ll talk.”

  He quickly broke the connection—probably better to cut it off before she either refused his offer, began cursing a blue streak, or told him to get lost. Then he pocketed the phone and stood up. “See you later.”

  Matt nodded, watching as Rob made a beeline for the door. For a moment, he considered warning him to avoid going into the kitchen with her, because “Bets-sweetie” had a mean scrambling arm. Finally Matt just shrugged. Oh, what the hell. As long as Rob wasn’t an egg, he’d probably be safe. So he went to get himself some more casaba melon instead.

  ****

  “He did that?” Rob shook his head in disgust as he sat on the sofa next to Betsy.

  She nodded. “Right on the street, too. Not even in the office, where I could bean him with a paperweight.”

  He made a noisy tongue-click to show how appalled he was. “The cad… who’s also a coward.” He put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a hug. “Definitely a coward.”

  Betsy nodded. “I think so.”

  “Well, you think right, sweetie. The man’s not worth getting upset about.”

  She leaned against him, loving the way he listened and always agreed, making appropriately sympathetic noises in all the right places.

  She had gone through the entire story of her being dumped, happily carried along on a wave of Rob’s hand-holding, shoulder hugging, and cheek patting. And now that she had reached the end, she realized the most remarkable thing of all. She had gone through it without once bawling or thinking about drowning her sorrow in watered-down tequila.

  In fact, she wasn’t feeling bad at all. She was really feeling pretty good after pouring out her problems. Not just hinting at them vaguely either, as she’d done with Matt Pollard, but actually chucking the whole mess in Rob’s sympathetic lap.

  And that’s why it was so nice to have girlfriends, even if they were guys like Rob, the best damn girlfriend-surrogate a woman could hope for.

  She pulled away from his hug and looked up, giving him an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry for getting so angry at you. You did warn me about Tyler. I just didn’t listen. My fault.”

  Without missing a beat, he shook his head in true, caring-girlfriend fashion. “No, sweetie, it wasn’t your fault. It was the S.O.B.’s fault. You were just following your heart, and no one can blame you for that.”

  “Well, now that my heart led me into disaster, what do I do?”

  He smiled as though the solution was as simple as one-two-three. “Now you start again.”

  Betsy shivered at the thought. She couldn’t do that, and if she tried, she’d just mess up big-time. Start again, fail again. That’s the way it had always been with her, and likely always would be. “Can’t. I’m bad at love. And even worse at sex.”

  Rob shrugged. “Well, the love part’s always a bitch.” He patted her hand. “But the sex part can be handled.”

  Betsy raised her eyebrows. “Just like that?” She snapped her fingers.

  “Just like that,” he echoed, mimicking her finger snap. “Piece of cake. All you need is to work at it.”

  She stared at him. “Work at it?”

  Rob spread his hands and grinned at her, looking supremely confident. “Take it from an old hand at sex, sweetie, the only thing you need for success between the sheets is to become an old hand at sex.”

  She kept staring. He was being more delicate than his friend, Matt Pollard, but unless she didn’t understand nuance, their advice was pretty much the same.

  Practice, practice, practice, because—all together now—practice makes perfect.

  “Right,” she stammered, wondering if maybe she had misunderstood. At least hoping she had. “So by that you mean I should—”

  “Give yourself a few days to recover. You know, eat chocolate, buy an expensive perfume or a pair of kick-ass, four-inch-high stilettos, have your nails done, then jump right back into the game. But not with somebody you’re really interested in. You know, when a relationship has fallen apart and your self-confidence has tanked right along with it, sometimes you need a small, casual fling just to get your sexual juices back in sync.”

  Betsy swallowed. Nope, she hadn’t misunderstood.

  Rob squeezed her hand and flashed an upbeat, you-can-do-it smile. “Remember, you’re just experimenting here. You only want to improve your skills so the next time you meet someone you could love, you’ll be ready with the technical side.”

  Betsy took a breath and sat back against the sofa cushions, trying to get her bearings.

  Technical side.

  As if sex was just a series of positions to be mastered, a collection of complementary body parts to be fitted together until they joined, meshed, and shook with a burst of energy that reached your nerve endings but not your heart.

  God, she thought. It was a shivery prospect, and a completely guy thing. No way could she behave like that. Not today, not tomorrow, not in a thousand years.

  ****

  But, for some reason, when Monday morning rolled around, the thought still echoed in her brain.

  Practice makes perfect.

  Practice makes perfect.

  Practice makes perfect.

  Even in sex.

  Probably she couldn’t let it go because it was so ridiculous. At nine o’clock, Betsy sat in her office, desperately trying to concentrate on her work. She stared at the computer screen. This article is important, really important, so stop dawdling and get started on it. But getting started wasn’t an easy thing to do when she couldn’t get Rob’s advice out of her mind. Not that she could follow the advice. She wasn’t the date-anything-in-pants type. And she definitely wasn’t the type to jump into bed for the dubious purpose of getting proficient in sexual calisthenics.

  So ditch that idea. And, finally, she more or less managed to. But she still couldn’t ditch the thought of Tyler or the hope that maybe, just maybe, he’d realize the error of his ways and repent.

  They worked in different departments and sometimes didn’t see each other for the entire day, but he knew where her office was. Lord knows, he’d been there often enough, especially on those twice-a-week occasions when he trapped her on the desk and did a quick, efficient slam-bam-thank
-you-ma’am on her. Granted, it wasn’t the kind of slow, thorough lovemaking she preferred, but she’d been all right with it, and she could be again, if only the idiot would show up and apologize.

  She was still ready to forgive, forget, and climb willingly on the desk for him an hour later, when somebody knocked at the door. She looked up hopefully. Tyler? Tyler crawling into her office on hands and knees with regret in his eyes and remorse on his lips.

  But it was only one of the mailroom guys waving an envelope with her name printed across the front.

  “Don’t bother reading what’s inside.” He blithely flipped the envelope onto her desk almost the way Tyler used to flip her onto it in the exact same place, right between the computer screen and her research books. “It’s an invitation to the company’s tenth-anniversary party. Six weeks from Friday. This time, they’re going all out and renting space at a downtown hotel, unlike last year’s cheapo affair with fruit punch and processed cheese on crackers down in the fifth-floor cafeteria.”

  Betsy forced a smile to hide her disappointment. “So if they’re upgrading the venue, maybe they’ll upgrade the food too, and we’ll get white wine and blue cheese on croissants.”

  “Blue cheese. That’s the stuff with mold all over it, right?”

  She nodded.

  He made a yuck face. “No thanks. I’ll stick with the processed cheese.” He left her office still grimacing at the thought of grazing on elegant decay.

  “Come to think of it, so will I.” Betsy followed him out to get a cup of coffee from the employee lounge down the hall.

  Luckily, the voices coming from inside the lounge caught her attention before she barged into the room and embarrassed herself. And, no doubt about it, she probably would have embarrassed herself big-time, because the voices belonged to Tyler and Charlie Flynn, one of his good buddies.

  Ordinarily, she would have hightailed it back to her office before someone saw her eavesdropping. But the conversation she heard being played out between them was anything but ordinary, so she stayed there, silently hovering out of sight to listen.

  “So how’s the relationship with this new chick going?” Charlie sounded jovial.

  Betsy frowned as she tried to make sense of the question. Relationship? Tyler’d told her to get lost a couple of days prior, and already he had a relationship? Not just a date or two with that blonde from the street corner, but an entire relationship? Even worse, a relationship that other people in the office knew about?

  “Lisa?” Tyler put a wealth of gloating into the two syllables. “She’s incredible.”

  “Not like Betsy, huh?”

  “Betsy’s cute enough, but no sizzle.”

  She slumped back against the wall and seriously considered murder. No sizzle! Three months together, and she’d never once sizzled the man’s boxers off? Yes, boxers. Not even sexy, form-fitting briefs. How much sizzle did he think he had?

  “God.” Tyler’s voice held a satisfied, masculine growl that made Betsy scowl. “Whenever I’m near her, the girl acts like she can’t get enough of me.”

  Her scowl deepened. Okay, obviously he thought he had a lot of sizzle. Certainly more than he thought she had. Well, the hell with him. If she didn’t have sizzle now, she could always get it. If she only knew how.

  Backing quietly away from the door before she had to listen to Tyler giving a detailed account of Lisa’s sizzling body parts and sexual practices, she turned and walked down the hall and into the bathroom.

  Bad move. As soon as she stepped across the threshold, she was confronted by a wall of mirrors that threw her image back at her. Betsy Kincaid looking kewpie-doll cute…but without a single sizzle to her name.

  She stared at her reflection. No sizzle? Well, she knew that. She’d been saying it about herself for years. Not in so many words, of course. Actually, the term “sizzle” had never occurred to her. But the thought was still the same. The only problem was that hearing it said aloud by someone else was a hundred times worse than thinking it herself.

  Betsy made a face at her face.

  She didn’t want to be cute. Cute was a stuffed teddy bear, a two-year-old toddler, an animated film with toys forming a chorus line and kicking up their heels to some bouncy, feel-good melody.

  What she wanted was to be hot, torrid, scorching, blazing, fiery. Damn, what she wanted was what Lisa possessed naturally—the ability to sizzle a man’s clothes right off his body.

  Biting her lip to keep from either crying or screaming in frustration, she stormed out of the bathroom, so intent on the fantasy of someday out-Lisa-ing Lisa in the sizzle sweepstakes that she didn’t feel any embarrassment at all when she passed Tyler and gave him a distracted greeting in answer to his cautiously friendly “Hi, Betsy, nice day, isn’t it?”

  Back at her desk, she opened the envelope and pulled out the invitation, staring, transfixed, at the extravagant calligraphic lettering as an equally extravagant idea took shape in her mind. There were six weeks until the party. Six weeks for her to get her act together and learn to sizzle so that when Tyler saw her all tricked out in her slinky new persona, he’d finally realize Lisa wasn’t the only sexy babe in town.

  She could do it. At least she could try.

  But how?

  She certainly wasn’t ready to go out and get tantric with a total stranger. Hmm. Matt Pollard. She smiled. Okay, so no anonymous sex, but she did know Matt. Sort of. And he was gay, so that in itself would avoid any emotional complications. And he had offered to help her with the problem. More or less. And even if the offer was a joke, he’d still made it, so maybe he’d be willing to give her a brief demonstration or at least provide some quick pointers.

  But could she do it? Should she do it? Especially with Rob’s new best friend? Of course it wasn’t as if she and Matt would be having a romantic relationship. This would be just a series of lessons. With a little skin involved. And Rob had advised her to find someone she wasn’t interested in to practice with. If Matt Pollard didn’t fit that profile, then no one did.

  So maybe it would work out all right. Granted, it was one of the more bizarre plans she’d ever had, but it might be worth a try.

  A sexual demonstration from a gay guy she barely knew?

  Tyler’s rejection had obviously driven her insane. Nothing else could explain it.

  She sat silent for a moment. Then breathing in slowly so she wouldn’t hyperventilate, she made the kind of decision she’d never made before…the kind she never thought she could make. She’d do it.

  Lifting the receiver with an iron grip that turned her knuckles white, she punched in Rob’s phone number before her rational side got in the way of her insanity. “Rob…Betsy,” she said as soon as he came on the line. “Your friend Matt—”

  “Hi, Bets,” he interrupted. “Matt’s more than my friend. I told you in my message. He’s my—”

  “I know. He explained. But the thing is, I need his number. Do you have it? I wasn’t very, uh, cordial to him the other day, and I’d like to apologize.”

  “That’s really sweet of you, Bets.” Rob sounded as though he was almost cooing with delight over the fact that his good friend and his new live-in lover were going to make nice with each other. In a totally platonic way, of course. “Sure, I have his number.”

  Grabbing a pen and memo pad, Betsy took down the numbers as he rattled them off. “Thanks, Rob. Think I’ll call him now. Talk to you soon.”

  Desperate to end the call before he could ask any embarrassing questions, she dumped the receiver back into its cradle, took a breath, and silently counted to ten, hoping that by the time she reached eight she’d change her mind and ditch the idea of asking Matt Pollard for a close-up demonstration of sexual technique. When it didn’t happen, she worked her way up to thirty-nine. Pausing in mid-count, she finally sighed…and gave up. Forget it, no point in continuing. Even if the number counting reached a million, she was still going to do it.

  By the night of the company party, she’d b
e a total man-magnet, the kind of girl guys flocked to the moment she entered a room. Either that, or else she’d just give up and become permanently celibate.

  “Hi,” she said when Matt answered. To make up for the surly way she’d treated him, she forced an extra dose of sweetness into her voice. “This is Betsy Kincaid. We met on Friday. I’m Rob’s friend.”

  “I remember.” His tone implied there was no way he could ever forget their meeting.

  Betsy cleared her throat. “I realize I wasn’t a very good hostess that day, and I’d like to make amends. How about dinner at my place tonight at seven? Would that be good for you?”

  There was a split second of silence at his end, then to her relief, he said, “Sure, that would be good.”

  “Wonderful. And do you remember my problem? The one we discussed at breakfast.”

  “Your problem?”

  “Yes. You know…” She lowered her voice in case anyone passing by the door could hear. “My man problem, the one you said you could help me with. I was wondering if we could talk about it.”

  Another split second of silence, and then—“I remember your man problem.”

  He sounded stunned, but at least he didn’t hang up, so Betsy plunged ahead. “I don’t want to impose on you, but I really need help.”

  His swallow was audible. “Umm, what kind of help would that be?”

  “You know, training, pointers, uh, lessons, the way you suggested.” Now his breathing sounded faster than before, and a little labored.

  “Lessons,” he finally said. Actually, he sort of stammered it, and his voice sounded strangely husky. “Definitely. Lessons are doable.”

  She breathed a sigh of relief. “Marvelous. You don’t know how much I appreciate your help. We’ll talk about it tonight, okay? At seven.”

  “I’ll be right on time. You can depend on it.”

  His voice was still husky, but Betsy could tell that he was smiling. Even better, she was smiling, too, when she hung up.

  Then she stopped smiling and felt appalled. Oh my God, what had she done? Simple. She smiled again. For once, she’d taken her life and fate into her hands. That’s what she’d done, and she was proud of it. At least she was pretty sure that she was proud. Unless that fluttering sensation in her stomach wasn’t excitement or anticipation, but her body’s way of signaling that she was about to lose her breakfast.