I go up the steps, enter the small vestibule, press the button for Bailey’s apartment—and wait.
It gives me time to think about the choices I’ve made for tonight.
I hope they’re correct.
I spent a lot of time planning our evening. For some reason, my approach to this thing hasn’t been as businesslike as it should have been, so this afternoon I put in a couple of hours remedying that. I don’t want Bailey to feel intimidated, so I’ve made reservations at a restaurant in Chelsea that’s not elegant but is definitely upscale. And I’m dressed down, not up. Jeans. Boots. A white broadcloth shirt open at the neck under a gray tweed jacket. I know. Tweed isn’t in, but I like it, maybe because my Dad has always been a tweed guy.
And how come she hasn’t buzzed me in? Could she have gotten cold feet and decided to call the whole thing off?
Bzzzz.
Okay. Here we go. I trot up the endless steps, hang a right and get to her door. It’s cracked open.
I rap on it with my knuckles. “Bailey?”
“Yes. Come in.”
I do, but she’s nowhere to be seen. I shut the door behind me and make a mental note to warn her about leaving her door open. The buzzer system isn’t really much of a deterrent against intruders.
“Bailey?” I say again.
“I’ll be right there.”
I stroll around her tiny living room. Don’t I pay her enough for a bigger place? A place with an elevator? I’m pretty sure I do. On the other hand, what do I really know about rent in Manhattan now? After NYU, I moved into a flat near Wall Street. I shared it with two other guys and after my first bonus, I moved into a place of my own. And after that, I bought the townhouse. Maybe I moved up too fast to pay enough attention to…
Mrrrow.
I look down. The Siamese is weaving between my ankles. What’s her name? Prudence. Patience.
Priscilla.
She says Mrrrow again and keeps making those figure eights. And leaving cream-colored fur on my jeans. Well, what the heck, I think as I squat down and stroke her. Walter sheds too. His fur is darker so you don’t see it as easily, but—
“Is this okay?”
I look up. And think, OMG! It’s Bailey. And I don’t know which is worse—what she’s wearing, or the look of desperation in her eyes.
It takes me less than a second to come up with the answer.
That look reaches right inside and does something funny to my heart.
“Hey,” I say, smiling as I get to my feet.
“It’s not, is it? All right, I mean.”
Well, no. It’s not. The good news? She’s not wearing one of those suits. The bad? If one of those suits could give birth to a dress, this would be it.
The dress is, I don’t know, it’s like stripes. Horizontal stripes. And it’s made of something chunky. Wrong word. Heavy. Still wrong, but hell, what do I know about fabric? This stuff is…thick. It looks like it could stand up all by itself. Plus, it’s just—it’s just not right. The sleeves go to her wrists. The neckline’s so high I’m surprised she isn’t gasping for breath. Okay. It’s not the dress’s neckline. It’s the neckline of a matching jacket.
And the skirt…Same as any guy I’m a big fan of those little dresses that just about cover a woman’s thighs, but okay, maybe not on Bailey. It wouldn’t be right. Not that I don’t think she’s probably got great thighs—yeah, sure, I’ve given them a couple of minutes thought since last night, when those yoga pants or whatever you call them hinted at what was beneath…
How did I get off on this track?
The point is, Bailey’s not the kind of girl you’d pick up in a bar. Or find on Tinder. I wouldn’t want to see her ass when she bends over. Well, I would, but only if we were alone and we’ll be in public tonight…And I didn’t mean that about wanting to see her ass if we were alone. Or maybe I did. Because, really, I’ve spent enough time looking at her the past, what, twenty-four hours to know that she’s an attractive woman. Easy on the eyes. Pretty…
Shit.
She’s beautiful, if she’d just stop hiding behind the baggy clothes, the pulled-back hair, the clunky shoes.
They’re not quite as clunky tonight, but they’d still qualify as the kind of shoes a woman would wear if she were heading off on a ten-mile march. And, yes, her hair is pulled back, secured low on her neck with a band. And before you think I’ve forgotten the length of that dress, I haven’t. It’s not thigh-high which, I’ve already said, is okay. It’s not above-the-knee, which would fine. It’s not right-below-the-knee, which wouldn’t be great, but I could live with that.
The hem of this thing hits at mid-calf. My mom wears her skirts shorter than that.
“Matthew.”
I look up. Her mouth is trembling.
“I bought this last year. For an aunt and uncle’s fortieth anniversary party. It’s the only dress-up thing I have.”
“Don’t tell me,” I say carefully. “You were home. And Cousin Violet went shopping with you.”
She nods. Her mouth trembles a little more.
“I look hideous,” she says, and before I can think about it too long, I reach for her and pull her into my arms.
She’s a little stiff at first and then she gives a muffled sob and leans into me.
My arms tighten around her.
She feels warm and soft.
The simple truth is, she feels wonderful.
I murmur some nonsense words, sort of the way I did one day when my little niece fell down and skinned her knees. I run one hand up and down Bailey’s spine. Mostly, I just hold her.
I close my eyes. Damn, she smells good. And her hair, even plastered back the way it is, feels soft when I stroke my hand over it.
Instinctively, I pull off the elastic that’s confining it. It tumbles free, a mass of curls that frame her face and shoulders.
She mumbles something. Reluctantly, I draw back a little and look down at her.
“I couldn’t hear what you said,” I tell her softly.
She looks up at me. “I said that this is never going to work.”
Her eyes are damp. Glittering with tears. Carefully, I wipe them away with my thumbs.
“Of course it is.”
She shakes her head and looks down again. “We’ll never fool anyone. I was wrong to think we could.”
“Hey.” I put a hand under her chin and raise her face to mine. “An NYU grad and a Columbia grad with business and finance degrees. Surely two smart people like us can—”
“Medieval Lit.”
“Huh?”
She sighs. “That was my major. Four years of Beowulf and Chaucer, and do you know what happens when you graduate?”
“Well—”
“Nothing happens. There are zero jobs for people who study Medieval Lit. They end up waiting tables. Working at Walmart. And they take out loans so they can go back to school for a year to study…”
“Business,” I say.
She sighs. “Yes.”
“Maybe it’s karma,” I tell her. “That some of us think we know what we want to study until it turns out we were wrong. I mean, I studied business. Well, finance, to be exact. And when I graduated, there were lots of jobs, all right, but it turned out it wasn’t anything that made me happy.”
“And building houses does?”
“Yeah.”
She manages a wobbly smile. “I thought I was the only person who wasted four years.”
“You didn’t waste anything.”
“Of course I did.”
“Did you enjoy Medieval Lit?”
“Yes, I loved it.”
“Then studying it wasn’t a waste.”
“Cousin Violet said—”
I put my finger across her lips. Man, her lips are soft!
“Never mind what Cousin Violet said. Life is short. If you find something that gives you pleasure, go with it.”
“So, how did that work for you? Did you at least get pleasure from studying finance?”
“Yeah. I did. I have this thing for numbers, you know? They’re fun. And without that degree, I’d never have made enough money to quit and go back to school to study what I really wanted.” I run my finger lightly over her mouth. I’ve dated a couple of women with lips that you just know have been shot full of whatever that shit is that makes them plump. Touch those, it’s kind of like when you were a kid visiting your grandma and you’d sit down on the sofa and feel as if the cushions were going to swallow you.
Anyway, you get my meaning. Artificial softness isn’t so great.
Real softness is.
And my PA’s lips are real. And really, really soft. And her eyes are still damp, the lashes anyway, the very long, dark lashes…
I bend my head and kiss her.
An easy kiss. A tender one.
Her eyes close. She draws in her breath.
It’s as if it’s me she’s drawing in.
I step back. “Okay,” I say briskly, and she blinks her eyes open. “Okay,” I say again. “Let’s see what we can do with this outfit.”
Wrong thing to say, even for a guy who can, at this moment, barely think coherently. Her mouth trembles again. I think about stopping that trembling with another kiss.
Instead, I turn brisk and businesslike.
“Nothing wrong with it,” I tell her. “We just need to, uh, to nudge it along.”
“How?”
How, indeed? I step back and look her over. Her face colors a little under my scrutiny. I squat down and finger the hem. She starts to jerk back and I frown up at her and tell her to stand still.
The material is, as I said, chunky. Wrong word. It’s—it’s substantial. It has heft to it. I bet if you cut off part of the hem, nobody would notice that you’d done it.
Hell. Why not? And we don’t have time to waste. A quick look at my watch tells me we’re due at the restaurant in forty minutes.
I stand up. “Scissors.”
“What for?”
“Bailey. Just get me a pair of scissors, okay?”
She looks at me as if I’m nuts. Then she turns and heads for the kitchen. She returns clutching a big pair of scissors.
“Great,” I say, as if I know what I’m doing. “Okay. Climb up on that chair.”
“Mr. O’Malley—”
“Ms. Abrams. Get up on that chair.”
She makes a face, but she steps up on the chair. I hold out my hand to help her and I get a flash of leg.
A very nice flash.
The legs go with the rest of her. Shapely. Firm. Not scrawny, even though I know that scrawny is in. I like my women with a little meat on their bones. Not that Bailey is my woman. Well, she is, but only as a loaner…
Jesus, O’Malley, stay with the program!
“Matthew! What are you doing?”
What I am doing is cutting away part of the dress. The skirt. I’m cutting along the bottom of a blue stripe. I step back and take a look. Not enough. The stripe above it is pale blue. I cut it away. Still not enough.
“Matthew…”
“Stand still. I’m almost finished.”
Not true. I slice away half a dozen stripes, which is maybe eight inches of skirt. Now the hem is just a couple of inches above her knees, and I have a great view of knees, calves and ankles. It’s all prime real estate—and the lady in question is sputtering.
I put aside the scissors, grab her by the waist and lift her down. She yanks free, eyes the cut-off stuff on the floor and then looks at me as if I’m certifiable.
“What did you do?”
She asks it pretty much the way a horrified bystander would ask Godzilla what he did to Tokyo.
“Do you have a mirror? A full length mirror?”
“Yes. In the bedroom. But—”
I grab her hand and hurry her out of the kitchen, through the hall and to the door at the end. Her bedroom. It stops me for a minute. It’s, well, it’s not Bailey. Or maybe it’s just not the Bailey I thought I knew all these years, because that Bailey would not have a room done in white and what I guess you’d call peach, with multiple pillows strewn over the bed and—what do you call that thing coming down the sides of the mattress, some kind of ruffled skirt. There are silver candlesticks on the dresser across from the bed with peachy-colored candles in them…
And while I’m standing there gaping, she frees her hand, walks to a closet, opens the door and yup, there’s a mirror.
She looks at me.
I signal that she should turn around and look at herself, not at me. She hesitates, takes a deep breath, turns, and…
She claps her hands to her face. “My skirt is gone!”
I laugh. “It’s not gone.”
“You left most of it on the floor in the living room!”
“I left the part you don’t need on the floor in the living room.”
She shakes her head wildly from side to side. “It’s too short.”
“It’s just right.”
And it is. For the third time in the past five minutes, I notice she has great legs. In fact, I bet she has great everything else, if we can just get to see some of it.
“What’s under the jacket?”
“The dress, of course.”
“Not a, you know, a shirt?”
“A blouse? No. It’s a dress. But—”
I walk up behind her, turn her around, and reach for the buttons on the jacket. Her hands slap at mine.
“What are you doing?”
“I want to see the dress.”
“You’re not supposed to see it. That’s the reason for the jacket.”
“Then why isn’t it just a suit instead of a dress?”
She stares at me. “Because it isn’t a suit. It’s a—”
“Exactly. It’s a dress. Jacket optional.”
“You’re supposed to wear them together.”
“Fashion advice from Violet the Vile?”
I can see she doesn’t want to laugh, but she does. Meanwhile, I begin undoing buttons.
One. Two.
I can see her throat. It’s lovely throat, long and smooth-looking, with a rapid beat in the hollow.
Three. Four.
Better and better. The dress actually begins just above her breasts. In fact…
Five. Six.
In fact, I can hardly breathe. I’ve revealed the swell of her breasts. The lush curve. The start of the delicate shadow between them.
“Matthew,” she says in a whisper.
“Shhh,” I say, and slowly I ease the jacket back. I can see the narrow straps that hold the dress on her shoulders. I ease the jacket back further. It slides away and falls to the floor.
I was wrong when I said she was beautiful.
She isn’t just beautiful. She’s gorgeous. She’s Goldilocks personified: Not too much. Not too little. She’s just right
I say her name. She says nothing; she just stares at me wide-eyed. I say her name again. I want to reach for her. Take her in my arms. Hell. What I want is to reach behind her, unzip the dress…
“Matthew,” she says, her voice barely a whisper, and I know I could do it, she would let me do it, she would let me strip her naked so I could kiss her, taste her, her breasts, her belly, her thighs…
So you could take advantage of her, you mean. Because that’s what you’d be doing. She knows zilch about the world, about men. That’s why you’re here, pal, or maybe you forgot that this isn’t real. You’re doing this for her. Remember?
The voice is clear and cold inside my head. The message is valid. One hundred percent valid. I take a deep breath and step back; I pin what I hope is a big smile on my face.
“There,” I say. “Perfect.”
She runs the tip of her tongue over her bottom lip. Man, I wish she wouldn’t do that.
“Really?”
I grab her hand and turn her toward the mirror. “Look.”
She looks. In fact, she stares. I watch her face, trying to read what she’s thinking. Is the skirt too short? Does
the dress show too much? I wasn’t this nervous waiting to see my first bonus check back in the days when I was a hedge fund hotshot who could do no wrong.
She lifts her hand. Touches her hair. “I never wear my hair loose,” she says.
“Well, you should.”
“And the skirt…”
“Not short enough?” I ask innocently.
She looks at me in the mirror. “Very funny.”
“It’s fine.”
She looks uncertain and I think about taking her in my arms. Just for comfort, of course…
Have you noticed that I’m a bad liar?
“Okay,” I say briskly, “time to get moving. Our reservation’s for eight o’clock…What?”
This time, she’s not touching her tongue to her lip. She’s sinking her teeth into it. Very gently. I could do it even more gently.
“My shoes.”
I clear my throat. “Your shoes?”
She nods. I look down at her feet. She’s right. Those serviceable clodhoppers definitely don’t make it with her new look.
“Before you ask,” she says, “I don’t have anything with, you know, a different kind of heel.”
Hell. I look at my watch again. What we need is a shoe store, but we’re running out of time. I know the owner of the restaurant we’re going to, but I want us to have a leisurely dinner. Plus, I have a bad feeling about getting her into a place where she’ll be faced with a zillion choices in shoes. Still, what else can we do?
“Okay,” I tell her. “We’ll make a stop on the way. Saks is still open.”
She blanches. Actually, I’ve never used that word before. It always struck me as, I don’t know, overdone. But there’s no other word to describe Bailey’s reaction except to say that she blanches.
“Not Saks,” she says.
“Why not Saks?”
“I—I don’t know. I mean, I’m not dressed for Saks…”
“Did we or did we not agree you look great?”
“You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”
“Bailey. You’ve been with me for, what, six years? By now you surely know that I speak my mind. If I say you look great, it’s because you do.”
She hesitates. “Really?”
“Really,” I say, and when I see the wariness in her eyes I do the only natural thing a man can do in this kind of situation. I lean in and kiss her. That’s all I do. My mouth on her mouth. No tongue. No pressure. It doesn’t last much more than a tenth of a second.
The F-Word: A Sexy Romantic Comedy Page 7
