“Yeah, well, they are. Anyway, Blue Blazes sent over those mock-ups and some others but I’m not sure the concept will work when the model is forty feet tall, in motion, and lit up.”
She nodded in agreement, although she wouldn’t have minded seeing that particular male model strutting his stuff at any size. Come to think of it, that went for Justin Watts too. She doubted that the model had better abs than Justin. She would guess that they were about even when it came to world-class male abs.
“Your company has at least one sign in Times Square right now, right?”
“We do.” He named the brand and the global food conglomerate that owned it. “It’s a great big bag of holographic potato chips. The bag rotates and the potato chips float out. The idea is that they’re lighter than other potato chips.”
“Got it.”
“Of course, we don’t show the calorie count or fat grams. Both would give a cardiologist a heart attack.”
“I understand,” Beth said, laughing. “But that’s a great account to have.”
“But visually not exciting. There’s a limit to what you can do with potato chips. Seen one, seen ’em all. That’s why I was so interested in what you did with the tap-dancing beets. They had personality.”
She smiled. “That wasn’t easy.”
“I can imagine.”
“So…” She was curious, and he had asked all the questions. “You really do have the Blue Blazes account?”
“Yup.”
She nodded in understanding. “And you want to do a jeans ad that will have everyone talking and stopping to look.”
“That’s right,” Justin said. “But I don’t think their approach is going to do it.” He flicked the photograph of the male model to one side.
“Hmm.” Beth clicked through older folders in her documents. “Let me show you the first sign I ever did—here it is. I scanned in these drawings.”
Justin peered at the image on the screen. “What is that?”
“A fried clam. Sammy the Clam, to be exact.”
“You’ve improved.”
Beth laughed. “Well, I was only seventeen when I did those. I worked at the Olde Clamme Shacke as a waitress and the owner needed a new sign. So I came up with Sammy. The orders went up right away.”
“Why?”
“We printed Sammy on the menus and the placemats, too. He was a goofy little character that stuck in people’s heads, I guess. Different from what I usually drew.”
Justin shot her an interested look. “Which was?”
“Superheroes. If you grow up reading comic books, it comes kinda naturally.”
“I see. Doesn’t seem like a girl thing to do, but why not?”
“Hey, I put plastic dinosaur heads on my Barbies. I wasn’t ever a girly girl—basically, I was just a weird kid.”
“Weird kids usually grow up to be some of the most interesting people, Beth.”
Awww. She beamed at him, momentarily forgetting that she was supposed to be in interview mode. “Sometimes I was shy and sometimes I couldn’t stop talking.”
“I’m not sure that’s changed.” Justin chuckled in a very nice way. “So keep talking.”
Encouraged by his wink, Beth took a breath and continued. “Um, I never really felt like I belonged in suburban Long Island. When I was old enough, I took the train into New York every chance I got. It always seemed like a perfect place for superheroes and it felt like home to me. Lots of comics are set in, quote-unquote, Gotham. Anyway, blah blah, I went looking for the settings I’d seen in my dad’s portfolio and I actually found a few.”
“I’d like to see them.”
Beth gave him a curious look. “They’re still there. Maybe not for long. The city’s getting ripped up and torn down.”
“I know what you mean. An entire YMCA can disappear overnight.”
“Yeah. At least in comics, an intergalactic rec center would pop up in its place.”
“Sign me up,” Justin said with a huge, guy-type grin.
Beth grinned back. They just looked at each other for a minute that didn’t feel at all uncomfortable or weird.
“So,” he said at last, “how would you define your approach to a campaign like this?”
Beth thought it over. “You have to make people believe that wonderful, impossible things are real. It’s all about that.”
“Which makes you perfect for advertising work.”
Beth smiled. “I hope so.” Perfect for this job would be just fine. Had he decided? Evidently not.
“Show me more,” he said.
Beth clicked open a few more files with drawings and concepts for all kinds of things. Then she came to one with a title she didn’t recognize and opened it without thinking.
The image appeared. It showed a canopy bed with four posters made of neon tubes. Hot pink neon tubes.
“What’s that?” Justin seemed more than curious. He leaned in for a really good look.
Holy cow. She never should’ve clicked on that one. Beth wanted to close it out, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to. It would be like slamming a door right in Justin’s face.
“Ah—not my work. An ex-boyfriend of mine designed that. Not exactly practical.”
Justin was reading the fine print next to the image of the bed. “Says here that it lights up at the moment of orgasm.”
Uh-oh. She’d forgotten about that part. Beth gave him a sheepish smile. “He never did build it.”
“Great concept, though.”
Beth cleared her throat. “Never was more than that. Okay, moving right along—”
She finished her presentation and Justin’s attention never strayed. If she had to describe his reaction, she would say that he seemed really excited by her ideas. Maybe even by her.
His energy was definitely contagious. Her initial nervousness had completely vanished by the time the interview was over.
He got up while she shut down her laptop and wandered around his office, looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows.
“You never did mention where you’re from,” she said, by way of making conversation. She closed the cover with a snick. “New York?”
“Yeah.” He waved at the skyline outside. Or the sky. Whatever. She didn’t need to pry.
“Still live in the city?” she asked lightly.
Justin turned around. His energy almost seemed to crackle around him, but then he’d said he’d just bought the company, so maybe the carpets were new and full of static.
Beth tugged at her skirt to keep it down, just in case it got electrified and started clinging. The interview had been all about her talent and not her knees. Good sign, she thought.
“Yes, I do. How about you?”
She nodded. “I have a studio just off Hudson Street.”
“Oh, then you’re not far from me. I live in the Bolt Building.”
Beth thought a minute. “The Art Deco skyscraper that’s way downtown? The one with all the lightning bolts on the façade?”
“That’s right. Built in 1935 by Jasper Bolt, the world’s craziest billionaire.”
“How did he make his money?”
“No one really knows. But the building is great, full of freaky architectural details.”
He didn’t say anything tacky like come on up and play in my penthouse. But given a few weeks of working with him, assuming she had been hired, she wouldn’t mind if he did. Was she, then? He had quoted a salary. He just hadn’t said the most wonderful three little words in the world. You have job.
I love you would’ve been okay with her too, but that was definitely rushing things.
“I bet it is,” Beth said politely.
“Okay,” he said suddenly. “Let’s get back to business. You do have the job, if you want it.”
She inhaled, and tried desperately not to squeak on the exhale. “I do? This job?”
“Yes.” He waited for a beat. “Now you say yes.”
Beth willed herself to remain completely calm and forced he
r voice to reflect some self-control. “Exactly what will my responsibilities entail?”
He shrugged. “We’ll figure that out as we go along, Beth. You know the salary.”
She nodded, rigid with the effort of not jumping around the room. “I think it’s commensurate with my abilities.”
He stuck his hands in his pockets. “Talk corporate to me. I love it. Is that a yes or a no?”
That damned dimple of his was flashing like a go-for-it sign. “Full benefits, by the way. Dental. Disability. And 401K matching, the whole nine.”
Beth fought the urge to throw her arms around him and give him an exuberant kiss on the cheek. But she couldn’t resist the excellent offer a second longer.
“I accept. Thank you.” She wanted to scream a yes. She hoped her measured voice communicated some enthusiasm. She knew her eyes were sparkling, because her nose was itching. She couldn’t scratch it, just couldn’t.
Justin nodded, and gave her a huge grin. “All right. See you Monday. Bright and early.”
“Okay.” She couldn’t think of anything else intelligent to say. “Wow. This is so incredible. Thanks again. This is going to be great.”
“I agree.”
He stayed where he was. She backed out, trying not to trip on his new carpet. Beth clutched her laptop under one arm and gave him a fingery wave. Then she skittered down the long, white hallway, flashed a huge smile at the receptionist, and went out the door. She did dance in the elevator. There was no one in it but her.
Out on the sidewalk, she felt like she was walking on air. She had a job. She wasn’t going to be broke. She was ready, really ready to sell blue jeans. Life was good again.
She blew her last bucks on a work-appropriate wardrobe for SpectraSign, shopping until early evening. You deserve it, you need it, you will be able to pay for it in another week, she told herself, lugging the bags home, along Hudson Street, trying to keep the strap of her laptop case from sliding off her shoulder.
It was twilight and the streetlamps were just coming on. A strong westerly breeze was blowing from the river, making a few pieces of litter fly around through the side streets, including hers. Beth went up the stoop of her five-story building, the bags rattling and bouncing against her legs. Her short skirt was a lost cause, flipping wildly.
It was a relief to edge inside the main door. She set everything down except the laptop and peered into the brass grille of her mailbox. There was something white in there. Probably another bill.
Ha ha. She could pay them all now. She could even afford senior-care cat food for old Freddy, and maybe cut down on the hairball count. Beth found her key ring and looked for the tiny brass one that opened the mailbox, pulling out a letter from her father.
She knew it was from him without even looking at the return address. He always drew on his envelopes and letters, something he couldn’t do with e-mail. She saved each missive—since she’d moved out of his house on Long Island, there had been one every week for years. She slipped the decorated envelope into one of the shopping bags and continued upstairs.
Four locks later, she was inside her studio apartment. Still struggling with the bags, Beth bumped into the antique dressmaker’s dummy that she called Miss Boom Bah and used as a coatrack. The full-figured dummy tipped forward, then stood upright again when she gave it a shove back. It took a lot to upset Miss Boom Bah.
Beth slung her light jacket over the coat on the dummy’s shoulders and looked down at the old gingerbread-colored cat rubbing her ankle. “Guess what, Freddy?”
The cat gave a wheezing, very faint meow. She bent down to give him a chin rub just the way he liked it.
“We’re in the money. I have a job.”
Freddy wheezed, and she sat down and stroked him for a while. He got bored with it, wandered off, and stuck his nose into one of the shopping bags.
“Stay away from my fabulous new wardrobe,” she told him sternly. Freddy glared at her as she got up, gathered all the bags, and hung them on an inside hook in her tiny closet. Then she went into the kitchenette to call her dad.
2
Two months later…
“So this is the famous Bolt Building.”
Justin was waiting for her, a bulging plastic shopping bag in his hand. He was wearing jeans with a few for-real rips, and a linen shirt, and disreputable-looking sneakers. He looked fabulous. “Yup. And this is just the lobby.”
“Wow,” she said. The riotous Art Deco ornamentation didn’t stop. Every surface she could see was covered with stylized motifs, quite a few of them representing lightning, as far as she could tell.
The concierge, an unassuming older guy, sat at a console, if that was the right word, which would have been a great altar for a pagan god. Huge, freestanding bolts of lightning bolts framed it, done in chrome polished to a high shine. The console itself was also metal, with a huge bronze sun emitting spiky rays adorning the front.
When Beth got done looking at it, she studied the vaulted ceiling, shot through with more bronze rays and zigzagging lines. No matter where her gaze settled, something about the restless design made it move on. She got the dizzying feeling she’d walked into an alternate galaxy and glanced down again, at the floor, hoping it would ground her.
No such luck.
Even the floor was decorated with fanciful planets and stars and comets, done in flat metal and imbedded at random in each of the tiles.
“Welcome to my world,” Justin said laughing. “It’s a bit much, isn’t it?”
“It’s spectacular,” she said, “but I guess you get used to it after a while, like anything else.”
“Yeah, I am by now.” He walked toward the bank of elevators, and Beth followed.
“How long have you been living here?”
“I bought my apartment when I bought SpectraSign,” he said. He punched the up button, which was in the shape of a very small lightning bolt, and waited with her. “Glad you could come.”
“I wouldn’t have missed this for anything,” she said. And she didn’t mean the lobby. He’d taken her out for dinner several times since he’d hired her, and it was clear that his interest in her wasn’t all about work.
Though they had been doing plenty of that. The design team, a bunch of thirtyish men and women with eyeglasses so narrow she wondered how they saw out of them, had slaved away on the Blue Blazes account and the software geeks had actually been able to turn their ideas into something that worked.
The resulting sign concept was accepted by Blue Blaze top management and was now being built in Times Square. It would be fifty feet high, thirty feet wide. Beth couldn’t wait to see it. They were celebrating the go-ahead tonight.
She’d coordinated the project from her first day on the job, simply because she worked so closely with Justin. At first Beth had wondered if that was wise, but it wasn’t like she exactly had a choice. That was how he wanted it.
And it was really clear that he wanted her. Likewise, as far as she was concerned. Which was why she’d bought killer lingerie from Agent Provocateur for tonight. It did wonderful things for her, um, things. If he got that far.
From the way he was looking at her right now, she suspected he would.
An elevator arrived, the door whooshed open, and they went inside. She looked around, wondering why it had glass walls, then figured it was to let the passengers look at the decorated inside of the shaft. Yep, more lightning.
“This Bolt guy was crazy,” she said.
“Certifiable.” Justin put a keycard in a slot next to the PH button and up they went.
A penthouse. Ooh. She really wanted to see what life was like that high up in the air.
“Do you get vertigo?” he asked.
“Not usually, why?”
“We’ll be in the glass part of the elevator shaft in another few floors. It was added much later, about ten years ago—here it comes.”
Beth gasped. “Oh my God, what a view!” All of lower Manhattan suddenly appeared. The buildings thrust u
pward, almost appearing to move along with them, their lit windows turning into streaks of light here and there. She glimpsed details that were impossible to see from the street—on the older buildings, gargoyles and lion’s heads and decorative pediments and, on the new buildings, raked angles of glass that glowed strangely in the twilight and even neon outlining the tops.
What a view, she thought. She wasn’t going to crow it out loud again, because it was a corny thing to say and he was probably just as used to the spectacular scene as he was to everything else about the Bolt Building.
“Yeah, it’s incredible.”
There was a note of awe in his voice, which pleased her. She’d picked up on his natural enthusiasm from the first day they’d met and in the eight weeks that she’d been on the job, observed how it inspired the company clients and his employees, her, most of all.
Beth looked at him instead of the cityscape for a moment, observing the way the otherworldly glow of the city at night brought out something that was indescribably wonderful in his face. The color of his eyes seemed to intensify and become a different blue. Call it blue times two.
Justin sighed with pleasure as the elevator came to a stop and he held the button for her to exit ahead of him.
“Hold on. I just want one last look,” Beth said. She turned around to take in the panoramic view of New York’s harbor. Even in the semidarkness, she could make out the giant orange ferries coming and going from Staten Island, trailing long white wakes, and innumerable small boats out on the water. The vast shapes of tankers moved slowly, guided by the tugs she’d loved to watch as a kid, heading toward the graceful, gigantic bridge that soared over the narrows before the open sea.
“You can see that from my living room,” Justin said, keeping his finger on the open button and letting her look her fill. “And the Statue of Liberty, too. My big green girlfriend.”
She thought of Miss Boom Bah and smiled.
“We can drink a toast to her,” Justin added. “I have champagne on ice.”
Everlasting Bad Boys Page 27
