Hard Sell (21 Wall Street)

by Lauren Layne

  There’s a moment of confused silence, and I imagine Monica uttering a silent ohhhhhh as the situation clicks into place in her mind.

  “Okay, great!” she chirps, her voice a full octave higher than before. “I need to run out to the front real quick, but I’ll be back in a bit!”

  Sabrina and I stay perfectly still until the lingering silence tells us Monica’s left the dressing room area.

  “Well,” Sabrina says in a quiet voice, stepping back. “That was . . . horrifying.”

  “Come on. You’ve never hooked up in a dressing room before?”

  “Not since I was seventeen and in a mall,” she says, pulling a shirt off the stack of clothes to try on and tugging it over her head.

  “I like it,” I say, nodding at the fitted red top.

  “Shut up,” she mutters, attempting to detangle her hair from a tag.

  “Need a hand?”

  “No,” she snaps irritably. “I need for you to get out of here and go figure out what of the stuff she brought you you’re going to buy. You know what, just buy all of it. It’s the least you can do after—”

  “After what?” I ask, swatting her hands aside and carefully pulling the dark strands of her silky hair away from the tag at the back of the shirt.

  “After we defiled their dressing room.”

  “Defiled?” I say with a laugh. “It was a kiss. We didn’t even get to the good stuff.”

  “Thank God for that. I nearly violated my own rule.” She sounds genuinely horrified by the realization.

  I catch her chin with my fingers, studying her face. “When did you turn into such a prude?”

  “I’m not a prude; I’m a professional. This may be a game to you, but it’s not to me. This is my job.”

  “Are you forgetting why we’re here in the first place?” I ask, stepping closer. “For my job. And believe me when I say that my career being on the line is just about the only thing that could compel me to come to you for help.”

  She blinks, and for a split second, I swear I see something other than the usual disdain on her face. Something that looks a bit like hurt. Then she lifts her chin and it’s gone.

  “Get out. Go back to your dressing room and prepare your credit card for a workout.”

  “I don’t get why you’re so pissed about this,” I grumble as she tugs on a pair of pants. “Wasn’t this the plan? To let people think we’re together?”

  “The key word there being plan,” she snaps, buttoning the pants. “We’re supposed to plan when people see us together, not get caught acting like teenagers.”

  I grin. “You know the reason I think you’re really mad?”

  “I’m just about to faint from holding my breath, dying to know.”

  “You’re mad that we got interrupted. You’re mad that I only kissed you, that I didn’t put my hands all over you.” To piss her off, I reach out and play with a strand of her hair.

  Sabrina lifts a warning finger. “Touch me one more time, and I’ll tear up our contract, leaving you on your own.”

  I study her for a moment, debating just how serious she is. Best not to risk it.

  My hand drops. “All right. You win this one. Get whatever you’re going to get,” I say, waving a hand at the enormous pile of clothes. “But have Monica send the stuff to your apartment. We’re not carrying the bags around with us.”

  Her eyes narrow. “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t want to deal with them when we go to lunch.”

  “Oh.” I can tell she hadn’t expected me to want to extend our impromptu day date, but she’d never admit it. “Fine. I have reservations at—”

  “Not your place,” I interrupt. I’m done letting her be in control. “I’ll pick the place.”

  She puts her hands on her hips. “Where are your reservations? Because my place is sure to get us spotted by—”

  “Who’s paying the bills here, me or you?”

  “You, but you’re paying me to get the job done, and lunch at Fig & Olive will ensure the right people see us.”

  “I appreciate your efforts, but I’m not in the mood for fussy food.” I jerk open the door to the dressing room, saying, “Cancel those reservations,” as I step out.

  “Only if you tell me where your reservations are. What if—”

  I shut the door on her protest and go to my dressing room, where a pile of untouched clothes awaits.

  I pull out my phone to make lunch reservations. Yeah, yeah, whatever. I lied about already having them. Trust me, it was necessary. To have any chance of surviving the next month, I need to get the upper hand.

  I hear the neighboring door open as Sabrina calls for Monica in a too-sweet voice.

  “What’s up?” Monica says, scurrying back into easy speaking distance.

  “So somehow I ended up with the sweetest boyfriend on the planet,” Sabrina gushes. “He just offered to pay my entire shopping bill today; can you believe it?”

  My head snaps up from the restaurant app on my phone. Uh-oh.

  “He’s a keeper!” Monica says, clearly delighted with the turn of events. “So what did we decide on? Let me see the yeses!”

  I close my eyes, already knowing what I’m going to end up buying for my “girlfriend.”

  “You better get us some more champagne,” Sabrina says. “Matt’s told me to go ahead and buy all of it.”

  I shake my head as I make reservations for two at a restaurant where the food is mediocre but the drinks are big and strong.

  I know, I know, drinking before noon.

  But you’ve met the woman. Can you blame me?

  8

  SABRINA

  Saturday Lunch, September 23

  I frown and look up at the sign as Matt holds open the restaurant door for me. “Isn’t this a chain?”

  “It is.”

  “But—”

  He plants a hand on my back and gently pushes me forward.

  I’m fully braced for garish decor, horrible lighting, and the smell of old onion rings. Braced for everything that reminds me of my childhood, of my mom’s occasional stints working at dirty, tired restaurants until she’d be inevitably fired . . .

  I’m pleasantly surprised.

  The lighting’s flatteringly dim, and the restaurant seems to be made up of tall black-leathered booths, no red vinyl or paper napkin dispensers in sight. Nothing to trigger my Philly flashbacks.

  Matt steers me toward the bar. I let him, mainly because sitting side by side on barstools somehow seems less intimate than sitting across from each other in a booth.

  “You know, nobody’s going to see us here,” I say, sitting down next to him and putting my purse on the stool beside me. The shopping bags—all dozen of them—are being delivered to my apartment, as planned. “It’s just tourists on weekends and corporate drones during the week at chain restaurants.”

  “I know,” he grumbles.

  “So why are we here?”

  “Because I like it,” he says.

  “Okay, fine, why am I here?”

  He sighs. “Honestly, I don’t know. I didn’t think it through. What I do know is that I just spent an obscene amount of money buying you clothes with plenty of witnesses. You got your girl to pump our names into the gossip circuit. Tomorrow, we’ll suffer through a stuffy brunch with tiny plates of shit like escarole and free-range turkey sausage. So right now, all I want is to sit in relative silence and get an enormous French Dip sandwich, with an even more enormous martini. Okay?”

  I purse my lips and consider. “Okay.”

  His eyes narrow. “That’s perhaps the scariest word you’ve ever said.”

  “How do you figure?” I say, taking a sip of the water the bartender’s just set in front of me.

  Matt leans in a bit farther. “How easily you forget that I know you. And I know that any time you easily agree to something, hell is sure to follow.”

  I hide my smile, because damn it . . . he does know me. Readily agreeing to something and playing th
e part of perfect acquiescence has long been key to my strategy of staying one step ahead of anyone and everything that comes my way.

  See, the trick to being in control is letting other people think that they are. No one lets their guard down faster than a man or woman who thinks he or she is driving the ship.

  Truth be told, though, right now, my “okay” really is just that—an okay.

  Matt’s not the only one who’s tired. Sure, we’ve been together all of a couple of hours, most of it spent drinking champagne and shopping.

  Not exactly a hard day’s work.

  And yet, it’s Matt and me. Which means there’s no such thing as easy. I’ve spent every minute far too aware of him, and don’t even get me started on whatever that was in the dressing room.

  I refuse to admit, even in my own head, just how close I came to letting that kiss turn into something more. To letting him back me against the wall. To having a quickie in a dressing room, for crying out loud.

  It’s everything rash and crass that I’ve spent my adult life trying to avoid. I’ve gotten to where I am not so much from smarts, or even hard work, but from impulse control. I stay in control, always.

  Well, almost always. The man sitting next to me is the one exception.

  “Something besides water?” the blonde bartender asks with a friendly smile.

  Matt nods to me to order first.

  “Belvedere martini. Three olives,” I say.

  “Same,” Matt echoes. “But with a twist.”

  “You got it.” The bartender moves away to fetch the vodka.

  “Belvedere, huh? Thought you were a Goose girl.”

  “I’m a vodka girl,” I clarify, picking up the menu. “Equal opportunity.”

  “And here I thought we had nothing in common.”

  “Having nothing in common’s never been our problem,” I say as I peruse the salad options. Seared ahi or chicken? Decisions, decisions.

  “Yeah? What is our problem?” he asks, turning toward me.

  I set the menu back on the bar and fold my hands. “Well. Off the top of my head, I’d say it starts with the fact that you’re a presumptuous ass, and I’m—”

  “A grudge-holding shrew?”

  “It’s not like I’m holding some imagined slight,” I say through gritted teeth.

  “No. But you are holding on to something that happened four years ago. That I apologized for about a hundred times.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “See, that’s our problem,” he says, raising his voice slightly. “You never want to talk about it, so here we are, years later, still hating each other’s guts.”

  “Are you forgetting who’s currently helping you save your job?”

  “Are you forgetting how much fucking money I’m spending to get you to do that?” he snaps back. “You hardly volunteered out of the goodness of your heart.”

  “I don’t have a heart. Weren’t you the one who told me that?”

  “Jesus,” he mutters, dragging his hands over his face. “It never stops with us, does it?”

  I don’t answer.

  The bartender appears with two blissfully large cocktails. “Any food today, or just the drinks?”

  Screw the salad. Lettuce isn’t going to cut it if I have to fuel up for dealing with this guy. “I’ll have the French Dip sandwich,” I say. “With fries.”

  Matt gives me a surprised look. “I’ll take the same. Extra horseradish.”

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” I ask when the bartender takes our menus and leaves.

  “Sort of had you pegged for a salad, dressing on the side order.”

  “Yeah, well, fighting with you works up an appetite.”

  He grins. “You know what else works up an appetite?”

  I laugh a little, because his expression is so classically horny dude. “We’re not doing that. Have you already forgotten our plan to move away from the fight-and-hookup thing?”

  “Your plan,” he mutters. “I was just fine with how things were.”

  I sip my drink. “Do you ever think that maybe the reason we are the way we are is because we hooked up too soon?”

  “You mean, do I regret sleeping with you the first night I met you? Absolutely not.”

  “Bet you regret the morning after,” I say, giving him a bland look out of the corner of my eye.

  He looks back at me. “You already know that I do.”

  I take another sip of my drink. He’s right. I do know that. To give credit where it’s due, he did apologize for what he said that morning. And a dozen times after that, too.

  Hell, I don’t even doubt that he meant the apologies a hell of a lot more than the off-the-cuff insult that landed us in our roles of adversaries in the first place.

  So now you’re thinking he’s right. That I am a shrew who holds a grudge.

  I’ll cop to the first one. I’ve never pretended to be a nice, sweet type of female.

  As for the grudge part, it’s not a grudge so much as . . . self-protection. Matt Cannon hurt me that morning in a way I’ve always promised myself I could never be hurt.

  I have no intention of letting it happen again. I’d rather be angry than hurt, and though he may not even realize it, I think Matt feels the same.

  “Okay, let’s talk business,” I say, popping an olive in my mouth. “Setting the foundation is good, but I can’t imagine The Sams are reading Page Six or clubbing with Georgie and crew. We’re planting seeds to make this whole thing believable, but how do we get to the people who matter?”

  “You mean the clients who are threatening to leave because they don’t like how I spend my weekends?” he growls into his martini.

  “These people aren’t trusting you with their piggy bank, Cannon. You’re handling millions on a daily basis. They don’t have any insight into what your life looks like, except what they saw in the Wall Street Journal. No one wants to imagine the guy in that picture as the one holding the keys to their retirement.”

  “I’m not sure they want the guy who makes his credit card sweat buying clothes for his ‘girlfriend,’ either.”

  I pat his arm with a smile. “I’ll take it all back tomorrow if it’s going to break your budget.”

  He clinks his glass to mine in a toast. “Don’t worry about it. I can afford it, and it was worth every penny knowing you’ll think of me each time you get dressed. Or undressed.”

  My smile slips, and his grows. “Well played,” I mutter.

  “I thought so,” he says with a wink. “Okay, so about this gala I’ll need you to accompany me to . . . It’s a big fancy fund-raiser—”

  “I’ve been to the Wolfe Gala before, Matt.”

  “Sure. As Ian’s date.”

  “As Ian’s friend,” I correct, even though I shouldn’t have to. Matt of all people knows that Ian’s and my relationship is, and always has been, completely platonic.

  “Well this year, you’ll go with me. As my girlfriend.”

  “Fake girlfriend,” I clarify, moving my drink out of the way to make room for the sandwiches the bartender’s setting in front of us.

  “Right. If we don’t kill each other before then,” Matt mutters, taking an enormous bite of his French Dip.

  Yeah, well. There’s that.

  We both lapse into silence, and I’ve got a feeling the train of his thoughts is probably pretty close to my own:

  How the hell is this going to work?

  How can we pretend to be in love when we can barely stand to be in the same room together? I’d been so sure that the forced proximity would change things between us, but so far, our relationship feels more complicated than ever. God knows my emotions feel . . . jumbled. And I hate that. I hate that it—

  “This isn’t going to work,” Matt says, interrupting my thoughts.

  My stomach drops at his words, though I don’t know whether it’s the blow to my professional pride or the personal implications. “What do you mean?”

 
He pushes away his plate, wipes his mouth. “We drive each other crazy.”

  “You knew that when you asked me to help you,” I point out.

  “Momentary lapse. I forgot how frustrating you can be.”

  “Me?! You’re the one who—” I take a breath for patience, determined not to let him get under my skin. “It’s the first day. There were bound to be some hiccups and arguments, given our history.”

  Matt gives me a curious look. “I’m giving you an out. Why are you not taking it?”

  It’s a good question. I should take the out. I should remove us both from this situation before things go to hell, but . . .

  The thought of failure tastes bitter. I’ve built my entire self-worth on my ability to control every situation. To fix every situation.

  I won’t let him take that away from me.

  “You hired me to do a job,” I say quietly. “Let me do it.”

  “So that’s all this is about? Our contract?” he asks, his gaze holding mine.

  I hesitate only a split second before nodding, but I can see from the way his eyes narrow that he saw the hesitation. That he suspects this is about more than my job. More than his job.

  Still, he merely nods in agreement, not pressing me for answers that neither one of us is ready for.

  9

  MATT

  Sunday Brunch, September 24

  You know what’s a pretty fantastic plan?

  Scheduling your “see and be seen” brunch at your bosses’ favorite restaurant, in hopes you might bump into them and show off your new “girlfriend.”

  The second I walk into Rosemary’s, I know my plan’s about to pay off, because who’s sitting at the bar? Sam and Samantha Wolfe, next to Adam Feinstein, an eccentric billionaire known for being old-school with his money strategy.

  Granted, this isn’t exactly how I thought it would go. I’d deliberately booked an earlier-than-usual brunch and then purposefully arrived well ahead of the reservation, before Sabrina.

  My plan was to ensure I got a table by the door, so that if and when The Sams arrived, I’d be positioned in a very cozy, very visible, romantic brunch with my “girlfriend.”

  But . . . this can work, too. Or at least, I’m determined to make it work.

  I check in with the hostess, knowing full well that since I’m early, my table won’t be ready yet. She assures me that my table should be available “closer to my reservation time” if I want to wait at the bar. Which I absolutely do.