She smiled. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t privately gloat over being asked in the first place. Jana thought she should have gone out with him anyway. Called it a “conference lunch” or something. Grady had—well, come to think of it, he hadn’t really passed judgment one way or the other. A tactic she just now realized he’d come to use more and more often. Well, she wasn’t going to go there tonight. Right now she had more pressing concerns.
Like should she even attempt lip liner when her hands were shaking?
She glanced at the phone, debating for the hundredth time whether she should call Vivian. She wanted to. Vivian had called several times to check up on her over the past month, though the last time she’d been forced to leave a message when Lucy had been kept late at school for a staff meeting.
So she knew Vivian wouldn’t mind the plea for a last-minute pep talk. She couldn’t call Jana or Grady. They both meant well, and they were her support unit, come thick or thin. But their support in this was a kind of hollow offering. They wanted the best for her, but they really didn’t get it. Not the way Vivian seemed to.
Grady invariably changed the subject to the latest developments in nanotechnology or sports. Any sports. Basically any topic Lucy would have no opinion on. Jana didn’t exactly leap to her defense, either. In fact, she usually willingly followed Grady’s lead.
But she hated to bother Vivian. Especially on a Saturday night. It might have seemed like her godmother was always on the job, at least during Lucy’s stay at Glass Slipper, but Vivian had alluded—often—to a very active social life. Which Lucy took to mean “sex life.” Whatever the case, she doubted Vivian was at home much in the evenings.
“So, you’re on your own,” she told her reflection. “Final-exam time is now.” Visions of Jason Prescott popped into her head. And she just as quickly shut them out. This wasn’t about wooing Jason. Like that was going to happen, anyway. She planned to represent herself better this time around, but she had no grand illusions about how the evening would end. “Just show them Lucy Harper kicks ass, and you’ll have aced your exam.”
Still, she admitted privately that she wouldn’t mind if he at least looked at her like he wanted to throw her over his shoulder and find the nearest bed.
Or wall. Or hallway carpet.
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Tonight was about proving something to herself. So why have you turned down the few offers you’ve gotten for dates in the past couple of weeks, hmm? Sometimes she hated her little voice.
But she went through the mental exercise anyway. She’d turned down all offers because, after all, she hadn’t aced her final yet, right? She’d just felt like she had to see the reunion through, and then she’d be ready to really unleash herself on the world.
God, that was so lame even she wasn’t buying it.
Sure, one offer had been from a married man and yet another from a grimy construction worker, and while there had been something of a cheap-thrill factor in eliciting a business card from the former and a catcall from the latter, she’d never considered actually accepting either offer. Just like she couldn’t accept dates with her students’ dads. But that didn’t explain why she’d turned down the guy she’d bumped into—literally—in the Comedy section of Blockbuster. She was still a klutz on occasion—all right, on more than one occasion—especially when she wasn’t concentrating on being the New & Improved Lucy Harper. And yet the guy—Todd something or other—had smiled at her and fumbled his way through a few cute ice breakers before asking her if she’d like to get a drink sometime.
Looking back, she should have said yes. I mean, wasn’t that at least partly why she’d done all this? To attract attention? He’d been cute enough, and seemed sort of funny in an endearing kind of way. They even had the same taste in movies. Well, his pick had included Adam Sandler, and hers, Harrison Ford. But they were both comedies. “Harmless” had been the adjective that had come to mind at the time. So she told herself she’d learned a valuable lesson. Cute or not, “harmless” didn’t turn her on.
“And because men are just throwing themselves at your feet, you can afford to be so damn picky,” she told her reflection. She had to stop doing that. She had to put herself out there. So what if he didn’t make her pulse race right off, it was still a date. Maybe, even with all the improvements, that was all that was out there for her.
“Well,” she told herself, “I guess you’ll find out once and for all tonight.” She started with the bra and panties, liking how the silk felt against her skin, but paused before putting on what came next. Namely, the matching garter and stockings. She’d tried them on before. Exactly once. But she’d felt so incredibly naughty that she’d giggled the entire time she’d spent wriggling back out of them. She hadn’t dared buy herself more of them, despite Vivian’s heartfelt sermons on how when a woman wore garters she projected sexual tension. She didn’t need to project sexual tension in the classroom, and frankly, she didn’t need to in Blockbuster or Safeway, either.
Tonight was different.
Lucy fingered the satin straps and finally unhooked it from its personal little padded hanger. Vivian shopped at places that actually hung up their lingerie on hangers. She tried to imagine opening her closet and shifting through rows of padded hangers as she selected today’s underwear. Couldn’t do it. Hers were all in a jumble in her dresser drawer. Oh, they might start out perfectly folded and sorted, but, inevitably, one morning of sleeping through her alarm clock and her dresser looked like the white sale at Bloomingdale’s. After the sale.
Still, she’d kept this set on its little hanger. And she did have to admit that just looking at it and imagining herself in it raised her pulse rate a few notches.
Lucy gingerly unclipped the strips of slinky satin nothingness. “Here goes nothing.” She fastened the hooks in the front, then spun it around so they were in the back, then bent down to slip on the stockings. They were Parisian, pure silk, another Vivian find, with a very thin seam up the back. After three tries, the seam still wriggled up the back of her calves, looking like a map of Rock Creek Parkway.
The stockings were starting to get stretched out and she was losing patience when the phone rang. Sighing in frustration, she strode into her bedroom, garters slapping against her thighs, and yanked up the phone. “Hello,” she said, knowing she sounded harried. She was harried! She’d had all day, and somehow there was only an hour left and she still had to finish dressing and do her makeup and get out before traffic became a nightmare.
“Darling!”
Lucy slumped in relief. “Vivian. Hi.”
“You’re sounding vexed, darling. What is the problem? This is your night and you should be shining. I know you will be triumphant.”
“At the moment, I can’t even triumph over a pair of stocking seams. I’m about two seconds away from another glass of wine and a package of Safeway panty hose.”
“‘Panty hose’?” Vivian made the two words sound like some dreadful disease.
“It’s the seams. They look like I let one of my students loose with a marker up the backs of my legs.”
“Well, then, I suppose it’s a good thing I’m here with backup.”
Lucy’s head swiveled toward her door. “‘Here’? As in—?”
“As in, go open your front door. We’re coming up.”
“‘We’?” she squeaked, but the line went dead.
Lucy scrambled off the bed, tripped over the CFM pumps, ended up staggering into the bathroom, looking wildly around for something, anything, to cover herself with. Her bathrobe. Where in the hell had she left her bathrobe? Then she remembered she’d had it on earlier in the living room while attempting to paint her own toenails. (Money saved toward the Brazilian.) Major mistake for several reasons. Her toenails looked like they were done by the same eight-year-old who had helped with her stockings. And her coffee table had come dangerously close to a serious polish spill. Fortunately, Jennifer Lopez’s breasts had borne the brunt of the disaster. Lucy knew that s
ubscription to Us magazine would come in handy someday.
But her bathrobe had sacrificed itself in the name of frugality. That, and L’Oreal Jet-Set Red.
So she grabbed the next best thing. The towel she’d slung over the curtain rod after her shower. It was still damp, and immediately soaked her flimsy lingerie, but it was better than answering the door in peek-a-boo silk.
A brisk knock, followed by a “Yoo-hoo, darling!” sounded at the door. She tossed a frantic gaze at her not-so-tidy apartment, wishing Vivian had given her more notice. Like a week. She could have hired a cleaning service by then. Or moved.
She stopped in front of the door, managed to catch her breath, push her hair out of her face, and attempt at least some semblance of the new sophistication she’d supposedly learned at Vivian’s master hand. With one hand firmly clutching the towel knotted between her breasts, she opened the door. “Hi! What are you doing here?”
Vivian’s expertly outlined and painted lips spread into an immediate knowing smile. “Darling, you didn’t think I’d leave you to the wolves without a last-minute pep talk, now, did you?”
Lucy couldn’t even pretend to fake it. She all but wilted against the doorframe, she was so grateful. “I was going to call you, but I wanted to handle this on my own. Shouldn’t I be able to do this myself? Isn’t that the real test?”
Vivian patted her on the shoulder, then futzed with her hair a little, before smoothly barging her way inside Lucy’s apartment. “Darling, life is a series of tests. I’ve learned never to turn down a helping hand. It’s hard enough being a woman in demand. We need all the assistance we can get.”
Lucy went to close the door behind Vivian, when someone cleared their throat. She looked into the hall to find not one, but three people standing clustered in front of her door, carrying an assortment of what looked like luggage. “Hi,” they all chimed together.
Lucy looked from them to Vivian and back to them. “Hi?” she managed.
The tallest one, a guy who looked like the love child of David Bowie and Sting, spoke first. “’Ello, luv. I’ve brought along my magic pots. We’ll ’ave you ready for the ball in no time.” He bustled past her frozen form. “I’ll just set up by the windows in the parlor,” he said after a quick scan of her apartment. “Best natural lighting there.”
“‘Magic pots?’” Was she so far gone she required supernatural help? And she hated to break it to him, but the “parlor” he’d referred to was the central room of her entire home.
“I’ve got your headgear,” the next one said. She was elfishly small, with spiky, white-blonde hair and tortoiseshell glasses that, on her pixie face, somehow looked trendy rather than nerdlike.
“‘Headgear’?” Lucy repeated numbly as the woman moved past her, pulling a wheeled suitcase. Images of padded helmets floated through Lucy’s mind. “I’m really doing much better with the heels,” she commented, earning a confused look from both Sting and the elf.
“She’s talking about brushes, hot rollers, that sort of thing,” the final member of the makeover trio said as he skirted around her, careful not to let the lumpy garment bag he was carrying over his shoulder so much as graze the doorframe. He was wearing leather pants so tight Lucy could see the DNA of his children, and an extremely short haircut that was as black as Spiky Elf’s hair was blonde.
“And who are you?” she asked.
“Why, your fairy godmother, of course,” he said, his blue eyes twinkling quite devilishly as he swished his hips and tight little tushie.
So, she thought, the stereotype lived. But he was pretty cute.
“What’s in the bag?” She bumped the door closed behind her, still with a death grip on the towel wrapped around her. She looked at Vivian. “I was going to wear the dress we picked out at the consignment store, remember?”
“Of course I do, darling. And every woman needs a drop-dead little black dress, but you’ll find many, many uses for that on future dates. When I saw this little frock, I knew it was for this night. For you.” Vivian nodded to Swishy Elf, who hung the heavy black garment bag on her bedroom door, then unzipped it with a flourish.
“Voilà!” he said with an extravagant hand gesture that Vanna White would have killed for. “Sex on a hanger!”
Lucy gulped. “It’s—it’s . . .” Well, she didn’t know what it was. There was hardly enough fabric to even qualify it as a dress. She’d thought the plunging neckline and above-the-knee slinkiness of the little black dress was pushing boundaries. This dress never knew boundaries existed.
She looked from the ice-blue, sequiny wisp of nothingness to Vivian. She didn’t want to sound ungrateful, nor did she want to offend Vivian. But she couldn’t pull that off. Even if she wanted to. Which, of course, she didn’t. That dress did not shout Lucy Harper. Old version or new.
That dress shouted Sharon Stone.
“Wait until you see it on,” Vivian assured her. “It’s positively perfect with your coloring. You’ll be drop-dead gorgeous in this, darling. Drop-dead.”
“It’s Donatella,” Swishy Elf added. “That woman knows better than any man how to drape fabric on a woman’s body.” He looked her up and down. “The more leg, the better. And honey, have you got some leg on you.”
Lucy blushed and clamped her arms down more tightly on the towel. “Vivian, really, it’s gorgeous. But I—”
“You haven’t seen the rest,” Swishy announced.
She looked at him. “So that’s just the top, then?” Really, it looked like nothing more than a slightly long tank top, held up by two thin silver chains, with another, thinner chain that held it together between the breasts.
Swishy just laughed at her little joke. She wished she’d been joking.
“Look at these,” he said, pulling a shoe tote from a Velcro hook inside the garment bag. “On his best day, Manolo could only dream of designing shoes like this.”
They were strappy sandals with a clear Lucite heel that was every bit of four inches, tipped in silver at the bottom, with something glittery floating inside the lucite. The sole was trimmed in silver also, with a slender strip of silver leather that cupped the back of her heel, and incredibly slender, sequiny straps that tied around the ankle, matching the narrow sequin-crusted strip that crossed the top of her foot. The color was a perfect match for the dress. In fact, the sequins looked exactly the same.
Swishy must have read her thoughts. “Donatella’s new young assistant, Fabricio, designed these personally. Mark my words, he’ll be the next Jimmy Choo, and then some.”
Lucy realized she was still ogling the sandals—they were really amazing—and jerked her attention back to Vivian. “I can’t let you do this.”
“Why darling, it’s already been done.”
“It’s too much. And I can’t repay you—”
Vivian gave her as maternal a smile as she was capable of, which still came off like a tigress defending her young.
Lucy couldn’t deny that for a moment, a very tiny moment, a hot thrill of excitement shot through her. All she had to do was work up the nerve to put it on. “It’s really something. I just don’t think I can pull that off.” She shifted the knot in the front of her towel. “There’s nothing holding that dress up, and I sure as hell can’t.”
Swishy reached into an inner pocket in the bag and pulled out two foam pads and a roll of what turned out to be double-sided tape. “Don’t worry, honey, with this we can give you cleavage so you look like Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich.”
Lucy stared at the foam pads, trying not to let her mouth drop open. “I, uh . . .” She glanced at Vivian. “I don’t know. It seems a little deceptive. Sort of like false advertising.”
Everyone in the room laughed. “Men love the illusion, lovey,” Sting said, then wiggled his eyebrows and winked. “Trust me.”
She felt her cheeks heat again. “You all are being so nice, and you’ve gone to so much trouble. I’m amazed you came out to help me like this.” She turned to Vivian. “I feel like
I’m already so indebted to you. This almost feels like cheating or something.”
Vivian came over to her and put her arm around her shoulders, gently nudging her toward her bedroom door. “You don’t owe me anything but to go in there tonight and knock them dead.” She turned Lucy at the door, bracing her shoulders so she looked her in the eyes. “I know we’re known as the godmothers of Glass Slipper, but you’ve really made me feel like I am one. Watching you transform into such a lovely butterfly has been a very rewarding experience for me.” She squeezed Lucy’s shoulders. “You’ve already emerged from your chrysalis. You’ve arrived, darling. Just let me wave my magic wand and make this one special night perfect for you.”
Lucy felt tears gather in the corners of her eyes. “I never thought I’d feel like a princess going to the ball,” she said, her voice tight with unshed tears. “But you’re sure doing your best to make me feel exactly like that.”
Vivian beamed. “That’s what I want to hear. Now,” she instructed, as if all had been settled, “one last thing before I turn the team loose.” She held out her hand and Swishy gave her a slender velvet box. With a smile that was part sly and part avid excitement, she opened the box.
Lucy gasped as the gorgeous icy blue stones of the slender pendant and earring set winked up at her. “Oh, my God.”
“I know. Understated, and yet the perfect icing to this little cake.” She went on before Lucy could protest. Surely she would have protested such extravagance. “Fred has long been a close friend, so don’t worry. He lets me dip into his personal vault all the time.”
“‘Fred,’ ” she repeated. “As in—?”
“Leighton.” Vivian smiled. “Old connections are the best ones.”
“How much—?” She was stuttering.
Vivian merely patted her on the arm. “You don’t want to know dear.”
“Wow.” She gulped. “That much?”
“Just wear them and enjoy. They’ll come alive on you. Now,” she pushed Lucy into the bathroom, where Spiky Elf had set up a small salon’s worth of utensils. “Off you go, gorgeous.”
Sleeping with Beauty Page 18
