Michael reminded himself it was no more cheap paper and flimsy covers. No more riding around Brooklyn and the Long Island Expressway with a van full of products. For that, he could deal with Ernie and his corporate babble.
Ernie stuck out a bony hand, and Michael shook it, careful not to crush it in his.
“Great to have you on board,” Ernie said. “We love nurturing talent. We think you’re really going to create a very special endeavor here.”
What the hell does that mean? Michael thought, but he just smiled. “Thanks. The guys will be arriving shortly. I’ll send them upstairs when they get here.”
“Good. Remember, you’re part of the Blakely’s family now,” Ernie told him. Then he flashed an insincere smile at Susan Katz and was gone.
Susan closed the door behind Ernie and looked at her handsome boss. He was leaning over the windowsill outside his office, surveying the street. Nobody was here; the creative gang didn’t show up to work until ten o’clock at the earliest. She indulged in a brief, glorious fantasy that Michael would turn around to her, thrust up her neat little burgundy skirt, grab her thighs around the cream-colored lace thigh-high stockings she was wearing today, and throw her over her cubicle desk and just fuck her brains out.
“So what do we do now?” Susan ventured.
Michael turned around and handed her a neat sheet of folded paper from his jacket pocket. “This is the call sheet for today. I made it up last night.”
“Yes, Mr. Cicero,” Susan said, sighing.
Of course. Work. She was insane to think there could be anything else in Michael’s life.
*
Michael Cicero could never clearly recall his first few weeks in business. It merged into one long, confused, exhilarating, exhausting blur. While Seth and his other illustrators worked with Blakely’s production team, he was hiring salesmen, visiting booksellers and making presentations. At night he was wiped out, but still didn’t want to leave. Susan Katz, reluctantly, would leave the office, in a breath of perfume, wishing him good-night with her pencil-lined mouth, tossing her gleaming hair back across her shoulders, and Michael, oblivious, would head out to a bar when he could no longer squeeze in even one more call.
The line was coming together. The response was superb. He felt he was living on a cloud of adrenaline and energy. He snatched a sandwich or burger when he could, and fit in his workouts by rising an hour earlier. Every night, Michael wanted to celebrate.
What he really wanted was a woman.
There was no shortage of girls, of course. There never had been. Poor Susan; if Michael had met her in a bar he would have jumped her bones without thinking twice. But the office was sacred to him. Three times a week, on average, he picked up a girl, usually one he had banged before; girls he knew, clean, dumb, gorgeous girls, women he could take in small doses. They had big breasts, small waists and round, firm butts. Unfortunately, most girls were stupid and Michael couldn’t take stupid. He was polite and kind and didn’t lie to anybody. Nine times out of ten, they wanted a return encounter. He liked Janet, who wore a bra two sizes too small, so creamy, jiggling flesh poured out over the top of the black lace, and Elsa, the fitness instructor, who had that delectable ass, curvy, jutting and muscular. He laughed at her when she complained about it. When would girls learn that most guys didn’t want a tomboy? Every time Elsa leaned over to pick up something from the floor, he got a twitch in his groin.
But all the girls who banged Michael so eagerly, all the condom packets he went through, didn’t satisfy him. He wanted a girl he could talk to when she was done giving him head, preferably expertly. And if her technique wasn’t perfect, he’d be happy to give her practical lessons.
He thought he’d found her when he met Iris. She was in a bar on Twenty-fourth and Eighth, but then again, so was he. She was a paralegal, with hopes of becoming a lawyer some day. She had an excellent body, a curvy ass, good tits, and she knew several words of more than one syllable. Michael asked her out and to his surprise, found she wouldn’t give it up on the first date. Nor the second. She made it to three before sharing his bed, and when she did so, he found she could suck him well. Better than well. She wasn’t the classiest girl, but he figured you had to make allowances. And he was full of adrenaline, and she was there.
One evening, three weeks into their relationship, after a more expensive dinner than he could really afford, Michael had taken her home, banged her, and was now wondering how long he had to wait before he could ask her to leave, without being rude. A girlfriend was great, but he had to get up in the morning.
Iris lay sprawled across his bed, reading his tabloids: the News and Post which Michael only bought for the sports sections. Iris liked to call all the jewelry shops advertising discount diamonds she couldn’t afford, and then move onto the gossip pages. She propped herself up on her slim elbows, which let her breasts sway nicely, her nipples still hardened from his tongue on them earlier.
“Anything interesting?” Cicero asked. Play nice, he thought with an inward sigh.
“Yeah. Something about your boss.”
“Where? Let me see.”
“Oh, so now you’re interested,” Iris teased, but she handed over the inky sheet. “It’s a bit about the wife, actually.”
“Diana? She’s a snotty little bitch,” Michael said unthinkingly, and then cursed himself. He shouldn’t say things like that. Not even to Iris. Discretion was important in a business like his.
“You met her?” Iris demanded. She sat up butt-naked, and he admired the firm lines of her stomach. She sighed, wistfully. “They’re always taking her photo. She looks so great. She throws, like, the hippest parties, and everybody goes.”
“Do they now,” Michael said, absently. He scanned the article to see if it said anything about Ernie. It didn’t; he was about to throw it out.
“Sure. All the celebrities, the politicians, basketball players, everyone … and her clothes, such incredible clothes!”
Iris babbled on, but Cicero paid her no attention. He was looking at the shot of Diana, in a soft cashmere sky-blue sweater worn over a silk taffeta skirt, emerging from a dinner at City Hall. She looked … out of his league. Classy, like a princess or something. The thought of Ernie Foxton banging that was literally incredible. He tried to picture it: He failed.
Diana Foxton. There was something about her he should remember, wasn’t there? Something he had meant to do that had slipped by him?
Oh, shit, Michael thought. Of course. They had fought—stuck-up madam that she was. Class, sure, but didn’t she know it—and he had signed his deal before she could go running to Ernie and blow it for him.
But in fact, she hadn’t said a thing. Ernie had never mentioned it. Nobody had said boo to him. Mrs. Foxton had actually kept that plump, sexy little mouth shut.
He should thank her. He had meant to go and thank her. She could have made things hard for him, and she had chosen not to.
Credit where it’s due, Michael thought. He resolved he would see her tomorrow.
He looked across at Iris, her legs up in the air, lying on her stomach now. Her ass stuck straight up in the air. He was sure she lay around naked deliberately. Whatever, she was a great piece of ass.
“Get over here,” he said.
ELEVEN
Michael Cicero looked at Diana.
He was lounging on Ernie’s antique Chesterfield sofa that she had found at huge cost with the help of two decorators. Diana couldn’t accuse him of being rude, at least not directly. His feet weren’t propped up on her Indian ottoman, he wasn’t smoking and dropping ash onto the Persian carpet.
But something about his manner set her on edge. Diana’s skin prickled when she noticed his body, lean and hugely muscled, looking even bigger in that new suit he was wearing, arranging itself comfortably on the leather, relaxed, confident. Cicero didn’t seem in the slightest bit put off by the fact that he was lolling on a fifteen-thousand-dollar piece of furniture; nor nervous that he might knock over
one of the eighteenth-century vases. He wasn’t even staring reverentially at the pictures and mentally calculating how much they cost. He didn’t seem, Diana realized with another shock of annoyance, to care.
His suit was charcoal, hand tailored. It was no designer she could pick out. The shoes—John Lobb, maybe? Diana was hazy on men’s fashions, but she knew instantly that Michael Cicero had come into money and that he had aggravatingly good taste.
“That’s not the most pleasant way to greet a guest, ma’am,” Michael said with a lazy smile. His eyes flickered over her, and for the first time, Diana noticed it. She blushed slightly and drew herself up, angry at having been caught in blatant rudeness. You couldn’t allow yourself to slip like that. This arrogant man was some kind of business acquaintance of Ernie’s.
I won’t endear myself to Ernie by putting off his colleagues, Diana thought.
She glided into the drawing room and offered him the warmest smile she could muster.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it how it sounded.”
“‘Oh hell, it’s you’?” Michael quoted, with a broad grin.
Diana was slightly flustered. “Well, I—I guess—it came out—”
Cicero held up one hand. “Hey, that’s fine. I understand. Don’t worry about it.”
Diana bit down on her lip. “You were waiting to see Ernie here? I’m afraid he’ll be at the office for quite some time.”
“No. I came to see you.”
She paused, not quite sure she’d heard him properly. “You came to see me?”
“You’re going to ask, To what do you owe the pleasure, aren’t you?”
“Something like that.”
“Please, have a seat.” It was amazing, the way he could so generously invite her to sit down in her own apartment. He did it with such force of will that Diana found herself settling on the armchair opposite him.
Michael watched the way she tucked her slender legs in behind her automatically as she sat down. Her back was rigid, her bearing ladylike. She was one class act, he thought, and judging from the way she was dressed, she cost exactly what you always imagined these dames fetched. He thought about Ernie Foxton. Maybe she liked Ernie’s take-no-prisoners business style, who knew? The guy had nothing else to recommend him. Prancing around in his flashy clothes, with his designer offices, and weak limbs—probably never seen a set of weights in his life. He hadn’t had the right body language with his girl either, when they were at lunch. Hadn’t even held her hand. Hell, if she were my woman, Michael told himself, I’d be all over her.
He decided that the unyielding rigidity of her back was due to the fact that she never came. A little mouse of a man like Ernie couldn’t melt the ice over that exterior. No way.
He pulled himself sharply back from his reverie. She was a spoiled little minx, and she looked exhausted—from her long day of shopping, probably. Best that he said his piece and got out.
“Well, actually, I figured I should come around and thank you,” Michael said.
“Thank me for what? I’m sure you don’t owe me anything.” Diana pressed a little button on the table, and Consuela glided into view. “Could you fetch us a pot of coffee and some cookies, please, Consuela?”
“It’s not necessary. I won’t be staying. My company, Green Eggs, signed a deal with Ernie’s company last week.”
“Really? I don’t pay much attention to his work,” Diana said vaguely.
Then it’s not his business nous, Michael thought, just good old-fashioned gold-digging. He refused to believe that the gorgeous creature in front of him could love anybody at all apart from herself, and certainly not Ernie Foxton.
“Well, yeah, we did. It meant I got new offices, some cash to play around with, great distribution, more staff, a printing facility…”
“Congratulations,” Diana said, slightly coolly. Why on earth was he telling her all this? It pained her to see this—this thug from the wrong side of the tracks sitting in front of her and congratulating himself on his shiny new offices and fleets of staff, or whatever it was, when she herself could not even get a lousy editorial assistant’s job.
“And in a way I have you to thank for it.”
“I don’t see how.”
Michael swallowed. This was the bit he hadn’t been looking forward to. “When we had lunch that time, I guess I let rip some. And since you were Ernie’s wife, I expected you to go running home to him and tell him. It could have blown the deal. Not the main deal, because I signed real fast, but some bonuses and stuff.”
“If you’re coming here to apologize for what you said that day at lunch, I forgive you.”
“Not at all. I’m not apologizing,” Michael said quickly, struggling not to snap when he was supposed to be thanking her. “I just want to thank you for having kept it to yourself.”
Diana bristled. She’d wanted him to eat humble pie, and apparently that was not on today’s menu. But what could she do when he was here thanking her?
Her blue eyes settled on his face. It was handsome and square jawed. She had visions of him with maybe dozens of women. That was usually what made men so cocky. This one had been the same way even when he’d showed up to lunch in that cheap suit and bad shoes.
“That’s no problem at all.” I’m going to be gracious if it kills me, Diana thought. “I don’t go telling tales on people. Whomever Ernie wants to deal with, that’s his business. I hope the takeover works out well for you.”
“It’s not a takeover, it’s a partnership.”
“Whatever. I hope it makes you very rich.”
“I certainly hope it’s good for the company,” Michael said neutrally. “For both companies.”
Diana felt a great wash of exhaustion rock her. She didn’t feel up to an in-depth discussion of this guy’s successes right now. She pressed one slender hand to her forehead. “Look, Mr. Cicero—I wonder if you would be kind enough to excuse me. I’ve had a really bad day, and I was looking forward to a bath and bed.”
“Of course.” He stood up, and she couldn’t help but notice he was short, and very stocky. He was about five ten, and his lack of height just made his body look bigger. “I’m sorry to hear that. Why was your day so bad?”
“I couldn’t get a job.” Diana half clapped her hand over her mouth. Had she just said that? She must be tired.
“You were trying to get a job?”
“Do you all have to look so surprised? Yes, I worked before my marriage. I was a fashion assistant at Vogue in England. Ernie’s an American citizen, so as his wife I have a right to look for work.”
“Hey, hey, slow down.” He sat down again. “I’m sure you do. Now, who’s ‘you all’? How many interviews did you go on?”
Diana wondered how she had gotten into this, but there was no point in lying now. “Seven. And the last woman was just rude to me.”
“I’m sorry.” Michael tried, and failed, to imagine the woman in front of him going to seven job interviews. Seven in one day would mean that she was almost serious about getting a job. “She was rude, huh? What did she say?”
“She said I should sit at home and throw charity balls for the paparazzi.”
Michael burst out laughing, and Diana couldn’t take it anymore. She stamped her foot.
“You’re worse than she was! How dare you laugh at me! You’re in my home!”
“Look.” Michael smothered his laugh and walked closer to her, putting his hands on her arms. His touch was very strong, but subtle. “I’m truly sorry I laughed just now. It was just such a rude thing of her to have said.”
That was a lie, but a little white lie couldn’t hurt. It wouldn’t comfort her to know that he’d laughed because that was exactly what he’d thought Diana should do himself. Cicero felt an unexpected small pang of guilt. The girl was trying, right? He had to give her credit for that.
“It was, wasn’t it?”
“Very. Look, if you’re serious about working, you could maybe come and do something in my office.”
>
“Like decorating it?” Diana brightened. “I’d be excellent at that and very reasonable.”
That would be a coup. She’d love to tell her friends that she had her first decorating commission. That might actually be fun.
Michael Cicero was giving her a surprised look with his dark eyes. “No. I have the wall color I want and a print and some furniture.”
“I think I could manage something rather more exciting than that. I could start with some Eames chairs, and—”
“My budget for decorating isn’t really large,” he said, dryly. She was a fox, no doubt about that, but she was definitely starting to irritate him again. “I mean, say, being my assistant, helping to file, and make phone calls—”
“Fetch tea and coffee?” Diana asked sarcastically.
The sarcasm washed off him like water off a duck’s back. “Exactly. Tea, coffee, frank the mail, whatever needs doing. It’s like a Girl Friday job. It would be hard work and it wouldn’t pay much.”
“Sounds great.”
“Look, if you don’t want it, I understand. You’re a rich lady. Thanks for taking the time to see me,” Michael said, courteously, offering her a stiff little bow.
“No—wait, please.” Diana ran and caught at the elbow of his jacket. Her pride was stung. He agreed with the nasty hag from City Woman, he thought she should stay at home and run charity balls. I’m more than that, she thought fiercely. I can handle a job! Why does everybody except Milla assume I would fail? The thought of Mira Chen, in the office, the little businesswoman, probably right now taking a “meeting” with her husband, made her furious. “I’d love the job. It doesn’t matter about the pay. Just as long as I can start as soon as possible.”
For All the Wrong Reasons Page 9
