Undressed

by Heather MacAllister

  Yes, Gina needed serious therapy.

  “Hi.” Ford unbuttoned his jacket before he sat, and cast a quick look around. “Is Monica in the ladies’ room or…?”

  “She’s…not here. Yet.” But I am! I am!

  He picked up the bottle of wine, looked at the label, smiled to himself and refilled Gina’s glass.

  That was very generous of him, Gina thought, since she’d already drunk a glass—maybe a glass and a half.

  “Do we have an ETA?” he asked as he waved away the assistant waiter and poured his own glass.

  “We do not. The clients she’s meeting with have been slow to come to a decision.”

  He gave a short nod and surveyed the table. “What do we have here?”

  Gina had decimated the platter. “I ordered a tasting menu and the chef needed to begin service.” She showed him the menu card with her notes. “Oh, and he might have the idea that you’re considering having your reception here.”

  Ford ate one of the salmon eyes. “Are we?”

  “No,” Gina whispered. “We are placating a restaurant that we’ve canceled on three times.”

  “Gotcha.” He studied the card. “Octopus. Nothing says I love you like grilled octopus.”

  Gina chortled. “Personally, I thought the eyes were a little Halloweeny.”

  “Yeah. I don’t like my food looking at me.” Ford ate the other one.

  Gina allowed herself a little, meltingly tender, inward sigh. She needed to snap out of it, she truly did. But not yet. After the wedding was soon enough.

  The Monica cell buzzed with an incoming text. Gina had been holding it in her lap and glanced down to read the message.

  Still discussing. Ford there?

  Yes, Gina texted back.

  Thot he’d cancel. Tell him I’ll make it up to him.

  Gina stared at her screen. Monica had stored that last line in her macros, she’d had to use it so often.

  She looked up to find Ford watching her. “She’s not coming, is she?”

  “The meeting is still going on. It started at four o’clock and we knew it was going to go long when they ordered in dinner, but Monica felt that—”

  “Don’t explain.”

  “She said to tell you that she’ll make it up to you.”

  “It’s not a big deal.”

  Gina thought it should be, although to be fair, Ford had canceled a number of times himself. Gina shouldn’t be so judgmental. It was the nature of their careers that much of his and Monica’s face-to-face meeting time with clients took place after regular work hours and on weekends.

  Reaching for her purse, she dropped the cell phone in its pocket and put her napkin by her plate.

  “Hey, don’t go. Unless Monica…?”

  “No. I’m done for the day.” Or what was left of it.

  “Gina! Stay and finish your dinner.” He waved at the nearly empty platter.

  He didn’t need to ask her twice. Gina put her purse down and reached for her napkin.

  “I’d hoped that Monica and I could discuss our housing situation.” Ford brought out a map and several brochures as the waitstaff cleared away the platter and replaced it with the next course, a lamb lollipop on a bed of something green and curly.

  Monica and Ford could not agree on where they were going to live. Monica’s town house was near her office, which was in the arty social area of Austin. Ford’s home was a small, specially constructed “green” house on the far outskirts of Austin in a mostly undeveloped area.

  Austin’s tangle of traffic and unfinished highway construction was notorious. Whoever moved would have a tedious commute.

  Both parties had vented to Gina. Monica felt she had the ideal location for her business, and moving so far out of town would hinder her legendary networking.

  Ford’s house was an example of his passion and his business. He couldn’t live in a house that hadn’t been built to make the smallest carbon footprint possible. He’d be a hypocrite.

  This was a toughie. To Gina, the obvious solution was to build green in Monica’s area. But there weren’t any available housing lots, and anyway, there wasn’t enough time before the wedding.

  Ford spread the brochures out so they faced Gina. “There’s a new subdivision going up not far from here and I’ve been consulting with them. Mark, the owner, flat-out asked me what kind of home he’d have to build before I would buy it. And so, we went back and forth, and—” Ford unfolded the paper stapled to one of the brochures “—came up with this.”

  Gina looked at the simple floor-plan drawing of a three-bedroom house. It looked like any other house plan she had seen, but she was no expert.

  Ford grinned. “Looks like nothing special, right?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  He pointed to a curving line. “That’s the side of the hill. The back part of the house will be built into the limestone and stay at the same temperature year-round without using electricity or gas.”

  He expounded more on all the sustainable features the new house would have, his enthusiasm making him even more attractive. No wonder Monica had fallen for him.

  No wonder Gina had.

  “So won’t Monica love this?” He was beaming.

  No. Monica would not. Gina would have given anything to tell him what he wanted to hear. “Monica will love the idea, but she’s not going to want to live in a cave.”

  2

  “THIS BACK SECTION is not going to be like living in a cave!” Ford laughed as though amazed anyone would think so. “There will be skylights. The front third of the house is all outside like any other house. I promise, you won’t even know you’re in the side of a hill.”

  Monica would never go for it. Never, never, never.

  Even Gina, with her images of puppies, wet, wiggly children and a Ford with eyes only for her, would have to be talked into it.

  “There have been such phenomenal developments in sustainable construction materials,” Ford told her. “And this way, Monica could decorate with environmentally friendly fabrics and low-VOC paints. I know how much being a good steward of our planet means to her.” He gazed into the middle distance. “When I saw her wearing that dress made of Eco Intelligent polyester at the Festival of Green, that was just it for me. I knew she was the one.”

  Because of a dress? That dress? He wanted to marry Monica because she wore a dress one time? The polyester was more intelligent than he was.

  Crush or not, his cluelessness made Gina want to stab him with her fork. She wanted to stab Monica, as well, but Ford was here and Monica wasn’t.

  Monica didn’t care about the environment. Okay, that wasn’t true. Of course she cared, but she wasn’t an environmental activist. Gina had been the one who’d shopped all over for a “green” dress. She and Monica wore the same size—a factor in Gina’s hiring, she knew—and Gina had been the one forced to try on poorly made dresses in stiff, wrinkled, organic cotton and hemp in drab colors. Or thin, limp bamboo with puckered seams. Did responsible have to mean ugly? And just finding a dress that wasn’t too casual or emblazoned with a tree-hugging slogan had been nearly impossible. But she’d finally found one in a golden-brown fabric with a little sheen to it and had the tailor cut off the sleeves. Monica had pronounced it barely acceptable and vowed never to wear it again. It was currently hanging in Gina’s closet.

  Ford could be excused for overestimating Monica’s commitment to the green movement. The thing was, Monica immersed herself in whatever cause had hired her as a fund-raiser. When the campaign was over, she moved on. It was no reflection on the worthiness of a goal or charity. Monica was a professional and there were many worthy goals and charities.

  Ford should have picked up on that by now.

  It was not Gina’s place to enlighten him. She wasn’t sure it was her place to enlighten Monica. Maybe she’d give her a heads-up, but that was it.

  If ever two people needed to have a serious meeting of the minds, it was these two.

  While Gina
had been thinking, and Ford had continued talking about the future with Monica as he saw it, the chef had sent out yet more courses. Grilled fallow deer medallions and blueberry-pepper-encrusted wild boar. Oh, why not?

  Ford picked up the brochures (printed on recycled paper with soy ink) and put them back in his inside jacket pocket. “I’d give these to you to show her, but I’d like to see her face, you know?”

  Gina wanted to see her face, too. “Let’s sync schedules.” She got out her iPhone and accessed the calendar.

  Ford withdrew his BlackBerry. “Try to find a free afternoon. I’ll take her to lunch and afterward, we can look at the property.”

  There was no such thing as a free afternoon in Monica’s schedule. There were only things that could be moved and things that could not be moved. “How about meeting late in the afternoon on Thursday? You could drive out, see the property and then have dinner.”

  Ford shook his head. “I’ll be in Dallas.”

  They continued going back and forth through a course of some kind of duck that Gina thought was a bit on the pink side. She stopped and photographed it, as she had been doing with all the others.

  “Was lunch on the eighteenth the last time you two saw each other?” she asked.

  “Actually, we missed each other that day,” he confessed. “I ran late and Monica had to leave early.”

  Gina looked up at him. “When was the last time you and Monica saw each other? Actually saw each other. Face-to-face.”

  “I don’t know…three weeks? Maybe a month. It’s been crazy.”

  No, you two are crazy. “Then we’d better make something happen.”

  “Saturday. Pick a Saturday,” Ford told her. “In fact, pick a whole weekend. We’ll make it a wedding-marathon weekend and take care of all the details we’ve been putting off.”

  Gina hesitated. It would take some shuffling. “She has her fitting for her wedding gown Saturday after next and I absolutely can’t reschedule that. Not again.”

  “Okay—then I’ll meet her afterward.”

  Slowly, Gina nodded and blocked off the time on Monica’s calendar.

  And then she and Ford thoroughly enjoyed a mini crème brûlée and a torchon of chocolate ganache with sea salt and olive oil drizzled on top.

  ON THE SATURDAY after next, from the flybridge of a sinfully wasteful but heavenly motor yacht, Ford watched the coastline of Lake Travis ease by. This morning, he’d received a call from Monica canceling their plans.

  “Gina told me you couldn’t move your fitting,” he’d said.

  “Gina will find a way. It’s still three months until the wedding—how much time does it take to sew a hem and replace a few beads? The salon just wants to make a big deal out of it to justify the price of the dress. Anyway, I’ve got to go. Gina will call you to reschedule.” And she’d hung up.

  That last bit rankled. “Gina will call you to reschedule,” she’d said as though he were an irritating client and not the man she’d agreed to marry.

  Sure, Ford had canceled before. But this was different. They were supposed to be finding a place to live and they were running out of time. Mark Crawley had offered to meet them here at the site and explain his vision of Green River Homes. He’d gone to the trouble of making mock-ups.

  They could have first pick of the lots. First. Pick.

  Ford felt worse when he saw that Mark had brought his motor yacht so he could take Monica around the area in the lake.

  “There it is.” Mark pointed to a sliver of undeveloped land fronting the lake. “I bought that lot from the owners of the house on the left. Now I can build a community boat dock and ensure the residents have convenient access to the lake. Otherwise, they’ll have to pay for privileges at the marina a couple of miles away.”

  Ford patted the cushy chair—vinyl just oozing chemicals into the atmosphere—and gestured to his surroundings. “They can’t park something like this at a community dock.”

  Mark smiled. “No. This baby lives in her covered slip at the marina.”

  Ford looked directly behind the lot Mark had bought and up into the hills where he hoped to build the Green Lake subdivision.

  “I’m a little uncomfortable with the concept of sustainable living and a motor yacht.” He was appalled that Mark owned such a thing, to tell the truth.

  “I’ve been waiting for you to bring that up. You’re absolutely right. So.” Mark grinned at him. “How about we start a company making green pleasure craft? You design and I’ll implement. Realistically, people aren’t going to deprive themselves of everything they enjoy. But we can offer them a more eco-friendly way to have fun.”

  Ford felt a little pop of interest, the same little pop he always felt at a good idea. “Mark, I’m a landlubber from west Texas. I don’t know anything about boats.”

  “You can learn.” Mark rounded one of the hundreds of bends in the snakelike lake. “And the field’s wide open.”

  “It sounds intriguing.” That was Ford’s standard stalling response.

  Mark recognized it for what it was. “Tell you what. Let me know when you can corral that fiancée of yours and I’ll lend you the Sarah June. Best way to learn what’s important on a boat and what you can’t mess with is to spend a couple of days on the water.” He slid a sideways glance at Ford. “You two can have a romantic getaway. Even better, I’ll show you the places on the lake where there’s no cell-phone reception.”

  The man did know how to negotiate. “You know what, Mark? You’ve just made me an offer I can’t refuse.”

  TWO WEEKS LATER, Gina sat in the parking lot of Elizabeth Gray Bridal Salon in Rocky Falls. Alone. Monica had flown to Nashville early that morning to present a fund-raising proposal to an arm of the music industry. She wasn’t even in the same time zone anymore.

  Gina was checking for an e-mail from Ford. After Monica had canceled her fitting and her outing with him two weeks ago, there had been a drop in the number of e-mails and texts. Those that were sent had a distinctly chilly tone.

  E-mailing Ford was Gina’s guilty pleasure. It had started months ago with Monica saying, “E-mail Ford that I’ll be late—make it nice. You know.” So Gina embellished the unpleasant info, and when Ford responded, she’d responded, and they were off. Gina knew that he thought he was e-mailing and texting Monica. And, in her mind, she was only saying what Monica would say if Monica had time. But Monica had Gina and that was Gina’s job and…and it was amazing how easy it was for Gina to justify her guilty pleasure.

  The entire record of their correspondence was there for Monica to see, but Gina knew she didn’t keep up with it, so if Ford said anything Monica really needed to know—such as having an aunt in the hospital, or inviting her to dinner with friends—Gina informed her at their daily briefing.

  The shared jokes, the extra tidbits of interaction, Gina just enjoyed. After Monica and Ford were married, she would miss this, because she most definitely could not continue. No way did she want to get one of those “You were incredible last night” e-mails. Blech.

  Ford had been angry when Monica canceled two weeks ago, and when Gina had called to reschedule, he’d vented. Gina had alerted Monica, but she’d just closed her eyes in weariness.

  “I can’t deal with that now. Gina? Can you…?”

  And Gina knew she was supposed to smooth things over on Monica’s behalf. “I’ll do my best.”

  But things weren’t smooth at all.

  Gina stared at the entrance to the salon. Things weren’t smooth on the wedding front, either.

  Monica wouldn’t accept that she couldn’t reschedule her fitting again. After all, hadn’t she canceled the uncancelable two weeks ago? And hadn’t Gina come through with yet another appointment?

  “They’ve got two months,” Monica had said. “Offer to pay them a rush fee.”

  “We’re already paying them a rush fee because we broke your last appointment,” Gina reminded her. “They absolutely refuse to book you another fitting. There’s a huge we
dding party scheduled and the seamstresses will be working on those dresses. You’ll have to find your own tailor if you don’t keep Saturday’s appointment.”

  Monica exhaled. “Then you’ll have to do it.”

  “What?”

  “Keep the appointment. We’re the same size. I have to try the dress on after the alterations have been done anyway, and they can tweak the fit then. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before!”

  “That’s—”

  “Gina, I’m counting on you.” Monica had gripped her shoulder. “Make this happen.”

  So here she was, making this happen. Gina got out of the car and entered the salon. At least she didn’t have to endure another horrible conversation with Ford. When she’d called to tell him about today’s fitting and see if he wanted to try the same schedule as before, he’d declined, saying they’d just play it by ear.

  He’d turned down a chance to see Monica. Did Monica even notice that two weeks had gone by without her breaking a date with Ford because there had been no dates to break?

  Gina had noticed. She missed talking to him and couldn’t shake the feeling that he was angry with her because she’d told him Monica had an unbreakable appointment. Now that Monica had bailed on this one, too, Gina was very glad Ford had declined.

  “I’m here for Monica Teague’s appointment,” she said to the receptionist.

  Gina had hoped she could just slip in and get fitted, but Lia, the assistant manager, busted her.

  After an unpleasant conversation, Lia handed her an alterations release form that basically said that the customer had asked for work to be done against the advice of the salon and therefore, the salon wasn’t responsible, etc., etc. “After you sign, I’ll make you a copy.”

  Signing the release was the only way Lia would agree to use Gina as a fit model. Gina didn’t blame her.

  Lia led Gina to a large room in the back where she had to put on uncomfortable underwear of the type women had liberated themselves from wearing. As if that weren’t enough, Monica’s dress required hoops.