Loe raamatut: «Blind Date»

Prologue

“OKAY, ON THE COUNT of three, we start taking our clothes off. One—”

“Stop counting! We can’t just strip in a department store aisle, Meg!”

“Why not? It’ll teach them to put their fitting rooms in obvious locations, won’t it?”

Wendy gave her an exasperated look. “Either you quit it right now, or I’m going to call your mother on my cell phone and tell her what you’re doing. I don’t think the current president of the Women’s Garden Club will be amused.”

Meg Kendall assessed her best friend for seriousness of intent and decided Wendy Jones would do exactly as she’d threatened. Besides, Meg didn’t really intend to follow through with her daring plan. Her conservative upbringing hadn’t exactly encouraged wild spontaneity—but it was fun to kid about it. “Oh, all right, you win.” Shifting her armload of new spring outfits, Meg again scanned the vicinity for anything resembling a fitting room. “What now, fearless leader? Got any ideas?”

“Yes. We keep looking.” Doing just that, Wendy slowly turned around, searching. Suddenly, she pointed off to their left. “Ha. Right over there. See?”

Meg looked where Wendy indicated and saw a subtle but promising doorway cut into a wall of the very upscale department store anchoring one end of Tampa’s fabulous International Plaza. She brightened. “Good eye, Wendy.”

She set off, weaving her way around several carousels hung with pants and shirts. Mere feet from her destination, Meg was stopped by a restraining hand on her arm. She spun around to face her friend. “Whoa, head rush. What are you doing, Wendy?”

“We can’t go in there. These are—” she lowered her voice to a whisper “—the men’s fitting rooms.” Though equally laden with her own choices in outfits, Wendy managed to point above their heads.

Meg looked up, only now seeing the big blocky letters affixed above the entry. “Oh. So they are. Well, who cares?”

“I do. It’s against the law.”

“Oh, please. It used to be against the law for women to vote or go braless, but did that stop us? No.” Meg again surged forward.

Wendy held her firm. “Men could be in there undressing.”

Instant full-color, centerfold-quality snapshots popped into Meg’s mind. Hard-bodied athletes and cops and firefighters, all half-naked or better. Whew. She shook her head to clear the pictures. “Gorgeous men with their clothes off. How, exactly, is that supposed to dissuade me?”

Wendy released Meg’s arm. “What if they look like Maury instead?”

A replacement mental vision of the short, barrel-chested and blustery four-thousand-year-old sweetheart of a little old man who lived in the same complex as she and Wendy did in trendy South Tampa had Meg grimacing her distaste. “Thanks. Now I have to gouge out my mind’s eye.” She shook her head to clear the image. “Nice try. But I’m still game. I’m tired, my arms are about to fall off from carting these clothes all over the place, and I’m not getting any younger.”

“Same here, but first let’s think this through…”

“Oh, please, Wendy, not that.”

“Just listen. If we go in there, we run the risk of getting caught by the security guards and being charged with a crime, disowned by our families and convicted. If that happens, we’ll be sentenced to jail, where, just to survive, we will have to become some big, sweaty chicks’ bitches—”

“Big, sweaty— Where do you get this stuff?” Meg could hardly believe some of the things that came out of her cute blond, blue-eyed friend’s mouth.

“I’m not done. You have to promise me that if we get thrown into jail, we’ll pretend to be each other’s bitch so no one else will mess with us.”

Disbelief rounded Meg’s eyes. “You’re serious, aren’t you.”

Wendy nodded. “Go on…promise. I’m waiting.”

Knowing from long experience that Wendy would not budge until Meg promised her, she exhaled dramatically. “All right, fine. If we get caught and thrown in jail, I promise we will—and I can’t believe I am even going to say this—pretend to be each other’s…bitch. There.”

“And no farming me out in exchange for cigarettes or chocolate.”

“Seriously?” Meg pretended to weigh the pros and cons of such a course of action—Wendy promptly smacked her arm a glancing blow. “Ouch! Okay, fine on the cigarettes. I don’t smoke, anyway. But if it comes down to you or chocolate, I’m giving you up, honey.”

“That’s not funny—”

“Look, if you don’t have the guts for this, keep looking for the women’s fitting rooms. But don’t expect me to wait for you once I’ve found the dress of my dreams.”

Wendy rolled her eyes. “Oh, whatever. But one of these days, I’ll figure out why I let you talk me into doing dumb things.”

Meg instantly brightened. “It’s not dumb, and you do it because you secretly admire my courage.”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“I know it is.” With Wendy once again on her heels, Meg breezed under the forbidden arch. Quickly, she moved down the row of louvered doors, checking to see that each one was indeed empty. For all her bravado, she didn’t want to embarrass or alarm some guy. Or go to jail. Or be anybody’s bitch.

From behind her, Wendy said, “Back to Maury Seeger, he’s quite the character.”

Meg couldn’t help but warm to the subject of their elderly neighbor. “Maury and his Mafia-mobile,” she said, and smiled. Meg could visualize the little old man’s hulking, chrome-armored black tank of a car. “I just love Maury and his stories. The way he’s always going on about how he was a Mafia don in his younger days and how they called him The Stogie because of his cigars.”

“But don’t you think Maury—and I mean this in a loving way—has got to have a screw loose? Maybe a whole handful loose?”

Meg shrugged. “Probably. Who doesn’t?” Having finished casing the room, she said, “Oh, good, come on—they’re all empty.” She chose a stall and indicated to Wendy that she should take the one next to hers. Stepping in and closing the door after her, Meg called out, “By the way, did I tell you that I’m going out Saturday night with Maury’s great-nephew from out of town?”

“Yeah, you did. That’s my point.” Wendy’s raised voice and the sound of a closing door told Meg her friend had gone into her own fitting room. “This guy is from the same murky gene pool as Maury. Have you thought about that, Meg? And what about Carl? You just broke up with him last weekend. Are you sure that’s really over?”

“Beyond sure. Carl’s a two-timing jerk. He is so out of the picture.” Tamping down her simmering anger born of catching Carl out on a date with a woman who definitely had not been her, Meg sorted out the outfits she’d brought with her and hung her choices on the hooks provided. “My evenings are free now, so why shouldn’t I go out? Besides, this isn’t an actual date. It’s a blind date that isn’t even really that.”

Wendy’s voice became teasing instead of scolding. “If it isn’t a date, why did it require an evening trek to the mall in the middle of the week to buy a new outfit?”

“It didn’t. We came for you. You’re the one looking for something to wear on the airplane Friday afternoon.” Meg tossed her purse down and unsnapped her lightweight denim dress. “I just got lucky and found some cool things I like. Anyway, what’s the harm in wanting to make a good first impression?”

“I knew it! Tell me again how this isn’t a date, blind or otherwise?”

“It’s not. It’s a favor.” Meg considered her first selection. A scarlet linen shift, the hem of which was encircled with tiny rows of multicolored chain-stitch embroidery. A definite possibility. “I’m doing a nice thing for a little old man who owns a spot in my heart. His nephew is coming and he asked me if I’d just show the guy around Tampa for one evening. Big deal. So I’ll give him the three-hour tour.” Standing in her bra and panties, Meg unzipped the linen dress and stepped into it.

“Meg, you do realize, don’t you, that this guy could be a serial killer?”

Meg settled the dress on herself and performed all the standard contortions a woman does to get a zipper up. “It’s not like I picked up some ax-wielding, smelly psycho from the side of the road. The guy’s a foreman for a construction company in Colorado.” She admired herself in the mirror. The dress fit perfectly. “Are you having any luck over there? I am totally loving this red linen dress.”

“Really? I’m not too sure about this blue suit. I like it, but if I’m going to wear it on my trip, I want it to be comfortable. Maybe I need the next larger size,” she said with a sigh.

The sound of an opening door told Meg that Wendy had just exited her fitting room. “Wait here for me, okay? I’m dressed and I have my purse. I’m going to go look for that next size.”

“All right,” Meg said. She reached around behind her to undo the zipper and about four or five inches from the bottom, the zipper balked…and then stuck.

Meg felt for the snag, found it and grimaced. Great. It was stuck on the lace at the top of her bikini underwear. And no matter how she fiddled with it, it would not come loose. Damn it. Short of pulling the dress down and off—along with her underwear, which would leave her naked from the waist down—Meg was doomed to stand there, frustrated. Where was Wendy when she needed her?

At that exact moment, the door to the next stall closed. Wendy was back! Meg opened her stall’s door, went to the next one and knocked on it. “Hey, before you take your clothes off, would you get this stupid zipper unstuck for me? It’s caught in my underwear.”

STANDING IN THE MEN’S fitting room stall, already shirtless but still in his jeans, Joe Rossi didn’t budge as his mind processed what he’d just heard. A knock on his door. A female voice. A zipper stuck in her underwear. And she wanted his help.

That didn’t happen every day.

But what the hell was she doing in here? Was she mistaking him for a boyfriend or husband? Probably. So this would be funny when she saw him and realized her mistake. Unable to resist his impulse to play this scene out, Joe opened the door, ready to see the surprise on her face and laugh with her.

Only, she wasn’t facing him. She had her back to him and her hands pinched in at her waist to keep the dress’s two back panels loose. Her head was bent forward, which sent cascades of shiny brunette hair falling forward over her shoulders. Joe swallowed. If her front was even half as nice as her back, then this was one really hot woman. She stood about average height, had a great figure—the parts he could see—and lightly tanned skin. Her bra was white and lacy. Her dress was open to below her waist. And, sure enough, the zipper was caught on her underwear.

Joe was torn. He wished he could help her out, but not for all the money in country music was he going to touch her. Not that he didn’t want to. He’d be pleased to. But he didn’t dare, not without informed consent, which this scenario did not imply—

“Sweetie, what are you doing back there? See if you can get the zipper unstuck. I don’t want to have to take off the dress, and my underwear along with it, so I can work on it myself. How embarrassing would that be?”

“More so for you than me,” Joe said.

The woman tensed, her head came up, and she apparently stared straight ahead. Suddenly, she swung around, her eyes wide, her hands covering her mouth as she stared at him in shock.

“Don’t scream.” Joe already had his hands out in front of him in a stop-right-there gesture. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you—”

She moved her hands about an inch away from her mouth. “You don’t have on a shirt.”

“You’re absolutely right. I do not have on a shirt.” A lucid corner of his brain—one not involved in this debacle—noted that her front was every bit as hot as her back. This woman smoldered. Wide brown eyes. Bedroom eyes. He flicked his gaze over her fine nose, down to her sensual, rosy lips, then her slender neck, to her full set of breasts—and right back up to her eyes. “I had just pulled off my shirt and was getting ready to try one on when you knocked on the door. I can show it to you if you like. The shirt, I mean.”

“No. Not necessary. I believe you.” She sounded breathless, apologetic. “I am so embarrassed. I thought you were someone else.” She tucked a stray lock of her thick, shiny, reddish brown hair behind her ear. “She was here a minute ago, I swear.”

“She?” Joe’s interest level ratcheted up significantly—a purely male response to a hot, possibly unattached and half-dressed woman.

“Yes. My friend Wendy,” the woman said distractedly as she blatantly checked him out. “Okay, I just have to say something, and it’s very politically incorrect. But all of this—” she waved her hand up and down him, indicating his bare chest “—wow. On the other hand, I am so sorry. How uncool am I? I’ve never even seen you before, and I just stick my booty right in your face.”

“Well, it wasn’t exactly…in my face.” Still, Joe’s testosterone-soaked brain created some really nice images of that. Really nice. But he probably shouldn’t linger there. Say something. “What, exactly, are you doing in the men’s fitting rooms, anyway?”

Wrinkling her nose, which only made her cuter, she sighed. “It’s a long story that involves women in line scratching and shoving, and I don’t come off very well in it. So, really, it’s not worth retelling.” She backed up a step and, hands behind her, clutched at her dress. “Anyway, I should just…go. Again, sorry. I really did think you were my friend.”

Though acutely aware that he shouldn’t say what he was thinking, given his situation with Linda, his would-be fiancée, Joe nevertheless shrugged. “I could be your friend, if you wanted me to be.”

Awareness flared in her eyes, but then she chuckled and shook her head. “I’m sorry, but a guy like you? If all you wanted to be was my friend, I’d have to kill myself.”

Amused and self-conscious, Joe swept his gaze down and away before recovering enough to face her again. When he did, he was trapped. He couldn’t look away from those mesmerizing brown eyes. “So…what do we do now?”

“Do?” She raised her eyebrows. “We don’t do anything. In fact, we pretty much never see each other again because this is the most embarrassing moment of my life.”

A stab of disappointment surprised Joe. “Are you sure?”

She frowned. “Well, unless we count that time in high school when my swimsuit bra came up as I jumped off the high dive—”

“No, I mean, are you sure that we can never see each other again?” He couldn’t believe he’d said that. He had no right. And yet, here he was flirting—and maybe wanting this chance encounter to go somewhere.

“Oh God,” she said, covering her face with her hands again, but not before he saw her turning red. “First I talk about my butt and then my boobs.” She was talking through the web of her overlapping fingers. “Can you just go back in that fitting room and forget about all this? Just pretend you never saw me and that this didn’t happen?”

His voice ringing with as much regret as humor, Joe said, “Sure. I can go back in the fitting room. But I have to tell you, it will be damned hard to forget this ever happened.”