gritted her teeth, shucked off both the thong and the panties, then put the thong on again.
Goodbye, Mary Poppins.
The view wasn’t so bad from the front. Well, it wasn’t good. Still, it covered what had to be covered. But from the back…Her face went from pink to red as she twisted and turned and peered at herself in the mirror. The thong went up. It went straight up. It just went up there and disappeared.
“Ms. Barry!”
The door jumped under the pounding of Chef Florenze’s fist. Lucinda jumped, too.
“Ms. Barry, do you hear me?”
How could she not hear him, she thought bitterly. He was shouting. He had to, she supposed, to make himself heard over the rock and roll music blaring from the ballroom.
Okay, she couldn’t expect a bunch of men at a bachelor party to be listening to Mozart but for heaven’s sake, did they have to listen to some idiot singing that he’d been born to be wild?
Whatever had happened to Chopin?
“You have five minutes, Ms. Barry!”
Five minutes.
Lucinda swung towards the mirror and stared at herself again. The cotton bra did nothing for the thong. Or maybe it was the thong that did nothing for the bra, she thought, and bit down on her lip.
“This is not funny,” she told herself severely.
And it wasn’t. The desire to laugh had nothing to do with seeing anything even slightly humorous in the situation. She was verging on hysteria. She remembered the first time it had happened, that out-of-place, overwhelming bark of laughter. It had been the day after her father’s funeral when his attorney had gently told the truth to her mother, and to her…
Lucinda lifted her chin.
“Just do it,” she said grimly, and she stripped off the cotton bra, put on the spangled demitasse cups, and faced herself in the mirror again.
It was her reflection that seemed to want to laugh this time. Who are you kidding? it seemed to say.
Never mind the silly excuse for a bra and the thong. She looked about as sexy as a scarecrow.
Any self-respecting male would take one look and beg her to jump back into the cake.
Lucinda frowned. Well, so what? Even if—if—she did this, whether she looked sexy doing it or not wasn’t her problem. Popping out of the cake was her problem, but as she’d learned over the past two years, desperation could make you do a lot of things. Like waitressing, and flipping hamburgers. Like admitting that being descended from Cotton Mather didn’t mean scratch compared to being descended from a father who’d left behind a house that was mortgaged to the hilt, a defeated wife and a disappointed mistress.
The mistress had found a new man. The wife—Lucinda’s mother—had found a new husband.
And Lucinda was finding a new life.
At least, that was the plan. It was why she’d put three thousand miles between herself and Boston, come to a city where nobody’s eyebrows would lift when they heard the name “Barry,” and nobody would say, with a little smirk, “Why, Lucinda, however are you, dear?” when what they really meant was, “Oh, Lucinda, how nice to see that the mighty have fallen.”
Lucinda’s shoulders straightened. It had been a silly life, anyway. The theater. The opera. Charity balls, and endless parties for the needy cause of the moment. Well, she was her own needy cause now. But she’d be a productive citizen, once she had her cooking school certificate in hand.
Once she had that job, tomorrow.
And there’d be no job, without that certificate.
Lucinda leaned forward, palms flat on the marble top of the vanity, and stared unflinchingly into the mirror. Oh, yes, she thought wryly. Looking like this, she’d definitely be a big hit at that stag party.
One by one, she took the pins from her chignon and shook out her hair. Unbound, the straight-as-sticks ash-blond tresses fell heavily to her shoulders.
That was better, she thought dispassionately.
Now for the glasses. She usually wore contacts but she’d dropped one getting ready to leave the apartment this evening, and there hadn’t been enough time to crawl around on her hands and knees and search for it. She wouldn’t be able to see that well without the glasses but then, she was going to be the cake decoration, not the decorator.
Lucinda swallowed hard as she set them on the sink. Her reflection was wavy around the edges. Actually, wavy around the edges was an excellent description of how she felt. Her belly had knotted into one gigantic ball that had lodged itself somewhere between her throat and her all-too-visible navel.
Was she really going to be the first Barry female ever to emerge, naked, from the center of a giant cake?
A six-layer white cake, swirled with milk-chocolate frosting and decorated with marzipan hearts and stars. She’d applied them herself, just this afternoon…
Lucinda gave herself a little shake. What did it matter who’d applied what to the damned thing? Besides, Chef Florenze had made it clear she would not actually leap through the real cake. Why ruin the best part of a dozen eggs, two pounds of butter, and all that confectioner’s sugar?
“It will be a cardboard cake,” he’d said while she’d gawked at him. “You will pop from it cleanly.”
Perhaps it was his incredible assumption that she’d even consider doing such a thing. Perhaps it was his solemn assurance that she wouldn’t have to contend with leaping through the butter-cream frosting. Whichever, a wild image had bloomed in Lucinda’s head. She’d pictured herself bursting from the top of a cardboard cake wearing the tiara, the thong, the barely-there excuse for a bra, and a jack-in-the-box mask.
The first semi-crazed snort of amusement had burst from her throat. The chef, naturally enough, had misunderstood.
“Ah,” he’d said with a beaming smile, “I am delighted to see that this little assignment is to your liking, Ms. Barry. I had, if only for a moment, feared you might, ah, might not be pleased with it.”
“Pleased?” Lucinda had repeated, the urge to laugh buried under the stronger urge to connect her fist with Chef Florenze’s chubby triple chins. “Pleased with being told you want me to display myself, naked, to a mob of howling hyenas?” She’d looked down at the small white box that held the costume he wanted her to wear and shoved it back at him. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Ms. Barry. I have explained the situation. The actress hired for the occasion—”
“Actress,” Lucinda said, and gave another snort, though not of amusement.
“She has fallen ill. And you must take her place. I’ve told you that three times.”
“And I’ve told you that I’m here to cook, not to—to entertain a bunch of degenerates.”
The chef drew himself up. “Degenerates, indeed,” he said coldly. “These men are
