not fantasy material.” She sighed and shook out the bunny costume before sliding it onto a hanger. “At least it wasn’t a Smurf costume.”
The next box of new costumes was better. A revealing slave-girl outfit, like something Princess Leia would have worn. A gorgeous cabaret getup. And, Josie sighed, a new Marilyn Monroe costume. All very sexy.
Unlike forest creatures and space aliens. She rolled her eyes. She’d blown it. What a dork, trying to flirt like that. She should have known better. She could no more flirt than she could just ask Tom out. Just imagining how bad she’d mess that up, her cheeks burned again in humiliation. But maybe she could drop a couple of hints next time he was in?
Contemplating different hints she could give without sounding stupid, Josie started to package costumes.
She glanced at the stack of Internet orders that needed to be shipped. A dominatrix for New York. A Betty Boop for Idaho. Sexy pirate in Pittsburgh. Gathering outfits for the already labeled boxes, she hummed a little tune. She frowned as she pulled the dominatrix costume from the rack. Could she ever find the nerve to wear something like this?
“Josie?”
She spun around, one hand still holding the other on her chest to calm her pounding heart.
“Tom?” She hoped he’d take her breathlessness as surprise instead of nerves. “What’s up? I thought you’d already left.”
He gave her a sheepish, little-boy grin that melted her insides. “I forgot to deliver one package.”
He held out a small box. But he was staring at the costume in her hands. He eyed the skimpy leather, then shifted his gaze to Josie. Interest sparkled, a naughty smile quirking one corner of his mouth.
“Now that’s an interesting getup,” he said. “I don’t suppose …”
Josie glanced at the leather in her hand, then back at Tom. Her eyes widened. Was he asking if she liked to play naughty? Color washed over her cheeks.
“The best thing about working at Dressed to Thrill is being able to role-play,” she told him. Then she hesitated and with a deep breath said, “Like our slogan says, ‘Bring us your fantasies, we’ll make them come true.’“
Tom smiled, but before he could respond, the phone rang. With a shrug, he said, “We’d better get back to work. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
Josie didn’t even pout when he left. Listening to her boss take the call, she grinned and gave a little dance and skip as she returned to the packing counter. He’d see her tomorrow. He’d said it like he was looking forward to it. Maybe tomorrow was the day he’d ask her out? Head filled with daydreams of Tom, she folded the dominatrix costume into the box heading for Idaho.
Wasn’t love grand? She patted the black leather and smiled. She sure hoped this costume brought the wearer as much luck as it had brought her.
1
“THE GIRL VOTED most likely to die a virgin.” “So unpopular, she attended her prom alone.” “The queen of geek chic.”
Zoe Gaston sneered at the labels people had scribbled under her senior picture. She hated labels. Although, she sighed as she glanced at the photo, sometimes it was hard to deny them. An ode to the dark side, she’d called her teen years. Black spiked hair, black-lined eyes, black glossy lips. She’d been a pudgy-cheeked brainy Goth-girl.
In other words, a total misfit.
“You think I should attend my ten-year reunion … why?” she asked Meghan with a grimace.
“To relive happy high-school memories and reconnect with all your friends, of course.”
Zoe’s sister-in-law actually believed that. She was the kind of gal who’d liked school. Plenty of friends, good times, general acceptance. The total opposite of Zoe’s experience. Other than one brief weekend when the hottie football star she’d crushed on had seemed to return her interest, she’d spent her high-school years as persona non grata.
“Oh, yeah, the good ol’ days.” Zoe squinted at Meghan and nodded sagely. “That would be when the cheerleaders hated me, the jocks were terrified of me and the teachers, ah, yes, the teachers. They were just as happy when I cut class as when I showed up.”
Meghan shrugged and snatched the yearbook away, obviously sensing the trip down memory lane wasn’t helping her argument any. She tossed it on Zoe’s electric-blue couch, the glossy cover swooshing across the slick leather.
“You publicly mocked the cheerleaders,” she pointed out with a dirty look.
Oops. Zoe bit her lip to hold back a laugh as she realized perky Meghan probably had a pair of bronzed pom-poms hidden away somewhere.
“Zach told me you kicked the quarterback in the balls,” Meghan continued, sounding shocked and irritated. Zoe raised her brow as if to ask what was wrong with that, but managed to keep her mouth shut as the other woman continued. “And he said you regularly argued with the teachers.”
A quick grin escaped. Okay, so her school days hadn’t totally sucked. “Exactly. I didn’t fit in. I didn’t want to fit in. And nobody wanted me to try to fit in. So why on earth would I go back?”
“To show them all how hot you are, how successful you are and how wrong they were about you.”
“Sure. Because I still don’t look like a Kewpie doll, I change jobs more often than most people change hairstyles and it’s been so long since I had sex that I might as well be the lifelong virgin they dubbed me.”
“So what? Those things don’t mean they were right about you, do they? And it’s not like you have to fill out some sexual-activity roster if you attend.”
Zoe smirked, then picked up her margarita glass and took a sip. Before she could come up with a clever response, Meghan puffed up her cheeks so she looked like an angry blond chipmunk, then blew out a gust of air. “If you don’t go, they’re all going to think they were right. Are you going to let them win?”
Zoe opened her mouth to say she didn’t care if they won or not. Then she sighed and shut it again. She couldn’t deny it. She did love to win. It was almost an irresistible need in her, that inability to step away from a competition, the compulsion to try to get the last word, to fight to the often-bitter end. It’d been the only thing that’d kept her in school after her parents’ deaths—that need to prove all the gossips wrong.
Of course, as soon as the challenge was met and she’d won, she lost all interest. Boredom was Zoe’s major downfall.
“I can overcome my need to win if I don’t step up to play,” she muttered, adding a silent maybe. She picked up the flashy neon invitation to the weeklong reunion and grimaced. “And returning to Central High’s school of torture is good incentive to stay out of the game.”
“And a rotten excuse for being afraid they might be right.”
Zoe glared, but didn’t respond to the direct hit.
“Why are you pushing this, really?” she asked,
