things like that, but he knew Shayna would be one of the first to arrive. In the six months he’d been a member of MBO, he’d learned that he could set his watch by that woman. She was so organized, he’d bet she color coded her underwear by the days of the week. Black on Mondays, red on Tuesdays…
Uh-oh! Max stepped on the gas pedal, trying to make the yellow light up ahead. It wasn’t wise to think about Shayna Gunther’s underwear while driving.
As he sped through the intersection, he heard a wild shriek. Glancing in his rearview mirror, he saw a bag lady wrapped in a garbage bag. She was bent over, trying to hold a sheet of newspaper over her head while struggling with an umbrella the wind had turned inside out. Max grimaced. Apparently he’d sloshed her good when he’d driven through a mud puddle.
“Sorry!” he called, tooting his horn, knowing she couldn’t hear him.
Twenty minutes later, Max swirled his cocktail and scanned the lounge again. Still no sign of Shayna. She was the only reason he’d bothered showing up in the first place. Now she was nowhere to be found, and he was stuck listening to the most boring guy in the room—Phillip Browning, Jr.
What was with this guy? Didn’t he know that no one cared how many copies of some duller-than-dirt accounting program he’d sold this week? Of course he didn’t know. He was too busy impressing himself.
Max surveyed the room again, this time searching for a way to exit the conversation. Hot damn. Both his prayers were answered at once. There was Shayna. Finally.
Max blinked. That was Shayna, wasn’t it? The woman slinking into the ladies’ room with her handbag covering her face had Shayna’s smooth honey brown complexion and slim sexy figure, but she looked like a drowned rat. A beautiful rat, but drowned nonetheless.
It had been raining when he arrived, but not hard enough to soak her like that. The front of her hair was plastered to her forehead and the back had frizzed into a puffy cloud. She hobbled on one foot because she’d apparently lost the heel of her other shoe.
Max turned back to Phillip, who was so absorbed in a monologue on his new line of Microsoft knockoffs, he hadn’t even noticed that Max wasn’t paying attention.
“I hate to cut you off, Phil, but I see a friend I need to talk to.”
Phillip’s face went blank for a moment, almost as if he were startled by the sound of someone else’s voice. “Sure, Matt, we’ll continue this later. I want to tell you about my new antivirus product.…”
Max backed away as Phillip picked up the conversation with his next victim.
Shayna stared at her reflection in the ladies’ room mirror, feeling close to tears. She was a wreck. She made her living planning, preparing for the unexpected and showing others how to do the same. How could this have happened?
She leaned her forehead on the cool glass of the mirror. Her perfect evening was over before it had even gotten started. Things couldn’t possibly get any worse.
“You okay in there?”
She looked up to find Max Winston peeking around the side of the ladies’ room door.
“Oh my God.” She tried to rake her fingers through her hair, but they got stuck in the frizzy mass. “Max, this is the ladies’ room. What are you doing in here?”
He stepped through the door and leaned against it. “I was worried about you. I saw you come in, but you never came back out.”
“So you decided to join me in the ladies’ room?”
He slipped his hands into his pockets, looking quite at home. “Nobody has come in here for at least five minutes. I knew you were alone. Besides, this is just the make-up-your-face area. I still have one more door to go through before I reach the point of no return.”
Shayna turned back to the mirror. Big mistake. For a split second she’d actually forgotten what a mess she was. She looked past her freestanding hair to the man behind her. Why, when she looked the worst she’d ever looked in her life, did Max Winston have to look the best she’d ever seen him?
This man, who came to every MBO meeting in T-shirts and blue jeans, was actually wearing a jacket. Pale gray. He was still wearing jeans but they were black—somehow it made a difference—and his offwhite shirt had a banded collar. He looked great.
He always looked great. In fact, he would have been at the top of her list of potential suitors if it weren’t for his fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants, spontaneous attitude that went against every principle she’d built her life upon. And now he had a front-row seat to the most humiliating night of her life.
Shayna felt like crying.
Max crossed to the mirror and looked over her shoulder. “So what happened, Shayna?” He pointed to her ruined shoes. “This is a risky fashion statement even for you.”
He was making jokes. Twenty-eight years of perfect grooming now amounted to no more than a silly joke. She met his eyes in the mirror. “You…want to know…what happened to me?” she asked quietly.
“Yeah, I’d like to know.”
She rounded on him. “You want to know what happened to me?”
He took a step back. “I…Well…You don’t have—”
“I’ll tell you…what happened…to me.” She turned back to the mirror, staring at her miserable reflection. Her voice sounded eerily calm to her own ears. “I bought a new dress just for tonight.” She smoothed her hands over her expensive white sheath, as she turned to face him. “Do you like this dress?”
He nodded obediently.
“And my hair…” She reached up to touch the flyaway strands, barely aware that Max’s gaze was still locked on the damp silk that clung to her curves. “I spent exactly twenty-three minutes trying to get my hair to curl like Naomi Campbell’s on the cover of Vogue.
“I looked good.” She stared at him. “I really did. When I left the house, I was feeling so good, a little rain couldn’t even get me down—after all, I always carry my trusty purse-size umbrella, right?” She laughed, almost hysterically. “I didn’t even blink when ‘a little rain’ turned into a full-fledged thunderstorm the moment I got out of the car to change my flat tire.”
“Ooh, that’s rough,” Max said sympathetically.
“No. It was okay. I was cool…until I discovered that my spare was flat, too.”
She held up a hand as if taking an oath. “But, like I tell my clients, ‘You must have a backup plan—always.’ So I called AAA and my neighbor Kitty, so she could meet Mr. Tow Truck Man and tell him where to tow my car. That way, I could just hop on the bus and make it here with time to spare, right?”
“Let me guess,” Max said, shaking his head. “It didn’t work out.”
“No! For some reason, today of all days, the bus comes five minutes early. So I’m running to catch it, and the heel on one of my two-hundred-dollar Italian shoes breaks off in a crack in the pavement. And, of course, I miss the bus.”
