dirty details of her idea. She had an open mind.
A desperate open mind?
Willing to go to any lengths to save her career?
Hmm. He could see himself playing the devil to her Faust.
“What? What’s the deal?”
“You get your three dates.” He did the finger thing—one, two, three. “And I get my three—”
“No.” She shook her head so forcefully that wisps of her blond hair caught on her lips, leaving her decidedly disheveled.
Eric liked the look. “What kind of double standard is this? I’m not allowed to say no, but you can turn me down flat without hearing me out?”
“I don’t want to hear you out. Not if it’s going to be about sex.”
He hung his head and did his best to look puppy-dog pitiful instead of guilty as hell. “After all that talk about friends being there for each other? You’ve gone and hurt my feelings, Chloe.”
“You’re saying your deal-making efforts aren’t intended to get me into bed?”
He looked up in time to catch the imperial lift of her brow. “What? And ruin this beautiful friendship?”
He wasn’t about to admit what the picture of her tousled hair was doing for his imagination. Just get her out of her shoes and shorts and, yeah, he could see Chloe Zuniga in his bed, wearing nothing but her socks and that jersey hanging over her thighs and curvy bare ass.
“Okay.” Her chin went up. She shook back her hair. “What three nonsexual things do you want in exchange for your escort services?”
“We’re going to do this, then?”
“Well, it depends on what you want.”
Nope. He wasn’t going anywhere near that one, either; there wasn’t a long enough pole. “Don’t worry. I’ll think of something.”
“So, you don’t even know what you want? This is just an open-ended deal? I’m expected to be at your beck and call while you get off on stringing me along?” At each question asked, her voice had risen. Her final query was nothing if not a screech.
“I suppose we can set a time limit.”
“Damn straight we’re going to set a time limit. I’d be a thousand kinds of a fool to leave myself open to the warped workings of your imagination.”
Ah. Now this was the Chloe he knew and…hmm. Definitely didn’t love. Admittedly had the hots for. “Okay, then. What? A month? Six weeks?”
She’d pulled a mini diary from her mini knapsack. “The Wild Winter Woman fashion show is my third event, and it’s in the middle of May, so let’s wrap up this deal by Memorial Day.”
He thought of everything he had on his calendar between now and then. A huge grin started at the edge of his mouth and spread until he thought his face would split.
“What the hell are you so happy about?” Chloe groused, hoisting her small leather backpack onto one shoulder.
“Just thinking how I’ve always wanted a genie to grant me three wishes. And here you are.”
SETTLED IN THE SADDLE of her exercise bike, Chloe wished her legs were longer so she could give herself a good swift kick in the pants.
Instead, she pedaled harder, faster, her legs pumping like pistons, and all the spent energy getting her abso-friggin’-lutely nowhere. She released the bike’s handlebar just long enough to swipe a towel over her forehead.
Her sweatband had long since passed the point of saturation, but she wasn’t about to stop spinning to switch it for a dry one. Not when she had an unstoppable rhythm going and hours of frustration to burn.
The television mounted in the corner of the spare bedroom she’d converted into her own personal exercise-slash-torture chamber was running a tape of Shakespeare in Love. But even Will’s desperately romantic pursuit of Viola was not enough to distract Chloe from yesterday’s fiasco.
Damn that cocky Eric Haydon, sweet-talking her into doing exactly what he’d wanted. Granting him three wishes. And how stupid of her to agree. No, not stupid. Just desperate enough to act like she didn’t have an ounce of common sense…or much of a memory for details.
He was wrong.
Yesterday afternoon, once she’d gotten out of Haydon’s and arrived home, she’d headed straight for her diary. And Eric was wrong. Sixteen. Not twenty.
She’d gone out with sixteen different men so far this year. Eight of them had been one-nighters, not deserving of the time of day much less any more than her cell phone number. Caller ID was a girl’s best friend.
Puffing through the aggravation of realizing she needed a new strategy for finding that elusive happily ever after, she tried to sort out the entire dating process—or at least her personal lack of dating success.
She was not unreasonably selective, yet she didn’t go out with just anyone who asked. Somehow, though, she had gained a reputation for doing just that. Which guaranteed she was asked out a lot.
By everyone, it seemed, but Cary Grant.
Her dating rules were flexible, her only demand that a man treat her like a woman. Too many took that to mean trying to get into her pants. Others assumed she wanted to be coddled and pampered and saved from herself.
She never went into a date with her rules spelled out on a cue card. But men asked, and she answered, and then all hell would break loose, depending on the man and what conclusions he’d drawn about women.
It was always one extreme or the other. The virgin or the slut. The whore or the lady.
What had happened to the middle ground?
Her looks were one problem, her vocabulary another, but she was who she was. Her upbringing had defined her; the pedestal on which she’d been forced to sit had towered miles above reality.
So she’d countered her father’s insistence that she rise above the rabble by getting down and getting dirty. To her sheltered and rebellious young mind that had meant a coarse vocabulary, a take-no-prisoners personality, an unapologetic enjoyment of life’s earthier delights, as well as the power afforded by passion.
Perhaps not the most straightforward approach to life or to love, but a method that had served its purpose. She’d learned that being good wasn’t going to get her anything she wanted. She’d also learned that what most men gave her she wanted to give back.
At the crook of her finger, they came running, bringing flowers and chocolates and baubles, and declarations of love so profusely poetic she wanted to barf. She had attention, affection, the things of female fantasy…and all of it was bogus as hell.
No man had ever taken the time or made the effort to learn that she read Tom Clancy for fun. That she’d take lemon over chocolate any day of the week. That she grew her own tomatoes in whiskey barrels kept on the patio, but killed every flower she planted.
Men.
