she didn’t add was that it had been a story Tess herself had assigned to her, so if Julia hadn’t been around for the meeting, it wasn’t exactly her own fault.
Instead of complaining, though, Tess only waved her bejeweled cigarette holder through a haze of smoke in front of her face and said, “I have a new assignment for you and Abby and Samantha. It’s for our February issue. Valentine’s Day, darling.”
Uh-oh, Julia thought. Valentine’s Day meant love. Couples stuff. Romantic stuff. It wasn’t exactly her area of expertise.
“Valentine’s Day?” she echoed with obvious trepidation.
Tess moved the cigarette holder to her mouth and inhaled deeply, holding the smoke inside for several moments while Julia watched fascinated. The woman’s lungs must be as black as her attire. Then again, Tess was a stickler for making sure her clothing and accessories matched. She’d doubtless insist on doing the same for her organs.
Finally, Tess exhaled, saying at the same time, “I want you to go out and meet men. Lots of men. And I want you to date them. Then I want you to write about your experiences in great detail for the magazine.”
Julia’s eyebrows shot up behind her long, medium-brown bangs. “I beg your pardon?” she said.
Tess expelled a sound of impatience. “Darling, you really should have been at the meeting yesterday. It’s going to be so tedious having to go through all this again.”
Oh, fine, Julia thought. Her editor wanted her to put herself on the block for a virtual gang bang and was calling it tedious? Julia could think of a few other things to call it. Luckily for her boss, she was way too polite to say any of them. And lucky for Julia, too, since saying them would land her on the street without a job like that.
“It’s called speed-dating,” her editor told her. “Have you heard of it?”
“A little,” Julia said. What she didn’t add was Enough to know I don’t want any part of it. Because she had a feeling she would have to eat those words if she said them aloud.
“It’s the latest thing for meeting people,” Tess added.
It was also the lamest thing, Julia thought.
“It’s something we’re long overdue for covering,” her editor said.
It was something that should be covered up completely, Julia thought.
“And I can’t think of a better person to write it up than you.”
Except maybe someone who actually wanted to write it up.
Julia sighed inwardly and mentally cleared her calendar. She was going to need a lot of free time if she was going to be a sacrificial lamb.
Tess tapped the ashes of her cigarette into a millifiore ashtray on her desk and smiled. A predatory, scheming, spleen-eating smile. A smile that told Julia she was about to be coated in a nice mint jelly.
“Darling,” Tess said as she lifted the cigarette to her mouth again. “Here’s what I want you to do.”
CHAPTER ONE
WHEN SHE HEARD THE BELL RING, Julia’s first instinct was to come out of her corner swinging. Which was a perfectly appropriate response. Because seated as she was in a bar full of people, wearing her favorite dress fashioned of black lace over pink charmeuse, armed with an appletini (and not afraid to use it), she was here to meet men. And lots of them.
Speed-dating. The words echoed in her head—though it was Tess’s voice saying them—as Julia awaited the arrival of her first victim…ah, date, she meant, of course. Who had come up with such a concept, anyway? Maybe she should explore the genesis and history of the phenomenon, too, as she researched her article for Tess magazine. See if she could find out just where the whole idea of dating en masse for four-minute increments had originated.
Then again, speed-dating was a good description for Julia’s own alleged love life. In the five years since she’d graduated from college, she hadn’t dated anyone for more than a few months. Usually, the guys she went out with disappeared after a few dates. And there had been one or two she wished hadn’t lasted more than a few minutes.
Even her college boyfriend, whom she’d dated for more than a year, had been surprisingly easy to get over after he’d dumped her for the captain of the gymnastics team, telling Julia that the whole double-jointed thing was going to be such a boon to his sex life. The joke had been on him, though. It had been sweater-weather at the time, so it had taken a couple of weeks for him to discover that gymnasts have no breasts, and by that point, Julia was so over him.
Since then, however, even her breasts hadn’t been enough to keep guys around. Or maybe the scarcity of a long-term relationship had been more due to her demand that she be treated with respect and dignity. Hard to tell. Men never seemed able to distinguish between honoring the breasts and honoring the woman.
She shoved a handful of shoulder-length, medium brown hair over one spaghetti-strapped shoulder—thankfully, the September evening had cooperated with her wardrobe by being balmy and dry—fluffed up her overly long bangs, and hoped she hadn’t applied her glittery eye shadow and lip gloss too heavily. She wasn’t normally one to wear a lot of makeup, but something about tonight’s event had made her drop into a Sephora store on the way home from work last night and spend more than she should have on stuff she’d probably never use again.
Or maybe she’d just wanted to adopt a disguise of sorts. The prospect of meeting so many men in one sitting had generated a desire in her to never be recognized on the street. It didn’t matter that eight million other people lived in New York, or that one rarely even saw one’s next door neighbors in this city. With her luck, every man she met tonight would be standing in line in front of her at Starbucks in the morning. Treating this like a masquerade had seemed like a good idea.
The first man on her list, Julia saw as she glanced down at her roster of prospective mates for the evening, was Randy 6. Well, now. That sounded promising. It had been a while since Julia had had any six…uh, sex. The way she was starting to feel, the randier Randy 6 was, the better.
According to the rules of the game—which the hostess had handed to Julia as she registered for the event, and which Julia had researched even before she arrived—she would have the opportunity to meet twenty-five men tonight. Each “date” would last approximately four minutes, starting and ending at the sound of a bell, with another minute in between for people to move from one table to the next. For the first half of the event—which was being held in the Starlight Roof of the Waldorf-Astoria—the women would be seated at tables and the men would flit from place to place. Then there would be a short intermission for “mingling,” followed by another round of “dating,” this time with the men seated and the women flitting. It would either be a lot of fun or phenomenally irritating. Julia had yet to decide which.
But she got her first clue—not to mention a jolt of disappointment—when Randy 6 sat down. He looked more like Somethingthecat 8. And then deposited in the litter box. Somehow, Julia managed to curb the urge to strike a line through his name in his presence.
“So. Randy,” she began after they’d introduced themselves, already mentally counting the seconds. Just how many were there in four minutes, anyway? She did some quick math. Two hundred and forty? That many? She’d never survive. “Tell me a little bit about yourself.”
