of your business.”
“I didn’t think so,” Anna returned.
Damn. His little sister had been playing matchmaker ever since his arrival. When it came to fixing him up, he was beginning to think there was nothing she wouldn’t try. While he considered calling one of her friends for a date, he looked down at the entrance to Grand Central and a sidewalk teeming with open umbrellas. People without them crowded under awnings, craning their necks to stare at the downpour as if they expected the rain to stop sometime soon. Others lifted coats over their heads and ran through the deluge.
“Have fun while I’m gone,” Anna was saying. “You work all the time, Ollie.”
So did she, and the way Oliver figured it, they were lucky to love their work. Anna’s boyfriend, Vic, was just as passionate and could talk for hours about the various ways photographers manipulated images. Kate Olsen also enjoyed working, so it was too bad she hadn’t rung his chimes. The truth was, lately he’d been rejecting most women. It was as if, deep down, he’d decided on an image of what he was really looking for and now he was waiting for that dream woman to materialize.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Anna announced, drawing Oliver from his reverie as she put the Sex Files CD into his ROM drive. “We’ll get a picture of the sexiest woman first. That’ll get your juices flowing, so you’ll be ready to call all my friends who are dying to meet you.”
This was definitely more intriguing than getting a printout of the sexiest man. “I’m working on the Most Wanted List.”
Anna leaned and jiggled the mouse, moving the cursor. “We can keep that program open,” she assured. “We’ll minimize it and work in another window.” He watched as she hit RUN.
They waited.
And then text filled the screen. Anna groaned in disappointment. “I thought you said we’d get a picture.”
“We will when you scroll down.”
“Oh, but this is good,” she whispered, reading the words. “America’s Sexiest Woman would be named Cameron,” she announced breathlessly.
“And according to this, she’d be tall,” he added. “Five-eleven.”
“Her measurements are thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six,” continued Anna. “And she loves wearing sexy clothes.”
“She sounds like a walking cliché.” Still, as he continued reading, there was no denying the pull of arousal. Barely suppressing a shiver, he tried to ignore the tightening below his belt, but it only increased when he read that Cameron never wore panties under her Lycra slacks, body-hugging knit dresses and silk teddies.
When she has to get dressed at all, the text read, Cameron likes to get out and have spicy, erotic adventures. She especially loves the excitement of world travel and meeting new male playmates. She likes a hint of danger, too. Exploring kinky aphrodisiacs is her favorite pastime, and she dabbles in everything from body paints to edible undies. Cameron will do absolutely anything—and everything—to please her man.
Oliver was surprised by how easily he was getting sucked into the fantasy. He prided himself on not being sexist and for liking a woman for her mind, though he thoroughly enjoyed the rest. “If I was a woman,” he commented, dragging a hand through his hair, “I’d hate this kind of thing.”
Anna laughed. “But you’re a man.”
As such, he had to admit that he found this fantasy woman appealing. “Point taken.”
Anna merely shrugged. “Ah. You don’t scroll. There’s a link.” She clicked on the mouse. In the instant before the image of America’s Sexiest Woman filled the screen, she said, “So, this is what Cameron would look like if she were real.”
Oliver felt as if somebody had punched him. Her hair was dark blond, a shade most would call honey, but it was shot through with everything from pale straw to bumblebee yellow to strands of brilliant white. Looking as soft as silk, it hung in loose waves past her shoulders, tightening into curls where the ends rested on a tan cashmere sweater.
His eyes dropped to her breasts. Slightly aroused nipples pebbled under the shirt. In contrast to what he’d felt with Kate Olsen, he found himself imagining cupping those mounds, then slowly stroking their creamy sides and swirling his tongue around their excited, satiny tips. When his eyes traveled toward her face, he couldn’t tear them away. Her neck was so nice. Very round, very creamy. And her face… “She reminds me of film stars from the forties.”
“Veronica Lake, maybe,” Anna agreed.
Parted in a jagged line, her hair framed her face, waving over one of her unusually wide-set dark eyes, lending an air of mystery. Miles McLaughlin hadn’t been kidding about the photographic quality of the pictures generated by Quick Composite, either. Cameron definitely looked real.
And familiar.
He could swear he’d seen her somewhere, but that was probably because she was such a cliché-woman, blond and dark-eyed with a perfect body. Because the picture looked so real, he had to remind himself that she didn’t really exist as he continued surveying her.
Her face was closer to round than oval; her cheekbones high and slanted. Light-brown eyebrows arched on poreless, pink-toned skin. Her mouth was decidedly kissable, the red, glistening lips parted slightly. The velvet tip of a tongue was exposed, touching a very slight, sexy gap between her two front teeth.
“Before you get carried away, Oliver,” murmured Anna, studying his expression, “please remember she’s not real.”
He barely heard.
“I’ll come back when you’re not so bedazzled,” she continued on a sigh, planting a kiss on her brother’s cheek. “I still want to see the sexiest guy. But now I’m late. I’ve got to run to Bloomie’s for another bathing suit to take to the islands. See you for dinner? After work, Vic and I want to take you to Little Italy. We want you to meet a friend of ours. If you hit it off, you can spend time together on Thanksgiving or Christmas. Her family—”
“Is going out of town, just like you and Vic, and Mom and Dad. C’mon, quit worrying about me. I’ll be fine over the holidays. And I’ll get my own dates.”
“When?”
He merely shrugged, his gaze returning to the computer screen. When he looked up again, Anna was gone. Because he turned instinctively toward the window to catch a glimpse of her, he was staring down at Forty-second Street when lightning jagged across the sky, illuminating the entrance to Grand Central Station.
The flash lasted only a heartbeat, just long enough for his jaw to slacken and for his heart to miss a beat as the angry sky turned dark again. He felt sure he was going crazy. But she’d been standing there, hadn’t she? He shook his head in disbelief, but he could swear he’d seen the same woman whose image still filled his computer screen.
“Cameron,” he murmured. But it was impossible. It wasn’t really her. It couldn’t be.
No. The lightning had come as fast as a camera flash. Oliver was far away, too. And besides, Cameron wasn’t even real. She was just a computer-generated image they’d gotten by crossing the Sex Files with Quick Composite.
And
