any woman not wanting that…”
“Oh, I can.” He snorted a laugh. “Nice guys finish last.”
“May I suggest,” she said gently, “that you’re a nice guy who maybe tries too hard?”
That hurt almost as much as a ringside body slam. “Baking brownies is trying too hard?”
“What do you do at night…besides bake?”
“Sit in my favorite armchair, listen to music. Watch cable if a good movie’s on.”
“While waiting by the phone.”
He shifted in his seat. “No.”
“Where’s the phone?”
“Next to the armchair.” Okay, she was smart. Uptight, but smart.
“You’re too available,” she said quietly. “People don’t respect someone who’s at their beck and call.” Her eyes softened, their pewter color shifting to a soft gray, and he wondered if she had firsthand experience in this area.
She took a sip of her coffee and set it down. “We need to make you more…unattainable.”
Kimberly jotted a note on the application, then put down her pen. “I have an approach that would work excellently for you. I’ve used it before with men and they’ve all ended up married to the woman of their fantasies within a year. I call it my Bad Boy Makeover.”
He frowned. He knew it. These regimented types always loved the bad boys. “I don’t want to be bad.”
“Wasn’t The Phantom bad?”
“He was known for defeating evil, saving the woman.”
“We’ll be doing something similar. Women eat it up. You’ll have to turn the ringer off on your phone because so many of them will be calling you.” She opened a drawer. “Let me get my notes, explain in a bit more detail.”
She extracted a navy-blue folder. “Here we go!” she said, opening it. “Step one,” she read. “Look like a bad boy. Step two, act like a bad boy. Step three, make women melt. Step four, kiss her ’til she whimpers. Step five, love her ’til she screams. Step six, pick ‘the One.’”
He blinked, digesting the stream of words, all punctuated with bad-boy this and that. He’d once dated a woman who loved writing “Honey-Do” lists, which had struck him as odd considering all she needed to do was ask him for help and he’d be there.
But this success coach’s bad-boy list was stupid. A perversion of a honey-do list. If you want a honey, do this. And this. What was step five? Love her ’til she screams? This edgy, armored broad thought she was going to teach him how to do that?
Was she freaking crazy?
He tapped his finger on the chair of the arm, figuring he could be out of her office and back on the street in ten strides.
Last chance for love, buddy.
He cleared his throat, rubbed a spot on his forehead. “And, uh, these work?”
“I’ve had an eighty-five percent success rate. Like I said, women love bad boys.” She leaned forward, a seductive look softening her features.
And for a moment, he saw something he liked in her. Something tender, almost needy. The opposite of everything she plastered on her earnest, coiffed self. And in that moment, he had a flash of understanding about this woman. Just as she externally made over others, she’d done so with herself.
And he wondered what was so soft, so vulnerable inside that she’d built this fortress of a person.
“I can make you over in three months,” she said.
Three months? In ninety days, he finally might have the one thing that had eluded him all these years. A loving partner, someone with whom to share his life, his dreams. A woman he could coddle and pamper and love for the rest of his life.
But a makeover?
Celine wailed about never finding love again.
“I’ll do it,” said Nigel.
2
Step one: Look like a bad boy
“LOOK LIKE A BAD BOY,” Nigel muttered to himself the next morning, giving his head a slow shake. He thought back to all the times he’d made one of his three kid sisters go back to her room and change clothes that were too tight, too low cut, too short before leaving the house. How many times had he reprimanded them, “Dressing bad isn’t good.” Who knew those words would come back to haunt him.
Come to find out, once you were grown-up, dressing bad was good.
But he still wouldn’t change a thing about how he treated his kid sisters, despite their eye rolling and occasional pouts. With their father working swing shift at the factory, their big brother, Nigel, had often had to play “Dad.”
Even their boyfriends did as he told.
And not just because Nigel was merely the big brother.
He was just plain big.
By twenty, he was six-five, two-hundred-and-eighty pounds of rock-hard muscle thanks to his daily workouts and amateur wrestling schedule. The brave young men who dated his sisters were more than willing to let Nigel be the law of the land. If he said to have his sister home by midnight, the kid pulled up in the driveway at 11:50.
Speaking of time, Nigel glanced at the wall clock again. This shop for tall men, aptly named Tall Threads, had a clock on the wall shaped like a pair of extra-long pants, with suspenders for hands. The shorter suspender pointed at nine, the longer at three.
Nine-fifteen.
Maybe he could scare teenage kids into being on time, but apparently it didn’t work with Ms. Kimberly Logan.
Yesterday, he’d thought she was joking when, while escorting him out after his interview, she’d announced she’d meet him at Tall Threads at 9:00 a.m. the following morning. She explained it’d be their first “success coach” meeting where they’d shop for bad-boy clothes.
He’d laughed.
She hadn’t.
With a pinched “this is serious” look, she reminded him that twenty percent of his fee, as outlined in the contract he’d signed, was allocated for miscellaneous expenditures.
Which, in this case, meant clothes to build his bad-boy image.
He had the urge to ask if she shopped someplace special to build her uptight-woman image, but had bitten his tongue. Not only because his mother had drilled it into him to never insult a lady, but also because once he’d made a commitment, he stuck to it. His siblings had the same trait; the roots from witnessing their parents’ living commitment to their faith, their marriage, their children. They’d soon be celebrating their fortieth wedding anniversary,
