the concept of moisture back into her throat and hummed a musical number.
Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my fan-ta-sy…
She thought maybe he’d make a good corporate executive and she the CEO of a company threatened by his hostile takeover…
Except, wait, hang on, hold it, stop right there.
She was twenty-six, she was female, she was straight, she was single, she had money in the bank, and now that the dark days were behind her, for once not a care in the world.
And not a single, solitary reason to keep herself from making this fantasy come true.
She gulped more tea. Even the thought had shaken her. And then it stopped shaking her and started stirring her instead.
No way. She couldn’t. Because…well, obviously, because…
She didn’t know why not. She just knew there was a “why not” and it was undoubtedly a good one. A sensible one. One any girl in her right mind should be able to come up with on the spot. Darcy’s mind was too clouded by hormones and the giddy excitement of being launched out of grief and drudgery and servitude and out of a stale, stagnant relationship into the world of new male possibilities.
Molly. She needed to call Molly, her best friend from the day they’d met at Longfellow Middle School in sixth grade. Molly was sensible, practical, down-to-earth and had been a Rock of Gibraltar and a pillar and an Atlas in Darcy’s world for years while it persisted in falling apart. A few sane words from Molly and the “why not” would be perfectly obvious to the point where Darcy would be embarrassed to have had the idea in the first place.
So.
She got up from her chaise and sauntered past Garrett’s ladder into the house—she’d be talked out of the idea of seduction soon enough, so why not have a little saunter-ish fun in the meantime?—aware his eyes were on her.
Well, she hoped his eyes were on her. She wasn’t crass enough to check. In her mind his eyes were glued to her body and radiated approval over every female part. And then some.
Inside, she grabbed her cell from the top of the bookcase in the kitchen that still housed her mother’s one hundred and forty-seven cookbooks, maybe three of which her father and she had cracked open after Mom died, and dialed.
“Hey, Molly.”
“Do you not love this weather? You can count on Wisconsin to come up with a day or two of spring a mere two months after the season has started.”
“Then straight into heat waves.”
“Uh-huh. What’s doing? I hear a problem in your voice.”
Darcy smiled. Could a man and woman ever get this close? She didn’t think so. In her opinion sisters and best girlfriends had the stronger connection. “I could use some advice, yeah. There’s this guy…”
“Ooh, let me sit for this one—” the sound of a scraping chair “—I’m listening.”
“He’s painting my house.”
“And?”
“I…want him.” She could see his legs if she stood next to the sink and peered out her kitchen window. She even wanted his legs.
“And you’re calling me because…”
“Talk me out of it.”
“Uh-oh. Out of what? Hang on—Kyle, for God’s sake, have I not said this a hundred times? You can have those after dinner. You want something now, have raisins or a banana, and don’t ‘oh, Mom’ me. You’ll thank me when you’re eighty and still have your teeth and a reasonable waistline—I’m back, Darce. Talk you out of what?”
“Seducing him.”
“Sed—are you out of your mind?”
Darcy recoiled from Molly’s uncharacteristic near-shriek. “I’m calling you, so not quite yet, no. Tell me. Why is it a bad idea?”
“You can’t think of any reason?”
“Mmm, no.” She sighed over his ankles, shins and thighs.
“Not one.”
“Honestly. For starters, he could be a psychopath, sociopath serial killer—”
“True.” Though odds heavily favored otherwise.
“—or have horrible diseases—”
“Ew. True.” Her glorious swelling fantasy deflated a bit.
“—or he could turn out to be one of those stalkers who can’t let a girl alone after he’s had her once, like what happened to Jody—”
“Oooh, true.” She cringed, remembering the hell their friend Jody had gone through after one date with a guy she’d met on MySpace. Police had been involved. ’Nuff said.
See? Calling Molly had been a good idea.
“—or he could be one of those vain, cocky guys who’ll get vainer and more cocky after you land him, and brag to his friends that he got laid on the job by some lonely single chick—”
“Blech. Ptooey.” Darcy made a face like a child given nasty medicine. Fantasy leaking serious air now.
“Or he could be a nice guy who would like you as you really are—a smart, sweet, nice girl—and would be turned off by you initiating sex when you don’t even know him. You could ruin a really good thing that was otherwise meant to be.”
Darcy’s nasty-medicine face smoothed. Now Molly was sounding like her father. And as much as Darcy had adored her father, nothing made her immediately want to be a teenage rebel again more than someone sounding like him.
She’d spent her life as a good girl because Dad refused to have it any other way. The one time she’d tried to express a little of the devil in her with a low-cut, ooh-la-la outfit she’d bought on the sly and sneaked on in the girls’ room before school’s opening bell, her father had found out. Hunky Evan Jacobus had practically drooled on the floor that day at school and the next, when she’d worn another very-unlike-her ensemble she’d borrowed from Tiffany Blatz. Darcy had gulped the male attention like a famine victim’s first meal. See? She wasn’t invisible to the opposite gender, after all.
Evan had even come over that night unexpectedly “to study” and had seen her in her regular appease-daddy clothes, and right in front of her father a question had risen from the murky depths of his teenage brain and emerged from his thin chapped lips. How come she’d been dressing so differently at school?
Daddy had not been amused. Evan didn’t stay long. The clothes were given away to those more fortunate than Darcy.
And then there was Greg whom she’d met at a Summerfest concert before senior year at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, jealous streak a mile wide, threatened by his fifteen-year head start on life. He’d wanted Darcy to look sexy only in the privacy of his or her bedroom, which hadn’t been often enough for her taste. But from his
