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His wife would be a calm haven in the stormy seas he sailed.
He’d said as much once, to his grandmother. Nonna had rolled her eyes and reminded him that even though he towered over her now, that wouldn’t stop her from whacking him across the backside if he needed it. A calm haven? Mama mia, what was he? A rowboat? Such a woman would bore him to tears in a month.
“A woman who can stand up to your Sicilian temper is what you need,” Nonna had said.
Matthew grinned at the memory. His Nonna was right about most things, but she was wrong about this. Who knew what kind of woman he needed better than the man himself?
“And you’re never going to meet the right woman if you don’t look for her,” Nonna had added, stamping her cane on the floor for good measure.
Well, he was looking. Slowly, maybe, but still, he was looking.
Matthew whistled as he strolled into the marble bathroom and turned on the shower.
Why rush something so pleasurable?
He shucked the boxer briefs he’d slept in, stepped into the stall, pressed his palms flat against the wall and bent his head. The water felt good, beating down on his neck and shoulders, and gave him time to think about the morning’s agenda.
He smiled thinly. And what an agenda it was.
He was really looking forward to his meeting with the definitely snide and probably incompetent Susan Something-or-other. Madison? Washington? Coolidge? A President’s name. Not that it mattered. Once it was on a severance check, Susan Whatever and her clever office memos would be history.
What sort of woman wrote stuff like that about a man she didn’t even know? What sort of woman played games with one man and sent love and kisses to another?
A woman who thought the sexual revolution meant she could have the best of both worlds. Susan Hoover figured she could make the kinds of cracks about men that she’d undoubtedly condemned men for making about women, but she saw nothing wrong with insisting on gender neutrality when the situation suited her.
Matthew shut off the shower and reached for a towel. Oh, yeah. He had this broad figured out right down to the dotted line.
He strode into the bedroom and put on a pair of white briefs and navy socks. Then he opened the wall-to-wall mirrored closet and reached for a pale blue shirt.
The woman had made the most incredibly sexist comments about him, then done a one-eighty and blithely assumed she’d been passed over for promotion because she was female. And that was wrong. Dead wrong. Matthew had done a little research into CHIC. It had given him everything the company had about her, and from what he could see, Susan Whatever was about as qualified to head a magazine as she was to write material for a stand-up comic.
Which was why she had to go.
His eyes narrowed as he zipped the fly of his custom-tailored gray trousers and slipped on the matching jacket.
His decision had nothing to do with the stuff she’d said about him, that the women he dated were dumb or for calling him studly and brainless. Or for saying he figured he was the sexiest man alive.
He wasn’t a vindictive man. It didn’t mean a thing to him that half his team had read the woman’s comments, that he’d heard the choked-back laughter at the next couple of meetings, that even now somebody on his staff would look at him and bite back a grin.
“It doesn’t bother me in the slightest,” Matthew said briskly to his reflection.
He snatched up his black leather briefcase, marched to the door, opened it and stepped into the hotel corridor.
“Damned right, it doesn’t,” he muttered, and slammed the door after him, so hard that it rattled.
CHAPTER TWO
IN HER college days, before Susannah had centered her studies on English lit, she’d taken a very popular philosophy course.
Professor Wheeler had made the round of all the talk shows with his theory of how to achieve happiness. Your successes and failures in life, he said, were dependent upon unwritten rules. Not the rules of physics, he’d add, with a condescending little smile, the ones that kept the earth from flying off into the sun or the polar ice caps from draining into the seas. The rules he referred to were very personal. Once you identified them, you could go through life secure in the knowledge that you had a Direction and a Purpose.
The best part was that you didn’t have to wait, like Isaac Newton, and get conked on the head by an apple to discover them. Your Very Own Rules, according to Professor Wheeler, found you.
Six years had passed since then, and some of Susannah’s personal rules had, indeed, discovered her. Unfortunately, as far as she could see, they had nothing to do with either Direction or Purpose—unless she planned to star in a low-budget sitcom.
Rule number one. White silk dresses worn to Italian restaurants meant the lasagna would fall into your lap. Rule number two. PMS was not an advertising gimmick dreamed up by Madison Avenue. Rule number three. Fat-free ice cream was.
Now, on a clear, chilly fall morning, she’d found not one more rule to add to her list but two.
Never trust an alarm clock on a day that could change your life.
Nobody but Superman could get from Greenwich Village to midtown Manhattan in less than twenty minutes during rush hour.
Sandwiched between an oversize woman who must have breakfasted on Garlic Krispies and a man who defended his eight inches of personal space with elbows that should have been classified as lethal weapons, Susannah rode the subway toward her destination.
Sardines had it better than this.
The train, packed with humanity, rumbled, rolled and rocked from side to side. Metal wheels screeched against the tracks. It was the ride from hell, but her fellow travelers, New York stoics all, showed no reaction. Susannah didn’t, either. What was the point? She was trapped, she was late, she was going to make an entrance into the staff-filled boardroom with all the aplomb of a runaway tram.
Susannah winced. Talk about bad images. Still, it was accurate. Why hadn’t she planned the morning better? She should have set a backup alarm. She should have had extra shoelaces tucked away in the drawer. Forget the shoelaces. She had to set the standards now. She should have appeared at this meeting dressed in something that would have impressed everybody with her control and confidence.
If only she had a clever plan to toss on the table, maybe—just maybe—she could redeem herself. She’d spent the weekend on statistics. Why hadn’t she spent it on ideas?
The train jolted to a halt. Susannah glanced out the window. The next station was hers. Her heart thumped. One more stop, then a four-block walk, and she’d be there.
“I need an idea,” she whispered. “Just one idea.”
“You need a head doctor,” the fat woman said indignantly, through waves of garlic-scented breath.
Susannah nodded mournfully “Maybe so,” she said.
The train hurtled into the station. She fought her way to the door, across the platform and up the crowded stairs.
Out on the street, she began to run.
* * *
> The taxi carrying Matthew Romano pulled to the curb outside the building that housed the CHIC offices.
Matthew paid the driver, collected his black leather briefcase from the seat beside him and stepped from the cab. A surprisingly cool wind sliced down the concrete canyon, and he turned up the collar of his raincoat as he took his first look at the CHIC building.
It was old, for New York. Matthew figured it dated back to the thirties, when Art Deco was all the rage. Grime coated the exterior and dulled the bronze doors, but he could still see the building’s handsome lines beneath the dirt. He’d expected as much, considering that some of the brightest names in publishing had once been on the Elerbee Publications roster.
Matthew strode through the lobby to the elevators. He’d already decided to keep CHIC’s office space after he disposed of the magazine, but now he thought it might be worthwhile to check into the building itself. Elerbee owned it, didn’t he?
Matthew reached into the inside breast pocket of his suit, took out a computerized recorder the size of a credit card and brought it to his lips.
“CHIC building,” he said quietly. “Possible purchase?” The elevator doors whisked open. Matthew put the recorder into his pocket and stepped into the car.
After this morning, CHIC was finished. His accountants would breathe a deep sigh of relief. Normally, he’d have put the magazine out of its misery as quickly and humanely as possible, but Susan Lincoln had made that impossible.
Not that he was vindictive, Matthew reminded himself as the elevator doors shut.
Not in the slightest.
* * *
Susannah came pounding around the corner.
The office was just ahead. She was in the home stretch. A minute to the lobby, another in the elevator…five minutes, max, she’d be at her desk. And then all she’d need was another few seconds to make a quick note about the absolutely incredible idea she’d come up with as she raced down the street from the subway.
She really had to start carrying a notebook. Or one of those little recorders.
