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She must have made a sound because suddenly Jake turned towards her.
“Ready?”
She didn’t trust herself to speak, not right away. To kill time, she went to the hall closet and got her jacket.
“Yes,” she said, when it was safe to face him again. “I’m ready. What’s on the agenda? New clothes? New hairdo? I made up my mind, Jake. I’m yours to command.”
Jake felt his jaw knot so tightly it hurt. She wasn’t. She was his for today, and only so he could ready her for another man.
What the hell kind of idiocy was that?
A sane idiocy, he told himself, without even wincing at the contradiction. He reached for his jacket, shrugged it on, and followed Emily out the door.
Snow did funny things to Manhattan.
On weekdays it snarled traffic, slowed buses and subway trains, piled up along the curbs and turned rapidly into slush.
It could do all those same things on a weekend ... but nobody seemed to notice. The lacy white flakes touched the city with magic. People had even been known to smile at each other as they hurried along the streets.
Not Jake.
He didn’t feel a bit like smiling.
He was seated in a leather and chrome chair built for contortionists in the waiting area of a place called THE BEAUTY SPOT. Mirrors surrounded him; music assaulted his ears. It came from every possible direction, some stuff he couldn’t imagine anybody could possibly enjoy especially if their mood, like his, kept alternating between mean and downright nasty.
This was their third, and last, stop of the day.
He’d sat through a session in Saks, while a gushing saleswoman brought out suits and dresses, pants and blouses and sweaters, shoes and handbags and who knew what else, for Emily to try on...
Try on, for his approval.
At first, he’d liked the idea.
He had a pretty solid notion of how Emily ought to look. He knew she should wear soft colors and earth tones, that she had legs that deserved showcasing, that she had a body that deserved gently clinging cashmeres and silks. So, for a while, it had been a kick to sit in a velvet chair that was half a size too small for comfort, arms folded, head cocked, and say “No,” “Yes,” “Great,” each time Emily stepped out of the fitting room.
“Your lady is so lovely,” the saleswoman kept saying, and all at once, maybe the sixth time she said it, Jake had stopped grinning like an idiot and saying yes, yes, she was, because it had suddenly hit him that Emily wasn’t his lady. She was his executive assistant and now she was his development project, and what he was “developing” her for was another man.
How come he’d forgotten that, somewhere between leaving her apartment and sitting through a fashion show? Things had gone downhill from there.
He must have looked it, too. The saleswoman had stopped gushing, Emily had started giving him quick little glances, and when they’d finally left Saks with her wearing a cashmere dress in softest rose, a pair of high-heeled black leather boots and a belted black coat that looked soft as velvet, she’d said that if he wanted to call it a day, that was fine.
What he’d wanted was to call her beautiful, as she stood there with her face turned up to his—a face now heightened with artful applications of soft black mascara and lip gloss that matched the rose dress, after a stop at the cosmetics counter.
Instead, he’d taken an armful of elegant boxes from her, scowled and said that he’d made a deal and he was going through with it.
Which was how come he was sitting here, in THE BEAUTY SPOT, surrounded by glassy images of himself, images that pretty much showed a man coping with a growing frustration that made absolutely no sense at all. What was there to be frustrated about? This had been his idea, this makeover. And it was going well. Emily looked beautiful and, until he’d turned into a snarling beast at Saks, she’d been happy.
Well, that was her problem. She wanted to be happy because he was grooming her for another guy, let her. He didn’t have to do anything except sit here with his arms folded, his back straight, his feet crossed at the ankles.
Jake glowered at himself. Half a dozen Jakes glowered back, all of them looking like police bulletins for the criminally insane. It didn’t help that he hadn’t bothered shaving this morning and he had a dark stubble on his cheeks and jaw. All in all, he might as well have been wearing a sign that said Keep Away. And people were. The place was crowded but the chairs on either side of him stayed empty and a good thing, too, because the last thing he wanted was to end up with some damned fool trying to engage him in polite conversation.
He was having a rotten time, and he didn’t much care who knew it.
