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“I save it for emergencies.”
Her phone rang. Jaine eyed it. Since it wasn’t yet eight o’clock, the phone had no business ringing. There could be nothing but bad news waiting if she answered.
On the third ring, Marci scooped it up. “Payroll,” she said briskly. “Oh—T.J. This is Marci. We were talking—Oh, damn, honey, I’m sorry,” she said, her tone changing to helpless concern.
Jaine snatched the receiver from Marci. “What’s happened?” she demanded.
“I’m outed,” T.J. said bleakly. “I just picked up my voice mail messages, and there are seven calls from reporters. I bet you have the same calls on your voice mail, too.”
Jaine looked at the message light. It was blinking like it had a tic.
“Maybe if Marci and I talked to them, that would keep them off you and Luna,” she suggested. “All they want is a story, right? They need a face to go with the story; then it’s over with and they move on to something else.”
“But they have all our names.”
“That doesn’t mean they need four interviews. Any comment should satisfy them.”
Marci, having followed the conversation just by listening to Jaine’s end of it, said, “I can do the interviews by myself, if you think it would work.”
T.J. heard Marci’s offer. “It’s worth a shot, I suppose. But I’m not going to run from this. If they aren’t satisfied after they talk to you and Marci, or just Marci, then we’ll all four sit down and give them their interview, and whatever happens will happen. I refuse to feel guilty and worried because we were having fun and made up a silly list.”
“Okay,” Marci said when Jaine hung up. “I’ll call Luna and fill her in, and then I’ll call those reporters back and set up something for lunch. I’ll take all the heat, downplay it as much as I can.” She crossed her fingers. “This can work.”
All morning long people stuck their heads in the door and made laughing comments to her; at least, the women did. Jaine also received a couple of measuring offers, as she had expected, from two of the guys and a few sarcastic remarks from others. Leah Street gave her a horrified look and stayed far away, which suited Jaine just fine, though she expected to see a “whore of Babylon” sign appear on her desk at any time. Leah was having more problems with this than T.J., and that was saying a lot.
All the messages on her voice mail were from reporters; she deleted them and didn’t return any of the calls. Marci must have been busy doing her mop-up campaign, because there weren’t any additional calls after about nine. The sharks, promised some chum, were now circling Marci.
Just in case the barbarians were still at the gate, Jaine chickened out and bought her lunch from the snack room vending machines again. If the diversion didn’t work and this was only the quiet before the storm, she intended to make the most of it. As it turned out, there wasn’t that much quiet, because the snack room was full of people who had brought their lunches that day, including Leah Street, who was sitting alone at a table even though the other tables were crowded.
The buzz of conversation transformed into a mixture of catcalls and applause when Jaine appeared. The applause, predictably, came only from women.
There was nothing she could do but take a bow, sweeping as low as her scraped knee and sore ribs would allow. “Thank you very much,” she said in her best Elvis imitation.
She fed her money into the machines and escaped as fast as possible, trying to ignore the comments of “That was so funny!” and “Yeah, you women get bitchy if some guy makes a remark about—”
The snack room quickly became a battleground with the lines drawn between the sexes.
“Damn, damn, damn,” Jaine muttered to herself as she went back to her office, diet soft drink and crackers in hand. Whom did she pay when she swore only to herself? she wondered. Should she put the money in a fund to pay for future transgressions?
Lunch had long been over and the time was closing in on two when Marci called. She sounded tired. “Interviews are over,” she said. “Let’s see if the heat dies down.”
The reporters were no longer camped at the gate when Jaine left work. She raced home to catch the local news, skidding to a stop in her driveway and slinging small gravel. She was glad Sam wasn’t home, or he’d be coming out to read her the riot act.
BooBoo had been at the cushion again. Jaine ignored the clumps of stuffing scattered over the carpet and grabbed the remote, clicking on the television and sitting on the edge of her easy chair. She waited through the stock market report—no crashes or dramatic dips, damn it—the weather, and the sports. Just when she was beginning to hope Marci’s interview wouldn’t air, the newscaster said in a dramatic tone, “Coming up next: the List. Four local women tell what they want in a man.”
She groaned and flopped back in her chair. BooBoo jumped into her lap, the first time he had done so since coming to stay with her. Automatically she scratched his ears, and he began to vibrate.
The commercials ended and the newscast resumed. “Four local women, Marci Dean, Jaine Bright, T.J. Yother, and Luna Scissum, have put together a list of desirable qualities for the perfect man. The four friends work at Hammerstead Technology, and the List, as it has become known, was the result of a recent lunchtime brainstorming session.”
Wrong, Jaine thought. They’d been at Ernie’s, after work. Either the reporter hadn’t asked and just assumed they’d been having lunch together, or “lunchtime” sounded better than “met at a bar after work.” Come to think of it, lunchtime would probably work better for T.J., since Galan didn’t like those Friday after-work get-togethers.
Marci’s face flashed on the screen. She was smiling, relaxed, and at the reporter’s question, threw back her head for a hearty laugh.
“Who doesn’t want Mr. Perfect?” she asked. “Of course, each woman would have different requirements, so what we put on our list wouldn’t necessarily be on someone else’s list.”
Okay, that was diplomatic, Jaine thought. This was good; nothing controversial so far.
Then Marci blew it. The reporter, politically correct down to her toenails, made a comment about the shallowness of the physical requirements on the List. Marci’s eyebrows arched, and she got a beady look in her eyes. Watching, Jaine could only groan, because those were Marci’s warning signs before she went on the attack.
