Mr. Perfect by Linda Howard
“Let me get back to you,” she said. “I’m already booked for the next two and a half years.”
“Figures,” he said, and winked.
She was so early that the puke-green hallway was empty. She was not so early, however, that some of the nerds weren’t ahead of her. She paused to read the new elevator sign: REMEMBER: FIRST YOU PILLAGE, THEN YOU BURN. THOSE WHO DO NOT COMPLY WILL BE SUSPENDED FROM THE RAIDING TEAM.
There, she felt better; a day without an elevator sign was a terrible thing to endure.
She was in her office before she realized the reporters and guard hadn’t upset her. They weren’t important. Her battle with Sam was far more interesting, especially since they both knew where it was heading. She had never had an affair before, but she figured the one she would have with Sam would singe the sheets. Not that she intended to be too easy for him; he was going to have to fight to get her, even after she was on birth control pills. It was the principle of the thing.
Besides, frustrating him would be fun.
Gina Landretti came into work early, too. “Oh, good,” she said, her eyes lighting when she saw Jaine at her desk. “I need to talk to you, and I hoped you would be in early so we wouldn’t have an audience.”
Jaine gave an internal groan. She could see what was coming from a mile away.
“Pam called me last night,” she began. “You know, my sister. Anyway, she’s been trying to get in touch with you, and guess what? She wants to book you on the show! Good Morning America! Isn’t that exciting? Well, all four of you, of course, but I told her you were probably the spokesperson.”
“Ah … I don’t think we have a spokesperson,” Jaine said, a little nonplused by Gina’s assumption.
“Oh. Well, if you did, you would be it. The spokesperson.”
Gina seemed so proud that Jaine cast about for a diplomatic way of saying, “No way.”
“I didn’t know your sister was a program booker.”
“Oh, she isn’t, but she spoke to the booker and she’s very interested, too. This would be a feather in Pam’s cap,” Gina confided. “The word is out the other networks will probably contact you today, so Pam wanted to get the jump on them. This could really help her career.”
Meaning that if she, Jaine, didn’t cooperate, any setbacks in Gina’s sister’s career would be laid directly on her doorstep.
“There might be a problem,” Jaine said, looking as contrite as possible. “T.J.’s husband isn’t happy with all this publicity—”
Gina shrugged. “So only three of you go on the show. Actually, it would probably be just fine if you were the only one—”
“Luna’s much prettier—”
“Well, yeah, but she’s so young. She doesn’t have your authority.”
Great. Now Jaine had “authority.”
She tried to use some of that authority and infuse her tone with firmness. “I don’t know. I don’t like all this publicity, either. I’d rather the whole thing just faded away.”
Gina looked at her in horror. “You can’t mean that! Don’t you want to be rich and famous?”
“Rich, I wouldn’t mind. Famous, no. And I don’t see how going on Good Morning America would make me rich.”
“You could get a book deal out of this! One of those multimillion-dollar advances, you know, like those women who wrote the book about rules.”
“Gina!” Jaine half-shouted. “Reality check here! How could the List be a book, unless the preferred size of a man’s penis is discussed for three hundred pages?”
“Three hundred?” Gina looked dubious. “I think a hundred and fifty would be plenty.”
Jaine looked around for something against which to bang her head.
“Please, please say you’ll say yes to Pam,” Gina pleaded, folding her hands together in the classic supplicant pose.
In a flash of inspiration, Jaine said, “I’ll have to talk to the other three. It’ll be a group deal, or nothing at all.”
“But you said T.J.—”
“I’ll talk to the other three,” she repeated.
Gina looked unhappy, but evidently recognized some of that mysterious authority she thought Jaine possessed. “I thought you’d be thrilled,” she mumbled.
“I’m not. I like my privacy.”
“Then why did you put the List in the newsletter?”
“I didn’t. Marci got drunk and let it slip to Dawna what’s-her-name.”
“Oh.” Gina looked even more unhappy, as if she realized Jaine was even less thrilled about the whole situation than she had previously thought.
“My whole family is mad at me about this,” Jaine grumbled.
Despite her disappointment, Gina was a nice woman. She sat down on the edge of Jaine’s desk, her expression changing to one of sympathy. “Why? What does it have to do with them?”
“My opinion exactly. My sister says I’ve embarrassed her and she won’t be able to hold her head up in church, and my fourteen-year-old niece got the entire transcript off the Web, so Shelley’s angry about that, too. My brother is angry because I’ve embarrassed him in front of the guys where he works—”
“I don’t see how, unless they’ve been comparing themselves in the rest room and he came up short,” Gina commented, then giggled.
Jaine said, “I don’t want to think about that”; then she began giggling, too. She and Gina looked at each other and burst into gales of laughter, laughing until tears welled and ruined their mascara. Sniffing, they giggled their way to the ladies’ room to repair the damage.
At nine o’clock, Jaine was called into her immediate supervisor’s office.
His name was Ashford M. deWynter. Every time she heard the name, she thought she was dreaming of Manderley. She dearly wanted to ask if the M stood for “Max,” but was afraid to find out. Maybe he was playing to the illusion, but he always dressed in a very European manner and had been known to say “shedule” instead of “schedule.”
He was also an asshole.
Some people come by it naturally. Others work very hard at it. Ashford deWynter did both.
He didn’t ask Jaine to be seated. She sat anyway, earning a frown for her presumption. She suspected the reason for this little conference and wanted to be comfortable while he chewed her out.
“Ms. Bright,” he began, looking as if he smelled something distasteful.
“Mr. deWynter,” she replied.
Another frown, from which she deduced it hadn’t been her turn to speak.
“The situation at the gate has become untenable.”
“I agree. Perhaps if you tried a court order …” She let the suggestion trail off, knowing he didn’t have the authority to obtain one even if there was a basis for it, which she doubted. The “situation” wasn’t endangering anyone, nor were the newspeople hindering the employees.
The frown became a glare. “Your facetiousness is unappreciated. You know very well this situation is your doing. It’s unseemly and distracting, and people are becoming unhappy.”
For “people,” she thought, read “his superiors.”
“How is it my doing?” she asked mildly.
“That vulgar List of yours …”
Maybe he and Leah Street had been separated at birth, she mused. “The List isn’t mine, any more than it’s Marci Dean’s. It was a collaborative effort.” What was it with everyone, holding her solely responsible for the List? Was it that mysterious “authority” again? If she had that kind of power, maybe she should start wielding it more often. She could make shoppers let her go to the head of the line, or have her street plowed first when it snowed.
“Ms. Bright,” Ashford deWynter said in quelling tones. “Please.”
Meaning, please don’t take him for an idiot. He was too late; she already did.
“Your brand of humor is very recognizable,” he added. “Perhaps you weren’t the only one involved, but you were undeniably the chief instigator. Therefore it falls to you to rectify the situation.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll go to the gate at lunch and tell them you don’t appreciate all this publicity and you want them to get off Hammerstead property or you’ll have them arrested.”
He looked as if he had swallowed a mackerel. “Ah … I don’t think that would be the best way to handle things.”
“What do you suggest?”
Now, there was a question. His expression went absolutely blank.
She hid her relief. It would have shredded her ego if deWynter had been able to think of a workable solution when she hadn’t been able to come up with even an unworkable one.
“A staffer from Good Morning America has called,” she continued. “I’ll blow her off. People magazine is supposed to call, too, but I just won’t take the call. All that free publicity can’t be good for the company …”
“Television? National television?” he asked weakly. He stretched his neck like a turkey. “Ah … it would be a wonderful opportunity, wouldn’t it?”
She shrugged. She didn’t know if it was wonderful or not, but it was undeniably an opportunity. Of course, she had just talked herself into a corner; publicity was exactly what she didn’t want. She undoubtedly had a serious character defect, since she couldn’t bear to let Ashford deWynter get the best of her in anything.
“Maybe you should run the idea by the powers that be,” she suggested, getting to her feet. If she was lucky, someone in the upper echelons would veto the idea.
He was torn between excitement and a reluctance to let her know that he had to ask anyone at all—as if she didn’t know exactly what his position was and how much authority it entailed. He was in the middle of middle management, and that was as high as his cream was going to rise.
As soon as she got back to her desk, Jaine called a war council. Luna, Marci, and T.J. all agreed to meet for lunch in Marci’s office.
She explained the current status to Gina and spent the rest of the morning, with Gina’s aid, dodging calls.
At lunch the four of them, fortified with a selection of crackers and diet sodas, gathered in Marci’s office.
“I think we can declare the situation officially out of control,” Jaine said gloomily, and filled them in on Gina’s sister and the calls that had come in that morning from NBC and People magazine, just as Gina had predicted.
They all looked at T.J.
T.J. shrugged. “I don’t see any point in trying to put out the fire now. Galan knows. He didn’t come home last night.”
“Oh, honey,” Marci said sympathetically, reaching out to touch T.J.’s arm. “I’m so sorry.”
T.J.’s eyes looked bruised, as if she had spent the night crying, but she seemed calm. “I’m not,” she said. “This just brought things out in the open. He either loves me or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t, then he should get the hell out of my life and quit wasting my time.”
“Wow,” Luna said, blinking her lovely eyes at T.J. “You go, girl.”
“What about you?” Jaine asked Marci. “Any trouble with Brick?”
Marci gave her wry, seen-everything-tried-most-of-it grin. “There’s always trouble with Brick. Let’s just say he reacted in typical Brick fashion, with a lot of yelling and a lot of beer drinking. He was still asleep when I left this morning.”
They all looked at Luna.
“I haven’t heard from him,” she said, and grinned at Jaine. “You were right about all the measurement offers and jokes. I’m just telling all the guys that my vote was for twelve inches, but the rest of you wanted to downsize. That generally stops them cold.”
When they stopped laughing, Marci said, “Okay, my giving the local guys an interview didn’t do the trick. What the hell—whaddaya say we stop trying to unring the bell and have fun with this thing?”
“DeWynter is running the idea of free national publicity by the suits upstairs,” Jaine said.
“Like they won’t fall on this like a starving woman on a chocolate bar?” T.J. scoffed. “I’m with Marci. Let’s punch up the list and really have some fun with it; you know, add some items to it, expand on our discussions and explanations.”
David and Shelley were going to have cows, Jaine thought. Well, they probably needed the milk.
“What the hell,” she said.
“What the hell,” Luna seconded.
They looked at each other, grinned, and Marci whipped out her pen and pad. “We might as well get started, give them a story worth printing.”
T.J. gave a rueful shake of her head. “This will really bring the crazies out of the woodwork. Did any of you get any weird calls last night? Some guy—I think it was a guy, could have been a woman—whispered, ‘Which one are you?’ He wanted to know if I was Ms. A.”
Luna looked startled. “Oh, I got one of those. And a couple of hang-ups that I thought might be him again. But you’re right; the way he was whispering, you couldn’t really tell if it was a man or a woman.”
“I had about five hang-ups on my answering machine,” Jaine said. “I had the phone turned off.”
“I went out,” Marci said. “And Brick threw the answering machine against the wall, so I’m temporarily messageless. I’ll pick up a new one on the way home this afternoon.”
“So probably all four of us got calls from the same guy,” Jaine said, feeling a little uneasy and grateful that she had a cop living next door.
T.J. shrugged and grinned. “The price of fame,” she said.
twelve
Jaine grumbled to herself all the way home, though she did remember to stop at the clinic and pick up a three-month supply of birth control pills. Upper management had decided that milking the situation for all the publicity they could was nothing but good, and things had happened fast after that. On behalf of the others she had accepted an interview on Good Morning America, though why a morning news show would be interested when it obviously couldn’t get into the racier items on the list, she couldn’t fathom. Maybe it was nothing more than network one-upmanship at work. She could understand the print organizations being interested—say, Cosmopolitan, or even one of the men’s monthlies. But what could People print, other than a personal slant about the four of them and the impact the list had made on their lives?
Evidently sex sold even when it couldn’t be discussed.
The four of them were supposed to go to the ABC affiliate there in Detroit at the supposedly reasonable hour of four A.M., and the interview would be taped. They were to be dressed, coifed, and mascaraed before they arrived. An ABC correspondent, not Diane or Charlie, was flying to Detroit to conduct the interview, rather than have them sit on an empty set with tiny plugs in their ears, talking to the air while someone back in New York asked the questions. Having an actual live person doing the interviewing was evidently a great honor. Jaine tried to feel honored, but merely felt tired in anticipation of having to get up at two A.M. in order to dress, coif, and mascara herself.
There was no brown Pontiac in the driveway next door, no sign of life in the house.
Bummer.
BooBoo had cushion stuffing clinging to his whiskers when he greeted her. Jaine didn’t even bother to glance into the living room. The only thing she could do at this point to protect what was left of her sofa was close the door so he couldn’t get into the living room, but then he would transfer his frustration to some other piece of furniture. The sofa already had to be repaired; let him have it.
A sudden suspicious feeling and a trip to the bathroom told her that her period had arrived, right on schedule. She heaved a sigh of relief. She was safe from her inexplicable weakness for Sam for a few days now. Maybe she should also give up shaving her legs; no way would she embark on an affair with bristly legs. She wanted to hold him off for at least a couple more weeks, just to frustrate him.
Going into the kitchen, she peered out the window. Still no brown Pontiac, though she supposed he could be driving his truck as he had yesterday. The curtains were closed on his kitchen window.
It was difficult to frustrate a man who wasn’t there.
A car pulled into her driveway, parked behind the Viper. Two people got out, a man and a woman. The man had a camera slung around his neck and carried a variety of bags. The woman carried a tote bag and was wearing a blazer despite the heat.
There was no point in trying to evade any more reporters, but no way was she allowing anyone in her stuffing-strewn living room. Going to the kitchen door, she opened it and stepped onto the porch. “Come in,” she said tiredly. “Would you like some coffee? I was just about to make a fresh pot.”
Corin stared at the face in the mirror. Sometimes he disappeared for weeks, months, but there he was again in the reflection, as if he had never left. He hadn’t been able to work today, afraid of what would happen if he saw them in the flesh. The four bitches. How dare they make fun of him, taunt him with their List? Who did they think they were? They didn’t think he was perfect, but he knew better.
After all, his mother had trained him.
* * *
Galan was at home when T.J. arrived. For a moment her stomach knotted with nausea, but she didn’t allow herself to hesitate. Her self-respect was on the line.
She lowered the garage door and entered the house through the mudroom, as always. The mudroom opened into the kitchen, her beautiful kitchen, with its white cabinets and appliances and gleaming copper pots hanging on the rack over the center island. Her kitchen was right out of a decorator’s book, and it was her favorite room in the entire house—not because she liked cooking, but because she loved the ambience. There was a small alcove full of ferns and herbs and small blooming flowers, filling the air with freshness and perfume. She had snuggled two easy chairs and a table into the alcove, plus an overstuffed footstool for weary feet and tired legs. The alcove was mostly glazed glass, letting in plenty of light but repelling the heat and cold. She loved to curl up there with a good book and a hot cup of tea, especially during the winter when outside the ground was blanketed in snow but inside she was all snug and comfortable, surrounded by her perpetual garden.