Masters for Hire Page 2

  I shrugged as I sat next to her. “Who has the time?” I offered with a good-humored smile.

  For the most part it was true. I was only thirteen when my mother was killed in the same accident that paralyzed my father. Margot moved in shortly afterwards, to see about Father’s daily affairs, but she was married to Husband #3 by the time I turned fifteen. After three difficult years learning to take care of my dad, he finally shoved me out of the house so I could spend the next four years getting my degree. Since then I had been busy doing anything and everything to prepare me for the day that Father would turn over the position of CEO to his one and only heir.

  I knew it was coming, I just didn’t know when. But every time I looked into my father’s aging face, I knew that my time at the helm would come sooner than later.

  “Oh, don’t listen to me,” Lucy said as she leaned against the seat. “You’re the one doing it right. Just date, have fun, no obligations, no demands. I remember those days.” She sighed. “It’s archaic, really. A farce. They sell us into bondage and convince us it’s some kind of party. My parents just can’t wait to marry me off to the highest bidder. I mean, look at me. Draped in virginal white.”

  We both snickered at the irony.

  “Come on,” I said. “I thought you loved Gus.”

  Another sigh. “I do. It’s just…,” she trailed off as she looked at the mirror across from us. “I don’t feel like me anymore.”

  “You’re kind of not you,” I pointed out. “You’re about to become someone brand new. Someone’s wife. Lucy Dunleavy,” I added, using my hands to mime a marquee.

  Lucy shuddered and hopped to her feet. “Ugh. Don’t remind me.” She stopped in front of the mirror to study the details of her plain dress. “I don’t want to be Lucy Dunleavy. I want to be Lucy Lyon. I want to be me.” She lifted her arm to examine the damage. “Maybe I’ll make Gus take my name.”

  I laughed as I joined her. “He would, you know. He’s crazy about you.”

  That made her smile. “Yeah. I know. I’m crazy about him, too. I just hate all this,” she said as she gestured to the opulent room around us. All the wedding dresses, the veils, the bridal magazines, the champagne… all the things that most girls craved about their special day was driving my poor friend to distraction.

  “So elope,” I teased. “A wedding is just a party anyway. It’s not the part that matters.” It certainly never mattered to me. I could never picture myself walking down the aisle of a crowded church to indulge some ritual that put me center stage for a day.

  Again, most girls wanted that. I never saw the need. I wasn’t exactly a fairytale kind of girl.

  “You are so right,” she replied. “But if I pull out now, both my parents and your father will have my head on a stick. Do you have any idea how much this shindig is going to cost?”

  “Who do you think wrote the invoice?” I reminded with a smirk.

  Again Lucy smiled. “Let me get out of this costume and I’ll treat you to a champagne brunch.”

  I thought about my meager breakfast. “Can I have sausage?”

  Lucy linked her arm in mine. “As many as you want.”

  This was why we were best friends.

  Lucy finally calmed down by her second mimosa. She had always been an excitable type, but rarely had anything ever rendered her as discombobulated as her very own wedding. I knew that had more to do with the fact that it meant more to her family than it did to her. Lucy had been a trailblazing feminist as a teen, swearing to anyone who would listen that she’d never participate in the patriarchal farce of marriage. To ensure this, she dated a score of losers throughout high school and college. None of the guys she had paraded in front of her folks were the kinds of people the Lyons would want linked on the family tree. It had been a brilliant plan until she met Augustus Dunleavy her junior year of college.

  He didn’t seem too remarkable at first glance, though he came from the same kind of pedigreed background as Lucy. Where she was bombastic and outgoing, he was quiet and reserved. His humor was wry, he was as sharp as a tack, but he had no need for the spotlight like his more gregarious girlfriend. But he was strong, dependable and loyal, and had eventually accomplished the impossible. He wore down her defenses against The Good Guy. After her last boyfriend broke her heart by cheating on her, Gus was the first one to hunt him down and punch him square in the jaw for not knowing how to treat a lady.

  After that, Lucy was smitten with the good ol’ boy from Texas, who may not have said much, but what little he did say actually mattered. He popped the question the day before we graduated, and by that time she didn’t worry about a patriarchal, misogynist institution of marriage. She said yes immediately because she knew one thing and one thing only. She’d never find another guy like Gus Dunleavy, and guys like that were worth hanging onto.

  The actual wedding, however, was more her mother’s affair. Sylvia Lyon was a true socialite in every sense of the word. Her life’s work meant keeping her family in good standing within the community. She held fundraisers and benefits, sat on the board of directors for several galleries and museums; she even helped her husband run for local office. She kept an impeccable home in Bel Air, and was a VIP at the country club.

  Essentially, if Sylvia Lyon wanted anything, she made it happen.

  What she wanted more than anything these days was a wedding so notable that people would be talking about it for years to come. She’d already invited politicians, even a few A-list celebrities, none of whom knew Lucy or Gus, but were willing to come whenever Sylvia called. The guest list was already bursting at the seams with more than five hundred people, including the fifty or so that the bride and groom would actually invite.

  “It’s not my wedding anymore,” Lucy confided over our shared frittata. “It’s hers. And it’s not fair. She already had one.”

  “At least it’s just the one,” I said. “Aunt Margot is looking for husband number four.”

  Lucy rolled her eyes. “It’s all so stupid, isn’t it? It’s like your dad, pushing Oliver on you.”

  I shrugged. It was hard to be mad at Father when he really did have my best interests at heart. So what if he was old fashioned? I knew he was a romantic deep down. He’d only married once, too. “Oliver is a good guy.”

  Lucy’s eyes met mine. There was no hedging the truth with her. “So what’s the problem?”

  It’s my turn to sigh. “There’s no problem. He’s sweet. He’s kind. He’s a nice guy. It’s all just really nice.”

  “So what is the problem?” she asked again, annunciating every syllable.

  “That is the problem.” Off her look, I expounded. “It sounds crazy but I just don’t want to settle for nice. I want someone who can, you know, break the rules. Do things his way. Someone forceful. Kind of dangerous. Mysterious.” These were the kinds of men I was encouraged to love via books and movies. Complicated men. Difficult men. Men who needed me to smooth their rough edges.

  What can I say? The marketing pitch worked.

  “Ah,” Lucy said as realization dawned. “You want a bad boy.”

  “Not bad, just not so… good.” We both laughed. “Look, you don’t get it. You got all those guys out of your system already. You know what a prize you have in Gus because you’ve already done the asshole thing, the douche-bag thing, and the man-whore thing. I’m afraid I’ll settle down into this nice, boring existence and always wonder what I’m missing.”

  “Yeah, well as someone who has dated the asshole, the douche-bag, and the man-whore, take it from me. You’re not missing anything. They’ll break your heart in ways you can only imagine. Only a nice guy will know how to put the pieces back together again. If you’re looking for a relationship, they are not the guys you want to gamble years of your life on.”

  “Fine, I’ll settle for straight sex,” I grinned. I didn’t have to tell Lucy that my sex life was the first casualty of growing up so damn fast. I didn’t get to have heavy make-out sessions in the back seat of
a car or a darkened theater like most teenagers. I was too busy managing nurses and juggling my thrice-divorced aunt and my paralyzed father to worry about dates and proms and s-e-x.

  Hell, if it weren’t for the Internet, I never would have learned what a lot of s-e-x really was.

  “Fine,” Lucy shrugged. “Then hire an escort.”

  I nearly choked on my mimosa. I had to glance around to see if anyone had heard what she said before I leaned forward. “Are you kidding?”

  “Why not?” As a sex-positive feminist, Lucy had no problems with strippers, porn stars and escorts. Commerce was commerce as far as she was concerned, and sex sold 98% of everything anyway. As long as everyone involved was a consenting adult, she had no moral problem with it. “You know what you want. Order it like you’re ordering a cheesecake. A little more expensive but not as fattening.”

  I shook my head. The whole thing smacked of desperation. My father was already to the point he was ready to sell me off for a couple of goats, I didn’t need to tarnish the goods with some salacious encounter with a gigolo. “Sorry. That is not for me.”

  “Fine, get your heart broken. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  As ludicrous as her suggestion was, the idea oddly took root. I came from an affluent family, so I was used to the idea of paying for what I wanted, ordering my life down to the letter, selecting, and then possessing, the best of everything. What normally posed limitations on other folks didn’t really stop me when it came to doing what I wanted to do, and I supposed that was never truer than with an escort, who was ready to fill my every desire for the right price.

  I had never before done it, but I could. It was a naughty thought, which only made it more intriguing. It loomed in the back of my brain when I returned to the office after our brunch, where I was tasked with fixing her dress before she had another meltdown. By that afternoon, I was approaching my very own meltdown with the fitting of my bridesmaid dress.

  As was a sticking point for me for years, Cabot’s didn’t really offer an extensive line of extended sizes. Some called them plus-sizes, but I refused to. It only reinforced that there was some idea of normal or average, which was ridiculous considering stores, manufacturers and designers couldn’t even agree on a sizing standard in the first place. It was as if every single store reset with new, random, arbitrary numbers that made little sense when compared across the industry. The numerical standard was undefined, every bit as what constituted a small, medium or a large.

  As someone who had studied women’s clothing for years, I had had enough of the bullshit. I was tired of being a large in one store, and an extra-large in another. I was tired of my mismatched proportions making me some anomaly that no one knew how to dress because my top half had a few more inches than my bottom half. Add to that plus, petite or junior, or the equally condescending ‘woman’s’ sizes, and it all felt to me like a big shell game, wagering our egos in the process. Do you belong here? Or are you going to go there? Keep your eye on the ball and see if you can keep up.

  But that wasn’t my only issue. I was sure the manufacturers we did have, who offered what few extended sizes we did offer, in what ludicrous measurement bingo they happened to decide upon, didn’t really understand the bodies of women who didn’t already look like hangers. Women came in all shapes and sizes, and as such looked quite a bit different wearing the same kinds of fashion. All the styles that our designers created for the slender bodies of their tiny models never looked right on my more curvaceous figure, where even a straight numeric sizing chart often worked against me. I could fit into a size fourteen in most stores, but since Cabot’s sizes typically ran smaller, this put me at the dreaded size-16. I went from ‘large’ to ‘extra-large’ in a dress size. If that wasn’t enough of an ego killer, none of those clothes compensated for the differences in my body type.

  And as far as Cabot’s was concerned, they also came with unforgiving fabrics and styles that aged me about twenty years. Dressing hip and sexy at size 16? Not at Cabot’s. Despite the generous discount I had to buy clothes at our store, I had no real desire to shop there. There was nothing there for me, almost by design.

  It was so bad that I had ended up making a lot of my clothes when I was younger, where I could amend the patterns to fit my body type. I was expected to sport the company brand wherever I went, but nothing the company offered made me feel good about myself. It made me feel old and/or dumpy and frumpy, like I didn’t fit in.

  These days I didn’t have the time to spend fashioning together more flattering outfits. I settled on a few comfortable pieces that I could mix and match and had to leave it at that.

  The whole thing had been a sticking point between my Father and me for years. Instead of hearing me out and considering youthful clothing lines by those who designed their clothes to flatter larger bodies, he’d just point out that the shoppers at Cabot’s who fit into those larger sizes tended to be older, and more settled, i.e. The Soccer Moms. This criticism would effectively shut me up because it would remind me of my other failures, namely not settling down with my own family before gaining Mommy weight.

  I surveyed myself in the puce taffeta gown, a size-14 I had insisted upon just because that was the largest one available to me in the store. It burst at the seams under my generous boobs, just like everything else I could buy off the rack in my store. I realized then that Father’s interference with my daily meals was probably warranted. There was no way I was going to fit into this dress by the end of June, and I couldn’t possibly wear a competitor’s dress at such a high-profile event.

  Worse, the size-16 was special order only, which meant I couldn’t even see how it needed to be tailored to fit properly until it came in. That meant four more weeks of hoping and praying (and eating celery and lettuce,) to make it all work.

  I had to come to terms with the fact that nothing short of a miracle would make me look uniform next to Lucy’s five other bridesmaids. Lucy had suggested to her mother that I have a special dress, since I was the maid of honor, but her mother shut down all that noise. It needed to be a picture perfect wedding.

  Clearly I was the weak link.

  “You okay?”

  I glanced up from my computer, where I finally placed the order for the larger dress. Oliver Lavoie leaned against the door frame with a smile, which made me smile in return. “Yeah, fine. Just maid of honor stuff.”

  He laughed as he walked into my office, closing the door behind him. “I heard that Lucy was fit to be tied. Thankfully for her that’s normal.”

  “She just wants her day to be perfect. Can’t blame a bride for that.”

  “I suppose not,” he conceded as he sat in the chair in front of me. “So how about Thai for dinner tonight? I heard about this funky little place in Silver Lake.”

  “Sounds good.” I said as I powered down my computer. “Just let me call Father.”

  “Already done,” he said with a smile. “He says to bring him some spring rolls.”

  I smirked. Typical. All the men were running my life for me. What an independent woman I was turning out to be. I was surprised that Lucy hadn’t disowned me entirely. “I guess I’m ready then.” I stood and so did Oliver.

  I had to admit that, for an arranged suitor, Oliver Lavoie wasn’t half bad. He was tall, with broad shoulders and a strong jawline. In fact, it was probably because he looked so masculine that his Nice Guy routine endlessly frustrated me. For a second, I wondered what it would be like if he just shoved all the stuff off of my desk and took me right there at the office.

  Of course, he would never think to do something so wildly inappropriate. He was all about respect; respecting me, respecting my father, respecting the offices where we worked.

  But then again, he never really “took” me anywhere else, either. Oliver Lavoie wasn’t necessarily a “take me” kind of guy.

  Our date was predictably nice, where we talked about the business, about Lucy’s wedding, and about the upcoming benefit. We were co-h
osting with Sylvia for one of her charities, the festivities held at our eighteen-million dollar home blocks away from the country club. Sylvia could have had it at the club of course, but she wanted a more personal touch.

  Since she and Margot were besties, my aunt was the first to recommend our home.

  “Margot does like to dominate, doesn’t she?” Oliver mused as he swirled his plum wine around in his glass. “Might explain why she’s had so many husbands.”

  “Sylvia is just as much of a force of nature as Aunt Margot, and she’s only had the one.”

  “Powerful women need quiet men,” he said. “And vice versa, I guess.”

  I thought about that for a moment. Personally I thought we were both pretty quiet. Finally I said, “So where does that leave us?”

  He leaned back in his chair. “Come on, CC.”

  This was a typical reaction whenever I tried to talk about the idea that we were, you know, dating. We went out all the time, but God forbid we actually talk about it. He never seemed to understand that his behavior made any date seem more like a chore, an obligation, where he was doing what was expected of him as much as I was. There was no heat, passion or desire validating the whole charade, which made it feel even more like a sham.

  It made me think again of the escort. At least that transaction would be a lot more straightforward. Whether I was seriously contemplating such a ridiculous thing or not, it ended up being another subconscious slash for the ‘pro’ column.

  I sighed as I tried to focus on Oliver. “Seriously. If neither of us is leading, where are we going?”

  His blue eyes darkened. “Where do you want it to go?”

  That was the big question. “Where do you want it to go?”

  “Why does it have to go anywhere? Why can’t we be happy that we’re right here, in a quaint little restaurant in Silver Lake? Why does it have to be more than that?”

  I looked around at all the other couples sitting together, enjoying each other’s company, no further expectations than simply a night on the town. Everyone was complacent. No one had a nagging concern they might be missing out on something more. So why did I? “I guess it doesn’t.”