No Strings Attached

Puffing through the aggravation of realizing she needed a new strategy for finding that elusive happily ever after, she tried to sort out the entire dating process—or at least her personal lack of dating success.

She was not unreasonably selective, yet she didn’t go out with just anyone who asked. Somehow, though, she had gained a reputation for doing just that. Which guaranteed she was asked out a lot.

By everyone, it seemed, but Cary Grant.

Her dating rules were flexible, her only demand that a man treat her like a woman. Too many took that to mean trying to get into her pants. Others assumed she wanted to be coddled and pampered and saved from herself.

She never went into a date with her rules spelled out on a cue card. But men asked, and she answered, and then all hell would break loose, depending on the man and what conclusions he’d drawn about women.

It was always one extreme or the other. The virgin or the slut. The whore or the lady.

What had happened to the middle ground?

Her looks were one problem, her vocabulary another, but she was who she was. Her upbringing had defined her; the pedestal on which she’d been forced to sit had towered miles above reality.

So she’d countered her father’s insistence that she rise above the rabble by getting down and getting dirty. To her sheltered and rebellious young mind that had meant a coarse vocabulary, a take-no-prisoners personality, an unapologetic enjoyment of life’s earthier delights, as well as the power afforded by passion.

Perhaps not the most straightforward approach to life or to love, but a method that had served its purpose. She’d learned that being good wasn’t going to get her anything she wanted. She’d also learned that what most men gave her she wanted to give back.

At the crook of her finger, they came running, bringing flowers and chocolates and baubles, and declarations of love so profusely poetic she wanted to barf. She had attention, affection, the things of female fantasy…and all of it was bogus as hell.

No man had ever taken the time or made the effort to learn that she read Tom Clancy for fun. That she’d take lemon over chocolate any day of the week. That she grew her own tomatoes in whiskey barrels kept on the patio, but killed every flower she planted.

Men. Ruled by their dicks. Every one of them.

What she wanted was chivalry.

Was the word really that anachronistic? The concept that out-of-date? And what about respect? Not only for her person, but for her ideas and opinions.

She was blond. She was built. She was not about to apologize for her love of makeup. She had a brain. She was not a bimbo. She liked men. She was not an easy score.

Why was that so hard to understand? she wondered, and pedaled even harder, faster, closing her eyes and pushing beyond the burn. She doubted her reputation or her mouth truly crossed Sydney’s line in the sand.

But Chloe loved gIRL-gEAR, her vice-presidential perks and position, the cyclical industry of fashion and her partners, the five women who’d been her best friends since their days in Austin at University of Texas.

Hell, she even had a soft spot for Poe, though the other woman’s ambition irritated Chloe more than a broken underwire on a brand-new bra. Poe needed the air released from her inflated self-opinion. She might have five years on Chloe, but Chloe had the heart Ms. Annabel Lee was missing.

The ringing of the phone in her bedroom slowed Chloe’s cathartic pace, but she didn’t stop pedaling until the machine picked up and she heard Eric Haydon’s voice.

“Yo, Chloe. About that first wish.”

Chloe sat up straight on the bike and listened to the recording being broadcast from across the hall.

“Be at Haydon’s. Saturday morning. Nine on the nose. Oh, and the outfit you had on yesterday? Wear it.”

The line went dead, then came the dial tone, followed closely by Chloe’s disbelief. That was it? Orders he assumed she’d follow left on an answering machine?

And what was up with the dress code? He knew she wouldn’t wear those clothes again on a dare. She certainly wouldn’t wear them because he’d told her to. Or would she? After all, she’d been stupid enough to grant him three wishes.

She’d had enough exercise, and her fill of that bossy Eric Haydon. Hopping from the bike, she headed for the shower, flinging pink Lycra and spandex all over the bathroom. Once the hot water started melting her balled up muscles, she was better able to think.

Other than removing sex from the equation, she and Eric had set no boundaries for this granting-of-three-wishes business. She supposed it was a fair enough trade-off.

Eric knew he’d be accompanying her to gIRL-gEAR business affairs. She knew she’d be doing anything Eric wanted her to do…except crawl naked into his bed. Chloe sighed.

How terribly disappointing.

3

HAVING ARRIVED at Haydon’s only minutes before Chloe, Eric leaned against the back end of his car, legs crossed at the ankle, arms crossed over his chest, and watched her pull her lime-green VW Beetle into the parking lot.

If he was a betting man, he wouldn’t take better than fifty-fifty odds that she’d worn the outfit he’d wanted her to wear. Still, she was here. And that was saying something.

He continued to watch as she jerked her sunglasses from her face, the keys from the ignition. With a look between a frown and a glare, she climbed from the car, her eyes never breaking contact with his.

“Well, blow my mind. A woman who can follow orders.” He grinned. He winked. Because seeing her in play clothes had just become the highlight of his day. “I think I’m in love.”

“I see your mouth is making promises you don’t have the backbone to keep,” she said, tucking both her shades and her car keys into her knapsack and slinging it over one shoulder.

“Not promises as much as observations,” he said, ignoring her dig. He pushed himself erect and headed for the passenger door, then added a dig of his own. “Unless you want me to see what I can do about paying up.”

Chloe, of course, ignored him. He’d opened the car door and now stood with both wrists draped over the frame. Chloe waited, one hand wrapped around her knapsack’s shoulder strap, the other at her hip, feet unmoving and eyes cutting from Eric’s to the Mustang and back again.

“I take it that you want me to get in?”

“You got it.”

“Do you mind telling me where we’re going? Or what we’re going to do? And, most of all, why you wanted me to wear this ridiculous getup yet again?”

Ah, yes. The Chloe he still didn’t love…but was starting to appreciate way too much. “How ’bout you get in the car and trust that all will be revealed in good time?”

“In your good time, you mean,” she groused, but she did slide down into the car’s bucket seat.

Eric closed the door behind her and skirted the rear of the car, slapping his hand on the trunk on his way to the driver’s side. Talk about your bad mood. He couldn’t believe Chloe could really be that worried about her position at gIRL-gEAR, worried enough to bite his head off when he was the one she’d come to for help.

She’d been one of the original girls. To his mind that made Chloe irreplaceable, the same way Ted Williams would always be a Boston Red Sox, Michael Jordan a Chicago Bull, Joe Namath a New York Jet. No. There was something else going on here. But Eric wasn’t going to ask her yet.

He slid into the driver’s seat, slammed the door and turned over the two hundred sixty horses beneath the Mustang’s hood. He shoved the five speed into reverse and whipped the car around, squealing his tires out of the parking lot and onto westbound Richmond Drive.

Chloe slid him a sideways glance. “Is the length of the skid mark a guy lays in direct proportion to his opinion of himself?”

“Nope.” Eric grinned. He wouldn’t be able to afford retreads if that were the case. “That’s just me giving the horses their head. Gotta put the sweethearts through their paces.”

“Humph. Typical man. Your car gets treated better than your date.”

Eric downshifted for the traffic light a half block ahead. “How do you figure?”

“‘Give the horses their head.’ ‘Put the sweethearts through their paces,”’ Chloe mimicked, digging for her sunglasses. The sun was at their backs, but glared off the approaching cars’ glass. “Your date doesn’t even get a straight answer when she asks where you’re taking her.”