Uninhibited

“No, not in front of her. Well,” she amended, “the hot looks were in front of her, but I don’t think she noticed. She’s ninety-two, you know. He waited until we were outside before he started calling me names. That’s when he called New Moon a fly-by-night operation—” her voice rose indignantly at the remembered slur on her company “—and said I could just forget getting any money from his great-grandmother to finance my little enterprise.” She curled her upper lip, giving the word the same unsavory implication he had.

“Jeez.” Gina folded the grocery sack and bent down to put it under the sink. “That sounds a little extreme, even for the repressed type. They usually content themselves with blaming you for arousing their libido, and let it go at that.” She reached for the bright red teakettle on the stove, then hesitated, head tilted as she considered her friend. “Wine or espresso? I’ve got some plain biscotti that would go with either.”

“Espresso,” Zoe said. “Wine would only make me get all weepy and maudlin.”

Gina nodded and turned on the faucet, her gaze lowered as she watched the kettle fill. “What on earth made him think you were some kind of con artist?”

Zoe shrugged. “Beats me.”

Gina lifted her gaze from the kettle to Zoe’s face.

“Honest, I have no idea why he would think that.”

“You want to look me in the eyes when you say that?”

Zoe sighed, knowing she was caught. “Okay. So maybe I, um…influenced his opinion in that regard. A little.”

Gina set the kettle on the stove and turned the heat on. “Influenced?” she murmured encouragingly.

“Well, he made me so darn mad. Staring at me as if he were imagining me naked one minute, and then looking down his nose at me the next, all superior and disapproving, as if it were my fault he was having lewd fantasies in his great-grandmother’s parlor. But I swear, Gina, I didn’t do one thing—not one darned thing—to encourage him. Not at first, anyway,” she admitted, making a clean breast of it. Gina would know if she lied, anyway, just by looking at her. “It was only after he made me so mad that I, well…” She shrugged. “You know how I get sometimes when I lose my temper.”

“I know, sweetie, and it’s not your fault this time. Some men are just pigs,” Gina said sympathetically. “You aren’t responsible for what goes on in their tiny little minds.” She reached across the kitchen counter and patted Zoe’s hand. “So, tell me what you did to make him think you were after his dear old granny’s fortune.”

“Well, Moira had told him she wanted to lend me the money for New Moon, and he was looking at me like he thought I was going to steal the silver on my way out or something, so I sort of—” she shrugged, her lips turning up in a little shamefaced grin “—lived down to his expectations, you might say. You know how I get sometimes, putting my mouth in gear before I’ve engaged my brain.”

Gina nodded sagely. “And what did he do then?”

“He clamped his hand around my arm and hustled me out of there so fast you’d have thought the house was on fire. And then he called me a con artist and said New Moon was a fly-by-night cosmetic company and accused me of trying to bilk—bilk!—his great-grandmother out of a fortune.”

“Cazzone cafone.”

“Yeah, well, he was kind of a jerk, but…” She shrugged again, and the shamefaced look was back. “I guess I can’t really blame him completely.”

“Zoe! He acted like a pig.”

“Oh, I blame him for the pig part,” she assured her friend, “but not what came after. I mean, at the end there, I did act like all I was interested in was the money. And you can’t really blame a guy for trying to protect his sweet old granny from being taken to the cleaners.”

“I can,” Gina said loyally.

Zoe smile at her. “I appreciate that. I really do. But I’ve got to face facts. I lost my temper and blew it, big time. There’s no way Moira Sullivan’s going to be investing in New Moon. Not if her great-grandson has anything to say about it. And it’s my own darn fault.”

“You’ll find another investor. There’s bound to be someone out there who has the vision to see what a great investment New Mo—” Gina cocked her head, listening. “Is that your phone?”

ZOE WAS BACK in her friend’s apartment less than ten minutes later. “You’ll never guess who that was.”

Gina didn’t look up from the tiny cups she was filling with thick, black espresso from the coffee press. “Who?”

“Mr. Stuffed Shirt himself.”

Gina put the coffee press down. “And?” she said carefully, her eyes on Zoe’s face.

“And he apologized for what he said this afternoon.” A big grin turned up the corners of Zoe’s mouth. Her eyes sparkled with anticipation and renewed hope. “He wants to meet with me as soon as possible to discuss investing in New Moon.”

4

“WHICH ONE’S THE STUFFED shirt?”

Zoe brushed the blowing tendrils of her hair out of her eyes with one hand, scanning the rugby field as they approached the sidelines. “There,” she said, unerringly zeroing in on him among all the identically clad men. “The tall one with the dark hair in the second row of that huddle.” She pointed at him with the straw sticking out of the top of her iced latte. “On the red team with the number five on his shirt.”

“Scrum,” Gina corrected, standing on tiptoe to get a better look. “It’s a scrum, not a huddle.” She sank back onto her sneakered heels as the men lowered themselves into an interlocking mass of humanity and started to move like some kind of giant multiheaded crab as they scrambled for possession of the football. “You didn’t tell me he was gorgeous.”

“Is he?” Zoe shrugged and poked her straw into the bottom of her drink cup. “I didn’t notice.”

“And when did you start losing your eyesight, Ms. Moon?”

“Well, I didn’t,” Zoe said defensively. It wasn’t exactly a lie; last Wednesday she’d been more concerned with the look in his eyes than his looks. Not that she hadn’t noticed those, too, but… “I had other things on my mind, if you’ll recall.”

Gina snorted inelegantly. “Don’t waste that big-eyed innocent look on me,” she advised dryly. “I haven’t got enough testosterone for it to work.”

“Fine.” Zoe jabbed her straw into the ice at the bottom of her cup again. “Think whatever you want.”

“He’s really got you rattled, doesn’t he?”

“Well, of course he does. He’s only holding the future of New Moon in his hands.”

But it was more than that.

Her cheeks were flushed and warm, despite the cool September breeze blowing across the field from the Charles River. Her palms were damp. Her nerve endings tingled, making her feel jittery and on edge, almost expectant, like a child sitting in front of the fireplace on Christmas Eve waiting for something wondrous to happen. And it had absolutely nothing to do with what he could mean to the future of New Moon.

Zoe sighed.

She wasn’t usually stupid about men. She was, in fact, never stupid about men. She’d learned early that a woman who let herself get all excited and moony-eyed over a handsome face or a charming manner invariably ended up paying for her gullibility in heartache and broken dreams. Her mother, who’d been married and divorced as many times as any Hollywood movie star, had taught by unwitting example what not to do in relationships with men, and Zoe had taken the lessons to heart. She knew, all too well, that to let herself start weaving silly little romantic fantasies about Reed Sullivan was stupid in the extreme.

Oh, sure, he’d apologized for what he’d said out there on the sidewalk in front of his great-grandmother’s house, but that didn’t negate his attitude while they were inside. As Gina had so wisely remarked, his attitude and actions identified him as “one of those,” meaning the kind of man who based his opinions of women on how they looked.

It wasn’t that Zoe minded being thought of as attractive, or having men think she was sexy or beautiful. Or even having them say so. That would have been stupid, because she was all of those things. And she liked being those things. Most of the time. No, what she objected to were men who thought what was on the outside was the sum total of what was on the inside. Or men who thought her spectacular physical attributes constituted a deliberate come-on, and got bent out of shape when she failed to deliver on what they thought she had promised, simply by being.

Not that Reed Sullivan actually fit either of those profiles, precisely. But he’d disapproved of her at first sight, on the basis of her looks alone, and that was enough to condemn him in her eyes.

Or should have been.

It was just the tiniest bit distressing that she couldn’t seem to work up the proper contempt for his sexist attitude, not with him running up and down the field in those little red shorts and the bright color block jersey with the word Bulldogs emblazoned across his broad chest.

Which meant, Zoe realized, totally amazed at herself, that she obviously had a few sexist attitudes of her own to address.

“What are you standing there looking so pensive about?” Gina asked, breaking into her reverie.

Zoe shook her head. “Nothing,” she said, her eyes still focused on the playing field.