Underneath It All

“What our company does best, son. I’ve given you an image as the most eligible bachelor in America.”

KATE MONAHAN’S FEET ACHED, which wasn’t surprising since she’d been on them all day. She was halfway through her third twelve-hour shift at New Image, the salon where she worked, in as many days. But her younger brother, Huey, needed braces and she had her eye on a DKNY skirt and jacket that her bargain-hunter nose told her was headed for another markdown, so she tried to think about her bank balance and not her feet.

Graduation season was always a busy, and lucrative, time of year.

“So,” she said to her fourth high-school senior that day, “what are we doing?”

“I want it layered, you know, like Rachel in Friends.”

“Sure.”

“But with the fluttery bangs like Cameron Diaz in Charlie’s Angels. Not the first movie but the second one.”

“Aha.” She shifted feet, trying to get the ache out of her lower back. Her friend and co-worker, Ruby, breezed by and they exchanged a glance, but at least her friend didn’t say anything to make her laugh. With Ruby, you could never tell.

“And the same color as Julianne Moore, only more like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.”

“You’re going to dye your hair for grad?”

It never failed to amaze Kate what these girls’ mothers let them get away with.

“Yep. Well, like your hair. What color is that?” the teenager with perfectly attractive brown hair asked her with a squint that was assessing. “Mocha berry or copper glitz?”

Kate grabbed a fistful of the mass of curls that no styling product, blow dryer or curling iron could ever entirely tame. “It’s red, and it’s the color God gave me.”

“Well, God gave me this boring brown and I want to look as hot as you when I graduate.”

Kate sent soon-to-graduate Bethany off to be shampooed and quickly phoned the girl’s mother to make sure it was okay about the color. Anything she wants, was the answer.

At eighteen. Imagine.

Ruby stopped her and said, “Tell that girl that Ashton Kutcher has cuter bangs. And no haircut or dye job is going to make her look like Julia Roberts.”

She stifled a giggle, but Ruby was right. Still, it didn’t hurt to put a little magic in a young woman’s life. She’d do what she could.

Once she had Bethany settled under the dryer, she passed her a sheaf of current magazines, and the brunette, soon-to-be-redhead immediately chose a well-thumbed copy of Matchmaker magazine.

“If I could marry him,” the girl said, pointing a freshly manicured index finger at the photo on the cover, “I’d be set for life.”

Kate gazed at the man’s picture. “Darren Kaiser, Matchmaker’s Match of the Year,” she read, staring at the man deemed so eligible women would go to humiliating lengths to marry him.

Darren Kaiser had playboy written all over him. He had Brad Pitt blond hair, a little long and with just a hint of a curl at the ends. It looked as though each strand had been individually groomed to provide that tousled disorder. He had the sensual face of a man who likes women and usually gets whatever he wants from them. His lips tilted in a smile that was only going through the motions—there was no genuine warmth. Beautiful eyes, she thought, but cynical. He wore a suit, and even though only the shoulders were visible in the picture, she was certain the clothes on his back cost more than her mother spent to feed her family for a year.

Yes, she thought, he was good-looking in a smooth, slick sort of way, but she didn’t see a real man in the photo. More like a perfect image of one.

“He’s a hottie,” sighed her client.

“He looks altogether too full of himself. And those rich men—” Kate shook her head “—what would they want with the likes of us? We’d end up picking up their socks and propping up their egos. Bethany, take my advice and find yourself a decent man who cares about you. Leave the boy millionaires to marry girl millionaires.”

She glanced at the photo of Brian she’d taped to her station. He was so different from the glossy fellow with the perfect smile. Things had been a bit weird lately between her and her boyfriend, but she thought it was because they were both so busy right now. Brian would never be a magazine cover’s idea of the ideal bachelor, but he was a down-to-earth man with a steady job in banking who shared her basic values.

He was ambitious, too, which was good. Having grown up with a widowed mother and four brothers and sisters, lack of money was all too familiar. Kate appreciated an ambitious man with a steady job. Besides, with all his training and knowledge, Brian was investing her money for her so she could achieve her dreams more quickly.

She glanced at the about-to-graduate teen glued to the story of a fantasy man and shook her head. No glossy hunk on a magazine cover was going to drop into their lives and provide the happily-ever-after.

2

“I QUIT!” Darren yelled, almost as red-faced as his father. “I can’t take this anymore. Women are waiting outside my co-op when I leave in the morning. Women are hanging around outside the office with signs written in lipstick reading, “Choose me!”

“You’re exag—”

“I’ve been propositioned, stalked, proposed to about three thousand times. This morning the doorman handed me a woman’s bra with a phone number on it.”

“It’s the excitement of the magazine, son.” His father tried to sound sympathetic, but he was as gleeful as a boy with a new Hot Wheels set. “A few months from now they’ll have forgotten all about you.”

“Not if you can help it,” he mumbled.

“We’ll hire you a bodyguard,” his dad replied.

“I don’t want a bodyguard. I want my life back.”

In fact, what he wanted was his life. His own life. Forget the family business, he wanted to succeed or fail on his own terms. Doing something he loved a lot more than creating artificial “need” in the marketplace for products anyone could live without.

“Our business has gone way up in the past week. Think of what this could mean.”

“No. Dad. I’m thinking about me. I love programming, it’s what I want to do with my life. Face it, I’m a computer geek and I don’t belong in advertising. I’m quitting. As of now.”

Their voices were rising, but Darren didn’t care. He’d inherited his temper from his father, if nothing else.

Just as angry, his father shouted, “You walk out that door, young man, and you can’t change your mind.”

“I won’t.” Darren strode across the room but hesitated at the doorway of his dad’s plush office, feeling not so much fear for his own future, but worry that his father couldn’t cope without him. He was about to speak when he heard some sort of commotion down the hall in the direction of his own office.

He turned and swallowed an expletive. There was a camera crew in front of his office, and damned if they weren’t filming some woman, some complete and utter stranger, leaving a dozen red roses outside his door. She was talking all the time, her face toward the camera so the flowers almost got knocked to the floor.

Oh, no. This had gone far enough. His dad had turned his life and his job into a joke. He’d become, not an ad exec, but a product to be marketed. The hell with it. Kaiser Image Makers would survive without Darren.

And Darren was going to be fine without Kaiser.

But before he left, he was going to give that woman and the cameraman a piece of his mind. Angrily, he made his way toward them. Instead of looking guilty and hurrying away, the woman with the roses, beamed a thousand-watt smile his way, then shouted into the camera, “There he is!”

She picked up the roses, yelled, “These are for you, Darren Kaiser. I love you,” and headed his way, hampered by her red stilettos and body-hugging red dress. She was followed by a skinny guy in a Knicks shirt balancing a TV camera on his shoulder.

In a moment of horror, Darren realized that unless he disappeared fast, whatever happened next would be filmed. He abandoned his plans to dress down the camera guy and the misguided woman. He abandoned any thoughts of standing his ground.

He turned on his heel and ran.

KIM employees stood in the hallway, mesmerized, until Darren yelled, “Out of my way,” and set a world sprinting record racing for the stairwell.