Bad Boy

“Hi, Sam,” Jon responded in a voice about an octave too high. God, her casualness was worse than being ignored! Now he could tell he’d been totally forgotten.

Then Samantha stopped. “Oh, hey. Sorry about Saturday,” she said over her shoulder, as if she’d just remembered it. Well, maybe she just had.

“Saturday?” Jon asked, his voice under control. Hey, he could get amnesia, too.

“I wasn’t sure if it was on or not, and then I got tied up and I was—”

“No problem,” Jon said cutting her off. Then he separated from the group and entered his office. He could hear the staff murmuring outside his door. Dennis said, “Man, what did she do with Jon that made her sorry?” Someone else made another wisecrack, one he couldn’t hear, and everyone laughed. He jumped when the phone began to ring. For a moment, he was tempted to ignore it, but he couldn’t. It might be Bella, his boss, with new info on the Parsifal funding. He picked up the receiver.

“Do you like surprises?” Tracie’s voice asked.

“Hit me with one.” He sighed. Anything would be a good distraction from his current modality.

“What if I said this isn’t Tracie? That it’s Merlin and I’ve considered your proposal?”

Marlon? Brando or Perkins? He was so tired, he felt fuzzy-headed. What was she talking about? Had he been so desperate Sunday night that he’d gotten drunk and asked her to marry him? He was confused. Then it hit him. The tutoring. Jon flung the papers he was holding onto a chair and sat down. “Tracie, I’ll do anything. Anything.”

“First of all, we’d have to buy you some decent clothes,” she said.

Jon couldn’t help thinking of Emerson—“Never trust an endeavor that requires new clothes.”

“My credit card is yours,” is what he said to Tracie.

“You’ll have to change your hair.”

Hey, I’d like to change my whole head, he thought. But he just said, “Transplants, or just the color? I’ll do either,” he assured her.

Tracie giggled. She had a really cute giggle. “A good cut will do for starters. And you need to start working out.”

“No problem. I can work out or in. All I do is work.”

“You know I mean at a gym!” Tracie remonstrated. “Partly to be buff, partly to meet people. Okay. So … for a start, you’ll have to get rid of your home answering machine. And your E-mail.”

She’d gone crazy. He was director of an entire R&D division, working on a cutting-edge project. “What? … How would I get my—”

“That’s the point. Rule Number One: Unavailability.”

“To women maybe. But I do have business to transact.”

“You’ve been doing nothing but work for the last six years. You’re going to have to change some of your ways to get cuties.”

He thought of Sam. “Okay. Okay,” he said. “Just give me the rules.”

“Rule Number Two: Unpredictability. Lose the watch.”

He began to unfasten the band from his wrist. “It’s not hip, right? I should wear a different one? A Swatch?”

She groaned. “God no. Bad boys just don’t need watches. You’re either fashionably late or inconveniently early, but never on time.”

“Plus, no logos. No little alligators, no boomerangs. If people want to read, let them buy the Times, not stare at your chest. And forget your Micro/Connection wardrobe.”

“I don’t always wear Micro/Con stuff,” he said defensively. He looked down at his chest. It said FROM FLOPPY DISK TO HARD DRIVE IN SIXTY SECONDS. Perhaps his argument was weak. Actually, he hardly ever noticed what he wore.

“Not if you sleep in the nude. But whenever I’ve seen you, you’ve been branded. And it is so lame.”

Maybe she was right. “I’ll put on a real shirt,” he promised.

“So, your homework assignment: Tomorrow, you go to work without a watch and no Micro/Con. Then we’ll meet at your place tomorrow at seven.”

Jon was a good student. He’d always gotten the extra-credit points and the trick questions right in school. It was only in his personal life that he screwed up. “Is this a test? Am I supposed to be late? Or early?”

“On time,” she told him in a stern voice. “Don’t play those games with your alchemist.”

Jon hung up, smiled, and swirled around in his desk chair. Yes! Soon he’d have the Samanthas of the world and all their freckles at his feet.

Chapter 10 (#ulink_095297b5-c350-54d6-9190-c2061ac07d36)

Tracie walked into her apartment and nearly fainted from the scent of rosemary and thyme in the air. She began salivating immediately. She never had any food in the place, because she’d eat it if she did. This was … overwhelming.

“Hi, honey. You’re home,” Laura sang out. The table was set with Tracie’s nice china, salads were already put out, and Laura opened the door enough for Tracie to see something really good seemed to be roasting in the oven. “I didn’t know how you felt about duck, so I made chicken à l’orange,” said Laura. Tracie frowned. She thought that took hours—though she’d never even read a recipe. And she was starved, but she was also getting concerned. As far as she knew, Laura hadn’t been out of the apartment in the last three days. Plus, neither of them needed this many calories.

“Honey, you can’t go on like this,” Tracie said as she sat down at the table. Laura pulled a small dish from the oven. On it was a tiny bit of bread smeared with something and decorated artfully with a few leaves.

“Have a cheese savory,” said Laura cheerfully, ignoring Tracie completely. She was already drinking a glass of red wine and poured some out for Tracie. Tracie couldn’t resist, but she knew she’d hate herself in the morning. It was funny—after only a few days, the two of them were acting like a long-married couple.

“Laura, this is impossible,” she said as she popped the savory into her mouth. Then she couldn’t do anything except make animal noises because it was so delicious. All thoughts of dieting left her head. “Can’t we have these for dinner?” she asked. Laura laughed. “Don’t worry. Everything is that good.”

Laura was telling the truth. Tracie only came back to her senses after the flan that her guest had made for dessert. Only then—replete with food and guilt—did she begin to shake her head. “We’re getting fat. I can’t take this rich food every night.”

“Don’t be silly,” Laura said in her best Julia Child imitation. “What’s rich about a little sour cream and truffles and foie gras and cheese?” She winked. “It’s not like I’m baking farm cakes.” But she might as well be. Laura’s cooking was rich.

With some difficulty, Tracie got up from the table and dragged herself over to the sofa. She was stuffed. “Okay,” she said. “That was it. I’m locking up the pans and from now on we’re spending our lunchtimes at the gym.”

“I am not friendly enough with gymnasiums to call them by their first names,” Laura sniffed. “I don’t do gymnasiums.”

“You didn’t do them in Sacramento. You do do them here,” Tracie told her. “And you are way too talented not to be cooking. You’ve got to go out and find some catering jobs. Better yet, get a job as a chef. You always wanted to do that.”

“Hey, babe, you’re not doing your transformation on me,” Laura said. “You’re doing one on Jon, and even that’s not a good idea. It’ll end in tears, as my mother used to say.”

“Your mother used to tell you sex felt bad,” Tracie said as she attempted to find the place where her waistline had been only a few days before. Now it wasn’t just the top button but the entire zipper of her slacks that had to be loosened. “Jon asked me to do this.”

“Yeah? Well don’t you see that every single thing you’re going to do will be a criticism of him? At some point, he’s really going to resent it. Maybe my mother lied, but there’s an old Chinese saying: Why does he hate me so? I never did anything for him. That’s based on truth.”

“Don’t be silly,” Tracie said. “Jon will be grateful for anything I do to help him.”

“Mmm? Remember when you used to try to do diet consulting for me?”

“You didn’t ask me to! And I stopped!”