Be Mine: Sizzle / Too Fast to Fall / Alone with You

“THAT MAN IS GOING to listen to me,” Emily told Jane the next morning. “I am going to be courteous and cooperative, but still forceful and demanding.”

“This should be interesting.” Jane looked skeptical.

“I will stun him with my competence.” Emily stuck out her chin. “I will keep an open mind.”

And during the week that followed, Emily did her best, but she was doomed. Richard kept ordering her to send him files, ordering her to meet him for meetings and ordering her to arrange conferences until she was ready to throw the whole campaign in his face. When she came into the office on Friday morning and Jane told her that Richard wanted her in the conference room, she broke.

“Too damn bad!” She slammed her briefcase down on her desk. “I have things to do.”

“Courteous and cooperative.” Jane handed her a folder. “Here’s his cost estimates. You won’t like them. I think it’s showdown time. Be nice to him, but let him know he can’t dictate to you. You know, forceful and demanding.”

“What happened to marry him and be obsessive together?”

“You can do both. Hey, I did the same thing with Ben. I was nice to him, but I let him know he couldn’t dictate to me.”

“Ben never dictates to you.”

“See?” Jane grinned at her. “It works.”

* * *

EMILY WAS RUNNING DOWN his cost estimates when Richard met her in the conference room.

“Here.” He tossed a small black bottle at her. “Put some of this on.”

She caught it and glared at him.

“It’s the product.” He dropped some folders onto the table and sat down, opening one. “Let’s see what it smells like.”

The hell with you, Emily thought. She held it out to him. “You put it on. We’ll see what it smells like on you.”

“I tried it last night.” He sorted through the folder without looking at her. “It took me two showers to get it all off before I came to work.”

“Then you know what it smells like.” She put the bottle on the table and returned her attention to the estimates.

“Put it on.” He pulled a legal pad for notes out of his briefcase. “See what you think.” He looked over at her for the first time and waited for her reaction.

Courteous and cooperative.

Emily sighed and pulled the stopper out of the bottle, putting her fingers over the opening and flipping the bottle over to release a few drops. She tapped the drops behind her ears and on her wrists, then replaced the stopper. “It’s nice.” She picked up the estimate report again.

“Just nice?” he asked.

“I’m not much for perfume,” she said, and he laughed.

“You’re responsible for selling four million dollars’ worth of perfume. I should think you’d be interested.”

“Look.” Emily dropped the report, exasperated. “If you got a job selling tampons tomorrow, you’d work hard so you’d be successful, right? Even though you personally aren’t much interested in tampons?”

Richard lost his smile, taken aback by her intensity. “Well, yes. Why are you so angry?”

“Because you’re treating me as if I were an amusing child.” Emily folded her hands in front of her, clenching them to keep her temper. “An amusing female child. That crack you made at the meeting, about ‘no price too great to pay for Paradise’ being my motto was insulting. You would never have made it to a male executive. And now telling me to wear the perfume. Would you ask George to wear it?”

“That’s different.”

“No, it’s not. He’s never smelled it, either.”

Richard looked uncomfortable. “George isn’t part of our team.”

“Throwing a bottle of perfume at someone and ordering her to wear it is not teamwork!” Emily snapped. “It’s not a team. It’s a boss and a flunky, and I am nobody’s flunky. I told you I wouldn’t put on that perfume, and you simply ordered me to put it on again. You give me orders, and you never listen to me. This is not a partnership. This is not teamwork. I don’t need this.” She slammed her portfolio closed and stood up.

“You’re right,” Richard said.

She stopped and glared at him, and he rubbed his hand over the back of his head and smiled at her ruefully. At that moment, he looked more like a boy than a man, sheepish and apologetic. It was devastatingly effective.

“I’m used to being the boss.” His eyes pleaded with her. “I’m sorry.”

Emily sat down again. It would be a whole lot easier to stay mad at him if he wasn’t so damn charming, she told herself. That smile must get him a lot. She opened her portfolio. “All right, then, listen. Our main problem with this product is that we have to distinguish it from Paradise. And that’s going to take more than a different name. More than just switching from diamonds to rubies. And it’s so important that anything we can do to make the difference clear to the consumer will be worth extra money in the long run.”

Richard pulled the cap from his pen, prepared to listen so hard he’d take notes. “All right, how is it different?”

“It’s cheaper. But it would be suicide to market it that way.”

“Granted.” He was still trying to cooperate. “Does it smell different from Paradise?”

“Of course.” She unstoppered the bottle again. “It’s spicier, sharper. Paradise was heavier, fruitier. We marketed Paradise as a slow, languid, sexy scent.” Emily waved the stopper in front of her to smell the scent in the air. “This stuff has more of an edge. We could try for a more exciting approach, I suppose.”

She touched the stopper to the back of her hand and sniffed. “It definitely has an edge.” She frowned as she replaced the stopper in the bottle and flipped the bottle upside down to moisten it. Then she absentmindedly touched the stopper to the hollow at the base of her throat. “It’s just as sexy as Paradise, really. Just different.” She moved the stopper down into the V of her blouse, stroking it between her breasts.

Richard watched her, fascinated.

“It will be a while before the scent is true,” she told him. “It needs to be warmed by my skin.”

“Oh.” He swallowed. “Fine.”

“It doesn’t matter if you don’t know much about perfume,” she said to reassure him. “We just sell the sizzle, not the steak, remember?”

“Right.” Richard cleared his throat. “Does this perfume have sizzle?”

Emily rubbed the silk of her blouse against the skin between her breasts to release more scent and wriggled her nose as it floated up to her. “Yes. Actually, this is pretty good stuff.”

He cleared his throat again. “So, uh, how would you base the campaign?”

“Well,” she said slowly, “we marketed Paradise as sex—you know, the heavy, filled feeling you get when—”

“Right.” He nodded. “I know.”

“This stuff is more like...foreplay. You know, exciting and edgy.”