How To Be the Perfect Girlfriend. Heather Macallister
meant she was going to be late. Whipping out her cell phone, she called Hayden, hoping to catch her before she left for the café.
“Where are you?” was the way Hayden answered the phone. From the background noise, Sara could tell that she was already in the building’s atrium café.
“Can you grab us a table? I’m caught at the photocopier.”
“Can’t you just scan and print?”
“No. You know we don’t want confidential information on the network.”
“I swear. You people in payroll are paranoid. Hey—you just need black-and-whites, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then go on up to my floor. There’s an old machine that we keep next to the vending machines. It doesn’t collate or do anything fancy, but you’ll get your copies.”
“I’m on my way.” Sara pulled open the door to the stairs and started running up the two flights to the twenty-sixth floor, her steps echoing in the stairwell.
The running lasted half a flight. She really needed to start exercising.
Breathing heavily, Sara found the old machine in the deserted vending area of the marketing department. All the marketing people apparently ate lunch out. If Sara had an expense account, she’d eat out all the time, too. But payroll assistants didn’t have expense accounts. Sara brown-bagged her lunch at least two days a week and aimed for three. It was part of her long-range plan to become fiscally responsible. See? She was planning for the future. She was maturing.
She deserved a mature relationship. One with commitment at its core. A life-partner relationship.
Either that or a lot of really fun, hot, immature relationships. Relationshipettes, maybe. Memorable encounters, even. The kind that inspired women to write memoirs. Sara visualized herself with silver hair, gnarled hands weighed down with diamonds and a satisfied smile as she dictated her life story to a fascinated and envious young woman.
Right. At this point, both visions seemed extremely far-fetched. She was neither fabulously single nor contentedly married. She wasn’t even contentedly single and fabulously married. No, Sara was discontentedly unmarried.
There was a difference between being single and being unmarried. Single had a proactive sound and implied a life of fun dates and attractive men at one’s beck and call. There had never been a man at Sara’s beck and no one had called in far too long.
Lately, Sara had found the idea of being part of a committed couple increasingly appealing. She’d done the casual relationship thing—that is, all her relationships had been casual as far as the men were concerned—and now she wanted to experience the novelty of having a male completely devoted to her. Solely to her.
A love slave would be nice, or at least a man who put her first instead of bowling night with his friends, and who actually checked with her before accepting an invitation to the Astros game, which he went to without her instead of taking her to the art film he’d kinda sorta promised he would that night and then not even realizing why she was mad….
Well, anyway, Sara wanted someone different from her usual sort of man. Maybe it was because she was staring thirty in the face, or maybe it was something as shallow as buying all those wedding shower gifts at Williams Sonoma when she couldn’t afford to buy anything for herself there, but Sara had experienced definite coupling urges. Unfortunately, there was no one to couple with.
The old machine was humming along nicely and Sara was manually collating as she went when there was an ominous whirring and everything stopped. The paper-jam light blinked. It figured. Unfortunately, Sara couldn’t see any scrunched-up paper. In frustration, she put down her papers and called Hayden.
“Does the stupid machine ever jam on you?”
“It jammed for real? Oh, you lucky girl.”
“What?”
Hayden’s voice turned husky. “You get to call Simon.”
“I don’t have time to wait for a repair guy.”
“No—Simon Northrup.”
“You mean Mr. Northrup?” Only Hayden could get away with bothering a company vice president with something like this. But then men treated Hayden differently than they treated the rest of the female population.
“Oh, yes.” Hayden sighed. “I’ve been known to use a rubber band and a staple to jam the copier just so I can watch him lean over the machine.”
“Hayden, you are a sick woman.”
“He wears European-cut slacks and he wears them very well.”
Hayden’s voice was so loud that Sara looked over her shoulder in case there was someone to overhear. “I can’t bother Mr. Northrup. Besides, he’s probably already gone to lunch.”
“He never goes to lunch this early.”
“I’ll just figure out how to unjam the thing myself. Oh, uh, I asked Missy to join us, so don’t wander off. Bye!” Sara hurriedly disconnected before Hayden could protest.
She opened the side door of the big old machine and peered at the copier’s guts. Yeah, there was the paper scrunched way back in there. Stretching her arm through and getting a black toner smear on her blouse, Sara found she couldn’t reach the paper. Great. She was either going to have to go in from the top, and it didn’t look as though she could reach the jam that way either, or pull the thing out from the wall. It was wedged between the Coke machine and the coffee bar.
Or she was going to have to—
“Ah. Another jam.” A tall man wearing cool techno glasses strode across the break room. “Sometimes I wonder why we keep this machine.” It was Simon Northrup.
Sara had seen him before, of course, but had never actually spoken to him. He’d always seemed a little remote and kind of intimidating, but the smile he gave her was friendly enough.
“Yeah, it, uh, jammed.” Brilliant, brilliant.
“Let’s take a look.” He set his coffee mug on the counter next to Sara and unbuttoned the cuffs of his blinding white shirt.
Custom, Sara thought, without ever having knowingly seen a custom-tailored shirt. Nice. More men should go custom. Maybe she should go custom.
“It’s a great old warhorse,” he nodded to the machine, “so I suppose we can allow it this one eccentricity.”
Eccentricity. Each letter sounded crisply. Sara could listen to him talk all day. Since she dealt with personnel records, she knew Simon Northrup was from Boston and had gone to boarding school in England. The resulting accent might not be as noticeable up North, but in Texas the clipped edges and slightly formal word choice contrasted with the good-ole-boy twang she heard all the time. Contrasted in a good way. A sexy way. She was beginning to see why he appealed to Hayden.
As he rolled up his sleeves, Simon asked, “Are you a new employee? A temp?”
Gritting her teeth, Sara sighed inwardly. Unmemorable. That’s what she was.
“Wait—I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?” He studied her, his head tilted slightly in a way that emphasized his square jaw.
If Hayden hadn’t gone on about him, Sara would never have noticed the square jaw. “I’m Sara Lipton from payroll. I was trying to avoid the wait at our machine.”
“Well, we’ll see if we can’t get you back in business here.”
Sleeves rolled up to reveal arms more tanned than she’d expected, Simon closed the side door Sara had opened, raised the heavy top section and leaned over the machine.
From then on, Sara saw everything in slow motion…the way his shirt clung to him as he bent over the machine and reached inside; the way his flanks stretched; his hips flexed and the fabric of his dark slacks