The Maddening Model. Suzanne Simms
head. A boy of eight or nine was standing beside him.
He didn’t want another drink, but there was something about the kid, something about his eyes.
“Sure.” Simon flipped him a coin. “And keep the change.”
The small face broke into a huge grin. “Thanks, boss. Beer right away.”
Maybe the hardest lesson he’d had to learn in the past year was that he couldn’t rescue everyone like this street kid. So he did what he could.
“Which isn’t very much, is it, Hazard?” he acknowledged as the boy set the glass down, brown liquor sloshing over the sides, and took off with his newfound wealth.
He couldn’t do anything about the boy, but he could—and would—do something about the woman.
Simon watched as the redhead approached the man behind the bar. Damn, if there wasn’t something familiar about her. He had the strongest sensation that he’d seen her before.
He stared unabashedly. Why not? Everybody else in the Celestial Palace was. Not that it seemed to bother her. She appeared oblivious to the stares and the whispers. This was a woman, he realized, who was used to being noticed, who expected to be noticed.
She slid her sunglasses up into her hair and looked directly at the bartender. The noise level dropped off for an instant and Simon clearly heard her say, in a voice that sent cool shivers down his spine, “Perhaps you can help me. I’m looking for someone.”
The man answered in accented English, “Looking for who, lady?”
The din of voices, clinking glasses and a crooning Elvis Presley picked up again. She leaned over the counter and said something Simon couldn’t make out.
The bartender raised his hand and pointed. He was pointing in the direction of Simon’s table.
She turned. Without the sun at her back, without the dark glasses obscuring her features, Simon saw her clearly for the first time. She was stunning, but not in any conventional sense of the word. Her hair was too red. Her eyes were too green. Her cheekbones were too prominent. Her nose was too aristocratic. Her mouth was almost too perfect.
He had seen that face before.
His gaze dropped to her slender shoulders, her generous breasts, her slim waist, her long, long legs.
He had seen that body before. He could swear it.
She walked toward him, stopped in front of his table and looked down her nose at him. “Are you Simon Hazard?”
He refused to alter his expression. “What if I am?”
“I believe we have an appointment, Mr. Hazard.”
“An appointment?”
“For three o’clock.”
He resisted the urge to glance at his watch. “Is it three o’clock already?”
“Five minutes past,” she said, consulting the slim gold band on her wrist.
“Time flies when you’re having fun,” he muttered dryly.
“Are you?”
“Am I what?” He snorted and drained his glass to the last drop. “Having fun?”
Apparently, she chose to ignore his attempt at making a witticism. “Are you Simon Hazard?”
He might as well confess. “The one and only.”
She thrust out her right hand. Simon wondered if he was supposed to shake it or kiss it. “I’m Sunday Harrington,” she informed him.
Sunday. He supposed, with a name like that, she’d heard them all.
Sunday, fun day.
Sunday in the park with George.
Solomon Grundy buried on Sunday.
Sunday afternoon.
Sunday school.
Sunday’s child.
Never on Sunday.
“Sunday Harrington?” The name rang a bell. He studied the initials on her handbag: a stylized, intertwining S and H. Then it suddenly dawned on him. “S. Harrington stands for Sunday Harrington.”
“Brilliant deduction.”
He bit off a brief and rather crude expletive. The legs of his chair hit the floor of the Celestial Palace with a resounding thud. “I assumed the S stood for Sidney or Sheldon or Stanley.”
“You assumed incorrectly.”
His eyes narrowed. “You’re not a man.”
She seemed to be biting the corners of her mouth. “I’m not a man. I would think that was obvious, even to you.”
It was.
“You’re my client.”
“I’m your client.”
Bloody hell, she was his client.
That’s when he recalled reading in the newspapers—it had been a few years ago now—about a fashion model who always dressed in pink or purple or red, despite conventional wisdom that redheads should avoid those colors.
That’s when Simon Hazard remembered the last time he’d seen this woman. She had been larger than life, literally, and she had been wearing several tiny scraps of purple material that left little, if anything, to the imagination.
Simon blew out his breath expressively. As a matter of fact, the first and last time he had seen Sunday Harrington, she had been wearing next to nothing....
Two
She’d made a mistake.
A big mistake.
A huge mistake.
“There must be some mistake,” she said, swallowing hard.
A small, mocking smile appeared on the man’s lips. “You can say that again.”
“But you’re a—” She was too polite, Sunday reminded herself, to say he was a two-bit cowboy, an unshaven slob, a disreputable character and very possibly a drunkard, besides. She took a deep breath. “But you’re an American.”
He flashed her that smile again. “Born and raised in the heartland of the U.S.A.—Minneapolis, Minnesota.”
“You’re not Thai.”
“I would think that was obvious, even to you,” he said, his voice laced with sarcasm.
Sunday stood a little straighter, not that she had ever been one to slouch. “I assumed you would be Thai.”
“You assumed incorrectly.”
The situation was getting awkward. “I thought my secretary made my requirements clear. I want someone who speaks the language, understands the customs and knows his way around this country.” The man just sat there. “What I want, Mr. Hazard,” she said, no longer mincing words, “is the best.”
There was a flash of straight, white teeth. “Lady, that’s what you’ve got—the best.”
What she had, Sunday realized, was a problem. And a big problem, at that. From where she stood—and he sat—it was apparent that Simon Hazard was tall, well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, long-legged and handsome as sin...if a woman was partial to the rugged he-man type, which, thankfully, she was not.
He stuck out like a sore thumb from the tips of his scuffed cowboy boots to the top of his head. His hair was blue-black and long at the nape; it was damp from the