Suddenly, the challenge had become a bet. Sabrina, the wanderer without a committed bone in her body, was to try settling down for the first time in her life. She’d also agreed to forego men until she became serious about just one. Now, two months later, she’d already signed a lease, found a job and developed an intense attraction with Kit.
Whereas Mackenzie was undergoing the opposite process. She’d left her long-time career as a buyer in the sweets division of Regal Foods and had invested all her savings in her own business, a penny-candy store called Sweet Something. She’d let go of her steady old boyfriend, Jason Dole, even though being single again after several years of comfortable, if unexciting, companionship made her feel like an untethered kite. Last of all, she’d agreed to put herself in the hands of a stylist and personal shopper and was on the way to a brand-new look, just in time for her store’s grand opening.
Cutting her waist-length hair was the last step. One she’d been resisting.
She’d always been comfortable with long hair, simply because she’d always had it. She was a person who rarely ventured outside her comfort zone.
Yes, that was her reasoning and she was sticking to it. It wasn’t as if she was actually hiding behind her hair. And she certainly wasn’t still clinging to an ancient memory of Devlin, who’d once said…
Mackenzie closed her eyes, succumbing to a moment of pure longing. All she had was memories, but they were enough to make a hot flush of desire rush up her throat.
Nonsense. Her lids popped open and she stared at the distorted reflection of her pink face in the salon’s glass doors.
Nostalgia, she thought. Nothing more.
It had been nearly ten years since she’d seen her high-school crush, Devlin Brandt. Even so, she’d never forgotten that he’d once complimented her on her hair—which had been about the nicest thing he’d ever said to her. Far better than the “Thanks, cutie,” or “What would I do without you, Mack?” comments he’d usually tossed her. Like fish from a seal trainer.
By God! She wasn’t balancing that ball on her nose for another instant.
Mackenzie tucked her bag under her arm and whipped the braid over her shoulder. “Let’s go.”
Sabrina groaned. “We can’t leave. I bargained my soul for this appointment after you broke the first one. Costas is booked months in advance—”
Mackenzie interrupted. “No, let’s go inside.” It was true that she’d already backed out once. She would not do that again, even though her heart was going thumpety-thump. “I’m ready to make good on our bet.”
“Oh. Well, that’s great.” Sabrina’s enthusiasm was obviously dimming now that it appeared Mackenzie would follow through. Despite Sabrina’s easy-come, easy-go attitude, she didn’t want to lose the ring they’d both treasured since they were little girls. That meant she’d have to stick with her promise to keep out of Kit’s bed…even if the only way to cure her sexual cravings was to gorge on enough chocolate to dip the Statue of Liberty.
Mackenzie’s thoughts returned to her own most wicked temptation. As always, she got no satisfaction. Devlin was merely a fantasy, not a flesh-and-blood, here-and-now partner like Sabrina’s Kit.
While Sabrina had once known about her younger sister’s crush on the high-school bad boy, it was far too embarrassing for Mackenzie to admit that she still thought of him a decade later.
Every now and then.
Like whenever she brushed her hair.
In a moment of unusual whimsy, Devlin had said that her long dark hair made her look like an evil sorceress—the opposite of the fair-haired, smiley-faced princesses who ruled their school. Mackenzie, forever a “good girl,” wasn’t even close to being bad, so naturally she’d loved the comparison.
The problem was that Devlin had shown no sign of being bewitched himself.
And now Mackenzie was grown-up. Devlin was a distant memory. She had to give him up, forever, for good.
Sabrina was holding the salon door open. Mackenzie sucked up her courage and sailed on through it. Time for her to cut that man right out of her hair!
1
Two weeks later
“I WAS CRAZY to think that Devlin would be at the reunion,” Mackenzie Bliss said, working her tail-bone even farther into the padded seat.
She received only a grunt in response, but that didn’t faze her.
“Y’know, it’s bad enough that it’s raining and my new shoes hurt and the spiked punch has given me a headache,” she grumbled, pouring out all her complaints. She was in her safety zone, the one place where she could make an anonymous confession. “What’s worse is that my stylist persuaded me to wear a panty shaper. Do you know what a panty shaper is? No? I’ll tell you. It’s a girdle in disguise, that’s what it is.” She tugged up the tail of her blouse and poked a finger into the bulge rising from her tight waistband. “See that? Like a lump of dough overflowing the pan.”
Before her confessor could look—should he even want to—she let the blouse fall across her slumped midriff. “But the worst, the absolute worst, is that I wasted four hours of my brand-new life and four hours of the brand-new fabulous me waiting for a man who was never going to show. I’m deluded, is what I am. Deluded!” She tossed up her hands.
They fell limply onto the seat. She didn’t have the energy to work up a really good snit. The disappointment of missing Devlin was too heavy, despite all her resolutions that she was never going to think of him again. She hadn’t realized until tonight what a large part of her motivation for change had come from the ever-so-slight possibility of seeing him again at the reunion of their high-school graduating class.
“It was my tenth high-school reunion, did I tell you that?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Of course Devlin wouldn’t come. He was the baddest of the high-school bad boys. By the very definition of bad boy, he wouldn’t come. Reunions are for ex-cheerleaders and the jocks who haven’t lost their hair yet. The geek who made a mil with a dot com, maybe. Girls who organized the car washes and decorated for school dances? Definitely.”
That’s me, she thought. You can cut my hair and dress me up, you can give me a trendy business and a feature article in The Village Voice, but I’m still the girl who did Devlin’s homework.
Not the one he kissed.
“Poor, poor, pitiful me,” she muttered.
The cab screeched to a stop near her building on West 17th in Chelsea, a gently aged brown-stone with rent control. She paid the driver—who hadn’t spoken a word the entire trip—and shoveled herself out of the back seat, gathering her belongings with an unusual carelessness. When the booklet from the reunion fell into the puddle at the curb, she left it, feeling too disconsolate to make the effort. The thing was useless anyway. Although many of her classmates had provided lists of degrees, childrens’ ages, home and e-mail addresses, for Devlin there was nothing. Only an old senior photo and a name.
Devlin Brandt.
Halfway through the evening, she’d taken one of the keepsake pens off a crepe-ribboned table and scrawled MIA? beside his name. At the tail end of the party, having finally worked up some punch-drunk courage, she’d gone around asking about him.
The majority hadn’t seen Devlin since graduation day, when he’d arrived halfway through the ceremony on a dinged-up Indian motorcycle and then taken off with a diploma tucked in the front of his jacket and Misty “Most likely to become a Hooters girl” Michaelson whooping it up behind him.
Those who knew Devlin, or had heard rumors of him, had two words for Mackenzie: Stay away.
He was into bad stuff, they said. She