beautiful rat, but drowned nonetheless.
It had been raining when he arrived, but not hard enough to soak her like that. The front of her hair was plastered to her forehead and the back had frizzed into a puffy cloud. She hobbled on one foot because she’d apparently lost the heel of her other shoe.
Max turned back to Phillip, who was so absorbed in a monologue on his new line of Microsoft knockoffs, he hadn’t even noticed that Max wasn’t paying attention.
“I hate to cut you off, Phil, but I see a friend I need to talk to.”
Phillip’s face went blank for a moment, almost as if he were startled by the sound of someone else’s voice. “Sure, Matt, we’ll continue this later. I want to tell you about my new antivirus product.…”
Max backed away as Phillip picked up the conversation with his next victim.
Shayna stared at her reflection in the ladies’ room mirror, feeling close to tears. She was a wreck. She made her living planning, preparing for the unexpected and showing others how to do the same. How could this have happened?
She leaned her forehead on the cool glass of the mirror. Her perfect evening was over before it had even gotten started. Things couldn’t possibly get any worse.
“You okay in there?”
She looked up to find Max Winston peeking around the side of the ladies’ room door.
“Oh my God.” She tried to rake her fingers through her hair, but they got stuck in the frizzy mass. “Max, this is the ladies’ room. What are you doing in here?”
He stepped through the door and leaned against it. “I was worried about you. I saw you come in, but you never came back out.”
“So you decided to join me in the ladies’ room?”
He slipped his hands into his pockets, looking quite at home. “Nobody has come in here for at least five minutes. I knew you were alone. Besides, this is just the make-up-your-face area. I still have one more door to go through before I reach the point of no return.”
Shayna turned back to the mirror. Big mistake. For a split second she’d actually forgotten what a mess she was. She looked past her freestanding hair to the man behind her. Why, when she looked the worst she’d ever looked in her life, did Max Winston have to look the best she’d ever seen him?
This man, who came to every MBO meeting in T-shirts and blue jeans, was actually wearing a jacket. Pale gray. He was still wearing jeans but they were black—somehow it made a difference—and his offwhite shirt had a banded collar. He looked great.
He always looked great. In fact, he would have been at the top of her list of potential suitors if it weren’t for his fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants, spontaneous attitude that went against every principle she’d built her life upon. And now he had a front-row seat to the most humiliating night of her life.
Shayna felt like crying.
Max crossed to the mirror and looked over her shoulder. “So what happened, Shayna?” He pointed to her ruined shoes. “This is a risky fashion statement even for you.”
He was making jokes. Twenty-eight years of perfect grooming now amounted to no more than a silly joke. She met his eyes in the mirror. “You…want to know…what happened to me?” she asked quietly.
“Yeah, I’d like to know.”
She rounded on him. “You want to know what happened to me?”
He took a step back. “I…Well…You don’t have—”
“I’ll tell you…what happened…to me.” She turned back to the mirror, staring at her miserable reflection. Her voice sounded eerily calm to her own ears. “I bought a new dress just for tonight.” She smoothed her hands over her expensive white sheath, as she turned to face him. “Do you like this dress?”
He nodded obediently.
“And my hair…” She reached up to touch the flyaway strands, barely aware that Max’s gaze was still locked on the damp silk that clung to her curves. “I spent exactly twenty-three minutes trying to get my hair to curl like Naomi Campbell’s on the cover of Vogue.
“I looked good.” She stared at him. “I really did. When I left the house, I was feeling so good, a little rain couldn’t even get me down—after all, I always carry my trusty purse-size umbrella, right?” She laughed, almost hysterically. “I didn’t even blink when ‘a little rain’ turned into a full-fledged thunderstorm the moment I got out of the car to change my flat tire.”
“Ooh, that’s rough,” Max said sympathetically.
“No. It was okay. I was cool…until I discovered that my spare was flat, too.”
She held up a hand as if taking an oath. “But, like I tell my clients, ‘You must have a backup plan—always.’ So I called AAA and my neighbor Kitty, so she could meet Mr. Tow Truck Man and tell him where to tow my car. That way, I could just hop on the bus and make it here with time to spare, right?”
“Let me guess,” Max said, shaking his head. “It didn’t work out.”
“No! For some reason, today of all days, the bus comes five minutes early. So I’m running to catch it, and the heel on one of my two-hundred-dollar Italian shoes breaks off in a crack in the pavement. And, of course, I miss the bus.”
Max winced. “Okay, I get the picture.”
“Wait. There’s more. The next bus drops me off a block away from the hotel. So I’m walking, and the wind turns my cute little purse-size umbrella into a useless piece of junk. And there I am, in the middle of a storm. I’ve got a newspaper over my head to protect this glamorous hairstyle. I’m struggling with my crappy umbrella, and some jerk comes flying down the street and splatters the back of my dress with mud. Can you believe that?”
“Uh, is that your garbage bag?” he asked, pointing toward the crumpled black plastic on the counter.
“That’s not a garbage bag. It’s my handy-dandy-fold-up rain slicker,” she said with exaggerated cheerfulness. “What’s wrong? You look sick.”
“I feel really bad—for you—because you’ve been through so much tonight.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Shayna sighed, resigned to her fate. “It’s not your fault.”
Despite her reassurance, Max looked even more distressed.
“But could you do me a favor and call me a cab? I can’t go out there.”
Max frowned. “What? Leaving so soon? Come on now. You obviously went through a lot to get here. This evening is still salvageable.”
Shayna placed a hand on her hip. “Are you kidding me? I realize that nothing in life ever fazes you, Max, but even you’ve got to see that I have a problem here. My dress is ruined, so are my shoes. And I don’t even want to talk about my hair.”
Max stepped back for a moment, studying her. “We can work with this.”
Shayna just stared at him. This was a nightmare and she was going to wake up any minute.
“Let’s start with the dress,” he said, taking off his jacket. He handed it to her. “Try this on.”
Too confused to do anything else, she put on the lightweight jacket. Of course it was too big.
Max stepped forward, rolled up the sleeves and arranged the lapels. He stepped back, surveying his work. Shayna just stood there like a dressmaker’s dummy.
“Not bad.” He nodded.
She turned to the full-length mirror on her right. She never would have believed it, but the jacket helped a lot. She made a full circle. The jacket just brushed the hem of her dress,