The main problem tonight was the personal issue. The issue of Lacey Clark—who she really was, where she’d really come from. She’d pleaded with J.T. not to go ahead with the announcement he planned to make at the party. Not unexpectedly, he’d ignored her, caring only about the circulation numbers, not about personal feelings. Not even hers.
Lacey’s high heels clicked loudly on the polished floor as she walked toward her destination. There was one spot where she knew she could be alone. She couldn’t escape the inevitable forever. But she could at least take some time to prepare for the evening she faced.
Thirty minutes. She deserved thirty minutes of peace before J.T. changed her secure, comfortable, low-key world forever.
“NOTE TO SELF. Next time you attend a rich man’s cocktail party, bring your Game Boy.”
Nate Logan clicked off his microcassette recorder and tucked it into the pocket of his black tux. Since everyone he worked with knew he always carried the thing around with him, making observations for use in columns, no one would have been surprised to see him talking to himself. Not that it mattered, anyway, since he was alone. Completely, blissfully alone.
He’d finally cut out of J.T. Birmingham’s party after enduring about twenty-five minutes of insipid conversation with colleagues who’d love to see him fall flat on his face. Grabbing a few bottles of beer from the bar, he’d slipped out a patio door and made his way around the lawn, searching for a place to sit down and drain a cold one.
Nate’s exploration of the well-manicured grounds led him to a secluded pool area. The pool ran right up to the edge of the house, and he imagined there was another section inside for bad-weather swimming. Curious to see what it looked like, he tested the handle of a nearby door and found himself inside a recreation room, complete with gym and spa. A light in a far corner illuminated some pricey workout equipment, including weight-training centers, stair steppers, treadmills, even a trampoline. The enclosed pool took up the other half of the massive chamber.
“The magazine business must be doing very well, indeed,” he mused as he moved a lounge chair right up to the edge of the pool. He took a seat, then leaned over the armrest to test the water with his fingers, liking the coolness against his skin. Damn, it was a miserably hot night, particularly for early June. The crowded party had made it that much more so.
He twisted off the cap of a bottle, took a long pull of cold beer and settled back in the chair. He would have loosened the stupid bow tie at his neck but knew there was no way he’d be able to tie it again without a mirror, so he left it alone.
All in all, the evening was proving to be a total waste. Hobnobbing with the rich and famous of Baltimore was not exactly Nate’s thing. Most of the women he’d met tonight either stared icicles or came at him with enough heat to melt iron, each thinking she might be the one to transform the sexist bad boy she knew from the pages of Men’s World.
As if that Nate Logan really existed.
Well, okay, maybe he existed to some extent. Yes, Nate’s writing style reflected his personality—a little smart-alecky, a lot tongue in cheek. But the rest didn’t. As much as readers—and female columnists—might argue it, Nate was not a sexist jerk. He didn’t dislike women. Far from it! So he didn’t particularly care to be exposed to a bunch of female readers who wanted to either smack him or seduce him.
It wasn’t as if he bashed women. He wrote a column for men in a men’s magazine. When he wrote, he pictured himself just talking to a bunch of guys. All guys—single or married, committed or on the make, young and eager or old and reminiscent—talked about women. What women did. What women said. What women wore. What women wanted. Particularly what women wanted. Mainly how the hell a man was supposed to figure out what women wanted!
He viewed his writing as a just-between-us-men, talking-after-a-workout kind of thing. Unfortunately, some women had started eavesdropping on the conversation and weren’t too happy about it. As if he, Nate Logan, had invented the concept of men griping about the opposite sex. Ridiculous, unless one also subscribed to the theory that women never indulged in man bashing. Which was, of course, complete bullshit.
This was where his startlingly sudden success in the publishing world had gotten him. A great job, a terrific salary, the freedom to express the views of the average man on the street. Oh, and a big, fat, pig-shaped target on his head.
He didn’t like his sudden notoriety. Sure, he’d had fun with it the first few months, until he realized not everyone was in on the joke. Some people didn’t see the real Nate Logan at all anymore. He found himself on guard with each person he met, judged by other people’s preconceptions. He’d begun to miss the anonymity he’d enjoyed working as a staff writer for a weekend magazine in D.C. or doing his freelance work. He’d rather be covering another corruption scandal in the nation’s capital than be stuck here, at a highbrow party, surrounded by men who agreed with every word he said—except when their girlfriends were around. Not to mention those girlfriends, who wanted him either in their crosshairs or in their beds.
To ice the three-layer cake of this particular bash, he was going to come face to face with that frigid prig Lacey Clark. Of all the people in the world with whom he didn’t want to spend an evening, including Barry Manilow and the guy who’d thought up those stupid Chihuahua commercials, she was number one on his list. After all, it was partially her fault half the world’s population—the female half—was out for his blood. She was the one who had given him the reputation of being a male chauvinist without even having to mention his name.
Earlier at the party, he’d seen one pinched-looking, severely dressed woman who might qualify as the schoolmarm he suspected Lacey Clark to be. She was tall and skinny, wearing a mannish black suit, with graying hair pulled into a severe bun. He’d asked Raul, a casual friend and co-worker, to confirm she was his nemesis.
Raul had grinned and slapped Nathan on the back. “How on earth do you do it? I mean, how can you come into a room, look at someone and immediately know who she is?”
“You mean I’m right?” Nate had asked, somewhat deflated to think this woman was indeed the one he was going to share the spotlight with later in the evening.
Raul had shrugged and lifted his hands in defeat. “What can I say? You really are a master of deductive reasoning. I think I’ll go on over and say hello to Lacey now. Don’t worry, I won’t let on to her that you picked her out so easily.”
Then the junior editor from Men’s World had sauntered away, leaving Nate to speculate about the sour-faced crone who’d made his life a living hell for months. He hadn’t been able to remain in the same room with her for ten more minutes before he’d made good his escape. He’d meet her soon enough, when the two of them were lucky enough to be congratulated for helping to invigorate the magazines they worked for.
“Here’s to you, Lacey Clark,” he muttered as he sat in the lounge chair by the pool. “Maybe you’ll get lucky tonight, meet some poor SOB with bad eyesight, get laid and get the hell off my back.” If anyone sorely needed to get laid, it was Lacey Clark.
As he lifted the bottle of beer to his mouth, Nate noticed the door at the far end of the gym opening in the semidarkness. Hoping he wasn’t about to be discovered, he slid lower in his lounge chair, willing the intruder to leave.
No such luck. The person—he could see from here it was a she—slipped into the gym and pushed the door shut behind her. She leaned against it, her body almost sagging. He imagined her sighing in relief, probably glad to have escaped the party. That was at least one thing they had in common. Then she stepped away from the door, into the light cast by an overhead fixture near the rowing machine.
“Man, oh man,” he whispered.
She was blond perfection. A teenage boy’s breathing, moving erotic dream. From the sleek golden hair falling in a wave past her shoulders to the pale throat, the soft shoulders revealed by the tight black dress and on down the centerfold curves, she was one-hundred-percent pure female temptation.
Nate suddenly found it difficult to pull another chlorine-tinged breath into