Chasing Harry Winston

  “If you wanted him yourself, why did you encourage me to go for him? Just to make an ass of myself?” Mackenzie hissed in Adriana’s direction while staring straight ahead. Both women smiled at the waitress as she placed endive salads before them.

  Adriana sighed and checked to make sure that Dean was engaged in a different conversation before continuing. “I didn’t—don’t—want him myself, querida. I just couldn’t bear to watch that. It just felt so, so…” Adriana tried to think of another, gentler word here, but she already felt so exhausted.

  “So what?” Mackenzie insisted.

  Adriana met her gaze levelly. “So desperate.”

  Mackenzie inhaled sharply and Adriana felt a pang of sympathy before remembering that she was doing Mackenzie a favor. If no one had told her this already, she was pretty much doomed. So she’d hate her. Adriana had bigger things to worry about than yet another woman hating her.

  “It wasn’t desperate,” Mackenzie whispered. “I was just being friendly.”

  Ah, the friendly card. Adriana was instantly transported back to her teenage years, when her mother was trying to teach her these important lessons and Adriana had raised these very same arguments. She almost smiled with the memory.

  “Friendly, outgoing, engaging, charming, whatever you want to call it, it still translates into ‘available and desperate’ when you’re the one who initiates contact.”

  Mackenzie appeared to mull this over, at one point opening her mouth to disagree and then changing her mind. “You think?” she asked finally.

  Adriana nodded. It was boring, it was so obvious. Why didn’t American women understand this? Why weren’t they taught it? The Rules had helped a little but hadn’t done nearly enough; it instructed women how to deny men, but not how seduce them. If she hadn’t actually witnessed it herself over the last ten years, she never would have believed there existed grown women who thought the way to get a man was to chase him. She’d found the exact same thing with her friends—Leigh to a slightly lesser degree because of her more reserved personality, but Emmy had been downright humiliating, initiating conversations, calling first, suggesting plans, and making herself constantly available.

  “So I shouldn’t have introduced myself?”

  “No.” Adriana sipped her wine.

  “Well, how were we going to meet otherwise?”

  Adriana looked at her and tried not to get frustrated; she had to remember it wasn’t really Mackenzie’s fault. “You would have met, probably within minutes, when he had introduced himself to you.”

  “Oh, please! What’s the actual difference who—”

  Adriana continued as though she’d heard nothing. “At which point you would have rewarded his politeness with a smile and some smoldering eyes, and then you would have promptly dodged any of his direct questions, turned away, and become completely engaged in a conversation that did not include him.”

  “Even if—”

  “Even if he was midsentence, even if he asked you a question, even if he seemed smitten with you. Especially if he seemed smitten with you. The only time it’s acceptable to continue is if he’s ugly, because, well, we’re not really concerned with the outcome then, are we?”

  Mackenzie nodded, seeming more entranced with Adriana than annoyed by her slightly patronizing tone. This was so basic it was elementary; how had this otherwise attractive, successful woman missed it?

  “So basically what you’re saying is that we should all be living embodiments of The Rules? Which, in my opinion, is totally unrealistic.”

  “I agree,” Adriana said. “It is totally unrealistic. The Rules is a good place to start, for teenagers. But it’s nothing for grown women. I mean, any book that addresses sex only as something you should avoid or withhold is not remotely relevant.”

  Adriana was pleased that Mackenzie appeared transfixed. She continued, “Because really, what’s the point of men in the first place if you can’t properly enjoy them?”

  Mackenzie kept vehemently nodding her head in agreement, so Adriana kept talking. It had been a while since she’d done something out of the goodness of her heart for someone else; it was time she imparted some of her lessons to someone less fortunate.

  “It’s a complete myth that once a man has sex with you he’ll lose interest. In fact, it should be just the opposite: If you’re doing your job well, it will make him want you more. It’s all about finding the balance of mysterious and unavailable and challenging with sensual and seductive and sexy. You make them work for it—not just the first time, but again and again and again—and they’ll love you forever.”

  “You sound so sure….” Mackenzie’s voice trailed off, but Adriana could tell she was a believer.

  “I am so sure. I’m Brazilian. We know men and we know sex.”

  Adriana began to eat her salad while Mackenzie stared at her. In almost the same moment, Adriana could see the gorgeous guy wrap up his conversation and turn to Mackenzie. “Excuse me?” he asked.

  Mackenzie paused for a moment before turning to him and offering him a radiant smile. “Yes?”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t properly introduce myself. My name is Jack. It’s nice to meet you.”

  Like a pro, Mackenzie peered at him for just long enough before offering another smile—only this one was slightly more teasing, with pursed, just-licked lips. “It’s lovely to meet you, Jack,” Mackenzie purred.

  “So, how do you know Catherine?” he asked.

  “Oh, who doesn’t know Catherine?” She laughed confidently and turned her back to him. “Adriana, honey, you were just telling the most amusing story about that shopping disaster last week. Will you finish it for me? Please?”

  Good god, Adriana thought, the woman is a natural. Adriana played along and crafted some fictional anecdote for the sake of conversation, just long enough for Jack to excuse himself and use the men’s room.

  “You were perfect,” Adriana declared the moment he stood up.

  “Really? I feel like I offended him. I was so rude that he left!”

  “Absolutely perfect. You didn’t offend him, and you weren’t rude—you were mysterious. Keep it up for the remainder of the evening and he’ll go home with you tonight. Give a little, and then ignore. Flirt, then withhold. He’ll go crazy trying to pin you down.”

  And sure enough, when Jack returned, he spent the duration of dinner, all of dessert, and a solid hour of postdinner drinks trying to keep Mackenzie’s wandering attention. The man was working, and Mackenzie clearly loved every minute of it. Adriana could see her confidence increasing with every passing flirtation, and she congratulated herself on a job well done. It was delightful to watch, especially since she was occupied enacting the advanced moves of what she’d just taught Mackenzie, trying to juggle with alternating cold shoulders and batted eyelashes two very different men of her own.

  A little after midnight, Toby finally agreed they could leave. Dean had ducked out a bit earlier with profuse apologies that he had to get to a friend’s party he simply couldn’t miss (damn him!), Mackenzie was now feigning disinterest in Jack on a love seat in a dark corner, and Adriana was, once again, supremely bored. She’d already tried every trick in the book to get Toby to take her dancing, but he would have none of it. He was exhausted from the work and the travel; he was going directly back to the hotel, and he expected his girlfriend to join him.

  Toby chattered on about something as he helped Adriana into her coat, but it wasn’t hard to block him out. What proved more difficult was remembering that she was only thirty—a mere girl, practically!—and not the fifty-year-old woman she felt like. At least the night wasn’t a total loss; it looked like Mackenzie, all touchy and laughing with Jack, was a changed woman. Adriana waited to catch her eye and offered a little wave good-bye.

  Mackenzie motioned for her to wait a minute and, like a consummate professional, lightly grazed Jack’s lips with her fingertip and sashayed away from him, toward Adriana.

  “You’re leaving alrea
dy?” Mackenzie asked, glancing at Adriana’s coat.

  “It’s after midnight. I’m beat,” Adriana lied. Not beat, just bored, she thought. “But it looks like you’re doing great work.”

  “You. Are. A. Goddess!” Mackenzie whispered, leaning in and clutching Adriana’s arm. “He’s already invited me back to his place for a drink. I told him I’d think about it.”

  Adriana was impressed. Nothing worked more efficiently than a maybe. It wasn’t a flat-out rejection, but it definitely sent the message that he’d have to work a little harder.

  “Just remember, if you sleep with him, no staying over. I don’t care if it’s five in the morning; you have to be the one to get up and out. Stay as long as you’re having sex. The moment it’s time for sleep, you’re out of there,” Adriana advised her new pupil and tried not to think about how much she sounded like her mother.

  Mackenzie nodded, hanging on every word. “What if he—”

  “There are no exceptions.”

  Another nod.

  “Enjoy!” Adriana trilled. She gave Toby’s hand a little tug to pull him away from the circle of people who had entrapped him. “Honey, we really should be going….”

  “Oh, and one more thing,” Mackenzie whispered. “I want to pitch a story idea to you, as the focus for our next issue. I’m not sure what the angle would be yet, but you have an absolute gift and I think our readers would love to know about it.”

  Well. This was an interesting—and unexpected—development. Adriana was accustomed to being solicited for her picture by random tourists who thought her exotically gorgeous, and tonight wasn’t the first time a magazine editor had deemed her beautiful enough to be included in an issue. But a story focusing on her innate abilities with men and her talent for teaching other women how to snare them? That didn’t happen every day.

  She feigned indifference even though her voice shook slightly from the excitement of it all. “Oh, well, that might be nice,” she said blandly.

  “Oh, I do hope you’ll think about it and agree. I can see a double-page spread with a full interview and lots of gorgeous glossy pictures. We’ll make it phenomenal, I promise,” Mackenzie gushed. She hadn’t seemed like a gusher earlier in the evening, but then again, she hadn’t seemed like someone who could snag a guy so expertly, either.

  It was all Adriana could do not to shriek with joy. “Well, um, Catherine knows how to reach me—or, at least, how to reach Toby—so that’s probably the best way….”

  But Mackenzie had already started back toward Jack. “I’ll call you next week! Great to meet you. And thanks…for everything.” She waved and continued her sashay back to the darkened love seat.

  “I hope you had a nice time, sweetheart?” Toby asked as he hailed a cab outside the building.

  “It was so much more than nice, Toby. I had a wonderful time,” Adriana said with more honesty than she’d thought possible before Mackenzie’s idea. “An amazing, splendid, wonderful time.”

  The knock woke Leigh out of a deep sleep, something she rarely achieved at night, never mind in the middle of the afternoon when she hadn’t even intended to fall asleep. There was something about the air or the water out here, something she needed to bottle: Every time her little rental car pulled into Sag Harbor, her whole body went slack with relaxation.

  “Come in,” she called after a quick check to make sure she was clothed and not covered in drool. She was shocked to see that it was already dark outside.

  Jesse opened the door and peeked just his head inside. “Did I wake you? Sorry, I figured you were hard at work twenty-four hours a day.”

  Leigh snorted. “Uh-huh. I’m learning firsthand that having two Bloody Marys before lunch isn’t all that conducive to productivity.”

  “True enough. But how good do you feel?”

  “Pretty good,” she admitted. Despite the bits and pieces of her dream that were flashing back to her—something to do with walking down the aisle naked and shivering—she still felt rested and peaceful.

  “Wait just a minute,” Jesse said as he crossed the room in three quick strides. He sat on the edge of the bed where Leigh sat fully dressed bolstered by half a dozen pillows, on top of the quilt. “What do I see here?”

  Leigh followed his eyes to the paperback that was spread open across her stomach. It sported a baby blue cover with a picture of a prettily wrapped gift and was a sequel to Something Borrowed, a book she’d just finished and loved.

  “This?” she asked, folding down a page and handing it to him. “It’s called Something Blue. The first one was about a girl who falls in love with her best friend’s fiancé and doesn’t know what to do. Well, they end up together, and now in this one, we see the story from the perspective of the best friend who lost her fiancé. Not that she’s so innocent, either, because she slept with one of her ex-fiancé’s groomsmen.”

  Jesse read the back cover while shaking his head. “Incredible,” he murmured.

  “What?”

  “The fact that you read this.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Oh, come on, Leigh. You don’t think it’s amusing that little Ms. Cornell-English-major-I-only-edit-serious-works-of-literature is reading Something Blue in her free time?”

  Leigh snatched the book back and pressed it against her chest. “It’s really good,” she said with a frown.

  “I’m sure it is.”

  Leigh wanted to say that, at least as of this moment, Something Blue was far better written than the latest draft of Jesse’s novel. That it had a sensible structure and coherent language. That maybe it wasn’t exploring too many lofty intellectual themes, but so what? It was witty, clever, and fun to read—something Mr. Literary Hotshot could use in triplicate right about now.

  But of course Leigh didn’t say any of this. She merely said, “I’m not going to defend my pleasure-reading choices to you.”

  Jesse held up his hands in surrender. “Fair enough. But you do realize that this changes everything, don’t you? I now have actual proof that the work-Nazi editor is actually a human being.”

  “Just because I read chick lit?”

  “You got it. How tough can someone be if they read and relate to Bridget Jones’s Diary?”

  Leigh sighed. “I loved that book.”

  Jesse smiled. “What was that other one…The Nanny Diaries?”

  “A definite classic.”

  “Mmm,” Jesse murmured, and Leigh could tell he was rapidly losing interest. She knew his gestures now, his expressions, could decode the meaning of a furrowed eyebrow or a half-smile. She’d been to the Hamptons four times in the last three months, and with each meeting things had felt less awkward. The second time she’d again stayed at the American Hotel, although she’d spent barely a handful of hours there—a fact that said a great deal considering the visit took place on a No Human Contact Monday (she waived the rule for one night). On the third and fourth visits she accepted Jesse’s offer to stay in the guesthouse he’d built for his nephews—it was so much more convenient—and it wasn’t until yesterday, on this fifth visit, that Leigh had realized the wisdom of bunking in one of the main house’s upstairs guest rooms. After all, they often worked late into the night, and the walk to the guesthouse was winding and dark.

  It was all very innocent and, to Leigh’s surprise, it felt extremely natural. She was pleased that they were able to work so well together and still maintain professional distance, even if they were sleeping in rather close quarters. Henry hadn’t thought it strange when Leigh mentioned she’d stopped staying at the hotel; he had other editors who traveled to visit authors—some to places more far-flung than the Hamptons—and they often bunked down on the property somewhere. When Leigh had told her father at dinner last week that she’d taken to spending two or three days a week working with Jesse in his home, he’d said something to the effect of “It’s not ideal, but if they won’t come to you, you go to them.” All their blasé attitudes only furthered Leigh’s convict
ion that Russell didn’t need to know.

  “I wondered what you wanted for dinner,” Jesse was saying. “It’s almost six and it’s the off-season, so if we don’t motivate soon, we’re going to be shit out of luck. Do you want to grab a burger somewhere, or should I make something?”

  “By ‘make something’ do you really mean ‘pour cereal in a bowl’? Because if that’s the case, I’d rather a burger.”

  “Ah, sweet Leigh, charming as ever. Is that your way of saying ‘Thanks, Jesse. I’d love a home-cooked meal, I’m just way too difficult a bitch to actually say so’?”

  Leigh laughed. “Yes.”

  “I had a feeling. Okay, then, cooking it is. I’m going to run to Schiavoni’s for some food. Any requests?”

  “Lucky Charms? Or Cinnamon Toast Crunch. With two-percent milk, please.”

  Jesse threw up his hands in mock disgust and left the room. Leigh waited until she heard the front door close and the car start before she picked up her phone.

  Russell answered on the first ring. “Hello?”

  He always pretended he didn’t know it was her, even though he had caller ID like the rest of the civilized world. “Hey,” she said. “It’s me.”

  “Hi, baby, how are you? How’s the lunatic these days? He staying sober enough to get any substantive work done?”

  Russell had taken to putting down Jesse pretty much every chance he got, regardless of how often Leigh reassured him that Jesse was nothing like his reputation, or how many times she told him that he was just another author, alternately confident to the point of arrogance or insecure to the point of debilitation. It didn’t seem to matter, and Leigh figured out the more she defended Jesse, the more it incensed Russell. He was jealous—she certainly would be if he spent so much time with another woman—but she couldn’t bring herself to reassure him. Even if Jesse never mentioned his wife (and Leigh had yet to detect any actual proof of her existence), the fact remained that Jesse was married and Leigh was engaged, and they had developed a nice friendship in addition to their working relationship. A nice platonic friendship—something Russell claimed, much to Leigh’s irritation, was an impossibility between men and women.