A Long Hot Christmas. Barbara Daly

not! Hope got up, too. “First I really do insist on having an—”

      “—estimate. Budget.” Maybelle sighed. “Honest to gosh, if you yuppies could get your minds off money for a split second…”

      She was moving rapidly toward the door with Hope in her wake. “…and credentials,” Hope said firmly. “Was the correspondence course the end of your professional training?”

      Maybelle spun. “Lands no! I spent two years in Chiner and Jap-pan learning everything they had to teach me, then I come up here and got me the kind of degree you young folks understand. The Parsons School of Design. So don’t you worry none about my credentials.”

      “Well. Okay, here’s a key.” The voice that uttered those utterly reckless words was strange, yet familiar. It was her own voice. That’s why she recognized it.

      Hope promised herself she’d call the insurance company first thing in the morning. Have an art appraiser out. Determine the current value of the African head and the glass bowl. Adjust the insurance accordingly. And when this nonsense was over, she’d hire a proper Manhattan decorating firm to undo the damage.

      She would never see Sheila again.

      And tomorrow night she was going out with Sam Sharkey.

      A little thrill shot straight down through the center of her body just thinking about it.

      SAM GUESSED he’d been looking for a brown-haired woman with green eyes and a face to match.

      As he stepped out of the luxurious Lincoln he’d hired for the evening, he scanned the crowd surging through the doors of the office building into the blustery wind of December and didn’t find anyone who fit that description. The woman who waved and stepped briskly toward the limo was something else again.

      “Hope?”

      She smiled. “Am I late?”

      “Right on time.”

      First thing, her face wasn’t green. Of course he hadn’t really expected it to be. He wasn’t prepared, though, for creamy skin or full, glistening lips, for the even thicker, darker lashes that framed her eyes—still green, thank God. And her hair. Why had he thought it was brown? Must have been wet. This woman had hair the color of copper pipe.

      Maybe she’d dyed it to match her product.

      Under a thick, soft-looking cape, she was wearing a tuxedo. So was he, but the only similarity was their satin lapels. Hers had a short skirt, for one thing, and some kind of low-necked black-lace top under the jacket instead of a white shirt and bow tie. And the jacket poofed out at the top and in at the waist in a way that almost made him forget the reason she was with him in the first place.

      For a second he felt like somebody had gut-punched him.

      He slid into the car first and let the driver help Hope in beside him. He helped her shrug off the cape—cashmere, by its feel—and pretty soon she was showing him a pair of long, long legs with smooth, slender knees in sheer black stockings. Something bubbled up inside him that was supposed to simmer, covered, for another five years or so, until he really got his feet on the legal ground.

      The next thing she was showing him was a laptop. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said, perching it carefully on top of those pretty knees. “I was into something important when I realized it was time to change jackets.”

      “Be my—” he paused to clear his throat “—guest. I brought work along, too.”

      Even before he got to that last line he was looking at her profile, at a big emerald earring on a really cute ear that had a thick bunch of shiny hair tucked behind it, at slim hands with long fingernails painted a sort of ginger-peachy color that matched her lipstick, fingernails that went tap-tap, tap-tap-tap on the computer keys.

      Wondering if this had been a really bad idea instead of a really inspired one, Sam reached down for his briefcase.

      For a time they rode—sat absolutely still, rather, in the crosstown traffic—in silence except for her taps and the rustle of the brief he was scanning.

      Hope knew it was a brief because she’d let her gaze stray once too often in his direction, sweep up and down the considerable length of him. Lord help her, he was glorious in black tie! Black tux, onyx studs in the buttonholes of a dazzling white shirt, black hair, black lashes…she wouldn’t mind having a brief of her own to fan herself with.

      She’d set up her laptop at once in order to have something to focus on besides him, but she wasn’t getting a lot done. For one thing, she was concentrating on hitting the laptop keys with the pads of her fingers, not her nails. Clear polish was definitely the way to go, and that’s the way she usually went, but for some reason she’d wanted to look especially, well, pretty tonight.

      But only because she wanted to be sure she left the right impression with the boss’s wife. Lick your lower lip at somebody else. He’s mine!

      “How do you want me to act tonight?” she said. She’d been thinking about it, but she hadn’t meant to say it aloud.

      “Oh, I don’t know.” Sam rolled the brief a little in his hands and frowned. “Like a girlfriend, I guess.”

      Wonder how a girlfriend acts. I haven’t been one since… She couldn’t remember since when. That was pathetic. Her sophomore year in college, she thought, when she’d dated a pimply philosopher.

      “Like…smile up at you, and…”

      “We should use terms of endearment,” Sam said. “You know, ‘Sam, darling, would you fetch me one of those adorable caviar canapés.’ That kind of thing.”

      “I take it I can put ‘that kind of thing’ in my own words,” she said, giving him a sidelong glance.

      “Whatever makes you comfortable.”

      Comfortable? She was already not comfortable and she hadn’t even begun acting yet. “We shouldn’t try to pretend we’ve been together a long time,” she said to get back on track. “I’m popping up for the first time, and these people know you. You’d have said something about having a girlfriend.”

      The thoughtful look that crossed his face told her that maybe he would’ve, maybe he wouldn’t. What he said was, “Could we claim love at first sight?”

      “What about—” she did little quotation marks with her fingers “—fourth or fifth date, but we feel this really strong attraction?”

      He nodded. “That’s the attitude. The overdone ‘how can I make you happy’ stuff, like ‘are you cold, here’s your cape, are you hot, let’s go out on the balcony, are you thirsty, I’ll get you a drink.’”

      “Very good,” Hope said. “Then we do the sudden looks of appreciation at discovering something new about each other we’d never known before, like ‘you sail? Oh, my goodness gracious! I simply lo-ve sailing.’”

      “That’d be you,” he said, looking uncertain for the first time, “saying ‘my goodness gracious, I simply lo-ve…”’

      “Probably not,” said Hope. “But better me than you, now that I think of it. Incidentally, is there something you do that I should know about?”

      “I work.”

      “Well, yes, but…”

      “That’s it. I work. Just say ‘he works.’ Anybody you’re talking to will know we’re well-acquainted.”

      There was a faint bitterness in his tone, or had she imagined it. Must have, because almost immediately he turned to her with a quick, flashing grin. “Then there’s the ‘isn’t she wonderful’ face,” he said. “For me, that’d be a sappy smile.” He demonstrated.

      “Yuck. You look like a lovesick gander. For me,” she said, “it would be a sort of parted lips, widened eyes kind of thing.” She demonstrated,