Shop and Let Die (10 page)

“
Of course not. Just feels
a bit weird. Dating upstairs in my office while you’re downstairs
watching sitcoms.”

He thought about it for a
moment, but then shook his head. “No thanks. I’d rather have the
sitcom. Online dating is pathetic.” He grinned at me, his eyes
lighting up with a mischievous look. “Why don’t you tell them to do
it the right way — meet in a bar — like us?”

“
Pathetic’s a bit harsh.
Not everyone likes the bar scene. We didn’t. We just got lucky.”
Memory is a tricky thing. Standing there in the kitchen, I had a
flash of the feeling that had swamped me when he’d walked up to me
the very first time — right before he offered to buy me a drink and
handed me his cheesy pickup line.

He’d had the softest,
sexiest lips I’d ever seen. Nice eyes, too. I hadn’t gone
barhopping ever again. As far as I know, neither had he.

He smiled again, and the
hazy unfocused look in his eyes told me he was remembering, too.
“Lucky happens easier in bars, though.”

“
If they were offering me
two hundred dollars to go barhopping, would you rather I did
that?”

“
If you could take a
guest.” He laughed. “You check out the guys, I check out the women.
Besides, there isn’t a barhopping serial killer out there, only a
mall serial killer.”

My temper was heating up
to a steady simmer. Why wasn’t he even a little bit jealous? But I
had work to do, so I turned off the heat. “Okay, you watch your
sitcoms, I’ll face the pathetic online dating millionaires
alone.”

“
Millionaires?”

“
I told you, it is
an
exclusive
site.”

“
Hmmm.” Money is his
weakness—not that he makes a ton of it himself, but he’d like to
dream of it. “Okay. I wouldn’t want to leave you alone against the
millionaires.”

At last, the green-eyed
monster reared its head. All it took was the idea of me playing in
a pool of guys with lots of dollar signs in their bank
account.

Somehow, it made me feel
just a little sexier than usual. Who knew? Sue and MysteryK79 were
right. “Great. You help Ryan with his math and make sure Anna takes
a bath while I’m at the PTA meeting, and we can launch the
beginning of our profitably kinky lifestyle when I get back, at
nine-thirty sharp.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Dating for Two

The kids were asleep by the time I got home from the PTA
meeting. Seth sat in the dark, grading papers and watching TV. The
light shifted over him, making him suddenly look 20, and then
suddenly 60. It was eerie. I snapped on the lights.

He blinked. “You’re back
late. Good meeting?”

“
Bianca was in prime
dictatorial form, tonight,” I complained.

“
What did she do this
time? Make you sharpen all the pencils again?”

“
No. She decreed that we
needed to meet every week until the May fair has been pulled off
without a hitch.”

“
Every week?” Even Seth
understood what this meant — more daddy-in-charge duty. “You should
tell her you can’t do that. You have a family.”

“
Everyone there has a
family. That’s why we’re there,” I scoffed. “Even Norma, who is
never intimidated, didn’t dare to object.” I shrugged. “The fair is
our biggest fundraiser of the year. If it doesn’t do well, we don’t
have money to pay speakers, or hold the fall dance.”

“
If you get a real job,
you’d have a reason to quit.”

“
I can’t tell you how
tempting that sounds at this moment. Especially since Bianca then
proceeded to tell us all that she’d be taking two weeks in Paris
with her husband.” Not that I’d quit PTA if I could help it. How
else would I know what was happening at the school? But I didn’t
think I could ever explain it well enough for Seth to understand,
so I shifted gears and changed the subject. “Are you ready to go on
our date?”

He glanced at the TV.
“It’s late.”

“
It is.” I was suddenly as
nervous as I’d been on our first date. “If you want to bail on me,
I understand.”

He shook his head and
turned off the TV. “No way. We have few enough date nights. I’m in.
Bring on the millionaires.”

My office is not large, so
I convinced Seth that we should use his laptop and set up in the
living room. I managed to make it sound romantic and cozy, so I
don’t think he picked up on my reluctance to have him invade my
office. As a rule, there’s always a pile of books, printer paper,
or something blocking the floor and/or the door, so he rarely does
more than poke his head in and ask if I’m checking my
email.

Still, I don’t like him in
there, looking over my shoulder, judging my every move. He says he
doesn’t. But I know the look in his eye well enough to know that’s
just a polite lie.

In the olden days, before
there were computers, Seth would be the kind of husband who assumed
his wife ate bonbons and watched soap operas all day long. Now he
assumes I do email and play online games all day long—despite the
fact that I do a minimum of four to six mystery shops a week, shop
and cook and…semi…clean for our family. Not to mention carting the
kids to school, lessons, and appointments.

I set up a place for us to
work and poured two glasses of merlot. Seth preferred white wine,
but I decided red wine set a richer mood when one dealt with
millionaires—besides I opened the merlot for dinner to go with the
meatloaf and we needed to finish the bottle before it went
off.

“
You’ve turned the lights
down.” Seth came in with his laptop, his baby, cradled in his arms
and eyed the wine glasses as if they were enemies on the
field.

“
It seems appropriate to
be romantic on a night like this—when we take our first step into
the world of soft porn.”

“
Do you find this sexy?”
He sat beside me heavily, flipped open his laptop and set it
whirring as it booted up. He frowned when I reached for the laptop.
“Maybe I should do the typing,” he said.

I said, “No
misspellings?”

He relinquished control.
Ryan’s dyslexia comes from his side of the family. Seth can read
well, but he can’t spell. Even computer spellcheck can’t always
figure out what he’s trying to type.

“
Don’t worry,” I reassured
him in my softest, sexiest voice, “I’ll be gentle.” His eyes
sparked to warmth, reminding me of that long ago moment when we
first met and the world changed forever.

I logged in to my shop
assignment details and retrieved the picture of Serena that we were
to use.

“
Wow, we are one hot babe.
Are we sure we’re not a ringer out to inveigle some unsuspecting
millionaire out of his hard earned money?”

“
Of course not—we are a
professional lawyer who just uses all the weapons in her arsenal
well.” Including the pair of double D’s and the long silky blonde
hair.

We plugged in the picture
and the vital stats on Serena—38, never married, good health,
healthy portfolio, and the name of the three people she’d needed to
recommend her to the exclusive site.

When I hit the submit
button, the wait button appeared—a very attractive wait button,
edged in gold and spinning three dimensionally.

“
Think they’re on to us?”
Seth stood up to peek out the window. “I don’t see any lights or
hear sirens.”

“
We’re following the
directions exactly. They’re not going to be on to us.” But I knew
how he felt—antsy and somehow as if we were doing something
illegal, or shady. It was incredibly exciting, which made me
realize just how boring my real life had become.

The next phase of the
application popped up on the screen—I breathed a secret sigh of
relief that our false data had passed muster. “Oh look, this seems
like a psych test.”

“
A psych test for
millionaires? What does it ask—How many illegal aliens have you
personally stuffed into a closet to avoid INS? How much of your
money is hidden overseas?”

He sat down beside me and
I pulled up the answers Serena needed to provide.

Seth said—“Wait, let’s see
how well we match the profile on our own.”

“
If I don’t do this
according to the instructions, we won’t get paid, dahling,” I said
with a faux cultured accent.

“
That’s no
fun.”

“
Open up a separate file
and put our answers in it.” I suggested. “One for me and one for
you. That way we can compare ourselves to Serena and still get
paid.”

He grinned, his eyes
lighting up at the new twist on the game. “You think like a
millionaire, my love.”

“
I think like a woman who
likes to be paid for her work, and have a little fun.”

“
Could have fooled me.” I
ignored his purportedly lighthearted words. He was right. I could
plan fun for the family, but I couldn’t really have fun. Not
anymore. There was just too much to do, all the time, and no way to
ever get — or even feel — caught up.

I wanted to say something,
to ask him to help me find a way off the speeding Supermom train,
but there was no time. We were logged in. We were on the clock. I
needed to get the application in by a deadline of midnight
tonight.

I wondered if I was making
a mistake asking Seth to share the adventure. Maybe I’d have been
better off simply turning the assignment down and being condemned
to $10 fast food shops for the rest of my natural life…or until I
caved and got the “real” job Seth wanted me to get.

I took a deep breath. Fun.
We were supposed to have fun. We were going to have fun. I waved
the papers I had printed upstairs in my office under his nose.
“Remember, I am not me tonight and you are not you. We are the
mysterious Serena and we are looking for a man who will be able to
match our prodigious income and handle our independent and somewhat
autonomous lifestyle.”

“
She works?”

“
We
work.” I can feel myself going into mystery shopper mode,
putting on the persona I need to wear to do the job right. I take a
deep breath, and focus on the idea of having fun with this
assignment.

Seth sensed my shift in
mood, and played along. “What do
we
do?”

I consulted the papers.
“We are a lawyer at a top NY firm.”

“
Don’t we hate the
traffic?”

“
Absolutely.” I think for
a moment. What would I, Molly, do, if I, Molly, were a millionaire
lawyer at a top NY firm? “We can afford cabs. Maybe even
limos.”

I thumbed through the
papers. “Doesn’t say here, but I think we have our own driver. All
those highly billable hours, wouldn’t want to waste them in cabs or
on the subway.”

Seth nods approvingly.
“True. The office in the back of our limo is a great place to make
our commuting time productive. Waste not, want not, our father
said.”

“
Our mother,” I correct.
“Our father was too busy working sixteen hours a day to tell us
much of anything.”

Seth doesn’t like that
plot twist, so he adds another. “At least he wasn’t out spending
all the hard earned money like our mother.”

He was smiling, as if he
thought he’d made a joke. But his little passive aggressive dig at
my lack of steady income stole a little of the fun from our
game.

I could have been
forthright and had a fight with him—but I had a job to do, so I
settled for a passive aggressive dig of my own. “At least he made
enough so that all her spending made them a very comfortable
home—until the divorce.”

He leaned back a little,
acknowledging my anger with his body, but avoiding any need to
apologize by getting back into the game and speaking in the high
culture accent of a 1940s black and white movie blue blood, “Which
is why we’ve come to this dating service. Don’t want to waste
twenty years in a dead-end marriage like our parents did. So we’re
paying the best to find the best—for us. Waste not, want
not.”

I imitated a high society
Katherine Hepburn, my favorite old-time movie actress. “Should that
be our motto, then dahling?”

He lifted his chin and
countered, “Mottos are too plebian, don’t you agree?” His leg
pressed against mine, and one hand came to rest on my
hip.

I leaned my head on his
shoulder and we both stared at the screen.
“Indubitably.”

We sounded like idiots
speaking in the fashion we had seen veddy wealthy people speak in
old Hollywood movies, the ultimate unreality. I bet rich people
have to put their pants on one leg at a time, just like we do. They
just have nicer pants.

But Sue had been right. It
was fun to pretend I was online millionaire date material, with my
husband and a bottle of merlot sitting beside me.

The sexy glow lingered a little the next day. I couldn’t wait
to tell my friends Sophie and Celeste. They were local Secret
Shopper Sisters and we’d taken to inviting each other on lunch
shops when we could. It made things more interesting.