Shopping for a Billionaire 1 (4 page)

“Nice guard cat,” my mom says. She holds her purse over her shoulder and keys in her hand. “Before you ask,” she adds as I press my palm over my heart, willing it to stay in place as Chuckles’ death ray of magnetic harm tries to pry it out of me, “Amanda called and told me she couldn’t reach you.”

“I’ve been unavailable by phone for no more than thirty minutes. Thirty minutes! And she sends out the National Guard.”

Mom looks triumphant. Marie Jacoby is what all my friends called a MILFF—Mother I’d Like to Flee From. A little too tan, a little too blond, a lot too judgmental. My mother doesn’t greet you with “Hello.”

“You should” is her salutation of choice.

“You should consider yourself fortunate. Some young girls would be falling all over themselves to have a mother who cares so much,” she grouses.

“First off, I’m not a girl. And second, you’re right. How about I sell you on eBay as mother of the year? You’d fetch a great price.”

One eyebrow shoots up. One perfectly threaded eyebrow, that is. No stray hair can live on Mom’s face. She visits the mall weekly and the women at the threading spa not only know her by name, they know her preferred coffee order from the little espresso place next to the escalator.

She peers intently at me, her eyes that luminous sapphire I still envy. I got dad’s dirt-brown eyes. “You’ve met someone,” she crows, plopping her oversized fake Prada bag on my scarred thrift shop table.

Which means she is here to talk.

“How do you do that?” I screech, channeling the same inner fifteen-year-old she can conjure at will with just two sentences and one knowing look.

Her eyebrow climbs higher. “So I’m right.” She stands and gives my coffee machine an appraising look. It is an espresso machine I’d gotten on a mystery shop for a high-end cookware store. “Make me a coffee and I’ll only ask the basics.”

“Blackmailer,” I mutter, but I know the score. Do this and she’ll leave me alone. Argue and I am in for the full hover-mother treatment that makes the NSA look like
Spy Kids
.

I grab the can of ground espresso out of the cabinet above the sink and she makes a guttural sound of reproach. Ignoring her, I fill the machine and make sure there is enough water. Sometimes, pretending she didn’t make a noise works.

But not this time.

“Look at the food in your cabinets! Coffee. Sugar and sweetener packets. Ketchup and soy sauce packets. Sample-size cookies. Teeny packages of microwave popcorn.”

“I eat a perfectly fine diet, Mom,” I mutter as the machine begins to hiss. Or maybe that’s me. It’s hard to tell.

She waves a perfectly manicured hand dismissively. The nail polish matches a thin line of mauve that runs as a single stripe through her shirt.

“Not for you. For the man you’ll entertain! He can’t see that. That’s not wife and mother material. No woman who makes a good wife keeps a pantry like that!”

“Last week you were Feminist Crusader Mom, telling me how proud you were that I finished my degree and support myself!” This is a well-worn argument. Since she turned fifty a little more than two years ago, and as her friends are all getting to Momzilla their way through their daughters’ weddings, Mom has become zealously devoted to finding me A Man.

Not just any man, though.

A man worthy of a Farmington Country Club wedding.

Mom’s phone rings. “You Sexy Thing” fills the room and Chuckles makes a disapproving sound eerily similar to my mother’s. I seize my chance.

“Gotta wash the toilet water off my arm!” I call back as I pad to the bathroom and turn on the shower, drowning out whatever comments she peppers me with. Stripping out of the pajamas I’ve been wearing for far longer than their shelf life feels like shedding a skin.

The tiny, hot pinpricks of escapism give me ten minutes to cleanse myself and to think. Or not think. Mom chats on the other side of the bathroom door, blissfully unaware that I am not listening. Or commenting. Or responding in any way, shape, or form.

That doesn’t stop her.

I turn off the shower spray and hear her shout, “And so that’s how Janice’s daughter found out her and her husband’s toothbrushes had been shoved up the robbers’ butts.”

Whoa. As I towel off, my reflection opens its mouth and closes it a few times, wondering how I am expected to respond to that.

Some things are best left to the unknown.

As I open the door, a plume of steam hits Mom. “My hair! My hair!” she shouts. I inherited her limp hair and Dad’s eyes, which is so totally backwards. Dad has lush hair that my sister, Amy, got—perfect spiral curls that rest elegantly in auburn tendrils against her back. And Mom has those blue eyes.

I look in the mirror and Declan’s name runs through my mind, planted there by my subconscious. If I say a word about him to Mom then she’ll be planning the wedding and have him in a headlock, demanding a two-carat ring before he can say “Hello.”

I walk into my bedroom wearing a towel, and stop short. Clothes are laid out on my bed for me.

“What am I? Four?” I mumble. Then I grudgingly put them on, because Mom does have good taste. The adobe shirt she pairs with navy pants and a scarf I never use looks more stylish than I want to admit.

“I can color code your wardrobe for you, Shannon,” she shouts from the hallway as I dress.

“You should start a clothing line. Garanimals for Adults. It would be very popular!”

She takes my comment at face value. “What a great idea! I’ll ask Amy what she thinks. Maybe we can do one of those crowd-funding things to raise money for it like Amy does.”

Amy is an intern at a venture capital company.
So
not the same thing as Kickstarter or Indiegogo. I don’t correct Mom, because it’s about as useful as correcting Vladimir Putin about the Ukrainian/Russian border.

“Who was on the phone?” I ask.

“Amanda. She wants you to call her. What’s wrong with your phone?”

“I dropped it in a toilet on a shop this morning.”

Mom’s face freezes in an outrageous O. “You didn’t…
retrieve
it?” The only thing Mom fears more than never marrying off a kid at the Farmington Country Club is germs.

“I stuck my hand in the toilet in the men’s room and saved it, even as I flushed!” I say with glee.

She glares at me. Chuckles leaves the room, clearly outclassed. “Men’s room?”

I smile. “Where do you think I’m meeting men?”

“Oh, Shannon,” she groans, reaching for the espresso I made for her before the shower. It’s likely tepid by now, but that’s how she likes it. “Have you become so desperate?”

“I know the men’s room is a bit—“

“No—the men’s room is ingenious, actually. No competition, except with the gay ones.” She drinks the entire espresso in one gulp and slams the cup down like it’s a shot competition during Spring Break in New Orleans. “I mean, really? On a
mystery shop
?” She says the last two words like Gwyneth Paltrow says the word
divorce
.

“So let me understand, Mom. Trolling the men’s room is a clever way to meet a man, but doing so during a mystery shop is debasing?” She quickly pulls my unruly hair into an updo and bobbypins appear in her mouth like she had them shoved up her nose the entire time, waiting for the perfect moment to correct my hairstyle.

“It’s just…” She sniffs. “What kind of man will you meet at a burger joint? Or a car wash? Getting your oil changed or buying a bagel sandwich?” Her face perks up. “Is there an elite level of mystery shopping? Who are the secret shoppers for Neiman Marcus, or the Omni Parker House? What about Tiffany’s?” Her eyes glitter. “Now that would be one way to meet the right kind of man.”

“The right kind of man.” I can’t keep the disdain out of my voice, but an image of Declan flashes through my mind. That smile.

“You won’t meet him on your eighth bagel sandwich dressed like a college student on the fourth day of exams with a bad case of lice,” she adds.

“I don’t have lice!”

“Well, honey, you looked like it.”

“Mom.” I steel myself. “This has been great. Really. But I have to go.” I grab my purse and throw a few cups of white rice in a baggie, then shove my phone in it. “But I need to get to work.”

“We need to talk, Shannon—”

“Bye! And change Chuckles’ litter box for me, would you? He looks like he’s about to go in the zen rock garden.”

And with that, I run down every one of those twenty-seven steps, grateful for my escape.

Chapter Five

The drive to the office gives my body a chance to settle in to the day. Awake since four a.m., it is screaming for some kind of break.

Or maybe that is my inner thighs. They begin to spasm and ache, and not in that stretchy-groany kind of way after a long weekend of incredible sex.

Squatting on the toilet has, apparently, led to a fair amount of injury. Great. Add this to the growing list of occupational hazards.

If only Declan had been responsible for this burning ache in a decidedly more delicious way. Daydreaming never hurt anyone, right? I let my mind wander, wondering what he looks like out of that suit. In bed. Under bright white sheets on a crisp spring day, windows open and gauzy curtains billowing with the breeze, the air infused with the scent of sensual time.

Would he be a patient lover, taking every curve and valley of my body with a slow touch that built to a crescendo? Or an intense, no-holds-barred bedmate, with fevered kisses and unrestrained hands that need and knead, fusing us together in sweaty promises of nothing but oblivion?

A new kind of ache emerges between my thighs, and it’s closer to the kind I wish I’d had with him.

For the first time since our meeting a few hours ago, I let myself laugh. Really giggle, with belly moving, abs engaged, and chest whooping with the craziness of it all. Was he laughing, too? I feel a blend of incredulity and shame inside me, too, but there’s a lot more amusement. Never one to shy away from self-effacing humor, this event will be reshaped and I’ll retell it to my friends, crafted in a way that makes everyone think,
That silly Shannon.

Is Declan even thinking about me at all? The laughter dies inside fast. Maybe I’m just some whacko woman he humored as he now tells scathingly nasty stories to his work buddies about the chubby chick he found squatting on the men’s room toilet, fishing her phone out.

Am I the butt of jokes? Does he describe me with vicious derision, using me as a quick one-off story, the office equivalent of a viral BuzzFeed link that makes people pause, point and laugh, and move on?

A lump in my throat tells me I care way too much about what he thinks. Why am I fantasizing about a guy who trapped me in a toilet stall while I was on a mystery shop?

Because you’re that desperate
, my mother’s voice hisses in my head.

I throw an imaginary cat at her.

The company I work for, Consolidated Evalu-shop, Incorporated, is in a building as nondescript as the business’s name. If boring had a name, it would be Consolidated Evalu-shop. The building is made of block concrete. The interior steps are concrete as well. No carpeting anywhere, leaving the hallways to echo. If Stalin’s army had designed an office building, this is what it would look like.

Fortunately, our actual office has carpet. Cheap industrial carpet that is about as thick as a gambler’s wallet the day after payday, but it’s carpet. It pads our feet and keeps the floor warm. I open the main door and walk into the office. There is a reception area the size of two or three graves shoved together without any chairs, and then to the right a long hallway, with three offices on either side. At the end of the hall is something the owner, Greg, calls a “kitchen” but I call it a supply closet with a sink in it.

Want coffee? Get it from the donut shop next door. Same if you need to respond to nature’s call. Greg doesn’t provide fancy fringe benefits like bathrooms, microwaves, coffee machines, or even pens. He uses the freebies he gets at the bazillion marketing conventions he attends (on the company dime, of course).

To be fair, we get plenty of freebies in this line of work, too. You go to enough mystery shops at banks and open a new account, you get to keep your free pens, notepads, water bottles, can cozies, toasters, smartphone cases, and other assorted swag that you receive.

Greg is super-cheap about outfitting the office, but he doesn’t skimp on health insurance. I might make slightly more than a full-time assistant manager at the Gap, but I have one hundred percent employer-paid health insurance, so I’m not complaining.

Plus, he pays mileage for all our driving. Which adds up, fast. You drive a piece of junk like I do and you need the fifty-five cents for each mile to feed the hamsters that keep it going.

“Oooh, someone got lucky last night. You’re walking like a woman who got what she needed and then some,” Josh says, winking as I limp into the office. Josh is the company tech expert, which means we all think he’s a little bit shaman, a little bit magician, and mostly a nerd.

My glare should make him spontaneously combust, or at least turn into a hedgehog with a profound case of psoriasis, but no such luck. “Not even close. I hurt my inner thighs sitting on the toilet this morning.”

His eyebrows shoot up and disappear into his disappearing hairline. “You need more fiber.”

“I need a lot of things, Josh.” Limp. Limp. I feel like I’ve been riding a Shetland pony for three days. At least I don’t have saddle sores. But Josh’s original idea, of having a man do this to me in bed…Mr. Sexy Suit comes to mind. Not the pompous ass who made me flush my own hand and cell phone, but the one I turned into Mr. Dreamy before The Great Toilet Fiasco of 2014.

I have the second door on the left, sandwiched between Josh and Amanda. My office smells like pine and vinegar, which means it must be Thursday. The cleaning crew came through the night before. I hang up my purse, pull out the baggie with rice and my phone in it and put it in my windowsill to bake in the sun, and flip my computer on.

Amanda’s left a note on my desk:
Leave it for two days in a baggie full of rice. If it doesn’t work, we’ll get you a new one. Greg won’t be happy, but too bad. Hope your hand doesn’t fall off from germs.