Sleeping with Beauty (12 page)

“Come now, darling, we need to start developing your regimen right away.”

Yeah, that’s what worried her. But one ray of hope shone through the new batch of fears threatening to send her into a panic. “Does this mean no appointment with the shrink?”

“That won’t be necessary.”

But before Lucy could complete her
whoosh
ing sigh of relief, Vivian added, “From now on, you’ll be working directly with me.”

Chapter
8
                                                                                                                                       

I
heard from Lucy.”

Grady froze with the pizza halfway to his mouth. “She called you?” It shouldn’t have bothered him. After all, Jana was her best friend. “I thought any contact with the non-Barbie world was verboten.”

“She left a message on my cell yesterday.” Jana wrapped a piece of dangling cheese around her finger, then popped it into her mouth. “SOS call.”

Okay, he was definitely bothered. Jana might be her best friend, the one Lucy turned to for gossip and anything PMS related, but when it came to rescues, that was his job. He bit off the end of his pizza, then grew reflective as he chewed. There was a potential bright side to this. If Lucy was trying to break out after only one day, maybe they could put this whole self-improvement thing behind them and go back to the way things were.

Jana plucked an olive off her pizza and flicked it at him.

“Hey!” He peeled the offensive black ring from his forehead, then tossed it into the almost empty box with a grimace. “Olives, yuck. I can’t believe they got our order wrong. We’ve only been ordering pizza from Brick Oven for how many years now?”

“They didn’t get the order wrong,” Jana said as she chewed.

Grady glanced at her, eyebrows raised. “Since when do you like olives?”

“I have no idea.” She lifted a shoulder in a half shrug. “I just looked at the picture on the coupon and thought it looked good and heard myself order it when the person came on the line.”

Grady just looked at her, but finally shrugged. Women. Sometimes even the ones he knew the best stumped him. “So why the flickage?” He rubbed at the little grease spot on his forehead. “What was that about?”

She polished off the last bit of crust and reached for her Coke. “Perfectly good waste of an olive?”

First the flickage, now evasiveness. He definitely should have stayed in the lab. He wasn’t up to playing Decipher Her Thoughts tonight. But before he could comment, he watched as she reached for her fourth slice. Grinning, he motioned to the cheese-heavy slice she’d already taken a huge bite out of. “What, didn’t they let the girl reporter eat today?”

Jana just sighed in mozzarella bliss as she swallowed. “Reporting is hard work. And the reason for the flickage was that face you made when I mentioned the SOS call.”

“What face?”

Jana pulled a hangdog expression. “That face.”

“I never make that face.”

“No, you’re right. You do it much better than me. More practice.”

“Great, just great. I come over here for Pizza Night, bring you Coke”—he mock shuddered and downed a slug of his beer—“and even paid for the damn pie when you couldn’t find your wallet—”

“I told you, it’s in my car. Must have fallen out of my bag when I got home. I offered to go down and check. I don’t know where my brain is these days.”

Grady waved his hand in a faux magnanimous gesture. “No, no. I don’t mind. And I know exactly where your brain is. All that baby-making with Dave. But now you’re going to flick condiments at me and tell me I look funny. Is that any kind of gratitude for babysitting you through Dave’s layover in Vancouver?”

Jana spluttered, as he’d known she would. “‘Babysitting’? This is Pizza Night. We have them all the time.”

“Except we weren’t going to this week because of Lucy being gone and you and Dave doing—you know.” He covered his eyes. “Visuals of which I really just don’t want to think about, if it’s all right with you.”

“What, did the Blockbuster manager turn you down?”

He peered through his fingers. “She got promoted. Transferred to someplace in Prince Georges.”

“Ah,” Jana said, not looking remotely sorry for his predicament.

Frankly, he hadn’t been that put out, either. He’d hoped to distract himself from the whole Lucy/Barbie makeover thing with an advance screening of something interesting, followed by whatever he could manage afterward. He should have been more disappointed to find out Pam had left the area and not even bothered to let him know. It wasn’t like they were exclusive. Hell, it wasn’t even like they were dating. One date did not a relationship make. “But like I told you before, my social schedule doesn’t hinge on Lucy’s whereabouts.”

“Which is why I called and invited you over for pizza, dummy.” She polished off the last bite. “But let’s not debate who is babysitting whom here.”

Grady let the jab pass, mostly because he realized he was happier here, anyway, despite the lack of sex in his immediate future. He missed Lucy. And though he’d been a bit concerned that Jana might get all weird on him like she had on The Mall the other day, he’d chalked that up to the whole baby thing. He’d been happy to hear from her, and so far, other than killing half a large pie all by herself, she’d been pretty much normal. Until the olive flick. “So, what happened with the SOS?”

“I got an abort-mission text message about an hour later.” Jana slid off the kitchen stool and wiped the grease off her hands with a paper towel. “I don’t know, maybe she panicked or something. I never got to talk to her. I’m guessing she got past whatever it was that spooked her into wanting to leave.”

Grady let that information settle as he finished his last slice and washed it down with the last of his beer. He didn’t like the idea of Lucy being stuck somewhere she didn’t want to be. But maybe it was for the best. Some things she had to figure out for herself. He could only hope that realizing this was all a phenomenal waste of time was one of them. “Wonder what happened,” he said, after promising himself he wouldn’t.

Jana grinned. “I’m guessing she’s past the welcome stage and into the plucking stage. And we both know Lucy’s not big on pain management.”

Grady flinched in automatic sympathy. The idea of having any body hair removed in any manner other than shaving . . .

Jana just laughed. “God, you two are such a pair.”

Grady made big business of cleaning up the empty pizza carton and tossing the empty cans in the recycling bin.
Yeah,
he thought,
we’re a pair, all right.
He just hoped that status remained quo.

O
uch! Shit! Christ!” Lucy all but came off the padded table entirely as the swatch of linen was ripped quite rudely, not to mention abruptly, from her skin. Her very tender skin. The kind of tender skin, she was now quite certain, that was never meant to be abused in this fashion. When she finally blinked away the tears that had sprung instantly to her eyes, she glared at the woman seated at the base of the table.

The woman, whom Lucy had already christened Sadistic Susie and her Wonder Wax of Death, smiled blandly in return. “Relax. You must relax. It will go much easier.”

“‘Relax’?”
She didn’t exactly screech the word, but only because her throat had closed over when Sadistic Sue had lifted another glob. “Are you on crack?” Fighting not to hyperventilate, Lucy immediately craned her head around until she found Vivian, who, true to her pledge, had not left her side since she’d entered this torture chamber. “Is this part really necess—
Holy Mother of God!
” She jerked her thigh away from Susie, who was currently slathering very hot wax on parts of her anatomy that had never been exposed to sunlight, much less a tongue depressor coated in molten lava. “When you said I could have baby-smooth skin, I was thinking more along the lines of softening the skin on my face.”

With a knowing, if not entirely soothing smile, Vivian stepped over and gently pushed her back down on the table. “I know this is difficult the first time. But I assure you, you’ll thank me later.”

And if I don’t?
Lucy grumbled silently. “I find it hard to believe that women actually put themselves through this willingly.
OW!
” She yelped as another strip of wax-coated fabric was stripped from her skin, snatching yet another patch of her privates bald. She covered herself with her hands and glared at Sue yet again, all but daring her to even think about putting hot wax on her skin. “Wait a minute, okay?” She glanced up at Vivian, tears pricking her eyes again. “You know, I don’t have a high threshold for this kind of thing. Actually, I don’t have any threshold. I’m a total wuss with pain. And I don’t really feel the need to overcome that particular fault.” Her neck developed a crick and her glasses were sliding down her nose, but one glance at Sue and her Tongue Depressor of Torture, and she kept her hands right where they were. She shot a hopeful look back at Vivian, tried for a winning smile, but missed it when her lips trembled. “I mean, don’t they make products that just dissolve the hair now? Couldn’t we just do that?”

“It’s not the same thing,” Vivian informed her kindly. “This does a far better job and lasts much longer. Besides, you’re half done. You can’t stop now.”

Lucy removed her hands and hiked herself up on her elbows. Her glasses slid almost completely off, and when she went to push them back up, she almost rolled off the table, and would have if Vivian and Sue hadn’t grabbed an arm and a leg respectively. Blushing sheepishly, she angled herself up, then craned her neck and looked . . . down there. Sue helpfully held up a small hand mirror. Lucy gasped and her eyes went wide. “Wow.”

Vivian’s smile widened. “Exactly, darling.” She stroked Lucy’s hair and settled her back down on the padded table. “The first time is always the worst. It will get easier each time you do it.”

Lucy hated to break it to Vivian, but baby smooth or not, even with a gun pointed to her head, she was never going to do this again. “I still don’t see the benefit. I mean, not when contrasted with the pain,” she added, not wanting Vivian to think her ungrateful for the change. “It’s not like it even matters. I wear a bathing suit a maximum of, like, five days out of a whole year. And that’s just with Jana when we do our girls weekend in Rehoboth. And I’m not even going this year because I came here instead.” She heard Jana’s I-told-you-sos echo clearly through her mind.

“I’m not concerned with making you presentable for bathing-suit season, darling. Think of it this way: one of the benefits of this is rather like that of making sure your man has a really close shave.”

Lucy craned her neck again, hissing in a breath as more hot wax met more fragile virgin skin. Virgin in more ways than one, it seemed. “Huh?”

“Razor burn. Men don’t like it any more than we women do.”

It was probably the haze of pain she was currently enveloped in, more than the fact that she was out of step with the specifics of giving and receiving sexual pleasure. At least, that’s what she told herself. Just because the opportunity hadn’t presented itself lately—okay, ever!—didn’t mean she was naïve to such things. She read
Cosmo.

“Can I just go on record as saying that, while I appreciate doing what I can to ensure my partner’s pleasure,” Lucy paused long enough to send what she hoped was a feral scowl in the direction of Sadistic Sue as she began fingering yet another cloth strip, “I honestly don’t think this makes even the top-ten list of things I’m most concerned with at the moment. Or the top twenty, for that matter. Shouldn’t we be focusing on the more . . . obvious? SHIT!” Through watery eyes, she propped herself up on her elbows and glared at the tiny blonde woman seated at the other end of the table. “You enjoy this, don’t you?”

The Glass Slipper skin-care tech glanced nervously at Vivian, who smiled and merely made a small motion for her to ignore Lucy’s outburst.

“Vivian, come on,” Lucy pleaded. “Is it really that important? It’s not like anyone’s even going to know.”

“Have faith, darling,” she admonished. “Besides, most important in this is the fact that you’ll know.” A rather wicked smile curved Vivian’s perfectly painted lips. “Trust me, I can always tell when a woman has had a Brazilian. She carries herself completely differently.”

“Yeah. Bowlegged from permanent scarring.”

Vivian laughed. “You’ll see what I mean when this is all done.”

Lucy grumbled but lay down again. “I just don’t see why we couldn’t have started on something a little easier and more obvious, like my eyebrows.”