“I’m still a good cause.”
“You’re a hopeless cause.”
“And you’re as bad as Stephanie.”
Gwen bolted upright and gasped. “What a vile thing to say!”
Alec’s lips quivered and then he started laughing.
She hadn’t been serious, but he shouldn’t have figured it out so quickly. Shaking her head, Gwen cleared away their plates. “At least that explains the cat. You have never struck me as a cat person.”
“Armageddon is not a cat. Armageddon is demon spawn from hell.”
“Poor kitty. With a name like Armageddon, what do you expect?”
“He earned the name. Thirty seconds at my place and he’d sprayed a white silk sofa.”
Gwen rolled her eyes. “No real person has a white silk sofa.”
“I do, or I do if the cleaners did their job. But Army came to the apartment with me that day and has avoided me ever since. He lives under the bed until I go into the bedroom. The rest of the time, he plots his escape.”
Gwen rinsed their plates and put them in the dishwasher. “From what I remember, he’s had a couple of successes.”
“Yeah. Brad comes over and lures him back, though.”
“The poor little thing.”
“Don’t feel sorry for Brad.”
“I was talking about the cat and you know it. He just doesn’t understand.”
“He’s not the only one,” Alec muttered darkly.
Gwen returned to the sofa. “Is that an oblique reference to Stephanie and New Year’s?”
He nodded.
“She doesn’t quite see why you have to maintain the purity of the quest.”
“Or words to that effect.”
“I’ll bet.” Gwen stared at her Scooby-Doo slippers. They stared back. “Your grandfather could have shopped at secondhand stores, right?”
“Oh, yeah. Wearing clothes from the church’s charity box is always a featured part of the story. But if you think—”
“Buy your tux from Brad.”
“What?”
“Offer him five or ten bucks for it. He’s not going to be wearing it and you know it fits.”
“That’s…” Gwen could see the possibilities occur to Alec.
He gave her a slow, admiring smile. “That’s brilliant.”
“I thought so. And if you give me a ride over to my parents’ house, then you can borrow my car.” Sometimes she was too brilliant for her own good.
Alec kissed his fingers toward her. “Gwen, you are a prince among women.”
“Is that anything like being a queen among men?”
He hesitated briefly, but tellingly. Very, very tellingly. “I didn’t mean it to be.” He laughed. If a forced chuckle could be called a laugh.
Gwen could attribute the hesitation to him being slow on the uptake, but Alec wasn’t slow. No, for just a moment there, he’d considered the possibility that they were both sexually oriented in the same direction.
Was this what she was going to have to face? If a woman didn’t want to be with a man, then…then… And just because she wasn’t Alec’s type didn’t mean she wasn’t somebody’s type.
She’d show him. She’d…she’d go put on the skirt, that’s what she’d do. Gwen jumped up. “Hey—I got a new skirt I was thinking of wearing on New Year’s. How about a man’s opinion?”
“Danger. Warning. Woman requesting clothing opinion. Alert, alert.”
“Oh, stop.” She headed for the bedroom. “I just want to know what you think.”
“What I think is that nothing I say will be right,” Alec called after her.
Gwen grabbed the skirt, hanger and all, and went back to her living room. She unsnapped the clamps, then held up the skirt. “I’ll be with Laurie, so…you know.” She hoped he’d fill in the blanks about at least holding her own beside Laurie.
And speaking of blanks—Alec stared at the skirt, then met her eyes. “It’s…it’s just a black skirt. It doesn’t look all that short or tight.”
“So you’re saying that to appeal to a man, a skirt has to be short and tight?”
“Not…yes. Yes, it does.”
She walked closer so he could see how the light made it shimmer, maybe even feel the fabric.
He was clearly unimpressed by shimmer. “Well, Gwen, it’s a nice skirt.”
Nice. Kiss of death.
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
I want you to be overcome with lust, that’s what. So much for the skirt’s man-attracting potential.
“The sweatpants make it look lumpy. Why don’t you put it on?”
“All right, I will.”
Gwen returned to the bedroom, suspecting that the reason she hadn’t put the skirt on in the first place was because if Alec was overcome with lust, she’d forget that she’d given up men and men like Alec were exactly the reason why. He’d talked about Laurie being high-maintenance, but if he took off his shirt—a pleasant, but distracting prospect—he’d have “high-maintenance” tattooed across his chest.
Already, she’d offered him her car and helped him with his love life—a love life that didn’t include her. Now, she was putting on the skirt after she swore she wouldn’t just so he’d find her attractive. And she’d just cooked dinner for him. Hadn’t she?
Gwen stepped into the skirt, thinking that she probably ought to put on panty hose, and pulled it up. Pulled…now more of an easing…sucked in her stomach…more…gave up on fastening the hook until after the zipper was zipped…zipped two inches and…
And staring in horror as her white, pizza-filled belly remained exposed because her hips and thighs had taken up all the room in the skirt.
3
SAVED. SAVED FROM herself. Putting on the skirt to attract Alec—what had she been thinking? Or rather, why had she been thinking it?
Fortunately, when she returned, he was typing some manly strategy he’d thought of into her laptop, and didn’t seem to remember the skirt.
Not fitting into the skirt didn’t matter. And yet Gwen ate salad with dressing on the side and avoided ice cream until Wednesday. She wasn’t dieting—she just suddenly developed a real fondness for naked lettuce. Besides, her ice cream day was Friday. Okay, Thursday through Saturday—Wednesday, if it had been a really rough week. But never Monday or Tuesday. Never. Oh, maybe a bite or two from Friday’s pint—but that was absolutely it.
And did the skirt care about naked lettuce or avoiding ice cream? Did it cooperate by at least letting Gwen zip the zipper completely? No.
So when New Year’s Eve rolled around, Gwen had to resort to her “safe” outfit—black silky pants, elastic waist, and the cute, but scratchy, Lurex sweater with the gold and silver champagne glasses all over it. Some of the glasses had bubbles coming out of them and Gwen had to stand up straight or a couple of the bubbles would be positioned suggestively.
The sweater had a V-neck and