“No, don’t tell me. Let me guess.” Victor Gray raised a finger in a halting gesture. “Stiletto Cosmetics.”
Folding the business section in half, Cole slung it across his desk in disgust. “How’d you guess?”
“If you’re frowning, it usually has something to do with them.”
Cole pushed away from his desk and began to pace in front of the wall of windows offering a panoramic view of downtown Nashville. He’d known when he’d returned to his hometown that reviving his family’s troubled cosmetics company would be a monumental task.
The widely held opinion that Espresso Cosmetics was old-lady makeup was firmly entrenched. Moreover, an upstart cosmetics company had set up shop in town, grabbing both headlines and Espresso’s dwindling customer base.
“The media’s handing out good press to Stiletto like candy on Halloween,” he muttered. “Meanwhile, we can barely get a reporter to return a phone call.”
Victor hovered in the doorway. “They’re just capitalizing on their fifteen minutes of fame since that singer mentioned them on television. It won’t last much longer.”
Cole wasn’t so sure. Stiletto had been generating buzz on the web even before pop star Crave gave them a shout-out on national television. He stopped midpace to glance out the window. An electronic billboard in the distance stood out against the gray January skies. It flashed continuous images of a cheeseburger with toppings stacked nearly as high as Espresso’s aging eleven-story building.
He stared blankly at it, his mind on how Stiletto was gaining ground with a generation of young women Espresso was desperate to attract. Unfortunately, an article in today’s paper had pushed that demographic even further out of their reach.
“I stopped by to see if you wanted to go to lunch with me later,” his stepfather said. “I saw a billboard of the most mouthwatering burger I’ve ever seen on the drive in this morning, and I’ve been drooling ever since.”
That burger did look good, Cole thought. Real food. A lot better than the upscale dining experiences he’d endured while handling Espresso business these past months.
He also recognized that Victor’s invitation was for more than lunch. His late mother’s second husband, the only father he’d ever known, was extending another olive branch to help rebuild their once-close relationship after eight years of estrangement.
“Another time, Vic. I doubt I’ll have an appetite by lunchtime. Dinner, either.”
“So are you going to tell me what’s going on or keep frowning until your face gets stuck like that?” the older man said, still hovering in the doorway.
“There’s something you need to read.”
Cole watched his stepfather hesitate before venturing beyond the doorway into the overhauled office that no longer bore the feminine traces of the company’s founder.
Cole snatched the copy of America Today off the mahogany executive desk he’d brought in to replace the elegant Queen Anne writing table his mother and Espresso founder, Selina Sinclair Gray, had ruled from. Snapping it open, he pointed out the article responsible for his current mood and handed it to Victor.
He watched his stepfather’s eyes narrow as he zeroed in on one of the photos accompanying the story. The older man drew the newspaper in until it nearly touched his nose.
“Wow!”
“Exactly,” Cole said, still steaming over it. Then he caught an uncharacteristic gleam in Victor’s eyes. It lit up his entire face. In fact, he was practically ogling the newspaper.
What the...?
“God knows I worshipped the ground your mother walked on,” his stepfather said, “but would you take a look at those long legs in that short skirt and those high heels. I don’t see a thing here to put a frown on a man’s face.”
Cole snatched the paper back from him.
Victor shook his head and a sly grin spread over his lips. “She’s got a young Angela Davis thing going on with that wild Afro, too. Yes, sir! If I were five or ten years younger, she’d be your new mama.”
Cole stared at the smaller photo he’d ignored before, the larger one having grabbed his attention and earned his ire.
“More like twenty-five to thirty years younger,” he grumbled. “She could be your daughter.”
Cole frowned at the photo of the woman sitting on the edge of a desk. So this was Stiletto’s owner. His gaze drifted to the untamed mane of kinky coils surrounding a no-nonsense face and full, unsmiling lips. Sage Matthews looked exactly like what she and her company were—a pain in his ass.
He shoved the newspaper back at his stepfather and pointed. “This photo is the problem.”
Victor re-examined the newspaper and then looked up at him. “The young lady in this one is okay, but not nearly as good-looking as that Matthews woman. She’s smoking hot.”
“Enough about her.”
“Okay, okay,” his stepfather said, still examining the photo. “You know, the old woman standing next to the young one in this picture looks kind of like...”
“A man in drag.” Cole finished. He jabbed his finger toward the offending photo of an attractive young woman juxtaposed against an older one presumably representing Espresso. “Not only are they relegating us to the brand for senior citizens, they exaggerate the point with one of the ugliest old ladies I’ve ever seen.”
“Well, as you just said, he’s no lady.”
A vein on the side of Cole’s head pulsed. “You think?” Sarcasm permeated the question. “What gave it away, the hot mess of a gray wig or the damned goatee?”
“Hmm.” Victor tilted his own graying head to one side, then the other as he continued to study the grainy color photo. “Not really a goatee. I’d say it was more of a five o’clock shadow.”
“Are you actually defending that photo?” Cole asked.
The corner of his stepfather’s mouth quirked upward. “You know he kind of looks like the guy who stars in those Maw-Maw movies.”
“Who or what is a Maw-Maw?”
Victor looked up, an incredulous look on his face. “Wow. You have been out of the country a long time. Maw-Maw is the star of a slew of movies about a wisecracking, busybody matriarch, who can’t stop sticking her nose in her family’s business.” He chuckled and shook his head. “Can’t believe you never heard of them. I have a couple on DVD. I’ll let you borrow them.”
“No, thank you,” Cole said firmly, his patience waning.
“Oh, come on. You have to at least see Maw-Maw Passes the Plate. It’s the one where Maw-Maw puts an envelope containing a thousand dollars into the church offering plate by mistake.” His stepfather burst into a fit of laughter, slapping the newspaper against his thigh. “The old girl starts leaping over the church pews, like a sprinter clearing hurdles in the summer Olympics, trying to get it back. She even tackles a deacon. It’s hilarious!”
Cole cleared his throat loudly.
“I’m not interested in any movie featuring a grown man wearing a dress. Right now, all I care about is this article and the damage it’s doing to Espresso’s image, which isn’t one bit funny.”
“Sorry about that, son.” Victor dabbed at the tears that had gathered in his eyes from laughing. “I guess I got sidetracked.” He extracted a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket and resumed studying the article.
A few minutes later, he shrugged. “Okay, so they took a bit of a dig at us. Try not to get so bent out of shape over it. It’s not that big a deal.”
“Not