Isobel smoothed her thick, long brown hair with her palm and sighed, desperately wishing she didn’t remember. “I would ask if you were joking, but I know you better than that. What possessed you to go through with this crazy scheme? This isn’t even remotely close to real life, Camille.”
“I wasn’t even looking! I’m telling you the truth. No one could have been more shocked or amazed than I. All I was doing was talking with a regular patron at my hotel—a rich, quite handsome, very well-connected patron, I might add.”
“All the people who spend time at your hotel are rich,” Isobel reminded her friend blithely. “And well-connected. Handsome, though. Since when is that a requirement for hotel patronage?” she teased.
“Oh, Isobel. You have no idea. This guy is out of this world!” She stopped suddenly and clapped a hand over her heart, sighing loudly and dramatically, even as a dark blush stole up her cheeks. “Addison Fairfax.”
“But that’s not the point.” She faltered for a moment, and Isobel found a bit of humor in the fact that her dear friend was actually flustered over this Addison Fairfax. It took a lot for Camille to show interest in a particular man, preferring in general the whole of mankind.
“Go ahead, Camille,” Isobel encouraged with a smile and a sly wink that let her friend know she was on to her. “Handsome and…?”
Camille placed a hand on her reddened cheek and continued. “We were making our usual small talk, you know, and I was telling him about my brilliant idea for you to make over some regular guy—not anything like Addison, of course. He dresses divinely.”
She followed her high-speed discourse with another long, drawn-out sigh.
Isobel chuckled.
“Well, the next thing you know, he’s telling me all about his problems. You are the answer to his prayers, Isobel, I kid you not. Neither of us could believe it!”
“I might as well hear it,” Isobel said with a groan. “Go on.”
“Okay, I’ll tell you,” she agreed, casually stringing it on with a laugh. “But Izzy, you have to promise to listen all the way through before you jump to any conclusions.”
Isobel smiled. She was certain she’d be jumping to conclusions long before her friend was finished telling what was sure to be a wildly fantastical story—but she could promise to keep her thoughts to herself, at least until she’d sorted the whole wild, bizarre idea out in her mind.
“So, it’s like this,” Camille began with a flourish of her hand.
“Once upon a time,” Isobel teased.
Camille threw her a mock glare. “If you’re going to keep interrupting every time I speak, I’m never going to get through this.”
Isobel chuckled. “Sorry. It won’t happen again.” She made the motion of zipping her lips closed with her thumb and index finger.
“So there’s this man I was telling you about, Addison Fairfax, who often uses our hotel for his meetings and conventions,” Camille said, her voice growing with excitement at every word. “He’s the CEO of Security, Inc. You know it?”
“I’ve heard of it,” Isobel replied. Of course she knew the name. It was only one of the most prestigious financial firms in Denver, probably on the continent.
Everyone had heard of Security, Inc.
“You can only imagine how successful Addison is, not to mention how wonderfully handsome he looks. He’s always polished, precise and dressed meticulously.”
“So, what’s the problem?” Isobel asked, wondering how she could help such a high-and-mighty being, and why on earth he would think to pay her for it. Sounded to her as if he had it made.
Unless, like many of her clientele, he was simply too busy to worry about fashion. But then, where would be the challenge in that? He was the type of man Isobel worked with on a regular basis in her business, not something out of her league.
“Oh, it’s not Addison,” Camille said, holding her hands up, palms out. “You can trust me on this. That man is perfect just the way he is.”
Isobel laughed. “It sounds as if you have a genuine, fully loaded crush on the man.”
“A crush?” Her friend sounded mortified. “I would never stoop so low. I haven’t had a crush on a man since ninth grade.” She sniffed, her nose in the air like a cat who’d been offended.
“Tenth grade. Mr. Monahue, our history teacher,” Isobel reminded her with a smile.
Camille chuckled. “Oh, he was cute, wasn’t he? If I recall, I wasn’t the only one who thought he floated over the ground.”
Isobel shook her head, smiling at the memory. Every tenth-grade girl in Mr. Monahue’s class had had a crush on the charming teacher.
She shook her head again, her mind returning to the present dilemma. “Okay, so Addison Fairfax is interesting,” she said, rephrasing for her friend’s sake and to keep the conversation on line. “But I still don’t understand what that has to do with me.”
“It’s his younger brother, Dustin. Now, Dustin is a mess—a regular slob, in Addison’s words. And Addison actually wants to pay you to whip him into shape. Six short weeks of work and an enormous salary tacked on as a bonus. Think of it, Isobel! You don’t even have to stop your own work to help him.”
“Why would I want to do this, again?” Isobel asked, crossing her arms and tipping her executive-style black leather chair as far back as it would go, wishing for a short moment it would crash backward, sending her down through the twenty-two floors below and away from her glassy-eyed friend and the half-cocked ideas spouting from her lips.
“Remember our conversation from the other day?” Camille reminded her, dangling the thought out before her like a carrot to a rabbit.
“I remember you saying a bunch of stuff. I don’t remember me saying anything at all. Most particularly that I wanted to participate in such nonsense.”
“Oh, but you do, Isobel, whether you want to admit it now or not. Think of the tremendous challenge involved. I know you love the idea, deep down. Admit it!”
Isobel crossed her arms and shook her head. Vehemently.
“Don’t you see? Dustin Fairfax would be a test of your true strength as an image consultant.” Camille raised her hands to emphasize the mental marquee board. “I mean, they make gorgeous hunks into ugly bums all the time in the movies. Don’t you think you could do the opposite for one poor man who needs what only your special brand of fashion sense can bring to him? He’ll be a new man!”
Isobel admitted—in her heart, anyway—that she was intrigued, despite every bone of sense in her body screaming to the contrary. Something about the whole setup just didn’t seem right, though she wasn’t sure what was bothering her.
It sounded innocent enough on the outside, but something…
“How old is this man?” she asked after a slight but pregnant pause.
“Dustin?” Camille asked, her eyes gleaming with the victory she sensed was coming.
Isobel was quite aware Camille knew her better than anyone. They’d spent their whole lives together, been best friends forever. Camille would know that once Isobel capitulated in the least, she had her bagged and roasted for sure.
Camille certainly looked like a tiger hunter in full triumph, stripes sighted down her scope.
“Well, I know Addison is thirty-three,” her friend supplied thoughtfully. “And since Dustin is his younger brother, I would guess he’d be about thirty, give or take a year.”
“And what,