Kasey Michaels: High Heels and Holidays

"You know what I mean, Alex. I ... I just can't afford to go where you seem to think we might be going. You weren't here four months ago. How do I know where you'll be four months from now? And don't give me that evolving thing again, okay? I know you're adapting well ... very well, to being here."

"Making myself more real, just as I said, and thus more permanent," Alex said, trailing the side of his finger down her cheek, using its tip to raise her chin so that she had no choice but to look at him.

"Oh yeah, that works," Maggie breathed, swallowing yet again. "But—"

"Maggie," he interrupted almost kindly. "Let's consider this, all right? If I, as you say with depressing regularity, were to poof back out of your life—"

"How I hate that word," she said, watching his mouth.

"And I agree. But if I were to poof, would you rather be left with memories—or regrets?"

She shifted her gaze to his eyes. "You're such an arrogant bastard."

"Yes, I know. The perfect Regency Era hero."

"Living in the twenty-first century on the Upper West Side of Manhattan," Maggie pointed out over the buzzing in her ears. "Alex, I don't know if I can take that chance."

"But you want to," he said, his smile gone now. "You want to be daring. You want to not think, but to make that last great leap of faith into the unknown. You long to know, just as I do, if our two halves make a whole. If what we need to be complete, both of us, is at this very moment literally within our grasp."

"The ... the thought has occurred," Maggie admitted, sliding her hands up the front of his sweater. Cashmere. He liked the feel of cashmere. He liked the feel of fine things. He was a sensual man. Would he like the feel of her?

"Saint Just? Is Maggie all—oh, a thousand pardons, Saint Just. I didn't realize you were romantizing," Sterling said from the door.

"Some people's kids," Maggie mumbled in an attempt at humor as she stepped completely away from Alex. From temptation. "I'm much better now," she told Sterling. "But you know what? I'm also starving. What do you say we leave this mess and go out for something to eat? Alex?"

"Certainly, my dear," he said smoothly, just as if they both didn't know what had been about to happen if Sterling hadn't showed up. "I must admit that I, too, am famished."

Maggie shot him a quick look, trying to decide if what he'd said had some sort of double entendre in there somewhere, then decided she was overreacting. "Famished, huh?"

"Exactly," Alex said, leaning down to whisper in her ear. "I believe I could happily nibble on you all night."

"Oh, okay, so I wasn't wrong, and shame on at least one of us. And that's a lousy line, by the way."

"I know. It was the best I could conjure up at the moment, however, as I admit to being under some considerable stress. You will forgive me, and allow me to try again some time?"

"Bite me," Maggie said, just before she winced. She was so used to saying that when she ran out of comebacks, but this time? This time it was a very bad choice. "Pretend I didn't say that."

"Never," Alex said, then, gentleman that he was, he went off to retrieve her coat.

"Hide me," Bernice Toland-James pleaded plaintively as she swept past Maggie and into the condo at ten the next morning, then stopped dead five feet inside the living room. "Christ. Who does your decorating, Maggie? Salvador Dali in his melting clocks period?" She pushed a heap of gold garland onto the floor and collapsed her long, slim, liposuctioned and nipped-and-tucked frame into one of the flowered couches in a cloud of scent.

Maggie was all-American Girl, with a heavy dose of Irish coloring and cleverly streaked honey-colored hair that was her one vanity. She rarely wore makeup and seldom thought about clothing beyond whether or not it was comfortable. In fact, her usual at-home uniform was pajamas that only sometimes matched. Bernie, on the other hand, was Victoria's Secret runway, and as long as her plastic surgeon kept his magic touch, visually stunning.

"I'm not done yet," Maggie said defensively. "But the tree is up and decorated—see? My pride and joy."

"Very nice," Bernie said, peering at the tall, pre-lit tree now covered in a lovingly collected assortment of individual gold, crystal, and burgundy ornaments, as well as enough carefully placed multicolored silk poinsettias to make Martha Stewart proud. "If she shows up, I can stick a poinsettia between my teeth and hide in it."

"So much for my hard work." Maggie picked up the garland and tossed it in the general direction of one of the opened boxes. "And there you go again. Hide? Why? And she who?" She wrinkled her nose. "Whom?"

"Felicity," Bernie told her, reaching into her overlarge Fendi purse and pulling out a full-size box of tissues. She snatched two tissues and lustily blew her nose, for all the publisher of Toland Books had gotten out of her trip across the pond was a rotten English cold. "She's on a rampage."

"Faith?" Maggie said, as she refused to call her onetime friend Felicity. The one, happily the only, Felicity Boothe Simmons.

Not that Maggie had anything against pseudonyms. But she hadn't demanded that her supposed closest friends stop calling her Maggie and begin calling her Cleo, even in private, just because she'd hit the NYT. Momma pin a rose on me! Jeez. "So why's our Ms. Boob-Job on a rampage this time?"

Bernie scrunched up the used tissues, pulled a plastic bag from the Fendi, and the tissues joined a bunch of their similarly abused mates. "I read that this is supposed to be more hygienic—and this purse cost the earth so I don't want to get it soggy. There is that, too," she explained as she zippered the bag shut. "I love it when you call her that, by the way. Someday she's going to knock someone out with one of those things. She asked my advice, I told her a C, like me, so naturally she went for the double-D. Woman has no sense of proportion. And she fell off the Times, that's why. And I mean all the way off, even the extended list. Only three weeks. Then again, considering the boobs, maybe she bounced off the list. Oh, God, that was lame—blame it on the head cold."

"Not even the extended list? Really?" Maggie said in some glee, then frowned and repeated more sympathetically, "Really? Ah, that's too bad. Only three weeks, huh? Bummer. Poor Faith, she must be absolutely devastated."

"Oh, please, you'll be drooling in another minute. Naturally, it's entirely my fault. I didn't print enough copies. I didn't do enough promo, certainly not enough radio. I should have sent her to more cities on her tour, found a way to get her on the Today show—like that was going to happen, but ever since you were on last year, she's had a bug up her backside about it. Hell, I would have sent her to the moon if I could have—I mean, you've never been there, she could beat you to it. Think how proud she'd be, up there in orbit. And how blessedly quiet it would be down here."

"Wow, you're in a good mood."

"I have a headache. That book is a headache. Destiny of Desire was a stinker out of the gate. I knew it, she knew it. The title doesn't even fucking make sense."

Maggie nodded, still attempting to feign sympathy for Faith. "Well, it happens after eight books in the same series. Moment of Desire. Night of Desire. Season of Desire. On and on. Sooner or later, you run out of good words. And plausible plots," she added under her breath.

Maggie and Faith went, as the saying goes, way back. Back to when they were both struggling authors fighting the often losing battle of the mid-list. Then, just as Maggie's first alter ego, Alicia Tate Evans, had bit the big one, Faith had rocketed to the big time as Felicity Boothe Simmons, newly crowned queen of the historical romance novel, and the friendship had gone from equals to that of the Big Star only occasionally deigning to smile in the peon's direction.