Heather Macallister - How To Be the Perfect Girlfriend

Right. At this point, both visions seemed extremely far-fetched. She was neither fabulously single nor contentedly married. She wasn’t even contentedly single and fabulously married. No, Sara was discontentedly unmarried.

There was a difference between being single and being unmarried. Single had a proactive sound and implied a life of fun dates and attractive men at one’s beck and call. There had never been a man at Sara’s beck and no one had called in far too long.

Lately, Sara had found the idea of being part of a committed couple increasingly appealing. She’d done the casual relationship thing—that is, all her relationships had been casual as far as the men were concerned—and now she wanted to experience the novelty of having a male completely devoted to her. Solely to her.

A love slave would be nice, or at least a man who put her first instead of bowling night with his friends, and who actually checked with her before accepting an invitation to the Astros game, which he went to without her instead of taking her to the art film he’d kinda sorta promised he would that night and then not even realizing why she was mad….

Well, anyway, Sara wanted someone different from her usual sort of man. Maybe it was because she was staring thirty in the face, or maybe it was something as shallow as buying all those wedding shower gifts at Williams Sonoma when she couldn’t afford to buy anything for herself there, but Sara had experienced definite coupling urges. Unfortunately, there was no one to couple with.

The old machine was humming along nicely and Sara was manually collating as she went when there was an ominous whirring and everything stopped. The paper-jam light blinked. It figured. Unfortunately, Sara couldn’t see any scrunched-up paper. In frustration, she put down her papers and called Hayden.

“Does the stupid machine ever jam on you?”

“It jammed for real? Oh, you lucky girl.”

“What?”

Hayden’s voice turned husky. “You get to call Simon.”

“I don’t have time to wait for a repair guy.”

“No—Simon Northrup.”

“You mean Mr. Northrup?” Only Hayden could get away with bothering a company vice president with something like this. But then men treated Hayden differently than they treated the rest of the female population.

“Oh, yes.” Hayden sighed. “I’ve been known to use a rubber band and a staple to jam the copier just so I can watch him lean over the machine.”

“Hayden, you are a sick woman.”

“He wears European-cut slacks and he wears them very well.”

Hayden’s voice was so loud that Sara looked over her shoulder in case there was someone to overhear. “I can’t bother Mr. Northrup. Besides, he’s probably already gone to lunch.”

“He never goes to lunch this early.”

“I’ll just figure out how to unjam the thing myself. Oh, uh, I asked Missy to join us, so don’t wander off. Bye!” Sara hurriedly disconnected before Hayden could protest.

She opened the side door of the big old machine and peered at the copier’s guts. Yeah, there was the paper scrunched way back in there. Stretching her arm through and getting a black toner smear on her blouse, Sara found she couldn’t reach the paper. Great. She was either going to have to go in from the top, and it didn’t look as though she could reach the jam that way either, or pull the thing out from the wall. It was wedged between the Coke machine and the coffee bar.

Or she was going to have to—

“Ah. Another jam.” A tall man wearing cool techno glasses strode across the break room. “Sometimes I wonder why we keep this machine.” It was Simon Northrup.

Sara had seen him before, of course, but had never actually spoken to him. He’d always seemed a little remote and kind of intimidating, but the smile he gave her was friendly enough.

“Yeah, it, uh, jammed.” Brilliant, brilliant.

“Let’s take a look.” He set his coffee mug on the counter next to Sara and unbuttoned the cuffs of his blinding white shirt.

Custom, Sara thought, without ever having knowingly seen a custom-tailored shirt. Nice. More men should go custom. Maybe she should go custom.

“It’s a great old warhorse,” he nodded to the machine, “so I suppose we can allow it this one eccentricity.”

Eccentricity. Each letter sounded crisply. Sara could listen to him talk all day. Since she dealt with personnel records, she knew Simon Northrup was from Boston and had gone to boarding school in England. The resulting accent might not be as noticeable up North, but in Texas the clipped edges and slightly formal word choice contrasted with the good-ole-boy twang she heard all the time. Contrasted in a good way. A sexy way. She was beginning to see why he appealed to Hayden.

As he rolled up his sleeves, Simon asked, “Are you a new employee? A temp?”

Gritting her teeth, Sara sighed inwardly. Unmemorable. That’s what she was.

“Wait—I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?” He studied her, his head tilted slightly in a way that emphasized his square jaw.

If Hayden hadn’t gone on about him, Sara would never have noticed the square jaw. “I’m Sara Lipton from payroll. I was trying to avoid the wait at our machine.”

“Well, we’ll see if we can’t get you back in business here.”

Sleeves rolled up to reveal arms more tanned than she’d expected, Simon closed the side door Sara had opened, raised the heavy top section and leaned over the machine.

From then on, Sara saw everything in slow motion…the way his shirt clung to him as he bent over the machine and reached inside; the way his flanks stretched; his hips flexed and the fabric of his dark slacks stretched, smoothed, outlined and emphasized his fabulous behind….

Oh, boy, did it emphasize. Sara inhaled deeply. Simon’s rear end was indeed a thing of beauty. She was an immediate European-cut convert. Who knew?

She swallowed, aware of a nearly irresistible urge to touch it. No, not touch…grab. Manhandle, as it were. It was a revelation. Was this the way men felt about women?

“The paper isn’t jammed in the normal spot,” Simon said from inside the copier.

Sara thought of Hayden’s deliberate jamming which she now not only understood, but applauded. “I really appreciate you taking the time to fix it.” Take all the time you want.

Simon raised himself slightly to glance at her over his shoulder. Sara nearly whimpered when the movement shifted his hips, resulting in the perfect calendar shot. Man and machine.

Actually, just the man was plenty.

“My pleasure,” he said before turning back.

The pleasure is all mine. Sara had picked up her employee evaluations and gripped them closely to her chest. She hadn’t thought she was the type to appreciate a man’s physical attributes à la carte like this. Usually, she accepted or rejected the whole package, not that Simon’s total package was anything to reject. It was just that there were some spectacular, uh, aspects to consider. So she considered them carefully, even while acknowledging that this package was not for her. Undoubtedly, some other woman unwrapped it at night.

“Got it.” He straightened and tossed two scraps of paper into the wastebasket.

“Thanks.” Sara would retrieve them later. Her department now shredded all document-related trash to ensure privacy.

Simon washed his hands at the sink, then poured a mug of coffee. “Happy copying,” he said on his way out before she could say anything memorably brilliant.

Omigosh, omigosh, omigosh. How could this man have been working just two floors away from her for the past year?

Okay. Calm down. Realistically Simon Northrup was not her type. Or rather, she wasn’t his type. She didn’t have the…the something men who looked like that required in their women.