Heather Macallister - Tempted In Texas

“Nice,” he said, and Laurie hadn’t even put anything extra in her walk.

“Yes.”

“But out of my price range.”

“What do you mean by that?”

At her sharp tone, he turned to her. A second later, realization dawned. “No! Hey—I just meant that a woman like that is high-maintenance and expensive. To stay in the running you’ve got to take her to clubs and restaurants and the bill runs up real quick…and I’m just digging myself deeper into a hole, aren’t I?” He gave her a charmingly rueful grin. Alec had charm to spare and knew it.

“Any deeper and there’ll be an echo.”

He held up both hands, black-creased palms outward. “I meant nothing against your friend.”

“I know. It’s okay.” Gwen agreed with him, anyway, but wouldn’t betray the sisterhood by admitting it.

“And, ah, I didn’t mean that you weren’t worth running up the tab for, either.”

She wished he hadn’t said that. They both knew she wasn’t a Laurie type and honestly, Gwen was all for the Lauries of this world. Why shouldn’t they value themselves enough to require men to make an effort? For all the effort Gwen required, she was a bigger bargain than a Christmas sweater in January. She needed to stop that.

But she didn’t want to have that kind of discussion with Alec, who was still standing there, searching her face for a sign of whether she was mad at him or not. He was a decent, if typically male, sort.

“I’m in a good position to guilt you into a really expensive evening, aren’t I?”

He didn’t smile and Gwen felt a twinge of that same guilt for making him suffer. But just a twinge. “Let me have a moment to savor the feeling….” She drew a deep breath. “I’m done. You’re off the hook.”

He grinned and his whole stance relaxed. “You’re okay, Gwen.” He made a movement and for a second, she thought he was going to give her a punch on the arm, but at the last minute, he swung his hand upward and raked his fingers through his hair. “Hey, you should give your car a spin around the block to make sure it’s running okay. Or I could do it for you,” he added casually.

He probably had errands to run. She really didn’t mind, though she was succumbing to his charm more than she should.

“Would you?” Gwen asked, as though he’d be doing her a huge favor.

“Sure!” He patted his shorts for her keys and dug them out. “I might stop off at the grocery store and get some quarters. Need anything?”

Gwen shook her head.

“Uh—do I look okay? I don’t have a grease moustache, or anything?”

“Just…” She hesitated, then reached up and rubbed at the faint streak on his brow bone. She could feel him watching her and hoped she wouldn’t do anything horridly juvenile like blush.

He had warm brown hair and warm—friendly warm—brown eyes to go with his warm brown body. Okay, so the warm body part was a wild guess based solely on his forehead, but the rest was true. Gwen also had brown hair and eyes, but her hair wasn’t as rich as his since she’d quit streaking it. What was the point? She’d given up men.

Funny how she had to keep reminding herself.

Especially when she was around Alec.

MAYBE IT WAS being around Chelsea and Kate and the wedding, or maybe it was the skirt—or more likely Alec and his stupid cutoffs—but Gwen decided she needed to do something active to remind her of her goals.

Or at least fine-tune them a bit. As she unpacked her suitcase, Gwen reflected on what Laurie had said about the intrinsic value of playing caffeine fairy to the office workers in the greater Houston area. In the mornings when people arrived at their jobs after fighting the rush-hour traffic and were absolutely dying for that first cup of coffee, the Kwik Koffee machines were mighty important. And didn’t those cardiologists and astronauts and scientists drink coffee, coffee that her company made sure was fresh, hot and available? Didn’t it put them in the right frame of mind to begin their days of important discoveries and saving lives? Therefore, wasn’t Gwen actually helping the world?

Okay, so that was a stretch, but she’d file it away for the next time Laurie downplayed their importance in the grand scheme of things.

But she’d also realized that climbing up the ladder at her company was really only a means to her true goal: she, Gwen Kempner, wanted to live the life of a man. Not be a man, just get the same advantages.

From where she stood—currently on a chair so she could shove her suitcase onto the top shelf of her closet—men had it pretty good and that was because they had conned women into helping them. They didn’t even have to be married—Gwen had noticed that the single men always seemed to have a girlfriend or even a spare mother to take care of them or wait for various delivery people. Men could even negotiate the after-five delivery times, whereas Gwen always got the, “Don’t you have a neighbor who’s home during the day?” question. Once, and she wasn’t proud of this, she’d taken half a personal day to wait for the cable guy for Eric.

Never again.

She needed somebody to help her, someone to take care of the little things so she didn’t have to.

She needed a wife.

Most career women did, and since they couldn’t have one, the superachievers who could afford to hired nannies, housekeepers and personal assistants. Gwen didn’t need a nanny, and she didn’t mind cleaning her apartment herself. But boy howdy, a personal assistant was sure looking good. The trick was to get the company to pay for one and they weren’t going to pay for a junior member of the regional director’s staff to have an assistant.

So Gwen would just have to become a regional director.

After sorting the clothes she was going to take to the dry cleaners tomorrow, Gwen looked again at the skirt.

No washing instructions. In fact, no label of any kind. She couldn’t exactly call Chelsea on her honeymoon and ask her how the thing was supposed to be cleaned. The skirt looked fine and Gwen decided that Chelsea had cleaned it before she’d passed it on.

Okay, then. Gwen hung it up, got out her laptop, plugged it into the phone line, flipped on the TV and proceeded to check her office e-mail. She’d missed work Friday and it would pay to get a jump on the week instead of spending Monday morning getting up to speed. That’s what people who wanted promotions did.

Assuming there were no coffee crises requiring her immediate attention, she’d spend the rest of the evening coming up with a battle plan that would lead to a promotion. After all, the sooner she got an assistant, the better.

ALEC STUDIED all the laundry detergents and picked the cheapest no-name brand he could find. Passing up fabric softeners—a luxury he hadn’t missed—he headed for the frozen food aisle to see if there were any ninety-nine cent TV dinners or frozen pot pies on sale three for a dollar.

Instead, he found himself tempted by store-brand frozen pizzas. They weren’t big, but they were three for five dollars. However, right next to them—at two for five dollars—he found a more generously sized-and-topped brand. Before he could talk himself out of it, he’d grabbed the pizza and then had the insane impulse to buy a six-pack of domestic beer. His import days were gone for now. Unfortunately, as he stood in front of the cooler, he realized that even a six-pack was out of the question, so he snagged two oversize individual bottles and made his way toward the express checkout lane.

What are you doing? It was the voice of reason, which had been remarkably silent when he’d accepted his grandfather’s gleeful challenge, but which could always be counted on to provide wet-blanket thoughts every time Alec contemplated anything that might be self-indulgent these days.