Colleen Collins - She's Got Mail!

“Now I’ve got you,” she said, pleased with her impromptu sleuthing. She was going to be substantially late to work now because it would take forever and a day to find a parking space. If I’m going to be mega-late anyway, after walking back, I’ll take a few extra minutes and pay a visit to the third floor before heading to my desk.

Honk!

Rosie turned and glared at a square yellow truck stopped behind her Dodge. A burly arm, covered with hair and tattoos, waved at her in a very unceremonious fashion.

“You own this alley, lady?” The truck driver’s voice sounded hairier than his arm.

Men. Couldn’t deal with a little inconvenience. Rosie brushed back a curl that had toppled over her right eye. “As a matter of fact, I do!” she retorted, seizing the opportunity to vent. Falling back on the coping mechanism that started in her teenage years when she had to deal with her four strong-willed, overprotective older brothers, she adopted the personality type of one of the Greek goddesses to give her strength.

Although she was much better at running, she sashayed back to her Dodge with the grace of Artemis, a perfect choice for an alley goddess. After settling into the driver’s seat and easing the car down the lane, Rosie twiddled her fingers in a goodbye wave to the fuming trucker.

“GOOD MORNING!” A hand, wriggling bright orange-tipped fingernails, snaked around Benjamin Taylor’s office door.

Ben gripped his cup of coffee as his ex-wife’s head followed the hand. Meredith’s lips were the same color as her fingertips. He momentarily wondered if that was a real lipstick color…or if she’d been kissing those plastic pylons the city put on the streets. New lipstick. New nails. Maybe she’d just broken up with her latest boyfriend, Dexter-Something, and was turning to cones for attention and affection.

Or turning to her ex-husband, easygoing, always-there-for-you Ben.

“No good morning?” Meredith put on her best pout, which—to Ben’s still blurry precoffee vision—looked as though she’d condensed her cone-orange lips into a circle of glowing lava.

“Morning,” he barked, then quickly took a sip of hot coffee. Please, God, don’t let those lava lips feel the need to plant a kiss somewhere.

“That’s better,” she simpered. The rest of Meredith appeared in the doorway. He tried not to squint at the visual blast of bold orange, green and blue that comprised some satin kimono-robe-thing she was wearing. Typically when she dropped a boyfriend, or vice versa, Meredith also dropped her old look. The facts were stacking up that this new oriental theme was the result of a recent breakup with Hex…Lex…whatever his name was.

She eyed a lamp in the corner. “I saw the most to-die-for coatrack—black lacquer, faux mother-of-pearl inlay—that would look perfect there….”

Ben stiffened. Typically, when she took on a new theme, so did Ben’s office. That’s what happened when one’s ex-wife was an interior decorator who had enough money to indulge these whims. New themes weren’t a bad thing, except when the jobs were left incomplete. History had proven that she’d start redoing some wall or chair—or coatrack—in a to-die-for style, fall madly in love with some new man, and leave Ben’s office in mid-theme.

Ben had long ago decided that just as archeologists interpreted the lives of cavemen from the wall drawings, someone would someday track the love life of Meredith Taylor from the various decorating themes in Ben’s office.

“That lamp stays,” Ben warned.

It still irked him that she’d kept his last name. You’d think an ex-wife who’d been remarried and divorced since your divorce would keep husband number two’s last name. Or revert to her old, original name or use any name other than the name the two of you shared during a short, fitful marriage that, at best, was a millisecond of insanity in an eternal universe.

“All right, lamp stays.” She blinked her overmascaraed eyes at him. “You’ve never spoken to me in that tone of voice.”

His outburst had surprised even him. But one look at Meredith’s eyes told him to tread carefully—this was a brokenhearted woman on the redecorating rebound. “I plead not enough coffee.”

She arched one eyebrow. “Darling, sometimes you say the oddest things.”

“Lawyer talk.” Yep, she’d definitely broken up with Dexter-Whatever. She never called Ben darling when she was involved with someone.

“Like my hair?” she asked, gesturing toward it with those orange-tipped appendages.

He wondered when the hair question would raise its head. He tried not to frown as he checked out the hodgepodge of curls and what was sticking out… “What are those? Pick-Up Sticks?”

“Darling, they’re chopsticks!”

Chopsticks? “It’s so…Dharma.” The way bits of her hair stuck out, it also looked like a bird’s nest gone amok. But he had enough sense to keep that thought to himself.

Whether she was going through an oriental theme or a bird theme, he noted the slight stoop to her shoulders and the dark circles under her eyes. Despite their tumultuous divorce, and the fact she always returned to Ben like a swallow to Capistrano, he didn’t have the heart to hurt her feelings further. It was so obvious that Meredith was in mourning.

“No, really, your hair looks…nice,” he murmured, making a mental note not to have Chinese for lunch.

“Nice—?” Her green eyes took on an expectant gleam that said, “Only one word? Nice?”

“Nice…and brown,” he amended.

Too little, too late. The gleam took on a sinister edge. She opened her mouth to say something, but was cut off by a second high-pitched female voice.

“Mer-e-dith!” Heather, whose idea of year-around fashion, rain or shine, was a skimpy shift dress, wrapped her slim brown arms around his ex-wife’s shoulders. They gave each other air kisses. Heather pulled back and appraised Meredith’s new look. “You look cool! Dig your hair, too! That let-it-go look is so in these days.”

So much for the oriental versus bird themes. It was a let-it-go theme. Dread chilled Ben’s veins as he imagined Meredith redecorating his office—or part of it—in a let-it-go style. He gave his head a shake, trying to dislodge the images of chopsticks and bird’s nests adorning a corner wall.

Meredith smiled demurely, obviously mollified by the avalanche of Heather’s unsolicited compliments—a far better coup than Ben’s two-word response. She lightly fondled one of the chopsticks. “Thank you. Felt like trying something new.”

Heather’s blue eyes softened. “Broke up with Dexter, huh?”

Meredith’s cone lips quivered. She sniffled, loudly, before collapsing into Heather’s arms. Heather, her long blond hair spilling down the gaudy kimono, shot Ben a look. “Don’t you have anything to say?” she asked edgily.

“You’re late.”

Heather flashed him an impatient look. “Not to me, to Meredith.”

“Her hair looks nice and brown. But it’s almost nine and you’re late.”

Heather huffed something under her breath and continued cradling the distraught Meredith, who was blubbering about Dexter wanting ice cream back.

Ice cream?

Ben watched the two of them, his ex-wife and ex-fiancé, and realized he almost had enough exes to play tic-tac-toe. But at thirty-six, he was not in the market for another ex. Or even another current. If anything, he yearned for basic male companionship. Hell, a night of beer and bowling with the boys would suffice. Although, truth be told, he preferred wine, and chess—pastimes he once shared with his best buddy Matt before Matt fell in love and moved to California.

Since then, the closest Ben ever came to a man-to-man conversation, in a roundabout way, was when Heather would read out loud the “A Real Man Answers Real Questions” column from her favorite magazine, Real Men, where men would ask about everything from the best fishing lines to the best pickup lines. When clients weren’t around, and Heather was out to lunch, Ben sometimes read the questions and answers himself, but he’d rather be caught dead than be seen reading a magazine whose covers were plastered with buffed males grinning smugly over articles like “Australia’s Great Barrier Hunks” and “Chicago’s Hottest Firefighters.”