Candace Schuler - Uninhibited

“Out.” Gina flapped a hand at Zoe, waving her away as she began to help unload the groceries. “It’s too crowded in here with two of us.”

Zoe moved to one of the two stools on the other side of the counter and plopped down with a dejected sigh. “Things were really going great at first,” she said morosely, watching Gina as she moved around the tiny kitchen. “Moira Sullivan is a wonderful old lady. Very charming and elegant, but really sweet and down-to-earth, too. Not snobbish or stuck-up in the least. She was interested in everything I’d brought her and was talking about what I could do when I had the money, not if. And asking how much and did I think it was enough. And then he walked in.”

“He being the stuffed shirt?”

“Yes. And right from the first…from almost the second he walked in and saw me sitting there next to his great-grandmother…I could tell he didn’t like me.”

Gina turned to face her, a package of spaghetti in one hand, eyes rounded in disbelief, her lips parted in astonishment. “He didn’t like you?”

“Nope.”

“But, Zoe, men always like you. They can’t help it. It’s—” she extended her free hand, palm up, moving it in an expressive gesture that encompassed the half of Zoe’s body that was visible above the counter “—hormonal.”

“He didn’t.”

“Well. My goodness,” Gina murmured, momentarily at a loss for words. She opened a cupboard and put the package of spaghetti away, then turned around with a thoughtful expression on her face, her hand still on the cupboard door. “Is he gay?”

“Definitely not,” Zoe said, shivering a bit as she remembered the way he’d looked at her, and the spark, or whatever it was, that had sizzled between them. She’d had a good long time to think about it, sitting alone in her apartment, fuming, as she waited for Gina to get home so she could discuss it with her. The conclusions she’d drawn left her almost as angry as she’d been when she’d stomped away from him that afternoon. Almost. “I’m pretty sure he’s got the hots for me.”

“The hots? Well, then…” Gina’s eyebrows rose into spiky bangs on her forehead. “You’ve lost me.”

“He likes my body—a lot—but he disapproves of me.”

“Aaah.” Gina nodded her head knowingly. “One of those.”

“Yes, definitely one of those. He practically undressed me with his eyes. Oh, very politely, of course—the man could give etiquette lessons to Miss Manners—but his eyes were anything but! Polite, I mean,” she clarified when Gina just stood there, staring at her. “They’re like blue laser beams. Very cool on the surface, but intense underneath, like a volcano. Very focused, you know? He gave me this one look that practically scorched me all the way to my toes.”

“Scorched?”

Zoe chose not to respond to the question in Gina’s voice. “And then he had the nerve to call me a con artist—me! a con artist!—and accused me of trying to swindle that sweet old lady out of a fortune.”

“In front of her?”

“No, not in front of her. Well,” she amended, “the hot looks were in front of her, but I don’t think she noticed. She’s ninety-two, you know. He waited until we were outside before he started calling me names. That’s when he called New Moon a fly-by-night operation—” her voice rose indignantly at the remembered slur on her company “—and said I could just forget getting any money from his great-grandmother to finance my little enterprise.” She curled her upper lip, giving the word the same unsavory implication he had.

“Jeez.” Gina folded the grocery sack and bent down to put it under the sink. “That sounds a little extreme, even for the repressed type. They usually content themselves with blaming you for arousing their libido, and let it go at that.” She reached for the bright red teakettle on the stove, then hesitated, head tilted as she considered her friend. “Wine or espresso? I’ve got some plain biscotti that would go with either.”

“Espresso,” Zoe said. “Wine would only make me get all weepy and maudlin.”

Gina nodded and turned on the faucet, her gaze lowered as she watched the kettle fill. “What on earth made him think you were some kind of con artist?”

Zoe shrugged. “Beats me.”

Gina lifted her gaze from the kettle to Zoe’s face.

“Honest, I have no idea why he would think that.”

“You want to look me in the eyes when you say that?”

Zoe sighed, knowing she was caught. “Okay. So maybe I, um…influenced his opinion in that regard. A little.”

Gina set the kettle on the stove and turned the heat on. “Influenced?” she murmured encouragingly.

“Well, he made me so darn mad. Staring at me as if he were imagining me naked one minute, and then looking down his nose at me the next, all superior and disapproving, as if it were my fault he was having lewd fantasies in his great-grandmother’s parlor. But I swear, Gina, I didn’t do one thing—not one darned thing—to encourage him. Not at first, anyway,” she admitted, making a clean breast of it. Gina would know if she lied, anyway, just by looking at her. “It was only after he made me so mad that I, well…” She shrugged. “You know how I get sometimes when I lose my temper.”

“I know, sweetie, and it’s not your fault this time. Some men are just pigs,” Gina said sympathetically. “You aren’t responsible for what goes on in their tiny little minds.” She reached across the kitchen counter and patted Zoe’s hand. “So, tell me what you did to make him think you were after his dear old granny’s fortune.”

“Well, Moira had told him she wanted to lend me the money for New Moon, and he was looking at me like he thought I was going to steal the silver on my way out or something, so I sort of—” she shrugged, her lips turning up in a little shamefaced grin “—lived down to his expectations, you might say. You know how I get sometimes, putting my mouth in gear before I’ve engaged my brain.”

Gina nodded sagely. “And what did he do then?”

“He clamped his hand around my arm and hustled me out of there so fast you’d have thought the house was on fire. And then he called me a con artist and said New Moon was a fly-by-night cosmetic company and accused me of trying to bilk—bilk!—his great-grandmother out of a fortune.”

“Cazzone cafone.”

“Yeah, well, he was kind of a jerk, but…” She shrugged again, and the shamefaced look was back. “I guess I can’t really blame him completely.”

“Zoe! He acted like a pig.”

“Oh, I blame him for the pig part,” she assured her friend, “but not what came after. I mean, at the end there, I did act like all I was interested in was the money. And you can’t really blame a guy for trying to protect his sweet old granny from being taken to the cleaners.”

“I can,” Gina said loyally.

Zoe smile at her. “I appreciate that. I really do. But I’ve got to face facts. I lost my temper and blew it, big time. There’s no way Moira Sullivan’s going to be investing in New Moon. Not if her great-grandson has anything to say about it. And it’s my own darn fault.”

“You’ll find another investor. There’s bound to be someone out there who has the vision to see what a great investment New Mo—” Gina cocked her head, listening. “Is that your phone?”

ZOE WAS BACK in her friend’s apartment less than ten minutes later. “You’ll never guess who that was.”

Gina didn’t look up from the tiny cups she was filling with thick, black espresso from the coffee press. “Who?”

“Mr. Stuffed Shirt himself.”

Gina put the coffee press down. “And?” she said carefully, her eyes on Zoe’s face.

“And he apologized for what he said this afternoon.” A big grin turned up the corners of Zoe’s mouth. Her eyes sparkled with anticipation and renewed hope. “He wants to meet with me as soon as possible to discuss investing in New Moon.”