Julie Kistler - More Naughty Than Nice

“Boink ’em and throw ’em away! Woo-hoo!”

“Anna, maybe you should—”

“No, listen, Steph. We should so do this! A new message for a new century. Gloria Steinem meets Britney Spears. Independence. The bad girl. The independent bad girl! It’s perfect!”

“Okay, well, let’s not run away with ourselves.”

“No, no, you don’t see.” Anna leaned closer. “I don’t have a job, and you’ll be working for Missy. They don’t respect either of us, and we don’t have to put up with that. So you’re going to go back to work on the Monday after New Year’s and tell Findlay that you quit.”

“I am?”

“Yes, you are. And then we’ll have the time. We already have the brains. And we have you.”

“Me?” Stephanie asked dimly. “What does that mean?”

“Well, we can’t go revolutionizing women without a spokesmodel.” Anna crossed her arms over her chest. “Face it. No matter what we do to me, I’m still going to be too short and too square. But you…You’ve got real possibilities. You could be really hot if we put some Tae Bo and a few Glam products where our mouth is. Besides, you’re great at presentations, remember? You pitch like nobody else. This is like one big pitch.”

“But, Anna…” Stephanie peered at her friend. “How did we get from ‘boink ’em and dump ’em’ to me being a spokesmodel? I am so not the type. I’m way too nice!”

“But that’s just it. Inside, I think there is definitely a naughty girl itching to get out.”

“Out of me?”

“You bet! Babe, you and me, we know women ages 18 to 25 like the back of our hand,” Anna argued. “We know exactly who they want to be. So we provide the who. You! I do the marketing, you write the results, you live the results. This is so perfect.”

“Are you talking a how-to?” Stephanie asked. “Or something more like a like a video or a magazine?”

“We’ll figure that out later. Put some focus groups together and see what plays the best.”

“But what’s our message?”

“We’ve already got it. The independent bad girl. Spike your stiletto heel through his heart!”

“That’s a tad violent, isn’t it?”

“Okay, then—sassy sisters doing it for themselves. Guys are for fun, but not for forever.” Anna beamed with satisfaction. “We make up for every Fred in Accounting, for every Mr. Findlay who ever picked a bimbo over the smart girl. We show them all who knows what about marketing. And our demographic eats it up with a spoon.”

Stephanie blinked. She couldn’t quite believe it, but this all made sense. Cold, hard, perfect sense.

“So?” Anna prompted, raising her cosmopolitan in a half toast. “Do we show them what we’re made of?”

Sassy sisters doing it for themselves. She loved it! She could already see the marketing plan, the product tie-ins, the PR possibilities dancing before her eyes.

No more Ms. Nice Girl… Letting out the naughty girl inside…Stephanie smiled with grim satisfaction as she lifted her own glass. “Let’s do it, Anna. Let’s show the world.”

A few days before Thanksgiving, three years later

“STEVIE, DO YOU THINK we should ice down your nipples before you go out?”

Stevie Bliss, aka Stephanie Blanton, author of the fabulously successful new book, Blissfully Single, whipped around so fast she almost knocked her assistant over. “Anna, are you nuts?” she whispered. “Ice down my…? You’re kidding, right?”

“Of course I’m not kidding.” Anna fixed her with a stubborn stare. “Nipples happen to be big right now. Our focus group went off the charts when they saw video of J. Lo at the—”

“I’m not doing it,” Stevie interrupted. “Besides, I’m wearing a jacket. Nobody would see them, anyway.”

“Are you sure?” Anna persisted. “We’ve gotten as much play as we’re going to get off the rest of our out-there elements. Maybe one more is just what we need for a new round of press. We’re coming up on the biggest shopping day of the year. We’ve got to keep you in the public eye.”

Stevie almost smacked her. Anna was her best friend, her confidante and her partner in this crazy plot to put them and Blissfully Single on the map, but sometimes she really went too far.

“I’ve done everything you’ve asked, Anna, including the no underwear thing, which I personally think is ridiculous—”

“It killed on the surveys and you know it,” Anna returned. She began to tick items off on her fingers. “For our last element, we gave them a choice of tattoo, various piercings, magenta or blue hair, exposed midriff, exposed thong and even carrying a snake. Nothing scored like going commando.”

“I know, I know.”

“It makes you naughty, outrageous, but not too far over the line. And it gives us an advantage over most men, who are so distracted by what may be going on under there that they forget to feel threatened by the message.”

“I know, I know.”

Sounding just a tad testy, Anna said, “I don’t make this stuff up, Stevie. It’s all in the hard data.”

“And I have done everything so far that skewed right with that data,” Stevie explained patiently. “But the whole thing, the whole Stevie Bliss persona, it’s set now. Set. In stone. Or at least in leather.”

She took a deep breath, looking down at the slick black leather miniskirt and zip jacket, both scandalously expensive, the deeply plunging neckline on the silk camisole underneath, the knee-high boots with three-inch heels… She had never imagined herself strutting around in an outfit like this. And whether you called it a hottie or a ’ho, it certainly made an impact.

She’d tried hard to own this new brazen person she had become. Day in and day out, she continued to try. And she was doing pretty well, if she did say so herself. For the past month, ever since they’d launched this leg of the official media tour for Blissfully Single, she and Anna and their PR machine had been blitzing the East Coast markets. Everyone from Letterman to Liz Smith had bought into Stevie Bliss, champion of the single, sexy, independent woman, confident in her own sizzling womanhood.

And now they’d brought their act to Chicago for the holidays. They had a month of appearances and signings designed to saturate the Midwest from their base in the Windy City, where there was fabulous shopping and exactly the right demographic of shoppers.

Meanwhile, every piece of her persona, from the streaks in her hair to the shape of her “smart girl” glasses and the precise amount of cleavage she showed, had been carefully selected, based on hours of marketing research. She looked terrific. She didn’t need iced nipples to sell this package.

“But Stevie—”

She held up a hand. “Anna, give it up.”

The bookstore manager peeked around the corner into the office, cutting off further discussion. “Ms. Bliss? We have everything set up. Are you ready?”

Stevie raised her chin. “Absolutely,” she said, with the lazy drawl that was her trademark. Soft and sexy, with a hint of a growl, this was the voice that played best with her public.

From recent experience, Stevie knew she would be fine as long as she stuck with the program and played the role to the hilt, safe behind the disguise. Reminding herself—as some psychological consultant or other had recommended—that she was a cool jungle cat, she strode out behind the man from the bookstore, sliding carefully and yet easily into the chair next to the podium, perched at the front of her seat with her knees down so as not to show off anything she didn’t want to. Instead, she offered a polished smile and more than a hint of décolletage to the eager fans in the front row.