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“To the start of a new tax year with lots more money!” Sugar slugged back her drink and Keeley followed suit, the tart liquor puckering her lips. Yum. The trendy bar they were drinking in made the coolest cocktails. Since it was Sunday night, the crowd was a bit lighter, but more casual than Friday or Saturday night. The weekend was basically over, so people were more relaxed and not trying so hard to hook up with each other.
“Thanks for treating me to dinner and drinks, Keeley. It’s fun to get dressed for a girls’ night out. I got stuck working Friday night and last night, so I could use a break before my Monday morning class.”
“Thanks for suggesting we come here, and you’re welcome. It’s the least I could do after you treated me to lunch last week.” After getting Binky’s first check, she had a bit of breathing room.
“But that was lunch, not dinner and drinks. You must have had a great tax season. Or maybe Binky’s gig panned out and you’re doing his audit?” Sugar swiped some butterscotch sauce off the rim of her martini glass and licked her finger.
Keeley hesitated, client confidentiality keeping her from spilling her guts.
“Oh, come on, Keel. You know Binky tells me everything.” She dug in her purse and held up her cell phone. “I can call him to give you permission if that would make you feel better.”
“If you want to know that badly, go ahead.”
Sugar pressed a couple buttons, and Binky’s name popped up on her phone screen.
“He’s on your speed dial?” Keeley whispered.
“Anyone with eight or nine zeroes in his bank account is on my speed dial,” Sugar whispered. “Hello, Binks, sweetie, how are you?”
Binky was apparently fine and wanted to tell Sugar all about it. Keeley slugged back the rest of her limoncello while Sugar made appropriate cooing noises. That was the trouble with dancers seeing customers outside of the club. They got way too involved with each other’s personal lives, and things could get messy. On the other hand, Binky’s fraternization with strippers had landed Keeley a job with him, so who was she to complain?
“Binky, I’m here with my good friend Keeley, but she’s superprofessional and won’t tell me a thing about your situation until you give her the green light.” She listened and handed the phone to Keeley. “He wants to talk to you.”
“Hello?”
“Binky Bingham, here. Please feel free to take Sugar into your confidence, my dear. She has one of the best business brains I’ve run in to. In fact, on that unfortunate day when she steps down from her entertaining career, I’ve told her she can have carte blanche of positions at Bingham Brothers.”
“Thank you, Mr. Bingham. I take my clients’ confidentiality very seriously—”
“Of course you do. Could you ask Sugar when she’s next scheduled to perform at Frisky’s?”
Keeley rolled her eyes but did as he asked.
“Wednesday. I’ll be looking for you, Binky!” she called into the phone.
“Excellent. Goodbye, and good luck, Kelly.” Binky hung up.
Close enough, as long as his check cleared.
“So who is Binky’s mysterious protégé?” Sugar leaned closer over her glass.
“You know him—Dane Weiss. I start working with him at Bingham Brothers tomorrow.”
“My, oh, my, Bridget’s brother!” Sugar whistled. “And how is the very virile viking these days?”
Keeley wondered if Sugar had ever been close to Dane’s “virility.” “You know him well, then?”
“I’ve met him a few times at Bridget’s functions, but never outside that.” She giggled and wiggled her perfectly groomed eyebrows. “Don’t worry, sweetie. He’s not a regular of mine. In fact, he thinks I’m a bad influence on his sweet little sis. She came to Chicago fresh from the family farm and fell in to designing stripper outfits for rent money. Of course, that’s how she got her big break, but that’s neither here nor there to him. He disapproves of the whole business.”
“Dane doesn’t like strippers and he’s a friend of Binky’s?” Keeley asked skeptically. “Binky does enough business at Frisky’s to list their address on his tax return.”
“Yeah, considering how much money he spends there, Tony the manager would offer Binky a lap dance himself to keep him happy.”
Keeley shuddered at the idea of short, fat Tony gyrating above Binky in his shiny gray suit and open-neck black shirt, his gold chains glittering. “I need another drink to get that picture out of my mind.”
Sugar hailed the waiter, who practically vaulted over three tables to get to her. He took their reorder and galloped back with their drinks.
Keeley took a sip of her limoncello cocktail. She loved the fresh lemon liqueur, a grown-up version of the el cheapo powdered lemonade she and her sister drank on hot summer days when they were kids. Lacey used to set up elaborate lemonade stands for the neighborhood kids while Keeley kept a protective eye on her. At least the lemonade stand had never been robbed, unlike the convenience store where their mom worked.
Dane Weiss had grown up on a dairy farm. She bet he never had to worry if his dad was going to come home from the barn or if a cow would pull a pistol on him.
“That was a pretty heavy sigh, Keel.” Sugar, an expert at reading people’s moods, eyed her over her martini rim. “Don’t worry about this gig with Dane. He’s a real straight shooter.”
Keeley shook her head. “If he’s such a straight shooter, I don’t know how this will all turn out.” She leaned over the table. “I’m going in undercover as his secretary.”
“Undercover or under the covers with Dane?” Sugar whooped.
“Ha, ha.” Although she had definitely considered the second possibility. Dane was so big, so strong and handsome…She drank most of her limoncello to try to cool off.
“If you don’t want him, I’ll give him another try. Maybe he likes blondes.”
“Hands off, honey,” Keeley snapped without thinking.
Sugar giggled. “Well, well. I haven’t heard that tone of voice from you in a long time.”
“Just slipped out,” she mumbled. And she couldn’t even blame the cocktails, since it was only her second.
“Keeley, darling, please put yourself first for once. Ever since we’ve known each other, you’ve been all work and no play. Helping your sister, putting yourself through school and finally taking that dreadful CPA exam—how many hours was it?”
“Fifteen long, torturous hours sitting in front of a computer terminal.”
“Ugh.” Sugar shuddered. “And I thought my MBA classes were bad. So when was the last time you got any?”
“Any what? Sleep?” Sugar was right. She had been going nonstop for months.
“You know what.”
“Oh, that. That’s been kind of low on my priority list lately.”
“Well, rewrite your priority list with that at the top. You could do worse than Dane Weiss to have some fun with. He’s single, handsome and really strong from that clean, dairy-farm upbringing. He’s built like a bull.”
“And probably hung like one, too,” Keeley answered without thinking. She’d seen a bit of a wiggle under his zipper during her double entendres at the bakery.
“There you go!” Sugar patted her hand. “Thank goodness, a sign of life after all.”
“I don’t know, Sugar. I’ll be working with him for several weeks and it could be awkward bringing sex into the equation.”
“Nonsense. It’ll add to the spice. Fear of discovery is a major turn-on for men. You know that.”
Keeley did know that. Could she put herself first for once? And would Dane even be receptive to her? “I don’t know. Maybe he won’t be interested in me. Maybe I’ve lost my touch.”
“Puh-leeze! Once you’ve got it, you never lose it. Ditch those boring brown dust rags you call clothes and lighten up. Just because you’re an accountant doesn’t mean you have to dress like a manila file folder.”
“That’s what Dane said. In fact, Binky’s paying me a clothing allowance to disguise myself so Charlie won’t recognize me from previous networking events.”
“Clothing allowance?” Sugar straightened. “How much?”
“A bundle. But I haven’t had time to spend it since I got stuck filing a bunch of tax extensions this weekend. I do have enough old outfits to get me through a few days at Bingham Brothers.”
“Your old outfits?” Sugar raised her eyebrow.
“I still fit in them, you know.” Geez, it wasn’t as if she’d porked up.
“Not exactly office wear.”
“I know that. Nobody will suspect the newest bimbo secretary of auditing the accounts, and besides, Dane told me to wear more revealing clothing.” He had no idea what he was in for tomorrow.
“Dane’s the boss. I know you’ll knock his socks off.”
Keeley drained her glass. “Maybe I’ll knock his pants off instead.”
KEELEY UNLOCKED the door to her second-floor walk-up apartment and hung her waist-length brown leather jacket on a hook in the narrow foyer. She walked into the small kitchen with its metal 1950s cabinets and tossed her keys on the gold-speckled Formica counter.
Her vintage 1905 greystone was one of the few buildings left untouched by the renovation bug sweeping through the Ukrainian Village neighborhood. Her landlady lived downstairs and had successfully resisted her sons’ attempts to move her into an assisted living home and sell out to a rehabber. Of course, once everything was overdeveloped, Ukrainian Village would lose the qualities that made it a fun place to live—reasonable rents, decent parking and a laid-back, yet hip atmosphere.
Keeley grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and headed into the bedroom to decide what on earth to wear on her first day as an undercover bimbo.
She opened the tiny closet and reached past the white-and-cream high-neck blouses, brown, black and gray suits, and the sensible neutral pumps and subdued silk scarves, to the clothes she never wore anymore, but hadn’t been able to let go of.
She pulled out skintight sleeveless tops in fuchsia, red and lime-green, skirts so short they were illegal in certain jurisdictions and the literal kicker, four-inch high stilettos and platform heels in black, white and clear plastic Lucite.
If bimbos ever got together and wrote a dress code, she could comply perfectly. She stripped off her khaki pants and cream-colored blouse and exchanged them for a low-cut white top, black miniskirt and black open-toed heels with rhinestone ankle straps.
She took a few experimental steps across her bedroom, her old sashay falling into place. The heels were higher than she was used to, but the rhinestones still sparkled nicely, if not as much as they had under the stage lights.
She stopped in front of the mirror. Something was out of place. The clothes were okay, her bod still fairly decent, but it was the hair. Too brunette.
She reached up to the top shelf—easy to do in her platforms—and picked a round white box. Blowing the dust off, she set it on her bed and studied her emphatic hot-pink printing on the top. Property of Cherry Tarte!!! She shook her head at the juvenile writing. At least she hadn’t drawn hearts to dot the exclamation points.
She removed the lid and lifted out her absolutely favorite red-haired wig, its luxuriant waves cascading over her hands. Brenda Starr-red. Rita Hayworth-red. Ann-Margret-red. And of course, stripper-red.
Pulling the wig on, she tucked her hair under it and stared at her reflection. “Hello again, Cherry,” she said to herself. “Bet you thought you’d never come out of retirement.”
For it had been the infamous Cherry Tarte, Keeley’s alter ego, who had paid for her accounting degree by baring it all for the boys at the Love Shack. It was ironic, to say the least, that she’d use Cherry’s persona for what could be the biggest accounting job of her career.
And it was all thanks to Dane Weiss and his need for a bimbo forensic accountant. She couldn’t wait to see his face when his new executive assistant started work tomorrow morning all tarted up. Or rather, “Cherry-Tarted.”
4
RUNNING LATE WAS not the way Dane wanted to start his pseudocareer at Bingham Brothers, but he’d stayed awake late going over the background materials from Binky. Probably a whole lotta nothing, but he always needed to know about the major players before he walked into a new place.
Dane paid the cabbie in front of the LaSalle Street skyscraper that housed Bingham Brothers and punched the elevator button to take him to the offices on the upper floors.
It was a long elevator ride, and he yawned, partly to pop his ears and partly because he needed to. Even after he went to bed, he’d dreamed of the brunette stripper from Frisky’s. Not particularly unusual for a guy who’d been celibate for a few months, but the part that had really woken him up sweating and hard was when she turned to face him. It had been Keeley Davis looking at him with a sexy, come-hither look.
And he was the guy who had asked her to dress sexier for the office? Granted, it was to fool Charlie Bingham, but Dane was the one who would be working with her fifty or sixty hours a week.
The elevator doors opened and he stepped into the cool gray lobby of Bingham Brothers and approached the middle-aged receptionist with her apricot helmet of hair. No teenage, nail-filing receptionists for them. This lady had probably been the company’s telephone operator since the age of plug-in switchboards.
“May I help you, sir?”
Dane introduced himself and quickly found himself in possession of a photo ID badge and directions to his new office. She showed him how to swipe himself in through the security system and, presumably, the time clock as well.
He thanked her and passed into the offices, threading through several columns of cubicles and pushing through the door marked with his name. He stopped in surprise.
A mob of guys stood around the desk where, he surmised, Keeley sat. Judging by the way their backs were to him, he guessed they weren’t waiting to greet him with a rounding chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Unless she was running the office betting pool, Dane would gamble that they were all chatting her up.
“Good morning.” His loud tone cut through the noise. The men jumped away guiltily, parting like the Red Sea to reveal a redhead. And what a redhead she was…her long, glorious waves falling over her shoulders and her breasts, brushing the edges of some Grand Canyon-deep cleavage flashing from a tight, white blouse.
Where was Keeley?
“Good morning, Mr. Weiss,” the redhead purred.
Oh, dear God, it was Keeley. She’d made her hazel eyes look wider and greener, her coy brushing of eyelashes dark on her cheek. She even had a little Cindy Crawford mole near the corner of her mouth. Real or drawn on, he didn’t care. It was a point on a map, leading the way to her full, red lips.
She smiled at the men flanking her. “Sorry, boys, playtime’s over. Looks like the boss is here.”
Her husky tones rolled over the male crowd, pulling them further into her spell. He had to clear his throat and glare pointedly at the outer door. They straggled out, some giving him nasty looks, some gazing longingly at her. He was sure to be one popular guy at Bingham Brothers.
He grabbed Keeley’s elbow and steered her into his inner office. Holy cow, where was the rest of her skirt? She had to have at least twelve inches of visible thigh. Her black micro-micro mini barely covered her ass when she was standing. If he started at her knee and stroked upward on those firm, toned thighs, he could slip his hand under that skirt with room to spare.
“Good morning, Mr. Weiss. I’m your new assistant, Cherry,” she singsonged. “How do you take your coffee?”
Ice-cold and down his pants, that’s how. “What the hell is this getup?”
“Exactly what you asked for—younger and lighter. Nonaccountant clothes.”
He sat on the edge of his desk, flabbergasted. Yeah, he’d asked for it, all right. But what had he gotten? “You’re so far from accountancy, you’re not even the same species. Where on earth did you get that outfit?”
“A little something I had in the back of my closet.”
“Yeah, right. Where’d you go shopping, the stripper store?”
“You mean the store where your sister gets her design ideas?” Her tone was syrupy sweet.
He rubbed his jaw. She had him there. “Okay. But attracting attention wasn’t what I had in mind.” He lowered his voice and leaned over to her. “How are you supposed to conduct a covert audit when nobody can take his eyes off you?”
“That’s the plan.” She gave him a sly smile. “It’s like a magician’s sleight of hand. You distract the audience with flashy stuff on top while the serious business goes on below.”
