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Slightly Settled
Wendy Markham
Top Two Don'ts for the Office PartyDon't dress in a revealing manner. (Translation: Don't wear the sexy scarlet, size-eight dress you couldn't fit into three months ago. The one that flaunts your firmed-up cleavage and newly discovered collarbones.)Don't make a spectacle of yourself. (Translation: Don't get drunk and make out with a really cute stranger for the whole company to see; he could turn out to be your boss's roommate.)I didn't follow those tips, and here I am with a hot new man in my life, Jack.But my friends are asking if I really want to bump into my boss in his boxers in the hallway of their apartment. After all, I am aiming for a promotion. And now, not only does my ex want me back, but the guy I used to think was Mr. Right just kissed me!Three months ago I couldn't hold on to one guy. Now three want me. When did my life become so complicated?
CRITICAL PRAISE FOR SLIGHTLY SINGLE BY
Wendy Markham
“…an undeniably fun journey for the reader.”
—Booklist
“Bridget Jonesy…Tracey Spadolini smokes, drinks and eats too much, and frets about her romantic life.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This is a delightfully humorous read, full of belly laughs and groans…It is almost scary how honest and true to life this book is. It is a fun read for a beach day, or a steamy evening in one’s own un-air-conditioned abode like Tracey’s.”
—The Best Reviews
WENDY MARKHAM
is a pseudonym for USA TODAY bestselling, award-winning novelist Wendy Corsi Staub, who has written more than fifty fiction and nonfiction books for adults and teenagers in various genres—among them contemporary and historical romance, suspense, mystery, television and movie tie-in and biography. She has coauthored a hardcover mystery series with former New York City mayor Ed Koch and has ghostwritten books for various well-known personalities. A small-town girl at heart, she was born and raised in western New York on the shores of Lake Erie and in the heart of the notorious snowbelt. By third grade, she was set on becoming a published author; a few years later, a school trip to Manhattan convinced her that she had to live there someday. At twenty-one, she moved alone to New York City and worked as an office temp, freelance copywriter, advertising account coordinator and book editor before selling her first novel, which went on to win a Romance Writers of America RITA
Award. She has since received numerous positive reviews and achieved bestseller status, most notably for the psychological suspense novels she writes under her own name. She was a finalist in the 2002 Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Awards single-title suspense category, and her previous Red Dress Ink title, Slightly Single, was honored as one of Waldenbooks’ Best Books of 2002. Very happily married with two children, Wendy writes full-time and lives in a cozy old house in suburban New York, proving that childhood dreams really can come true.
Slightly Settled
Wendy Markham
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For both of my beloved Jens:
Jennie King Eldridge, who was by my side
at the fateful office party, where the story began…
And Jennifer Hill, who has been there for Chapter Two:
Married Life in Suburbia.
And, as always, for Mark, Morgan and Brody, with love.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
1
Size eight.
That would be me, Tracey Spadolini. A size eight.
Can you believe it?
No, not my shoe size. My size, size.
I’m actually wearing a size eight dress—without one of those stretchy tourniquet tummy bulge compressors I used to live in—and I’m not even holding my breath.
When I started my summer diet, I figured I had about forty pounds to lose. But I’m down at least fifty, melted off with good old-fashioned diet and exercise, and kept off thanks to the little pink pills I take daily.
No, not the kind of little pink pills in a plastic baggie that you buy in a dark alley.
We’re talking a prescribed drug here.
Officially, I’m taking it to stave off panic attacks.
According to the pharmacy’s insert, potential side effects included diarrhea, constipation and severe flatulence. Not pretty, right? So I spent the first few medicated days close to home, not wanting to find myself on the crowded subway with a severe case of the runs—or, worse, uncontrollable gas.
But I’ve had nary a disgraceful rumble or abdominal cramp. In fact, aside from banishing my anxiety, the pink pills have brought on only one glorious side effect: a diminished appetite.
Happy Pills, my friend Buckley calls them.
He’s the one who referred me to the shrink in the first place, after the whole anxiety thing started this past summer. I thought I was just freaking out because my boyfriend, Will, had abandoned me. Technically, Will was away doing summer stock, but, essentially, he abandoned me.
Anyway, after a few sessions Dr. Schwartzenbaum suggested that although Will’s leaving probably triggered the panic attacks, I might have an underlying chemical imbalance. That must be true, because I’ve been on the medication for almost two months now, and haven’t had a single panic attack. Factor in that I’m rarely hungry and voilà—Happy Pills.
Back to the dress: scarlet and snug; a slinky cocktail dress with a high hem and a low bodice that, last June, would have revealed alpine cleavage. But I certainly don’t mind that my boobs shrank along with the rest of me. In fact, I barely notice. I’m too busy admiring my protruding collarbones—the protruding collarbones I’ve coveted on many an award-show red-carpet walker.
“Tracey?” Kate Delacroix taps on the dressing room door.
“It fits!” I squeal, turning away from the trio of full-length mirrors only for the second it takes to open the door and allow Kate to poke her blond head in.
“Wow. Tracey, you look ravishing in that.”
Ravishing. There are very few people who can get away with using a word like that and come across as genuine. Kate is one of them, Southern drawl and all.
Embarrassed that she might have caught my admiring gaze at my own reflection, I make an attempt to portray uncertainty.
I shrug. Tilt my head. Pretend to ponder. “Oh…I don’t know. I mean, I look okay, but…”
My jutting collarbones might be red-carpet-worthy, but an actress, I’m not. My brown eyes are still enraptured by the mirror, and I can’t seem to keep an exultant grin from tilting the corners of my—um, chapped lips.
Okay, it’s possible that I’ve been so focused on myself from the neck down that I’ve neglected the rest of me.
Mental Note: buy ChapStick at Duane Reade on the way home. P.S. Make appointment for lip wax ASAP. P.P.S. Haircut, too.
Back to skinny, ravishing below-the-neck moi. I look ten times better in this dress than I did in the silky teal shirt I wore into the dressing room. Kate gave the shirt to me for my birthday. It has a designer label and I know it cost her a fortune. But the cut and color are all wrong. Her taste is expensive, but not necessarily good. At least, not when it comes to others.
Kate’s big on teal. Aqua, too. Shades that complement her bluish-green colored contact lenses and year-round tanning salon glow. Shades that seem to cast the same sickly tint to my skin that fluorescent lighting does.
Naturally, I told Kate that I love the shirt. Naturally, I feel compelled to wear it. But only to places like the ladies’ dress department in Bloomingdale’s, where the chances of meeting a potential boyfriend are about the same as finding one strolling along Christopher Street in Greenwich Village on a Saturday night.
“You don’t think this dress is too skimpy for a corporate Christmas party?” I ask Kate now, tugging the hem southward.
She dismisses the query with a wave of one French-manicured hand. “Nah.”
“Are you sure? Because the last thing I want to do is look cheap.”
“Tracey, that dress is almost two hundred bucks on sale. It’s not cheap.”
“I know, but sometimes expensive things can look—Kate, what the hell are you wearing?”
She shrugs.
I grab her arm and pull her all the way into the dressing room.
“That’s a wedding gown!” I accuse.
“Yup.”
“Are you and Billy…?” Still clutching her white-satin-encased arm with price tags dangling, I jerk it up to examine her fourth finger for a telltale diamond.
Nothing.
Kate is unfazed. “I’m thinking we’ll get engaged at Christmas. He’s coming to Mobile with me to meet my parents and…well, he knows I’m not going to keep living with him forever without a commitment.”
“Forever? Kate, it’s been three months.”
Will McCraw and I were together three years. Three years, and instead of moving in together, we broke up. To be blunt, he dumped me. No, first he cheated, then he dumped me. And when he did, I passed out cold. Literally. I collapsed in an undignified, heartbroken heap on the parquet floor of his twenty-sixth-floor studio apartment.
But that was almost three months ago.
A lot can happen in three months.
Clearly, Kate thinks so. She sways her narrow hips slightly, the long white skirt rustling above her pedicured toes as she undoubtedly imagines herself at her reception in Billy’s arms.
I glance down at her feet. Pretty pink polished toenails in the dead of November. Huh. That Kate sure thinks of everything. I don’t even shave my legs at this time of year unless I think somebody’s going to see them.
Maybe that explains why she’s standing there in a wedding gown with a damned good chance of becoming a bride momentarily, while I don’t even have a date for the Blaire Barnett Christmas party next weekend.
But I’m not the only one. Brenda isn’t bringing her husband and Yvonne isn’t bringing her fiancé and Latisha isn’t bringing her boyfriend. It’s going to be Girls’ Night Out—to celebrate my triumphant return to the ad agency.
I quit my job back in September; in fact, on the same day the dumping/fainting incident took place. But Blaire Barnett, unlike Will, wanted me back.
What happened was this: the temp secretary who replaced me filed a sexual harassment suit against my ex-boss, Jake. Long story short, he wound up getting fired, and they offered me my old position back.
I was reluctant to take it, because I was making more money working for Eat Drink Or Be Married, a Manhattan caterer. But waitressing is hard, dirty work, it encompassed my nights and weekends and there were no benefits. Besides, I missed my old friends at Blaire Barnett; I was offered more money, and they promised me the opportunity to interview for the next junior copywriting job that opens up over in the Creative Department. Meaning I won’t be a secretary—or broke—forever.
All in all, it’s good to be back.
In fact, all in all, there’s not much about my life right now that isn’t good. My regular life, that is. My love life is a different story. The kind without a happy ending. At least, so far.
Kate—currently a vision in Happy Ending—gathers her long blond hair on her head with one hand while running the other along the row of satin-covered buttons at her back, feeling for gaps.
I step toward her, my legs engulfed in yards of swishy white, and attempt to fasten two buttons near her tailbone. It isn’t easy. They’re slippery, and the size of those mini M&M’s I haven’t had since July.
She says, “I swear, Tracey, three months is long enough to live together without a commitment. If Billy doesn’t get me a ring for Christmas, I’ll be shocked.”
“So will I.”
“I thought you just said—”
“It’s only been three months. That’s what I said. I didn’t say I don’t think you and Billy should get engaged.”
