“Thanks,” I said drily.
He grabbed his coat off the hook in the front hallway and disappeared out the front door.
“He’s always doing that,” Jill exclaimed in frustration the moment the door had closed behind him. She exhaled loudly and shook her head.
“Doing what?” I asked.
She waved angrily at the door. “Just disappearing like that,” she said, looking upset. “The days he’s supposedly off, he’s always getting called in. It drives me crazy.”
“Have you said something to him about it?” I asked.
She shook her head. “It’s his job. What can he do? It’s no use me getting upset about it.”
“But you
are
upset,” I pointed out.
“No reason to burden him with that,” she said with a shrug, visibly pulling herself together and slipping back into perfect-wife mode. “Besides, he’s off saving people’s lives. Who am I to complain?”
I paused for a second.
“Jill, he’s a cosmetic surgeon,” I pointed out. “He’s not really saving people’s lives.”
She looked at me sharply for a moment: then her face softened. She sighed.
“I know,” she said. “But he’s doing important work. Making people’s lives better and all that. I understand why he has to go. Anyhow,” she said, visibly switching tracks. She blinked a few times and smiled at me. “I’m glad we have some time alone.”
“Why?” I asked, concerned. I put down the sandwich I was eating and looked at her closely. Was she going to confess some problem in her marriage that she had thus far been unable to talk about? Personally, I think I would have reached the limit of my patience within the first twenty-four hours of being married to Alec. Maybe she was finally admitting that his constant condescension drove her crazy.
“Because it will give me the chance to go over The Rules with you,” she said cheerfully. My heart sank. I was hoping that we could finally talk about Alec’s shortcomings. But apparently that was a conversation for another day. Or, knowing Jill, we’d
never
have the conversation, because she’d be too busy pretending to herself that everything was perfect.
“What rules?” I asked.
She looked at me, astonished. “
The
Rules,” she said. Images of the old-fashioned dating advice book flashed through my head for one horrifying moment until Jill clarified. “My mother’s cardinal rules for dating. They worked for me. I know they’ll help you with The Blonde Theory, too.”
Oh great. Marianne Peters’s dating rules straight out of the nineteenth century were almost worse than the outdated book. I’d grown up hearing about them and vaguely remembered them from the days when Jill used to babble about them ceaselessly, but I had never paid much attention. I’d always thought they were silly and antiquated. Then again, come to think of it, Jill was the one who had gotten married to the kind of guy she’d always dreamed of while I was stuck acting like a dumb blonde because I’d apparently been unable to date like a normal human being. So maybe there was some merit to the rules after all.
“Okay,” Jill began dramatically while I reached for another sandwich quarter and looked at her apprehensively. “I know I’ve told you these rules before, but it’s been ages.”
“At least ten years,” I agreed. I refrained from adding how silly I’d always thought the rules were and tried to keep an open mind. After all, it wasn’t like Jill was trying to get the
real
me to follow them. I tried to remember that.
“Right,” she said. “But it seems like you could use a refresher now. For use on all these dates you’re going out on.”
Jill apparently still believed wholeheartedly in her mother’s rules, which were designed to result in a happily-ever-after marriage to a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or other high-powered, successful businessman. As an only child, Jill had been the sole focus of her mother’s indoctrination efforts, and thus grew up believing in the rules the way other people believed in their religions. In fact, I suspected that Mrs. Peters’s rules were very much like a religion to Jill, and her marriage to a well-established doctor like Alec only solidified their efficacy in her head.
I, on the other hand, had never believed in “rules” for dating, relating, or anything else. I believed in learning from experience, trusting your gut, and trying to play it smart. I didn’t think there was a one-size-fits-all set of instructions that would land me my Mr. Perfect.
Then again, Jill
had
landed the man of
her
dreams (even if
I
wouldn’t exactly consider Alec a dreamboat). And I was still conspicuously single. Perhaps I needed to reconsider my aversion. With that in mind, I listened with as much optimism as I could muster, although that was easier said than done.
“Okay,” she said dramatically, while I concentrated on an egg salad sandwich quarter. She seemed thrilled to have an audience for once. “Let’s start with the most obvious ones. Always let men open doors for you. Never second-guess a man. And of course, don’t sleep with a man or even ask him up to your apartment on your first, second, or third date.”
“Why not?” I whined, only half kidding. I smiled slyly at her, knowing my words would bug her.
She rolled her eyes at me.
“Never babble, and make the man work to find out more about you,” she continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “Never be an open book; always remain a mystery.”
“That shouldn’t be too hard since my new personality is a mystery to me, too,” I said with a smile.
Jill rolled her eyes at me again. “Always listen attentively,” she continued. “Always stand up straight. Don’t touch him too much, because you appear needy. Always act just a little aloof, so that he feels he has to work to earn your admiration. Never act like you know more than him, though. That can be emasculating.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” I muttered. After all, wasn’t my whole dating history a testament to that? Hmm, maybe I
would
have benefited from spending more time in the Peters household, listening to Mrs. Peters’s rules. “It’s not like I’ll be acting like I know anything as a dumb blonde anyhow,” I added.
“Good point,” Jill said thoughtfully. “Maybe that’s one of the reasons this Blonde Theory has been so successful so far. Because it’s based on one of my mother’s cardinal rules.”
I snorted, then quickly apologized.
“Maybe you’re right,” I admitted reluctantly, hoping that Jill’s mom, whom I’d always dismissed as somewhat shallow and materialistic, hadn’t been right all along. That would be the ultimate slap in the face—to realize that I’d had all the correct dating advice in front of me at age twelve, and had chosen to ignore it. Oops.
“Just a few more rules for now,” Jill said. “Make sure to let him know you need him. Not that you need a boyfriend, but that you need
him
specifically, because his wisdom is so indispensable to your life and you can’t figure things out on your own.”
I had to laugh at that one. “Is that really how you acted around Alec?”
Jill shrugged. “Let’s just say he still thinks I don’t know how to change a lightbulb or drive a car with a manual transmission,” she said with a wink.
“You’re kidding me,” I said. “Six months into your marriage, he still thinks you need him to do things like that for you?”
She shrugged again. “It makes him feel important,” she said. “Which, by the way, is another one of my mother’s rules. Always let a guy know that you think he’s very, very important.”
“So basically just stroke his ego,” I said drily. It seemed that most of the guys I’d been out with—even pre–Blonde Theory—had egos that were large enough already. I almost felt like I’d be doing the world a disservice by stroking them further.
“Oh yes, and always wear enough makeup,” Jill added.
I raised an eyebrow. “That’s one of the rules?” I asked dubiously.
She nodded. “My mom added that one when I was seventeen,” she explained. “She told me then, ‘Guys don’t want to know that you have wrinkles, blemishes, or imperfections of any kind.’ I think she’s right.”
“So basically, according to your mother’s rules, women should strive to be perfect in every way except that they need men to help them do even simple things,” I recapped.
She shrugged innocently. “Pretty much.”
“Sounds like you’ve been trying out The Blonde Theory for the last twenty years,” I said.
Jill just looked at me. She didn’t have an answer for that.
O
n my cab ride back to the office that afternoon, with Jill’s Rules swirling through my head, I had a new thought about The Blonde Theory. What if it wasn’t really about
me
anyhow? What if it wasn’t that
I
actually intimidated guys? What if it was that they were so insecure to begin with, they were scared to date women who were smart enough to potentially see beneath their thin layers of power and prestige?
I thought about it all the way back to my office and was still deep in thought as I glided past my secretary, Molly, and sat down at my desk. Maybe these men
knew
deep down that they were complete duds and relied on the stupidest women they could find to build up their egos anyhow. In any case, these realizations weren’t exactly helping me. I was no closer to discovering the secrets of successful dating than I had been a week ago. If anything, I was feeling more discouraged, especially after my little talk with Alec.
I was just mulling over that thought when Molly burst into my office, looking nervous, her eyes wide behind her thick glasses.
“Um, Ms. Roberts?” she asked, pushing her short brown hair distractedly behind her ears.
I cocked an eyebrow at her and tried to relax her with a smile. “Molly,” I said, “I’ve told you a hundred times to call me Harper, not Ms. Roberts.”
She was a fantastic secretary; don’t get me wrong. There was just something about the doe-eyed twenty-five-year-old who filed my papers and booked my appointments calling me “Ms. Roberts” that made me feel about twenty years older than I was. After all, she wasn’t
that
much younger than me. And after a year and a half as my secretary—and more than a hundred corrections from me each time she said “Ms. Roberts”—it seemed high time that she started addressing me by my first name.
“I’m sorry, Ms...Harper,” she stammered.
“Don’t worry, Molly,” I said soothingly. “Everything okay?”
“Um, yes,” she said. “But you have someone waiting downstairs in the lobby to see you. He’s not in your appointment book, though, so I didn’t know whether you wanted me to have reception send him up or not.”
I checked my watch and frowned. I didn’t have an appointment until four o’oclock, and it was only two. This wasn’t exactly a business where people did drop-bys, either. I was on the thirty-fourth floor of a Wall Street office building; it wasn’t like my office was just a Midtown storefront where people with random ideas they wanted patents for could stream in and out.
“Molly, I don’t think we had anything scheduled until later in the afternoon,” I said finally. “Right?” I certainly hoped not; I had a ton of paperwork to do for a few clients whom I’d met with last week.
“No,” she said hesitantly. “But the man downstairs insists you should be expecting him. I told him that he wasn’t on your schedule, but he asked me to come in and check with you.”
“Well, who is it?” I asked, starting to feel annoyed. Not at Molly, but at the stranger outside who felt he was due a meeting with me.
“He says his name is Matt James,” Molly said.
“Matt James?” I repeated, dumbfounded. What could
he
be doing here? I flashed briefly back to our “date” at my firm dinner and blanched when I realized that any of my co-workers could see him in the hallway. Great, now they’d all think he really
was
my boyfriend, and I was being über-unprofessional by letting him come visit me in the office. What could he possibly want anyhow?
“Um, Harper?” Molly asked hesitantly, and I snapped my focus back to her.
“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. I was painfully aware of the fact that I was blushing. “Er, okay, send him up.”
Molly nodded, looking a bit confused, and walked back out to the waiting area outside my office door. I hurriedly shuffled through the admittedly messy stack of papers on my desk and shoved them into one of the big drawers to the left of me. Then I quickly reached into my desk drawer, where I always kept my little container of Tarte blotting papers and mattifying powder, and quickly blotted as much nervous moisture as I could from my forehead, dusting powder onto my pink cheeks to conceal my blushing. I hadn’t had a chance to screw my face up too badly since coming back from Jill’s, so the rest of me looked relatively decent. I quickly shoved the little purple compact back into my desk and tried to look busy.
Not that I cared what Matt James thought of my appearance. I mean, why would I? It’s not like I
liked
him.
“Hey, Harper,” Matt’s deep voice rang out a moment later as Molly pushed the door open. She shrugged at me as he entered. I looked up, still pretending that I was working on something very important, because after all, I didn’t want him thinking that I just sat here and goofed off. I didn’t. I had a job. A serious job. So there.
“Hello, Matt,” I said, trying to sound as formal as possible. “Please. Have a seat. What brings you here today?”
He grinned at me as he crossed the room and sat down. Despite my best intentions, I couldn’t help noticing how cute he looked. His thick, nearly black hair was unkempt and floppy, but in that intentional way common among the MTV crowd. It should have looked ridiculous on a man who was in his late thirties, but somehow it didn’t. His green eyes looked particularly bright this morning, and his tan deeper than it had last time I’d seen him, leading me to wonder if he spent weekends in the islands—or twenty minutes a day in a tanning bed. Hmph. Flake.
He was dressed in dark-washed Diesel jeans, a black blazer, and a gray ribbed T-shirt that wasn’t too tight but still showed me the contours of his well-developed chest.
I shook my head, trying to rid myself of the inexplicable pull I was feeling toward this guy whom I’d never date in a million years. After all, he was just a flaky actor. And he had seen me at my most embarrassing. Not good.
“You’re looking lovely this afternoon, Harper,” Matt said as he settled into one of the overstuffed leather chairs that faced my desk. He appeared to be smirking, or at least smiling with a slightly smarmy edge, so I wasn’t sure whether he was actually complimenting me or disguising a little dig.
“Thank you,” I said stiffly, all of a sudden aware of how uptight I must look in my blue starched blouse and my fitted black Ralph Lauren skirt suit. I cleared my throat. “Is there something I can help you with, Matt?”
“I see,” he said, flashing me his wide, white-toothed signature grin. “No time to beat around the bush, right? You’re all business.” His expression was amused, which made me quietly simmer. What did he think this was, some kind of game?
“Well, this
is
my business, Matt,” I said slowly, not caring that I sounded patronizing. “And
you’re
the one who came to see
me.
So is there something I can do for you?”
He just smiled infuriatingly at me and craned his neck to look around my office, slowly taking it all in as I waited, tapping my fingers impatiently on my oak desk, trying to ignore the uninvited attraction I was feeling for him.
“Nice office you have here,” he said finally, looking back at me and nodding his approval.
“Glad you think so,” I said drily. My patience was wearing thin. The longer he sat here, the more I noticed the strong curve of his jaw, the adorably curly ends of his thick shock of hair, even the thickness of his dark eyelashes. Not only did I not have the professional time to waste on Matt James today, but I didn’t want to keep noticing all his numerous attractive features. I was sure he went for twenty-one-year-old blonde starlets or something—not over-the-hill, destined-to-be-single-forever attorneys. So why waste my time noticing his perfect cheekbones, his well-defined triceps, or his perfectly straight teeth?
Besides, I knew I was still blushing. I
hated
that he made me blush.
“I hope you don’t mind me just dropping by this way, Harper,” Matt said, finally refocusing his attention on me. Man, he flashed that smile of his around a lot. I tried to resist its sparkle. I cleared my throat again.
“It’s fine, Matt,” I said brusquely. “But I do have quite a lot to do today. So if you’ll just tell me why you’re here...” I let my voice trail off and raised an eyebrow at him. He finally seemed to get it.
“Right,” he said with a nod. “Sorry. I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop by to talk.”
“Matt,” I said slowly, as if talking to a child. “You’re in the neighborhood every day. Your studio is right down the street. And it’s not like we’re friends. Why would you stop by for a chat?”
“Not exactly a chat,” he said, looking momentarily wounded and then quickly flashing me another of his incredible smiles. I had to admit, they were starting to melt my tough veneer. But I couldn’t let him see that.
“What do you mean?” I asked, trying to keep my tone even.
Matt shrugged, stretching out his long legs and leaning back. “Fine, fine, I’ll cut to the chase, if you want,” he said, looking resigned. “I was actually hoping you’d be willing to talk to me about your job.”
“About my job?” I repeated dubiously. I didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about.
“Right,” he said, nodding eagerly. “See, I just got a raise at work. They’re going to be increasing the number of scenes I’m in this season.”
“Congratulations,” I said, still completely confused about what this had to do with me.
“Thanks. Anyhow, I was hoping you could... help me. I mean, I think I do a decent job of portraying a lawyer now. But most of my scenes are out of the courtroom. This next season, the writers want to give me more courtroom scenes. I just want to make sure I nail them. I need someone to help me make my scenes authentic.” He paused and looked at me imploringly. “I need
you.
”
I coughed and tried to ignore his last words, because of course what he
meant
was he needed me to help him with his scenes. Still, it was hard not to feel at least a little bit of something when a drop-dead gorgeous man sitting mere feet away told me he needed me. Especially a drop-dead gorgeous man who was not under the mistaken impression that I was a dumb blonde. Which, of course, made the possibility that he was actually flirting with me astronomically slimmer.
“Matt,” I began. I paused and continued, trying to keep my voice flat. “Flattered as I am by your interest, I’m a patent lawyer. Not a criminal attorney like your character. I’m rarely even in the courtroom.”
Matt nodded. “I know,” he said urgently. “But you went to law school. I know you know how to practice criminal law. In fact, I know you were a criminal lawyer for your first year out of school while you studied for the patent bar.”
I looked at him, startled. “How did you know that?”
“Emmie told me.”
“You asked her about me?” I demanded, well aware that my cheeks were growing even hotter. I just hoped that this wasn’t as obvious to Matt as it was to me.
He nodded and shrugged. “I was curious,” he said casually. “Anyhow, will you help me?”
I studied him for a moment.
“I don’t even understand what kind of help you’re asking for,” I said finally. The truth was, I didn’t know how I was going to say no to him. I suspected that few people were able to; he could probably charm his way into just about anything.
“Nothing big,” he said with a shrug. “I just want to come in sometime this week and talk to you. Pick your brain, so to speak. About legal terminology, closing arguments, courtroom behavior, that sort of thing.”
I looked at him dubiously. He must have mistaken my hesitance.
“I’ll pay you your hourly rate, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he added.
“No, no, don’t be silly,” I said with a wave of my hand. I looked at him for a moment, then nodded. “Look, I don’t know how I’m going to be able to help you. But you could come one day this week during my lunch break and I can answer whatever questions you have. Okay?”
He nodded enthusiastically. “I really appreciate it, Harper. I really, really do. You have no idea how much this will help.”
I relaxed a bit and smiled back.
“Don’t thank me until after we talk,” I said, picking up a pen that lay on my desk and twirling it distractedly through my fingers. “I’m still a bit doubtful that there’s anything I can really do to help.”
“No, no, I know it will help,” Matt said, shaking his head. “Okay?”
I paused for a moment, then nodded and buzzed Molly to ask which day I was free for lunch. She consulted my schedule and called back to tell me that I had an opening on Thursday at noon. I asked Matt, and he happily agreed to be back at my office the day after tomorrow for our lunch meeting.
“Great, great!” he enthused. He stood up and reached across my desk to shake my hand, which seemed oddly formal. Still, I grasped his hand firmly and shook back, as I always did with clients. He looked me in the eye and smiled broadly. I tried to ignore the beat that my heart skipped as he did so. “I’ll see you Thursday at noon, then!”
“See you Thursday,” I murmured as he hastily made his way to my door. I tried not to notice how incredibly cute he looked from behind as he left. Because that was really irrelevant. Wasn’t it?
B
Y THE END
of the workday, I had finished the patent paperwork I needed to do and met with a regular client of mine, Larry Bond, the director of development for Fisher Pharmaceuticals, a small drug manufacturer that brought me a lot of my business thanks to its productive research department. This year already, I had secured patents for the firm on two new eczema skin creams and a birth control patch with a low dose of progesterone. Today’s meeting had been about a new pain relief medication that was in the final stages of development. Larry had wanted to get the patent ball rolling early, so we had pored over paperwork and documents most of the afternoon. I couldn’t help but think, as we batted around statistics and figures, how completely unglamorous my job was. Boy, was Matt James in for a shock if he thought he could pick my brain about ways to spice up his portrayal of defense attorney Patrick Carr, lawyer extraordinaire. I was probably the most boring lawyer in Manhattan. Even though I loved it, patent law wasn’t exactly full of made-for-TV excitement.