Pink Satin

Chapter Three

Wearing a pastel green suit and matching sandals, Greer was perched on the conference table, her legs swinging as she waited for the discussion to die down.

The conference room, like the offices at Love Lace, was thickly carpeted in pale pink. Flocked ivory wallpaper added an elegant touch; the paperweights were mother-of-pearl; and the ambience from the sewing room to the customer entrance was supposed to reflect luxurious serenity-an atmosphere conducive to the selling of lingerie.

Greer had known for a long time that the atmosphere was a scam. Marketing panties was as cutthroat as any other business, if not more so. Greer’s glasses were perched on her nose as she surveyed the three pairs of male eyes glaring stubbornly at her.

“You all appear to be deaf this morning,” she said cheerfully. “I agree that the nightgown is a unique design-one of the sexiest we’ve ever had. It just won’t do at all for the catalog cover.”

“The hell it won’t,” growled the tall blond in front. Barney tossed copies of designs on the table in front of him. “The others don’t hold a candle to it, Greer. And since you’re the only holdout-”

“And Marie’s vote would be on our side. You know that,” Tim interrupted.

Greer nodded patiently. The two potential choices for their fall catalog cover design were lying next to her. One was a pastel yellow lounging outfit, an infinitely soft design that draped loosely over the model’s figure. The look was sensual, comfortable and subtly alluring.

That was the one the men didn’t like. Their favorite was Marie’s coup de grâce, a negligee in pearl-pink satin and cream lace. The model wearing it had a Penthouse figure-which the gown required. Satin, however luxurious, was not an easy fabric for most women to wear. It had a sheen and, like a mirror, reflected a woman’s worst faults. The gown flowed over a body that had to be perfect, from flat stomach to smooth hips and long legs. The cobweb-lace bodice cupped breasts that had to be sizable and tilted up just so. The low, heart-shaped neckline, the cutouts showing the sides of the breasts-only a certain kind of woman could wear the style, a sexually uninhibited woman who had the courage to flaunt her assets.

“If our customers were men, I would agree with you,” Greer continued patiently. “But they’re women. Women we want as return customers.”

“Women who are increasingly buying sexy lingerie, or we wouldn’t all be here now,” Ray drawled from the chair closest to her. “Sex is in this decade, sweetheart. We’re asking you to catch up and become part of the times…”

Greer tossed a wad of paper in his general direction. Grant, from the back of the room, didn’t so much as raise an eyelid. “You can sell the nightgown on that basis,” Greer said evenly. “And it will sell, even if the price is much higher than for our usual lingerie. You’re still missing the point. The nightgown doesn’t enhance the image we want Love Lace to project, and in the long run, we’d lose money because of it.”

The argument raged on. Greer’s eyes darted back and forth between the men in front of her, her tone calm and her stance never wavering. This morning the men were generally behaving like turkeys. Normally, she was pretty fond of them.

In front of her sat Barney. In his mid-thirties, Barney was tall and blond and divorced. His specialty was fabric and tech care; he was great at his job, but she’d had a few problems with his roving hands when she first started working at Love Lace. There’d been no passes, however, after he’d had the flu and she’d taken chicken soup to his home…and listened for six hours to his divorce woes.

Tim, on the other side of the table, was the firm’s accountant. He looked harmless enough with his fluff of gray hair and myopic brown eyes, but he was one of the most confirmed misogynists Greer had ever met…until she’d discovered he was a sucker for doughnuts in the morning. The way to some men’s hearts was still through their stomachs.

In the back of the room sat Grant, the boss, a small, spare man with thinning hair, a wisp of a mustache, a gentle voice and the business instincts of a shark. Throughout the meeting, his face remained expressionless, except for the faintest of smiles as he watched his ad psychologist in action.

One of Grant’s favorite management strategies was never to conduct a staff meeting himself. Actually, few of his business methods followed a standard set of rules-they just worked, and woe to any competitor who misjudged his gentle look as weakness. Greer thought affectionately that the man had only one major flaw: He couldn’t stand arguing with his French wife.

Today he didn’t have to, because Marie had stayed home with a cold. Volatile and brilliantly creative, Marie was their chief designer. On the rare occasions when Grant didn’t feel that one of his wife’s designs would sell, he expected Greer to be his hatchet woman. And the cream lace on pink satin was Marie’s choice for their fall catalog cover, or someone’s life was going to be miserable.

Probably Greer’s, though she doubted Grant would escape the flying shrapnel when his wife returned to work.

Regardless, Grant had warned her when she started with Love Lace that there were areas in which she’d have to sink or swim. Because of her looks, she was better prepared than some to deal with sexism. She’d managed Barney and Tim, but Ray was her last holdout, and it was Ray who followed her to her office once the staff meeting was over.

He paused in the doorway while she tossed her glasses on her desk and unloaded the mound of paperwork in her arms. “You won again,” he remarked idly.

“Hmm.” Greer scanned the messages next to the phone before glancing up. Ray was their resident feudal baron, she thought whimsically. Black hair, black eyes, a subtle smile, broad shoulders in meticulous dress. He only needed a castle with moat to complete the picture. And an estate populated by women who bowed to him.

Ray could market oceanfront property in Kansas successfully, and Greer respected him for that. But at times his salesmanship didn’t make him any easier to work with. Ray generally backed down just before a clash, but he and Greer inevitably circled each other in conversation like wary combatants.

Leaning against her office door, he lazily crossed his ankles. “Marie will have your hide.”

“You’re telling me something I don’t know?”

Ray chuckled and moved in to slouch comfortably in the pale gray chair next to her desk. “It would have made a good cover.”

“For Frederick’s of Hollywood.” Greer sat down and slipped off her shoes. The others were used to her padding around in stocking feet; she wasn’t about to change her habits for Ray. As she waited for him to speak, she was aware that his eyes were roving over her mint-green suit, slowly removing that suit, and just as slowly continuing to talk with her stark naked-in his imagination. Used to his mode of operation, she paid little attention.

“You’re one of the few women who could wear that nightgown to absolute perfection,” Ray drawled.

“Yup,” Greer agreed smoothly. “Unfortunately, pink makes my face break out in spots.”

Annoyance flamed in his dark eyes, but only for an instant before he let out a low chuckle. “I still think I caught just a glint of lust in your eyes when you looked at that nightgown. Don’t tell me we’ve found a rare weakness in you, Greer?”

Something sharp pricked her finger, and she glanced down in surprise. The paper clip in her hand was completely bent out of shape, unusable now. Had she really just done that? Tossing the thing in the wastebasket, she let her eyes return to Ray. “I know you’re ticked because you were backing Marie on this one, but rationally you know better. Cost margins were part of it-the nightgown is too much higher than our regular lines. And style is part of it-the style simply has limited appeal; too few women would look good in it.”

“You want me to listen to your whole lecture again?” he asked dryly.

Greer leaned forward, resting her chin in her cupped hands, wondering why some men remained uneducable. “We’re selling fantasies,” she said patiently. “The whole business of lingerie is based on people’s fondness for make-believe. We sell sinfully delicious fantasies-daydreams that don’t threaten. A woman is going to buy what makes her feel good about herself. What feels good next to her skin. Clothes that give her confidence because she does feel sexy in them. And that’s entirely different from a nightgown that shouts-”

“Sex object. ‘Promoting sexuality is inherent to the field, but it doesn’t have to be on a sex-object basis,’” Ray quoted with another of his subtle smiles, mimicking her earlier words in the staff meeting. “One of the staff can be very, very picky on that infinitesimal difference between sexy and sex object.”

“A huge difference,” Greer corrected.

“You’re full of peanuts, darling.”

Control your temper, Greer. “You voted with me in the end,” she reminded him.

“That was business. Business is a different game from life.” He stood up and stretched lazily, his opaque, hypnotic eyes fastened on her. “I really only came in to say I was shocked you didn’t have a little feminine temper tantrum over going with me to the trade show.”

“Why on earth should I?”

He shrugged. “You’ve backed out of attending every other trade show before this.”

It was true-she had. Because lingerie conventions were just like other conventions. A lone woman was a prize lamb in a meat market, something Greer would never willingly let herself in for. And the minute she’d yielded to Grant’s suggestion at the end of the staff meeting that she go, she knew Ray would offer a suggestive comment. “Love Lace always sends two representatives,” she said smoothly, “and since Marie can’t go with you this time, I don’t mind.”

“Somehow I thought you would.”

“Why?”

“You and I rather rub each other the wrong way, don’t we? On the other hand, we could probably solve that rather quickly if we took a double room at the convention.”

Greer frowned innocently, as if considering. “Sex does solve everything,” she said cheerfully, “but I doubt it would work in this instance. I snore-loudly, I’m told. You’d get crabby from lack of sleep, and then we’d never stop bickering.”

“I didn’t have in mind getting all that much sleep, anyway.”

“Would you kindly get your bedroom eyes out of here so I can get some work done?”

Ray chuckled, pausing only for another second at the door. “Are you that sassy with the men in your life, Greer?”

“Worse,” she said absently, and deliberately opened a folder on her desk. He was gone a few seconds later. Her pulse slowed down a few moments afterward. Ray inevitably ruffled the figurative fur on the back of her neck. She didn’t know why she let him do it. There was a psychological label for men who didn’t feel sexually secure about themselves unless they were aggressive with the females of the species. Whatever the term, it was her own problem that she let him continue to bother her.

She worked for an hour and accomplished precisely nothing. When the clock struck twelve, she put on her shoes, grabbed her purse and sauntered to the front door.

On the street, a soft breeze fluttered through the leaves in restless surges. The day was warm, bright with the North Carolina sun. Settling her sunglasses on her nose, she slid her hands into the pockets of her suit and simply strolled, taking in the springtime mood and relaxing.

The offices near Love Lace were well landscaped; gay rows of colorful flowers danced in the faint breeze, neat and confined within their borders and as new as the season. The smell of freshly mown grass filled her nostrils, and birds were rocking on the branches overhead, most of them in pairs. Another sign of spring.

The sun’s touch on her face felt as sensual as a caress. Her mood half lazy, half oddly wistful, Greer strolled through the business district and window-shopped. She paused before a display showing a rose-colored evening gown, and thought helplessly of the pink satin negligee. The damn thing, she was well aware, was starting to haunt her, but not because she hadn’t been right about the catalog cover.

Cream lace on pink satin…maybe every woman had a secret fantasy about color and texture and whatever it was that made her feel sultry and sexy and exotic. That negligee was Greer’s. She wasn’t the type to wear it; even the thought of wearing it raised a fleeting feeling of nameless anxiety, but she couldn’t get the thing out of her mind.

She hadn’t been able to get her new neighbor out of her mind, either. She’d woken up thinking about Ryan, and at most inconvenient times all morning she hadn’t been able to get him out of her head.

His kiss bothered her. The men who knew her would never have misunderstood a simple gesture of affection; he obviously thought she’d invited that kiss with her own behavior. Because they were going to be neighbors, she obviously had to find some way to correct a misleading impression if she’d given one.

Glancing at her watch, Greer turned around and ambled back toward work, suddenly feeling restless, unsettled. Something about her new neighbor seemed to bring on a bad case of spring fever.

She’d known and worked with a lot of men in the past five years. As a girl, she’d hid her figure in oversized clothes, but that nonsense was all past. These days she had no reason to hide, and dressed to reflect the woman she was. Gentle colors and subtle styles suited her; sexy fashions didn’t. She happened to be a naturally affectionate, caring woman, but not the type to lure out the sexual predator in a man.

Ryan-she couldn’t fathom why-felt like danger.

Greer was too sensible to let a dangerous case of spring fever get her down.

“Off the counter if you value your life,” Greer warned Truce. For once, the feline seemed to realize she meant business. He immediately leaped down and paced in wounded silence toward the living room.

Blowing a wisp of hair from her eyes, Greer turned the steaming bread out of the loaf pan and set it on a plate. Next to it was a luscious chocolate cake covered with two inches of seven-minute frosting. Licking her fingers, Greer stood back to survey her masterpieces with a critical eye.

They passed. They definitely passed. The loaf was tall and golden brown, and smelled…irresistible. And the cake-if she said so herself-would tempt the most determined weight watcher. Satisfied, Greer glanced at the clock, noted it was just after nine o’clock, and realized absently that her crank caller had actually left her alone for an entire evening. It seemed a good omen. Resolutely, she balanced the cake plate in one hand and the bread in the other.

Truce didn’t make the juggling act any easier by trying to wind around her legs at the door. “I’ll be right back. Promise,” Greer told him.

Turning the knob was a precarious business, but she managed, and padded barefoot across the hall. Using her elbow as a knocker, she thumped on her new neighbor’s door and waited.

No answer. Earlier Greer had heard various thumps and rattles through their shared apartment wall; she was certain Ryan was home. Chewing her lip indecisively, she tried her elbow on the bell and threatened the bread with a dire future if it toppled.

“Just open it,” Ryan’s voice finally yelled impatiently from within.

“I can’t.”

“You’ll have to.”

Hmm. Pasting an innocuously cheerful smile on her face, Greer managed to turn the knob with her wrist and push it open. “Ryan?”

Boxes and packing crates greeted her. Of course he’d only moved in a few days before, but Greer still couldn’t help smiling. He had obviously unpacked assorted tools and books as a first priority, whereas he hadn’t bothered with anything so mundane as putting up his bed-a queen-sized mattress was lying plop center on the living room carpet. Men.

“I heard that.”

“I never said a thing.” Greer swung around to face him-as well as she could with her arms full.

Like Greer, Ryan had tousled hair and bare feet; he was wearing jeans so old they were a soft gray-blue. But whereas Greer wore a scarf and a holey sweatshirt, Ryan was bare from the waist up.

Very bare. Strikingly bare. His chest was sun-browned, his shoulders sleek and muscular, and his jeans hung low over lean hips. Crisp, curling hair grew in an intimate line from his throat to his navel.

For an instant, Greer felt a strong, unfamiliar emotional rush, making her palms feel oddly slippery, her world tilt slightly off-balance. She tried to banish it. Certainly the rest of Ryan’s appearance was enough to bring back her natural humor. He was covered with paint. Speckles of white dotted his mustache, his chest hair and his jeans, and both hands glistened with them…partly because he was still holding a paintbrush.

Greer took a breath and then chuckled. “I can see why you couldn’t answer your door,” she said lightly. “Don’t tell me you don’t share Mrs. Wissler’s love for purple?”

“I’m glad you came over,” he said quietly. “If I’d known it was you-”

“Just bringing welcome-to-the-neighborhood offerings.” Greer rushed past him, her arms beginning to give out even before she reached his kitchen counter. Sensibly, she plopped down her peace offerings, while most unreasonably her pulse was throbbing a mile a minute. She’d heard his low, vibrant baritone, the obvious glad-to-see-you-here in his voice. “I didn’t come to stay, just to cart over the cake and bread,” she called back brightly. “I have this terrible problem when I come home from a tough day; I can’t sit still and inevitably find myself in the kitchen. Then, though, there’s this problem with calories-which I figured I could shift on to you, being the nearest unfortunate neighbor. No hurry returning the plates-”

You can stop jabbering any time, Greer. She hadn’t meant to stay, and she now found herself in a great hurry to leave once she’d deposited her gifts in his kitchen.

Wiping her palms on the seat of her jeans, she whirled for the doorway, and found Ryan’s dark shadow blocking it. Her best company smile immediately curved her lips. “Honest, I’m not staying,” she repeated.

“Did you get another phone call tonight?”

“Nope. He must be taking a vacation. Hardly ever misses a Wednesday.” It was still easy to talk to him. The only difference was the memory of a thirty-second kiss, and a feeling of sexual awareness Greer hadn’t had the day before.

She tried to shake it off, but it wasn’t that simple with Ryan standing there half-naked, a silent apartment behind him, and his soft, luminous eyes on hers. Had she really thought him ordinary-looking yesterday?

He wasn’t at all. He had the sleek, lean look of an animal in the wild, the body of a man who used his muscles to do far more than push paper around a desk. His maleness assaulted her in the suddenly intimate silence, and Greer felt totally irritated with herself. It was one thing to be unnerved by a man who threatened her, but another thing altogether to get uptight when the man had done nothing but be friendly…give or take one kiss. “I’ll be going…”

“Stay a minute and see what I’m doing.”

She shook her head, “Really, I still have a ton of things to do.”

“Just for a minute,” Ryan coaxed.

“You’re busy,” she informed him firmly.

“And if I have to face one more purple room alone, I think I’ll suffer apoplexy. Have you ever tried to outstare a dead purple wall?”

“Actually, no.” Greer took a breath, and another step closer to the door. Ryan didn’t move. She smiled engagingly at him. “Something told me you wouldn’t keep the purple walls. Honestly, though, I don’t want to get in your way.”

“You don’t have to pick up a paintbrush, I promise. Just spare me a few minutes of conversation.”

“Really, I…” She’d only come to set things straight, and in Frank Sinatra fashion, her way. If she made an act of pure uncomplicated friendship, he would have to react in kind. And since she was dressed like a bag lady, she figured he’d get the rest of the message.

Maybe he was getting the rest of the message, Greer thought dismally, but for some unknown reason she seemed to be headed toward his bedroom a few seconds later.