Meredith sighed. “All right, just give me a size then.”
Jessica did. “And nothing fancy,” she whispered, so that Jamie, sitting just outside the door, couldn’t hear her. “I don’t like underwires in my bra. And I don’t like lace on my underwear, at all.”
Meredith was looking mutinous.
“It’s scratchy!”
Meredith left, and Jessica sank down on the Cleopatra-style pink tufted chaise longue. What had she just let herself in for? Another woman was choosing underwear for her. It was appalling. She should have protested more strenuously, instead of agreeing to be Meredith’s hostage.
Shoot, she’d forgotten to mention that all important word. Budget. She looked at the ceiling. She’d worry about that later, when it came time to make final selections. She’d have to put her foot down then.
Jamie waited until Jessica had closed the change room door after Meredith left, then got up from his chair quietly and followed the sales associate out into the store.
“Can I get you to take the tags off things before you bring them in to her? I want her to get what she wants, and not be influenced by the price.”
Jamie told himself that giving this instruction to the sales associate was why he had stayed. But it was a lie. There was something about being a witness to Jessica discovering some of the treasures of being in New York that he found himself unable to resist.
“At the end, if it could add up to her insurance settlement that would be great.” He named the amount. “I’ll look after the difference, if you can slip me a second bill.”
What on earth was he doing?
“Love that!” Meredith said, grinning at him, a delighted coconspirator. She held up two dresses. “Which one do you think she would pick?”
One dress was a subtle gray pinstripe with straight lines and a longish skirt. The other was a sundress style with a full skirt. It was white with huge red poppies all over it.
“She’d go for the gray,” he said. “Very businesslike.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Meredith said, and with a wide wink at him, hung the gray dress back up on the rack. “This other dress can be for business, too, with the right sweater and shoes. What do you think of this one?”
And so, somehow he ended up being on Jessica’s personal shopping team. It was all fun and games until they came to the underwear section.
Meredith, unabashed, held up a pair of shapeless beige panties. “What do you think?”
He didn’t want to be thinking about Jessica’s panties, obviously!
“This is what she told me she wanted,” Meredith said with barely concealed scorn.
Somehow, it made him feel oddly sad for Jessica that she didn’t celebrate her femininity. On the other hand, if she did? Danger zone! He had to remove himself from this situation.
Meredith smiled at him, held up another pair.
He felt his mouth go dry. Thankfully, his phone pinged. He glanced at it. Not at all urgent. But he wagged the phone at Meredith, anyway. “I have to take this.”
“Chicken,” she mouthed at him, adding a generous supply of froth and film to the already gigantic pile over her arm. “Okay,” she sang, “this will get us started.”
You had to like a woman who loved her job.
“I haven’t had a chance to tag these yet,” Meredith said to Jessica as she went through the door of the change room. “I’m raiding our brand-new summer stock, just for you.”
“But I need to know—”
The door closed on Jessica’s protest, which Meredith must have managed to assuage, because Jessica emerged from the change room in the first outfit. It was the poppy-covered white sundress and she looked absolutely stunning.
If he was not mistaken, she had makeup on. It was subtle and yet the changes to her face were extraordinary. Her eyes looked huge, her cheekbones high and sculpted, her mouth a sultry pout of pure temptation. Her hair had been put up in casual knot, instead of clipped back, and tendrils were escaping and curling wildly around her face.
Despite the sophisticated woman-of-the-world look of the clothes, Jessica looked as shy as a young woman going on her first date.
Meredith had paired the dress with a short white cashmere sweater and white high heels, and the look was professional, yet hinted at a playful side at the same time.
“Give a twirl,” Meredith ordered. “You have to see the movement in that skirt.”
Jamie wasn’t sure if he was ready for the movement in that skirt! Jessica hesitated.
“Pretend you are someone else,” Meredith advised. “Elise Hollander on the red carpet.”
Jessica hesitated, and then obviously made a decision to get in the spirit of things. She put a hand on her hip and cocked it. She twirled. He expected she might be awkward, but nothing could have been further from the truth. She was as graceful as a ballerina, and her legs were toned, tanned and looked a mile long as the skirt swirled around them. He was pretty sure he caught a glimpse of a pair of panties that were about the furthest thing from boring beige that a man could imagine.
She finished her twirl, set her legs wide apart, put her hand back on her cocked hip and winked at him.
“Fun, flirty and youthful,” Meredith declared approvingly. “Yes or no?”
Jessica held his gaze. He nodded his head, unable to speak.
Next she came out in a straight-lined plaid skirt, that should have looked librarian—or bookstore owner appropriate—paired with a pair of stilettos and a loose white blouse that was, by design, semitransparent. He could see a lacy outline beneath it. It was about the sexiest thing he had ever seen.
“These shoes...” she said hesitantly.
Shoes?
“Are perfect,” he growled, without even looking at them.
Meredith was an absolute wizard at her job. The clothes she had chosen showed off Jessica’s amazingly lithe but sexy figure. Jessica made the transformation from a small-town girl to a supermodel before his very eyes.
He loved seeing the change in her. It wasn’t just the clothing, though
