Sleeping with Beauty (9 page)

“Tomorrow? I have another appointment?”

Aurora nodded. “I can’t really pursue much further than this. She’s more qualified, dear. Trust me, you’ll get a greater benefit from continuing with her.”

“But—”

Just then there was a chirping noise. Aurora fumbled in the folds of her caftan and produced a slender cell phone. Lucy wondered what the hell else she might be concealing. Probably a tape recorder, she thought with a defeated sigh.

“I’m terribly sorry,” Aurora told her, “but I have to take this. I’ll have Audrey confirm your appointment for tomorrow.”

As if so commanded, the office door cracked open and there was Audrey, beckoning Lucy to follow her. How long had she been out there? Had she been listening to the whole session?

Lucy lifted her hand in response to Aurora’s brief wave and smile, then stood and followed Audrey out as if on autopilot. She wasn’t in Barbie Boot Camp, she thought as she followed the back of Audrey’s perfectly pressed linen blazer. She was in Stepford Wife Hell.

Well. Not for long. She wasn’t exactly a prisoner here.

Chapter
5
                                                                                                                                       

I
wonder how it’s going,” Jana mused, peeling the skin off her orange.

“She’ll be fine,” Grady said shortly. He tore off a piece of hot-dog roll and tossed it out to the pigeons gathering around their bench.

Yeah, but will
you
be fine?
Jana sent him a sideways glance, worried about her best friend. Both of them. She’d finished up her preseason interview with head coach Joe Gibbs earlier than expected, so she’d left Redskin Park and made a beeline for D.C. with the sole purpose of ambushing Grady.

She’d been wrestling with her conscience over what to do ever since the invitation had shown up and Lucy had gotten it into her head to make herself over. Should she barge in and potentially change things between them forever? Or play it safe and keep her mouth shut? After all, she’d been keeping her mouth shut for what, going on fifteen years now?

She knew Grady jogged every afternoon, alternating his path between laps around The Mall or the Tidal Basin. It was Monday; Lucy had been gone two days now. Jana staked out a bench on The Mall, across from the Museum of Natural History, and waited. He hadn’t seemed completely surprised to see her. Wary, but not completely surprised. Of course, he’d been avoiding her calls since he’d dropped Lucy off at Glass Slipper headquarters. He had to know she wasn’t going to stand for that very long.

Only now that she was here, with no chance of Lucy popping up or calling, the perfect opportunity she’d so carefully staged staring her right in the face . . . she was chickening out. “Maybe we shouldn’t have given her such a hard time about this,” she said, inwardly cursing her cowardice. “If she feels she needs to do this for herself, who are we to say she’s wrong? Right?” She picked at her orange. “What was the place like?”

“Very Tara Meets Capitol Hill.”

A smile tugged at the corners of Jana’s mouth. “Pretty much what we’d deduced from the website, then.” She hazarded another glance, but he wasn’t looking at her, didn’t so much as nod.
To pry, or not to pry?
“Did you meet the godmothers?”

“I saw them. Interesting lot. Not surprised they don’t include their photos on their home page.”

Jana straightened, both intrigued and shamelessly relieved to put off the Very Important Talk a bit longer. “Really? Why?”

“They were quite . . . colorful.” He didn’t add anything else.

Jana knew he wasn’t in the mood to dish. Of course, delivering one-liners while she and Lucy dished on the subject of the moment was more his thing. Another time she’d have dragged every last cynical detail out of him anyway. But not today. “So, was Lucy excited? Nervous?”

“Both.”

Christ, it was like pulling teeth. “Did she say anything else to try and convince you how great an idea this really is?”

Jana watched Grady as he threw the rest of his crumbs at the expanding, grateful flock, then leaned his rangy body back on the park bench. There had been times over the years when Jana had found herself looking at his body in more of an opposite-sex way, not a best-friend way. She’d even dared to quiz Lucy a time or two, when she thought she could get away with it, without giving away what she knew. What the whole world would know if it paid the slightest damn bit of attention. Lucy’s responses had generally been vague, like those of a sister being asked to rate her brother on a scale of one to hottie. Lucy said she found it hard to be objective about a guy she’d watched go through puberty; zits, developing body hair, and all.

Maybe it was because Jana was married. Or maybe it was because she had the analytical, objective eye of a reporter. Or maybe it was because she’d never been able to look at any member of the opposite sex without mentally ranking or undressing them—yet another reason why her coworker, Frank Winston, made her cringe with loathing—but at the moment, Jana found herself eyeing Grady’s mop of damp curls, the contemplative look on his oh-so-serious face, the way his sweat-soaked T-shirt clung to his lean but well-defined torso, the ropy muscles lining his long runner’s legs . . . and thought he ranked pretty damn high on the hottie chart. Especially for a self-admitted geek who was mostly clueless about his hottie potential. Which actually gave him added points.

“Yes, she did make a last-ditch effort,” he said. “And no, it didn’t exactly work.”

“‘Exactly’?”

He shot her a sideways glare. “Journalists are worse than lawyers. Don’t look for some hidden story in my every word.”

Jana smiled and half shrugged. “Can’t help it.”

“You could have saved the trip and interrogated me via cell phone.”

She chucked a piece of orange rind at him. “Which you never pick up when you’re in the lab,” she pointed out. “Which is where you always are. I figured with Lucy in Barbie Rehab, you might not surface for the whole two weeks.”

“Contrary to popular belief, my social calendar is not codependent on Lucy’s calendar.” He crossed his ankles and glared at the pigeons. “Or yours.”

It was the perfect opening. And he had to know it. A cry for help? Did he
want
her to out him? “You have no social calendar,” she said dryly. “Nailing that movie-geek manager at Blockbuster is hardly a social calendar.”

She saw his lips twitch. “You’re forgetting I also get first-run releases up to forty-eight hours before the general viewing public.”

Jana rolled her eyes. “I was happier thinking you were more interested in her for the sex. Sometimes you worry me.”

There was a slight pause, then he said, “Sometimes I worry me, too.”

Then there was silence. Followed by more silence. And she wasn’t jumping in with the obvious follow-up. It wasn’t because she’d suddenly lost her knack for knowing how to pin an interview subject to the wall. It was because she cared very deeply about this particular subject. And once she opened Pandora’s box, there would be no going back.

Finally, Grady filled the chasm of awkwardness with a long, whistling sigh. He rolled his head toward her. “Why did you come down here, Jana?”

And there it was. The moment of truth. She looked at him, at those soft, serious, studious dark eyes of his, and her heart jerked a little.
Please forgive me if I’m about to screw up one of the best friendships I’ve ever had.
“You know why I came down here, right?” she said quietly, earnestly. Chickenshittedly.
Yeah, that’s courage, all right. Make him say it first.

He shifted his gaze back across The Mall. “To talk about Lucy.”

Oh, great. Soft lob, followed by an even softer one. Bastard. Who was the journalist here, anyway? “Yeah. Yeah, I did.” She took a deep breath. “I’ve often wondered why I waited this long. I thought about it once before, back during senior year. But we were heading off to college, and it didn’t seem right. Since then, I guess, uh, I guess it never felt . . . I don’t know. Critical.” She stole a glance at him. He was still watching a bunch of college students play football Frisbee. “Like it does now,” she added. Meaningfully.

He didn’t say anything right away. Just left his arms resting on the back of the bench, keeping his gaze forward. And very much not on her. “What makes you say that?” he asked at long last.

“The reunion. Glass Slipper.” She did watch him now, gauging his reaction. “Jason Prescott.”

Bingo. The stoic mask slipped. You had to be looking for it. But there it was. She hadn’t imagined that flicker of anger, that flinch.

“You don’t want her to go through that again,” she said, pressing on slowly, gently. Praying he’d jump in anytime now and just freaking relieve her of this horrible burden.

“Of course not. But she’s a big girl now. She can make her own mistakes.” Then, under his breath, she thought she heard him mutter, “Again and again.”

“Grady—”

He sat up abruptly, pressed his hands on his knees, and looked at her before standing. “Neither of us wants to see her get hurt. No shit. We’re her friends. I get that. Now, I have to get back to work.”

“Yeah, well, friends don’t let friends—” She broke off. “Okay, so I’ve got nothing clever to end that with. But you know what I’m saying here, Grady, right?”

“You’re saying I should do something to fix things so she doesn’t get her heart skewered like a shish kebab and handed to her on a reunion-size platter.” He did stand then. “I’ve spent a lifetime trying to do that. Maybe I shouldn’t have.” He looked down at her, his expression all inscrutable. Geeks occasionally had a real advantage that way. “Maybe real friends let friends figure things out on their own.”

Jana felt the prick of accusation. Of condemnation. He knew that she knew. And he didn’t appreciate or want her blurting it out. It should have been a giant relief. They could just go back to pretending they were all nothing more than good friends. Except it wasn’t a relief. If anything, the burden felt all the heavier because it was obvious he wasn’t going to shoulder any of it. “Yeah,” she said, just as quietly. “Maybe.”

“I’ll catch up with you later.”

She didn’t want him to take off. Not yet. Even though they’d basically agreed to disagree on how to handle things where his feelings for Lucy were concerned, she was still afraid she’d done harm to their friendship. “Dave and I are trying to have a baby.”

It took a second for her blurted confession to sink in. For both of them. She’d had no intention of telling Grady or Lucy about this very recent, still somewhat shaky decision she and Dave had made. She’d wanted to tell them. Badly. But with everything else going on, the tension between them all, she’d decided it could wait.

“What?” Grady asked, sitting back down next to her. He took her hand between his wide palms and curled his long fingers over hers. “A baby?”

She couldn’t help it. She smiled. And maybe she got a little glassy-eyed. What he didn’t know was that it was more from sheer terror than a misty-eyed reverie. At the look of awe and wonder in his eyes, her throat got a little tight and she couldn’t spit that part out. She managed a nod.

He pulled her into a spontaneous hug, then immediately pushed her back. “Sorry, didn’t mean to sweat on you,” he said, but he was beaming at her. All thoughts of Lucy and their uncomfortable confrontation of moments ago were apparently forgotten. “That’s fantastic news. Does Lucy know?”

For a few seconds, anyway. “We really just started seriously considering it. I haven’t . . . I haven’t even really come to terms with it myself.”

Grady’s smile dimmed a little. “You’re not sure? Was this Dave’s idea, then?”

She shook her head. “No, no. It was mutual. We’ve been sort of dancing around the subject for a while. You know he’s from a huge family, so it’s no secret he wants one of his own.”

“And only-child you? How do you feel about that?”

She lifted a shoulder, wishing now she hadn’t been so quick to use her personal situation as a diversion from the Lucy situation. “I’m not sure.”

He smiled encouragingly. “It’s normal to be nervous. It’s a big step. If it helps, I think you two will make awesome parents.”

She couldn’t tell him it was more than being a little nervous. She managed a dry smile. “God knows we’ll be relying far more heavily on his experiences than on mine.”

“Hey, do any first-time parents really know what the hell they’re doing?” He rubbed her shoulders. “I mean, except for Lucy, we’re poster children for family dysfunction. And look how we turned out.”

Jana laughed at that. “Why do you think I’m so terrified?”

“Well, I think it’s great. I’m happy for you two.”

“Says the guy who thinks commitment is actually writing down a woman’s phone number in case you want to use it again. Someday.”

His easy smile remained, but something flickered in the depths of his puppy-dog eyes that had her mentally kicking herself. If she was going to offer up her big life decision and plop it on the altar of their friendship, the least she could do was not waste it by taking giant steps backward into awkwardness.

“Give Dave a manly handshake for me” was all Grady said, his smile still a sincere one.

“What, no ‘Way to go, dude’ beer toast, followed by a macho ‘You’re-a-procreating-stud’ high five?”

“I’ll save that for when I see him in person.”

“And the womenfolk who would kick your sexist-pig ass aren’t around.”

He grinned. “That, too.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Then there was another slight pause, the beginning of an awkward moment. Grady stood up before it loomed any larger and lobbed his balled-up hot-dog wrapper in the nearby trash can. “Thanks for the nitrates and carcinogens.”

She wrinkled her nose and looked at the half-eaten hot dog still nestled in its aluminum-foil wrapper on her lap. “Anytime,” she said, knowing he was teasing her. But still. “What are friends for, right?” she added without thinking.
Jeez.
Apparently, she was a walking friendship time bomb.

There was a beat, then he looked down at her, all serious again. “You’re the best kind a guy could have. That’s why I know you’ll make a great mom.” And with that he took off at a loping run, down the wide path, heading toward the Washington Monument.