If the Shoe Fits (12 page)

When Sarah had questioned her about it, Letitia had stared at her granddaughter and declared, “Just because you marry does not mean you are meant to forfeit your privacy! They are husbands, Sarah, not roommates!”

Sarah turned to look out onto Oak Street. It was early evening. The flight in her father’s plane had been ridiculously luxurious, and she felt like a spoiled pet for even implying that suffering through eight hours of Jane’s veiled insults made it a trial.

Picking up her cell phone, she checked for messages. Nothing.

Sarah usually came to Chicago for at least two weeks per month, with an additional weekend thrown in to catch up and simply enjoy being in her own place. New York was exciting and exhilarating and inspiring, but it was also enervating. Her apartment there was a white box that she’d never taken the time to make her own. Chicago always gave her a chance to recharge. She decided to go for a long, leisurely walk in the brisk October night air along the lake, and then she spent the rest of the evening curled up in front of the TV, half dozing on the daybed in the boudoir.

Trying—and failing—to forget Devon Heyworth.

Monday and Tuesday were filled with meetings from eight in the morning until ten at night. Despite being exhausted at the end of each day, Sarah kept waking up at four thirty in the morning with plenty of physical energy and a logy mind. By Thursday morning she was wide-awake again.

She supposed she could go for another walk, but she didn’t want to turn into some crazy exercise nut or anything. Walking once or twice was one thing. Daily exercise sounded like a routine. She tried to snuggle deeper into her bed.

The problem was she could not stay in her bed for more than a few minutes after she woke up without being overcome with the desire to have strong, male hands on her body.

On Monday morning, she’d thought she could shake the residual desire of her vague, seductive Devon-dreams without having to actually get out of bed and brave the cold, dark morning outside. That had lasted about five minutes. She’d grabbed her iPad and tried to read the early AP feed, only to realize that her other hand was trailing down her abdomen. Her eyes started to close at the thought of Devon’s hands… it was always
his
hands on her… and his lips were good too… and the way that muscle on his upper arm curved? That occasionally came to mind… and his jaw…

Enough!

She’d finally forced herself out of bed, thrown on some approximation of a workout outfit, and walked along Lake Michigan. Now, for the fourth time in as many days, with her iPod blasting away her thoughts, she was trudging along the lakefront trying to pound the desire from her body. At night, she’d fall into bed, her body finally whipped into exhausted submission. Her dreams, on the other hand, were out of her control. Or entirely controlled by lust, more like.

She never remembered any of the details when she first woke up, but throughout the day, little snippets of a dreamy erotic still life would flash unbidden into her mind’s eye. During a particularly boring conference call with both Carrie and her assistant in the room, and the two head buyers from Bergdorf Goodman on the other end of the speaker phone double-checking their spring order, Sarah glanced out her office window and a vivid image of Devon’s mischievous face, with a devastatingly lascivious smile, materialized… rising up from between her own legs. She swung her attention back to the top of her desk a bit too quickly and tried to stare meaningfully at the innocent telephone.

After the call ended, Stephanie went back out to her desk, but Carrie hovered a bit. Sarah forced herself to erase the lewd image and stay on task.

“What’s up, Car?” Sarah asked without looking up.

If Carrie Schmidt had ever wondered about her boss’s sex life, it wasn’t something she would ever lob into day-to-day conversations. She and Sarah had always kept their relationship completely professional.

Carrie asked, “May I close the door?”

“Sure.” Sarah looked up and smiled. “Should I be worried? You’re not quitting, are you?” Sarah’s voice went an octave higher with each rapidly fired question.

“Of course I am not quitting, Sarah!” Carrie sat back down in the chair she had been using for the conference call, straightened her pad on her lap, and looked up at Sarah. “It’s just, you seem a little… distracted… since you got back from the London trip.”

Great. Distracted. You have no idea
, thought Sarah. “Well,” she continued carefully, “I… it was a lot to do in a short amount of time and I think I’m having a hard time shaking the jet lag.”

“Jet lag, hmm?”

Sarah wasn’t inclined to confide much of anything to anyone, and she certainly wasn’t going to reveal her newfound (and seemingly boundless) lust to her executive vice president. Carrie Schmidt was everything that Sarah was not. She had gone to all the right Ivy League schools and had worked at three of the top luxury shoe companies in the world. When Sarah was headhunting for a seasoned MBA to run the business with her, she was almost too intimidated to hire her. Carrie was thirty-two and had confidence beyond anything Sarah could ever hope to muster. It wasn’t arrogance exactly, but Carrie didn’t take shit from anyone.

Even now, three years into their working relationship and with Sarah’s obvious seniority—she signed her paychecks, after all—the two of them still had a somewhat stilted relationship. Sarah was far more comfortable with her executive director in New York and chalked up her awkwardness with Carrie to the older woman’s blistering intelligence. Sarah didn’t need to be her confidante; she needed to be her boss.

“It’s just exhaustion, I think,” Sarah said. “I’m eager to get back to New York and start in on next year’s fall designs. I feel like I can’t get any really creative work done here.” She hoped that didn’t sound like the complete fabrication it was.

Carrie stared at her a second longer, then shrugged and stood up. “Okay then. Let me know if there’s anything you need from me.”

“Everything looks great for the board meeting. I think we’re all set. Thanks for doing all that.” Sarah went back to double-check the orders that she’d just confirmed from Bergdorf’s as Carrie headed back to her own office. The past year had been her highest in terms of gross income, but her net was slipping. She stared at the spreadsheet and continued making more speculative calculations far into the night.

Later that night, she was thinking maybe she should return to New York for the weekend, just to shake whatever it was that was dogging her. She spent hours at her drafting table and couldn’t think of a single new design. She stared at spreadsheets for hours and ended up seeing a swimming sea of numbers and no solution as to why certain cost centers refused to turn a profit. She tried to convince herself that the lush comforts of home were causing her to relive her steamy weekend of hot sex with the best man (ugh! she was such a cliché!), and if she just got back to the grit and pace of Manhattan, she’d be back to her normal, competent self.

There was really nothing for it; she started masturbating. Of course, she had done it before, a few times now and again, but it had never felt like this sort of necessary remedy to something… pressing. And a person could only take so many brisk walks along Lake Michigan (especially a person as non-brisk as herself).

Friday morning at seven, her cell phone rang and woke her from a convoluted (needless to say erotic) dream.

“Hello,” she croaked.

“Sarah James, please.”

Male. British. Official.

“Speaking.” She forced herself awake and got into a sitting position against the padded headboard; her heart started to hammer.

“I know we haven’t seen each other in quite some time, almost an entire sennight, but I was hoping you might recall a weekend we spent together a while back? My name is Devon Heyworth, in case it may have slipped your mind.”

Sarah couldn’t talk, her speech having been robbed by the warring demons of lust and shame. She wanted him so terribly, she kind of hated him for it. She took a deep breath and tried to sound nonchalant. “I think I vaguely remember meeting you. At a wedding, maybe? But I just woke up and I’m all… disheveled… and would you mind telling me a little bit more about yourself?” She could almost feel his smile through the phone line.

“I’m more interested in this
dishevelment
you speak of.”

Sarah’s body was shrieking:
Enough
of
your
feeble
attempts
to
satisfy
me! Call in the professional! Do it now!

“Is this phone sex?” she blurted.

“Oh my, you really are the archetype of subtlety, Sarah.” A crackling loudspeaker announcement came through the phone, almost drowning him out when he said her name.

“Where are you? There’s some sort of interference.”

“I’m at Heathrow. I have to be in Chicago on business for a few days. Are you already back in New York?”

Her heart, which had slowed to a steady, animated trot, leapt back to a full gallop. “Uh, no, I am still in Chicago. What brings you to Chicago? I am ashamed to confess I don’t even know what you do for a living. I had just assumed you were a dilettante… or a part-time race car driver.”

“Both, actually. But when not being dilettantish or popping bottles of champagne after a win at Le Mans, I work for an architectural firm here in London.” There was a brief silence in which Devon had a very fleeting and very unpleasant desire to be legitimate.

“An architect… really. How curious,” Sarah said in that throaty, sleepy voice that was making him crazy.

“I’m not an architect, so don’t get your hopes up. I just work in the back office, tracking projects, bureaucratic ducks in a row, that sort of thing. Very unglamorous.” Since when did he downplay his own glamour, especially when trying way too hard to seduce a woman?

He could practically hear her smile through her words. “It is difficult in the extreme for me to imagine you as unglamorous—”

“Do you imagine me?”

She caught her breath. “I was saying, it’s hard to imagine someone as anything but glamorous when the only two times you’ve seen him, he’s been wearing a velvet dinner jacket one night and a bespoke tuxedo the next. I look forward to meeting this unglamorous Devon Heyworth.”

“Would you look forward to meeting him for dinner tonight?”

She paused again, not wanting to let him hear the near-panting enthusiasm that accompanied her internal response. “Yes.”

The loudspeaker at Heathrow started blasting again. He waited until it was finished, then continued, “So, do I need to pretend to check into a hotel?”

She looked at her chintz duvet cover, then up and around her almost painfully elegant bedroom with new eyes and was inexplicably terrified. Not inexplicable, on second thought. No man had ever been in this bedroom, much less a strapping, larger-than-life British one who bent her over bedposts. “Uh…”

“Enough said,” he interrupted cheerfully. “I will check into the Four Seasons. My plane lands around five this afternoon, local time, maybe an hour to get into town, you think?”

“Uh… that sounds about right.”

“Okay. Give me an hour to shower and change and I’ll pick you up at, say, half past seven tonight?”

“So… sure… that sounds great. Shall I make a dinner reservation or anything?”

“No, let’s just play it by ear. That’s the final call for my flight. See you tonight, love.”

Click.

That little “love” at the end of that sentence. That little throwaway bit. That was the thing.

Sarah turned her phone off and put it back on her bedside table. She tried to stay composed and then just threw her face into one of the large square down pillows and simply screamed with joy. She pounded her feet up and down into the mattress like a toddler, then fisted her hands and pounded them too. Her body started to tingle with desire and she happily dismissed the demanding pull and jumped from bed.
Someone
else
will
soon
take
care
of
that, she thought with anticipatory glee. She went into the bathroom and turned on the sound system that ran through the house from her iPhone app. She cranked “Beautiful Day” then turned on the shower. A few minutes later, Bono was screaming and so was Sarah.

She scrubbed her body with masochistic fervor. She wanted to force her tingling skin to calm down, but quickly realized that Bono’s sexy voice and the hot, soapy water were doing nothing to reduce her physical awareness.

Quite the opposite.

She rinsed off with freezing water, dried off matter-of-factly, and tried to think of some unsexy music. She tied a towel firmly around her chest, trying to bind her desire, then put another towel up into a tight turban on her head and switched the music to a Bach harpsichord invention that could have been played in a convent. Much better. As long as it wasn’t some throaty Celt going on about touching her and showing her the way.

The rest of the day passed in a blur of happy, busy work. By Friday afternoon, Carrie and Stephanie had put everything together for Monday’s board meeting and Sarah even reined in her prurient imagination long enough to make a few tentative sketches for next year’s fall line.

Around four that afternoon, her office phone rang and a few seconds later, Stephanie poked her head in to let Sarah know her stepmother Jane was on the line. Sarah walked over to her desk, but remained standing when she picked up the phone, hoping the conversation would not go on for too long.

“Hi, Jane. How are you?”

“Fine thanks. Great news! I got you a date tonight with the most eligible bachelor—”

Make
that
the
second
most
eligible
bachelor
, Sarah thought with a happy grin, but said, “Jane, I already have plans tonight.” Big. Plans.

“What do you mean you have plans tonight? You told me that I could set you up. Your exact words were ‘cream of the crop’ if I recall correctly. And this young man is certainly the cream of the crop, Sarah. He’s only in town for a few days visiting his parents and I won’t—”

“Jane, I absolutely cannot change my plans.”

“Well. You’ve put me in quite an awkward position.”