The Blonde Theory (19 page)

She agreed and we both hung up. I turned to push back through the ladies’ room door, and to my surprise, I found Matt James leaning lazily against the public phone that hung on the wall outside the bathrooms.

“Going somewhere, Harper?” he drawled casually, grinning at me.

“Oh, cut the crap, Matt,” I snapped. “I don’t have time for this.” I really didn’t. I needed to get out of there immediately. Jill had to be my first priority now.

“I don’t have time for this either, Harper,” Matt said, his voice suddenly husky. He took a step closer.

Then, before I knew it, he was kissing me, pressing his gorgeous, surprisingly soft lips to mine. Time seemed to stop for a second. He had caught me so off-guard. I hadn’t expected this. And it felt so . . . good.

Damn it.

As he pressed into me, parting my lips gently with his tongue. I didn’t have time to think about how much I hated him, time to think about how much he had embarrassed me, or time to think about how inappropriate this was since we were both here with other dates. That’s because time ceased to exist for the eternity that our lips were pressed together.

And despite myself, I kissed back.

Finally he pulled away, looking tenderly into my eyes, his long-lashed lids lowered seductively, his right thumb stroking my jaw ever so gently. I felt dazed, so much so that I couldn’t think of a single sarcastic thing to say. That was a first. I opened my mouth but no words came out.

“That was nice,” he said softly, still stroking my face and gazing into my eyes.

“Yeah,” I agreed weakly. Then logic and awareness kicked in. I cleared my throat and hurriedly straightened up, backing away from him. “I mean, no it wasn’t!” I exclaimed, indignation rising within me. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Kissing you,” Matt said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Okay, well, I supposed it was.

“Why?” I demanded angrily. I wasn’t really angry that he had kissed me, but I wished I was. That would make it easier to gloss over how nice it had felt. Why did he have to be such a good kisser? Damn it, damn it, damn it.

Matt looked taken aback. “Because . . . because I wanted to,” he said finally.

“Oh yeah?” I challenged him. “What about your little girlfriend upstairs?”

“Lisa?” Matt asked, looking surprised. He paused, then laughed. “She’s just a friend, Harper.”

I hated the sense of relief that washed over me when he said the words.

“Yeah, well, it doesn’t matter,” I snapped. “Because I have to go. So enjoy the rest of your night with Lisa, okay?”

Matt looked bewildered and bemused at the same time. With one last desperate look at him, I dashed up the stairs, quickly made my apologies and excuses to a surprised Jack and Lisa, mumbling something about an emergency at the bar where I worked, then hailed a cab on the street.

It wasn’t until I was leaning against the sticky leather of the taxi’s backseat, trying to slow my pounding heart, that I realized my lips were still tingling. And that the only thought crowding my mind was how nice it would be to kiss Matt James again.

Damn it.

Chapter Fifteen

E
mmie called me about five minutes after I’d settled into a cab to tell me to meet her at the corner of Second Avenue and 4th Street, in the East Village. Alec had gone into an apartment building on the southwest corner a few minutes earlier, and Emmie had staked out a spot across the street, in a window booth at a diner called Over the Moon on the southeast corner of the same block.

“Thank God you’re here,” she said, her face a mask of concern as I bustled through the door to Over the Moon ten minutes later, after begging the driver to get me there as quickly as he could. Emmie stood up quickly to hug me, and we both slid into the booth she’d been sitting in. “Here, put this on.”

She quickly handed me an enormous khaki-colored hat that looked suspiciously like one that a beekeeper would wear—if the beekeeper in question had absolutely no taste whatsoever.

“Emmie, what
is
this?” I asked, regarding the hat suspiciously.

She shrugged apologetically. “It’s all I could find on such short notice in the wardrobe closet. We need something that’ll cover your face so Alec won’t spot you.”

I looked suspiciously at her. She didn’t appear to be in possession of a second beekeeper’s hat for herself.

“And what will
you
be wearing?” I asked in a tone as even as I could manage. Emmie sheepishly held up a wig of thick, dark, long hair.

“It’s from a scene where my character dreams she’s Cher,” she said, looking a little embarrassed. I rolled my eyes. Okay, so she’d dressed me as a frumpy beekeeper and herself as a glamorous singer. This wasn’t the time to address it.

Emmie quickly filled me in on her evening. She had sat for hours in the coffee shop across the street from Jill and Alec’s apartment, watching. When she saw Alec leave, she had hailed a cab to follow him. Then she’d called Jill from her cell phone and, feigning pleasant conversation, asked casually if Alec was around. No, Jill had said. He had just been called into work for an emergency operation. That was right about the time Emmie and her cabdriver had sped right past the entrance to Alec’s hospital while hot on his tail.

I felt instantly guilty that I had left Emmie to stalk Alec all alone while I was off on a date. I told her so. She waved me off. “Actually, except for the fact that I am dying inside for Jill, this stakeout has been kinda fun,” she admitted. “Who knows, maybe I’ll have to play a detective one day. My agent says they’re going to be casting soon for a role in a new Brad Pitt–Cole Brannon film noir detective movie. Maybe I can audition.”

A middle-aged waitress named Marge brought us coffee and seemed content to let us sit, unbothered, peering distractedly out the window. We must have looked like a pair of crazy people.

I was trying desperately not to think about Matt James and the way he’d kissed me in the basement of Bistro 49 less than an hour earlier, but the longer Emmie and I sat there, the more it was weighing on my mind. Finally, I nervously broached the subject with her while we both peered out the window.

“Matt James came to see me today,” I said.

Emmie nodded. “Yeah, he told me he was going to come talk to you about your job.”

“Right,” I said slowly. “But he also told me he knew about The Blonde Theory. He saw my profile on NYSoulmate.”

Emmie turned her head sharply and stared at me, a stricken expression on her face.

“Oh, Harp, I swear I didn’t say anything to him,” she said, looking concerned. “I would never do that. I can’t believe he knew.”

“I know you didn’t say anything,” I said soothingly. “He apparently figured it out on his own. But the thing is...he asked me out.”

Her jaw dropped. “He what?”

I quickly recounted the whole conversation, then told her about his infuriating appearance at Bistro 49. Emmie stared at me wide-eyed while we took turns glancing out the window to keep an eye on the situation.

“And then, right after I got off the phone with you and was about to go back upstairs to tell my date I needed to leave,” I concluded slowly, “he kissed me. In the hallway. Outside the bathrooms.”

“Oh my God,” Emmie breathed, her full attention turning to me. “Oh my God,” she repeated.

“I know,” I said miserably. I glanced out the window again to make sure that Alec hadn’t reappeared. “And the thing was, the kiss was
great
. But what am I going to do? I mean, it’s not like I like him. And he’s
your
co-worker, for goodness’ sake.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she said dismissively. “I don’t like him or anything. And I guess he’s more your type. But I have to warn you, I hear that he’s a bit of a player.”

“Oh,” I said, not entirely sure why my heart had just sunk. Of
course
he was a player. Why else would he ask me out then turn up with another woman on his arm? I was such an idiot.

“But you can’t believe everything you hear,” Emmie added after a moment, turning back to the window. “I mean,
I’ve
never seen him do anything creepy to a woman. I don’t even know anyone he’s dated. He doesn’t date the actresses at work like the other guys on the show do.”

Hmm, this was food for thought. I was about to say something else, to protest to Emmie that I didn’t really like him that much anyhow so this was all a moot point, when there was a movement in the doorway of the building across the street. Emmie and I both gasped at the same time.

“It’s Alec!” she exclaimed softly.

“And that’s the girl I saw him with last night,” I said grimly as he emerged with his arm draped around the shoulders of a scantily clad, familiar-looking redhead.

Emmie and I each threw down a five-dollar bill to pay for our coffee and a nice tip for the waitress, and then we threw on our “disguises”: the ridiculous beekeeper hat for me and the glamorous Cher wig for Emmie. Our waitress stared after us, a bewildered expression on her face, as we rushed out.

We stayed half a block behind them and across the street as they walked south on Second, his arm still draped around her. I couldn’t help but think he looked a little ridiculous (this coming from a woman in a beekeeper’s hat, of course). In her four-inch stilettos, the redhead dwarfed Alec by almost half a foot. She was wearing a very short black skirt, which left little to the imagination, and her long, deeply tanned legs ended in expensive silver Choos. I was just the teensiest bit jealous of her footwear. Was that wrong?

They turned right onto 3rd Street while we followed, still hanging back half a block. They didn’t appear to notice that they were being tailed. Finally, they entered a small Italian restaurant called Bella Toscana, tucked between a bookstore and a vintage-clothing shop. Emmie and I let them go inside, then stood just to the left of the window and conferenced about what to do next.

“We can’t go in,” I said, feeling I was stating the obvious. “They’ll see us, for sure.”

“But we can’t get a photo of them from out here,” Emmie said urgently. “The windows are too dark. And we definitely need some kind of proof to convince Jill. Obviously, Alec will deny it.”

Indeed, it was nearly impossible to see through the darkened windowpanes into the dimly lit restaurant. More than that, Alec and the redhead had been seated somewhere near the back, entirely beyond our view. Finally, after much debate, we agreed that Emmie would take her digital camera inside, act as if she were trying to find the restaurant’s bathroom, and snap several quick zoomed-in photos from as close as she could get to their table. She would keep the camera in her handbag, with just the lens peeking out, so no one would notice what she was doing.

“Why do I have to do this instead of you?” she whined before going inside.

I smiled. “Because, Cher, you’ve dressed me in a beekeeper’s hat and this Day-Glo pink dress,” I said. “And it will be a lot more obvious than your jeans, T-shirt, and black hair. Plus, this whole crazy ‘detective’ plan was your idea.” Emmie sighed and nodded. I wished her luck and crossed my fingers nervously as she slipped through the doorway of Bella Toscana, her ridiculous Cher hair billowing behind her.

The seconds seemed to be taking an eternity to tick by as I stood outside the restaurant, fingers still crossed, heart in my throat, alternately tapping my right foot impatiently and glancing in to see if I could spot her. Finally, I saw a flash of light inside and heard a male voice yelling. In a second, Emmie burst out of the doorway, wig askew, her face twisted with concern.

“Let’s go,” she snapped, grabbing my arm and dragging me with her as she turned left out of the restaurant, heading back toward Second Avenue.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” I asked as I raced after her, marveling a bit, despite myself, at my speed in stilettos.

“He saw me,” she said grimly over her shoulder. “Alec saw me.”

Finally, two blocks later, when it became clear that no one was following us, we slowed and turned down 5th Street to lean against the side of a building and catch our breath.

“He saw you?” I repeated, panting.

Emmie nodded. “I guess I’m not much of a detective,” she said glumly. “I took about four pictures. Then when I tried to zoom in a bit more to take a fifth, I must have accidentally reset the automatic flash on my camera. It went off as soon as I snapped the photo. He turned and looked right at me, and I know he recognized me.”

“Oh no,” I said, feeling a bit sick. Alec was a smart guy; he was probably already inventing excuses that he could tell Jill before we had a chance to get to her. That meant that we had to get to her
soon
. Like now. “Were the pictures okay at least?” I asked, hoping against hope that they were.

“Let’s see,” Emmie said nervously. She turned her camera back on as I crossed my fingers again. Without clear photos, it would be our word against Alec’s.

“Bingo,” Emmie breathed softly after a moment, sounding triumphant and sad at the same time. I looked over her shoulder at the photos and knew immediately why. All five of them were clearly of Alec and the redhead. It was obvious they were on a date; they were holding hands in one photo, she was touching his cheek in another, and in the fifth picture, the one where the flashbulb had gone off and illuminated the room, it was painfully obvious that they were locked in a passionate kiss across the table. We’d caught him red-handed with the redhead.

But it was hard to feel victorious knowing that the photos stored in Emmie’s camera would be the death knell to Jill’s marriage.

E
MMIE AND
I shared a cab uptown and called Meg—who was at the office closing a feature that had come in late—during the ride. We quickly filled her in, and, sounding very sad, she agreed to meet us at the coffee shop across from Jill’s apartment right away. Then we called Jill.

“Oh hi, Harper!” she said cheerfully when she picked up. “How did your date go tonight?”

“Fine,” I answered hesitantly. “Listen, I have a problem I need to talk about with you. Can you meet me at the coffee shop across the street from your apartment in about twenty minutes?” Emmie, Meg, and I had decided not to say anything to Jill over the phone about the reason for our call. It would give her too much time to invent excuses in her head. We needed to present her with the hard evidence—the photos—from the outset.

“Harper, are you okay?” Jill asked with concern. “Should I call Meg and Emmie?”

“Um, no,” I said. “I’m fine. I just need you to meet me right away, okay?”

“If you need me to, I will,” she said slowly. “But Alec just called and is on his way home. He said he had something important to discuss with me. I think it’s probably about the trip I had asked him to take with me.” Her voice took on a gleeful edge. “I’ve been dying to go to France, and he keeps telling me that he’s busy. But I have the feeling he’s going to surprise me with tickets tonight, or something.”

I teared up just listening to her. I was hating Alec more with every passing moment.

“Look, it won’t take that long,” I said. “Please. In fact, why don’t you leave your apartment now? I’m on my way there. If Alec gets home before you leave, you’ll just get caught up in a long conversation with him.”

In reality, I was more worried that Alec would preclude our revelation by explaining it away before we had a chance to. But what could he say? That in the photo he was actually performing CPR on the redhead? That his medical emergency had actually been in a dimly lit Italian restaurant instead of at the hospital? There was truly no way out for him. But I feared that Jill, desperate to keep her life looking perfect from both the inside and the out, would somehow convince herself that his words must be true. Clearly, he had been deceiving her for months—in fact, for months even
before
their wedding if Emmie had been right about what she’d seen. The thought that he’d been cheating on my friend practically since day one made me feel physically sick.

“Okay, Harper,” Jill agreed. “Are you sure you’re okay?” Her voice was heavy with concern for
me,
which broke my heart.

“I’m okay, Jill,” I said, my voice breaking a bit. “I just need you to meet me, okay?”

“I’ll be there, sweetie,” she said softly. “Whatever it is, don’t worry. It can’t be that bad.”

Emmie rubbed my arm comfortingly as I hung up with Jill.

“It’s going to be okay,” she soothed. “She’s going to be okay.”

I nodded, but I didn’t know if I believed it. Jill’s whole life had been built on constructing her version of the perfect existence. And she believed so strongly that she had it. She thought she had done everything right, had fit everything into the preconceived ideals she’d started the game with.

It was about to come crumbling down all around her. I wished I could stop the fall. But no one could.

Emmie and I arrived at the coffee shop fifteen minutes later and found Jill sitting there with a cup of coffee in front of her and a look of concern on her face. When we both walked through the door, she looked a bit confused.

“I thought you were coming alone, Harper,” she said, standing up to give us both hugs. I knew the somber expressions on both of our faces were making her nervous, because she started chattering. “But I’m so glad to see you both. Are you okay? I was so concerned when you called, Harper. I thought maybe something bad had happened on your date. Wait, why aren’t you on your date?”