Read the book: «Bachelorette Blues»

1

Curiosity nagged at Shayna Gunther like the box of chocolate cookies stashed in her desk drawer. She plucked the envelope out of her In bin and studied it. Rain had smeared the blue ink, blurring the return address.

With a jewel-handled letter opener, Shayna sliced through the envelope and pulled out a wrinkled, wideruled sheet of notebook paper.

Just her luck. Her nine-year-old niece, Tiffany, had sent her a chain letter. Shaking her head in amusement, Shayna read the childish scrawl.

This is not a joke or a prank. It is very serious. If you follow these instructions carefully, you will find true love. Within seventy-two hours, you must copy this letter six times and mail it to six friends who are looking for love. At midnight, on the third day, drink a glass of water and say the name of a boy or girl you like. He or she will be yours forever. If you break the chain, beware. Bad luck will be yours. Forever.

With a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sigh, Shayna picked up the phone on her desk. She normally called her sister Nicole on Sunday afternoons, but this just couldn’t wait.

“Hi Nic, it’s Shayna.”

“Shayna? What’s wrong? Are you switching from Sundays to Wednesdays?”

“Come on, I’m not that bad.” Shayna was used to being teased about her predictability, but she didn’t let it get to her. The talent for organization was her unique gift.

“Girl, I knew you were ‘that’ bad when you started color coding your underwear with the days of the week. Yellow on Sundays, pink on Mondays…”

“Nicole, stop. I was only eight. That was just a phase.” She still wore blue on Tuesdays, but Nicole didn’t have to know that.

“Yeah, a phase. That’s why you make your living creating schedules and routines for other people to follow.”

“I make good money as a life management consultant, and you know it.”

Knowing what Shayna was like in high school, Nicole, of all people, should understand. Shayna had never had her sister’s easy popularity and self-confidence. For years, if anyone was tripping over bleachers at football games or spilling drinks at parties, her name was Shayna. Carefully planning for every possibility had helped her pull herself together.

“Anyway, I called about Tiffany,” Shayna said, pushing old memories aside.

“Uh-oh.” Nicole’s voice took on a resigned what-has-my-child-done-now? tone.

“No, no. It’s nothing bad. I just wanted to tell you about the letter I got from her today.”

“Tif sent you a letter?”

“A chain letter.”

Nicole’s hearty laugh cut through the miles that separated Delaware from Maryland. “That’s my girl. Do you want to talk to the little troublemaker?”

“Please.”

“Hi, Aunt Shay,” Tiffany said with a burst of excitement. Shayna could picture the girl’s bright smile curving her caramel-colored cheeks.

“Hi, Tif. I got your chain letter today.”

“Well.” Tiffany sighed dramatically the way only nine-year-olds could. “You’d better get started right away, Aunt Shay. Mom says you’re long overdue for a boyfriend.”

Shayna made a mental note to strangle her sister.

“That’s why I called, Tiffany. Chain letters and other superstitions don’t really work. If you want something in life, you have to get it for yourself by working hard.”

“Oh, but it does work. Last week, Ricky Jacobs invited me to a pizza party. Then I started liking Jimmy Hunter…”

As Tiffany continued, Shayna couldn’t help noticing that a fourth grader had a more interesting social life than she did.

“Anyway, Amy Morton broke the chain, and boy, did she have it rough.”

“What do you mean?” Shayna asked despite herself.

“First she got a D on her math test, then her parents stopped letting her watch ‘Melrose Place’ and then—”

“Tiffany, those were just coincidences.”

“No. Her bad luck didn’t go away until—What? Okay, Mom. Mom says it’s time for dinner. I gotta go.”

“I’ll talk to you on Sunday, Tif. We can make plans for our slumber party.”

“Aunt Shay? Please don’t break the chain. I want you to find true love, not bad luck.”

Shayna smiled. “Thanks, Tif.” She hung up the phone, shaking her head. Apparently everyone knew she needed a man. She was nearing thirty, and according to her life plan it was time. But thank goodness she knew the proper way to go about finding the right man. Not chain letters. Not crystal balls or tarot cards. Just careful planning, plain and simple.

Shayna looked at her calendar. Each important date was color coded by event. Blue for business appointments, green for social events like movies or dinner, and purple for special occasions. She reserved red for dates with that special someone.

Unfortunately her calendar hadn’t seen red ink for months. There hadn’t been room in her schedule for dating. But that was about to change.

Shayna touched the purple lettering written in the block for next Saturday. “MBO Cocktail Mixer.” The local chapter of the Minority Business Owners, a support group for the self-employed, had been her salvation for the past three years. Now that her consulting business was taking off, the organization was going to help her find the perfect man.

Through careful research, Shayna had compiled a list of the MBO’s most eligible bachelors. They were all successful enough to be her equal, intelligent enough to bring good genes to the union and handsome enough to give her goose bumps. Any of the three men would be a good catch, but Phillip Browning, Jr., the owner of SoftTech Computer Consulting, headed the list. He dressed impeccably, spoke articulately and still had all his hair.

Shayna casually tossed the chain letter into her recycling bin as she reviewed her well-laid plans for Saturday evening. Yes, Phillip Browning, Jr. had definite potential, and in just four short days, she would know if he was “the one.”

Max Winston turned onto Wisconsin Avenue and headed for the Chevy Chase Holiday Inn. His windshield wipers were keeping perfect time with the old Motown song playing on the radio. The digital clock on his dashboard read 7:45. He was fifteen minutes late. Normally he didn’t worry about things like that, but he knew Shayna would be one of the first to arrive. In the six months he’d been a member of MBO, he’d learned that he could set his watch by that woman. She was so organized, he’d bet she color coded her underwear by the days of the week. Black on Mondays, red on Tuesdays…

Uh-oh! Max stepped on the gas pedal, trying to make the yellow light up ahead. It wasn’t wise to think about Shayna Gunther’s underwear while driving.

As he sped through the intersection, he heard a wild shriek. Glancing in his rearview mirror, he saw a bag lady wrapped in a garbage bag. She was bent over, trying to hold a sheet of newspaper over her head while struggling with an umbrella the wind had turned inside out. Max grimaced. Apparently he’d sloshed her good when he’d driven through a mud puddle.

“Sorry!” he called, tooting his horn, knowing she couldn’t hear him.

Twenty minutes later, Max swirled his cocktail and scanned the lounge again. Still no sign of Shayna. She was the only reason he’d bothered showing up in the first place. Now she was nowhere to be found, and he was stuck listening to the most boring guy in the room—Phillip Browning, Jr.

What was with this guy? Didn’t he know that no one cared how many copies of some duller-than-dirt accounting program he’d sold this week? Of course he didn’t know. He was too busy impressing himself.

Max surveyed the room again, this time searching for a way to exit the conversation. Hot damn. Both his prayers were answered at once. There was Shayna. Finally.

Max blinked. That was Shayna, wasn’t it? The woman slinking into the ladies’ room with her handbag covering her face had Shayna’s smooth honey brown complexion and slim sexy figure, but she looked like a drowned rat. A beautiful rat, but drowned nonetheless.

It had been raining when he arrived, but not hard enough to soak her like that. The front of her hair was plastered to her forehead and the back had frizzed into a puffy cloud. She hobbled on one foot because she’d apparently lost the heel of her other shoe.

Max turned back to Phillip, who was so absorbed in a monologue on his new line of Microsoft knockoffs, he hadn’t even noticed that Max wasn’t paying attention.

“I hate to cut you off, Phil, but I see a friend I need to talk to.”

Phillip’s face went blank for a moment, almost as if he were startled by the sound of someone else’s voice. “Sure, Matt, we’ll continue this later. I want to tell you about my new antivirus product.…”

Max backed away as Phillip picked up the conversation with his next victim.

Shayna stared at her reflection in the ladies’ room mirror, feeling close to tears. She was a wreck. She made her living planning, preparing for the unexpected and showing others how to do the same. How could this have happened?

She leaned her forehead on the cool glass of the mirror. Her perfect evening was over before it had even gotten started. Things couldn’t possibly get any worse.

“You okay in there?”

She looked up to find Max Winston peeking around the side of the ladies’ room door.

“Oh my God.” She tried to rake her fingers through her hair, but they got stuck in the frizzy mass. “Max, this is the ladies’ room. What are you doing in here?”

He stepped through the door and leaned against it. “I was worried about you. I saw you come in, but you never came back out.”

“So you decided to join me in the ladies’ room?”

He slipped his hands into his pockets, looking quite at home. “Nobody has come in here for at least five minutes. I knew you were alone. Besides, this is just the make-up-your-face area. I still have one more door to go through before I reach the point of no return.”

Shayna turned back to the mirror. Big mistake. For a split second she’d actually forgotten what a mess she was. She looked past her freestanding hair to the man behind her. Why, when she looked the worst she’d ever looked in her life, did Max Winston have to look the best she’d ever seen him?

This man, who came to every MBO meeting in T-shirts and blue jeans, was actually wearing a jacket. Pale gray. He was still wearing jeans but they were black—somehow it made a difference—and his offwhite shirt had a banded collar. He looked great.

He always looked great. In fact, he would have been at the top of her list of potential suitors if it weren’t for his fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants, spontaneous attitude that went against every principle she’d built her life upon. And now he had a front-row seat to the most humiliating night of her life.

Shayna felt like crying.

Max crossed to the mirror and looked over her shoulder. “So what happened, Shayna?” He pointed to her ruined shoes. “This is a risky fashion statement even for you.”

He was making jokes. Twenty-eight years of perfect grooming now amounted to no more than a silly joke. She met his eyes in the mirror. “You…want to know…what happened to me?” she asked quietly.

“Yeah, I’d like to know.”

She rounded on him. “You want to know what happened to me?”

He took a step back. “I…Well…You don’t have—”

“I’ll tell you…what happened…to me.” She turned back to the mirror, staring at her miserable reflection. Her voice sounded eerily calm to her own ears. “I bought a new dress just for tonight.” She smoothed her hands over her expensive white sheath, as she turned to face him. “Do you like this dress?”

He nodded obediently.

“And my hair…” She reached up to touch the flyaway strands, barely aware that Max’s gaze was still locked on the damp silk that clung to her curves. “I spent exactly twenty-three minutes trying to get my hair to curl like Naomi Campbell’s on the cover of Vogue.

“I looked good.” She stared at him. “I really did. When I left the house, I was feeling so good, a little rain couldn’t even get me down—after all, I always carry my trusty purse-size umbrella, right?” She laughed, almost hysterically. “I didn’t even blink when ‘a little rain’ turned into a full-fledged thunderstorm the moment I got out of the car to change my flat tire.”

“Ooh, that’s rough,” Max said sympathetically.

“No. It was okay. I was cool…until I discovered that my spare was flat, too.”

She held up a hand as if taking an oath. “But, like I tell my clients, ‘You must have a backup plan—always.’ So I called AAA and my neighbor Kitty, so she could meet Mr. Tow Truck Man and tell him where to tow my car. That way, I could just hop on the bus and make it here with time to spare, right?”

“Let me guess,” Max said, shaking his head. “It didn’t work out.”

“No! For some reason, today of all days, the bus comes five minutes early. So I’m running to catch it, and the heel on one of my two-hundred-dollar Italian shoes breaks off in a crack in the pavement. And, of course, I miss the bus.”

Max winced. “Okay, I get the picture.”

“Wait. There’s more. The next bus drops me off a block away from the hotel. So I’m walking, and the wind turns my cute little purse-size umbrella into a useless piece of junk. And there I am, in the middle of a storm. I’ve got a newspaper over my head to protect this glamorous hairstyle. I’m struggling with my crappy umbrella, and some jerk comes flying down the street and splatters the back of my dress with mud. Can you believe that?”

“Uh, is that your garbage bag?” he asked, pointing toward the crumpled black plastic on the counter.

“That’s not a garbage bag. It’s my handy-dandy-fold-up rain slicker,” she said with exaggerated cheerfulness. “What’s wrong? You look sick.”

“I feel really bad—for you—because you’ve been through so much tonight.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Shayna sighed, resigned to her fate. “It’s not your fault.”

Despite her reassurance, Max looked even more distressed.

“But could you do me a favor and call me a cab? I can’t go out there.”

Max frowned. “What? Leaving so soon? Come on now. You obviously went through a lot to get here. This evening is still salvageable.”

Shayna placed a hand on her hip. “Are you kidding me? I realize that nothing in life ever fazes you, Max, but even you’ve got to see that I have a problem here. My dress is ruined, so are my shoes. And I don’t even want to talk about my hair.”

Max stepped back for a moment, studying her. “We can work with this.”

Shayna just stared at him. This was a nightmare and she was going to wake up any minute.

“Let’s start with the dress,” he said, taking off his jacket. He handed it to her. “Try this on.”

Too confused to do anything else, she put on the lightweight jacket. Of course it was too big.

Max stepped forward, rolled up the sleeves and arranged the lapels. He stepped back, surveying his work. Shayna just stood there like a dressmaker’s dummy.

“Not bad.” He nodded.

She turned to the full-length mirror on her right. She never would have believed it, but the jacket helped a lot. She made a full circle. The jacket just brushed the hem of her dress, hiding the mud on the back of her skirt. From the front, her dress, which had been shielded by her broken umbrella, was clean, and the jacket hung in gentle folds on either side.

“It’s not bad, but what about my hair? And my shoes. I can’t go out there with the heel of my shoe missing.”

He touched her cheek. “You’re on your own with the hair, babe. But I can do something about the shoes. What size?”

“What?”

“What size? There’s a department store across the street. They don’t close until nine-thirty.”

Shayna was dumbfounded. “You’re going to buy me new shoes?”

He grinned. “Sure. Why not?”

Shayna sighed. Why not? “Well, let me get you some money.”

“Forget it. What size?”

“Seven, but—”

“Be right back.” He slipped out the door as suddenly as he’d appeared.

She turned back to the mirror. At least this evening couldn’t get any weirder. Ugh. What was she going to do about this hair?

Before Max returned, Shayna managed to retouch her makeup and pull her hair into a respectable French braid with light bangs falling over her forehead. The overall effect wasn’t stunning, but it was decent.

Two women had come in to fix their lipstick, when Max strolled in like he belonged there. “Hi, ladies,” he said, casually handing Shayna a bag from the shoe store.

She had to laugh when the two women exchanged looks, then hurried out.

Shayna pulled a pair of pearl gray pumps, the exact color of Max’s jacket, from the box. “These are beautiful.” She slipped them on, feeling like Cinderella.

She turned to the mirror. Not bad. Not bad at all. Maybe this evening would turn out okay after all. She looked at her watch. Nine o’clock. There was still time to find Phillip and—

“Shayna! Watch out!”

Max grabbed her arm and pulled her forward just as a ceiling tile fell right where she’d been standing.