Читать книгу Underneath It All - Nancy Warren - Страница 8

“I QUIT!” Darren yelled, almost as red-faced as his father. “I can’t take this anymore. Women are waiting outside my co-op when I leave in the morning. Women are hanging around outside the office with signs written in lipstick reading, “Choose me!”

“You’re exag—”

“I’ve been propositioned, stalked, proposed to about three thousand times. This morning the doorman handed me a woman’s bra with a phone number on it.”

“It’s the excitement of the magazine, son.” His father tried to sound sympathetic, but he was as gleeful as a boy with a new Hot Wheels set. “A few months from now they’ll have forgotten all about you.”

“Not if you can help it,” he mumbled.

“We’ll hire you a bodyguard,” his dad replied.

“I don’t want a bodyguard. I want my life back.”

In fact, what he wanted was his life. His own life. Forget the family business, he wanted to succeed or fail on his own terms. Doing something he loved a lot more than creating artificial “need” in the marketplace for products anyone could live without.

“Our business has gone way up in the past week. Think of what this could mean.”

“No. Dad. I’m thinking about me. I love programming, it’s what I want to do with my life. Face it, I’m a computer geek and I don’t belong in advertising. I’m quitting. As of now.”

Their voices were rising, but Darren didn’t care. He’d inherited his temper from his father, if nothing else.

Just as angry, his father shouted, “You walk out that door, young man, and you can’t change your mind.”

“I won’t.” Darren strode across the room but hesitated at the doorway of his dad’s plush office, feeling not so much fear for his own future, but worry that his father couldn’t cope without him. He was about to speak when he heard some sort of commotion down the hall in the direction of his own office.

He turned and swallowed an expletive. There was a camera crew in front of his office, and damned if they weren’t filming some woman, some complete and utter stranger, leaving a dozen red roses outside his door. She was talking all the time, her face toward the camera so the flowers almost got knocked to the floor.

Oh, no. This had gone far enough. His dad had turned his life and his job into a joke. He’d become, not an ad exec, but a product to be marketed. The hell with it. Kaiser Image Makers would survive without Darren.

And Darren was going to be fine without Kaiser.

But before he left, he was going to give that woman and the cameraman a piece of his mind. Angrily, he made his way toward them. Instead of looking guilty and hurrying away, the woman with the roses, beamed a thousand-watt smile his way, then shouted into the camera, “There he is!”

She picked up the roses, yelled, “These are for you, Darren Kaiser. I love you,” and headed his way, hampered by her red stilettos and body-hugging red dress. She was followed by a skinny guy in a Knicks shirt balancing a TV camera on his shoulder.

In a moment of horror, Darren realized that unless he disappeared fast, whatever happened next would be filmed. He abandoned his plans to dress down the camera guy and the misguided woman. He abandoned any thoughts of standing his ground.

He turned on his heel and ran.

KIM employees stood in the hallway, mesmerized, until Darren yelled, “Out of my way,” and set a world sprinting record racing for the stairwell.

He was out of here.

Running on instinct, he tore down several flights of stairs, spurred by the sounds of pursuit far above. Then he abruptly stopped and, as quietly as possible, opened the door to the twelfth floor and the law offices of Stoat, Remington, Bryce, where his buddy Bart worked. Since the receptionist knew him, she motioned him to go on through.

“You never saw me,” he panted, and, ignoring her startled expression, kept going, racing through the hallowed halls of the law offices to seek temporary shelter with his old friend.

Stumbling into Bart’s office without knocking, he shut the door, put his sunglasses on and borrowed the Yankees baseball cap Bart kept hanging on his wall along with a signed pennant. Then he slouched low in the leather club chair Bart kept for office visitors.

“Drop in anytime,” Bart said as he watched Darren.

“I’m in trouble.”

“Hey,” Bart complained, as Darren tugged on the cap. “You can’t wear that! You’re a Giants fan.”

“I’m in serious trouble, Bart.” Darren panted, expecting any second to hear the sounds of that crazy female after him like a baying hound after a juicy fox.

“You have to help me.”

As well as being a good friend, Bart was a dedicated lawyer. He immediately assumed an air of concern. “You did the right thing coming here. What’s up?”

“I quit my job just now and I have to get out of town. Go far away where no one has ever heard of Matchmaker.”

Bart’s expression of concern was replaced with one of hastily suppressed amusement. “Is that what your trouble is?”

“Yes! It’s that magazine.”

“I don’t want to make your day any worse, old buddy, but you’re everywhere. It’s not just the magazine. It’s the Internet, chat groups, newspapers and on the TV. You, my friend, are news.”

“I need to stop being news. Damn it, I never agreed to be Match of the Year. I want to sue Matchmaker Enterprises or whatever they call themselves, Bart.”

“What for?”

“You’re my lawyer. Aren’t you supposed to advise me? How about defamation of character? Harassment? Libel?”

“Buddy, they aren’t defaming you when they call you God’s gift to women. It’s supposed to be a compliment.”

“I can’t even live in peace in my own home. I’m being mobbed, stalked. Women I don’t know give me their bras. Mary Jane Lancer proposed.” He’d known Mary Jane for years. Their fathers belonged to the same club. She was part of his social circle, but there never had been a hint of attraction between them until the bachelor thing.

A rich chuckle answered him. “Harassment. Hmm. There are men all over America who would kill to be in your shoes. You’d only make a fool of yourself.”

There was a long pause. Darren waited while Bart drummed his fingers on his blotter, obviously deep in thought.

“But libel, now you’ve got something. Let’s see, I just happen to have a copy of the magazine.” He twirled his chair and found the hated magazine in a stack of papers and flipped it open. “Ah, here it is. They called you rich, good-looking and intelligent. Man, we can sue for millions.”

Darren’s heart sank. “Okay, very funny. So what do I do?”

“My best advice is to go with the flow. Have fun with it. Make your father’s company a few more millions. Enjoy your fifteen minutes of fame and kiss a bunch of gorgeous women. Seriously, have you seen the babes who go for stuff like this? Be the rich boy all the girls want to marry. It’ll be over in a year and long before that somebody else will be news.”

“You don’t get it. It’s not just me being a minor celebrity and that’s it. A week ago I was a happy single man living a wonderful single life. I was a New York bachelor. One of millions. Now I’m some freakin’ great catch and no one but no one thinks I should remain a happy bachelor.”

He paused to take a breath and a quick check outside Bart’s office. So far he seemed safe.

“In the past week, I have been proposed to by girls with braces, women old enough to be my mother, loonies, the lonely, the desperate, and even women I thought were my friends, Like Mary Jane Lancer.” That, he thought, had been the worst. “It’s like they’re trying to snap me up before any other woman gets a chance.”

Bart started to chuckle. “Let me get this straight. Are you telling me you don’t want women all over the country throwing themselves at you? Is that what I’m hearing?”

“Yes! I told Serena Ashcroft I won’t cooperate. They should admit they made a mistake and find someone else. She told me to think about it. No hurry. I told her I won’t change my mind and she laughed.”

“I’m sure they would stop writing about you if you won’t cooperate. They have the right to choose you as the most eligible bachelor, though. You can’t stop them loving you.”

“I don’t know. She’s a devious woman. Who knows what she’s planning? I can’t stand it anymore.”

Bart shrugged. “Do what movie stars do when they want some privacy. Hide. Lay low somewhere until this blows over.”

“Hide?”

“Sure. If you insist on trying to avoid publicity, why don’t you pretend you’re in the Witness Protection Program? Find a new locale, a new identity. Maybe a disguise.”

Bart had enjoyed a brief spell of fame in college as an actor. Particularly memorable had been his Falstaff. Truly a method actor, he’d become roaring drunk every night for weeks before the performance in order to prepare for the role. He’d been good, too. Except that his brain had been so alcohol-saturated and his hangover so severe, that he’d forgotten half his lines on opening night.

What Bart was suggesting was that Darren run away. He’d never been the type to run from his problems, but suddenly it seemed as though he were being offered freedom, the likes of which he’d never known.

He sat up, slipping his sunglasses down his nose so he could regard his friend more clearly. “If I hide out somewhere, I can take some time to work on my own stuff.” Not having to sneak in his real work at night would be incredible. He had some money saved up, and if he sold his BMW he would have some decent cash quickly, enough to live on for a while. He could probably finish his line of software programs in less than a year.

“Right. You’re the next Bill Gates. I forgot.”

Darren didn’t bother to correct him. He had one line of educational software he was developing to help kids read. His younger brother Eric had a symbol-retrieval problem and he’d found a way to help him by writing a simple program. Eric was now studying engineering at college—and the fact that he’d made the difference in his younger bro’s life gave him a lot more pride and satisfaction than his most successful day at the family firm. Now he wanted to see if he could create a more elaborate program that might help other kids like his brother.

Maybe his program wouldn’t cure cancer, but helping kids overcome learning hurdles felt more useful to him than getting some KIM client’s brand of deodorant up two percentage points in the marketplace.

“Okay. But you’ve got to help me.”

Bart grinned. “You have come to the right place,” he said, almost rubbing his hands with glee. “You’re one of the most famous faces in America. But, my man, we’re about to change all that.” Bart, the sometime actor, rose majestically from behind his desk and gestured. “Follow me,” he said. After a surreptitious glance up and down the hallway, they surmised the coast was clear, then took the elevator to the main floor.

After hiding in the back seat while Bart drove them out of the building’s car park, Darren wondered how famous people handled celebrity. He felt hunted, and the baseball cap and dark glasses, not to mention the Brooks Brothers suit, weren’t helping him blend in with the crowd.

They ended up in a drugstore, where Bart pondered a row of Miss Clairol boxes. “You want to blend in with the locals, but look completely different from how you look now. Where are you going, anyway?”

Maybe it was the throwaway comment about Bill Gates, but it made up Darren’s mind. “Seattle.”

“That’s a long way away.”

“Exactly. I don’t know anyone there, I’ve no reason to go. Hell, I was only there once for a weekend. No one will think to look for me in Seattle.”

Bart picked up a box of dark brown hair dye.

“What are we doing in the girl aisle?”

“Women’s hair dye doesn’t last as long as the men’s stuff,” Bart explained, reading the instructions on the box as though he might actually need them.

“I’m not dying my hair.”

“Do you want to disappear or don’t you?”

“Yes. But…” He stared at the box. “If I wear Miss Clairol, I might as well pierce my ears and wear pink golf shirts.”

Bart snapped his fingers. “Now, that’s a great—”

“Forget it.”

“Listen, here’s some advice from a once potentially great actor. If you want to become a character, you step into his shoes and into his skin.”

“And into their hair dye. Yeah. I’ve got it.”

“It’s not just his hair. It’s the whole persona. What we’re doing is building a character. Who is this man who’s going to appear in Seattle? We’ll start with the hair and see where it goes.”

A woman glanced at them curiously and then picked up a box with a picture of a blonde on it.

Darren stood there surrounded by women’s hair-styling products, wondering how his life had ever come to this. Finally, he pulled out his wallet and handed Bart a twenty.

“You’re buying it.”

Two hours later, they were at Bart’s place and his damp hair was now brown. Darren couldn’t believe how it changed his appearance. His skin tone seemed lighter, his eyes darker.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Bart, who was getting right into this dye-your-hair and dress-up thing. “You really are a computer geek, and you’ll be living in Silicon Valley north, so why not dress like one? It’s the perfect disguise.”

“What, you mean wear plastic pocket protectors and plaid weenie shirts?”

“Too much?”

“Definitely.”

“Okay. The trick is to keep people’s attention off your face. I’ve got some black thick-framed glasses from when I played Willy Loman. They’d be perfect. The hair, baseball caps, those will help. But I’m thinking wild shirts like boarders wear. Loud, casual and cheap.” His buddy laughed and then clapped him on the back.

“Geek chic.”

Darren snorted. But he kind of liked the idea. Who’d look for him under a loud shirt? He’d never owned such a thing in his life.

“Okay,” he said, knowing he couldn’t pass up this opportunity to escape being marriage bait and at the same time follow his private dream. “I’ll do it.”

“Great.” Bart dug in a drawer for a pair of kitchen shears. “Now, hold still,” he said, and picked up a lump of Darren’s still-damp hair.

“I paid two hundred bucks to have my hair cut two weeks ago,” Darren informed his old buddy.

“Welcome to the world of—hey, what are you going to call yourself?” Bart asked as he started cutting.

KATE MONAHAN SAT AT HER kitchen table with her calculator and her monthly budget. She had the pleasant feeling of being ahead of her target.

She’d worked a lot of extra shifts to get here, but knowing her investment account with Brian’s bank was growing, and that soon she’d be able to follow her life-long dream and enroll in teacher’s college, had her beaming.

She heard the broken cement at the end of the duplex’s driveway rattle as a car rolled in. The landlord was too cheap to fix the drive, or much else, but the rent was reasonable so she didn’t complain. She wondered if this could be the new tenant moving in upstairs, and got up to look out the window.

She hoped it would be someone as friendly as the last tenant, Annie.

Kate went to the kitchen window and peeked out. Well, it was a guy moving in. Annie had been a fun-loving flight attendant—a girl after Kate’s heart—and the house had been more like a single home than a duplex. But Annie had been transferred to Denver. Somehow, Kate didn’t think this guy and she were going to be watching old movies together and sharing bowls of popcorn, or borrowing shoes and jackets.

He got out of a nondescript beige compact that had seen better days and glanced around as though suspecting he might have been followed.

The guy was tall, and he stretched his back as though he’d been driving a long time, pulled off the baseball cap he wore low over his eyes and scratched his scalp. He had dark brown hair in a cut his barber ought to be ashamed of, glasses with thick black frames on a pleasant, strong-boned face. He looked sort of familiar, though she was certain they’d never met. But it was hard to concentrate on his face when he was wearing such a wild shirt. Bright red, with big white flowers. The shirt was open to expose a white T-shirt that was soft from many washings. He wore creased cargo shorts and navy flip flops.

Shoving the cap back on his head, he popped open the trunk and pulled out a computer keyboard and a cardboard box with computer-type stuff sticking out and started toward the outside stairs that led up to his suite. Suddenly, he stopped, his gaze focusing on her kitchen window.

Her hair. It must be her wretched hair that had caught his attention. She’d thought she was hiding behind her curtains, but obviously he’d caught sight of her.

Well, she’d have to introduce herself now.

She opened the kitchen door and stepped out. “Hi,” she said, with a friendly smile.

He nodded. Not smiling. Not speaking. Looking at her as though she might be an assassin sent to kill him. Oh, great. He looked like a cross between a California surfer boy and a computer nerd, and was paranoid to boot.

He stepped past her and kept going toward the stairs. “I’m Kate,” she said. “I live downstairs. If you need anything—”

The upstairs door opened and then slammed shut.