She could slip into the ladies’ room. Make sure to reveal the background. Make it a little raunchy.
A new message popped up on the screen. You know you want to.
He was right. She did.
No. It was better to make him work for it a little longer. Play hard to get. Make sure this was for real before giving him what he wanted.
She typed a response: Very tempting. And very soon.
That should serve its purpose. Buy her a little time.
In the meantime, she had someone else to meet. She saw the minivan pull up in front of the train station. Her ride was here. She had two secrets. Dan Hunter and the man whom she’d been meeting here nearly once a week for the last two months. They both made her feel special in ways she’d never known before.
Chapter Three
F our days after Alice first met Drew Campbell at the Fuller Building, the conversation that once held life-changing promise now seemed like nothing but heady party talk.
“I hate to say I told you so.” Lily’s dark green eyes smiled at her over the rim of the Bloody Mary she was sipping on the other side of the tiny bistro table.
“Oh, yes. I know how much it pains you to be right. I mean, as pain goes, having to say you told me so is way up there: hot tar, waterboarding, the iron maiden.”
Lily had skipped out of work early to meet her for a late lunch at Balthazar. Unfortunately, they weren’t the only New Yorkers with fantasies of a leisurely afternoon spent lounging at a Parisian-style brasserie, authentically re-created in SoHo. Even at three o’clock, they’d had to wait thirty minutes for their postcard-sized table. Still, as Alice broke off another chunk of baguette, she had no regrets.
“What is an iron maiden anyway?” she asked.
“No clue,” Lily said, tucking a loose strand of her pixie cut tightly behind her left ear before reaching for another moule. “At the very least it inspired years of big-hair, leather-pants metal music. Torture enough as far as I’m concerned.”