All Through the Night Read Free Page A

allowed him to call as often as he had. Yes, she rather liked Phil’s voice. It shivered up a person’s neck like warm air currents. Nevertheless, she had to be firm with him now.
“I’m quite serious,” she told him. “I have no desire to work in design anymore. I’m perfectly happy as a game tester, and if you call me again, I’ll be forced to report it as harassment.”
“Hey, hey, no one’s harassing anyone here. If you don’t want me to call again, I won’t. But could you answer one question? Why are you so adamant? Do you feel as if you were treated unfairly here? Was anyone unprofessional or improper?”
She was treated like yesterday’s news, trashed by the boss himself, but it was a highly personal situation and she wasn’t going to discuss it with a veritable stranger.
“There’s improper and there’s improper, Phil. One’s about wearing hoop earrings and a leather micro-mini to church. The other’s about acting boorishly without a thought to the pain you cause others. I’ll let you figure out which is which.”
With that, and an icy-bright best wishes for the holidays, she pressed the OFF button and considered herself well rid of the pest and his simmering pot of a voice.
Joe Gamble’s telephone headset was calibrated to pick up noises as faint as normal respiration. People breathed and he could hear them. Unfortunately. Because right now he had a dial tone trying to buzz-saw a hole through his head. Kerry Houston had just cut him off at the kneecaps, and he was probably lucky it wasn’t higher. She hadn’t let him get in one more word, much less the last one.
Damn, it annoyed him when that happened.
It annoyed Phil, too. Technically Philip was his middle name, but since she refused to talk to Joe Gamble, and most everyone else at Genesis, he’d had to resort to the subterfuge. He snapped off the headset and draped it over his halogen arc lamp. Apparently there were still a few people who could not be bought, and she was one of them. He admired her for that, but how was he going to get her back if not with filthy lucre?
The game he’d been uploading suddenly flashed onto his computer screen, distracting him. An array of multiple-choice questions appeared against a background of pink cupids, pouty red lip imprints and silhouetted females of the supermodel variety. It was pretty garish, plus the music playing through the speakers sounded suspiciously like the “Love Boat” theme.
“Preferred breast size?” Joe read aloud.
It wasn’t the first question that came up, but it was the first one to catch his eye. A set of multiple-choice answers followed: (a) plums, (b) peaches, (c) Texas grapefruit or (d) honeydew.
“What?” Joe remarked dryly, “no seedless watermelon?”
He clicked on the FEEDBACK icon, and then RECORD. “The fruit references aren’t going to fly,” he said, leaving a message for the game’s architects. “I don’t want to ruin the fun, but is it possible for you pervs in design to think in terms of small, average, full… something like that?”
Joe was evaluating a Genesis product in the design stages with a working title of “Build Her and She Will Come.” The idea of the game was to let men visualize and create their ideal mate from head to toe, including her physical characteristics, but globular fruit was certain to offend a key demographic who might buy it for their brothers or male friends, namely women. And the title was certain to offend everyone.
He clicked on “Peaches,” just for evaluation purposes, of course. Honeydew was excessive, plums were vaguely prepubescent and grapefruit had never been a big favorite. Made his teeth hurt.
An animated cupid thanked him for his answer, and then pointed his little pink arrow to the next question: “Preferred leg length?”
This one had a flower theme. The design team was having way too much fun, Joe thought, as he read the choices under his breath. “(a) Long-stemmed American Beauties, (b) daffodils, (c)