Beautiful You Read Free Page A

could see the chairs each associate had safely left behind at his or her desk. Here in the rarified air of the executive floors it was always hushed, but this was spooky. No voices or footsteps echoed off the paneled walls or tasteful landscape paintings of the Hudson River Valley. Open bottles of Evian had been left behind so quickly that they still fizzed.
    She’d completed a four-year undergraduate degree in gender politics, and two years of law school, and now she was rounding up chairs for people too lazy or too self-important to take their own to meetings. It was so demeaning. This, no, this was something Penny would definitely not e-mail her parents to boast about.
    Her phone began to vibrate. It was Monique texting: “SISTER, WHERE ARE THOSE CHAIRS?!” By now Penny was sprinting down hallways. With the cardboard box of coffees barely balanced in one hand, she was lunging at doors, grabbing knobs only long enough to see whether they’d turn. Frantic, she’d all but given up hope, hurtling breathlessly from one locked office to the next. When one knob actually turned, she wasn’t ready. The door swung inward, and she was instantly thrown off balance. Falling through the doorway in a great splash of hot coffee, she landed on something as soft as clover. Sprawled on her stomach, she saw close-up the intertwined greens, reds, and yellows of beautiful flowers. Many flowers. She’d landed in a garden. Exotic birds perched among the roses and lilies. But hoveringdirectly in front of her face was a polished black shoe. A man’s shoe, its toe was poised as if ready to kick her in the teeth.
    This wasn’t a real garden. The birds and flowers were merely patterns in an Oriental rug. Hand-dyed and woven from pure silk, it was the only one of its kind in all of BB&B, and Penny realized exactly whose office this was. She saw herself reflected in the dark shine of the shoe: her coffee-drenched hair swinging in her eyes, her cheeks flushed, and her mouth hanging slack as she panted on the floor, out of breath. Her chest heaving. The fall had lifted her skirt, leaving her bottom stuck up in the air. Thank goodness for old-school opaque cotton panties. Had Penny been wearing a racy thong, she would have died from shame.
    Her eyes followed the black shoe up to a strong, sinewy ankle sheathed in an argyle sock. Even the jaunty green-and-gold pattern of the man’s sock couldn’t disguise the muscles within it. Beyond that was the hem of a trouser cuff. From this low angle, her gaze followed the sharp crease of the gray-flannel pant leg upward to a knee. Meticulous tailoring and cut revealed the contour of a powerful thigh. Long legs. Tennis player legs, Penny thought. From there the trouser inseam led her eyes to a sizable bulge, like a huge fist wrapped in smooth, soft flannel.
    She felt the hot wetness between her and the floor. She was wallowing on the squashed cups. A combined gallon of soy latte skinny half-caf mocha chai venti macchiato was soaking into her clothes and ruining the room’s priceless floor covering.
    Even in the buffed, murky leather of the shoe, Penny could see the blush in her cheeks deepen. She gulped. Only a voice broke the moment’s trancelike spell.
    A man said something. The tone sounded firm, but as soft as the silk carpet. Pleasant and bemused, it repeated, “Have we been introduced?”
    Penny’s eyes looked up through the veil of her long, flutteringeyelashes. A face loomed in the distance. At the farthest point of this gray-flannel vista, there were the features she’d seen so often in the supermarket tabloids. His eyes were blue; his forehead was fringed by a boyish ruff of his blond hair. His gentle smile put a dimple into each of his clean-shaved cheeks. His expression was mild, pleasant as a doll’s. No wrinkles in his brow or cheeks suggested he’d ever worried or sneered. Penny knew from the tabloids that he was forty-nine years old. Neither did crow’s-feet offer any proof that