Mr Perfect Read Free Page B

thanking God, she'd add to the list her thanks that today was Friday. It had been a bitch, but it was the last bitch – at least until Monday. "Tell me about it," Marci muttered as she stubbed out a cigarette and promptly lit another one. "Brick's been on a tear lately. Is it possible for men to have PMS?"
    "They don't need it," Jaine said, thinking of her jerk of a neighbor – a cop jerk. "They're born with testosterone poisoning."
    "Oh, is that what's wrong?" Marci rolled her eyes. "I thought it was a full moon or something. You'll never guess – Kellman grabbed my ass today."
    "Kellman?" the other three said in synchronized astonishment, their combined voices drawing the attention of everyone around them. They burst into laughter, because of all the possible offenders, he was the least likely.
    Derek Kellman, age twenty-three, was the walking definition of nerd and geek. He was tall, gangly, and moved with all the grace of a drunken stork. His Adam's apple was so prominent in his thin neck that it looked as if he had swallowed a lemon that became permanently lodged in his throat. His red hair was a stranger to a brush; it would be matted flat in one place and standing out in spikes in another: a terminal case of bed head. But he was an absolute genius with computers, and in fact they were all sort of fond of him, in a protective, big-sisterly way. He was shy, awkward, and absolutely clueless about everything except computers. The office buzz was that he'd heard there were two sexes, but wasn't certain the rumor was true. Kellman was the last person anyone would suspect of being an ass grabber.
    "No way," Luna said.
    "You're making that up," T.J. accused.
    Marci laughed her husky smoker's laugh and took a deep drag off her cigarette. "Swear to God, it's true. All I did was walk past him in the hallway. The next thing I know, he grabs me with both hands and just stands there, holding my ass like it's a basketball and he's about to start dribbling."
    The mental image had them all giggling again. "What did you do?" Jaine asked.
    "Well, nothing," Marci admitted. "The problem is, Bennett was watching, the jerk."
    They groaned. Bennett Trotter thrived on picking on those he considered his subordinates, and poor Kellman was his favorite target. "What could I do?" Marci asked, shaking her head. "No way was I going to give the asshole more ammunition to use against the poor kid. So I patted Kellman on the cheek and said something flirty, along the lines of 'I didn't know you cared.' Kellman turned as red as his hair and dodged into the men's room."
    "What did Bennett do?" Luna asked.
    "He got that nasty smirk on his face and said that if he'd known I was so hard up I'd settle for Kellman, in the interest of charity he'd have offered his services a long time ago."
    That set off an epidemic of eye-rolling. "In other words, he was his usual jerk self," Jaine said in disgust. There was political correctness, and then there was reality, and the reality was that people were people. Some of the guys they worked with at Hammerstead were nasty leeches, and no amount of sensitivity training was going to change that. Most of the guys were okay, though, and it all evened out because some of the women were barbed- wire bitches. Jaine had stopped looking for perfection, in the workplace or anywhere else. Luna thought she was too cynical, but then Luna was the youngest of their group and her rose-tinted glasses were still intact – a bit faded now, but intact.
    On the surface, the four friends had nothing in common other than their place of work. Marci Dean, the head of accounting, was forty-one, the oldest of the group. She had been married and divorced three times and, since the last trip through the courtroom, preferred less formal arrangements. Her hair was bleached platinum blond, her smoking was her ginning to take its toll on her skin, and her clothes were always just a bit too tight. She liked beer, blue-collar men, rowdy sex, and