Enchanted Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

meeting with Lance Heart Smith today had everything to do with her hesitation. Lance reminded her of the life she’d left behind—fast times, every moment a feel-good party. Julian also left her with vestiges of the glamour and drama of her former life. But Lance was hardly the settling down type. He was everything she was trying to overcome: sexy come-ons and one-night stands. Between the two, Julian offered the better bet.
    This restlessness had been with her for a while. It was there before the trip to Rhode Island, before she’d seriously started thinking about expanding the Guilty Pleasures operation. It had been there for a long time.
    If she could pinpoint it at all, it started with Basil laughing in her face, telling her she’d never make a go of an underwear store. Basil refusing to cosign the loan she’d needed to complete her financing package. Basil telling her she was pretty window-dressing and nothing else. He’d reminded her time and again that when her figure and her face changed with pounds and age, she’d have nothing. The thought—and the inevitable brutality of it—left her anxious and tense.
    The sober reminder and reality of what she could look like and where she’d be without her looks and figure filled her with fear bordering on hysteria.
    â€œViv?”
    She started at his touch, then realized she’d clutched the delicate stem of the martini glass so hard that it snapped in two. The red of the liqueur and cranberry juice in the Cosmopolitan stained the creamy white linen of the overlay and quickly soaked through to the blue layer of tablecloth. Mixed with the alcohol was the deeper red of Viv’s blood where she’d cut a finger on the glass.
    Julian sprang into action, efficiently hailing a waiter, staunching the trickle of blood by applying pressure to her hand. Viv watched, almost as if in a trance or viewing a distinctly unpleasant stage play, one not worth leaving because the tickets were paid for, but not worth staying because surely there had to be a better way to kill time.
    Killing time.
    That’s what she’d been doing the last many years of her life, hopping from man to man. She was twenty-seven going on forty-seven in many respects. Julian had been a safe diversion; Basil an annoying thornbush in her garden. But in the end, she’d been doing nothing more than treading water in a shallow pond; afraid to go deep where the bigger fish swam in unknown depths.
    A small group of Cloud 9 staff, all male, gathered at the table, fussing over her while Julian directed the action. A clean white cloth, ice at its center, was pressed to her finger. The manager clucked, the waiter murmured, the others spoke in a rush of sound that seemed to be leading to an eardrum-bursting crescendo.
    She had to get some air. Now.
    â€œI’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”
    She pushed her chair back and accepted a hand up from a man—the wine steward?—with orange highlights in his box blond hair. “Where’s the ladies’ room?”
    A moment later, safe from the suffocating fawning, Viv stood before a full-length mirror in the women’s rest room. She didn’t have to study her image to know what was reflected there. Her face had been on enough billboards and buses and in enough magazines over the years to know what she looked like—and not be all that impressed. Not in the total scheme of things. Now, as always, the outer package remained what it was: an attention getter. Something she’d never taken for granted though. Time and circumstances were too fleeting to take anything in life for granted.
    Would the men out there—Julian, the restaurant manager, the waiter, and the wine steward—react to her the way they did if she didn’t have the voluptuous curves, the sexy smile and wide dark eyes? Would they?
    Viv knew the answer. And it hurt just as much as it always did.
    Taking a deep