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started to go.
    But the question had penetrated the mists of lust that had addledmy brain. In spite of my libido, I had my pride. “Yes,” I called out after him. “It’s damn good.”
    “Then don’t blow it by trying to look like your own grandmother. Even little TV stations in the middle of nowhere would rather book a girl who’s cute.” And he left.
    What happened next is pretty much a blur. Tommy and his assistant, Elisa, went through the clothing racks and produced a pink silk wraparound dress that accentuated my cleavage and showed off my waist. The top of me, according to Tommy, was just fine, and I should never wear a baggy sweater again as long as I lived. Elisa stitched a couple of darts in the bodice that made my waistline look even smaller. The full skirt of the dress swished gracefully over my hips and thighs—which Tommy called “that little problem area down under.”
    The hairdresser piled most of my wild-woman’s mane on top of my head, leaving just enough falling down around my face to make me look like I’d recently climbed out of bed. Then Leeland, the makeup artist, went to work with lip liners, false lashes, tweezers, brushes, and blushers to reveal a couple of cheekbones I’d never known were there, a pair of almond-shaped eyes, and a mouth that was still full, but now it was a good thing. In this new face my long nose looked … elegant. As a finishing touch, Tommy handed me a pair of high-heeled pumps to wear instead of my sensible shoes. I teetered on them for a minute or two and then, when I had the balance right, I swanned over to the white backdrop where Jake was waiting to take my picture. When he saw me, he clapped. Really. The guy applauded.
    “You have a Henry Higgins/George Bernard Shaw/Pygmalion thing going on, don’t you?” I asked, because I was feeling shy all of a sudden and I wanted to be funny. But when he looked at me, I realized I’d hit home.
    “Yeah, I’m afraid I do,” he said.
    “Hey, that’s a good thing,” I said.
    “You think?”
    “Works for me.”
    “But I prefer to think of myself as Svengali.”
    I nodded. “Sounds more exotic.”
    Then he laughed and said, “Look at you! You’re a fox! She’s smart, and she’s a fox!” And for the first time, I got the full force of Jake Morris in Happiness Mode. Up to that moment I’d been overcome by his looks, and, okay, he was sexy as hell. But when I stood there watching those sparks of pleasure that just seemed to be exploding around him and realized I had caused them … that was when I fell in love.

CHAPTER 4
    The problem was what to do next. I’d never learned how to flirt. It wasn’t a skill that was prized in my home, where the mantra was the old seventies slogan that everyone attributes to Gloria Steinem although she wasn’t the one who said it: “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
    Like most feminists of her era, my mother was determined that her girl child not fall prey to the myths of romantic love that had kept women in shackles for so many generations—her words, not mine. “Just remember, Francesca,” she said, when I was five and she was dismissing the entire Disney Girl oeuvre, “Snow White was an idiot who ate an apple without washing it first, and Cinderella jammed her feet into glass slippers, which had to hurt like hell, so she could find a guy to save her from having to scrub toilets. She should have hired a lawyer and taken the bitch stepmotherto court. Even better, she should have become a lawyer and fought for herself.”
    When it came to my mother’s romantic life … well, romantic life wasn’t the right term, sex life was more accurate. Alexandra preferred to have occasional flings with commitment-phobic men who got out of her hair in the morning before she had to worry about making them coffee—or introducing them to Pete and me. Not that she had to worry about that, because Pete and I were out of the house and in college before our mother