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thanher cell phone number. Caller ID was a girl’s best friend.
    Puffing through the aggravation of realizing she needed a new strategy for finding that elusive happily ever after, she tried to sort out the entire dating process—or at least her personal lack of dating success.
    She was not unreasonably selective, yet she didn’t go out with just anyone who asked. Somehow, though, she had gained a reputation for doing just that. Which guaranteed she was asked out a lot.
    By everyone, it seemed, but Cary Grant.
    Her dating rules were flexible, her only demand that a man treat her like a woman. Too many took that to mean trying to get into her pants. Others assumed she wanted to be coddled and pampered and saved from herself.
    She never went into a date with her rules spelled out on a cue card. But men asked, and she answered, and then all hell would break loose, depending on the man and what conclusions he’d drawn about women.
    It was always one extreme or the other. The virgin or the slut. The whore or the lady.
    What had happened to the middle ground?
    Her looks were one problem, her vocabulary another, but she was who she was. Her upbringing had defined her; the pedestal on which she’d been forced to sit had towered miles above reality.
    So she’d countered her father’s insistence that she rise above the rabble by getting down and getting dirty. To her sheltered and rebellious young mind that had meant a coarse vocabulary, a take-no-prisoners personality, an unapologetic enjoyment of life’s earthier delights, as well as the power afforded by passion.
    Perhaps not the most straightforward approach tolife or to love, but a method that had served its purpose. She’d learned that being good wasn’t going to get her anything she wanted. She’d also learned that what most men gave her she wanted to give back.
    At the crook of her finger, they came running, bringing flowers and chocolates and baubles, and declarations of love so profusely poetic she wanted to barf. She had attention, affection, the things of female fantasy…and all of it was bogus as hell.
    No man had ever taken the time or made the effort to learn that she read Tom Clancy for fun. That she’d take lemon over chocolate any day of the week. That she grew her own tomatoes in whiskey barrels kept on the patio, but killed every flower she planted.
    Men. Ruled by their dicks. Every one of them.
    What she wanted was chivalry.
    Was the word really that anachronistic? The concept that out-of-date? And what about respect? Not only for her person, but for her ideas and opinions.
    She was blond. She was built. She was not about to apologize for her love of makeup. She had a brain. She was not a bimbo. She liked men. She was not an easy score.
    Why was that so hard to understand? she wondered, and pedaled even harder, faster, closing her eyes and pushing beyond the burn. She doubted her reputation or her mouth truly crossed Sydney’s line in the sand.
    But Chloe loved gIRL-gEAR, her vice-presidential perks and position, the cyclical industry of fashion and her partners, the five women who’d been her best friends since their days in Austin at University of Texas.
    Hell, she even had a soft spot for Poe, though the other woman’s ambition irritated Chloe more than abroken underwire on a brand-new bra. Poe needed the air released from her inflated self-opinion. She might have five years on Chloe, but Chloe had the heart Ms. Annabel Lee was missing.
    The ringing of the phone in her bedroom slowed Chloe’s cathartic pace, but she didn’t stop pedaling until the machine picked up and she heard Eric Haydon’s voice.
    “Yo, Chloe. About that first wish.”
    Chloe sat up straight on the bike and listened to the recording being broadcast from across the hall.
    “Be at Haydon’s. Saturday morning. Nine on the nose. Oh, and the outfit you had on yesterday? Wear it.”
    The line went dead, then came the dial tone, followed closely by Chloe’s disbelief. That was