Bride On Loan. Leigh Michaels
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stopped. “Hey, if you’re implying I was goofing off, Paige, I wasn’t. But Milady’s right across the mall from the costume place, and I had to wait while they adjusted the tail on my cat suit.”
Paige laughed. “And given a choice between killing time looking at lingerie or trying on clown noses—”
“I’ll take lace and satin any day,” Sabrina agreed.
Paige gave a tug to the other garment bag and glanced without apparent interest at the contents. “At least it isn’t lace and satin,” she said. “But I still don’t see why we have to dress up for this. It’s not like we’re part of the party, we’re just running the thing.”
“Because we won’t look so out of place if we’re in costume. And it’ll be more fun for the kids that way. They love it when adults make fools of themselves.”
“No doubt,” Paige muttered darkly. “Personally, I wouldn’t mind dressing as the party organizer. Jeans, sweatshirt, running shoes and clipboard are my idea of a great costume.”
Sabrina grinned. “Hey, be grateful I didn’t call you All Hallows’ Eve and deck you out in fig leaves and apples.”
“I’ll remember that,” Paige said. “Mother, are you absolutely certain you don’t want to go to the party at the senior center tonight instead of staying here alone? I can drop you off, and they’ll make sure you have transportation home even if I’m late. It would be much more fun—”
“If you’re worried about my safety, Paige, I certainly have no intention of opening the door to the sort of little hoodlums who are likely to come trick-or-treating. I’ll just sit here with the lamps turned off, with my book and a flashlight, and they’ll never know I’m home at all.”
Sabrina wanted to roll her eyes. Sitting alone in the dark seemed to her to be one of Eileen’s favorite pastimes—especially if there was a chance of making Paige feel guilty about it.
“Now if you wouldn’t mind finding my cough drops, Paige,” Eileen said.
“Is your throat worse, Mother?”
“I don’t think so.” Eileen’s tone, in contrast to her words, was full of doubt. “Though if you could see your way clear not to go out tonight…Cassie will be there to help with the party, won’t she?”
Sabrina nodded. “But it’ll take all three of us just to oversee the people I’ve hired.”
“I thought this was going to be a small party,” Eileen said. “Just a little entertainment for the staff’s children, to keep them off the streets on Halloween night.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Sabrina agreed. “But then it grew into a celebration for everybody at Tanner Electronics.”
“That’s because Caleb Tanner’s bimbo of the week got hold of the idea,” Paige explained.
“At least she’s not expecting us to arrange all the entertainment for the adults.” Sabrina wrinkled her nose at the memory. “But since it looks as if her festivity’s going to last all night, I decided it might be prudent to hire a couple of baby-sitters for each age group, to take the kids off and entertain them while their parents party.”
“It breaks my heart, Paige,” Eileen said mournfully, “the sort of people you’re being exposed to.”
She sounded, Sabrina thought, as if she believed her daughter was still an impressionable preteen. “And there’s an amazing age range on these kids,” she went on, “so the number of sitters required—”
“Besides, there’s not only a range, there’s a lot of kids,” Paige said. “For what was represented to us as a bunch of nerds with nothing on their minds but work, the crew at Tanner Electronics have an awful lot of offspring.”
“Which is why it’ll take all hands to manage the party, Eileen. And right now,” Sabrina added, “though she means well and she tries hard, the fact is that Cassie doesn’t have eyes for anything but Jake, so she’s going to be of minimal—”
“That’ll wear off soon enough.” Eileen’s tone was chilly. “The tunnel vision, I mean. And obscene bits of underwear won’t delay the process by much, either.”
Obscene? The teddy was certainly suggestive, Sabrina thought. It was even a trifle naughty—that was the whole point of honeymoon lingerie, after all. But it was hardly obscene.
Sabrina couldn’t stop herself. She draped the teddy across the arm of Eileen’s wheelchair so the woman couldn’t avoid an up-close view while she painstakingly retied a blue satin ribbon, located at the bikini line, which had come undone. “I don’t suppose you’d like to tell us exactly how you know all that,” she said innocently as she held up the teddy once more.
Paige intervened hastily. “If you’re going to get everything done in time, Sabrina, hadn’t you better be going? I’ll be along just as soon as I can.”
“Perhaps you’d better go right now, Paige,” Eileen said. Her voice was grim. “There’s no telling what Sabrina could accomplish if she’s left to herself—she could bring down the whole business that you’ve worked so hard to build.”
“It is true,” Paige said judiciously, “now that Rent-A-Wife has landed a client like Caleb Tanner, we’d be wise to avoid offending him. But I’m sure Sabrina already—”
Sabrina gave her a sunny smile. “Oh, well, if not offending Caleb Tanner is the goal,” she said gently, “then you really had better wear the teddy!”
The atrium lobby at Tanner Electronics was brightly lit and bustling; Sabrina noted that Cassie’s crew of volunteers had been busy, for most of the decorations they’d selected were already in place. Fake spiderwebs, bats hung on threads and a scarecrow-like witch in the corner all looked a bit obvious at the moment, but when night settled in and the lights were turned down, the effect would be appropriately spooky.
Not as good as a true haunted house, of course, Sabrina thought regretfully. But in the year since she and Paige and Cassie had combined forces to start Rent-A-Wife, they’d learned to work within all kinds of restrictions. And since this was the first good-size job they’d done for Tanner Electronics, it was more important, Paige had said, to pull off a simple, nice event that stayed well within the budget than it was to blow Caleb Tanner’s socks off with an expensive gala.
At the time, Sabrina had agreed, but after her first encounter with Caleb’s bimbo of the week, she’d had a change of heart. It was more likely, it seemed to her, that anything Rent-A-Wife came up with would look anemic to a man who was used to the celebrations thrown by a woman who obviously had no hesitation about spending his bank balance.
But Paige was right; there was quite a difference between the two situations. And it was too late for modifications now. They’d just have to impress Caleb the old-fashioned way.
Though it was an hour till the start of the party, Sabrina changed into her sleek black cat costume in the ladies’ lounge before she started to fill the dozens of black and orange helium balloons that would finish off the atrium’s decor. She knew from experience how easily time slipped by when she was busy and how hard it was to break away from a half-finished task, with party pressure already under way, to change clothes. This way, if the kids started arriving before she was finished, they’d think that helping blow up balloons was simply part of the planned entertainment.
Pumping helium into what seemed to be a million individual balloons was not Sabrina’s idea of high enjoyment. By the time the first hundred were filled, tied and bobbing from a hook on the side of the rocket-shaped helium tank, she was reminding herself that the occasional tedium of her job was more than offset by the daily advantages of flexibility, frequent change and lack of pressure.
By the time the second hundred were finished, she was regretting that she hadn’t kept her coat handy; the delivery company had left the helium tank right inside the main door, and every time an employee