Feels Like the First Time. Tawny Weber
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boxes, she hummed a little tune. She frowned as she pulled the dominatrix costume from the rack. Could she ever find the nerve to wear something like this?
“Josie?”
She spun around, one hand still holding the other on her chest to calm her pounding heart.
“Tom?” She hoped he’d take her breathlessness as surprise instead of nerves. “What’s up? I thought you’d already left.”
He gave her a sheepish, little-boy grin that melted her insides. “I forgot to deliver one package.”
He held out a small box. But he was staring at the costume in her hands. He eyed the skimpy leather, then shifted his gaze to Josie. Interest sparkled, a naughty smile quirking one corner of his mouth.
“Now that’s an interesting getup,” he said. “I don’t suppose …”
Josie glanced at the leather in her hand, then back at Tom. Her eyes widened. Was he asking if she liked to play naughty? Color washed over her cheeks.
“The best thing about working at Dressed to Thrill is being able to role-play,” she told him. Then she hesitated and with a deep breath said, “Like our slogan says, ‘Bring us your fantasies, we’ll make them come true.’“
Tom smiled, but before he could respond, the phone rang. With a shrug, he said, “We’d better get back to work. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
Josie didn’t even pout when he left. Listening to her boss take the call, she grinned and gave a little dance and skip as she returned to the packing counter. He’d see her tomorrow. He’d said it like he was looking forward to it. Maybe tomorrow was the day he’d ask her out? Head filled with daydreams of Tom, she folded the dominatrix costume into the box heading for Idaho.
Wasn’t love grand? She patted the black leather and smiled. She sure hoped this costume brought the wearer as much luck as it had brought her.
1
“THE GIRL VOTED most likely to die a virgin.” “So unpopular, she attended her prom alone.” “The queen of geek chic.”
Zoe Gaston sneered at the labels people had scribbled under her senior picture. She hated labels. Although, she sighed as she glanced at the photo, sometimes it was hard to deny them. An ode to the dark side, she’d called her teen years. Black spiked hair, black-lined eyes, black glossy lips. She’d been a pudgy-cheeked brainy Goth-girl.
In other words, a total misfit.
“You think I should attend my ten-year reunion … why?” she asked Meghan with a grimace.
“To relive happy high-school memories and reconnect with all your friends, of course.”
Zoe’s sister-in-law actually believed that. She was the kind of gal who’d liked school. Plenty of friends, good times, general acceptance. The total opposite of Zoe’s experience. Other than one brief weekend when the hottie football star she’d crushed on had seemed to return her interest, she’d spent her high-school years as persona non grata.
“Oh, yeah, the good ol’ days.” Zoe squinted at Meghan and nodded sagely. “That would be when the cheerleaders hated me, the jocks were terrified of me and the teachers, ah, yes, the teachers. They were just as happy when I cut class as when I showed up.”
Meghan shrugged and snatched the yearbook away, obviously sensing the trip down memory lane wasn’t helping her argument any. She tossed it on Zoe’s electric-blue couch, the glossy cover swooshing across the slick leather.
“You publicly mocked the cheerleaders,” she pointed out with a dirty look.
Oops. Zoe bit her lip to hold back a laugh as she realized perky Meghan probably had a pair of bronzed pom-poms hidden away somewhere.
“Zach told me you kicked the quarterback in the balls,” Meghan continued, sounding shocked and irritated. Zoe raised her brow as if to ask what was wrong with that, but managed to keep her mouth shut as the other woman continued. “And he said you regularly argued with the teachers.”
A quick grin escaped. Okay, so her school days hadn’t totally sucked. “Exactly. I didn’t fit in. I didn’t want to fit in. And nobody wanted me to try to fit in. So why on earth would I go back?”
“To show them all how hot you are, how successful you are and how wrong they were about you.”
“Sure. Because I still don’t look like a Kewpie doll, I change jobs more often than most people change hairstyles and it’s been so long since I had sex that I might as well be the lifelong virgin they dubbed me.”
“So what? Those things don’t mean they were right about you, do they? And it’s not like you have to fill out some sexual-activity roster if you attend.”
Zoe smirked, then picked up her margarita glass and took a sip. Before she could come up with a clever response, Meghan puffed up her cheeks so she looked like an angry blond chipmunk, then blew out a gust of air. “If you don’t go, they’re all going to think they were right. Are you going to let them win?”
Zoe opened her mouth to say she didn’t care if they won or not. Then she sighed and shut it again. She couldn’t deny it. She did love to win. It was almost an irresistible need in her, that inability to step away from a competition, the compulsion to try to get the last word, to fight to the often-bitter end. It’d been the only thing that’d kept her in school after her parents’ deaths—that need to prove all the gossips wrong.
Of course, as soon as the challenge was met and she’d won, she lost all interest. Boredom was Zoe’s major downfall.
“I can overcome my need to win if I don’t step up to play,” she muttered, adding a silent maybe. She picked up the flashy neon invitation to the weeklong reunion and grimaced. “And returning to Central High’s school of torture is good incentive to stay out of the game.”
“And a rotten excuse for being afraid they might be right.”
Zoe glared, but didn’t respond to the direct hit.
“Why are you pushing this, really?” she asked, turning the tables. Zoe pointed to the bright reunion invitation that Meghan had brought over with an explanation that it’d been mailed to Zoe’s brother when the committee hadn’t been able to track her down. “You don’t care if I relive my teen years or not, so what’s behind it? The truth this time.”
Meghan picked up a fuchsia pillow and ran her fingers through the fringe, her diamond wedding band sparkling. Finally, she looked up at Zoe with puppy-dog eyes and said, “Zach’s in trouble.”
Zoe sat upright so fast, her margarita sloshed over the edge of her glass. She ignored the icy stickiness trickling down her fingers and grabbed Meghan’s arm. “What’s wrong? What happened to Zach? Is he sick?”
“Nothing like that,” Meghan hastened to assure her, her blue eyes wide and shocked at the vehement response. Zoe realized she might have overreacted a smidge, but Zach was all she had. “He’s fine. Overworked and overstressed, as usual. It’s not his health that’s the problem. It’s his business.”
The fear slowly released its hold on her muscles. Zoe forced herself to breathe. Once, twice, then a deep, relieved sigh.
“Z-Tech?” she asked, referring to Zach’s company. When the dot-com boom had gone belly-up, Zach had struck out on his own, creating a video-game company that catered to niche markets. Since she specialized in business consulting, Zoe had advised him more than once to expand his horizons, but Zach had always claimed he liked the cozy feel of specializing. He had decided last year to risk it all on his own platform. To compete with the likes of Sony and Microsoft, he’d gone with the concept of cheap, functional and expandable.
“Is his new system having problems?”
Meghan nodded. “He’d be furious if