“Interviewing them for the paper.” Now that she’d seen all of them this morning, she was beginning to feel a bit apprehensive. Next to her five-foot stature, they were huge.
“Do you think they’d notice if you snapped some pictures?”
“They might.” Jane laughed. “They didn’t seem as dumb as you’d expect.”
“Bummer. I wouldn’t mind seeing some naked hockey players.”
And now that she’d seen them all, seeing them naked was one aspect of the job that worried her. She had to travel with these men. Sit with them on the airplane. She didn’t want to know what they looked like without their clothes. The only time she wanted to be near a naked man was when she was naked herself. And while she wrote explicit sexual fantasies for a living, in her real life she wasn’t all that comfortable with blatant nudity. She was not like the woman who wrote about dating and relationships in the column for the Times. And she was absolutely nothing like Honey Pie.
Jane Alcott was a fraud.
“If you can’t take pictures,” Caroline said as she reached for her fork once more and picked the chicken from her Oriental salad, “take notes for me.”
“That’s unethical on a lot of different levels,” she informed her friend. Then she thought about Luc Martineau’s offer to “piss” in her coffee, and she figured she could bend ethics in his case. “I did see Luc Martineau’s butt.”
“Au naturel?”
“As the day he was born.”
Caroline leaned forward. “How was it?”
“Good.” She pictured Luc’s sculpted shoulders and back, the indent of his spine, and his towel sliding down his perfect round cheeks. “Really fine.” No denying it, Luc was a beautiful man; too bad his personality sucked.
“God,” Caroline sighed, “why didn’t I finish college and get a job like yours?”
“Too many parties.”
“Oh, yeah.” Caroline paused a moment, then smiled. “You need an assistant. Take me.”
“The paper won’t pay for an assistant.”
“Bummer.” Her smile fell and her gaze lowered to Jane’s blazer. “You should get new clothes.”
“I have new clothes,” Jane said around a bite of ham and cheese.
“I mean new, as in attractive. You wear too much black and gray. People will begin to wonder if you’re depressed.”
“I’m not depressed.”
“Maybe not, but you should wear color. Reds and greens especially. You’re going to be traveling with big strong testosterone-infused men all season. It’s the perfect opportunity to get a guy interested in you.”
Jane was traveling with the team on business. She didn’t want to catch the interest of a man. Especially a hockey player. Especially if they were all like Luc Martineau. When she’d declined his offer concerning the coffee, he’d almost smiled. Almost. Instead he’d said, If you change your mind about that, let me know. Only he hadn’t said about. He’d said aboot. He was a jerk who hadn’t completely lost his Canadian accent. The last thing she wanted or needed was to attract attention from men like him. She glanced down at her black blazer and pants, and her gray blouse. She thought she looked okay. “It’s J. Crew.”
Caroline narrowed her blue eyes and Jane knew what was coming. J. Crew was not Donna Karan. “Exactly. From the catalogue?”
“Of course.”
“And black.”
“You know I’m color blind.”
“You’re not color blind. You just can’t tell when things clash.”
“True.” That’s why she liked black. She looked good in black. She couldn’t make a fashion faux pas in black.
“You’ve got a nice little body, Jane. You should work it, show it off. Come back to Nordy’s with me, and I’ll help you pick out some nice things.”
“No way. The last time I let you pick out my clothes, I looked like Greg Brady. Only not as groovy.”