The Sexiest Man Alive (The Romanos 1)

“Oh.” She swallowed her disappointment. “Well, that’s no problem. It really wouldn’t be so awful if I checked out the other restaurants—” alone, she’d been going to say, but the word stuck in her throat “—if I checked them out with someone not connected to CHIC.”

He swung toward her, his face suddenly harsh in the lamplight.

“Peter?” he said.

Peter? she thought. Peter? And then she remembered.

“Peter, yes,” she said, and smiled brilliantly. “He‘s—he’s really got excellent taste in—in fine dining. I’m sure he’d—” Her words died away. They stood looking at each other. Tell me you don’t want me to go out with Peter, Susannah thought suddenly, say it...

“Or Sam,” Matthew said, with a glittering smile.

“Well, no. Sam’s on—”

“Cape Cod. With Mama.” A muscle danced in his cheek. He took her arm and hurried her toward his Porsche, unlocked the door and motioned her inside. “Take anyone you want,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

Twenty minutes later, after they’d said a polite good-night, Susannah stood inside her dark apartment.

“It doesn’t matter to me, either,” she said into the silence.

She’d check out the rest of the restaurants alone. Matthew was wrong. She didn’t need him with her. No more evenings wasted, no more senseless small talk…

Something silky and soft wound gently around her ankles.

“Mrrow?” said Peter.

Susannah smiled and scooped the cat into her arms

“Why on earth would it matter?” she said.

And then, for no reason whatsoever, she buried her face in Peter’s fur and wept.

CHAPTER EIGHT

IT WAS late in the day, and the CHIC team was gathered in the boardroom for a brainstorming session.

They sat around a conference table heaped with photos, notepads and computer printouts. A coffee urn, packets of artificial sweetener and an open jar of powdered creamer stood on the sideboard, flanked by half-empty boxes of rapidly aging bagels and pastries from Doughnuts Deelishus.

People, deep in thought, sat tilted back in their chairs, slumped over the table or staring into space, waiting for that elusive killer of an idea to spring into their brains.

Susannah’s brain, unfortunately, seemed to have died. As far as she could tell, there wasn’t a clever idea in it.

She reached for her coffee, then hesitated. Maybe the problem was too much artificial sweetener. Or too much caffeine. Wasn’t it caffeine that was supposed to give cancer to laboratory rats? She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember much of anything, not after the last couple of weeks.

Everybody at CHIC was exhausted.

The world’s sexiest restaurant issue had just hit the stands, and it was a smash hit. The distributors said they couldn’t stock shelves fast enough to meet the demand, and advertising space was being sold at a premium for the next issue. But if they didn’t capitalize on their momentum by making that next issue bigger and better, CHIC would slide right back downhill.

The hot-button feature for the next issue—the world’s sexiest getaway—was ready to go. The editorial staff had chosen three incredible places. They’d photographed all of them, and now they were ready to declare one the winner, with an extra-special photo spread to be shot on its romantic premises.

And that would take them to the February issue. The sexiest man alive.

What had started almost as a gag had turned into the feature of the year. Distributors, readers, newspaper columns, even TV shows, were giving the sexiest man terrific publicity.

CHIC, of course, was doing more than its part.

“Just wait until you see us for Valentine’s Day,” the current magazine gushed, “when we’ll bring you The Sexiest Man Alive. Yummy! You’ll drown in his gorgeous eyes, meet him up close and personal, complete with a no-holds-barred, pull-out centerfold.”

The copy made Susannah groan, but she knew it would sell lots of magazines. Actually, it already had. Readers had sent in nominations by the carload, and Susannah’s staff had narrowed the list to four finalists.

Bart Fitt, whose bare buns of gold had given new meaning to the words camera close-ups on a highly rated, late-night TV soap.

Alejandro Rio, the handsome male model for Cotton Puffs underwear, whose glorious male assets bulged in the briefest pair of briefs on a billboard above Times Square.

Zeke McCool, the smoky-voiced lead singer for a hot new band, who pranced around onstage with his shirt off so that his impressive abs had millions of women begging to do his laundry.

And Stefan Zyblos, a writer with a whiskey voice and a steamy smile, whose highly anticipated first novel was said to be so erotic it was going to be sold with oven mitts.

“Something for everyone,” Claire had sighed, after a day spent narrowing the choices, “and, by golly, studly to the bone.”

Susannah had smiled in agreement and wished she’d never used the silly word.

“But no studlier than our Mr. Romano,” Claire had added, with a quick look at Susannah, who’d pretended not to hear.

Why would she? She didn’t think about Matthew anymore. Not in any way that mattered. Not so that she felt the foolish, almost overwhelming sadness she’d felt the night he’d walked out of her life, or the days and the nights after.

Susannah frowned, let her chair fall forward so that the legs hit hard against the floor and went to get another doughnut. It tasted like cardboard, but she chewed and swallowed methodically until she’d finished the last crumb. Then she licked the powdered sugar from her fingertips.

Artificial sweeteners, caffeine, sugar be damned.

So what if she was on chemical overload? She had work to do and she needed the energy. That her thoughts had drifted off the subject and onto a dead issue like Matthew only proved it. He’d disappeared as soon as he’d decided that bedding her wasn’t a prize worth pursuing, and a day didn’t go by that she didn’t breathe a sigh of relief. She had nothing at all to do with him. Joe Romano was her contact now. When she needed an okay for something that crept beyond her budget, he was the man she got in touch with.

Joe was easy to deal with. Helpful, too. He loved the sexiest getaway and the sexiest man stuff. In fact, he’d been the one who’d suggested they feature all four of the sexiest man finalists in the Valentine’s Day issue, not just the winner.

“Pose the winning guy in nothing but a jockstrap,” Joe had E-mailed, “and we’ll sell out in an hour.”

Susannah thought he was probably right. The issue wasn’t shaping up as she’d imagined it—sex was battling it out with romantic, and sex was winning—but hey, that’s how it was in real life, too. Just look at what had happened with Matthew. A romantic evening, her in a gown, him in a tux, a romantic restaurant, and what had happened? She’d revealed more of herself than she should have, that was what, and it had scared him off.

And a good thing, too. Who wanted somebody like that hanging around?

Why was she wasting time thinking about him? Matthew was the past. CHIC’s February issue was the future—assuming she ever managed to get it on the stands.

Not so long ago, she and her staff had been short on ideas. Now what they needed was time. Time to cover the sexiest getaways, pick a winner, send a team to photograph it. Time to interview the sexiest man finalists. Time to choose one guy as the sexiest man alive, to arrange for the centerfold shot. Time to make the next two issues absolute winners.

Time, she thought, and sighed.

She’d sent out a memo called Solving Our Logistics Problem, and now here they were, her entire staff, pegging out on doughnuts, overdosing on coffee…and getting nowhere.

“It’s impossible,” Marcy from marketing said as she reached for her umpteenth cup of coffee.

“Impossible,” Amy from fashion agreed, and bit into a buttered bagel.

“Impossible or not,” Susannah said, trying to sound upbeat and perky, “we have t

o find a way to deliver.”

“Absolutely,” Marcy said.

The room feel silent.

“We could always chain the sexiest finalists to our desks,” Amy said.

There was a ripple of halfhearted laughter.

“Or ship them off for a weekend at the getaway finalists,” Marcy said. “The old two birds with one stone thing.”

Another ripple of laughter rang hollow in the room.

“There’s got to be a solution,” Claire said. “We just haven’t thought of it yet.”

Susannah nodded along with all the others. She trusted her team. They were sharp. She’d learned to let them brainstorm and to stay out of the early discussions as much as possible.

“Plus another great cover,” Amy said, “every bit as hot as the current one.”

There was a murmur of agreement. Susannah sighed, leaned her arms on the table and cradled her head. Her gaze drifted past Amy to the huge blowup of the December cover, which hung on the boardroom wall.

It was an interior shot of the Gilded Carousel. Candles, snowy-white napery, glittering wine goblets and a sexy couple from the modeling agency gazing into each other’s eyes across a platter of hors d’oeuvres.

“Oh, sexy,” Claire had sighed when she’d seen the proofs from the shoot. “That guy’s probably thinking about his boyfriend, but from here, he looks as if he’s ready to grab her hand and leap into bed.”

“You think it’ll sell?” Susannah had asked.

“Like crazy. Although they could just as well have taken a shot of you and our sexy publisher. Now, there’s a man who wouldn’t have any trouble getting me to jump between the sheets.”

Susannah had busied herself with arranging the proofs into a neat stack.

“That’s because you didn’t have to sit across a table from him, pretending you were having a good time.”