The F-Word

Her eyes close. She draws in her breath.

It’s as if it’s me she’s drawing in.

I step back. “Okay,” I say briskly, and she blinks her eyes open. “Okay,” I say again. “Let’s see what we can do with this outfit.”

Wrong thing to say, even for a guy who can, at this moment, barely think coherently. Her mouth trembles again. I think about stopping that trembling with another kiss.

Instead, I turn brisk and businesslike.

“Nothing wrong with it,” I tell her. “We just need to, uh, to nudge it along.”

“How?”

How, indeed? I step back and look her over. Her face colors a little under my scrutiny. I squat down and finger the hem. She starts to jerk back and I frown up at her and tell her to stand still.

The material is, as I said, chunky. Wrong word. It’s—it’s substantial. It has heft to it. I bet if you cut off part of the hem, nobody would notice that you’d done it.

Hell. Why not? And we don’t have time to waste. A quick look at my watch tells me we’re due at the restaurant in forty minutes.

I stand up. “Scissors.”

“What for?”

“Bailey. Just get me a pair of scissors, okay?”

She looks at me as if I’m nuts. Then she turns and heads for the kitchen. She returns clutching a big pair of scissors.

“Great,” I say, as if I know what I’m doing. “Okay. Climb up on that chair.”

“Mr. O’Malley—”

“Ms. Abrams. Get up on that chair.”

She makes a face, but she steps up on the chair. I hold out my hand to help her and I get a flash of leg.

A very nice flash.

The legs go with the rest of her. Shapely. Firm. Not scrawny, even though I know that scrawny is in. I like my women with a little meat on their bones. Not that Bailey is my woman. Well, she is, but only as a loaner…

Jesus, O’Malley, stay with the program!

“Matthew! What are you doing?”

What I am doing is cutting away part of the dress. The skirt. I’m cutting along the bottom of a blue stripe. I step back and take a look. Not enough. The stripe above it is pale blue. I cut it away. Still not enough.

“Matthew…”

“Stand still. I’m almost finished.”

Not true. I slice away half a dozen stripes, which is maybe eight inches of skirt. Now the hem is just a couple of inches above her knees, and I have a great view of knees, calves and ankles. It’s all prime real estate—and the lady in question is sputtering.

I put aside the scissors, grab her by the waist and lift her down. She yanks free, eyes the cut-off stuff on the floor and then looks at me as if I’m certifiable.

“What did you do?”

She asks it pretty much the way a horrified bystander would ask Godzilla what he did to Tokyo.

“Do you have a mirror? A full length mirror?”