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S
HANNON FELT LIKE A FRAUD
, a farce and a failure. And all the orange leather jackets in the world couldn’t change the facts: she, a failed actress, was nothing compared to someone like Hal Underwood, a guy so brilliant that he’d not only founded his own software company but was about to take it public.

Sure, she could help him with his public image. If only he could help her with her private one. People never got past her surface. For as long as she could remember, she’d been a victim of stares from both sexes. The stares of men were at best admiring and at worst downright lustful. The stares of women were usually hostile, envious or despairing.

She’d gotten used to being looked at—after all, there was nothing she could do about it—but she’d never get used to the strange emotions her appearance produced in other people. And she’d never grow accustomed to the feeling that nobody ever heard a word she said—they simply watched her lips move. Worse—she now didn’t even know who she was, and therefore what she had to say.

Since her car was flooded, they took Hal’s to see Enrique, her stylist.

His salon was a sumptuous ode to blue velvet. The curved reception desk was upholstered in a deep navy, as was the long sofa. Various chairs and pillows ranged in hue from royal to turquoise to periwinkle. Even the cornice boards were turquoise velvet.

A tall vase of peacock feathers stood in one corner, and on the one wall that wasn’t dominated by gilt mirrors hung every employee’s state cosmetology license framed in monstrously ornate gold.

Shannon had gotten used to Enrique’s royal environment. Hal stood like a deer in the headlights and gazed in stupefaction at the Early Bordello decor while Enrique danced out to greet them.

“’Allo, beeeyoootiful,” he said to Shannon.

“Hi, Enrique.” She kissed him on the cheek. “How are you?”

“Bueno.”
A small, vivacious man who barely reached to Shannon’s shoulders, he assessed Hal with great interest. He stroked his chin. He tapped his foot. He walked around him in a circle and peered at him.

“I theenk we have good things under all thees hair, my friend.”

Hal hunched his shoulders and sent a desperate look to Shannon. It clearly said, “Get me outta here!”

She smiled.

“Come!” ordered Enrique. “You seet here, in my chair.” He looped his arm through Hal’s, to the poor
guy’s discomfort, and dragged him off to his lair. Shannon repressed a giggle and followed.

“First, we shave, yes?” Enrique tugged on Hal’s beard.

“Ow!”

“Is no a good look for you. Off!” The stylist brandished an old-fashioned razor.

“Uh,” said Hal, fingering his neck. “Why not let me do that?”

“No, no. Is for you to relax.” The little man pushed him into a salon chair and immediately flipped it back to a lounging position. Within moments, he had his victim’s face smothered in shaving cream and was scraping away. Hal looked about as relaxed as a lobster being held over a pot of boiling water.

As Enrique scraped, he hummed tunelessly, achieving a virtually indescribable sound. Shannon concentrated on describing it anyway, so she wouldn’t laugh at the panicked expression in Hal’s eyes, and came up with Ricky Martin meets whale calls.

“Enrique may slaughter a tune, but he won’t slit your throat,” she reassured Hal.

The man who emerged from under all the white lather fifteen minutes later had high cheekbones, a strong jaw and a full lower lip. Paired with those blue eyes, even behind his cheesy glasses, the combination was striking. Shannon couldn’t help staring. Hal didn’t look at all like Saddam. He looked…good. Really good.

Enrique snatched off Hal’s glasses and then took
the poor man’s face between his hands and turned it this way and that. He smoothed back the overgrown, shaggy hair, pursed his lips and cocked his head.
“Sí!”
he announced, to no one in particular.

“Sí?”
Shannon asked. “Do you think a Caesar cut, or a little longer on top?”

“Caesar, yes, he has the bones for it.”

“He does?” asked Hal. “I mean, I do?”

“Yes, yes!”

“I’m not so sure about th…” Hal trailed off as great whacks of hair began to fall at Enrique’s feet. “Wait—”

“Be calm. You are in the presence of genius,” Shannon assured him.

“Yes, me! Genius! That ees so.” Enrique practically danced as he worked, fingers flying.

Hal closed his eyes and seemed to be praying. More hair flew as the stylist’s scissors flashed.

When the menacing chops ceased, Hal opened his eyes again and fished for his glasses, settling them onto his nose. He had become a different person, and judging from his expression, he couldn’t quite believe it.

For her part, she was floored. Hal was hot!

Enrique allowed the spectacles back on with a frown. He still snipped and fussed and compared lengths of hair in his fingers, but he seemed pleased. Hal stared at the stranger in the mirror.

Shannon stared, too.

“Bueno!”
Enrique exclaimed. “Behold Caesar!”

Shannon doubted that the great Julius had ever worn a polyester-blend plaid shirt or hideous glasses, but she didn’t contradict the stylist, who was clearly proud of himself.

Hal, still squinting into the mirror in disbelief, muttered something about the Ides of March.

Enrique made a dive for his glasses again, but Hal blocked him.

“Off!” the little man insisted. “These must go goodbye-bye. They
ruin
my brilliance. You get the contacts, eh?”

Shannon nodded. “Next stop, Fashionocular.”

Hal began to protest but was soon felled into silence by the magnitude of Enrique’s bill. Shannon hid another smile as he goggled at the charge.

“You’re kidding me,” he croaked. “This is
robbery!
”

Enrique drew himself to his full height of five foot nothing and puffed up like a blowfish.
“Perdón?”
His tone was ominous. “Rrrrobbery?”

Hal stood his ground.
“Larceny.”

Enrique tilted his head to the side and narrowed his black eyes. “Eh? I no familiar weeth thees word. But is obvious rrrrude.”

Hal looked again at the charge slip and didn’t deny it.

The stylist whirled on one foot, his chest heaving, and glared at Shannon. “He takes back thees insults, or—” he stooped to the salon floor and gathered up two fistfuls of hair “—I glue back thees hairs to his face!”

Shannon laid a hand on the enraged man’s arm,
but he shook it off, casting the hair clippings into Hal’s open mouth.

While he blinked, shocked, and spat them out, she said quickly, “Enrique! He didn’t mean it. Robbery—it’s just a turn of phrase. Cute. You know, ha-ha! Hal here was making a joke. Weren’t you, Hal?”

“Uh, no,” he said, blue eyes stormy. He pulled more hairs off his tongue and lower lip. “No, I was
not
making a joke.”

Enrique hissed like an angry Latin goose.

“Hal!”

“What?”

“You’re not making this situation any better.” She dug into her hobo bag for her wallet, pushing him out the door of the salon. “Wait for me outside while I pay him and try to salvage my relationship with the only top stylist this side of New York!”

A
S
H
AL WATCHED
through the glass door, arms crossed and foot tapping, a silent Shakespearean tragedy unfolded inside. Shannon’s lips moved earnestly while Enrique’s back remained steadfastly turned to her. She kept speaking until his shoulder eased a quarter turn in her direction, and he finally nodded.

She waved an obscene wad of cash at him, but he shook his head and made her talk to The Hand. Patiently she entreated his palm until he apparently got tired of extending it, since he rubbed at his bicep.

Hal snorted.

Shannon next said something to Enrique that actually made him smile, though his lips turned downward again and his nose went up as soon as he beheld Hal through the glass. She added a phrase.

Enrique gestured at him in obvious disgust and then nodded. The stylist finally snatched the cash, kissed Shannon’s cheek and strutted off, this time like an insulted rooster.

She opened the door, emerged, and then sagged against it, eyeing Hal with severity.

Uh-oh. He didn’t care much about Enrique, but he’d gone and pissed off the Goddess. Would she zap him with a moon ray, or something? Turn him into a fire hydrant frequented by neighborhood dogs? He squinted balefully at her jacket, at the way her glossy blond hair slid over it and beckoned his gaze to exactly breast level. He looked away from the forbidden zone.

“Tact, Hal. I know it’s a four-letter word, but you need to get some. You put me in a really bad position with Enrique, back there.”

Hal could practically feel his jaw jutting out in stubborn righteousness.

“He’s very proud of his work, and he’s cut the hair of a lot of bigwigs, no pun intended. You can’t tell him that what he charges is robbery!”

“But—”

“It would be like one of your clients saying
you
overcharge. That your software is garbage.”

Hal chuckled. “Never. That just wouldn’t happen.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I don’t think Enrique’s ever had it happen, either. Have you
looked at yourself,
by the way? He’s worth every penny!”

“So he cut a few inches off my mop. And what is this Caesar crap all about? Please tell me you’re not hauling me off to be fitted for a toga and ankle-wrap sandals next?”

Shannon’s lips twitched. “No. But believe me, Enrique did a lot more than chop a few inches. He’s truly an artist.”

Snort.
“I still don’t see why he’s worth six times what my regular barber charges.” Hal raked his fingers through the new Caesar cut, frowning. “I should charge
him
—he kept a lot of my hair! He probably runs a good racket selling the stuff for toupees out his back door.”

Shannon closed her lovely green eyes briefly. “Enrique does
not
sell clippings for hairpieces, I can assure you….”

Though he saw annoyance sparkling and radiating from her irises, he also discerned amusement. Was this Amazon sex goddess
laughing
at him again, on top of everything? The situation just sucked, plain and simple. He was going to wring Peggy’s neck for getting him into this.

They reached his Explorer and Hal walked around to the passenger side to unlock and open Shannon’s door for her. He supposed it was one of those things a goddess expected. She climbed into the truck one long leg at a time, and he tried not to notice the del
icate musculature revealed under the leather pants. Tried to ignore the more interesting creases and crevices where the lucky pants rode her hips and thighs. He failed.

He gave himself a stern internal lecture.

This woman is nothing but a torment sent by my sister and a scourge upon my bank account. I am not interested in her pants or anything inside them.

Like most lectures, it went ignored. Not only was he lying to himself, but he was hard again.

H
AL SWUNG INTO
the driver’s seat, started the ignition and checked the rearview mirror before backing out of his parking spot. What the hell? Who the hell? Oh. It was him. His new appearance was going to take some getting used to.

“Okay,” said Shannon, his tormentor and scourge. “You want to head toward Avon, Hal.”

He had a strong suspicion that he didn’t want to do that at all. “Why?”

“We’re going to update your eyewear now.”

“I just got these glasses a year and a half ago. I don’t need new ones.”

She blinked rapidly. “The frames are new, too, or just the lenses?”

“The lenses.”

“That’s what I thought. Those frames date back to about 1989, don’t they?”

“Uh…”

“Never mind.” Shannon reached over and cupped his jaw, tilted his chin toward her.

Hey, I’m trying to drive, here, woman!
But he
didn’t say it. The touch of her fingertips awakened exhilaration in him, plucked at some hidden longing that he didn’t want to acknowledge. A sweet lemon scent tickled his nostrils—her hand lotion?

“We need something smaller, lighter, with a more rectangular shape,” she said, after moistening her lips.

Was it his imagination or had her eyes gone smoky for an instant?
No, what we need is to get naked right here on Route 4.
Hal jerked his gaze back to the road.

“And I’d like you to try a set of contact lenses.”

“No. They irritate my eyes and drive me crazy.”

“When was the last time you tried them?”

“College.”

“They’ve made some improvements since then. Some of the new extended-wear lenses are so thin and flexible that you can’t even feel them.”

Hal sighed and kept driving. He had a feeling it was going to be a long day, and every moment spent with Shannon Shane was time he wasn’t tracking the source of his information leak. If he didn’t find it before the IPO… Such a possibility didn’t bear thinking about.

He put a hand up to tug on the whiskers normally abundant on his chin. Damn it! Nothing but skin. How far would this transformation go? The back of his neck was cold, too, and his head felt lighter. Hal wondered if this was how a sheep felt after its wool got harvested.

He looked over at the source of his torment, but Shannon now seemed lost in a world of her own. The
fingers of her left hand drummed restlessly on the leather seat between them, every now and then gripping the edge and then losing purchase, falling back to the cushion. The drumming began again seconds later. Her smooth olive skin stretched taut across the fine bones, seeming to barely contain her energy.

She seemed disturbed, deep in thought, trying to come to terms with something.

What went on in the brain of a goddess? Hal found himself vaguely surprised that he wondered. For surely goddesses didn’t ponder much—they just accepted the worship of others as their due and basked in the glory.

Shannon was obviously not in the least dim, but he doubted that she was contemplating the philosophy of Nietzsche or Kant.

She roused herself out of her reverie long enough to give him adequate directions, and soon they were turning into the strip mall that housed Fashionocular, scene of his next trial by fire.

The vague sense of doom hanging over Hal morphed immediately into dismay as he followed Shannon through the door. Hundreds—thousands?—of blank spectacles met his gaze, rows upon rows of them, running from floor to forehead level. He’d never seen so many at once. He’d always bought his glasses at one of the lower-end department stores, and had never chosen from more than perhaps fifty styles.

He looked around. Horn-rims, wire-rims, plastic-
rims of every possible width. Round lenses, cat’s-eye lenses, elliptical lenses, rectangular ones. And you could see the world in any hue: blue, green, yellow, tan, pink or even purple. The frames all stared at him, mocked him, disembodied though they were.

“I can’t possibly try all these on,” he said to Shannon. “I’d need hours…even days.”

“Of course not,” she said. “You’re going to work with Marta, trying on different contacts, while I select between five and ten pairs. Okay?”

“But I don’t want to stick little bits of plastic onto my eyeballs. I told you that….”

She nodded until he wound down a bit, feeling that she’d actually listened to him this time. Then she stuck a finger in his back and propelled him toward a plump, pleasant-looking woman.

“Marta? This is Hal Underwood. He’s a little squeamish about contact lenses, but I think he’s only tried the hard ones, years ago. I’m putting him into your care.”

“Hi, Mr. Underwood. We’ve got all kinds of soft lenses now that you can’t even feel, I promise. And look how handsome you are! Why would you hide that face behind glasses?” She smiled flirtatiously at him.

Handsome? The woman was hallucinating. Or more likely, Shannon paid her to butter up the clients she brought in.

Muttering to himself, and wondering when he could get back to his office and pursue more worthwhile things than his appearance, Hal sat in a squat
rolling chair in front of a counter that held a circular, magnified mirror. Marta asked what his vision was—20/600 in the left eye and 20/740 in the right—and then brought out several little boxes and sanitized her hands.

Then she reached with her forefinger and thumb into the tiny well of a contact case, and came up with something that looked exactly like a round piece of plastic wrap.

Hal stared at it.

“It’s painless, really,” Marta promised. “You put it on your index finger, like this, and add a drop of solution. Then guide it into your eye and blink.”

He grimaced. “And then how in the hell do I get it
out?
”

She dimpled and demonstrated. “You’ll grasp it just like this and pluck, presto.”

Yeah. Pluck, presto. Hal had a feeling he would die with the little pieces of Glad wrap still on his corneas. He hoped they were sticky so they’d hold the coins over his eyes when he got buried.

But aside from some blinking to get rid of excess solution, he had to admit the lenses were comfortable—and he even saw more clearly. His old glasses had obviously not been strong enough. He felt absolutely nothing in his eyes, and accepted Marta’s recommendation of two-week extended-wear contacts.

Hal peered at himself in the mirror, still shocked at his changed appearance. He’d noticed before that the little Latin bandit Enrique had left his hair in un
even but somehow choreographed chops and wisps. He touched it, mildly revolted by the waxy, sticky goop the stylist had worked in.

But, well…look at that.
He had Brad Pitt’s hair, if not his box office draw. Especially without the glasses, and with his new improved vision, he didn’t look half bad. Huh. Now if he could only find the source of the info leak, he’d be One Hundred Percent Man.

S
HANNON SHORED UP
her initial assault with a half dozen choices in designer eyewear. She cornered a reluctant Hal and slipped them on and off his face. Really, it was quite amazing how different he looked in each pair. More and more sophisticated. More and more confident—even authoritarian.

She debated between the last two pairs: one with a heavier, dark rectangular frame and the other with a lighter, more streamlined rimless frame.

“Hal, do you have any preference?”

“Nope,” he said. “I just want to be able to see.”

She decided in favor of the heavier frame. His strong angular jaw balanced out the glasses well, and they gave him an aura of power. Pair them with that hair, a little stubble, a black cashmere V-neck and…yum. You could find yourself wanting to skinny-dip in those Bahama-blue eyes of his.

He cleared his throat and looked away.

Shannon realized with a start that she’d been staring at him for about five minutes straight, and blinked. Come to think of it, he’d been staring at her, too.

And he’d been looking
inside,
trying to figure her out, not slobbering over her body and thinking of dragging her off to a cave by the hair. After years of experience, she could tell the difference.

She pushed the thought away and told Marta which frames they’d purchase. And then she braced herself, because with the nonglare coating, the shatterproof glass, the cool sunshade attachment and the costly designer frames, Hal was going to—

“Whaaaat?!
How
much did you say?”

—have an aneurism and a heart attack all at once.

“Y
ES, BUT WHAT YOU’RE NOT
understanding, Hal,” she told him in the privacy of the Explorer, “is that Marta can’t help the prices! She doesn’t make them up, she just works there. And you make her feel really bad when you squawk over the total.”

“Well, it makes me feel really bad, too! Who pays over six hundred dollars for a pair of glasses? I don’t see any diamond studs in them….”

“Hal, listen to me. You’re paying for a whole image, here. You’re essentially going to be advertising for your company, and you want to project an image of intelligence, decisiveness, sophistication. You want people to have confidence in your work, so—”

“So I’ll show them the damned product. Why does it matter what I look like? Is our society really that shallow? I should be able to do my own at-home, bowl-over-the-head haircut and wear glasses frames fashioned from a coat hanger! None of this has any
thing to do with how good I am or how effective my software will be in streamlining business processes. This is bullsh—”

Shannon threw up her hands. “Should, should, should,” she said, exasperated. “In an idealistic world, Hal, all of that would be true. But that’s not the kind of planet we live on.” She blew out a breath, shook her head and twisted her hair into a knot. She dug into her bag for a pencil and secured the curly mass on her head.

“Look. Why don’t you take me back to Finesse, okay? It’s obvious that you’re completely hostile to this whole process, and quite frankly you’re hurting
my
feelings at this point. I’m just trying to do my job, not bilk you of your life savings.”

They rode in silence for a few minutes. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched a muscle jump in Hal’s jaw. She turned away and looked out the window instead, at the road rushing under them like gray flannel, the grass an emerald blur, telephone poles whizzing by like matchsticks. The neat Cape Cods became pale flashes, their unique weathered charms lost in a fog of succession.

Did her birth mother live in one of those? Or in some stucco place in Florida? A limestone house in Texas? A ski chalet in Utah or Colorado?

Hal’s voice reached her on her imaginary journeys. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.” He reached out and put his hand on her arm.

A frisson of strange awareness shot through her.
She turned to him, surprised. It was rare, in her experience, for a man to apologize. His gaze bored into hers, and again she had the feeling he saw far more than she was used to.

He had a small mole in the middle of his right cheek—on a woman it would have been called a beauty mark—and she found herself wanting to touch it. She did no such thing.

“I know,” she said. “Thanks.”

He nodded and she let the noises of the car comfort and steady her. The sound of the wind rushing past, the rumble of the engine, the muffled tap of brakes as they slowed for a turning vehicle ahead.

“Did you grow up around here, Shannon?”

The question caught her by surprise. “Close.” She hesitated, anticipating his reaction. “Greenwich.” A lot of people assumed she was a snob when she told them she grew up there.

“Interesting. You don’t seem like the Greenwich type.”

“I’m not.” She left it at that.

“How did you get into this line of work?”

“Oh. Well, a friend suggested it, actually. My friend Jane, who’s a co-owner of Finesse. We were all in dead-end jobs—at least they were—I was just a miserably failing actress, out in L.A. with a hundred thousand of them.” She laughed self-consciously.

“That takes guts,” Hal said.

“No. It takes naiveté and delusion.” She chuckled again, but even to her own ears it sounded forced.

“You can call it what you want to, but I call it courage. To put your dream on the line like that, to move away from everything familiar…”

I could kiss him.
The thought didn’t shock her as much as it should have.
I could kiss him for saying that to me right now. It’s like he knows how badly I need to hear it.

They had turned into the parking lot of Finesse, and Hal idled the truck near her sodden car, the only other one in the small lot.

“Thank you,” she said to him. Then she leaned over and acted on her thought.