Page 68 of All the Wrong Places

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“Well, isn’t this a pleasant surprise,” Kendall Bates greeted Heather upon her return to work. “Nice of you to finally show up.”

Heather quickly tucked the bags from Nordstrom’s beneath her desk and began shuffling papers around in an effort to appear busy, in case one of the other dozen or more account people on the floor happened to be watching.

“Marsha’s been asking for you.”

“Shit.” Marsha was her supervisor, and it was just Heather’s unfortunate luck that she’d come looking for her on the one afternoon—all right, maybe more than one—she took an extra hour for lunch. Heather checked her watch. More like two extra hours, she realized. “What’d you tell her?”

“That you’d been complaining of an upset stomach, so you might have gone upstairs to lie down.”

“That’s the best you could come up with?”

“What’d you want me to tell her—that you took off half the afternoon to go shopping for a party dress?”

Heather rolled her eyes, glancing around the large, open space that housed the third-floor offices of McCann Advertising, while reaching into the largest of the bags and ignoring the not-so-subtle rebuke. “You want to see what I got?”

Kendall slid her chair from her cubicle across the aisle to Heather’s desk as Heather removed the skimpy, red-beaded cocktail dress from the layers of tissue paper surrounding it. “Wow,” Kendall exclaimed. “That’s some dress. Where’s the front of it?”

“You think it’s too low-cut?”

Kendall shrugged. “You know what they say—if you’ve got it, flaunt it.”

“I have it, and I intend to.” Heather laughed as she stuffed the dress back inside the bag. “Wait till you see the shoes.” She withdrew a box from the second bag.

“You got Louboutins?”

“Feast your eyes.” She opened the box and removed one rhinestone-covered pump, balancing its five-inch heel in the palm of her hand.

“Wow. How much did those set you back?”

“Not a dime. My mother paid for them.”

“Nice mom. Think she’d consider adopting me?”

Heather was returning the shoe box to the bag when she felt a large shadow looming over her. She didn’t have to look up to know the shadow belonged to her supervisor, Marsha Buchanan. She should have smoked a joint before returning to work, she was thinking, something to take the edge off a possible confrontation. She made a mental note to call Brandon later. McCann Advertising’s former courier was dismissed a few months back over his more lucrative sideline of supplying weed to employees. Heather had been one of his best customers.

“You’re not throwing up, are you?” Marsha asked, her distinctive gravelly voice dripping sarcasm. The voice hinted at too many late nights spent drinking and smoking, but the hints were misleading, as Marsha neither drank nor smoked. As far as Heather could tell, the woman, only a few years her senior, had no vices at all. If not for her simple gold wedding band and the myriad pictures of three chubby little children that littered her desk, Heather would have suspected Marsha was still a virgin. There was just something sexless about people who were overweight, she’d always thought. In fact, it was hard for her to imagine women as plain as Marsha Buchanan, with her unfashionable brown bob and flat, no-nonsense shoes, having sex at all. Heather couldn’t help wondering what Marsha’s husband saw in her. He was a good-looking man. She’d flirted with him at last year’s office party, which hadn’t exactly endeared her to her superior.

Oh, well,she thought, pushing her purchases farther under her desk with her left foot.

“I hear your stomach has been giving you problems,” Marsha said.

“I’m feeling much better now, thank you.”

“Yes, I understand the medical staff at Nordstrom’s is top-notch.”

Heather sighed, hearing giggles from across the aisle. “I’m sorry I was a little late getting back from lunch,” she began. “I must have eaten something that disagreed with me…”

“Save it. I’m just checking to make sure you got that presentation off to the client.”

What presentation?Heather thought. “What client?” she asked, the words out of her mouth before she could stop them.

The look of mild irritation on Marsha’s face morphed into outright anger. “Seriously?”

“You mean Johnson and Johnson?”

“No, I meanJohnson and Applebaum.Of course I mean Johnson and Johnson. You were at the meeting yesterday. Dick Westlake asked us to send over the presentation electronically, which I assured him would be taken care of immediately.”

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