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.Nudging the tampon boxes with his pencil, he felt resentment that he had bought them in the first place.He hoped her period began in the middle of some protest march, miles from any drugstore.Let Robbie solve that dilemma.• • •Frederick eased his station wagon into an empty space in front of the grocery store.He felt his pulse quicken as he spotted Doris Bowen’s blue Mercedes sitting seductively in the next row.Why did the woman do her own shopping? Never mind.His unmailed letter to Arthur Bowen Developers had been lying on his desk since Chandra left.Maybe that was fate.Maybe it would be best to simply give the letter to Doris.Frederick decided to play the hand and then see what might develop.Inside the store he worked his way past the fresh vegetables, putting items into his cart and checking them off his computerized list as he went.He spotted Mrs.Paroni and quickly swung down the aisle of laundry detergents, even though the only L on his list had been lettuce.He was in no mood for Mrs.Paroni’s jabber.Arthur Bowen’s bored wife was another matter.As he rounded frozen foods and headed down through cereals, he saw her.She was dressed in her usual white, a shorts and halter outfit which emphasized a rear that had most likely done some hard time on a treadmill.Some things you can’t buy.She was staring at the boxes, a little wrinkle of puzzlement between the tweezed arches of her eyebrows.“Thinking of changing your breakfast food?” Frederick asked as he wheeled up beside her.He immediately wished he’d said something wittier, sensuous even.“Actually, that’s just what I’m doing,” Doris Bowen said.“Arthur thinks he needs a high-fiber cereal, that if he keeps his bowels moving regularly he’ll stay healthy.I suppose a man his age worries about pleasing the little mistresses.” She smiled mischievously.Frederick did his best to appear nonchalant, pretending to read the ingredients list on a Fiber One box.But it had unnerved him to hear Arthur Bowen’s dirty laundry flapping about in the wind.He cleared his throat.“This is one of the highest in fiber, but to be truthful,” Frederick said, and they were most definitely being truthful, “it’s a lot like eating a bowl of hay.” Doris moved closer to him, looking down at the box.“Good,” she said.“I like the notion of Arthur eating hay.” Her cool fingers lifted the box from his hands.He could smell her scent, a sweet, expensive fragrance that caused an involuntary tingle in his loins.The smell of money.“So tell me,” Doris continued.“What do you like to eat for breakfast?”Frederick pictured her across the breakfast table from him, the untanned portion of her breasts showing through the gauzy material of some silky designer gown.He imagined Chandra walking in to catch him there, Doris in the act of feeding him strawberries, or maybe ringing for the butler to come and peel them a grape or two.“Actually, I mix the Fiber One with this,” Frederick said, hoping his voice didn’t sound too shrill.He took down another box, a different brand.“I find it makes a very palatable combination.By the way,” he added, “speaking of Arthur, I was wondering if you might know who does his accounting?” He felt his face flush, and hoped it wasn’t turning too red.Doris’s smile seemed to fade a bit.“Why?” she asked.Frederick stared at the number of calories in a single bowl of Oat Bran, a little thinking time.He mustn’t appear too anxious.“That’s what I do for a living,” he said finally, as if just remembering her there.“I’m an accountant.I wouldn’t mind having your husband as a client.” Doris flashed him a knowing smile.“You sly devil.You’re wanting me to put in a good word for you, aren’t you?”“I wrote him a letter about it,” Frederick said.“But I haven’t mailed it yet.I thought maybe you’d tell me the best way to approach him.”“The best way to approach Arthur is to prove that you can save him some money,” said Doris.“What did you say in your letter?” She was turning sexy again, giving him those warm eyes, leaning on her cart just enough to show a bit of cleavage.Frederick relaxed.He’d have been fine all along if it hadn’t been for the blushing, a curse he’d borne since grammar school—Fred the Red—a red flush that appeared at the most inopportune times.He later learned in Mr.Bator’s biology class that it was just a special aspect of skin pigmentation, a temporary enlarging of the blood vessels set off by nervousness and provoked physiologically.Chandra, however, said it was provoked by money and the talk thereof.“I listed my credentials,” he said.“And clients who will recommend me, et cetera, et cetera.” He saw a mischievous smile pull at the corners of Doris’s mouth.He heard Chandra, that constant goddess of his conscience, whisper her little uncertainties into his ear.He was doing this for the business, and only the business, wasn’t he? One did have to be aggressive today, in this belligerent world.He wished Chandra would get up from her perpetual spot on his shoulder and go sit somewhere else, maybe in the tofu section.Besides, what business was it of hers if he flirted with Doris, now that Robbie was in the picture, now that Chandra was holed up elsewhere?“Are you doing anything special for lunch?” Doris wondered.She arched one of her magnificent brows.Frederick felt his blood vessels enlarge even more.“I got a date with my mother-in-law,” he said.He expected her to inquire about this.A mother-in-law, after all, suggested that one was married.But she seemed undeterred.She dug down into her white purse for a card.Frederick reached for the pen in his shirt pocket—a top-rated Parker Place Vendome fountain pen, fifty bucks, which, according to Consumer Reports, wrote smoothly, didn’t spatter, and could take some hard knocks.Doris accepted the pen and jotted down a date and time.“Here,” she said.He wondered again why Doris Bowen, wife to all those developing millions, was still shopping among the hoi polloi, still interested in mortals.Frederick accepted the card.“I won’t see you here next Tuesday because I’ll be out of town.But I’m back the following Thursday.Give me a call.We’ll have lunch.And we’ll see what we can do about your problem.”“I’m a vegetarian,” he said.“Then we’ll eat vegetables,” she told him.“Maybe even hay.”“No dairy,” he added.“No problem,” said Doris.She turned and pushed her shopping cart down the aisle [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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