Romantic Women's Fiction
Want to know what CJ's thinking?
CJ
ignored the speech document and instead Googled Brenda’s name, scanned the
results, and found her Web site. Her picture popped up on her home page. A
sunny smile greeted him. She was leaning against the edge of a large mahogany
desk with crossed arms. He guessed her to be close to his age, perhaps a bit
younger. A slight tilt of her head, combined with a confident aura, suggested that
if you had a problem, she could fix it. Her crystal blue eyes showed a
starburst of creases near the edges. The rest of the page told about her two
books.
A
second picture, on the bio page, showed her with a scruffy gray-and-black dog,
posed by her side with perfect posture. The caption read, “Brenda McAllister is
a psychologist whose practice specializes in individual and couples’
relationship counseling as well as sex therapy in her Greenwich, Connecticut,
office. With a master’s degree and doctorate in clinical psychology from the
University of Hartford, Brenda sits on the board of the Fairfield County
Psychology Association. Aside from her work and writing, Brenda likes to hike,
travel, and play tennis.”
CJ
knew Greenwich, the affluent community where she practiced. Close to Manhattan
and sitting on the shores of the Long Island Sound, aka Connecticut’s Gold
Coast, houses there cost a bundle. In fact, the director of one of his films
lived there and had invited him over for dinner a couple of times. Did she live
there too?
CJ
couldn’t find mention of a significant other. Who was the man he’d seen her
with at the bar last evening? They’d talked for a while, even hit the dance
floor.
The
shower stopped, but his curiosity about Brenda still needed to be fed. He
located her Facebook page, but instead clicked on an article that had appeared
two months earlier in the Stamford Advocate. He scanned it until he
spotted a paragraph that mentioned her husband had passed away unexpectedly a
year earlier. The article also said her children were grown.
The
bathroom door opened and he quickly exited the article. Autumn stepped out in a
white terry cloth robe, a towel wrapped around her hair. “Mornin’! I’m glad
you’re up. You’d better hurry if you want breakfast before you go on.”
“Can
you order room service while I’m in the shower?” The throb in CJ’s temples
increased. He shut the computer and walked toward the bathroom. “I’ll have
oatmeal and coffee. Please.”
“Sure
thing, honey.”
Her
agreeableness annoyed him, yet it didn’t stop him from admiring her sway as she
walked to pick up the room service menu. A stab of shame forced him to admit
that his involvement with her had started and continued for all the wrong
reasons.
He
turned on the shower, popped two Tylenol, then stepped into the steamy
enclosure. Within minutes, the dwindling pain in his head subsided to a
tolerable level. Brenda crept back into his thoughts. Besides her nasty
comment, there was a second, more irritating reason that he couldn’t get her
out of his head: Brenda was precisely the type of woman he’d been trying to
avoid for the past ten years.
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