Sleeping with Beauty Read Online Free Page B

but she’d always gotten a little hung up on that one. Anyway, it was obviously yet another match made in heaven.
    And this was all fine with Lucy. She was happy for her friend. Dave traveled a good part of the year, and other than being forced to bear occasional witness to their somewhat gooey attachment to each other, Lucy and Jana still had plenty of free time to continue their friendship relatively unencumbered by the change in Jana’s marital status. The only real downside was that in her three-plus years of wedded bliss, Jana had joined the ranks of the Come in, the Water’s Fine Club.
    Just when Lucy had finally adopted her Single Pride mantra with a believable note of sincerity.
    Not that it had been all
that
challenging, really. Jana’s occupation regularly put her in the direct path of hockey goalies, point guards, and shortstops. Lucy’s options within her immediate office dating pool were somewhat more limited. As in extreme to the point of laughable. Most of the elementary-school staff were female—though choral teacher, Bonnie Colvin, had given Lucy a few looks that could only be described as “suggestive.” Which left her to choose between Jared, the still-closeted art teacher; Ramon, the janitor, who, in addition to using gold dental plating as his main fashion accessory, was also married with three small children; or the former Navy bomber-cum-PE teacher, Ed Foley, who, though widowed and available, was old enough to be her father. Possibly her grandfather. There would be no
bam!
with him. Not ever. Even she was not that desperate.
    Jana had taken it upon herself to fix her best friend up with the occasional athlete, newspaper reporter, or franchise executive. This was not a bad thing, in theory. Jana knew the kind of guy Lucy went for and came through like a champ. The problem? The only ones who called her back were the recent Russian athletic imports, who spoke next-to-no English but were very willing to let her do their laundry and fix them breakfast in the morning. Or the vertically challenged Washington power execs who thought that having an almost-six-foot woman on their arm—even a mousy, fashion-challenged klutz such as herself (she was the anti–Heidi Klum)—somehow compensated for their, uh, shortcomings.
    It wasn’t like she was looking for wedded bliss. Or even a seriously committed relationship. But it would be nice on the nights that Dave was in town to have someone else to rely on as a movie-and-coffee date. Sex was optional, though preferred. Of course, there was Grady, providing he wasn’t working. Except he always was.
    He’d become a think-tank genius for some government setup, in charge of creating God-only-knew-what kind of technological wonders. Lucy had asked him for details once, but with his typical deadpan humor, he’d spouted the very tired “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you” line. With anyone else, she’d have rolled her eyes. Only, where Grady was concerned, well, she still wasn’t entirely certain he hadn’t been telling her the truth. Of course, macho as all that sounded, the bottom line was, whatever he did for their government, he was doing it in a lab. Hardly James Bond. More like Q.
    Not that he didn’t socialize in between designing fountain pens that were actually poison darts or nametags that secretly harbored powerful zoom lenses. He jogged and played racquetball—two activities he’d invited her to participate in a total of once. Her insurance through the school system just wasn’t that broad-ranging, and his first-aid skills were negligible. Apparently his mad-inventor genius didn’t extend to devising a racquet that magnetically attracted the ball to it, thereby rendering skill and coordination a noncompetitive factor.
    Grady dated, but he didn’t talk about the women in his life much. Still, she and Jana knew they existed. You could always tell when Grady had gotten laid. He sprang for the pizza
and
the beer at their