from my dad three years before, I still couldn’t afford to hire another full-time funeral director. Not if I wanted to eat, anyway. I could make him take more call, but I’d have to pay him more and trust him to provide my clients with the same level of service I could give them myself.
Nobody could give them the same level of service I could. After all, I had very big shoes to fill. My dad and his brother, Chuck, both retired now, had taken over the business from their father. Frawley and Sons had been the only funeral home in Annville for fifty years. People could and did go to funeral homes in the adjoining towns, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t keep trying to be the best.
I busied myself with cleaning up the supplies I’d used on Mr. Dennison, glad for the chance to work in silence. I couldn’t stop thinking about the stranger. Sam. The hair, the eyes, the smile. Those long damn legs. The way he’d gotten harder when I said his name. I hadn’t even asked for his number.
Hell. He hadn’t asked for mine, either. I don’t blush easily, but I blushed just then, thinking what he must have thought. No wonder he’d looked so strange when I thanked him. He hadn’t known it was an accident.
The first time I’d paid for sex had been an accident, too, though the date was on purpose.
For years my parents had supported a local preschool’s dinner-dance fund-raiser, but since taking over Frawley and Sons, I’d also taken on the social obligations that went along with the position.
With no boyfriend in the picture and no desire to get one, I’d done what any organized woman would do. I’d hired a man to take me.
I could have gone alone. I wasn’t afraid of being without a man. Hell, the last boyfriend I’d had was in college and when that relationship ended, I’d been more relieved than upset. But dinner and dancing at the country club was always more fun with someone to dance with. It had been a no-brainer. I hired people to service my car and pull my weeds. Paying someone to pull back my chair and bring me drinks didn’t seem any different. In fact, paying someone to treat me like a goddess without having to deal with any corresponding male-ego crap had seemed like the best idea I’d ever had.
It was ridiculously easy to find a place where men could hire female “companions,” but it had taken a little bit of searching to find an agency offering similar services to women. As director of the funeral home I had to be discreet, but I also had a lot of contacts. People consumed by grief didn’t always censor their commentary. I’d learned about a lot of crazy things while offering the tissue box to mourners, most of which was useless. Places to buy drugs, who was sleeping with whom, where Mr. Jones had gone to buy the garter belt and stockings he’d been wearing when he died. The mourning widow, Mrs. Andrews, had slipped me a card just before launching into full-on mourning-widow mode.
Mrs. Smith’s Services for Ladies. Massage, conversation and other. I’d called the number on the card, made the arrangements and paid in advance. Mark had shown up at my door on time, perfectly groomed and handsome in a tuxedo that looked as if it had been cut to fit every line of his perfect, gorgeous body. It had been a little heady, being on his arm and entering the room filled mostly with people I’d known my entire life. Heads had turned and gossip had started, but the good kind.
It was, hands down, the best date I’d ever had. Mark was considerate, charming, a good conversationalist. If his responses were a wee bit slick and practiced sounding, that was all right, because the intensity of his deep blue gaze more than made up for any hint of role playing. I hadn’t, even then, been fooled into thinking the promises in Mark’s eyes were real. I didn’t believe it from men who tried to pick me up in bars or the grocery store, much less from a man whose time and interest I’d used a credit card to