Personal stylist Hayden Fox loves her job. She hopes to help her newest client, sweet, pretty Caroline, find confidence and a new perspective with a total lifestyle change. And Hayden is all about solving other people's problems—until she's confronted with one of her own: She's falling in love with her client's boyfriend.
BookShots Flames
Original romances presented by James Patterson
Novels you can devour in a few hours
Impossible to stop reading
Release date:
February 6, 2018
Publisher:
Little, Brown and Company
Print pages:
144
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Why in the world I let Diana Crompton talk me into speed dating, I’ll never know.
“I pick out clothes for people and help them with their style. What do you do?” I say.
I’m on round six of this stupid organized social torture. The five three-minute dates I’ve had prior to this one all crashed and burned, but this guy’s actually cute, in a Seth Rogen kind of way.
“I’m a commodities broker. But I’m fixated on this stylist thing. So you just buy clothes? That’s your job?” He scoffs.
Oh, no, not another one who thinks I’m shallow because I shop for a living. Never heard that one before. I swallow my sarcasm.
“We only have one minute left—Ryan, was it?”
“Brian.”
“Right, Brian. Anyway, so you say you’re a commodities broker…does that mean you actually sell pot out of your mom’s basement or something?”
He stares at me blankly for the final five seconds of the date. Now, I’ve crashed and burned. The bell rings and just before getting up he says, “No, Hayden, I don’t sell pot. I work at Charles Schwab.”
I shrug. “Sorry. It was joke.” God, if only he had Seth Rogen’s sense of humor. Well, another one bites the dust. That’s it, time to leave; I’m over this crap.
I skip out, avoiding my client Diana. No thanks for dragging me to this god-awful science fiction version of matchmaking. I text her from my car letting her know I don’t feel good, but I don’t think she cares at all. Her dates looked to be going wonderfully. Which is not to say that my dates also could not have been going well if I’d tried harder. I just get tired easily of the what do you do for a living conversation. I couldn’t take another minute or three of it.
Few people believed me when I told them I was dropping out of college to become a stylist. It was three years ago. I had one year left at Emory University before I could get my sociology degree. I had received a full academic scholarship, something most would kill for, and I “threw it away” to become a personal shopper and stylist.
Everyone I knew thought it was frivolous, irresponsible, downright crazy. My mother asked if I’d been doing a keg stand the moment I decided to drop out. I didn’t think that was funny. She was concerned that without the degree, I wouldn’t land a high-paying job. So far, she’s been wrong. I’m not exactly rolling in the dough, but at least I can support myself, I love what I do, and I can help my mom out when she needs it. Although, admittedly, my somewhat rash decision to drop out of the prestigious college I worked so hard to get into has created a fear of bottoming out as a stylist, so I’m still putting my all into it.
My boyfriend at the time, who was also attending Emory, said to me, “Hayden, shopping for other people is not a career.” Which made me even more determined to make it one and prove him wrong. It’d be my own personal sociology experiment. Of course, the day after I dropped out, he broke up with me and kicked me out of his apartment.
But dropping out didn’t mean I wasn’t going to apply everything I’d learned about sociology toward my dream career as a stylist. After all, dressing people is about knowing people, and their behaviors.
I was determined. I put my student loan money toward a loft in Decatur, the creation of a handful of advertisements and flyers, and the maintenance of a fancy professional website. In two weeks, I had three clients. In a month I had seven, and in two months, I had twelve.
Just to stick it to my ex, Joshua, I sent him a picture of my client list, as well as an ATM receipt with my new account balance showing the eleven thousand dollars I had made in the sixty-three days since he’d kicked me to the curb. He ignored my texts and then blocked me on Facebook. Good riddance.
Now I’ve settled into my little business and it’s thriving.
One day after the speed-dating catastrophe, I’m with Diana Crompton again.
“What do you think of this?” she asks me in the dressing room area at Bloomingdale’s. She’s a tall, beautiful woman in her forties with a ton of family money.
“I like the green, but I think mauve might be more your color. It’ll bring out the pink in your cheeks. Should I bring in the other option, just to compare the two?”
Diana is the one client I ever dread working with. She rarely entertains my suggestions, and she can be selfish and condescending at times. Also, she calls Bloomingdale’s “Bloomies,” which I absolutely hate. But I get paid to follow her around so she can use me as a human shopping cart, and that’s fine with me.
“I’ll give the mauve blouse a try,” she says, “but I want everything to look perfect for my date on Friday.”
Why is Diana always going on dates? Why can’t I get a date?
I shrug off my dating woes for a moment to direct my attention back to Diana. “It will be perfect for your date,” I say confidently. “But if you don’t like the mauve blouse, you have a strong option with the green one.”
“You’re so good at this. You know who could use your help?”
“Who’s that?” I say.
“My niece, Caroline.”
I keep my expression neutral. Though working with another Crompton sounds challenging, to say the least, I’m still building my client list. The family is ridiculously rich and I’m not in a position to turn away new opportunities.
“That’d be wonderful. What’s she like?”
We talk through the dressing room door as I pick up the clothes she carelessly tosses over it. She always acts like she owns Bloomingdale’s. Hell, she probably has enough money to buy it.
“Caroline is my brother’s daughter and she’s only twenty-five. She’s very young and pretty, but dresses dowdy, you know? Like a schoolmarm. Turtlenecks and dress pants in the middle of the humid Georgia summer.”
Hmm. It sounds like her niece is too insecure to be adventurous with her clothes. That’s a problem for a lot of my clients. A big part of my job is to make clients feel good about how they look—and clothes are usually the first way to do that.
I dealt with my own confidence and body issues as a teenager. My father took off when I was a baby, so my mother had to raise my brother and me on her own. She often left us with my grandmother, who was hard on me about my looks and weight as a child. Grandma called me “butterball,” and said if I didn’t thin out, I’d never be able to find and keep a man. That was always her concern, especially after seeing my mother struggle to make ends meet. My mother’s concern, on the other hand, was always about us going to college. My older brother got a degree, but he’s paying high dollar to live the life in New York City as an assistant to a book editor. He’s barely getting by. I’m proud that I can send my mom a little extra every month. She’s been working her butt off for thirty years as a grocery store cashier with no retirement in sight.
It’s not surprising, given Grandma’s awesome criticism of my body, that I became anorexic in high school and throughout part of college. I try to put those days behind me. Since the Hayden liberation three years ago, I’ve learned to love my body, modest curves and all.
“Sure, Diana,” I say, snapping to the present. “I’ll give your niece a call. Do you want to give her my information first?”
She peeks over the dressing room door and grins. “I’ll let her know you’ll be calling tonight.”
“Perfect.”
I stand in line for thirty minutes to check out for Diana while she gets a touch-up at the makeup counter. It’s been a long day, which is putting it mildly, and I’m ready to get home.
“Drinks?” Diana asks as we walk out of Bloomingdale’s.
A lot of the time my job requires me to be a friend or therapist, but I decide to shirk my responsibilities just this once. I have a good ex. . .
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