What Men Want. Deborah Blumenthal
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Название: What Men Want

Автор: Deborah Blumenthal

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Короткие любовные романы

Серия: Mills & Boon Silhouette

isbn: 9781472092991

isbn:

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      Praise for Deborah Blumenthal’s debut novel, Fat Chance

      “Food and men are two of Maggie O’Leary’s favorite pastimes…. To snag her star, she ignores her own antidieting dictates and sheds the pounds but eventually finds that you can get a man and eat your cake, too.”

      —People

      “Light as a cupcake and as fun to devour, Blumenthal’s debut novel will likely find many fans.”

      —Booklist

      “Deborah Blumenthal’s deliciously amusing novel offers a refreshing chick-lit twist: a heroine who embraces with gusto her inner—and generously proportioned outer—

      food-loving self. Zaftig Maggie O’Leary happily devours barbecued ribs rather than obsessing about whether her own will be visible to the naked eye—and builds a high-profile career encouraging fellow females to do the same. Fat Chance is as much sparkling, laid-back fun as good champagne sipped from a bottle!”

      —Wendy Markham, author of Slightly Single and Slightly Settled

      What Men Want

      Deborah Blumenthal

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

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      To Ralph

      Contents

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      Chapter Thirteen

      Chapter Fourteen

      Chapter Fifteen

      Chapter Sixteen

      Chapter Seventeen

      Chapter Eighteen

      Chapter Nineteen

      Chapter Twenty

      Chapter Twenty-One

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      Chapter One

      There are men that you meet and forget. And then there are men who keep you up at night…like Slaid Warren.

      It’s not what you’re thinking. Yes, the newspaper photo made him look like a runway model with his deep-set brooding eyes and long dark bangs swept back off his forehead. But that was all beside the point.

      Slaid worked for one major New York City newspaper, and I worked for another. So the thrusting and parrying between us was professional, all business, and it took place in print and on the phone, not between the sheets—not those sheets, anyway. We weren’t lovers. We weren’t friends. In fact, we had never even met.

      So, you know that I would have done whatever it took to scoop him, not only to get ahead professionally and win kudos from my colleagues, but also to enjoy the end-of-the-day phone call that inevitably followed slighting my success, thus convincing me of my triumph. It was usually brief, just a couple of sentences. But in those few seconds, I chalked up the fact that I had him in a headlock and it wasn’t where he liked to be.

      “You missed the story,” he said dismissively in one of our early conversations just months after I had been given the column. Of course he started the conversation without bowing to convention and introducing himself. Unthinkable to him that someone couldn’t recognize his voice, and anyway, we had an ongoing dialogue, interrupted just to allow for new columns to appear.

      “If it helps you to deal with it,” I said, leaning back in my chair and warming to his discomfort with the realization that my column had left him in the dust. He laughed heartily as though acknowledging a good joke.

      “No, babe,” he said, abruptly cutting off the laughter like a motorboat engine suddenly out of power. “Dealing is not the point. I was out nailing the real story. Your column was filler.” Before I could respond, he hung up.

      To backtrack, Slaid Warren and I both covered city politics. “Slaid in the City” was his column. He had me there. How could I hope to top that? Through no effort of his own, he had the good fortune to be born to parents hip enough to give him a cool, albeit weird, name. The only damage I could inflict was to write him e-mails spelling it S-L-A-Y-E-D, in keeping with that of readers who disagreed with him.

      My column, I’m loath to admit, had an agonizingly mundane name, echoing a sparrow chirping: “Street Beat.” Nothing there to summon the grit and substance of a tough investigative column. Then there was my vanilla name: Jenny George. As one well-intentioned boyfriend once commented, “It sounds more like the name of a cheerleader or talk-show host than a serious reporter. Why don’t you just change it?”

      Just change it? Although there are more things about me that I would change than not, my name isn’t one of them. And while a name that was heftier or more commanding—Lana Davis Harriman or Katherine Clotilde Porter III, for example—might have drawn me into public prominence faster, I love and respect my parents—imperfect as they showed themselves to be when naming their children. (Can you imagine Burt as a name for my older brother? If they had a second son, would he have been Ernie?) Anyway, it was the name they gave me and it seemed almost sacrilegious to consider changing it. Whatever.

      As for the column, it had been called “Street Beat” for years, it was well read, and as my editors saw it, why mess with success? To their credit СКАЧАТЬ