Next to You Read online

  But in focus groups they heard over and over the same damn thing. Women were tired of having to buy half a dozen different products to handle multiple skin care concerns. They had too much to do in the morning, too long a commute, too early a work schedule, kids to make breakfast for and see off to school. They needed to shave time off their beauty routine on those days when they didn’t have time even to shave their legs.

  The A2Z Cream let women choose the features they needed at an in-store kiosk, then use the kiosk camera to transmit a picture of their skin tone so the product shade would match exactly. The only hitch was that a custom formula couldn’t be created in a store. Consumers had to wait two weeks for delivery. Everyone in the industry was watching to see if Phlox Beauty could pull this off. If they did, it would be a major coup. If they didn’t … well, Phlox tried not to think about the fallout. It would be their biggest and most expensive product failure yet.

  The waitress brought out their pizza, crisp and hot. Phlox pulled off a slice for Rye, then one for herself. They ate in silence for a few minutes, Phlox waiting for her brother to bring up a certain someone. Eventually, he did.

  “David’s been asking about you,” Rye said.

  “Yeah, he’s called a few times.”

  “Want me to set up a double date for when you get home?”

  Phlox thought for a minute, then shook her head. “I know he’s a good friend of yours, Rye. But we just didn’t really hit it off before.”

  “Well, you two didn’t get to spend much time together before you were in the hospital.”

  “I know. But …” She stopped. She couldn’t tell her brother that his friend was only interested in her now because she looked better. “I’ll let you know about the date when I get back.”

  After three slices of pizza, she pushed her chair back and admitted defeat.

  “You’re a lightweight,” Rye grinned as he bit into slice number four. “I’ll tell Zee you ate the whole pie.”

  “She’ll never believe that.”

  An odd expression flashed over her brother’s face and he looked as if he’d been about to say something. Instead, he leaned around the edge of the table and pushed Phlox’s right ear and jawline up into the fading evening sunlight.

  “What do you have on this?” he asked.

  “A foundation I created.” Phlox touched the corner of her right eye. “It’s super pigmented so you get heavy coverage with a light coat.”

  “It looks great, Phlox. You can’t tell, even outside.”

  “That’s why I wanted the photo album.” The lie popped into her head quickly. She knew her brother would ask eventually. On the drive to the restaurant, she had wracked her brain for a plausible story that wouldn’t alarm him. “I’d like to develop the foundation into a viable product, and I’d use my own pictures as proof. I’m envisioning this as a product we’d sell to doctors.”

  “Why just doctors? Not the general public?”

  Phlox toyed with the remains of her pizza crust as she considered how to phrase her answer. “I want it to be a product for burn victims, plastic surgery patients. I want that to be the brand. It’s a product developed specifically for them. So they trust it.”

  Rye nodded, but said nothing.

  “I know there’s probably not much money in it. But now that I’ve developed it, it feels selfish to keep it to myself. I need to make something good happen out of this past year.”

  * * *

  The next morning, Phlox awakened to the mouth-watering aroma of bacon. Her stomach rumbled like a truck before she’d even thrown off the covers. She had eaten nothing but muffins and cereal for breakfast since she got here. A real breakfast would taste good.

  She threw on a pair of linen shorts and a light tee shirt, then practically skipped downstairs. At the foot of the stairs, she could hear coffee hissing and sputtering into the pot. Rye would make an unbelievable husband to some lucky woman, if only he stopped getting sidetracked by the equivalent of female bling.

  “Sis! You’re up. I was about to come pound on your door.”

  “Sorry. I’m not really on a rigid schedule up here.” She poured herself a cup of coffee, then poured one for her brother too.

  “Want to chop some veggies for the omelettes?” he asked, gesturing with his tongs toward a cutting board and knife.

  Phlox eyed them warily, wondering if there was any way to con her brother into moving them onto the island. Right now they were sitting right next to the range where he was frying bacon. The meat popped and crackled in the hot grease and, as if on cue, Rye rubbed a grease splatter on his arm. Her throat began to tighten.

  This was ridiculous. How many times had she cooked bacon and eggs in her life? Hundreds? This shouldn’t make her nervous. But the memories were hard to push away.

  She took a deep breath and rushed, blindly almost, to Rye’s side. She grabbed the cutting board and knife and whirled back to the island.

  “Careful there,” Rye said, reaching out his arm to steady her.

  She slid the onion, pepper and tomato to the far side of the island, putting three feet of granite between her and the range. Keeping her head down, she tried to ignore her brother setting another skillet onto a burner. She chopped more vigorously, allowing the knife to thwack against the wooden board, so she wouldn’t hear the click and poof of the gas igniting. Rye poured egg into the skillet, then turned to her for the vegetables. She pushed the cutting board across the island.

  She had to get over this fear. But how? Her mind knew it was irrational. An omelette wasn’t going to blow up in her face. But her body seemed unable to accept that reality. Just looking at a gas burner made her skin crawl, her muscles quiver, her lungs gasp for air.

  She couldn’t let her brother see her fear, though, so she busied herself with gathering plates and flatware, napkins and butter. If she couldn’t get over this, everyone would pressure her to sell the Connecticut house. She didn’t want that.

  “Toast?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  She dropped two slices of whole wheat into the toaster, then stood there and waited. She jumped a little when the toaster popped the bread back up.

  “Let’s eat outside,” she suggested after Rye flipped the second omelette onto a plate, garnishing it with two slices of crisp bacon.

  On the porch the morning air was still cool. The skin on her legs immediately tightened into gooseflesh. Rye handed her a plate.

  “Are you sure you want to eat out here?” he asked.

  “It’ll warm up soon.”

  The look on Rye’s face said he doubted it would warm up before they finished breakfast, but he let it go. “Anything you need me to convey to Zee on Monday?”

  “Nah. She’s being a hard ass about this phone call thing.”

  “If anything requires your attention, she’ll call you. Or I will. You need this time up here, Phlox. You need to get your head back on straight.”

  “I know I do. I’m working on it.”

  “I think that foundation product is a good idea.” Rye took a long swig of coffee. “It probably won’t make much money unless we priced it at a premium, which I’m guessing you don’t want to do, but I do think it will help you. Personally.”

  “I don’t want to be—” She caught the words just in time. “I don’t want it to be a drag on the company.”

  “It won’t be.” He looked at her sharply. “Nor will you.”

  * * *

  After Rye left, laden with pistachio muffins, Phlox settled into one of the Adirondack chairs on the back veranda and opened the photo album. The first page was filled with pictures of her before the accident. She and Rye as children on Christmas morning, their hair messy from sleep and their pajamas twisted and wrinkled. There was her senior portrait from high school, and a prom photo of her and her date, a boy she could barely remember now. Their one date had been the prom. There were photos of her and Zee in the early stages of the business. At the first factory they’d used. The day wh
ere they had literally put every single one of the company’s products on their faces—they looked like drag queens. Phlox holding up a copy of their first mention in the Wall Street Journal. Zee and Phlox mock-fighting over a dollar bill, their “first” dollar made.

  Absently, she reached up and touched her cheek. She no longer looked like any of those photographs, and it made her unspeakably sad. She hadn’t expected to miss the way she used to look. After all, she’d been no great beauty—much to her mother’s disappointment. Her nose had been a little too big for her face, with a snub tip. Her cheekbones had been invisible, her lips not exactly full and soft. The plastic surgeon had asked her what she hadn’t liked about the way she looked before—and it had been all of those things. With his help, she’d fixed all the things about her old face she didn’t like.

  Objectively speaking, her new face was better. Her nose was pert and petite. She had high cheekbones for the first time in her life, cheekbones that were made for blusher and highlighter. Lipstick no longer looked like a slash of color scrawled on her chin.

  She wasn’t used to this new face yet, that’s what she kept telling herself. In the morning, when she looked in the mirror as she brushed her teeth, she turned her head this way and that, marveling at its perfection. And it was perfect, as far as Phlox could tell, except for the scar that trailed out from the corner of her left eye and the long thin line that followed the curve of her face from her ear to her chin. Covered up with the foundation she had created, though, the face was perfect. Gorgeously, stunningly perfect.

  She would never be so ungrateful as to complain about it. It just wasn’t hers, and she wasn’t sure how to behave in it. Men talked to her on the subway, in coffee shops, standing in line for whatever. They never used to do that, so Phlox wasn’t good at making that kind of small talk or deflecting over-aggressive interest. Zee knew how to do it. Phlox had seen her in action. Zee could give her advice in that area, but so far, Phlox had been too embarrassed to ask.

  She flipped the page. There was only one photo on this page, her lying in a hospital bed, her face, neck and torso wrapped in bandages, an oxygen mask over her mouth, wires and tubes going in and out of her every which way. This was her between faces, the old one burned off, the new one not yet designed.

  She flipped through more pages and more photos of her as she gradually healed and the dozens of operations began. These were the faces people stared at on the street, looked away from on the elevator. She had avoided the subway during that period, but try catching a cab looking like that. Finally, Zee had insisted on a car service to get her around the city. That had made Phlox feel silly and even more conspicuous, so she’d ended up just staying in her apartment as much as possible. That was simpler for everyone concerned—herself and the entire population of Manhattan.

  Then the photos got better. Skin grafts smoothed out her face. Her nose and lips were rebuilt. What was left of her eyebrows were filled in with tattoos. Page by page, she began to look recognizably human again. Then came the section for her breasts. More skin grafts. No implants.

  After every new operation came yet another moment of truth when the bandages were finally removed and Phlox would see who was underneath. She had never really thought about how attached she was to her old self until she wasn’t sure that old self still existed.

  The memory of Jared stalking off the other day still stung. “People like you fucking well do not understand what it’s like,” he had said to her. Yeah, I do fucking well understand what it’s like.

  She wondered what had happened to Jared. Whatever it was, she hoped he hadn’t done it to himself like she had. Some days that was the hardest part of it, retracing her steps of that day, wishing she had done something else instead. Gone outside to garden or driven to the grocery store to shop or taken a nap or gone swimming. Anything but decide she just absolutely had to work on a new product in the kitchen.

  It had been her own stupid-ass fault and it always would be. She owned that. But she wasn’t letting anyone tell her she fucking well did not understand, because she did.

  She took one last look at the photographs, then closed the album and stood up. No, you Jared Connor do not fucking well understand the first thing about me. But you’re about to.

  She set the photo album on the bench outside the cottage, the one where she had left all those baked goods. No treats today, not for Jared Connor. Just a little light reading.

  Chapter 9

  I’m an asshole.

  Not exactly breaking news, that. Jared turned the pages of the photo album she had left for him. So she was Phlox Miller, the CEO of Phlox Beauty. Not her daughter or sister or niece. She was his employer, the woman whose photograph—old photograph—was on the company web site. He tried to remember what his brother had said about her. A nerdy scientist type, he believed it was, and something about an accident. But Jared had cut him off before Jake had told him the whole story.

  Normally, Jared hated hearing stories of other people’s accidents, like it was some bond of brotherhood between them. He hated being expected to compare surgical histories to see who’d had more, like it was a fucking badge of honor. But now he wished he had let Jake finish. It would have saved him making a total ass out of himself in front of her.

  She didn’t look like a nerdy scientist type. She hadn’t really even looked like one before. She’d been reasonably attractive then, too. But now she was a knockout. Yeah well, clearly she could afford all the plastic surgery she had needed. That always helped, of course.

  “You could have it done now,” Jake reminded him far more often than Jared cared to hear. “Hell, you could have had it done last year or the year before or whenever you wanted to.”

  Yeah, Jared was stubborn that way. He didn’t want no stinking surgery anymore. This was the way he looked. This was who he was now. Yeah so it was his fucking badge of honor. Get over it.

  He couldn’t help himself though. When he got to the end of the book, he flipped back through and tried to calculate how many operations she’d undergone. It was hard to tell, but the number was easily “a lot.”

  Yeah, you got a way with women, Connor. Only you could meet a woman who’s been through what you have and still manage to insult her over it. Nice fucking job.

  It was all over, he knew. He’d been worried about losing his job when the property owner learned he had yelled at her guest. Hah. The joke was on him. Nothing for the property owner to learn when she was the person he had unloaded on. Well, it wouldn’t take him long to pack. Jared traveled light.

  Guess Jake’s kids are going to get that visit from their uncle, after all. Jake and Mina’s manny job didn’t look so bad now.

  Still, he knew what he had to do. He had to go apologize to Phlox Miller. She wouldn’t be giving him any employment references, that was for sure, but he owed her an apology. There was still some residual gentleman buried beneath all his asshattery.

  At least her boyfriend had left. Otherwise, Jared would be exchanging an apology for a punch to his sorry, scarred face.

  He closed the photo album and headed for the main house, rehearsing his words as he went. I’m very sorry, ma’am. No, nix the ma’am. She wasn’t that old. I was out of line. I never should have said what I did. Please accept my apology and my resignation, effective immediately.

  He rapped sharply on the wooden screen door. The interior door was open and Jared could see straight through the center hall to the back screen door. Clearly, she was around somewhere. Not that leaving the doors open posed any great security risk out here, especially with a caretaker on site. A scary-looking caretaker at that.

  He knocked again but still there was no answer. He looked down at the porch. He wasn’t comfortable leaving the photo album outside. The weather forecast was clear but it could change and there were plenty of curious small animals around.

  Slowly he pulled open the screen door and stepped inside, listening for any sign of her.

  “Ms. Miller? You home?”
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  He let the door wheeze closed behind him, holding onto its frame so it wouldn’t slam shut at the end. It wasn’t like he hadn’t been in the house before. Before her arrival, he spent quite a bit of time in it, checking up on the cleaning service, making small repairs, keeping an eye on problems that might develop. It was an old house and needed a close eye.

  He walked past the wide front stairway and headed toward the back of the house, the old hardwood planks creaking beneath his feet. Maybe she was in the kitchen with earbuds in, listening to music. As soon as he laid the photo album on the kitchen island, footsteps clattered down the front stairway.

  “Oh hey. I thought I heard someone down here.” Phlox Miller seemed unconcerned that he had entered her house uninvited and was standing in the middle of her kitchen. He dipped his head toward the floor anyway, an automatic reaction to other people so they didn’t have to look at his face, but not before he registered what she was wearing. White shorts, a peach and blue striped shirt, and tiny leather flip flops. Her blonde hair was pulled up into a messy bun … thing. Jared was clueless when it came to women’s hairstyles or clothing or makeup. He was sure there was some actual name for the way her hair was right now. He could call Mina later and describe it to her.

  What Jared was sure of, however, was that he liked the messy bun thing. It was practically inviting him to undo it, to let her gorgeous golden hair fall down around her shoulders where he could bury his face in it and inhale the scent of her shampoo.

  He wanted Phlox Miller.

  Jared hadn’t thought much about women in ages. Hadn’t let himself think about women. Why torture himself with thoughts of something he couldn’t have? He kept all those desires pushed way down deep where they couldn’t bother him.

  But he was thinking about this woman. Thinking about all the things he wanted to do with her—innocent things like sit down here in her kitchen and talk over a beer or coffee. And not-so-innocent things like pull that striped tee shirt over her head and press his face to her breasts. He didn’t even care if they were surgically reconstructed breasts. He wanted to see them and touch them. Taste them.