Christina’s first week at work was a blast. She had no idea dull work could be fun if you were working with the right people. She’d often heard Mindy say things like that. It didn’t matter what your job was, as long as you got to work with fun people. Well, Mr. Mark Lewis had the market cornered on making the workplace fun.
For one thing, he was absolute eye-candy. There wasn't a woman who didn’t look on him like he was the ‘golden boy’ of the office. He was charming, charismatic, and he looked positively mouthwatering regardless of the circumstances. And Christina was his partner in crime. She was the little person he took everywhere with him. He took her to meetings and lunches with business partners while he fleshed out press releases and argued with talkative men about upcoming projects. He called it ‘training.' It made her feel instantly popular and accepted by everyone in the office.
Mark stayed in his office and worked on his computer responding to emails while she tidied the place up. He didn’t seem at all uncomfortable to have her there and didn’t ask her to leave the room when he talked about sensitive matters with executives over the phone. Christina thought it was a remarkable display of trust because her nondisclosure agreement wouldn’t be ready for her to sign until the end of the week.
Then Friday came. It would have been an ordinary day, except something unusual happened around lunchtime.
A tall elegant blonde swept through the elevator and made her way over to Mark’s office. Christina didn’t get the message herself, but she heard the receptionist buzz Mark to tell him Laura Figura was on her way to his office.
Christina heard it and attempted to hide her face. Mark might not be able to tell the difference between ‘Christina’ and ‘Tina,' but Christina bet Laura would take one look at her and the jig would be up. She had to hide!
Christina sat at her desk with her head ducked behind her computer screen. She prayed Laura would slip into Mark’s office without stopping to talk to her, but then she realized that Mark would probably introduce them. Christina got up. It wasn’t a very mature way to deal with the problem, but she’d have to wait in the bathroom until Laura left. Besides, it was lunchtime. They were probably going out for lunch together and if Christina could just stay out of sight for just a few minutes she’d be in the clear.
Christina hurried around her desk, but whoops—she wasn’t fast enough. Laura had already come around the corner and seen her.
Mark came out of his office.
Christina cringed. It was the end of the world. She was caught red-handed.
“Hi Laura,” Mark said simply when he saw the blonde.
Christina looked at Mark and then looked at Laura. She couldn’t help but wonder if they were still the couple Dominic said they were on Valentine’s Day.
“Hello, Mark. How’s work?” Laura chimed.
“I want you to meet my new assistant,” Mark said, beckoning for Christina to join them. “This is Christina Witten. This is Laura Figura from Financial Services.”
Christina was right about Laura. It took her about a micro minute to say, “Hello, Christina. Have we met before?”
Christina smiled but didn’t even get one word out before Laura finished up.
“Ah, yes. You used to date my brother Dominic, didn’t you? Or was it Alexander?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” Christina said, preparing herself to tell a few white lies. “I haven’t had a real date since high school.”
“Really?” Laura said, not exactly sounding catty, but definitely like she didn’t believe her. She sounded confident in her first instinct. Apparently, the ‘Christina’ in front of her was a person she could deal with, unlike ‘Tina.' “That surprises me. You’re very cute. Didn’t you meet some exciting boys at the college?”
“I was in administrative assistance,” Christina explained. “There weren’t any guys in my program.”
“Ah, I see,” Laura said, smiling warmly.
“Are you two going out for lunch?” Christina asked, backing away. “I’ll just get out of your hair. I’ll have those letters ready for you by the time you get back, Mark." She walked away from them expressing internal gratitude that she didn’t have to call him ‘Mr. Lewis.’
Then she worked like a demon through her lunch hour. There was no way Laura wouldn’t put the rest of the pieces together and bring it to Mark’s attention, and then Christina would be fired. The only thing to do was to work her can off to prove to him she wanted this job whether she used to work as an escort or not.
In the end, Mark didn’t come back from lunch, but instead, he called her and asked her to lock his office for him at the end of the day. He would see her on Monday morning. Something came up.
***
If Christina thought there was no price to be paid for taking a job at an escort service, she was wrong. Sure her parents didn’t find out and make a fuss about the morality of it and the possibility of her being attacked, drugged or raped, but worrying about what Mark was going to do when he came back to the office on Monday was torture.
On Sunday morning, Mindy came into the kitchen with the cordless phone and asked,
“Do you feel like doing one more job for the escort service?”
Christina sat at the breakfast table nursing a bowl of blueberry yogurt and thinking about her trouble. “One more job?” she asked emphatically. “Heck no! I’m already in deep water. I told you all about it.”
“You mean how that crabby woman from Financial Services met you as Tina twice and now she’s going to reveal your true identity to Mark?”
“Yeah,” Christina whined. She was so depressed about the prospect of being canned from her first real job and even more depressed about losing Mark. She’d probably never get another boss like Mark. Forget boyfriend. A boyfriend you only saw for a couple of hours in the evening. Her boss was around eight hours a day.
Mindy abruptly came up and grabbed Christina by the hair. “Since when did you turn into such a friggin’ sissy?”
“You’re hurting me!” Christina bawled.
“Then stop being so pathetic,” Mindy raged. She let go of Christina and slammed the phone on the table. “This is your chance to remove all suspicion that you and ‘Tina’ are actually the same person.”
“How so?”
“The person who’s requested you is Dominic Figura. Isn’t he the guy who outbid your precious Mark on Valentine’s Day?”
“Yes,” Christina answered.
“Didn’t he pay so much for you just so that Mark wouldn’t get to have you?”
Christina nodded.
“Then, here’s what I think. I think Dominic is asking you again because his snotty sister wants to show Mark that you are Tina.”
“All the more reason why I shouldn’t go!”
“Do you want me to grab your hair again?” Mindy threatened, towering over her. “If you don’t show up, it might seem like an admission of guilt. Here’s what I say you do. Dominic said he wants to take you to a charity carnival. There is no doubt in my mind that Mark and Laura will be there also. I’ll dress you up in a dark wig. I’ll also find you some brown contacts. You’ll be Cleopatra by the time I’m finished with you and no one will dare think that you are the same person as Christina. You’ll be in the clear if you can manage to trick them into believing that you’re a completely different person. You can pull it off, can’t you?”
Christina started to see things from Mindy’s perspective during her speech. Mindy was right. She should grab the bull by the horns and deal with it.
“Okay!” Christina said, gathering up all her energy. “When is the date?”
Mindy looked at her watch. “You’re supposed to meet him at the front gate at two o’clock this afternoon. It’s ten now. Get in the shower,” Mindy ordered, pushing her. “You’d better be out in exactly ten minutes. It’s not like you have any hair to wash and that’s just enough time to shave your legs. Move it!”
Christina had a shower and did everything else Mindy told her to do. Today, Mindy decided that Christina was going to wear a yellow sweater with white jeans. She would wear a heavy white belt over her sweater. To top it off, Mindy also gave her a pair of white witch boots with wicked ten centimeter heels.
“Don’t trip,” she said coldly as she set them by the door for Christina.
Mindy wasn’t kidding when she said she needed all four hours. She used almost every moment. By the time she was finished, Christina did indeed look like Cleopatra. Her wig was dark brown with a few gold highlights. Once she was wearing the brown contacts, she was also suddenly given license to wear twice as much eye makeup as usual. Mindy used a different color of foundation as well. Christina looked completely different.
At two o’clock, she was waiting for Dominic outside the fairgrounds. Christina had never felt as confident in her escort garb as she did that afternoon. She was so empowered. She was positive she made the people standing within a fifteen-foot radius feel the vibe.
Then all at once, Dominic, Laura, and Mark appeared near the entrance. She waved to Dominic and he approached her.
“Is that you, Tina?” he asked after she kissed his cheek.
“Yeah, of course. What is it? You look surprised,” she said, taking off her sunglasses and looking at him roguishly.
“You just look totally different from before,” he said.
“I was blonde on Valentine’s Day, wasn’t I?” she flirted, not daring to look at Mark and Laura. She didn’t understand why Mark played Dominic's game. Wasn’t he better than Dominic? Wasn’t he brave enough to ask her directly? And not only that, but it really looked like Dominic hadn’t lied when he said that Mark and Laura were dating. They had to be a couple, since they were still together, right?
“Don’t women usually go darker in the winter and lighter in the summer?” Dominic asked coyly.
Yeah, he would be the type of guy who knew that. Blah… he probably even read chick magazines. Christina wanted to shoot herself. Somehow in the rush of preparation, she had forgotten he was the devil.
“Normally,” she said, still not losing the gleam of trouble in her eye. “But I didn’t want your sister to think that you’d stopped dating ‘thrilling’ women,” Christina said before she turned around and greeted Mark and Laura. “Laura! Darling, you look wonderful. That diet of yours is a miracle worker. You look simply radiant." Then she took Mark’s hand and shook it, trying her best to make her handshake feel different from ‘Christina’s.' “It’s nice to see you again,” she said to Mark, right before she turned around and poured all her attention on Dominic again. “One hundred dollars an hour,” was what she whispered to herself as she took his arm.
Dominic didn’t seem like his ordinary tricky self as he took her around the carnival. They went past a petting zoo and a merry-go-round, but he didn’t seem interested in anything until they got to the games where you got to shoot things. Mark stood beside him and they both shot twenty rounds at paper targets. Christina half expected one of them to be a good shot, but both of them hit nothing but air.
Afterward, Dominic said to Mark and Laura, “I’m going to take Tina to get something to eat. Why don’t you both go… pet some goats or something?" He didn’t even wait for their answer before he put his hand over Christina’s and headed toward one of the hotdog carts.
“Are you really that anxious to lose them?” Christina asked as she turned into the heartless wench she had transformed into the last time they were alone.
“You didn’t call,” he said sourly.
“Mark never called and made a request for me,” Christina said sternly. “I thought that was the deal. Besides, I don’t phone clients and ask them to take me out.”
“Why not?” he demanded.
“I’m here for you—for your needs. I don’t have needs when I go on a date with you. I am here for your comfort and pleasure only. I do not phone and ask to fulfill your needs. You call me. Even you should understand that much about all this.”
“Well, I thought I did. I’m probably just being an idiot, but going out with you is a lot different than dating the girls I know,” he said, slipping his sunglasses over his rogue eyes. “You’re not afraid to show affection in public. You aim to make others jealous. I never saw a girl do that before. Even today.”
“That’s because that’s what you want,” Christina said. “I’m good at reading people.”
“Then you’re the only person who’s good at reading me.”
“You can’t think of me that way,” Christina said as he steered her away from the food carts and toward the grassy park.
“The thing is, I want to take you on a real date; get to know you and you get to know me. If it’s money you want, I understand that a woman has to make her living somehow. I’m really well off, I could give you a bank account with plenty of money. If you’ll give yourself the chance to get to know me,” Dominic said.
Christina couldn’t believe he said that. It had to be a trick. Mark and Laura were probably waiting in the bushes somewhere watching to see what would happen next.
“I don’t believe you. If you really wanted that with me, then you would have called me sooner. It’s June now, Dominic. Our last date was in February,” she said coldly.
“I didn’t realize I felt this way until I saw you standing there with your dark hair. Blondes never did turn me on,” he said, moving to touch her hair.
She slapped his hand away. If he touched her hair, he would feel it was a wig. “Like I’m going to fall for a cheap line like that! Exactly who do you think you’re talking to? Some country kid who just climbed out of the pumpkin patch?”
“You’re too good,” he said, contorting his mouth into something that almost looked like a smile.
Christina let go of his hand and pulled his sunglasses off his face. “Another thing is that a man who was truly sincere wouldn’t confess while wearing sunglasses. Nothing you do strikes me as the actions of a man who’s truly in love or even interested. You’re playing another warped little game with your sister and her boyfriend, aren’t you?”
“That’s what I thought before I saw you today,” he said wickedly. “Unfortunately, I have to pay off my sister before I can play the games I like. So for now, we’re playing her game and I paid you to play it,” he said, grabbing both Christina’s arms and pulling her close to him so that their noses almost touched.
“Okay, so tell me what you want me to do. I’m on your side.”
“You see Mark, over there. I need you to do something to make him change his mind about you. My sister wants to marry him, but he won’t consent because he says he can’t get you out of his mind and he hates the idea of being in love with someone as false as you. So, his attraction for you is keeping him from my sister—even though he doesn’t want to be with you either. Think you can do something about that?”
Christina was puzzled. “So you wanted me to come today looking... unattractive?”
“What? Women are insane. You look different today, but you’re so damn flirty that it doesn’t matter if you’re flirting with me, or him. He probably still admires you. I need you to cross the line and—”
“Make out with you?” Christina finished for him. “I’m not doing that. But if it would make you feel better, I’ll go breakup with him. I’ll go tell him to forget about me. It might take him a bit longer, but then he might decide to marry your sister after all.”
“You’d go that far?” Dominic asked his eyes narrowed.
“Of course,” Christina said, pushing his hands off her and moving away. “Do you think I want our little game to ruin his real life? How stupid. Besides, both of you are forgetting something really important.”
“Which is?” Dominic asked.
“I have a life outside this,” Christina said over her shoulder as she walked away to find Mark.
***
Mark and Laura were eating outside one of the hotdog stands. Christina walked up to them—a total of ten centimeters taller than she was normally—and asked Mark if she could talk to him privately.
Laura looked vexed by that little development but allowed Mark to go without kicking up much of a fuss.
Christina walked with him out of the fairgrounds and to the parking lot. She had no plans to go back to Dominic afterward. She will have fulfilled her obligation to him by then. Besides, Laura had definitely figured out she was Tina—or Laura was an idiot. She had probably already told Mark the truth about her and Christina was just screwing herself over trying to avoid the truth.
“Mark,” Christina said, leaning against the carnival sign. “I hear that Laura wants to marry you.”
Mark looked confused. “Why do you want to talk to me about that?”
“Well, Dominic told me. He’s a devil and a half, isn’t he?”
“Yeah,” Mark said, turning away.
“I need to talk to tell you something important, but first I want to confirm something with you. Dominic told me that you really like me and that’s why you won’t marry her.”
Mark took a deep breath. “Sorry about that,” he said. “I was using you as a scapegoat. You have nothing to do with it. I was just using your name as an excuse because I thought I’d never see you again. I don’t want to marry her or even date her, but she won’t give up on me. If you were around to get caught up in this mess, I would have made up a different story. If that makes any sense." He paused. “I owe you an apology. I didn’t mean to pull you into something like this.”
Christina smiled. “That’s a relief, but I sort of have another problem I’d like to talk to you about if I could.”
Mark didn’t say anything. He looked grim. Maybe it was just because Christina said it was a relief that he didn’t like her. Christina thought that it must have been her imagination, but didn’t he usually laugh at difficulties when they were at work?
“You see,” Christina began. “I sort of had some trouble last summer. I was planning on going to college, but I missed the deadline for a grant and for a scholarship. My student loan and savings weren’t enough to pay for my second semester or my housing. I was in a lot of trouble and the last thing in the world I wanted was to go home with my tail between my legs. So, I ended up taking a job at an escort service to pay my tuition and my living expenses.”
“Naturally,” Mark said, looking like he was bored and wanted to go.
But Christina was going to make him listen to all of it. “After graduation, I got that job working as your assistant.”
Mark’s eyes bugged out of his head. “You mean, Laura was telling the truth?”
“Yeah,” Christina admitted.
“I didn’t believe her.”
“No, my cousin takes good care of me. She helps me look like this. The thing is, I’m really the girl that works in your office. That’s my true personality. I’m not like this at all. I worked for the escort service for the money. In fact, I have already quit, but I didn’t want to run away from the consequences of what I did. I wanted to face you honestly and tell you I don't want to be an escort anymore. I want to be your assistant quite badly. Please don’t can me over this.”
Mark stepped away from her. “I don’t think I can use this as grounds to sack you, but it could turn into a scandal. It would be especially bad if Laura reports us, and I wouldn’t put it past her."
Christina stared. She had never thought there would be consequences for the company.
“But I might get off the hook since you didn’t disclose that you were an escort on your resume,” he continued. “Also I didn’t hire you personally.”
“You mean you’re thinking about your own hide?” she asked.
“Why would I worry about you?” he asked boldly. “You’re not going to suffer from this, and actually neither am I. The only thing that’s going to suffer is our company’s name and discretion."
The sound of his voice when he said those four words made Christina’s blood ignite—she thought she would explode. “You are so full of crap. You may not have hired me as your assistant in the company, which yes, is a shield you can use to cover your tracks if you like, saying you didn't know who I was when I was hired. But you did hire me personally to escort you to that party. You hired me!” she yelled.
“What if the press gets involved?” he questioned angrily.
“Oh, poor Mark,” she pouted. “Who do you think you are? You’re not the C.E.O. or a vice president. You’re not even the director of our division. You’re just a P.R. officer who couldn’t get an assistant. No one cares about your dirty little secrets. You are not important enough to warrant a scandal. The worst thing that could happen is your boss will call you into his office and talk to you about it seriously, and then laugh. That’s right. I think he’ll laugh.”
That seemed to take Mark down a notch. His shoulders sagged and his face turned beet-red. “What do you know?”
She shook her head. “Of course, I will take responsibility for what I did. Oh golly, I went on one date with you and so now I’m blacklisted for life. Dang!" She paused for a second before she started in again. “And you, Mr. Lewis, think you’re so friggin’ cute and you know what? You are. So cute that it nearly broke my country-girl heart when you didn’t outbid Dominic on Valentine’s Day. I needed the money badly that night and I hadn’t worked since New Year’s. But if you had called me any other night of the week, I would have said ‘yes’ and gone with you for free. You know, I didn’t want to be an escort. It’s not my style! I’m not even sexy without Mindy’s help, but I needed to eat. That’s right! Things had been going so badly I had to skip meals—often. Perhaps you didn’t notice the way I inhaled my meal on Valentine’s—”
“I noticed,” Mark said quietly, interrupting. “I noticed. I just didn’t think it was anything that serious.”
Christina stopped talking and stood there panting for an instant. She needed to catch her breath.
Mark suddenly put a hand over his eyes and said, “Look, Christina, this has been a lot to take in. You’re right. I think I exaggerated how serious this was. I’ll talk to my boss tomorrow morning and see what he thinks is best. Why don’t you go home now and I’ll explain your absence to Dominic? If he doesn’t want to pay you for the whole time because you ducked out early, I’ll cover your fees.”
“Thanks,” she said, turning around and calling Mindy to ask her for a ride. She couldn’t think of a good reason to bother with a taxi now that her alias was shot.