Free the Overnight Socialite by Bridie Clark

Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

    L ucy Jo squinted through the elaborate wrought-iron leaves covering the front door of Wyatt Hayes's Fifth Avenue building. She didn't know which was more intimidating--the gargoyles snarling down from the gray-stone facade, or the white-gloved doormen guarding the soft-lit marble lobby. With thudding heart and desperate resolve, she pressed the doorbell.

    "I'm here to see Wyatt Hayes, please," she told the doorman. She hoped he couldn't smell her fear. Breathe , she reminded herself. What's the worst that can happen?

    And then her mind, without her consent, answered the question: He's as arrogant as he seemed and you're humiliated and forced to move back to live with your mother and her six cats. You spend the rest of your life gluing on tips and double "dating" passing vacuum salesmen with Rita. Or Wyatt turns out to be some perverted wackadoo who drugs you and sells you into human bondage, like on that Dateline special--

    Lucy Jo struggled to regain her composure. Okay, just breathe. Forget thinking. Thinking makes breathing a lot harder .

    "Is he expecting you?" the doorman asked.

    "No, not exactly," she said. "But he gave me his card." Lucy Jo flashed it as if it were a security badge. The paper was soft from being overhandled.

    Breathe, Lucy Jo. It's easy. You've been doing brave things your whole life .

    Moving to New York had taken guts, no doubt about it. But taking the subway thirty blocks uptown and walking to the address listed on Wyatt's card had required deep drilling into reserves of courage she never knew she had.

    "I'll call upstairs. Your name, please?"

    "Lucy Jo Ellis. Thank you."

    "Wyatt?" Margaret, the broad Irish woman who'd cared for Wyatt since he was in diapers, popped her head into the dining room where he and Trip had just finished dinner. "There's a girl downstairs in the lobby to see you."

    Wyatt groaned, mainly for Trip's benefit. "Cornelia! She's relentless. Phone calls, e-mails--and now she's taken to just 'dropping by' the building."

    "So? Are you thinking about taking her back?" Trip asked.

    "Why should I? Nothing's changed."

    "It isn't Cornelia," Margaret interrupted. "It's a young woman named Lucy Jo Ellis."

    Wyatt frowned, trying to place the name. Trip found it faster. "Hey, isn't that the girl we met during that downpour? The one who walloped you? You don't think she's here to take you up on that crazy proposition--"

    "That horrible girl?" Wyatt shot up from his chair. "So she shows up here with her tail between her legs! Well, maybe she's smarter than she seemed."

    "She slapped you?" Margaret didn't ask why. "And what proposition did you make, Wyatt? Are you sure you want her--"

    "Yes! By all means, have Harold send her up," Wyatt said. For the first time in longer than he could remember, he felt genuinely curious about what would happen next.

    Wyatt watched intently as Margaret ushered the nervous, flush-faced girl into the dining room and then reluctantly excused herself. The only eye contact this Lucy Jo Ellis person could make was with the Alex Katz portrait hanging in the corner. Wyatt stepped closer. Even in the generous cast of the chandelier, she was more of a fixer-upper than he'd initially realized. Maybe he'd been overconfident. At the bar that night he had been overserved, and the two were famously correlated.

    "So what brings you here?" he asked, after Trip had risen from his seat to shake the girl's hand.

    The simple question seemed to heighten her terror. Lucy Jo stood tensed in the doorway, as if bracing for an earthquake. He could see beads of sweat crystallize above her upper lip. "You said you could transform my life," she managed to say. "I--I'm just here to find out more."

    Wyatt couldn't help feeling flattered by both her interest and her nervousness. It almost made him forgive her initial rudeness on that rainy night two weeks earlier, but not quite. If she was here to appeal for the same opportunity she'd previously