"Fourteen feet, six inches. Wouldn't you know it? Nothing is ever standard around here." She wrote down the figure in a notebook, and Ross watched, a bit bemused.
She wasn't quite what he'd expected. The dealings he'd had with her, though indirect, had made him picture her as cold, professional and extremely calculating-an icy, mature woman with absolutely no sex appeal. The Char ity Ames on the telephone earlier that day had seemed a bit more scatterbrained, a little helpless, uncertain, and the two images hadn't gibed. Now he saw something com pletely different from either of those pictures.
The mop of hair was unruly, but she was hardly imma ture. The eyes, beneath straight, feathered brows, were coolly assessing, but a spark of humor revealed itself now and then. She was pretty, her features even, her expres sion alive. Her figure was slender, but full. She wore black tight s, a huge salmon-pink sweater, and her feet were bare.
"Listen," she said, glancing up at him again. One spray of her curly mop fell over her eye and she pushed it back with a quick shove. "Picture this..." She made a dra matic sweep with one hand. "A white shag rug. Really thick. You got it?"
She glanced at him again, judging whether he was really paying attention.
"Okay." She ges tured in another direction. "A chrome-and-glass coffee table. With, unfortunately, this same old blue couch. What do you think?" Whirling, she confronted him, her dark eyes searching his. "How does that grab you?"
He was still standing in the open doorway of the apart ment, and he hadn't quite got his bearings yet. Usually unflappable, he was unsteady here, and the factor that figured most strongly in that was the steady gaze from those brown eyes.
"I don't know," he began doubtfully.
She let out an explosive sigh, waving a hand as she marched across the room to look at it from another per spective.
"Okay, listen, the paintings will be off the wall. Gone. Instead..." She frowned, turning slowly to survey the en tire room. "I'll put up framed posters of... oh, graphics of some sort. Colorful graphics. Rainbow colors and grinning faces. The sort of stuff you see all the time at your dentist's office." She looked up at him again. "What do you think?"
He hesitated, then shrugged. "Sounds fine to me."
She looked pained, shaking her head. "No good, huh? It just doesn't move you." She sank down onto the couch with a sigh, patting a place beside her in an invitation for him to sit.
She was casual. The invitation was offhand, friendly. And yet he felt a tiny stab of excitement, something he hadn't felt in some time, though he'd been the beneficiary of many a much more sexy come-on. Suppressing the excite ment, he sat.