She had to come up with a solution.
One, she would just put on her clothes as they were, her top now laying in the basin when she thought she could wash out the paint.
Two, she could open the door and call out that she was very sick, like, contagious sick, and could they postpone the meeting for another day. But that was not the right image to portray, and it would make her come off as weak. And Marjorie had said they were the crankiest men she had ever had the misfortune of dealing with, and she was surprised when they agreed to this meeting in the first place.
She had also told Ansley it was her only chance to convince them to let the shop stay standing. She had to have her chance to appeal to them. It was the only thing that could save the shop.
Her third option was to go out there naked and pretend nothing was wrong while she delivered her presentation. Well, at least her shoes had gone unscathed, so was she technically, completely naked?
She shook her head. None of those options would help her cause. She was going to let Marjorie down. The poor, sweet woman whose memories lived here.
Okay, so they weren’t sweet, innocent memories of love and romance, not if they had locked themselves inside the shop for a whole week, but Mr. Brown had been her soul mate. That was a rare thing, and dammit, she was going to preserve the memory of their first meeting on Valentine’s Day one more time, if it killed her.
Naked it is, then.
Right.
But then a relieved squeal escaped her mouth. One of the rooms she had entered had been a storeroom, and she had seen a rack of clothes. Of course, she wasn’t expecting a business suit, but hey, maybe that was someone’s role-play fetish, and then she’d be in luck. Problem solved.
She tentatively opened the bathroom door and peered out. She could see them standing in a circle talking quietly in what she knew was Russian. All she had to do was skip over to the other side, without being seen, and then she could slip into the storeroom.
Bracing herself, and as quietly as she could, wobbled over to the other side and sighed in relief when she entered the storeroom and closed the door behind her.
Katrina was wrong when she said Ansley followed trouble like a moth to a raging inferno. She was both the moth and the raging inferno. Drat.
She quickly flicked through the racks of clothes and her heart sank. Not a business suit in sight. Not even a decent skirt and top. Everything was in latex, about six sizes too small, and was meant to allure anyone with a pulse.
She had no choice.
Lifting her chin, she picked a dress with the most fabric. A black-and-orange animal print outfit that took hold of her boobs and squashed them together then slid over her hips like skin, and no matter how much she pulled downward, the lowest she could get the hem was mid-thigh.
She couldn’t overthink this. She was running out of time.
Besides, it wasn’t what she was wearing but what she had to say.
Which she realized might not work when her whole presentation had been on the false assumption that she was appealing to them to keep a toy store open.
Fuck me.
Refusing to wallow in her newfound misery, she yanked open the door and strode out. And with every step she took, the dress slid up. By the time she reached them, she was at risk of exposing her freshly waxed pussy, thanks to Lourdes at The Girl and Diamond Spa.
It was fine. Everything was still fine.
“Gentleman,” she said, yanking furiously at the dress. “I’m just going to be honest because I find that always works for me.” She counted to three silently, then raised her head and looked up at them and died all over again at their extravagant male beauty.
Nope.
She closed her eyes, cleared her mind, and imagined all three had transformed into cute, fuzzy teddy bears. It was a trick a self-awareness guru had taught her, and it worked every time… except now.
When did teddy bears become so… hot.
“Miss King, you’ve wasted enough of our time.”
“I’m sorry. I really am. I know it doesn’t look like I know what I’m doing, but trust me I did, and then I found out Marjorie didn’t own a toy shop like the one you would buy gifts for kids from, but an actual sex shop. And then I drank strawberry juice, and I have this crazy—”
“Miss King, are you trying to seduce us?”
“What? No. Of course I’m not. I’m trying to explain that when I ingest anything that has strawberries in it, I get really hot, and I need to take off my clothes and take a cold shower—” Even while she was speaking a mile a minute, some unheard-from-before voice in her head started talking. She took a second to listen, opened her mouth, then shut it again.