“So, Anna no-middle-name Ellis, I wanted to know how you feel about surprises.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I had never really thought about it before. “I guess it depends on the surprise. Like when Grandpa had to do bird CPR on Wil Tweeton or when Catalina set me up with her third cousin who did not understand personal boundaries. Those were not great surprises.” Or Marco Kimball appearing in my bedroom hadn’t felt like a fun surprise at the time, but I was slowly coming around to it. “The mixer, though, that was a fantastic surprise, and I really enjoyed that.”
“Great! So along that vein, and keeping in mind how much you love that mixer and that I am the one who sent it to you . . .” He trailed off, and now I was worried. Nobody brought up things they did for you unless they wanted something.
What more could he ask of me? Some nutso ideas ran through my head, including whether he might want me to be his surrogate to carry his heir.
That didn’t freak me out as much as it should have.
“Remember how I asked you about hair, makeup, and clothes? How do you feel about me getting you some of those things? If I pay for them?” he asked tentatively.
A makeover? I hadn’t expected that. He was right to be tentative. “You want to do a makeover. On me?”
“Yes?” Much more of a question than an answer.
“Pass,” I immediately said.
“Like a montage from a movie,” he said, as if that would convince me.
“It seems sexist and objectifying. I don’t need to change the way I look.”
“I’m not disagreeing with you. I just know my brother. He’s pretty vain and shallow. Shiny things, remember?”
Surely there was more to Craig than that. Annoyed at what Marco was implying, I snapped, “I want him to love me for me. I want to be myself.”
“You’ll still be yourself, just enhanced. Isn’t that your whole job? Enhancing women’s best features?”
“Yes, but . . .” I let my voice taper off. He wasn’t wrong.
“I don’t know that you’re in a position to argue when you’re the cosmetic chemist,” he pointed out unhelpfully. “Plus, attraction is about keeping the other person slightly off-balance. Craig has seen you one way—he needs to see you in another light. He won’t know what to make of it.”
Again, Marco might have had a point.
Before I could respond, he added, “And what if it works? You can take the empirical evidence and see if it makes a difference. If it doesn’t, you can go back to—” He waved his hand in my direction. “To what you’re more comfortable with. This is just about putting your best foot forward. When you did your science fair projects at school, didn’t you make your presentation board look nice before you submitted it?”
“That’s not the same thing,” I said, even though it kind of was.
“My plan involves a lot of formal events. I thought doing something like this might even give you some extra confidence, and confidence is always attractive.”
Confidence . . . there were things I felt very confident about. My intelligence. My ability to translate the ideas in my head into real, concrete objects. But if I were being honest, I’d never been very confident about my appearance. I just hadn’t ever done anything about it because it seemed unnecessary.
Maybe now it was necessary. Although I didn’t like what it was implying about Craig at all.
I had spent my professional career coming up with ways to make women feel better about themselves, more confident in their own skin. It would be a little hypocritical for me to back away from someone challenging me to do the same.
“Okay.”
His face lit up. “I’m so relieved you said that because—”
We were interrupted by a knock at his front door.
“Did you finally figure out how to shut it?” I asked as he went to answer it. He gave me a look and then opened the door.
There were a bunch of female voices saying hello to him, and then three bright and happy-looking women entered the room, carrying cases and pushing a rack of clothes.
“Anna, I want you to meet Jen. She’s a makeup artist.” She was a tiny, dark-haired woman who reminded me a bit of a Disney princess come to life. “This is Andi—she does hair.” Andi had a shock of vibrant purple hair put in a bun with chopsticks. “Gloria is going to be your stylist.” She was older, dressed all in black, and cooler than I could ever hope to be.
Marco turned to tell them where they could set up.
I walked over to stand by his side. “Do you remember when you asked me if there was anything else you should know about me?”
He nodded.
“I might kill you for springing this on me. You should know that.”
“Noted.”
“Where did you even find them?”
“They’ve all done a lot of photo shoots for Minx, and they were happy to come over and help out. My assistant set everything up. I think she even called Catalina to make sure Gloria pulled the right sizes for you.”
How Catalina ever managed to keep that quiet from me, I would never know.
“Over here!” Andi directed, pointing at a chair they had set up. I walked over with Marco.
“You owe me,” I told Marco.
“I do,” he agreed, far too cheerful for my liking.
I sat in the chair. Gloria was muttering to herself as she went through the clothes, and Jen took one look at my nails, gasped, and assured me that she was also an accomplished manicurist. Andi took my hair out of the messy bun I’d put it in.
“I’ll be working in my room. Let me know if you need anything,” Marco said, and he left.
Part of me wanted to call him back.
Andi was making tutting sounds as she walked around me. “When is the last time you had your hair cut?”
“Uh, two, no, three years ago.”
“Three years?” she nearly screeched, trying to cover up her shock. “That’s fine. It’s fine. You’re just long overdue for a cut. I’m guessing that I should be going for very low maintenance here.”
“The lower the maintenance the better,” I said.
She seemed particularly discouraged by my mousy brown hair. “I’m going to put in some blonde highlights, especially around your face. We’ll leave your hair darker at the top and lighter at the bottom. That way you can go longer without getting your roots retouched. I’ll be doing balayage and giving you a gradient look, if that’s okay.”
“I only understood about half of that, and I’m fine with whatever.” If I was going to be like some nerdy girl from a 1990s teen movie, I might as well go all in.
Andi mixed product while Jen laid out a bunch of makeup cases on the table in front of me. She was holding Minx products up next to my face to find the right colors. I picked up a lipstick, eyeliner, and a bronzer from the table. “I made these,” I told her.
“Very cool. And I’m going to teach you how to use them.”
“Good luck,” I said. People seemed to forget the artist part of makeup artist. Like being a cosmetic chemist and a woman meant I knew automatically how to make myself look good. That’s why they were called makeup artists and not makeup spacklers. It would be like expecting the clerk in the paint department down at Home Depot to be Picasso just because he made the paint. One talent did not guarantee the other.