Sleeping with Beauty by Donna Kauffman

majestic, oak-lined drive. He knew from doing a little on-line research that the private road wound its way back to a stately Potomac manse that had once been home to a state senator, the late Way Favreaux. His widow, the genteel southern magnolia, Aurora, had joined with two of her oldest and dearest friends—Mercedes Browning, former New England girls school headmistress, and Vivian dePalma, former Hollywood fashion maven and dresser to the stars—to open Glass Slipper, Incorporated, their self-termed “life makeover” business, several years before.
    Grady still thought the whole thing was ridiculous.
    “I appreciate you driving me.” Lucy folded and refolded the map, plucking at the corners with her stubby nails, as they slowly progressed down the winding private lane.
    “They provided you with a gilded pumpkin carriage—excuse me, I mean, a limo,” he reminded her.
    Her lips flickered briefly in a smile. “I know.” She reached over and laid her hand on his arm. “And I know you and Jana still don’t really approve of this. I wanted a last-ditch chance to explain. For all the good it did me.”
    He heard the dry tone, shot her a brief smile. It was hard not to. What you saw with Lucy Harper was what you got. He wished more people were like that. “Shoot me,” he said, honest with her as always, “but I’m not sorry that I think you’re fine the way you are.”
    “Thank you.” Then she made a gun with her fingers and clicked the mock trigger. “You’re being such a guy about this.”
    “At least I get that much credit,” he muttered as the car emerged from the tree-lined drive into a huge circular driveway. The mansion, the outbuildings—or “private guest cottages” as they were called on-line—along with the surrounding manicured and landscaped grounds were even more impressive in person. A sprawling ode to Victorian elegance, the entire place dripped with southern charm. Probably just like its current owners, he thought, imagining the “godmothers” (as they’d been dubbed by former clients in their gushing and endless tributes) as a trio of aging pageant directors whose vision of an ideal world included a tiara for every highlighted and hairsprayed head. That world was so not the Lucy Harper he knew.
    “All you guys have to do is shower, shave, and rub a towel over your hair and you consider yourselves presentable to the world,” she explained. “It’s a little more complicated for the opposite gender.”
    Not seeing a parking lot or additional signs indicating a visitors entrance, he simply parked in front of the fieldstone path leading to the big house itself. Then he shifted in his seat and looked directly at Lucy for the first time since picking her up at her Alexandria apartment forty-five minutes earlier. “And sometimes the opposite gender has a tendency to overcomplicate things.”
    “Oh, sure, like you don’t enjoy the mascara-enhanced batted lashes, the perfectly painted lips, hair that looks like a weekend of wild sex—”
    “Guys aren’t all that hung up on war paint and hairspray.”
    “Please. You might not care to know the particulars of how that war paint goes on, but you like the results. Men are visual creatures. Well, maybe not you. You seem to appreciate personality over cup size, but trust me, you’re the diamond in the rough there. And I mean ‘rough.’ A wilderness full of rough.”
    There was no point in asking her why she didn’t just go for the so-called diamonds. He knew the answer to that. And it had a lot to do with the proverbial pot calling the kettle black. She didn’t want to hear about that.
    “Most guys can’t get past what they see to find out if there’s anything else worth investigating,” she told him. “Much less take out to dinner, or home afterward for dessert.”
    No, but neither do you,
he thought, wishing for the umpteenth time he’d locked himself in his lab all night. It was all Jason Prescott’s fault. Again. “So, by