Accounting for Cole (Natural Beauty) by Holley Trent

CHAPTER ONE
    I’d been working as an accountant for six years. I figured it’d be my life’s work. Accountancy is a good, respectable field and as far as I could tell, a recession-proof one. I worked Mondays through Fridays and some Saturdays. I would have worked Sundays, too, but small towns in the Bible Belt tend to close down on Sundays.
    The Saturday before Father’s Day, I was in the small office I rented from Mercedes Garcia catching up on quarterly tax reports. I was behind on the chore because I had a knack for attracting clients who couldn’t get their shit to me in advance of their due dates. I thought about cutting them loose and saving myself the frustration, but I’d been eyeing some office space in the old elementary school recently turned into a strip mall. I was squirreling away my pennies to save up for a security deposit.
    My office at the moment had in the past been Mercedes’s beauty salon supply closet, but seeing the potential for a sideline of income, she bumped the closet into the shop a bit so the space could accommodate a desk, three hard wooden chairs, and a few file cabinets. A peeling vinyl sign proclaiming MACY VICKERS, CPA was adhered to the shop’s back door. You couldn’t see the sign from the road, but most people knew where I was, anyway. Edenton’s a small town.
    I never knew who to expect would pop into the office, so I always tried to dress professionally…which is to say modestly , even on Saturdays. On that June day I paired a tan skirt suit with sensible black flats and my favorite white blouse. The shirt had ruffles at the neck, and I confess I always felt a bit like Mrs. Slocombe when I wore it, minus all that Brit-com sass. My friend Beth, owner of Edenton’s only dance studio, made a habit of telling me every time she saw it that the suit was hideous and that I should give it back to my mother.
    Well, I didn’t get it from my mother. I bought it off the rack at Peebles, and it wasn’t even on sale. The saleslady said I looked quite shapely in it, but in hindsight—and seeing as how she worked on commission—she was probably bullshitting me. I believed her compliment at that moment probably because I needed to hear it.
    I’m five-feet four and weigh about a hundred and twenty pounds. Beth said I’m shaped like an Irish peasant woman and should never wear suits. When I gave her my patented stuck on stupid look about the peasant woman remark, she rested her hands on my hips and said, “Macy, honey, if you ever give birth, that baby is just going to fall right out without you pushing.”
    I’d brushed her hands away and harrumphed. If I listened to hyperbole-prone Beth, I would have seriously considered renting out billboard space on my ass. Ten bucks a square inch.
    “There you are!”
    I looked up from the envelopes I was sealing and found the devil herself, Beth, and our friend Gretchen spilling into my doorway. Gretchen is our “lady of leisure.” Lacking responsibility of any sort, she’s frequently beyond the legal alcohol limit for driving. We’re working on finding her a passion.
    On that day in my office, she wore a gauzy maxi dress that showed off her toned arms and sunken-in belly. She was even going braless, but since she had that California girl vibe about her, she could generally pull that off…although most ladies in town would prefer she didn’t.
    Beth was usually well put-together, but that day she made my spidey-sense go off because instead of the sparkly flip-flops she typically wore when she wasn’t teaching, she was wearing hooker heels: four-inch spiked, purple-metallic, stiletto sandals with little rhinestones covering the heels. As it was only three o’clock, I knew something was up.
    “What do you want?” I asked, not bothering to suppress the suspicion in my voice as I assessed Beth’s stretchy, slinky, mini-dress. Like me, Beth was unmarried at almost thirty, but in her case, her single status is due to a profound monogamy