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photographer already, and a man like Franconi wouldn’t need her help with a crowd of women. Armed with change and her credit card, she went to find a pay phone.
    For the first forty-five minutes, she spoke with her assistant in New York, filling her pad with times, dates and names while L.A. traffic whisked by outside the phone booth. As a bead of sweat trickled down her back, she wondered if she’d chosen the hottest corner in the city.
    Denver still didn’t look as promising as she’d hoped, but Dallas… Juliet caught her bottom lip between her teeth as she wrote. Dallas was going to be fabulous. She might need to double her daily dose of vitamins to get through that twenty-four-hour stretch, but it would be fabulous.
    After breaking her connection with New York, Juliet dialedher first contact in San Francisco. Ten minutes later, she was clenching her teeth. No, her contact at the department store couldn’t help coming down with a virus. She was sorry, genuinely sorry he was ill. But did he have to get sick without leaving someone behind with a couple of working brain cells?
    The young girl with the squeaky voice knew about the cooking demonstration. Yes, she knew all about it and wasn’t it going to be fun? Extension cords? Oh my, she really didn’t know a thing about that. Maybe she could ask someone in maintenance. A table—chairs? Well golly, she supposed she could get something, if it was really necessary.
    Juliet was reaching in her bag for her purse-size container of aspirin before it was over. The way it looked now, she’d have to get to the department store at least two hours before the demonstration to make sure everything was taken care of. That meant juggling the schedule.
    After completing her calls, Juliet left the corner phone booth, aspirin in hand, and headed back to the bookstore, hoping they could give her a glass of water and a quiet corner.
    No one noticed her. If she’d just crawled in from the desert on her belly, no one would have noticed her. The small, rather elegant bookstore was choked with laughter. No bookseller stood behind the counter. There was a magnet in the left-hand corner of the room. Its name was Franconi.
    It wasn’t just women this time, Juliet noticed with interest. There were men sprinkled in the crowd. Some of them might have been dragged along by their wives, but they were having a time of it now. It looked like a cocktail party, minus the cigarette smoke and empty glasses.
    She couldn’t even see him, Juliet realized as she worked her way toward the back of the store. He was surrounded, enveloped. Jingling the aspirin in her hand, she was glad she could find a little corner by herself. Perhaps he got all the glory, she mused. But she wouldn’t trade places with him.
    Glancing at her watch, she noted he had another hour and wondered whether he could dwindle the crowd down in the amount of time. She wished vaguely for a stool, dropped the aspirin in the pocket of her skirt and began to browse.
    “Fabulous, isn’t he?” Juliet heard someone murmur on the other side of a book rack.
    “God, yes. I’m so glad you talked me into coming.”
    “What’re friends for?”
    “I thought I’d be bored to death. I feel like a kid at a rock concert. He’s got such…”
    “Style,” the other voice supplied. “If a man like that ever walked into my life, he wouldn’t walk out again.”
    Curious, Juliet walked around the stacks. She wasn’t sure what she expected—young housewives, college students. What she saw were two attractive women in their thirties, both dressed in sleek professional suits.
    “I’ve got to get back to the office.” One woman checked a trim little Rolex watch. “I’ve got a meeting at three.”
    “I’ve got to get back to the courthouse.”
    Both women tucked their autographed books into leather briefcases.
    “How come none of the men I date can kiss my hand without making it seem like a staged move in a one-act play?”
    “Style. It