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herself.
    “You do.”
    She sighed.
    “Now I’m going to fuck you. I’m going to fuck you hard, bitch.”
    She rolled her eyes. Big tough guy. He was probably a total mouse in real life. In fact, she imagined he had a domineering wife or, better still, a female boss who thoroughly intimidated him.
    So he paid for accolades.
    And she provided them. For a price. “Oooh, Burt. You’re so big. So hard.”
    “Say it again.”
    She did, adding a few elaborations, then set the phone down for a second so she could put something on. She grabbed the only thing handy—a tight size 22 blouse that she’d been meaning to throw away but kept hoping she’d fit into someday—put it on, and cradled the phone in the crook of her neck while she buttoned. Truth was, she wasn’t even sure why she bothered with the shirt. She was alone. She was always alone. She could probably be naked for thirty-six hours straight and never run into a situation where she needed to get dressed.
    Except maybe to avoid the prick of Merlin’s claws.
    The only prick she’d actually felt in…Oh, god, it didn’t bear thinking about.
    Burt reached his crescendo just as she pulled the final button over. It held for a moment, then popped off.
    She could have cried.
    Instead, though, she’d do what she usually did to make herself feel better in these situations.
    She’d shop.
    She booted up her computer, offering the occasional moan, groan, or exclamation as her caller’s passion reached its death throes. When “Burt” finally finished, he was eager to hang up—he sounded like he was worried he’d get caught, probably by the boss Sandra had envisioned earlier—and she stopped the timer.
    Twenty-seven minutes.
    It wasn’t great, but she’d had cracked-voice young guys who took much less time than that, so it would do.
    She looked at the time on her computer screen. It was 12:45. Her appointment wasn’t until four, so with any luck, she’d be able to fill the next three hours with calls and order the Pliners before FedEx went out tonight.
    Thank goodness her job was so lucrative. Men loved “Penelope”—as she was known to them—and why wouldn’t they? The picture she’d provided for her catalog bio was a killer. Penelope had Angelina Jolie’s lips, Julia Roberts’s nose, Catherine Zeta-Jones’s face shape and eyes, mid-’80s Farrah Fawcett hair (tousled, not winged), and Cindy Crawford’s 1991 body.
    Sandra had put Penelope together with Photoshop herself, adding the small detail of replacing one of Catherine’s earlobes with her own. Just so she had one small way to identify with Penelope.
    It was fun to be tall, thin, and gorgeous—if only just in her imagination and that of countless lonely, horny men—when Sandra herself had been of average height and well-above-average weight all her life.
    The fact that her family was very wealthy and lived in Potomac Falls Estates had never bought Sandra any favors when it came to social acceptance. In elementary school, her physique inspired such nicknames as Sandra Claus and, after an unfortunate experience on a field trip to a farm, Moo.
    People also compared her—inevitably and unfavorably—with her older, very attractive sister, Tiffany. Tiffany the cheerleader, the homecoming queen, the average student who was remembered as a star by teachers and administrators alike because of her sparkling smile and outgoing personality.
    Where Sandra’s hair was the exact bland brown of a field mouse, Tiffany had dark golden blond hair, with subtle natural highlights of everything from strawberry blond to wheat. Sandra’s nose was straight and unremarkable, where Tiffany’s was the kind of thin, slightly tipped-up button women described to plastic surgeons all the time. Sandra’s eyes were deep coffee brown, and Tiffany’s? Grassy green. Again, the sort of thing most women could achieve only artificially.
    Growing up with her sister had been like being trapped in a “before and after” diet ad,