Engaging Men

“First-time novelist Curnyn pens an easy, breezy first novel that’s part Sex and the City with more heart and part Bridget Jones with less booze.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A diverse cast of engaging, occasionally offbeat characters, the hilarious sayings attributed to them, and a fast-paced style facilitated by Emma’s pithy sound-bite ‘confessions’ add to the fun in a lively Manhattan-set story…”

—Library Journal

“Readers will eagerly turn the pages…”

—Booklist

“Fabulous fun. The perfect antidote for the break-up blues.”

—Sarah Mlynowski, author of Milkrun

“…absolutely hilarious secondary characters. They alone are worth the cover price.”

—Romantic Times

“Lynda Curnyn has written a novel featuring a heroine that most people will enjoy reading about and even sympathize with her intense angst. Confessions of an Ex-Girlfriend is part comedy, but mostly a serious, delightful look at people at a painful point in their lives.”

—Bookbrowser.com

“Well written, with catchy dialogue and heartfelt sincerity.”

—Rendezvous

For Alexandra and Samantha

Dream big, little girls!

MILLS & BOON

Before you start reading, why not sign up?

Thank you for downloading this Mills & Boon book. If you want to hear about exclusive discounts, special offers and competitions, sign up to our email newsletter today!

SIGN ME UP!

Or simply visit

signup.millsandboon.co.uk

Mills & Boon emails are completely free to receive and you can unsubscribe at any time via the link in any email we send you.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A big thank-you to all who inspired and supported me during the writing of this book:

My family, especially my wise and beautiful mother, who always knows what to say, just when I need to hear it.

My wonderful editor, Joan Marlow Golan, for her insightful editorial expertise, her amazing support and most of all, her TLC.

All the talented people behind Red Dress Ink, especially Margaret Marbury, senior editor extraordinaire and dear friend. Laura Morris, Margie Miller, Tara Kelly and RDI’s own engaging man, Craig Swinwood.

All my wonderful friends, especially Linda Guidi, for always listening (even when I don’t…). Stacey Kamel, for bringing on the laughter. Julie Ann Coney, for that fab photo of me and the facts on adoptive search. Anne Canadeo, for the Tight-Lid Theory that inspired this book, and her sage writing advice. Jennifer Bernstein, Lisa Sklar and Farrin Jacobs, for keeping me from wigging out. Sarah Mlynowski, for always telling me how fabulous I am and for, umm, lending me her boyfriend (it’s not what you think…).

Elizabeth Irene, who told me just what it takes to make it as an actor in this town. Michael Scotto di Carlo (aka Motorcycle) and Katrina Lorne for the cool Web site. Pam Spengler-Jaffee, for sharing her PR savvy, as well as margaritas and the post-book Elton and Billy serenade.

And let us not forget all the ex-boyfriends (you know who you are…) who inadvertently inspired me to write this book, by sheer virtue of the fact that none of them ever actually got around to proposing.

Contents

1 Tight lids and other theories of male behavior.

2 I’m not really a wife, but I play one on TV.

3 Welcome to Brooklyn. Population: Married

4 I just called…to SCREAM…I LOVE YOU!

5 A rose by any other name…might still do the trick.

6 Love means never having to pack an overnight bag.

7 All a girl needs is a little courage—and a hefty credit line.

8 I have seen the future (and it’s gonna cost a bundle).

9 Caution: This jar is not a toy! Please keep out of reach of children.

10 A nose is a nose is a nose….

11 When life gives you lemons, screw the lemonade. You need a real cocktail.

12 Happiness might just be a warm gun.

13 Till death (at 30,000 feet) do us part.

14 I shoulda packed the ruby slippers….

15 I’m in a New York state of…mania.

16 And you thought it was just a common house plant.

17 I’ll take a carat and a half—hold the husband.

18 Love happens. (And there really is nothing you can do about it.)

19 The heart is a hearty muscle (Thank God).

Epilogue

1

Tight lids and other theories of male behavior.

It started with a message on my answering machine.

“Guess who’s getting married?” came a voice I knew all too well.

It was Josh. My ex-boyfriend. Turned someone else’s fiancé. Not that I’d ever wanted to marry Josh, who suffered from an aversion to dental floss. “Did prehistoric man floss?” he would argue. “Is prehistoric man still around?” I argued back. We lasted only six months, then I told him I couldn’t see myself at sixty-five, making sure he took his teeth out at bedtime every night. “Okay, okay. I’ll floss,” he’d replied. But it was too late. The romance was gone.

Now he was getting married. To someone he’d met not three months after we had broken up four years ago. And he wasn’t the first ex-boyfriend to go this route. Randy, the boyfriend before Josh, was whistling “The Wedding March” a mere six weeks after we had tearfully said our goodbyes. Then there was Vincent, my first love—he’d been married for nearly a decade. According to my mother—who lived within shouting distance of his mother in Marine Park, Brooklyn, and never failed to keep me updated—Vincent and his wife were already on their third kid.

One ex gets married, a girl can laugh it off. Two begins a nervous twitter. But three? Three?

A girl starts to take it personally. I mean, what was it about me that didn’t incite men to plunk down large sums of money in the name of eternal love?

“It’s the tight-lid dilemma,” my friend Michelle said when I expressed my despair at sending another man to the altar without me.

“Tight lid?” I asked, awaiting some pearl of wisdom that might turn my world upright again. After all, in the time it had taken me to get a four-year degree in business administration that I no longer made use of, Michelle, who’d grown up three blocks away from me in Marine Park, had gotten a husband, a house and a diamond the size of New Jersey.

“You know the scenario,” she continued. “You struggle for a good while trying to open a jar and the lid won’t budge. But sure enough, the next person you hand that jar to pops the lid off, no problem. I mean, you don’t really think Jennifer Aniston, cute haircut aside, would have landed Brad Pitt without the Gwyneth factor, do you? Then there’s me and Frankie, of course,” she continued, referring to her husband of seven years, whom she had snagged soon after his devastating breakup with Rosanna Cuzio, the prom queen of our high school.

I couldn’t deny the pattern, once Michelle had laid it out so neatly before me. Clearly I had been instrumental in warming Josh, Randy and Vincent up for the next girl to come along and slap with a wedding vow. Gosh, I should have at least been maid of honor for my efforts.

Instead, I was nothing but the ex-girlfriend who might or might not get invited to the wedding, depending on how secure the bride felt about her future husband.

Suddenly I looked at Kirk, my current boyfriend, with new eyes. We had been together a year and eight months, by far the record for me since my three-year stint with Randy. We had become quite a cozy little couple, Kirk and I. I even got party invitations addressed to both of us—that’s how serious everyone thought we were. The question was: Would Kirk be inviting me to his wedding someday or…?

“Kirk…sweetie,” I said, as we lay in bed together that night, a flickering blue screen before us and the prospect of sex lingering like an unasked question in the air.

“Uh-huh,” he said, not removing his gaze from the cop show that apparently had him enraptured.

“Your last girlfriend…Susan?”

“Yeah?” he said, glancing at me with trepidation. Clearly he saw in the making one of those “relationship talks” men dread.

“You guys went out a long time, right? What was it, two years?”

“Three and a half,” he said with a shudder that made me swallow with fear. Apparently I was heading for rough waters.

Still I plunged on. “And you guys never talked, um, about…marriage?”

He laughed. “Are you kidding me? That’s what broke us up. She gave me the old ultimatum—we get married or we’re through.” He snorted. “Needless to say, I chose door number two.”

Aha. Relief filled me and I snuggled closer to Kirk, allowing him to sink back into his vegetative state as the cops on TV slapped cuffs on some unsuspecting first offender.

If Susan was the lid loosener, that could mean only one thing: I could pop this guy wide open. Hell, I could be married within the year.

The next day, I met my best friend, Grace, for a celebratory lunch, which was always an event as Grace, with her high-powered career and high-maintenance boyfriend, barely had time to get together at all anymore. As a concession to her hectic lifestyle, we met at a restaurant two blocks from her office on E. 54th Street and Park Avenue. Of course, Grace didn’t know I was celebrating until I clinked my water glass into hers and said, “Congratulate me. I’m getting married.”

“What?” Grace said, her blue-gray eyes bulging in disbelief. Her gaze immediately fell to the ring finger of my left hand, which, naturally, was bare.

“Not now. But someday.”

She rolled her eyes, sniffed and said with her usual irony, “Congratulations.”

Leave it to Grace to laugh in the face of being thirty-three without a wedding band on her finger. She is the strongest, most independent person I know. Not only does she always manage to keep a killer boyfriend on hand, she has a killer job as a product manager for Roxanne Dubrow Cosmetics. Yes, that Roxanne Dubrow. The one you have to hike all the way to Saks Fifth Avenue for. Grace briefly dated my brother Sonny when we were in junior high, but we didn’t really bond until she saved my life on the playground of Marine Park Junior High. I was about to get my head slammed into the concrete by some giant bully of a girl named Nancy, who seemed determined to hurt me just because I was a good fifty pounds lighter than she was. Grace stepped in, tall and blond and strong, and told Nancy to take a hike. Everyone, even Nancy, was afraid of Grace. I was in awe of her. Even more so when she adopted me as her new best friend, despite the fact that I was in eighth grade and she in ninth. Her posse of ninth-grade girlfriends was not happy to have me tagging along. But Grace wouldn’t have it otherwise.

And here we were, still friends. The only two from the old neighborhood who had escaped unscathed, without marrying some thick-necked thug named Sal and popping out babies on an annual basis. Of course, Grace’s parents had dragged her away from the neighborhood to Long Island when she turned sixteen, hoping suburbia would save her from the cigarettes and boys and bad behavior to which she had taken and in which I couldn’t wait to indulge, myself. But we still spent our summers together. In fact, I felt a bit like a Fresh Air Fund kid, the way my parents shipped me off come June. Then Grace moved into the city right after college, and I followed a year later. She was the sister I’d never had, and my mother had even dubbed her an honorary member of our family.

“Don’t you ever worry, Grace? That you’ll wind up alone?” I asked now, searching her face for some sign of vulnerability.

She shrugged. “A woman in this city can have everything she wants. If she plays her cards right.”

Easy for Grace to say. Tall, voluptuous, with chin-length, tousled blond hair and perfectly sculpted features, she was beautiful. While I…I had always been “little Angie DiFranco”—and still was—five foot four with a head of wavy black hair that defied all styling products, and thighs that threatened to turn into my mother’s any day now. I sighed. It suddenly occurred to me that if I didn’t marry Kirk, I didn’t know what would become of me.

“What about you and Drew?” I asked now, wondering if Grace had been contemplating her current beau as a future husband. “Do you ever think about…you know?”

“Of course,” Grace said. “Every girl thinks about it.”

I felt relieved. At least I wasn’t the only thirtysomething unmarried hysteric. And Grace and Drew had been dating barely a year—at least eight months less than Kirk and I.

“But it’s not everything,” she said with a shrug.

Grace was right, I realized the next day as I headed for work. Marriage wasn’t everything. I had so much going on right now, it was practically a nonissue. I was an actor, and at the moment a working actor, which was really something. Granted my steady gig was Rise and Shine, a children’s exercise program on cable access, but it was good experience in front of a camera, at least according to an agent I had spoken to, who refused to take me on until I had experience outside of the numerous off-off Broadway shows I’d done.

But as I slid into the yellow leotard and baby-blue tights that were my lot as the show’s co-host, I wondered, for about the hundredth time, what, exactly, my résumé would say about me, now that I had spent six months leaping and stretching with a group of six-year-olds.

“Hey, Colin,” I called out to my co-host once I entered the studio, cup of coffee firmly in grasp. One downside of this job was that it meant getting up at five in the morning to make the show’s six o’clock taping. Apparently, it was the only time the station had allotted studio space for the program, which had a solid, albeit small, audience of upper-middle-class parents and the children they hoped to mold, literally.

Colin looked up from the book he was reading, startled, before he broke out in his usual smile. Colin was the only person I knew who could smile at six in the morning. It was his nature to be cheerful, which was why he was such a fabulous host for Rise and Shine. The kids loved him, and in the six months that I had gotten to know him, I loved him, too. He was warm, generous, loving, good with children. Not to mention gorgeous, with softly chiseled features, blue eyes surrounded by thick lashes and short dark hair always cut in the most up-to-date style. Everything a woman could want in a prospective husband. In fact, I might have dated him until he married someone else—if he weren’t gay, that is.

“Whatcha reading?” I said, bending over to see the title of his book.

“Oh, this.” He smiled, looking somewhat embarrassed as he held up a well-thumbed volume of The Challenges of Child-Rearing. “Figured it might help, you know. With the show.”

I laughed at this. “Colin, we just have to keep them fit, not raise them.”

He chuckled. “I know, I know. But you’ve seen how rambunctious they can get.”

I smiled. Colin really took this job on Rise and Shine very seriously.

“You ready?” he said now.

I sighed. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

It still amazed me that I had even landed this gig—up until my audition, I hadn’t exercised a day in my life. Yet, there I was, every weekday morning, cheerfully urging a group of ten sleepy-eyed kids to stretch, jump, run and tone. Lucky for me, my baby-blue tights were thick enough to hide cellulite.

“Positions, everyone,” Rena Jones, our producer, called out with a glare in Colin’s and my direction. Well, mostly my direction. She adored Colin. And tolerated me. Mostly because she was a stickler for timeliness, while I…wasn’t.

Once Colin and I had positioned ourselves in front of the cameras, I put on my required happy face and chimed in with Colin as we gave a three-minute intro designed to inspire a demographic with probably the lowest body-fat ratio of any age group to jump, leap and stretch, in the name of good health. “Good health is all about habits,” Rena would say, whenever anyone—mostly me—alluded to the fact that most six-year-olds weren’t in need of cardiovascular training.

Still, I took a certain satisfaction in the routine, assured that once the music—a strange mixture of circus rhythms and a singer who sounded like the love child of Barney the Dinosaur and Britney Spears—began, my feet would move into the steps of the opening warm-up dance right along with Colin’s. That when we progressed into the series of stretches, squats and leg lifts, my body was not only limber enough to make all the maneuvers, but could jog, jump and shimmer across the floor while I shouted out inspiring words to the ten little tumblers before us. Children, I might add, clearly struggling to keep up under the eye of their parents, who sat on the sidelines, their faces a mixture of parental pride and paralyzing anxiety that their kid would stumble, fall and be torn too early from the six-week segment they had lobbied long and hard to get said child on.

There was also the reassurance that when the clock against the back wall hit the thirty-minute mark, I would be able to heave a silent sigh of relief (which I disguised as a healthy exhale for the sake of my tiny followers), and bow down into a final stretch before leading the happy munchkins in the applause that ended the show.

“Hanging out with Kirk tonight?” Colin asked as we headed to the small dressing area at the back of the studio. I could tell by the way he always asked that question lately that he took a certain satisfaction in the progress of my relationship. His breakup with Tom two months earlier had been hard—Colin was clearly a one-man man—but he evidently took comfort in the fact that there were others in the world out there who were living monogamously-ever-after.

“Of course,” I replied, with all the confidence a girlfriend should have at the stage Kirk and I were at in our relationship.

Later that very night, however, I realized that Kirk was at a different stage.

I was spending the evening at his place, where I spent most nights during the week. Not only because he lived on E. 27th and Third, which was somewhat closer to the studio on W. 54th than my East Village apartment was, but because we liked to spend our every waking moment together—and every sleeping moment, which was often the case, as Kirk had a tendency to nod off early.

Besides, Kirk’s doorman-building one-bedroom was a welcome respite from the cluttered two-bedroom walk-up I shared with Justin, my roommate and other best friend beside Grace. Kirk’s place was an oasis of order, his closet filled with rows of well-pressed button-downs and movie posters lining the walls with precision (yes, we both loved movies, though Kirk had an unsettling predilection for horror flicks while I liked the classics and anything with Mel Gibson). Even his medicine cabinet was a sight to behold, I thought as I scrubbed my teeth before bed that night. The toothpaste was curled up neatly next to a shiny cup containing his brush; his shaving kit (a gift from the ex that I once tried to replace with a packet of Gillettes, but to no avail) nestled sweetly next to a bottle of Chanel for men (from me, thank you very much, which he only spritzed himself with under serious duress). I also kept an antihistamine there—I had a tendency toward congestion at the slightest provocation: pollen, dust mites, mold. With a contented sigh I spit my mouthful of paste—and water—into the shiny white sink, carefully rinsing out the suds to return it to its porcelain perfection, before I returned to the bedroom, where Kirk sprawled on the bed, laptop in hand, studying the screen intently.

“Time to play,” I said, bounding onto the bed in a pair of boxers and a T-shirt (pirated from his bottom left drawer).

“Just give me a minute, sweetie,” he said, glancing up from the screen briefly to flash me a small smile of acknowledgment.

I settled in beside him, sparing a glance at the screen, which was covered in a series of incomprehensible codes, and picked up the book I kept on Kirk’s bedside table, Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double. Turning to page five, the precise place I had been the last six times I had attempted to immerse myself, I started to read. Well, not exactly read,—my gaze was too busy roaming over to Kirk’s profile.

He had the most beautiful brow line I had ever seen. Almost jet-black against creamy skin and normally smooth, though right now it was furrowed over his gray eyes as they studied the screen, almost without blinking. One of the things I had admired from the start about Kirk was his ability to concentrate against any odds. I didn’t really understand it, frankly, since I inevitably threw away any thoughts of intelligent life the minute I found myself faced with the prospect of sex. In fact, it was Kirk’s seeming lack of awareness of the opposite sex that, oddly enough, had tantalized me from the first.

We met at my “day job,” or second shift, at Lee and Laurie Catalog, where I was a part-time customer service rep to make up for all the money I didn’t get paid as an actor. At the time, Kirk had been working for Lanix, which happened to be the software that Lee and Laurie thrived on, and had come to update our systems. From the moment I saw him, studiously occupied at one of the many terminals that littered the landscape of Lee and Laurie, I was intrigued. Not only was he good-looking, with dark brown hair, intelligent gray eyes, full lips and a strong jaw, he was smart. So smart, in fact, he didn’t seem to notice anyone or anything except the scramble of codes he typed into each terminal as he bounded from cubicle to cubicle. Which was probably why I succumbed to him so quickly, at least according to Grace, whom I called repeatedly to report to on how my every effort at flirtation fell completely flat. Still, I couldn’t stop conjuring up reasons to lure Kirk to my work-station—a lazy mouse, a jammed keyboard (sesame seeds from lunch, but at least I got a smile out of him) and a surprising lack of understanding of the new software updates he’d just installed. And as he patiently wiggled my mouse, dusted my keyboard and explained the new procedures yet again, I made goofy-but-good-natured jokes, standing close enough to “accidentally” brush his arm (delightfully solid) or smile winningly up at his smooth and seemingly unruffled features.

“I’m obsessed with him,” I told Grace during the second week of failed innuendos.

“It’s the challenge,” she replied. “You can’t resist it.”

She was right, I realized later, when I finally gave in to her advice to “just ask him out, for chrissakes,” and he, to my surprise, said yes. But I was hooked good from date one. Kirk was so different from all the men who had come before. For one thing, he made enough money to actually pay for dinner. And I couldn’t help but admire his ambition when he told me his dreams of running his own software company…or his well-toned physique, when things got to that level between us, honed from four times a week at the gym.

Now, as the warmth of that lean, muscled body seeped into my consciousness, I snuggled closer, eyes intent on my book, until I felt his weight shift as he closed the computer shut and reached over to rest it on the night table.

Closing the book with a joyful snap, I thrilled to the feeling of triumph that winged through me, as it never failed to do, even almost two years into the relationship. Call me competitive, call me a nymphomaniac, I don’t give a damn—there was nothing, to me, like the sight of Kirk smiling down at me, a predatory gleam in his eye.