"I am NOT sleeping with Andrew Simon for the next nine days!" My voice hovered at a pitch that could cause spontaneous insanity in dogs. I was squeezing the tour guide's forearm so tightly, his fingers had turned purple. "Major mix-up in the room assignments. MAJOR mix-up." I might have added that had I wanted to sleep with Andy Simon, I wouldn't have had to fly all the way to Switzerland to do it. I would have done it back in Iowa, like everyone else. But why ruin a man's reputation when he was doing such a good job of it himself?

The tour guide, who'd introduced himself at the Zurich airport as Wally, slid his attention from the hand I'd manacled around his arm, to my chest. A stunned look appeared in his eye. And why not? Thanks to the genius of Victoria's Secret, those of us who were modestly endowed could now flaunt awe-inspiring bosom beneath our turtlenecks. I had to watch myself though. My Click Miracle bra was set on maximum cleavage, so if I stood any closer, I'd poke his eye out.

"Have you misplaced your name tag already?" Wally chided. "It's supposed to hang right there, in the middle of your chest."

Wally was your typical boy next door with a few pounds on his bones and lines on his face. Beaver Cleaver at thirty-five. Brown hair. Receding hairline. Hazel eyes with no apparent eyelashes. Chipmunk cheeks. Pudgy around the middle. But he was half a head taller than I am, wore a suit that smacked of custom-made rather than off-the-rack, and he wasn't wearing a wedding ring. He had serious potential. However, if the only thing he noticed about my chest was the absence of a name tag, I figured we didn't have much of a future together. I consoled myself with the fact that he probably wasn't my type.

Of course, I had no idea what my type was anymore. The issue had gotten confused when I'd met Jack Potter seven years ago. I'd graduated from college with a degree in theater and was trying to peddle my talents as an actress in New York City. To pay the rent, I took a job as a ticket seller at Radio City Music Hall, where I worked beside Jack. We had so much in common, I suspected we were soul mates. He was an aspiring actor. So was I. He loved to shop. So did I. He was compulsively neat. I picked up after myself occasionally. And since both of us were having trouble choosing between eating or paying the rent each month, we decided to pool our resources and share an apartment.

The roommate thing might have worked if Jack hadn't had the body of a dancer and the face of a Roman god, or if I hadn't been consumed by raging hormones and lust. Within a year we became husband and wife. More good fortune struck when we were both offered parts in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Me, in the chorus. Jack as one of the brothers. But things deteriorated when he started borrowing my lingerie and makeup, not just for shows, but on a daily basis. Six months later he pulled a disappearing act and ran off with the actor who played Joseph's understudy. I moved back to Iowa after that, a little older and wiser, but my romantic life has been muddled ever since.

I squeezed Wally's arm a little harder. "My name is Emily Andrew. I don't wear name tags. And I don't sleep with married men."

Wally wrenched his arm from my grasp. "Do you mind? I have no feeling in my hand anymore. And look, you crushed the press on my sleeve." He gave his arm a vigorous rub and me an exasperated look. "We encourage all our Golden Swiss Triangle Tour members to wear their name tags, but of course, we can't force you." He looked me up and down, eyeing me like meat on the hoof.

I exercised regularly to keep cellulite from attaching itself to my five-foot-five-inch, 112-pound frame, so I knew I looked pretty decent in my favorite black leather skirt with the little slit up the side. But my hair was problematic. Not the color, which was a deep mahogany, but the texture. The minute a hint of humidity crept into the air, my coarse, wavy, shoulder-length hair acquired the kind of frizz that straight-haired people only achieved by sticking their fingers into electrical outlets. Since it was raining in Lucerne today, it was only a matter of time before I morphed into Little Orphan Annie, only with green eyes instead of the empty sockets.

"Aren't you a little young to be on a Golden Tour?" Wally finally asked.

"Traveling companion," I said. "I'm with my grandmother."

Nana belonged to a seniors' travel club run by the bank in Windsor City. The bank scheduled tours through a national company called Triangle Tours that arranged transportation, lodging, and a professional tour guide in the country of destination. Since many of the seniors were novices at foreign travel, the bank also provided a local escort to cater to the individual needs of the group. Nana invited me to accompany her on the trip because she said I'd be less bossy than my mother and a lot more fun than the other seventy-eight-year-olds in her retirement village. So being a sucker for flattery, I turned my back on the lure of Club Med for the opportunity to spend nine days in Switzerland with thirty white-haired seniors who made twenty-nine look young.

"Now," continued Wally, "who did you say you don't want to sleep with?"

"Look, Wally, someone made a mistake. I'm supposed to room with my grandmother, not Andrew Simon. In case you didn't know, Mr. Simon is our escort from the Windsor City Bank. He's being paid to accompany the group, not sleep with the guests."

Someone sneezed loudly behind me. I felt a hand caress the back of my neck. "Emily, honey, I just heard the good news. How do you suppose an old coot like me got lucky enough to room with the prettiest little trick on the tour?"

Andrew Simon was short, stocky, and stuck on himself. His year-round tan was out of a tube. His hair color was out of a bottle -- Surfer Blonde, which was something of an anomaly considering the only surfing you can do in Iowa is on the Internet. He'd married his sixth wife, Louise, three years earlier, and since then had whiled away his time swinging golf clubs by day and rehearsing lines for the local community theater by night. Louise was sister to the Windsor City Bank president, which explained how Simon had landed himself the cushy job of escort on the Golden Swiss Triangle Tour. He'd left Louise back in Windsor City, however, since the thought of flying gave her hives and caused her windpipe to swell shut. Not a good way to begin your Golden Swiss holiday.

I snatched his hand from my neck and stood toe-to-toe with him, our noses separated by bare inches, my chest every bit as inflated as his ego. "There's been a mistake. Your first name, my last name. Some out-of-touch administrator must have thought we were family and stuck us in the same room together. What's wrong with your eyes?" They were painfully bloodshot and weepy. "Are you contagious?" I took a giant step backward. He'd probably contracted a fatal disease on the plane and was infecting everyone within a six-mile radius. Bad idea for a holiday. Arrive in Switzerland. Die.

"It's that damned air on the plane. I shouldn't have worn my contact lenses. The pharmacist warned me, but I didn't listen. My eyes are so itchy, I feel like I have the worst case of hay fever in medical history."

He looked as if he had the worst case of bubonic plague in medical history. I inched back another step. I didn't want to be within hearing range when he peeled off his lenses. They'd probably dried out so badly, they were superglued to his eyeballs by now.

"About the room assignments, Emily, I don't know how that could have happened. The bank made all those arrangements. Frieda saw to it personally, and Frieda never makes a mistake."

Frieda Olson had been a fixture at the bank since the first ice age. At eighty-five she was still sharp as a tack and drove into work daily, but her glasses were thick as pond ice, which cast serious doubt on her ability to process paperwork. "I suspect you filled your travel form out incorrectly," I accused. He'd probably written ANDREW in the space for LAST NAME and SIMON in the space for FIRST NAME, which would conveniently give us the same surname and room assignment.

"Emily, honey, why would I do that?"

"Because I'm female and conscious?"

"Emily Andrew, are you hinting that I planned this mix-up?" His gaze drifted to my chest. It made me wish Victoria's Secret had come out with a padded underwire that lifted, separated, and launched rocket grenades. I seized Wally's arm again.

"Wally here is going to fix the problem. Aren't you, Wally?"

Copyright © 2003 by Mary Mayer Holmes