He looked at her carefully. She was beautiful. There wasn't even a smudge of lipstick on her face.
"Nothing," he said dreamily, and turned away. By the time he was asleep again, his mind had already erased the strange image from his clouded brain—that Livia Cord had absolutely no mouth at all.
It was hard to keep track of the glass-and-steel structures that had been springing up daily along the Fifth-Madison Thruway. When Tom and Livia stepped out of the cab in front of 320, he wasn't surprised that the building—an odd, cylindrical affair with a pointed spire—was strange to him. But he was taken aback to realize that all sixty floors were the property of Homelovers, Incorporated.
"Quite a place," he told the girl.
She smiled at him tightly. Livia was crackling with business electricity this morning, her spiked heels clicking along the marble floors of the lobby like typewriter keys. She wore a tailored gray suit that clung to her body with all the perfection and sexlessness of a window mannikin. In the elevator, shooting towards the executive offices on the 57th floor, Tom looked over at her and scratched his poorly-shaven cheeks in wonderment.
They plowed right through the frosty receptionist barrier, and entered an office only half the size of Penn Station. The man behind the U-shaped desk couldn't have been better suited to the surroundings by Central Casting. He was cleft-jawed, tanned, exquisitely tailored. If his polished brown toupee had been better fitted, he would have been positively handsome.
The handshake was firm.
"Good to see you," he grinned. "Heard a lot about you, Mr. Blacker. All of it good."
"Well," Livia said airily. "I've done my part. Now you two come to terms. Buzz me if you need me, J. A."