Slow Hands

Prologue
    “O H , MY G OD , I CAN ’ T DO THIS , it’s hopeless! We’re not going to be able to pull it off.”
    Penny Rausch heard the panic in her partner’s voice and struggled to keep her own alarm under control. One of them had to stay calm. Otherwise they were both going to lose their minds…not to mention their fledgling graphic design business.
    “Calm down. We’re almost there.”
    Janice, her partner and more-than-slightly ditzy younger sister, thrust her hand into her spiked blond hair, sending it into even more crazy directions than it had been before. A highly sought-after graphic designer, Janice had no head for business, but wow, was the girl creative…and not just with her hair. Her graphics were incredible. Her drawings collectible. Her fashion sense wildly imaginative.
    Too bad she was pretty helpless in nearly every other aspect of her life.
    “I dropped the file. The last six photos went everywhere. Just shoot me now.”
    She looked utterly exhausted, with dark circles under her eyes and a haggard hollowness in her cheeks. Janice was usually very precise about her appearance, but right now her yellow T-shirt was stained with something that was either ketchup from today’s fries or tomato sauce from last night’s pizza.
    They hadn’t left their office in thirty-six hours. Not since Janice’s expensive, nearly brand-new computer had crashed, taking most of the files for the high-end, glossy brochure they were producing down with it. And almost taking down their company, too.
    Because if they lost this job—creating the programs for a ritzy charity bachelor auction scheduled for next week—they were finished. They wouldn’t make the already-late rent, or keep the power on, or cover the printing bill. They’d be out of business overnight, after only being in it for eight months.
    “We can handle this,” Penny insisted. “We’ve come this far, we’re almost there.”
    “Maybe we could contact Mrs. Baxter…”
    “No. Absolutely impossible.” They could not let the snooty Junior League socialite know they’d had yet another mishap in the design job. No way. They were already on probation, thanks to a few hiccups—like Janice’s case of the flu and a flood in the office. If they admitted to the computer crash, the woman would kick them to the curb for good.
    “I can’t even tell them apart anymore,” Janice wailed, waving toward the table laden with photographs and copy. “Looking at one gorgeous man after another, hour after hour…”
    “Tough job.”
    “It’s not funny. I thought we were in the clear when we found the backup set of hard copies. Why didn’t we put the bachelors’ info on the back when we made them?”
    The biographies of the bachelors being auctioned off to support Chicago’s needy children had been on the backs of the originals. But the originals had gone back to the penny-pinching auction organizer, Mrs. Baxter, once they’d been copied and scanned. Now they had the scans on disc, and they had the hard duplicates. They even had the printed biographies.
    They just didn’t have any of those things together. And they had no way of knowing who was who.
    If not for some easily identifiable, well-known bachelors, some handwritten notes, as well as Google, which they’d accessed on Penny’s still-working laptop, they would have had to give up. But not now. We’re not giving up now .
    “We’re down to those last six men, Janice,” Penny insisted, bending to pick over the spilled photos. She laid them out on the worktable, grabbing the small index cards with the bios. “And I just identified four of them.”
    Janice’s eyes widened in delight. “Really?”
    Penny nodded, putting the correct bio cards with the correct faces, clipping them together in case there were any more spills. “I have spent the past five hours looking at archives in the Trib and I’ve found more of our boys. Eligible bachelors apparently get a lot of press coverage.”
    Janice threw her arms around Penny and squeezed her. “So we’re down to these last two.”
    Yes. Just two. “But we’re out of time. We have less than an hour to get the whole package to the printer’s if we’re going to make the deadline.” No more time to research…no more hesitation.
    Penny lifted the two photographs, studying the handsome faces carefully. Both were dark-haired, but that was where the resemblance ended. One had warm brown eyes, the other vivid blue. One’s hair was short