Read Online Chasing Harry Winston by Lauren Weisberger - Free Book Online

for, testing every brand on the market for softness and puffiness—slid to the floor and nearly knocked the bonsai tree off the nightstand. Russell didn’t appear to notice. “Why don’t I make you some tea?” he asked.
    Again Leigh felt like she needed to harness every ounce of willpower not to scream. She didn’t want to go to bed. She didn’t want tea. She just wanted him to stop talking .
    She took a deep breath, slowly, without being obvious about it. “Thanks, but I’m really fine. Just give me a few more minutes, okay?”
    He gazed at her with an understanding smile before bounding out of bed and wrapping her in a bear hug. She felt her body stiffen; she couldn’t help it. Russell just hugged harder and sneaked his face into the crook of her neck, wedging it in just above her shoulder and under her chin. His five o’clock shadow scratched her skin and she squirmed.
    “Does it tickle?” He laughed. “My dad’s always said I’d eventually have to shave twice a day, but I never wanted to believe him.”
    “Hmm.”
    “I’m going to get some water. Want some?”
    “Sure,” Leigh said, although she didn’t. She turned her attention back to the manuscript and had worked her way through half a page when Russell called from the kitchen.
    “Where do you keep the honey?”
    “The what?” she yelled back.
    “The honey. I’m making us tea and I want to make it with warm milk and honey. Do you have any?”
    She took a deep breath. “It’s in the cabinet above the microwave.”
    He returned moments later with a mug in each hand and a bag of Newman’s Own chocolate chip cookies between his teeth. “Take a break, baby. I promise I’ll leave you alone after a midnight snack.”
    Midnight? Leigh thought. It’s one-thirty in the morning and I have to be up in five and a half hours. Not to mention that not everyone has the naturally toned body of an elite college athlete and can afford to chow cookies at all hours.
    She bit into a cookie and remembered all the years in her early and mid-twenties that she had wanted this scene so badly: the doting boyfriend, the romantic late-night picnic, the comfortable apartment filled with all the things she loved. Back then it had felt almost impossible or, at least, very far away; now she had it all, but the reality didn’t feel anything like the fantasy.
    With cookies barely swallowed and tea still unfinished, Russell curled himself around a pillow and promptly fell into an intensely deep and restful sleep. Who slept like that? It never ceased to amaze Leigh. He claimed it came from a childhood surrounded by chaos, from learning to sleep through the clamor of two parents, two sisters, a live-in nanny, and three chatty beagles. Perhaps. But Leigh figured it had more to do with his clear conscience and his clean living and, if she was going to be really honest, with the fact that his life just wasn’t really all that stressful. How hard would it be to sleep like a baby if your daily routine included two hours of exercise (an hour of weights and an hour of cardio) and lacked caffeine, sugar, preservatives, white flour, and trans fats? If you taped a weekly thirty-minute show on a subject (sports) you loved innately just by virtue of being male, and had a team of writers and producers who put it all together for you to read? If you had healthy and productive relationships with both family and friends, all of whom loved and admired you for just being yourself? It was enough to make a person sick, or at the very least resentful, which, if she was being perfectly frank, it often made Leigh.
    Tonight it succeeded only in making Leigh desperately want a cigarette. No matter that she’d quit nearly a year ago, right when she and Russell started dating; not a day went by that she didn’t desperately yearn for a nice long drag. Smokers always waxed poetic about the ritual of it, how a large part of the satisfaction was packing the box and pulling the foil wrapper and plucking