Twenty-nine-year-old Julie Weston, President and CEO of GummiSoft, the top-notch children's software company she founded seven years ago, looked nothing like the glamorous image she'd projected in last month's People Magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People."
Instead of the risque, fetching Versace gown slit down her navel, she wore faded and torn denim cutoffs and a cheap T-Shirt with a long-dead high-tech company's logo on it. Instead of a perfect make-up job with Liquid Rose lipstick and Blue Sky Number 12 eyeliner, she wore a coating of dust and cobwebs from head to toe. Instead of her delicate fingers gripping the stem of a crystal goblet of champagne as she winked a toast to the reader, she gripped the scarred and worn leather handle of an ancient trunk as she dragged it from a dark corner of the filthy attic.
Yet somehow Julie still managed to look stunningly beautiful. The shorts exposed miles of creamy bare leg and thigh, and her ass looked amazing bulging through the holes of the torn cutoffs. The cheap T-Shirt hugged her full bosom impressively, and the dust and filth just served to make her look more human and approachable. If a man had been anywhere around, he would have immediately taken Julie and kissed her on the mouth. She had that look of frustrated exhaustion that just demanded a kiss.
Julie was exhausted for good reason: she'd spent the past day and a half rummaging through all the old junk in her parent's house. Four days ago her father, after a battle with prostrate cancer, had finally succumbed to the inevitable. Julie wasn't particularly moved. She'd been expecting it for over a year, and she and her father hadn't been close since the divorce when she was eleven, though after her mother had died, they kept in touch and occasionally celebrated Christmas together.
She missed her mother. That was strange, as they had never gotten along very well. Julie had been bitter about the divorce and blamed both her parents. She also had hated that her father got to keep the house and she and her mom had to move. It was what her mother wanted -- she had accepted a position at a prestigious law firm in San Francisco -- but Julie had been devastated to leave all her friends. It had taken the car accident for Julie to realize how much she depended on her mother. They may not have been best friends, but her mother was an intelligent and capable person, and Julie had incorrectly assumed that level of advice and support would always be around.
Her mother's advice and comfort was exactly what she needed right now, during this trying time. The company had gone public a year ago, and while technically Julie was a very wealthy person, there was a huge amount of pressure on her to hand the reins over to a more experienced manager. Julie had built GummiSoft from nothing and hated the thought of losing control of her baby, but she knew she had little business experience and Wall Street demanded top-level management. Still, she felt her most important assets -- solid technical skills, intimate, almost intuitive knowledge of the market, and her ability to put together incredibly advantageous deals -- would serve the company best. MBAs were a dime a dozen.
Then, in the middle of the battle for her company, her father passes away. Julie hated leaving Leon in charge while she cleaned up her father's mess, but something had drawn her here. She needed this. She needed to rummage through old memories and put some crap behind her. She was expert at detecting and following her hunches, and intuition told her that this was where she needed to be right now.
The trunk was enormously heavy, and Julie strained with all her strength to drag it to the middle of the room where the single bare bulb glowed dully. The lock on the trunk was rusted, so Julie got a hammer and busted it off. She couldn't imagine what was in the trunk. She'd already sorted through most of the books and boxes of rotted clothing and junk. She hefted open the lid.
And gasped.
Inside, curled in half, feet to nose, was Nanny. Tears instantly came to Julie's eyes when she saw how horribly Nanny had been treated. The robot couldn't feel anything, of course, but it was a shame to see her dusty and abandoned inside an old trunk.
