Chapter One.

Candy Kane was fretting as she awakened that morning in early October. She was scheduled to meet downtown with a couple of attorneys representing her employer, Aerospace Technologies, Inc., along with a mediator. This was the result of the sexual harassment suit she had filed against them. The fact was there was nothing to the suit; the reality was that the “sexual harassment” had been in the form of the lack of same. Candy thought she had just been ignored.

And the reality was that she had been. On the other hand, she was honest enough with herself to admit — privately — that ignoring her was the best possible behavior on the part of her coworkers: She was as prickly as a porcupine. This, in turn, largely resulted from the fact that she hated herself and for as long as she could remember had felt she was ugly as sin. The reality was that — probably as a result of an accident when she was very young — her mouth and jaw were horribly misshapen with her teeth having grown in at odd angles. She even had two pairs of teeth with one behind the other. At a time when schools were featuring self-esteem, Candy’s was in very large negative numbers.

Furthermore, she considered herself to be flat as a board. The reality was that she had a gorgeous figure, albeit with a pair of small breasts. Although they were small — sort of a B-minus cup — they were perfectly shaped with lovely little nipples that sat on areolae scarcely larger than the nipples themselves. Because she never wore a bra — never feeling the need for one — she had always totally misinterpreted the looks in her direction. She thought the men were laughing at her when in fact they were admiring her lovely body with its gorgeous little ass. At five feet nine, she was a tall girl with much of her height in a pair of perfect long legs. But Candy never realized that.

Then there was her name itself. She always thought it was the perfect name for a stripper — Candy Kane — and had even thought about stripping. Two things stopped her cold: her face, distorted by her misshapen jaw, and a figure with all the curves — she thought — of a straight stick. Nonetheless, she had investigated the possibility of silicone implants, and had actually gone to see a plastic surgeon who did such work. She was immediately turned off, though, when his receptionist — one of his earlier patients — proudly stripped off her blouse to reveal a pair of size double-D melons that, in Candy’s opinion, looked utterly ridiculous on her slender frame. While reaching that conclusion, it never occurred to Candy that her figure was far better than the girl’s. Her shoulders were broader, her buns were far nicer, and her legs were utterly magnificent. The receptionist’s legs were okay, but most of her height — five feet three — was in her torso; proportionately, her legs were quite short.

The other thing that affected Candy was the fact that she was a mechanical engineer and a very good one. In her more objective moments she realized that it was only her engineering talent that kept her employed. I would have fired my ass within the first thirty days, she admitted to herself.

Finally, there was her relationship with her parents who were now both dead. It started, she realized, with her name: She hated it and always had. Candace Kane wasn’t so bad, she admitted, but from the very beginning she had been Candy, and she hated it. Perhaps because of her strained relations with her parents things were worse than they needed to be; she was an only child born to her parents late in their lives: her mother had been 48 and her father had been 56 when she was born.

It was over parental objections that she had decided to become an engineer. Moreover, she realized that the reason for her becoming an engineer was probably because they objected. At any rate, she had gone to Cal Tech where she received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, as well as completing all the course work for her doctorate. In fact, she had recently submitted her just-completed dissertation based on her own machine design work.

Now at age 27 she was at a bit of a loss. In spite of its name, Aerospace Technologies wasn’t an aerospace company at all. Located in Huntington Beach on the Pacific coast south of Los Angeles, it was a machine tool company. The company had been founded by a couple of engineers from McDonnell-Douglas who had developed some computer-controlled machine tools with aerospace applications. When McDonnell-Douglas wasn’t interested in pursuing their ideas, they left and founded their own company. In the intervening years, it had grown and prospered, but Candy felt it could have and should have been doing far better than it was.