Tangled: Contemporary Romance Trilogy

by Dee Bridgnorth

  Yeah. That didn’t surprise me. Fishing trip. Remember? Florida? I sighed and pressed my lips together. Ruth had to figure this stuff out on her own, but I kind of felt sorry for her. All that time she had put in being Mr. Moss’s spy and now he couldn’t even have the decency to make sure that she had a job in the next administration? Sheesh. No loyalty among disloyal coworkers, right?

  “He left!” Ruth was getting louder. She marched into my office and stood right in front of my desk. “Mr. Moss introduced me to this new—this—this—acquisitions manager—and then he told me he was going to Florida for the week and that I shouldn’t worry about him.”

  “I’m sorry, Ruth.” I even did my best to sound sorry. “That must be a horrible shock.”

  “I shouldn’t worry about him?” Ruth snorted and plopped her plump hands on her plumper hips. “That jackass! And let me tell you about Mr. Acquisitions Manager! Oh my word! The man is insufferable. Of course he is a handsome devil. I’ve never seen a man with curls like that! It’s positively rakish! And his eyes!” She was actually fanning herself with one hand. “His eyes are green, Eleanor. Green! Can you imagine?”

  Actually, I could. And I was getting a very uncomfortable flashback of what it felt like to stand really close to Kevin’s chest and stare up into those eyes. But he had been older. Twenty-two to my nineteen. A man of the world. My first… Well, a lot of firsts if I was honest. But that had been fifteen years ago. It was a lifetime. He was probably middle aged-looking and paunchy like every other desk jockey type.

  “Eleanor!” Ruth stomped one high heel on my carpet. “Are you listening to me?”

  “Of course.” I cleared my throat. “I was just wondering how this situation was going to work out. That’s all. Mr. Moss wasn’t specific as to whether or not I was to meet with Mr. Landau or not. So I’m waiting here in my office trying to get some work done until the decision become obvious.”

  “Work?” Ruth gave a derisive snort. “There’s no work to be done if you ask me. Why would you want to do anything until you hear what Mr. Fancy Pants has to say? I’m telling you, Eleanor. There is going to be a reckoning around here.”

  “Is that right?”

  There was some movement going on in the huge common room we used for meetings that sat in the center of the office suite. It reminded me of school. They were lining up as though they were going out to recess or something. What on earth was happening here?

  Ruth apparently wondered the same thing because she went bolting out of my office as though her hair had caught fire. I wasn’t in that much of a hurry. I had known Kevin Landau as a young man. He had been working at a local department store back in those days. I didn’t know what he would be like as a recruiter or as an executive in charge of a company buyout, but I didn’t figure he would be anything other than decisive. It was just his personality.

  So I hid. It was cowardly, yes. I wondered if now was a good time to call my sister and see if her future husband could just give me a janitorial position at his company. It was pathetic. But I really didn’t want to face what was probably going to happen in the next few weeks.

  “Hey! You can’t do that! Who gave you the authority to do that? Where’s Eleanor? Did you clear this with her?”

  I jerked in my chair and fought the urge to crawl underneath my desk. Leave it to Owen Phillipson to try and pull me into an argument. I knew it was Owen because he had perhaps the most annoying voice of any man I’d ever met. It was high pitched like a woman’s and he talked with that trademark St. Louis speed that left him dropping g’s and forgetting to annunciate half his words. And of course, Owen always thought that he was the shit because his brother worked for Gateway Business Weekly. The two of them were constantly cooking up bogus stories for the magazine to run in hopes of flushing out one business lead or another.

  “Who is Eleanor?”

  Oh God.

  His voice! I clenched my hands into fists until my nails were digging into my palms. Kevin’s voice was deeper. It was richer and fuller and it gave me an almost irresistible urge to take a peek. Because that voice belonged to a man, but it was still Kevin and that was doing very serious things to my insides.

  I was a mess. My heart was hammering against my ribs. My palms were sweating. My toes curled over in my sensible dress shoes. I had worn a very classy black suit today. Pencil skirt, fitting white blouse, fitted jacket. My hair was back in a bun and my makeup was absolutely perfect. Not too much. Not too little. And I’m not going to pretend that all of this wasn’t intentional either. The only thing I had on my side was surprise. As least I hoped I had surprise. Mr. Moss had been surprised to hear that I knew Kevin Landau. That meant nobody had mentioned to Kevin that Eleanor Schulte was the current recruiting manager here at St. Louis Software Staffing Solutions.

  Well, not until now.

  “Eleanor is our recruiting manager,” Owen announced, presumably to Kevin Landau. “You can’t just put us out on the street without Eleanor’s okay.”

  I sighed. Owen was such a twit. He had absolutely no understanding of how this worked. Our firm employed entirely too many recruiters to begin with. We had one office. Recruiters barely managed to fill maybe one or two jobs a month. I averaged twenty. It was a bit extreme. But I worked with the salespeople and did my best to try and find permanent placements in just about every capacity I could think of. From huge car companies and industry giants like Budweiser to local dental offices who needed an IT guy on hand to keep their machines and software working.

  I stood up from my desk and smoothed my skirt. It was time. I might not want it to be time, but it was. I pasted a very neutral expression on my face and prepared to walk naked into hell. That was seriously overdramatizing things a bit. But you get what I mean.

  “Well, I suppose this Eleanor and I will simply have to come to an understanding then,” Kevin told Owen Phillipson. “You and your friends have not produced nearly the number of new hires that would possibly merit your continued employment. So if this Eleanor person wants to keep you around, she’s going to need to explain to me why you’re worth keeping.”

  “Eleanor!” Owen’s palpable relief at my appearance in the common area was short lived when I didn’t immediately throw down on his side. “Eleanor, he’s just firing us!”

  I spotted Ruth and her administrative cohorts standing in a corner. They were all whispering with their heads together. It was impossible to tell whether or not they honestly believed that they were somehow immune from what was happening. They didn’t matter right now.

  In fact, the only thing that mattered right now was the man standing in the center of the room. He was over six feet tall. At least six foot one or two. When had that happened? Had he grown in his twenties? Did people do that? And how was it that he could gain that much muscle mass when he was a desk guy? I’d been expecting the paunchy, kind of heading toward middle age look with the hair thinning on top and spiced with gray and the face lined from too many cups of coffee and donuts in the company break room.

  Yeah. Not exactly what I was seeing here. Kevin Landau was hot. Not just hot but hawt. Like, oh my God, ladies, look out, this guy is going to make your panties wet, hot! He was tall and broad shouldered with a trim waist. His suit jacket looked as though it had been custom made for him. He wore a deep blue dress shirt that really showed off his tanned neck and the dark stubble on his face. His slacks were just tight enough to give you a hint of a really nice ass. And the guy had the most incredible black curls a woman could possibly imagine. The soft hair fell across his forehead, over his ears, and around his neckline as though he had just neglected to get his hair cut. It was delightfully messy in a way that invited touching. Not that his expression could possibly suggest that was a good idea.

  The word cold came to mind. Of course, that was right before Kevin spotted me. And then the word mad came immediately into my head. Wow. Not only had he not expected to see me here, my presence was not likely to do anyone any favors. Myself included. If I had
wondered in the back of my mind whether or not Kevin Landau held a grudge against me for that little incident at the church all those years ago, the answer was a resounding yes.

  “Eleanor Schulte,” Kevin said in a rumbling voice. “What an unpleasant surprise.”

  Well, that was pointed enough for just about everyone in the room to look at me as though they were dying to know what the backstory was. I just barely managed to hold it together. Funny how coming face to face with the man you were supposed to marry after fifteen years and a whole lot of miles just sort of smacks you in the gut.

  But I got the distinct feeling that this was hitting him just as hard, if not harder, than it was me. Interesting. He hadn’t known that I would be here, but he knew that I was in this city. He hadn’t been back more than a handful of times since our ugly breakup. He had been in Kansas City. I had always assumed that Kevin was leading a happy life in another city with a wife and a house full of kids or something. That was what he’d always wanted. Now I wasn’t so sure. I was beginning to think that we were both married to our work and probably getting equally old, crotchety, and maybe just a little stuck on the idea of revenge.

  Uh oh.

  “Owen?” I turned to look at the whiney young man who was currently staring between myself and Kevin Landau with his mouth hanging wide open as though he could not figure out what had just happened. “Mr. Landau is here as a representative from the company that purchased this office, the accounts, the furnishings, and even your contacts list from Mr. Moss. Let me assure you that this does not guarantee any of us a job. I spoke with Mr. Moss. He isn’t concerned about any of it. So if you expect anyone to hold your hand through this process, then you’re sadly out of luck. If Mr. Landau has decided that it is in his employer’s best interest to downsize, then that’s what’s going to happen.”

  There was a rumble throughout the room. They were angry with me. Oh well. I would save as many jobs as I could, but I wasn’t even likely to save my own so I didn’t see that there was much I could do.

  Chapter Five

  Kevin

  I was still mentally reeling from the random and sudden appearance of Eleanor Schulte in my already chaotic return to the personal hell that was St. Louis. This morning had been a nightmare so far. If that made me melodramatic so be it. I had woken up to my sister singing in the shower. My father had apparently spent the night in his recliner. I accidentally hurt my mother’s feelings when she found out I didn’t have time to go to breakfast with her. Apparently, I was her substitute daughter while I was in town since my sister wasn’t able or willing to fill that role. It was raining cats and dogs and there was no covered parking left at my parents to keep me from getting soaked on the short walk from the front door to my SUV. Therefore, I had arrived here at the offices of St. Louis Software Staffing Solutions feeling damp and clammy and in a generally bad mood.

  And then of course I walked into the office of Mr. Lawrence Moss and was informed that he would be leaving for Florida in a few hours and that I could just help myself to whatever I needed. The idiot even had the gall to give me the elbow and tell me that the administrative assistant that I was apparently inheriting from him knew all the office gossip if I needed it.

  Office gossip. No wonder the numbers in this place were dismal. And then to top it all off—Eleanor Schulte. Not just in the city. Not just in my parents’ neighborhood or at the corner grocery store. The bane of my life was actually employed as the recruiting manager here at the company I was supposed to reorganize. If Dan and Todd wanted me to fail, they had certainly set the stage to make it happen and they probably didn’t realize just how far they’d stacked the deck against me.

  Knocking. At my office door. There had been a knock at least every ten minutes. I’d actually started keeping track. Ruth Powers was the kind of woman who could not help herself. I was closeted inside Mr. Moss’s office on the second floor of the complex. The entire office building was antiquated. The set-up looked like something from some eighties movie about an office. I had this vision of Lawrence Moss standing at the head of the huge staircase addressing the minions below for weekly pep talks or something.

  “Mr. Landau? Mr. Landau?” Ruth pushed her way into the office when I didn’t answer her summons. “Mr. Landau? Can I get you coffee? Would you like me to preorder your lunch? If you want Bread Co to deliver, you need to get your order in well before eleven in the morning.”

  “I’m good. Thanks,” I told Ruth without glancing up from the report I had been reading and rereading on the desk in front of me.

  I wanted to get the hell out of here for lunch. It was tempting as hell to make Eleanor go with me just to see her squirm. But I was afraid that would involve a lot of squirming on my part too and I had already made a total fool of myself in that department.

  “Oh.” Ruth was biting her lip. I could almost hear her internal monologue going at about a million miles per hour. That was one thing that I had quickly gotten used to in Kansas City. People talked slower. And this made them far easier to understand. “Well, did you need any other reports or information? I’ve got access to all of Mr. Moss’s files. I used to pull things for him all the time.”

  “I’m sure you did,” I murmured. I could actually see her doing more than that. Mr. Moss had files on everyone that had nothing to do with employment. “Can you pull the employment files for all of the recruiting managers for me?”

  “There are only two.”

  “Two?” I couldn’t stop myself from looking up at Ruth. “There are over forty recruiters here and twenty people on the sales staff. How are there only two recruiting managers?”

  Ruth shrugged. “Mr. Moss didn’t need any more than two. Charlie Cummins is a local guy. His father was a Purina executive back in the day so he knows just about everyone in the local market. And of course Eleanor handled most of the candidates. The vetting and all. That woman is a machine. She can interview twenty people in a single day if she takes the notion to.”

  Ruth was talking about a million miles a minute. I was having difficulty keeping up with her, but fortunately I didn’t need most of what she was continuing to babble about. Ruth was busy explaining to me that the administrative staff was the real workforce around here. They pushed the paperwork through. They handled benefits and retirements accounts and kept the place running while the recruiters just sort of hung around and drank coffee and made cold calls. Obviously, Ruth was putting a good word in for the sisterhood of secretaries. That was fine. But it wasn’t going to go far with the Midwest IT business model.

  “Fine,” I told Ruth more sharply than I’d intended. “Get me the files on Charlie Cummins and Eleanor Schulte. Then ask them both to come to my office.”

  “One at a time?” Ruth squeaked.

  “No. At the same time,” I decided.

  Yeah. I’m such a big badass, aren’t I? I couldn’t possibly imagine myself being able to handle a one-on-one conversation with the woman I had once expected to spend the rest of my life with so I was going to use her coworker as a buffer.

  I had to give Ruth credit. She had those files on my desktop in about thirty seconds. It was like she had pre-pulled them, except I hadn’t asked. So she was really working the efficiency angle at the moment. Fine.

  I perused the file on Charlie Cummins first. I forced myself to wait for information on Eleanor. It was some weird kind of personal torture and it made no sense. There was no possible purpose in forcing myself to wait. Other than the mild possibility that once I started reading Eleanor’s file I wouldn’t stop.

  Charlie was the quintessential recruiting manager. His biggest asset was that his family was connected to just about every big corporation in the city. That made him useful as long as he was willing to keep mining his contacts for job placements. He appeared to have an MBA from the University of Missouri at Columbia and had a family. That made him stable. His numbers were average. Pretty much what I could expect from the run-of-the-mill recruiter at our Kansas City office.
Not spectacular, but enough to get by.

  That left me staring at Eleanor’s file. She was single. Hmm. I wasn’t sure why I found this a compelling bit of necessary information. It was really none of my business. Her address was familiar to me. I felt like I’d spent a million nights knocking on that front door. She lived with her parents. Nice.

  I shook my head. That was unexpected. Eleanor lived at home with her folks and spent almost all of her time vetting candidates and placing them. She seemed to be the only one in this entire office who realized the value of the permanent placement where you no longer had to be responsible for a new hire’s benefits or retirement. They were a flat fee that worked like instant cash. No expiration date. No risk of that candidate winding up unemployed on your bench requiring you to pay them with no hope of return on investment for months at a time while you found them another placement.

  Eleanor had an almost one hundred percent permanent placement rate. That meant she did business in much the same way that I did. Why did that piss me off? I was still puzzling that out when my door opened and both Charlie Cummins and Eleanor Schulte walked in.

  I forced myself to look at Charlie. He was a pretty average middle-aged guy in khakis and a polo shirt with thinning brown hair and a wide toothy smile. He stuck his hand out over the top of my desk. “Mr. Landau, so good to meet you. I look forward to working with you to bring this office into the new millennium.”

  At least Charlie felt like this place was stuck in the eighties. That was a bonus. I took his hand and shook it. I liked the way it made me feel as though the two of us were deliberately excluding Eleanor. She needed to realize that she wasn’t going to get any favors from me based on past acquaintance.

  “Mr. Cummins, I’ve been going over your file and your numbers. You’ve been keeping up with the same standards that Dan and Todd Hopper expect of the KC employees. I think you’ll be a good help in making this transition go smoothly.”