From Boss to Bridegroom

by Victoria Pade

  Lucy Lowry was just one more in a string of women who had passed through his office since Sadie’s retirement, he told himself reasonably. There had been a dozen before her, there would be more after her, and that was all there was to it. What she did outside the office and who she fraternized with were her own business and no concern of his.

  And being eager to see her again this morning?

  It was just…

  Well, he didn’t know what it was. But it wasn’t infatuation.

  He tossed aside his unread newspaper, set his coffee cup on the nightstand and got out of bed, feeling more agitated than eager now. Because the very idea that he might be interested in Lucy Lowry was too much to bear.

  Women didn’t come into his life and tell him what to do. And he sure as hell didn’t like them if they did. He was only tolerating it in Lucy Lowry because he was in dire need of office help and Sadie had assured him he would get it from her niece.

  Yet despite all his sternness with himself, all his reasoning and rationalizing, as he headed for the shower Lucy Lowry popped into his mind’s eye again and he found himself wondering what that burnished hair of hers looked like down, falling in loose curls around her face.

  And if she might wear it that way today…

  Lucy’s doorbell rang at precisely seven-twenty-nine.

  She opened the door, expecting to find Rand Colton on the stoop and instead faced a stout, balding older man in a chauffeur’s uniform.

  She glanced beyond him at the long black Town Car parked at the curb and assumed her boss was waiting there.

  “I’ll be right out,” she informed the driver.

  Then she closed the door again and went into the living room where Max sat on Sadie’s lap, his teddy bear snuggled into the crook of one pajama-clad arm.

  “Okay, buddy, I have to go. Remember what I told you last night—Aunt Sadie will bring you to day care later this morning when she goes to read to the kids. Until then you’ll stay at her place. She’s making you a special breakfast and I put your dinosaur videotape in your backpack so you can watch that if you want or you can watch cartoons. Then you’ll come home with Aunt Sadie this afternoon and stay with her again. I probably won’t be home before you go to bed but it’s only this once and I’ll call you today and again tonight. Got all that?”

  Max nodded solemnly, more asleep than awake and seemingly unfazed by his mother’s imminent departure.

  “I’ll miss you,” Lucy told him.

  “Miss you, too.”

  “Be a good boy.”

  Again the nod.

  Lucy knew he’d be fine. She didn’t have a doubt that Sadie would take good care of him or that he’d enjoy playing with kids his own age at the day care. She knew he did well with other children, that he made friends easily. But she still felt awful leaving him for such an extended amount of time.

  It’s only for today, she reminded herself.

  And fast on that thought came one that had been popping into her head all through the last evening and again this morning like some kind of consolation prize—that she was spending the time away from her son with Rand Colton.

  She didn’t want that to be something that could brighten her spirits. But for some reason it was. Some reason she didn’t even want to think about, let alone analyze.

  “Kiss,” she demanded of her son.

  An instant, impish grin tugged at the corner of Max’s mouth just before he planted a wet one on her cheek. Then he turned his face for her to do the same to him.

  “I’m taking the Triceratops to day care with me,” he informed her in the meantime.

  “Okay, but you know the deal. You have to share.”

  “Then maybe I better take the Tyrannosaurus, too.”

  Max said that as if it were serious business, which, to him, dinosaurs were.

  “Have a nice day.” She ruffled his hair as she said goodbye to her aunt, then forced herself to walk out the door.

  “You have a good day, too,” Sadie called after her.

  The big black Lincoln Town Car outside had windows too darkly tinted to see through, yet knowing Rand was in that back seat made Lucy’s pulse pick up more speed with each step that drew her nearer.

  She wanted to believe it was nothing but first-day jitters. But she knew better. This had more to do with the man himself. And as much as she wished she could deny that fact, she couldn’t.

  There had been something about their brief meeting the day before that had caused him to stick in her mind vividly. Images of his tall, lean-but-muscular body, of his handsome face, even of his big hands, had kept her company all through the night.

  Something about their brief meeting had caused her to wake up earlier than necessary this morning with a desire to dress just so for their coming day and evening together, inspiring her to wear her best suit, a pale blue cashmere that buttoned in a diagonal from her right shoulder to her left hip. It had been an extremely expensive birthday gift from her aunt that she saved for only the most important workdays.

  And worst of all, there had been something about her brief meeting with Rand Colton that had caused her to look forward to today as if it were some kind of special occasion she’d been waiting for her whole life.

  He’s your boss, she reminded herself firmly. Not to mention that he was arrogant and irascible. And that she wasn’t interested.

  But still, as his driver got out and hurried around the car, a twitter of excitement danced across the surface of her skin at the imminence of seeing Rand Colton again. And no amount of telling herself that sense of excitement was completely uncalled-for made any difference.

  When the driver opened the door for her, she got her first view of Rand. Or at least of his profile.

  His dark, dark hair was impeccably combed, his face clean-shaven, and the scent of his aftershave wafted enticingly out to her.

  He wasn’t wearing a suit coat to cover his pristine white dress shirt, complete with French cuffs and cuff links of brushed gold. Against the stark whiteness of the shirt he wore a mauve silk tie Windsor-knotted at his throat. His suit pants were a rich wool that were not quite black and not quite gray but somewhere between the two. He looked better than any man had a right to that early in the morning.

  But Lucy tried not to notice.

  “Thank you,” she muttered to the driver as she slipped into the back seat.

  Rand was writing something on a sheet of paper braced by a leather-bound notebook. The notebook was propped against a massive thigh that was raised with the aid of his ankle perched atop the opposite knee.

  He didn’t look up as Lucy got in and the driver closed the door behind her. He didn’t even say good morning.

  Neither did she. Instead she said, “You’re from California and you don’t know how to drive?”

  “Of course I know how to drive,” he answered, still not looking up from what he was doing. “But I like living in Georgetown and I don’t like taking the Metro into the city.”

  Oh no, no public transportation for His Nibs…

  “Besides,” he went on, “we can get a surprising lot of work done on the way into the office if someone else is behind the wheel and fighting traffic. So yes, I own a car, but I also invest in a service that provides this car and driver.”

  He continued to write at a breakneck pace and apparently didn’t intend to waste any more time on small talk because he said, “You’ll find paper and pen in the pocket behind the seat. Take this down.”

  And so Lucy’s day began.

  From that moment on she barely had time to even notice Rand the man. He was like working with an excessively efficient machine. It took everything she had to keep up with him whether he was rattling off the perfect letter or having her jot down notes on his train of thought in preparation for writing a brief, or ordering her to fix his coffee, or to get a client on the phone or bring him a file.

  He had the most rapid-fire mind—and mouth to go with it—that she’d ever encountered. No wonder
he’d run through a succession of secretaries, Lucy thought more than once during the day. He was almost superhuman and what he really needed was two or three secretaries to meet all his needs.

  Not that Lucy missed a step, because she didn’t. In fact, matching him movement for movement became a challenge to her, and once she’d met that challenge, she one-upped him by anticipating several requests before he actually made them. Even though the job and the pace were not what she would have opted to do every day for the rest of her life, she found it all exhilarating. She found him exhilarating, if she were honest with herself or had had the time to ponder it.

  She did manage to sneak in a phone call to Max while Rand was in court, but beyond that the day flew by. Before she knew it, it was nearly 6:00 p.m. and they switched gears to tackle what Rand called the mess in the library—stacks of papers and files that previous secretaries had obviously set aside to deal with after the maelstrom of Rand’s workday and then never gotten back to.

  But the evening’s work was actually a nice change. After hours her sometimes-hard-to-take boss grew much less intense. Off came the exquisitely tailored suit coat he’d worn from the moment he’d gotten out of the car that morning, joined over a chair-back by his tie. Then he opened the collar button of his hardly wrinkled shirt and rolled his sleeves up to his elbows, exposing a thick neck and forearms so sinewy any construction worker would have been proud of them.

  “Get out those comfortable shoes you said you were bringing,” he advised Lucy as he led the way to the room he less formally referred to as the research room.

  Rand was still all business as they passed the evening going through the stacks of papers. He checked each sheet to make sure what it contained and where it belonged, then handed it to Lucy, telling her which file to put it in.

  It was a monotonous task that didn’t allow for conversation as Rand concentrated on what he was doing. But Lucy found herself waiting almost breathlessly for each of those silences to be broken by the deep tones of a voice so rich it could have come from a jazz singer in a smoky New Orleans bar.

  When all the papers were tucked neatly into the files, Lucy excused herself for a bathroom break and used her cell phone to call Max and bid him good-night. By the time she returned to the office Rand had transferred all the files to the file room where they spent the remainder of the evening sifting through the deep drawers of the cabinets to put the files away.

  She was surprised to find Rand joining her in that portion of the job. Making sure the papers got into the correct files had required his participation, but finding the right slot for them was certainly not something he needed to attend to. Yet there he was, doing just that, right alongside her.

  It was nice, Lucy admitted reluctantly. Nice to see that no job was too small for his attention. Rand Colton might be a bear to work for but he didn’t demand any less of himself than he did of anyone else, and somehow that seemed to cushion the weight of his heavy expectations.

  By ten o’clock Lucy was beat and glad when they finally finished.

  Even Rand seemed worn out as he raised long arms above his head, flexed his broad shoulders and stretched toward the ceiling.

  “Okay, enough is enough,” he said to the accompaniment of his back cracking. “That was quite a day’s work.”

  “No argument here,” Lucy agreed, rubbing at a crick in her neck.

  “I didn’t even let you stop for dinner.”

  “I didn’t let you stop for dinner either,” she countered with a small laugh.

  “I think I owe you that much. What if we hit the diner around the corner before we go back to Georgetown? My treat for a job well done.”

  That was all the invitation sounded like, too. It wasn’t as if he were asking her out on a date or even angling for that. Which, for no good reason, felt slightly demoralizing to Lucy.

  But it was the way things should be, she told herself. He was just her boss, she was just his secretary. They’d put in over fourteen hours of work and he was trying to reward her for it. That was all there was to it.

  Still, though, she knew she should decline the offer. Despite the fact that Sadie was baby-sitting and had long since put Max to bed, Lucy knew she should go home.

  But she was hungry.

  And Max would be asleep and wouldn’t know the difference if she were gone another hour.

  “What do you say?” Rand urged when she hadn’t answered immediately.

  “Nothing fancy?” she heard herself ask right in the middle of giving herself reasons why it wasn’t a good idea to fraternize with the boss.

  “It’s a diner. Definitely nothing fancy. And if you think I can protect you out on the mean streets of Washington, we can walk there, eat and then call for the car so we don’t interrupt whatever sporting event Frank’s watching while he waits for us to page him.”

  Frank was Rand’s driver and was apparently on-call. Lucy thought it was yet another surprise to find Rand considerate of the other man. And as for trusting that Rand could protect her on a late-night walk anywhere, it only took one look at the size of him, at the confidence in his comportment, to judge the notion of not being safe with him a joke.

  “A walk would be good,” she agreed. “I could use the fresh air.”

  “Let’s do it, then.”

  Within minutes they were down the elevator and out in the cold, crisp evening.

  “This way,” Rand said with a nod to his right as he pulled on leather gloves the same charcoal color as the knee-length camel hair overcoat he wore.

  Lucy had buttoned up her own black wool overcoat and also took gloves from her pockets as they headed off down the street that was still alive with people and traffic.

  Neither Lucy nor Rand said much along the way. Lucy could only assume that he was doing the same thing she was doing—winding down.

  The diner around the corner was just a hole-in-the-wall on the bottom floor of the office building abutting Rand’s. It had booths around the perimeter and counter-seating behind which was a cut-out in the wall that opened to the kitchen where orders and plates were exchanged.

  The restaurant was about half-full and Rand led the way to a vacant booth.

  “Workin’ late tonight are ya, counselor?” the waitress called to them from behind the cash register a split second after they sat down.

  She was an older woman with her hair cut in a man’s crew cut and a large black mole below her left eye. Lucy noticed as she approached their table that she was dressed in the classic Liberty-green waitress dress, white apron and white nurse’s shoes that might have come right out of a diner from the 1950s.

  Rand answered her greeting as if they were well-acquainted and ordered two Blue Plate Specials before so much as consulting Lucy.

  When the waitress left he said, “The Blue Plate is pot roast, potatoes, salad and rolls. At this time of night you don’t want anything off the grill. It hasn’t been cleaned since dawn and the food that comes off it is pretty bad. I should have warned you before we got here but since I didn’t I couldn’t do it in front of Gail. She’s part-owner and would have been insulted.”

  The offense Lucy had taken at not being asked what she wanted to eat abated with that explanation. She could hardly fault him for looking out for both her palate and the waitress’s feelings. So she decided to just go with the flow rather than make an issue of Rand Colton’s high-handedness.

  Gail returned with water and asked if they wanted coffee.

  This time Rand raised his eyebrows at Lucy, waiting for her to answer for herself.

  “I’ll have herbal tea.”

  “I’ll have iced tea,” Rand added.

  They’d settled their coats and gloves on the booth seats beside them and so there they were, face-to-face, with nothing to distract them. And although the view was grand since Rand looked every bit as terrific as he had to start the day, it was unnerving to have those penetrating eyes of his studying her as if she were a painting on a museum wall.

  �
�How did you get from California to Washington D.C.?” Lucy asked just to get the conversational ball rolling.

  “I was here a couple of times as a kid. To visit my father. He was a Senator when I was pretty young and my mother brought us here to see him. It was so exciting it stuck with me. Then I spent the summer after my first year of law school here, interning at a think tank, which basically means I spent twelve hours a day, six days a week, researching arcane case law for one of the resident thinkers. I still found the city exciting, though, and since it seemed like a good place to make my mark, after I graduated I decided to put out my shingle here.”

  “Is your family still in California?”

  He raised the chiseled chin that had been freshly shaved during Lucy’s bathroom break to call home. “Hacienda del Alegria—that’s the old homestead in Prosperino. My folks and an assortment of siblings and almost-siblings are still there, yes.”

  “Siblings and almost-siblings?”

  “My family has a colorful history when it comes to kids. There were six biological kids and a slew of adopted and foster kids my parents took in over the years.”

  “Really?” That was interesting, especially given Rand’s stand against his secretary having children. It had left Lucy with the impression that he might not like kids, that maybe he’d been an only child himself.

  “Did you resent your parents taking in foster children?” she asked as their meals were served, thinking that maybe resentment had turned him sour on the subject.

  “Did I resent it?” he repeated as he liberally salted his food. “No, why would you think that?”

  Lucy tasted a small bite of the pot roast, judged it more than edible, and then said, “You’re so against single mothers as secretaries.”

  “Just because it interferes with work. I like kids well enough and I certainly never resented my folks giving a home to foster kids.”

  “How did your parents start that? Had they done it before having a family of their own and just kept it up afterward? Or had they already had all of you and still wanted more?” she asked then, as they both settled into eating.