by Abby Gaines
“Do you come here often?”
He grinned at the old pick-up line. “Once a year.”
She raised an eyebrow. “The town looked beautiful when we drove through it. With the mountains all around, I’d have thought it would be the perfect place to de-stress.”
“I don’t get stressed.”
If that was true, why did his repressed rage seem even more apparent here in Kechowa?
“I like your parents,” she said.
It was true. She’d liked Beth right away and she felt an affinity with Edward’s more cautious manner. Jared’s father was tall and dark like his son, but that’s where the resemblance ended. Though they’d only been here a day, Jared moved about his parents’ house with an edgy restlessness. In contrast, Jared’s father seemed to measure each pace. Both men had confidence—Jared’s in himself, Edward’s in the orderliness of his world.
But while Jared’s warmth inevitably seemed fueled by impatience, anger—or desire—Edward’s warmth came from a shy cordiality. He’d been reserved to start off, but by the end of the previous evening he’d been chatting freely.
Edward didn’t deserve the hostility directed at him by Jared every time he spoke.
“Why are you so horrible to your father?” Holly demanded. “He’s a sweet man.”
Yeah, that was Dad, all right, Jared thought. Sweet as sugar and just about as good for you.
“I’m not horrible,” he retorted. “We’re just not close. You of all people should understand that.”
“Your parents are very close to each other,” she said. “I don’t know what went wrong with you.”
“When two people have been married that long, I guess they turn into clones of each other,” Jared said. “If that’s what you mean by close.”
“I mean, they seem to communicate in some kind of secret language. That’s what I call close.”
He stared at her, baffled. “What are you talking about?”
She sighed with exaggerated patience. “Your father talks to your mother without words. He says something with his eyes and she says something back. Surely you’ve noticed?”
“I’ve noticed they don’t talk much,” he said. “I think you’ll find that’s because they’ve run out of things to say. Not because they have some imaginary secret language.”
“Oh, brother. You really are—”
“We’re not here to talk about my family,” he said, angry. “If you’ve got anything to say about the Wireless World acquisition, go ahead. Otherwise, shut up.”
“I do have something to say about Wireless World, as a matter of fact.”
She had that crusading light in her eyes again.
“Go ahead,” he said wearily.
“The Greersons have built this business into the dominant player in the South—”
“I know. That’s why I’m buying it.”
She ignored the interruption. “There’s no doubt they have considerable skill on both the technical and operational sides. As far as I can tell, they’ve only made one mistake.”
Leaving Wireless World vulnerable to takeover by Jared. He made winding motions with his hand, to give her the idea she should skip the details.
She pursed her lips. “They won’t welcome your acquisition, and I daresay you’re planning to fire the lot of them.”
So she was familiar with his standard practice. Big deal.
“Family stockholders take this kind of deal too personally,” he said, irritated that he felt obliged to justify his course of action. “It clouds their judgment and they end up sabotaging the business.”
“The Greersons wouldn’t do that. They’ve put everything into that company.”
“However unintentionally,” he continued, “they end up causing trouble. I don’t need that during the transition.”
“Why not give them a chance?” She pushed a piece of paper across the desk to him. “I’ve had some thoughts about how you could employ various members of the family. You don’t have to keep them in the same roles they have now, but you could still benefit from their knowledge.”
His face darkened. “You’re not my personnel manager, and I’m not paying you to develop your own pet theories. If you’ve got something useful to say, say it. Otherwise—”
“Shut up,” she supplied for him. “I just thought—”
“This isn’t a movie where the softhearted, beautiful accountant persuades the hard-bitten executive to give up his callous plan and everyone comes out happy. This is business. Being nice doesn’t come into it.”
Holly opened her mouth to protest, then closed it again. Had he just called her beautiful? Flustered, she changed the subject. “About EC Solutions.”
Jared was reluctant to pick up on her cue. Trouble was, even if he did fool her and he got his revenge on Keith Transom, the day would come when Holly would realize exactly what Jared had done, and the part she’d played in it. Worse than her fury would be the betrayal she’d feel.
Because although Holly might have come into this project thinking him a sleazy jerk, Jared knew he’d earned her respect. But what he was planning to do with Transom went well beyond even Jared’s own ethical boundaries.
For that, Holly would despise him.
Jared looked across the desk at her, where she sat seemingly oblivious to his scrutiny, eyes focused on her screen, her lips pursed.
The room seemed suddenly stifling, and he had to escape. “Come for a walk. Let’s get some air.”
Holly took it as an olive branch—damn her—and her mouth curved into a generous smile that sucked the air out of Jared’s lungs. “Sure,” she said, and she was out the door ahead of him before he could tell her he’d changed his mind, he’d rather go alone.
They walked through the woods that started at the end of the backyard, where oak trees gave way to dense stands of pine and maple. The ground beneath their feet was dry, and sunlight filtered through the canopy above them. Holly took a deep, appreciative sniff of the pervasive, cleansing scent of pine.
“Don’t you just want to bottle this and take it with you?” she demanded.
“That’s what Greg used to say.” Jared could have kicked himself. He didn’t want to talk to Holly about his brother.
When she didn’t speak for a full half minute, he thought maybe she hadn’t heard.
“Were you close to your brother?”
No such luck. She’d obviously been worrying about the best way to broach the subject.
“Close enough,” he muttered. Above his head, the low-pitched caw of a raven mocked him.
“Did you play football, too?”
“One quarterback in the family was enough.”
“You were jealous of Greg.” It wasn’t a question.
“I was not jealous.” He saw her lips press together in a determined effort not to contradict him. “Okay, I admit I had some…younger brother issues. Show me the family that doesn’t. Greg and I were very different kids, but Mom and Dad accepted that. Greg was fifteen years older than I was.”
And that made Jared an afterthought. Why had his parents needed a second son, when the first was all but perfect? No wonder they’d never expected Jared to live up to Greg, never encouraged him to go into football or taken an interest in his passions. Okay, so maybe he had been somewhat jealous. “The age gap meant we weren’t best buddies. But I…loved him.”
Holly scuffed through the undergrowth. “How did he die?”
Jared took his time before he answered. “He killed himself.”
“Oh, Jared.” In her voice, he heard a wealth of sorrow. To his surprise, she took his hand in hers, squeezed it. When she would have withdrawn, he laced his fingers through hers and held on. For maybe another minute they walked like that, hand in hand. And because she didn’t ask how, why, he wanted to tell her.
“Greg was brilliant at everything. A scholar, football player—and when he’d finished his degree he got a job with IBM. Blue chip, that was Greg.”
They came to
a clearing, and Jared guided Holly to a picnic table in the center. The rough, bird-stained surface didn’t look as if anyone had lunched there in a while. They sat on the bench seat, side by side.
“Greg was ambitious, so after five years at IBM he went out on his own, started a software company. Did great, of course. Better than anyone expected—though I always knew he’d make it.”
“Then what?” Holly said at last.
“He started the business with financial backing from a private investor—a loan, rather than a stake. If there was going to be a huge financial gain, Greg wanted it all for himself.” Jared shook his head. “It’s not as if his problem wasn’t anything that millions of companies haven’t gone through before.”
“Cash flow.”
“Yep. He made a couple of huge sales—they would be worth millions when the dollars came in. But the product needed refinement first. That cost money, and Greg didn’t have it.”
“And banks are reluctant to lend money for software development without concrete assets to secure the loan,” Holly said. There wasn’t an accountant in Seattle, home to software legends such as Microsoft, who hadn’t learned that.
Something skittered among the trees behind her, and she twisted in alarm.
“It’s just a squirrel. Or a weasel,” Jared said, putting his hand over hers. “Greg went to his original backer, gave him the projections, asked for more money. And the guy came through. Greg was over the moon. He didn’t read the loan agreement too carefully.”
Despite the fact that it had already happened, that the course of history wouldn’t be changed by this recounting, dread pooled in Holly’s stomach. “What happened?”
“As soon as Greg spent past the point of no return, the guy recalled the new loan. And the original one, too.”
“Oh, no.”
Jared nodded grimly. “The banks didn’t want to know. Overnight, the business was gone, taken over by Greg’s supposed backer.”
“And that’s when—?”
“He didn’t have to do it!” His fist thudded into the brittle wood of the table. “Why kill himself over…what? A bunch of programmers and a few lines of code? Greg could do anything. He wasn’t even thirty years old. If he’d started again he’d have been back up there in no time.”
He took a minute to collect himself; Holly stared at the whorls of a knot in the pine table. “It was the first time he’d failed. Nothing in our perfect family life had prepared him for it, and he didn’t know how to handle it.”
From the flatness in his voice, Holly could tell Jared had been over his brother’s death a million times until he’d salvaged this explanation, poor though it was.
“Is that what your parents think?”
He shrugged.
“If they do, they may blame themselves,” she suggested.
“Sometimes,” he said slowly, “I wonder if their love for him died when his business failed. If it was so out of character for him to disappoint them, that they couldn’t handle it.”
“You can’t mean that.” Not when Holly had seen the still-raw hurt in Beth’s eyes.
“They were so calm, so accepting of his death. It wasn’t natural.”
“What else could they have done?”
“They could have gone after…the guy who called in the loan. Sued him. Not for the money—” he forestalled Holly’s next comment “—but for the principle. That bastard drove my brother to suicide, and was rewarded with a juicy business he’s made millions off. Why should he have gotten away with it?”
“Have you talked to them about it?”
He shook his head. “I was fourteen when Greg died. I ranted and yelled, but they didn’t listen. So we stopped talking, all of us.” He scowled. “Which suited Mom and Dad just fine. They couldn’t stand the stigma of having a kid who killed himself—knowing that everyone was talking about it. They were happy to forget Greg ever existed.”
“But—”
He cut off her protest. “I went away to college a few years later and we haven’t discussed it since.”
“You going into the Internet business,” Holly began tentatively. “You were following in Greg’s footsteps?”
He shook his head. “That’s where the similarity between me and Greg ends. After he died, I went off the rails awhile—petty theft, stuff like that. I think I was trying to tell Mom and Dad not to expect me to fill Greg’s shoes, that I’d never be the golden boy.”
“What got you back on track?”
“Believe it or not, I didn’t have it in me to be really bad.” He ran a hand through his hair, tipped his face up into the sun. “I guess like anyone who’s behaving that way, it dawned on me it wasn’t making me happy.”
Holly knew the hopelessness of that realization. You put all your effort, your focus into one thing, only to wake up one day and realize it would never be enough, that something of supreme importance was missing.
“Wh-what does make you happy? Your business?”
He looked at her almost with dislike, as if he didn’t want to think about it.
“I know what can’t make me happy,” he said. “I can’t be happy with an existence that’s a lie—the sort of life I grew up in, where everything seemed fine, where we looked just like everybody else. But something underneath was so rotten my brother killed himself the first time he made a mistake.”
“But not all normal lives are rotten beneath the surface.”
“Maybe not, but I never want to be so deluded that a bit of bad news could kill me.” He stood, extended a hand to pull Holly to her feet. “In this world, you go after what you want. If you don’t get it, you cut your losses. No hard feelings to chase you to your grave.”
“Is that how you feel about the guy who called in your brother’s loan? No hard feelings?”
A hunted expression crossed Jared’s face, then it turned arctic. “Let’s get back.” He turned and walked away from her.
CHAPTER TEN
IT DIDN’T TAKE A rocket scientist to figure out that Jared’s parents were falling in love with Holly. Wasn’t she the kind of woman any parent would dream of for their son? Pretty, smart, polite and deferential—in complete contrast to her attitude to Jared. And worst of all, she thrived on the cozy domesticity that had Jared pacing in front of the living room windows like a caged tiger.
Jared had brought women home before, partly to relieve his boredom, partly to reassure his parents and their neighbors, who inquired after him all the time. He was straight, he had a life. And Mary Jo, Helena, Cecie, whoever, was the proof. But he’d always taken care not to get his parents’ hopes up. None of the others had been daughter-in-law material. Attractive, sure, but they were lucky to have enough cells to make one brain between them. They were more likely to smirk and say, “This is so cute,” to Mom’s pot roast than they were to attack it with the gusto that Holly applied to everything she ate. They certainly wouldn’t have helped clear away after dinner, showed genuine interest in Dad’s stamp collection or taken crochet lessons from Mom.
He didn’t date dorky women.
So how his mother could be casting speculative looks from him to Holly whenever she thought Jared wasn’t looking was beyond him.
Yes, he’d felt…close to Holly after he told her about Greg when they’d walked together on Saturday afternoon. But that was because she’d caught him at a weak moment. After that, he’d kept things strictly impersonal, Jared assured himself as he stood in the kitchen making coffee on Monday.
Holly was taking a walk outside—he could see her now, through the slats of the wooden blinds above the sink, talking to his father in the garden. No doubt Dad was boring her with the story of his prize-winning camellia. And no doubt Holly wouldn’t be bored.
“She’s a lovely girl,” Beth said behind him.
Jared jumped, slopping hot coffee over his hand. “Ow.” He glared at his mother as he turned the faucet on and stuck his hand under the cold water. “Now look what you made me do.”
“I mu
st admit, when Holly first arrived, I wasn’t sure what to make of her. Those clothes she wears…”
Jared couldn’t help grinning as he peered through the blinds to check out, for only about the fiftieth time today, Holly’s extremely short denim cutoffs and her bright green, midriff-baring tank top.
“I guess I’m getting used to the clothes,” his mother said. “Underneath them is the sweetest, kindest girl.”
Jared stifled a snort. Underneath those clothes was some of the sexiest lingerie this side of the Rockies.
Beth took a deep breath, “I know you say this is only a working relationship, dear—”
“That’s right,” he said coldly to forestall the inevitable “but.”
“But—” so much for that idea “—I get the impression you like her.”
“I like her,” he said, and realized it was true. “But that’s all.” Except he wasn’t so sure about the veracity of that. He considered telling his mother Holly was an FBI fraud suspect—that would put an instant end to this love affair between his accountant and his ultraconservative parents—but reluctantly dismissed the idea. “We have to work pretty closely, so it helps to like her. But she’s not my type. I don’t want to have sex with her.”
He’d been deliberately crude, knowing it would deter Mom from pursuing the subject. Pink rose in Beth’s cheeks, telling him he’d succeeded.
“I don’t want to have sex with you, either,” Holly said from the doorway. She walked into the room, hips swinging with exaggerated casualness, but her gray eyes smoldering. “Now that we’re both clear on that,” she said sweetly, “can I have my coffee?”
Oh, hell.
Beth gave him an amused smile—get yourself out of this one, son—and left the room with a murmured excuse.
Jared decided not to hand the mug over to Holly yet, just in case the contents ended up thrown back in his face. He moved to stand between her and the cups. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Mom was in matchmaker mode and I said the first thing I thought of to shut her up. I knew she wouldn’t want to hear about my sex life.”
