Emily: Sex and Sensibility

by Sandra Marton

  “A what?”

  “A piano. One of those big things you see at concerts. The pianist wore a tux. The real deal, you know, a black tux, the coat with that funny-looking split tail—”

  “A white grand piano,” Marco said slowly.

  “No, sir. It was black—”

  “A white piano. The white vases on the glass risers, the vases filled with tall glass candles and alternating with tall white—”

  “Lilies,” Stein said excitedly. “White candles. White lilies. White piano. A guy in a white tuxedo.”

  “A woman,” Marco said, “in a white evening gown.”

  Stein nodded his head furiously. “Yes, sir! That would work. We already have the vases. I can get the candles, no sweat. And flowers—we won’t need anywhere near as many since we’re also using candles. As for the piano—no problem, I’m certain.”

  “In which case, all we lack is the piano player.”

  “They call them pianists, sir.”

  “They call them piano players,” Marco said, fighting back the little rush of anticipatory excitement that went through him.

  ******

  Stein left to deal with the piano, the flowers and the candles.

  “I’ll handle the rest,” Marco told him.

  “The rest,” of course, was Emily.

  He’d come away last night without her phone number, even without her last name but then, he’d never anticipated seeing her again. Getting in touch with her now was only logical. Nothing about it was personal. He needed a piano player. She needed a job. Now that he thought about it, he hadn’t really bought into her breezy Oh, my agent will find me something else. If it were that easy, she wouldn’t have been working in the kind of dive she’d described.

  This was business, plain and simple.

  He considered going to see her but decided against it. Too personal. A would-be employer would not turn up at a would-be employee’s door. Not that he would actually be her employer. This was a temporary job…

  “Hell,” he muttered, and reached for the phone.

  His attorney listened, asked for Emily’s address, said he knew just who to contact and would get back to him with the information within the hour.

  “Unless you want a full background check.”

  “I want an address and a phone number,” Marco said brusquely. “Nothing more.”

  Twenty minutes later, he had her last name—Madison—her cell number and her landline number

  All he had to do now was contact her.

  Why was he hesitating? What he was about to do was logical. Eminently logical.

  Nothing about this was personal.

  She needed a job. He needed a piano player. It was a win-win situation, a problem solved for him, a problem solved for her. It might even be more than that for her. This was only a one-day event but it would provide her with excellent media coverage.

  That kind of exposure was surely good for an entertainer. Not that he’d gotten the impression she saw herself as an entertainer. He hadn’t even gotten the sense that she saw piano as a career. It hadn’t been in anything she’d said but in her attitude. Maybe she was still looking for a career.

  Whatever. That didn’t matter.

  Her future was not his concern. Solving Wednesday’s problem was.

  Still, calling Emily himself struck him as almost as unwise as going to see her.

  Marco frowned.

  Normally, he’d have told his PA to handle things, but…

  But he did have an HR manager.

  He dialed her extension, quickly explained that there’d been a change of plans for the Wednesday opening of Twenty-two Pascal.

  “Of what, sir?”

  Hell, he was an idiot! What would Human Resources know about it?

  Marco filled her in on the situation and on how the company was dealing with it.

  “Well,” the head of HR said cautiously, “that’s great news—but what does it have to do with Human Resources?”

  Marco cleared his throat.

  “Obviously, we need someone to play the piano.”

  “Ah. Well, sir, unfortunately, I’m afraid I wouldn’t know how to go about locating a pianist—”

  “A piano player,” Marco said, “and I already know of someone. I’ll give you her name and number. Call her, explain that we have a one-day job for her and ask her to come in this morning.”

  “You want me to call this person, sir?”

  “Of course,” Marco said briskly. “We will be employing her, will we not?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “All hiring at MS Enterprises is done through your office, Mrs. Barnett.”

  “I really don’t know what to ask her, Mr. Santini. I mean, what should I look for in her résumé?”

  “Never mind a résumé,” Marco said briskly. “Just call her, tell her what we want and have her come in to sign the necessary documents.”

  “And if she asks how we know about her, sir?”

  Marco put his hand to his forehead. It was an excellent question.

  “Never mind.”

  “But you said—”

  “I’ll handle this myself.”

  Was he insane? He was making more of this than necessary. Emily played piano. She needed work. He had a piano. Well, a building his company had restored had a piano or it would have a piano and Dio, all he had to do was phone her and tell her he was offering her a job. Easy, especially since he wouldn’t even be in town on Wednesday.

  He’d be in Paris.

  Marco took a deep breath. Picked up the phone. And stared at it.

  His mouth was dry.

  This was ridiculous! He was behaving like a teenage kid calling a girl for a date. Not that he’d ever been a teenage kid calling a girl for a date. He’d discovered sex at seventeen with the mistress of the rich American who’d hired him to clear out the tangle of trees and shrubs behind the house the man had put up on the cliffs outside Catania.

  She’d kept him happy that entire summer, and by the end of it he’d saved enough money to emigrate to the States where he’d worked his ass off doing what he still thought of as donkey labor. Anywhere he could find it.

  The girls, long-legged American beauties, had found him.

  He punched in the cell number the attorney had given him. It rang and rang and then a robotic voice announced that the number was no longer working.

  OK.

  Maybe that was a sign…

  Except that she had a regular phone as well as the mobile and he had that number, too.

  Quickly, he punched in the numbers for the landline. The phone rang five times. Then another electronic voice announced that there was no one there to take the call.

  At the sound of the tone, please leave a message.

  Marco cleared his throat. “Emily. This is Marco Santini. Do you remember me?”

  He winced. Of course she would remember him. Not even twelve hours had gone by since they’d met. Since he’d kissed her like a man who’d lost control of his sanity.

  “What I mean to say is that I have a job for you. A one-day job. Playing piano.” Stupido! What else would it be? “At the ceremonial opening of that building we talked about, Twenty-two Pascal. You’ll get some good publicity out of it. Press, TV, that kind of thing. We’d intended to fill the atrium with flowers but that fell through and we thought, my designer thought, candles and some flowers and a piano, a white Steinway grand…”

  Marco clamped his lips together. Talk about information overload!

  “If you are interested, please call my Human Resources manager, Jane Barnett, at 212-555-1740 She is the person who will handle the arrangements. You will meet with her. You will not see me at all…”

  He rolled his eyes as he let his pathetic little speech trail off. Then he said a brisk “Ciao” and ended the artless call.

  ******

  Wasn’t this supposed to be the age of the paperless office?

  It wasn’t, and without his PA to sift thr
ough reports and memos and cull the ones that didn’t require his attention, he never got around to compiling the documents he needed for tomorrow’s trip to Europe.

  Just before noon, he made an attempt at involving the girl sitting in for his former PA. Bad move. Within minutes, she was in tears. When he asked—calmly, he was certain—what the problem was, she said that he talked too fast, wanted her to do too many things at once, and what on earth did he mean when he said “Tell Moscow that I agree.” Tell whom in Moscow? And to what did he agree?

  Marco started to explain, heard his voice rising, wondered, albeit briefly, if any of this could even remotely be the reason so many assistants flew the coop abandoned that as nonsense and shooed the girl from his office.

  He had lunch at his desk—the temp grew so flustered at the idea of phoning in his order that he did it himself. A green salad with oil and that special vinegar on the side. No, he did not know the name but how many types could there be? Cheese on a roll. Not just any cheese. The one his PA’s, all of them, always knew to order. And not just any roll. The long one without seeds and, Cristo, why would he know what it was called?

  The deli clerk who took his call was new—was this a day of new-to-the-job fools? So it was no great surprise that when his lunch arrived, it was the wrong roll, the wrong cheese, and the salad on the side was all wrong.

  He stuffed everything back into the bag it had come in and tossed it into the wastebasket.

  Coffee. At least he could have coffee. His PA always made it and no way would he ask the trembling girl outside his door to do so.

  Marco pushed back his chair and got to his feet. Surely they made coffee in the staff room. The sight of him would probably send everybody scuttling but his mood was going from bad to worse and, frankly, he didn’t give a damn whether they scuttled or not.

  His phone rang. He grabbed for it and snarled, “What?”

  It was the garage, with the first good news of the day. His Ferrari had not been stolen. It had been misplaced.

  “Misplaced?”

  Misplaced. The manager launched into an explanation. Marco cut him short, thanked him, hung up the phone and made a note to find a different garage.

  The phone rang again. “It’s Jane Barnett,” his HR manager said.

  “Mrs. Barnett. Jane. I meant to call.”

  “Actually, I’ve been trying to reach your PA.”

  Marco shuddered. “Yes. So have I. She seems to have disappeared. What of those candidates you were going to interview? How has that worked out? Please tell me you’ve found one who is suitable.”

  “Uh,” Jane said carefully, “well, I may have found one who is just about perfect.”

  The second good news of the day. Marco beamed happily as he sank into his chair.

  “Do you mean it?”

  “She speaks four languages. She’s traveled. She’s bright. I’m sure she can write up reports. Fairly complex ones, I suspect. As I said, she’s just about perfect.”

  Marco wanted to pump his fist in the air but not yet, not yet.

  “Did you explain that she’ll have to be prepared to leave the country tomorrow?”

  A pause. Then, “Uh, not exactly.”

  “Because?”

  “Because this isn’t precisely the job she came here to fill.”

  “Didn’t the agency explain the situation to her?”

  “Uh…”

  “What are you telling me, Jane? Is she not interested in the position? Did you explain how well it pays? Seventy-five thousand a year? Health insurance? Vacations? Pension?”

  “Uh, I thought you might want to talk with her yourself, Mr. Santini. See, this is a bit confusing. She was here to interview for one thing and I ended up offering her another.”

  Marco shut his eyes. Good news, but with an edge.

  “Wonderful. I have been dealing with incompetence all morning and now we add the incompetence of a headhunting agency that sends a person to the wrong job. But if this woman is suitable…”

  “I believe she is, sir.”

  “And what about Ms. Madison? Has she called?”

  “Uh…”

  Dio, another “uh”?

  “Never mind. One thing at a time. Send this paragon of efficiency to my office rapidamente.”

  “That’s why I’m calling, sir. I tried to reach your PA—”

  “My temp,” Marco growled. “God forbid she might ever be anyone’s PA.”

  “Yes, sir. Right. The point is, she didn’t answer. So I called Executive Reception to tell her that, uh, the candidate is on her way.”

  “And?”

  “And, uh, before you meet with her I wanted to explain that, uh—”

  “Jane,” Marco said through his teeth, “if there is something to explain, explain it.”

  “I’m trying to, Mr. Santini, but it’s a little complicated and, uh—”

  It was the final “uh” that broke the camel’s back—that, and the tap on his door that told him his terrified and definitely temporary assistant was about to step into his office.

  Marco swung toward the door as it opened, his patience, what little remained of it, shot to hell.

  “What in the name of God do you want now?” he roared at his PA. Except it wasn’t his PA.

  It was the woman who had kept him awake most of the night, the woman he’d hoped he’d never see again.

  Emily Madison.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Emily’s day had got off to a truly hideous start.

  Well, why wouldn’t it? Her night had certainly been a mess.

  She still couldn’t believe what she’d done. Losing her temper, losing her job…

  Nola wasn’t home. She had a boyfriend, an actor, and she often stayed at his place. That was fine with Emily but last night; she’d have given anything to have Nola there so she’d have had someone to talk to. She’d have told her about the disaster at the Tune-In. And she’d have broken the news that she wasn’t going to come up with her half of this month’s rent.

  The sooner she got that over with, the better.

  And then there was what had happened with that man. Marco Santini.

  That kiss.

  Exhausted as she was, Emily still hadn’t been able to fall asleep. She’d gotten up, made a cup of tea, paced the tiny apartment, turned the TV on, stared at it blankly and then paced some more.

  At five, she’d crawled into bed, dragged the blanket over her head and decided she just wasn’t going to think about any of it. If she just got an hour’s sleep…

  Which was why she’d pretended not to hear Nola come in and climb into her bed on the other side of the curtain they’d hung between the two beds in the pathetic pretense that they each had more than four feet of privacy.

  Within minutes, she’d heard Nola’s breathing turn slow and even.

  If only hers would do the same, but then, she had weighty things on her mind. No money. No job.

  Marco Santini.

  And wasn’t that ridiculous?

  He had kissed her. So what? She wasn’t a child. She’d been kissed before.

  But not like that.

  Or maybe the truth was that no kiss had ever affected her that way. She liked kissing. Liked sex. Even though she’d always thought it was a little overrated.

  Lissa and Jaimie sometimes teased her about her attitude.

  Or her lack of one.

  Always gently, of course, because they were her best friends, but she had never been the one to come home after a date flushed from what had gone on in the back seat of somebody’s Chevy.

  On the other hand, she had never been the one to sob from the pain of a broken heart.

  “Why would any woman in her right mind get involved with a man?” Jaimie had demanded in a tight voice during a three-way Skype session a couple of weeks ago.

  “A damned good question,” Lissa had said.

  Emily had looked at her computer monitor, from one sister’s face to the other’s.

  “Uh,
you guys want to talk about it?’ she’d finally asked.

  The answers had been no and no, and when the call ended, Emily had shaken her head the same way she had in the past and wondered how her bright, beautiful, talented sisters could be such fools when it came to men.

  Right.

  And now, after—what?—one kiss from a stranger, she was suddenly an expert on what men and sex were all about?

  “Ridiculous,” she muttered. And flinched. Because ridiculous wasn’t even close to describing what had happened last night.

  She had humiliated herself.

  He’d kissed her. OK. People kissed all the time. She could have stood still and let it happen. She could have turned her face away. She could have said, with Victorian indignation, that driving her home did not entitle him to take liberties.

  Instead, she’d—she’d wrapped herself around him like an octopus. He’d had to peel her off. Then he’d mumbled something polite and escaped as fast as was humanly possible.

  Humiliating didn’t come close to describing it.

  Emily groaned and burrowed deeper under the blankets.

  “Stop it,” she whispered. “Just—just put it out of your mind. You’ll never see him again so why keep thinking about what an absolute fool you made of yourself?”

  What she needed was sleep. A couple of hours, anyway. The day looming before her was going to be tough enough to handle without adding in a brain drained by exhaustion. She’d have to face Nola. Call Max Pergozin and if he had nothing for her, start the horrible thing known as searching for employment. And as what? Who would employ her? The city was filled with women like her, their heads packed with useless academic nonsense.

  Emily yawned. Yawned again. And drifted, mercifully, into sleep. And, unmercifully, into a dream about a tall, gorgeous hunk of masculinity, with dark hair, dark eyes and a sexy accent, who kissed her and then didn’t stop at kissing her.

  She was moaning when the piercing ring of the telephone jolted her awake.

  Let voice mail take the call. She’d just lie here, close her eyes, see if she could recapture the dream.

  At the sound of the tone, please leave a message.