by Sara Whitney
Frankly, he’d kill for either of those creature comforts at the moment; three days removed from his normal gym-office-home routine in Chicago left him feeling tense and twitchy. Of course, Brandon wasn’t helping things.
“So, why haven’t you made partner yet, Jakehammer? We all thought you’d manage that before you were twenty-five.”
His onetime college roommate flashed a grin that set Jake’s teeth on edge. They might not have seen each other much in the nine years since graduation, but Brandon still knew how to jab a thumb right into Jake’s vulnerable spots, starting with that idiotic nickname he’d been using nonstop since Jake had arrived in Beaucoeur on Wednesday.
Good thing he’d retained the lessons from his years as a scholarship student at the University of Chicago. Fake-it-till-you-make-it generally worked with his wealthier classmates, and since heir-to-the-Lowell-media-empire Brandon had been the leader of the privileged brigade, Jake responded with a smirk of his own.
“Don’t worry. I’m planning to dazzle you with my work on this sale and convince you to bring all the accounting activities for Lowell Consolidated to Black, Phelps, and Suarez. You’re my golden ticket, man.”
Brandon just nodded as if he’d predicted what Jake would say. “That’s exactly why I hired your firm. Nobody in our class worked harder than you. And hey, you could be my golden ticket too. This transition goes smoothly, and my old man might finally retire and let me take over the company. If that happens, I’ll make up new accounts just for you to audit.”
“Deal.” Jake dropped back in his chair, imagining the next few months. Straighten out the books, get a handle on Lowell’s accounting needs, and head home with a fat new contract for a major media conglomerate. That had to be enough to win the partnership he’d been vying for since joining BPS straight out of college. It was the only future he’d ever envisioned for himself, and he wanted it so badly his bones ached with it.
Dave Chilton’s voice crackled through the speaker near the office ceiling and intruded on his thoughts. “We got an email this morning, Mae,” the man said over the final notes of the boppy rock song the morning show had been playing.
“Oh yeah?” Mabel’s disembodied voice had Jake sitting up straight, the last of his partnership daydreams popping like a soap bubble.
Dave continued, “It’s the question we most often get asked, which makes me wonder: why are people so interested in our relationship?”
“Oh, our relaaaaaaaationship,” Mabel replied, the purr in her voice sliding along Jake’s skin like the softest velvet.
“Mmmm. That woman has a fine radio voice,” Brandon murmured.
“Shhh.” Jake didn’t want Brandon’s voice intruding as he listened to the blonde he’d met on Wednesday.
Said blonde briskly replied, “You’d think that two people who spend as much time together as Dave and I do have some kind of wild history. But the boring truth is, Dave and I are friends who met in college. We’re not married. We’re not dating. We never dated—”
“I mean, have you seen Mae?” Dave’s voice interrupted. “She’s hella scary in that tall Valkyrie way. I was never attracted to her. Yuck.”
“Dave needs his eyes examined,” Brandon muttered.
“Dude.” Jake sent him an irritated glare and tilted his head toward the speaker where the deejays’ back-and-forth spilled forth. Brandon widened his eyes and held up his hands in a silent apology.
“Yuck?” Mabel scoffed. “You were unattractive first! I wanted to not date you first! Folks, did you know that Dave dresses as a werewolf for Halloween every year just by wearing shorts and a tank top? Do you need the number of a good waxer, Wolfie?”
Dave bellowed out a Chewbacca roar, then said, “You’re one to talk. Mae once sent a date to the ER with a rash when he got too close to that prickly ’stache of hers.”
“My lady ’stache is magnificent,” she shot back, and Jake tilted his head to revisit his memory of their first meeting. No upper-lip hair, only a wide, expressive mouth and miles of tanned skin.
“What you listeners need to know,” she said, “is that when Dave sweats, it’s slightly radioactive. I once saw a droplet roll off Dave’s nose and land on a spider. Friends, that spider then bit a passerby, who immediately shot webs out of his wrists and crawled up the side of a building.”
Jake chuckled softly as Dave countered, “Good thing I have a lovely wife who doesn’t mind my jokes—”
“—or his radioactive sweat—”
“—and Mae, while also lovely, hasn’t found that special someone. That someone who won’t mind that she doesn’t know that Spider-Man’s web shooters are mechanical, not biological.”
“Nerrrrrd,” she interjected, but Dave barreled on.
“So if you’re interested in our gal here, send us an email with your bio, photo, and likely parole date.”
Mabel gave a gusting sigh that made the hair on the back of Jake’s neck stand at attention even though it was nothing more than a voice coming from a speaker. “My special someone’s out there somewhere, and in my heart of hearts, I know he’ll get sprung early for good behavior. Aaaand after the break, we’ll run down the community events scheduled for this weekend, so stay tuned.”
A Smashing Pumpkins song kicked up, and Brandon nodded to himself. “That girl is good. They’re gonna make me so much money.”
There was a conversation Jake should be interested in pursuing. It’s why he was in Beaucoeur after all: to make this station profitable. Yet his brain refused to focus on the numbers.
That girl is single.
The thought materialized like the sharp clang of a bell. Single. Sure, it’d only taken listening to one show for him to develop an appreciation for her fast wit, but that was just part of his job here, right? He closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, and sucked in a breath, picturing that empty partner office on the fifty-sixth floor of his building, waiting for him to fill it. The image helped push thoughts of Mabel’s voice from his mind, and he exhaled slowly, calm back in place.
“Everything okay?” Brandon was looking at him with curiosity.
“Yep.” Of course. He was reliable, work-first Jake Carey. The same as always.
“So who’d you leave behind in Chicago?” Brandon spoke as if Jake’s thoughts were printed above his head. “Wife? Girlfriend? Boyfriend?”
Thumb, meet another tender spot.
“Not even a potted plant,” he said flatly. “The job keeps me busy.” Which was true, even if it wasn’t the whole story.
Brandon just sighed. “God, you workaholics wear me out. At least I’ve got an ex pestering me about shared custody of the dog.” He pinned Jake with his sharp blue eyes. “Is it worth it?”
Brandon’s suddenly serious tone was a 180 from his normal flippancy, and Jake didn’t even have to think about the answer. “For a partner’s salary? Of course it’s worth it.”
Worth not pledging a fraternity in college so he could spend all his free time taking course overloads to graduate faster. Worth not investing time in his dating life, searching for relationships with the potential for more. Worth every skipped vacation, every weekend in the office, every family holiday where he’d paid for the meal but hadn’t left the office in time to eat it while it was hot.
Fuck, it had to be worth it.
“What a drag.” The man across from him shook his head as he tucked his phone into his pocket. “In your next life, I recommend being born rich.”
Jake huffed a laugh. How perfectly ridiculous and perfectly Brandon. “Sure. I’ll get to work on that.”
He might not have been born rich, but he’d busted his ass, and now he had a fat 401(k), a condo with a view of Lake Michigan, and enough in savings to allow him to sleep soundly at night. A BPS partnership would be the keystone in the life he’d been building from the moment he’d realized as a teenager that he wanted more for his worn-down mom and his hungry, big-eyed sister than constant money worries and a shitty walk-up apartment in
one of Chicago’s bleakest neighborhoods. And if that required spending a few months in an extended-stay hotel in downstate bumblefuck, so be it. Nothing was going to knock him off course.
“Knock, knock.”
How? How did she summon goose bumps with only a handful of words? His shoulders tightened when the woman with the sharp brain and the supple voice invaded the office. He dragged his eyes to the doorway to confirm that the blonde he’d met on Wednesday still vibrated with the same bright energy he’d first glimpsed through the studio window.
Single. The word resurfaced with another clang, and his palms started to sweat. Thankfully Brandon took up the talking banner while Jake wrestled his accelerating heartbeat under control.
“Well, hello, Morning Show Mabel.” Brandon leaned back in his chair and looked at her like a predatory cat. “What can we do for you?”
She stepped into the office, her eyes bouncing between Jake and Brandon.
“Do either of you have jumper cables in your car?” She gestured over her shoulder, presumably toward the parking lot. “The station van’s dead again, and I usually use Kirby’s cables to jump it, but he’s gone, and Dave’s at an appointment, and Skip’s on the air, and all the ad reps are out of the office doing God knows what, so which of you is gonna be my hero?”
She ended her flood of words with a smile-grimace that Brandon met with a grimace-grimace. “I’m sorry, did you say the station van’s dead again?”
Now Mabel was full-on grimacing too, and she slanted another gaze at Jake. God, she was pretty—and that was before she ran her tongue over her lower lip, flipped her hair over her shoulder, and resumed torturing him with her velvety voice.
“Yeah, uh, we need to jump it on occasion,” she said apologetically. “Usually after it rains. Or snows. Or if it’s unusually dewy. Did that… not come up before the sale?”
“It did not.” Brandon leveled a cool gaze at her, and she bit her lip. “Hopefully the human capital performs better under damp conditions.”
“Everything but my hair!” she chirped nervously, smoothing a hand over the golden mass hanging past her shoulders. “So, uh, cables?”
She glanced toward Jake again, and he forced himself to rally with a smile-smile. Brandon was being a dick, which meant it was up to him to be the decent person. The decent person who was laser focused on his job and his job only, like usual, no matter how much he enjoyed listening to her radio banter.
“I’ve got cables,” he said, surreptitiously swiping his damp hands down the front of his pants.
“Well, thank God,” she said with a breathy laugh. “Come white knight for me?”
No. Yes. Fuck.
“Yeah. Sort it out, Jakehammer,” Brandon said with a wave of his hand, blissfully unaware of Jake’s struggle to find his equilibrium. His eyes dropped to his phone yet again, and his thumbs started flying. “My ex apparently wants to start another text fight about whose weekend it is with the dog.”
“Jakehammer?” Mabel tossed a playful look over her shoulder as they exited the office and headed down the hall.
“I beg you, do not.”
Her voice was as decadent off the air as it was on. Only three days working on the periphery of a radio station and he already understood why some people made this their career. The job-centric thought summoned the calm, professional competency he was known for in Chicago. Of course there, he was usually examining audits instead of searching for battery cables.
“Where’s the van?” He stepped ahead to hold the door open for her, wincing at the blast of summertime heat.
“Around back.” She pointed. “We always keep the spot next to it open in case it needs a jump.”
She stopped short when they reached the far end of the parking lot and he hit the unlock button on his Jeep.
“This is yours?” she asked as she clambered into the passenger seat.
“Yes.” He slid behind the wheel to find her eying the interior with unabashed interest. Although his Jeep was obviously a decade old, he kept it looking like he’d driven it off the lot that morning.
“Huh.” Her finger traced the immaculate dashboard.
“What?” He fired up the engine and backed out of the spot, starting to suspect that his ride wasn’t impressing her with any kind of professional anything.
“It just…” She flapped a hand toward his suit-covered chest. “It doesn’t really fit your whole ‘I earned a million dollars before breakfast and made three assistants cry’ vibe. Don’t you guys all drive, like, black Audis?”
“I’ve never seen the point of spending money on a luxury car,” he said stiffly. Three of his coworkers did in fact drive black Audis, but the thought of spending money like that physically pained him. Far better to funnel it into rainy-day funds for his mom and Finn.
His mom and Finn. That’s why he was here. He needed to push away any other considerations, including the woman next to him smelling like a fancy garden, to get his job done. Work-mode Jake, activate.
He circled the building and eased into the spot next to the van plastered with the Brick logo, then shucked his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and grabbed the jumper cables. As he got to work hooking the clamps to the two batteries, Mabel’s words refused to stop tumbling through his brain. Once she got the van’s engine turned over, she joined him on the sunbaked asphalt where they stood in silence until he asked, “Is that really how I come off?”
Her eyes snapped up to his.
“Hmm?” She bundled her hair into her fist and lifted it off her neck. “Oh, the fancy-businessman-driving-an-old-Jeep thing?”
At his curt nod, she dropped her hair with a shrug, gesturing toward him. “Your suit looks like it cost more than your ride. I made assumptions.”
“I’ve never once made an assistant cry. Wouldn’t dream of it. That’s a hard job.” He kept his eyes on the motor of his Jeep. When he was fifteen, his mom had answered phones for a slimy insurance agent who sent her home in tears at least twice a week, so he’d picked up an after-school job bagging groceries. It added enough cushion to the household budget that she’d been able to search for a less stressful position. The day she quit the insurance job, the tears she’d cried had been happy ones and he’d figured out the best way he could contribute to the family.
“So, how are you liking the glamorous world of radio?”
The echo of Brandon’s question jolted him back to the present. “Why does everybody keep asking me that? You guys sound like a cult.”
She pressed her hands together as if in prayer and bobbed her head. “The cult of radio. You’re in it now, bub.”
“Clearly.” He stepped forward to unhook the cables from the now-purring engine. “It’s fine. It’s a job. One that’ll land me a partnership hopefully.” Then he’d be back in Chicago, and she’d be here using that voice to stroke the eardrums of everyone within listening radius.
“I hope you get it soon then. You don’t want to fall behind on your car payments.” She patted his Jeep’s bright green front quarter panel with a grin, and he bit back the urge to laugh.
“Careful. This Jeep is the longest relationship I’ve ever had.”
“Ooooh.” She caressed its panel again, then her phone pinged, and she fished it out of her pocket with a groan. “Shit, I’ve gotta go. I’m supposed to be doing a live remote at the Beaucoeur Public Library’s north branch in forty.” She clambered back into the van and cranked down the window. “Thanks for your help.”
“You bet,” he said. Then he shoved aside his detached professional competency for a second. “And hey, Mabel?”
She popped her head out the window, blue eyes round with curiosity. “Yeah?”
“Dave’s right. Spidey’s web shooters are definitely mechanical.”
Her mouth dropped open for a split second before she tossed her hair with a shout of laughter. “Another nerd! Oh, you’re gonna fit in fine around here.”
Then she slammed on a pair of sunglasses, reversed out of the spot, an
d roared away, leaving him staring after her on the boiling asphalt, the cables dangling from his hand and her laughter echoing in his head.
Three
“Oh good, you’re goofing off. That means you can help me out.”
Mabel looked up from her phone and narrowed her eyes at Dave’s wife in mock outrage. “That’s it? No hello? No ‘so good to see you, old friend’? Just ‘you’re lazy, please help me’?”
That earned her a smile from Ana Chilton. “Hello, old friend. So good to see you. Can I steal a moment of your very valuable time for a project that’s kicking my ass?”
“Duh.” Mabel levered herself off the greenroom couch with a grunt and shoved her phone in her pocket. “Whatcha need?”
“My husband, for one thing.”
Mabel jerked her head toward the studio where Dave was conferring with Skip about which local artists to promote on New Music Wednesday next month. Ana walked over to the window and waved until he spotted her, and Dave unfurled such a delighted grin that Mabel had to swallow past a hard little ball of envy in her throat. Not that she wanted Dave, of course. But had any man ever been that delighted to see her on the other side of a pane of glass?
No. That answer was a definite no.
“Hey, baby.” Dave exited the studio to greet his wife with a kiss, squeezing the sturdy brunette close. “How’d I luck into a workday visit?”
“I’m here to shamelessly use your brain.” She rested her hand on his cheek briefly, then tossed a look at Mabel over her shoulder. “That one too. She’s clearly not busy.”
“Hey!” Mabel protested. “I was staying abreast of current affairs so I’d be able to contribute on air tomorrow.”
“She was on Twitter,” Dave said.
Dammit. “Anyway,” Mabel said, “what’s up?”
Ana shrugged out of her blazer and dropped it on the back of the desk chair. “Work put me in charge of the questions for our women’s shelter fundraiser in two weeks. I need to see if actual humans can answer the things I’m pulling together. And you two are close enough approximations to humans for me to test them out on.”
