Chapter Six
Amy had thought Quint might stop by, but she’d hoped she’d be wrong about it. She wasn’t. She heard his voice at the same time she saw his polished wing-tipped black shoes by her right side. Closing her eyes for a brief moment, she stopped scrubbing and twisted to look up at Quint.
She hated the way he towered over her, but she couldn’t do a thing about it, no more than she could control the way he looked in a dark-gray suit that defined strong shoulders and muscular thighs. It had probably cost him over five thousand dollars. She looked back down at the white paint that Taylor had spilled on the carpet and started scrubbing at it again. “You got the check I take it?” she asked, not about to play games about this.
“I got it,” he said, and she could see him come a bit closer as he spoke. “I don’t want it.”
She stopped scrubbing, but she didn’t look up. “Then give it to charity. I don’t care. But you’ll get one every week until I pay off that jacket.”
“I don’t want it,” he repeated in a low voice as he dropped to his haunches beside her. “Here. Take it,” he said as he handed her the check.
She kept scrubbing, ignoring the check as anger surged in her, and the carpet was taking the brunt of that anger. Then he dropped the check, right on the stain, forcing her to stop. Before she could do anything, he stood and walked away.
That did it. She scrambled to her feet, grabbing the check and hurrying after him. She got between him and the door before he could get out of the center. Damn it, she hated being so short. She hated having to tip her head up to look him in the face, and she hated the way her heart was racing. “Don’t you dare,” she barked, tossing the scrub brush across to where she’d been, then held the check out to him.
“Don’t I dare what?” he asked, matching her tone of voice.
“Don’t you patronize me. Take this.”
“No.”
She hated the unsteadiness of her hand, but she kept the check held out to him. “Just take it.” Her voice rose slightly, and she heard Taylor stir. She looked at her daughter, watched her as she settled back to sleep, then she turned back to Quint. “Take it,” she repeated, dropping her voice to a tense whisper again.
“I’ll just tear it up,” he said.
“Then I’ll send cash up to your office, and you can tear it up, or you can light a hundred-dollar cigar with it, for all I care.”
He stared at her, his gaze intent. “I don’t get this,” he whispered. “I told you not to bother with the jacket, and now you look as mad as…” He shrugged. “I don’t get it.”
“You lied to me.” She drew the check back, folding it in half and closing her hand over it in the hopes of stopping the trembling.
“I’m not a liar,” he muttered.
“Oh, that was a two-hundred-dollar suit Taylor tossed juice on?” she whispered.
He had the decency to look taken aback, at least a bit. “I don’t know exactly what it’s worth.”
“Try five thousand dollars.”
He exhaled with a shake of his head. “Lady, who cares?”
“It’s a Marno, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t check labels before I put my clothes on.”
“Of course you don’t. What’s five thousand dollars to you?”
He looked past her at Taylor, then leaned toward her, erasing the illusion she had of any distance between herself and Quint. “Can we go someplace so we can talk in a normal voice?” he whispered.
Without saying a thing, she moved back, crossed to the entry area and locked the doors. Then she motioned him to follow her. She led the way to the hall in the rear without looking back, turned right and took a quick turn into her office. She knew he was there, just as she had the first night. She literally felt his presence and was thankful when she got into the office, turned and found out he’d stopped just inside the door.
“Okay, normal voice.” She opened her hand, saw the ruined check and tossed it on the desk. “I’ll send the cash up to you tomorrow. I’ll have Walt run it up.”
He stared at her hard, then came closer. “Let me explain that I don’t want your money. I’ll send Walt back down with it.” That wry smile was almost there, and it made her ache slightly in her middle. “The guy might need the exercise, but why put him through that?”
She didn’t want humor. She wanted this settled. She wanted him to leave and let her keep going with her own life. “Then don’t send him back down.”
He exhaled in a sigh. “Lady, listen to me. I know where you are. I’ve been there. I was a single father with a little boy and with more ability than money. Every penny counted.”
Oh, no, she didn’t want this, not his empathy. Sympathy, pity, empathy. She didn’t want any of that with this man. “You don’t know anything about me, but I do know that my daughter ruined your expensive suit. And it’s up to me to make good on that.”
“I’m not a liar. I just thought…” He shrugged. “Oh, sue me, I honestly didn’t care much for that suit and I probably would have tossed it sooner or later, so why would I want you to buy me another one?”
“You’re that rich?”
“What?”
“A five-thousand-dollar suit and you probably would have tossed it sooner or later without batting an eye?”
“I’m not rich, I’m…” He shrugged again. “My net worth has nothing to do with this.”
“What are you worth? One…two million?”
“I don’t know, exactly.”
“You’re a millionaire?”
His exasperation was evident by the rush of released air before he said, “Technically.”
She laughed, but there wasn’t humor in the sound. “Oh, technically? As in, you have millions, but you only keep about a thousand of it in your wallet at one time?”
He cocked his head to one side and narrowed his eyes on her, and that teasing was there, even without the smile. “So, you peeked, huh?”
“Excuse me?”
“My wallet. You peeked?”
She turned from him before the smile could come, and looked down at Charlie in his cage. The lucky rat only had to nibble on the seeds in his dish. He didn’t have to deal with a thoroughly infuriating man. “If you didn’t keep losing it, I never would have had to look in it to try and find you to get it back to you, would I?”
“You’ve got a point, now tell me one thing. How did you know what that suit cost?”
She stared at the rat, methodically nibbling on a compact pellet of food. “Jenn. She’s a buyer for one of the top specialty stores in the state. She knows fabric and she knows tailoring. And she said that it’s a Marno, and she showed me the thingy on the lining.” She took a breath. “And she said that they took six months to make and that they cost anywhere from five thousand dollars up.”
“They start around two and go up. And that suit, if you have to know, was probably around three or so. It’s a business suit, not an evening suit.”
She turned and he was there, so close. She stayed very still as she met his hazel gaze. “Were you really going to throw away that suit?”
He was silent for what seemed a long time, then he said bluntly, “No.”
She sagged back, sitting on the edge of the desk. “Why couldn’t you just say that at the first? Why couldn’t you have just said, ‘That’s a very expensive suit that I’m not about to throw away,’ instead of, ‘oh, it’s off the rack and cost about two hundred dollars’?”
“Do you want the truth?” he asked in a low voice.
“I thought that was the point of all of this discussion?”
“Okay, what I said before was the truth. I’ve been there, juggling a job, a kid, worrying about money. We were never poor, but we weren’t flush, either. I figured that telling the truth at that point in time would be counterproductive, and I was right.”
“That’s your opinion,” she muttered.
“Lady, you’d try the patience of a saint!”
“Oh, and
you’re a saint?” she asked without thinking.
There was dead silence, as if she’d hit a nerve, then a soft, almost rueful chuckle. “Not even close,” he murmured.
“So, you’ll take the money for the suit?”
“I don’t want your damned money. Don’t you understand that?”
“And I don’t care what you want,” she countered in a voice that sounded tight in her own ears. She touched her tongue to her lips and turned away from him, back to the rat on the desk as she asked, “Don’t you understand that?”
She was startled when he touched her, catching her by her upper arm and literally spinning her around to face him. She felt as if the world centered on the place he touched her, that and the fact that she could feel each breath he exhaled, brushing her face with heat.
His hold on her tightened slightly, hovering just this side of real pressure. But she didn’t move. She didn’t dare move. “This is what I want,” he murmured in a low, rough voice, and before she could think or move, he was kissing her.
She felt the brush of his mustache, then his lips found hers and any thoughts she might have had of pushing him away scattered and were lost to her. All she knew was the feel of his mouth on hers, the touch of his tongue, the way her lips opened as if of their own volition, and surrender was there without any warning.
She tried not to move, not to put her arms around his neck, not to arch her body toward his, not to absorb that heat that seemed to be seeping into her soul. But there was a raw hunger in her for his taste, for his touch, for closeness, for a sense of not being alone. She ached to stop feeling singular, to stop feeling as if she was drifting, and Quint was making that all change. Just being there, touching her, kissing her.
“Mama?”
Taylor’s voice came down the hallway, jerking Amy back to her senses and to the realization that she was desperate. Painfully desperate at that moment. She pushed away from Quint, breaking the contact that was threatening to drown her. Twisting to one side, she gripped the edge of the desk, then pushed around him and hurried out of the office.
Quint stood very still, letting his body settle and his mind start to function again. Impulsively kissing Amy under the mistletoe had been one thing. But this kiss was impulsiveness risen to a new height. She’d been so close, the scent of her filling his being, that all logic had disappeared. It was a shame that logic had come back, he thought ruefully. But it was there, cold and glaring. And he couldn’t avoid it.
He ignored the ache in his body and the lingering scent she wore that hung in the air around him. He’d forgotten about the way it felt to have a woman so close when he felt her start to melt against him. Now, he turned and went after her. In the main room, he saw her right away, hugging Taylor to herself, rocking back and forth, whispering softly to her child.
It hit him in the gut right then how much Mike had missed growing up without a mother, and how much he had missed, spending the past twenty years without a wife. Amy was everything those roles embodied—and he was twenty years too late to do a thing about it.
She turned, as if she knew he was there, and she looked directly at him. At the same time, Taylor turned, saw him and wiggled to get free of her mother’s hold. Amy put her down, and the little girl in pink overalls and a yellow T-shirt, hesitated, then slowly came toward him.
“I’ll write you a new check,” Amy said as Taylor came to stand in front of Quint.
He stopped himself before he said, don’t bother, and instead said, “Whatever you want to do.”
Without a word she passed both him and Taylor, going back toward her office. He didn’t turn to watch her go. He watched her little girl instead. A two-year-old. He remembered Mike at two, and wished he hadn’t had to work, that he could have been there for every event, every advance that he’d made. Working mostly from home and occasionally using a nanny had kept him close physically, but that didn’t mean he’d had the time to really enjoy things, to relish them. That was another way both he and Mike had been shortchanged by his stupidity in marrying the wrong woman.
Taylor was right in front of him, and he automatically dropped to his haunches in front of her. “So, how’re you doing?”
She cocked her head to one side, and long, silky lashes fluttered slightly. “Got baby,” she said, and he realized she had a doll in one hand. “Yike it?” she asked, holding it up to him.
He took the doll and fingered its slightly damp dress. “Yeah, I like it,” he said, “but she’s not as pretty as you are.”
Taylor studied him with huge brown eyes, then grabbed the doll back from him, hugging it to her. “Tay’s baby.”
“Yep, it’s yours.”
He didn’t hear Amy come back, but he felt her by him and he slowly stood. She was within a few feet of him, holding out another check. “Here you go. I’ll try to get one to you every week or so.”
He hated this. He didn’t want her money. He wanted her. That stopped him dead. He took the check, folded it in half and pushed it into his pocket, but he never looked away from Amy as she crouched by Taylor, brushing at her hair.
“Sweetie, go and get your coat and we’ll go home, okay?”
“Huh,” Taylor said with an emphatic nod, then toddled off toward Amy’s office.
Amy stood and faced him. “It’s late,” she said.
“Yes, it is.” He exhaled. “You know when I told you before that I don’t play games?”
She shook her head. “It’s late. I’m leaving. And you’ve probably got a…an appointment.”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t. But I do have to say something.”
He could quite literally see her bracing herself, stiffening slightly, one hand reaching out to touch the wall close to her right side. “I don’t suppose I can get you not to say anything, can I?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll say it for you. That was a horrible mistake in there, and it won’t happen again.”
He watched her closely. “Lady, what are you, a mind reader?”
She shrugged, but it ended with a slight shudder. “No, just telling the truth.”
He’d meant to say he was too old, and she was too young, and she had a little child, and he was past that. But instead he found himself saying, “It wasn’t horrible.”
She waved her hands as if to ward off his words. “Okay, but it was wrong.”
“Absolutely. It was wrong. I don’t date, you don’t date. I’m way past being around kids. You’re just starting out with them.”
“This isn’t a joke,” she muttered.
He wished it was, but she was right, it wasn’t funny. “Damn straight it’s not a joke. And just because I’m single and you’re single, doesn’t mean we’re on the same page.” He touched her chin with the tip of his forefinger and felt her tense. “And that’s the real shame here.” He looked at her lips, softly parted and murmured, “A damn shame.”
He felt something hit his leg and looked down at Taylor hitting him with a rubber hammer on the thigh. “Bang, bang, bang!”
Amy turned away from their contact, and Quint knew that whatever had barely started tonight was well over and rightfully so. “Okay, I’m leaving,” he said to the little girl and was rewarded by a bright smile. His leaving made her happy. He just wished it made him happy.
He looked back at Amy and knew he couldn’t just leave with bad feelings between them. “Listen, can we start over? No rats? No dead gingerbread family…and none of this? Can we just be friends?” That appealed to him on so many levels, just to talk to her, to look at her, to hear her voice. “Can we do that?”
She hesitated and oddly, he felt as if he couldn’t breathe until she finally nodded. “Okay.”
He held out his hand to her. “I’m Quint Gallagher. I work here.”
That brought a hint of a smile, and he loved it. “Amy Blake.”
The minute she put her hand in his, the minute he felt the fine bones and the heat in her, he knew he was a total liar and a sham. Damn it, he wan
ted to be friends, but there was more, so much more. “Good to meet you,” he murmured.
“Yes,” she breathed, then the contact was gone.
He forced a smile of his own. “Okay, I’m leaving. Maybe we’ll run into each other and…be friendly?”
Her smile was bigger now, but he hated that bit of relief he saw behind it. “Yes, of course. You’re welcome down here anytime.”
“Thank you.” He ruffled Taylor’s silky hair, bent down and said, “Remind me to never get you a real hammer. Bye bye.”
She looked up at him and frowned. “Bye bye.”
He glanced at Amy. “Good night,” he murmured and headed toward the door. It seemed to him that he was always walking away from her. A man not used to walking away from anything, was making a habit out of it with this woman.
AMY WATCHED Quint go and finally gave in to the need to hug herself tightly, as if that could stop this sense of fragmentation that had happened the minute the kiss had stopped.
Then Taylor toddled after him, and it was all she could do not to yell at her to stop. Quint must have heard her coming after him because he turned around. She watched the tiny child and the tall, lean man facing each other. Amy had a flash of what never had been for either of them. Rob and Taylor. It never had been. And in that moment, the sorrow over what could have been and never would be, hit her hard. She watched her daughter, so small and vulnerable, then Quint hunkered down to her level.
“You go back to mommy, Taylor, okay?” He looked at Amy over Taylor’s head, but was still talking to the child. “I have to leave.”
Amy couldn’t move. She felt immobilized by something beyond the grief, something she couldn’t understand. Then Quint urged Taylor toward Amy. Oddly, Taylor resisted for a minute, then Quint said, “Go and find baby.”
With that, Taylor took off, running back toward Amy while Quint straightened up. He looked at her from across the room, then turned and was gone.
Taylor found her baby and plunked down on her bottom, sidetracked with taking the doll’s clothes off. And Amy leaned back against the wall. Slowly, she sank down to sit on the carpeting, using the wall behind her for support, unnerved to be trembling. She closed her eyes tightly to stop the burning, then took a breath to try and ease the pain that came from nowhere to engulf her. Damn it, she’d grieved, really grieved, and she’d accepted being alone with Taylor. And she hated Quint for being there, for reminding her of that pain.
Millionaire's Christmas Miracle Page 8
