But even as she uttered the words, the underlying result of all this deeply concerned her. The reason this was happening didn’t change things. Baker could still ruin her and cause everyone who worked with her to lose their jobs, all because the man’s ego had been hurt.
She looked at the three people in the room with her and thought of the three others who were out of sight for the moment. They depended on her, believed in her in the lean times, had gone without pay at times so the company could get off the ground. She just couldn’t allow that egotistical maniac to win.
“When did you find out about this?” she asked Mike, since he’d obviously been the first one to know.
“Yesterday, after you left the office,” Mike told her. He looked at the others before continuing. “Baker’s lawyer showed up to serve us with papers. According to him, we’re supposed to shut down the company until this is settled.”
Her eyes widened with anger. That was not about to happen. “We can’t shut down production,” Erin cried. “We’ve got a ton of orders to fill.”
“I know that,” Mike said, producing the papers that Wade’s lawyer had left with him. He got up from behind his desk, crossed to Erin and gave them to her. “But I’ve got to admit, this looks pretty intimidating, as did his lawyer.”
Erin skimmed the first page. The words all swam in front of her eyes. Nothing was going to make sense right now. She was too upset for the words to sink in and register.
“The guy’s probably just some ambulance chaser,” she commented dismissively.
“If he is, then he’s capable of catching those ambulances with his bare hands,” Christian told her. “The guy looked like some kind of hulking giant. About six-four and close to three hundred pounds. Not somebody you want to mess with.”
Erin was growing progressively angrier. This lawyer, whoever he was, was threatening something she held dear, not to mention intimidating people she cared about by threatening their livelihood.
She looked at Mike. “You should have called me,” she told him.
“We hoped that maybe we could get this to go away. You’ve got enough to think about,” Mike said, “trying to get those chain toy stores to partner up with us.”
“Do the others know?” she asked, referring to Judith, Neal and Gypsy.
Mike nodded. “Everybody but you.”
“Erin, do we have enough money set aside in the kitty to hire a top-notch lawyer to fight this?” Rhonda asked.
“Forget top-notch—do we have enough money to hire any lawyer to fight this?” Christian asked.
Other than taking out enough to cover their salaries and pay for her mortgage as well as buy food, she had been plowing all their profits back into the company with an eye out to expand Imagine That enough to impress Toyland Toys, the other toy-store chain she’d set her sights on.
Erin’s eyes swept over the three people in the room. She’d started this company with a dream and three friends who were willing to help her make that dream flourish. It couldn’t end like this.
And yet...
It killed her to admit this, but she wasn’t about to start lying to people she cared about. “Right now we have enough money to buy a round of lattes for all of us—as long as we’re satisfied with the medium size.”
“Great,” Christian mumbled, sinking farther down on his chair.
“What are we going to do?” Rhonda asked.
Christian raised his hand as if they were back in elementary school. When she looked at him, he said, “I’ve got this cousin who knows this guy who could send Baker off on a one-way cruise as long as we pay for the steamer trunk.”
Erin frowned. That was a nonstarter. “Much as I’d like to, we’re not sticking him into a trunk. That would only make things worse,” she told Christian.
“Then what are we going to do?” Christian challenged.
Erin blew out a frustrated breath. What she would have liked to do was pummel Wade into the ground. “I could try reasoning with Wade.”
“That’s presupposing that the jerk has reason,” Mike pointed out. “Remember, this is the guy who doesn’t work well or play well with others.” His dark brown eyes met hers. “The guy I would have kicked to the curb on day one if you hadn’t been as softhearted as you were,” Mike reminded her.
Erin was keenly aware that at bottom, this was her fault. She was not the type to buck pass. “I know and I’m sorry. I just thought all he needed was a little time,” she told Mike.
“Twenty to life comes to mind,” Rhonda quipped.
“You sure you don’t want me to call my cousin?” Christian asked her hopefully.
It was a tempting idea but not the kind, ultimately, she could live with. “I’m sure.” Desperate, she cast about for a solution—
And then she thought of Steve. The man was a lawyer. At the very least, maybe he would have a suggestion on how she could extricate herself and her company from what was beginning to sound as if it could turn into an abysmal legal mess and call a halt to production—something she had a feeling was ultimately Wade’s goal in all this. He wanted to hurt her where she “lived.”
“I’m going to make a call,” she announced.
“You know a hit man?” Mike asked with renewed hope in his voice.
“No,” she said patiently, “I know a lawyer.”
“Hit men are more reliable,” Mike said.
“As much as I do relish the idea of strangling Wade with my bare hands,” she admitted, “I don’t think they’ll let us manufacture Tex and his friends from prison.”
“Hey, who’s to say? After all, they make license plates in prison, don’t they?” Rhonda pointed out.
Erin looked at the trio. God, but she loved these people. There was no way she was going to see all their efforts get swept away like sand castles before a tidal wave.
“You know,” she told them, “as a cheering section, you guys really leave something to be desired.”
Mike was hardly listening as he shook his head. “I knew I should have beaten Baker to a pulp when I found out what he was trying to get you to do.”
She patted the man’s face. “Not that I don’t appreciate the thought, Mike, but we also don’t have money to bail you out of jail, and Baker was the type to play dirty.”
“I think my grandmother has an old steamer trunk in her storage unit,” Christian called after her as Erin walked away to her office.
Instead of responding to the offer, Erin raised her hand above her head and waved at him. Or, more precisely, waved away the thought.
In the tiny glass-walled enclosure that served as her so-called private office, Erin sat down and pulled out the card that Steve had given her. She looked at it for a long moment. This was probably going to kill the movie date, she thought, but she’d already made up her mind. They needed the company more than she needed to go out on a date with him.
With anyone, she amended, striving to put distance between herself and what she was about to do.
Taking a deep breath, she hit the numbers on the keypad of her landline.
She assumed that she would be connecting to the law firm’s secretary and prepared herself for a female’s voice. Instead what she heard was Steve’s deep voice on the other end of the line. The second she did, Erin felt her pulse start accelerating.
The reaction was automatic.
She needed to get control over that, Erin told herself.
“Hi,” she said, her mouth growing even drier than it already was. “Is this a bad time?”
Now, there was a conversation stopper, she upbraided herself. He was going to think he was talking to a mental midget.
There was a slight pause and then she heard Steve ask, “Erin? Is that you?”
Considering that they had only talked on the phone once, that was a r
emarkable guess on his part. “You’re very good,” she told him.
He thought it wiser not to tell her that she’d been on his mind since last night, not just because his son kept talking about her last night as well as this morning, but because even if Jason hadn’t said a single word in reference to her, she still would have been lingering on his mind like a deep perfume that had infiltrated all his senses.
It was still early in the game and saying something like that might very well spook her. Not to mention that he might, after all, be reacting prematurely, giving her more credit than she deserved.
But with his other less-than-thrilling experiences in the dating world, it was easy to see why he would get carried away with Erin. She was bright and witty, and she had made a connection with his son.
“I’ve got a good memory for voices,” he told her, shrugging off her compliment. “So what can I do for you?” he asked.
“I need some advice.”
“Go ahead—I’m listening,” he urged.
“Turns out I’m being sued.”
“As of this morning?” Steve asked, a sliver of skepticism entering his mind. She hadn’t mentioned anything about being sued last night. It seemed like the perfect opportunity, if what she was saying now was the truth.
Or had last night been all about setting him up just for this? Had she just been pretending with his son in order to get on his good side? He disliked being this suspicious, but he disliked getting burned even more. Besides, this wasn’t about just him. It was never about just him anymore. He had to think in the plural because everything he did affected Jason.
“Actually,” she answered, “as strange as it sounds, yes. I didn’t find out about this until just this morning.”
Okay, he’d play along for now. Who knew? Maybe she was telling the truth. “Who’s suing you?”
“It’s a little complicated to get into over the phone,” she told him. “By any chance, are you free for lunch?”
As he spoke, he took out his cell phone and glanced at the entries on his daily calendar. He had something scheduled for noon, but it wasn’t written in stone and could easily be rescheduled.
“I could be,” he allowed, then remembered what she had told him yesterday about her time constraints. “I thought you said that you were really busy,” he reminded her.
Erin laughed shortly. “If this suit goes through and he wins, then the only thing I’ll be busy doing is looking for a job.”
Erin’s fear was almost palpable. He was beginning to believe her. She was either very good or very worried. “That bad?” he asked.
She thought of putting up a brave front, but he was, for all intents, almost a stranger and she had to be able to let her hair down with someone. He, at least, wasn’t going to be affected by anything that happened, one way or the other. She didn’t have to be the brave trooper, soldiering on for him.
“Worse than bad,” she confessed.
“Hold on a second—let me see what I can do with my schedule,” he said.
“I don’t want to disrupt anything,” she protested belatedly. When she received no answer, she realized that she was talking to dead air. He’d put her on hold.
This was a bad idea, she told herself. She was imposing on a man she hardly knew—and most likely wouldn’t get to know since he probably thought, at the very least, that she was using him.
The problem was that she didn’t know anyone else to turn to. She supposed that maybe her mother knew—
“I’m back,” Steve declared. “I’ve cleared ten o’clock to eleven o’clock this morning. Can you get down here by ten?”
Even if she couldn’t, she would. After all, he’d put himself out for her.
“Absolutely,” she told him.
“Okay, then, I’ll see you at ten,” he said. He had to admit, at this point his curiosity was more than just a little piqued.
“I really appreciate you making time for me like this.”
“I was at the end of my rope with Jason. You managed to bring him back around and on top of that, you made it seem effortless on your part,” he said quite honestly. “Trying to help you out is the very least I can do.”
“No, it really means a lot,” she countered. “It’s not as if I have any legal counsel to turn to. Thank you,” she told him, feeling that the paltry words weren’t nearly enough. But she had no others at her disposal. With the threat of an embarrassing spate of dead air stretching out between them, she quickly hung up.
Though he wasn’t happy about it, both his life and his vocation had taught him to be suspicious, which in turn had him wondering again about this phone call from Erin. Hopefully, he thought, returning the receiver back into the cradle, he wasn’t going to regret this.
He still hadn’t quite made up his mind about that yet.
Chapter Eleven
A little more than an hour later, Erin was walking into the ground floor of Steve’s building, a recently constructed office tower that was the last word in savvy architectural design. The outer walls were all dark, smoky glass. It looked as if it should have been home to an art museum instead of various professionals.
More than one law firm was listed in the first-floor directory. The one Steve was associated with had the largest letters, she noted.
I can’t afford this, Erin thought, getting on the elevator.
She was even more convinced that she couldn’t afford Steve’s services when she got off the elevator. It appeared that Steve’s law firm rented the entire fourth floor.
Erin approached the long, regal-looking reception desk that was facing the elevator bank on slightly shaky legs. Behind the desk were twelve-inch-high frosted silver letters that proclaimed the name of the firm: Donnal, Wiseman, Monroe and Finnegan, the four senior partners who had initially started the firm.
She probably didn’t have enough money in Imagine That’s assets to pay for the sign, much less the services of one of the lawyers associated with the sign.
This was a mistake, Erin thought. She shouldn’t have come.
For one fleeting moment, she thought of turning around and heading back down in the elevator, but her getaway was curtailed because at that exact moment, the sleek redhead behind the desk looked up from her keyboard and saw her.
“May I help you?” She asked the question in a slow, deliberate cadence.
Well, she was here—she might as well go through with the rest of it, Erin told herself. “I’m here to see Steven Kendall.”
The woman, an administrative assistant by the name of Ruby Royce, regarded her dispassionately for a second, as if taking measure of her. “Do you have an appointment?” she finally asked her in a calm, cool voice.
Erin pressed her lips together. “I’m not sure you could call it an appointment exactly.” Damn it, she was tripping over her own tongue, something she did when facing another adult without the benefit of a stuffed dinosaur in her hands. Taking a breath, she tried again. “I mean—”
“She has an appointment, Ruby,” Steve said, walking up behind the receptionist. “She’s my ten o’clock,” he specified.
“Hi,” Erin said with visible relief when she saw Steve coming to her rescue.
“Funny, she doesn’t look like a Harvey Rothstein,” Ruby observed wryly.
As far as administrative assistants went, there was none better than Ruby. All the associates made use of her skills. With that in mind, he played along with her wry observation.
“Mr. Rothstein was good enough to let me move his appointment to twelve o’clock,” he told Ruby. “You might want to make a notation of that on your schedule.”
Ruby nodded, doing just that. “I wish you’d let me know before you decide to play musical chairs with your appointments, Mr. Kendall.”
“I’m letting you know now, Ruby,” he told her, unf
azed. “I’ll try to improve my timing the next time around.” Looking at Erin, he said, “All right, let’s go into my office and you can tell me all about what has you so upset.”
Erin nodded, falling into step beside him as he led the way from the reception area down the hall to his office. But as they walked away from the reception area, she could swear she felt Ruby’s eyes watching her every move.
“I don’t think she likes me,” Erin told him in a low, hushed voice.
“It’s nothing personal,” he assured her as they turned down the hall. “Ruby just doesn’t like being caught off guard, that’s all. It interferes with her self-image—that of being the world’s best administrative assistant. Just between you and me, for the most part, she really is.
“Right this way,” he said, gesturing toward the office on his right.
Erin had almost walked right by it. She backtracked a couple of steps and crossed the threshold into the spacious, airy yet decidedly masculine office.
Feeling just a little intimidated, Erin paused inside the doorway, looking around.
“Something wrong?” he asked her, curious.
“No,” she answered a little too quickly, then said, “I was just thinking that my whole company could probably fit into this office with room to spare.”
Steve gestured toward the chair on the other side of his desk as he sank into the soft leather of his recently purchased chair. “The firm’s been around for close to fifty years. They’ve had time to build up.”
Erin began to follow suit and sit down. But, her hands still gripping the armrests, she stopped in midmotion, perched just above the actual seat. She reverted back to her feeling that coming here was most likely a mistake.
She might as well give him the negative news first. “I can’t afford to pay you,” Erin told him. “I mean, not right away. Not all of it,” she corrected herself again. God, but she wished she could have words deftly slide from her tongue rather than come out in choppy bits and pieces when she was nervous.
“What I’m trying to say is that I don’t have much available cash. Almost all the money I make gets plowed right back into the company, but I can pay you in installments—probably a lot of them,” she guessed, looking around at the sleek bookcase and the volumes of leather-bound law books that were neatly arranged on the shelves. “No matter how long it takes, I will pay your bill off,” she promised earnestly, “but if you decided that’s not how you do things, I’ll understand,” Erin concluded. She wanted him to understand that she wasn’t looking for special treatment.
Dating for Two (Matchmaking Mamas) Page 12
