Bachelor Boss

by Christie Ridgway

  “Are you blushing?” Believe it or not, a flush was definitely crawling up her neck to her cheeks. He stared. “Wasn’t it you who broke out the chocolate whipped cream?”

  She licked her bottom lip. “It was the heat of the moment.”

  “It was hot, all right.”

  “It was fun. ”

  “Lucy…”

  He saw her fingers tighten on the steering wheel. “What’s wrong with fun? Where in the male-female relations manual does it say sex has to be performed with a proper level of gravitas?”

  “Nowhere.” He sighed. But he didn’t want her to think that it made what they’d done together meaningless or forgettable. He didn’t want to be yet another man in her life, like her brothers Jason and Sam, who didn’t take her seriously.

  Lucy, for all her sunshiny nature, deserved better. Or maybe because of her sunshiny nature, she deserved his best.

  She deserved his honesty. Though she’d given him that perfect excuse for ducking from it—“let’s not talk about it,” she’d just said—he didn’t need to go along.

  “Lucy, would you mind driving me to the hospital before going to get my car?”

  For the first time since they’d climbed into the Volkswagen, she darted a look at him. “I don’t know…”

  The Suttons were all so damn smart. She could tell he had his own agenda and wasn’t sure she wanted to comply. “Please,” he said.

  She shot him another look, gave a little shrug, then changed lanes and took the appropriate exit. He didn’t continue until she’d pulled into a spot in the hospital’s visitors’ parking lot.

  Though the sights and smells of the hospital corridors couldn’t reach him here, Carlo’s gut was already knotting. He wiped a hand down his face and reminded himself that he owed Lucy an explanation. She’d been there for him last night when he needed someone and there was no reason not to share this with her. He’d stay calm and cool and the whole conversation would soon be over.

  Then he would have done the right thing and then they could go forward, because he would have assuaged some of his guilt.

  One hand swiped over his face yet again and he finally started, trying to ignore the gruffness in his voice. “I need to tell you about how I was feeling last night. About why we ended up in bed when I was so certain we shouldn’t before.”

  “I know why you’ve been resisting,” Lucy said quickly. She was staring out the windshield and her hands were still on the steering wheel, as if she was planning a quick getaway.

  He frowned at her. “You know?”

  She spoke the next words with the same speed one ripped a bandage off a wound. “It’s because of Elise.”

  “What?” Astonishment cracked his voice.

  Lucy continued staring out the windshield. “I’ve known about it for years. Since her wedding day. You’re in love with Elise.”

  “Good God.” He tilted his head to stare at the Volkswagen’s roof. “Where to start? Believe me, Lucy, last night…at no point did any of that concern Elise.”

  “Okay.”

  It was not an okay-I-believe-you kind of an okay, but an okay-I’ll-humor-you okay. “Lucy, I’m not in love with Elise!”

  Lucy remained silent.

  He shook his head. “Do I strike you as the kind of man who would torture myself over the past six years by hanging around with my best friend if I was in love with his wife?”

  “You don’t hang around so much anymore, not according to my sister.”

  He grimaced. “Don’t tell me Elise thinks I’m in love with her. I don’t believe that for a minute.”

  “She just noted that you’re kind of…remote these days. You know, arrive late to social gatherings, leave early….”

  “I get it. I’m not the life of the party anymore.”

  “I thought I understood why,” Lucy said quietly. “I thought I understood why you gravitated toward the distant corner. I thought I saw something, heard something at Elise and John’s wedding…”

  He shook his head. There she went again. Lucy saw things about him that no one else ever knew. “You’re wrong about how I feel now. Okay, on Elise and John’s wedding day…which was a long time ago, I did experience a brief pang. But it was brief and then it was eclipsed by…”

  He sighed, even at the hospital it was hard to push out the words. Settling for others, he said, “I was never what you’d call a party animal, Luce—”

  “You used to laugh, though. And you used to make up limericks. Not dirty ones, just…funny ones. You had a new one every time I saw you.”

  He’d forgotten about that. It seemed forever ago, but the memory made him smile. “You know what? I collected those for you, Lucy.”

  “Me?”

  “You’re the only person in the world who knows I used to have a limerick side.”

  “So what happened?” Lucy asked. “Where did all the limericks go?”

  Hesitating, he gazed out the side window.

  “If it’s not Elise, then it’s Pat. It’s about your partner’s death.”

  His head whipped toward her. “What makes you think that?” He thought he was so careful to keep its effect hidden from everyone.

  “I was with you at the hospital, remember? And then that night at Germaine’s, too. The night of the Street Beat party.”

  The night she’d seen how weak the memories had made him. The night she’d stepped in and distracted him from the way they seemed to suck him down.

  “Last night…last night you did for me what you did that other time, Lucy. Sometimes…sometimes remembering gets to be too much.”

  “Do you want to tell me about what happened?”

  Carlo inhaled a breath. It was why he’d come here, yet still he hesitated.

  “He was shot, right?”

  Shot. Four letters. One word. It had all happened that simply and that quickly. “We were heading back from an interview. Saw a patrol car with a lone cop who’d pulled over a van full of teenagers in a residential area of working-class homes.”

  It had rained earlier. The wipers on their unmarked detective’s vehicle had left a sludge of mud in the corners of their windshield, and the smell of wet asphalt filled the car when Pat unrolled his window to check if the police officer wanted help with his traffic stop.

  Yes, he’d appreciate it. There was a passel of kids who were milling on the sidewalk and they were distracting the officer from his job.

  “Pat got out to keep a lid on the kids, but first he strapped into his bulletproof vest. Just a precaution as there had been some gang activity in the area. I drove up the street to find a place to pull over. I put on my own vest, then I was getting out of the car when I heard gunshots.”

  He’d dived back in the car and grabbed the radio to call for assistance. Then he’d peered over the seat and saw that everyone on the scene, from the patrol cop to the smallest of the teenagers, had gone belly-down. He’d crept out of the car, staying low with his gun in hand, and he’d barked at them, ordering them not to move.

  Almost immediately more police appeared on the scene and surrounded the kids. The bullets hadn’t come from them, but from someplace across the street, Carlo had figured. When there weren’t any further gunshots, the kids started to stir. And that’s when Carlo realized Pat wasn’t moving at all.

  “The bullet pierced him under the armhole of his vest. Unlucky shot, I guess.” The end of a life.

  Carlo stared out the windshield, remembering Pat’s drenched sleeve, the last glimmers of awareness in his eyes, the bewildered look on Germaine’s face when Carlo had broken the news. His hands had still been sticky with his partner’s blood.

  Now he locked down on his memories, refusing to let them run free. His emotions, too, he locked away.

  “He was six weeks away from retirement. Germaine couldn’t comprehend how it had happened.” Carlo had watched, helpless, as she fell apart. “She’s stronger now,” he said, “but then…but then…I did the best I could. I made the funeral arrange
ments. I went through his closet and drawers.” Even though each time he touched an article of Pat’s clothing, Carlo could still see the blood on his hands.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucy whispered.

  “Last night…last night I remembered it all too well.”

  “Carlo…” He heard her sniff.

  He lifted his gaze to her face. “Oh, Lucy.” She was crying, the tears flowing down her cheeks. “I didn’t tell you this to upset you.”

  “I know. But I know how you must feel—”

  “That’s the thing, Luce. That’s how I’m different now. I usually don’t feel. Not too much.”

  “What?”

  “I work. I work some more. I think about work. I try not to think about anything else or get too caught up in the past or with other people. I like it that way.”

  “Carlo…”

  “It’s how I want it, Lucy. It’s why I don’t do the couple thing, it’s why I shouldn’t be here right now, raining on all your bright sunshine. I like my distance. I like my darkness. I’m most comfortable without strong connections. It’s why I’m better off alone in those distant corners.”

  She nodded. Drying her cheeks with the backs of her hands, she appeared to understand and accept his explanation. It was all true, anyway, and he should be feeling better for it, except…

  Except Carlo suddenly couldn’t shake the notion that Lucy’s tears would be as hard to forget as the sight of his partner’s blood.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Lucy straightened a small memo pad on the seat of an empty chair and arranged a sharpened pencil at a perpendicular angle beside it. She’d pushed back the partition between the two conference rooms in the McMillan & Milano offices so that all fifty volunteers for the Street Beat festival could be seated during their one and only orientation meeting, scheduled for five-thirty that evening. Checking her watch, she felt her stomach give a nervous twitch, even though she’d checked and double-checked the arrangements.

  There was a lot riding on this project. Of course, the high school students and parents needed to walk away from their volunteer experience with positive feelings about Street Beat, as well as McMillan & Milano. But there was more. Her temporary position at the security firm was coming to an end after this weekend—and she needed to walk away from it with something, too.

  Sunday brunch at her parents the weekend before had made clear that she still had a long way to go in proving to her family that Lucy Goosey had grown up. She hoped a successful end to her Street Beat project would shut the traps of her confidence-crushing big brothers. And maybe a successful end to her employment at McMillan & Milano would take that look of concern out of Elise’s eyes, too.

  For days, her sister had been closely watching, as if expecting that at any minute Lucy would break down and fall apart over Carlo.

  Wasn’t going to happen. Learning that he didn’t love Elise had been a surprise. Okay, a welcome surprise, but discovering how deeply he’d been affected by his partner’s death made him as big a mistake for her as ever. Sure, he didn’t love her sister, but she was just as sure he didn’t want to love any other woman, either.

  So she’d rededicated herself to the job and to demonstrating to everyone—maybe most of all herself—that Lucy Sutton was on the path to success in her life. No more job failures, and certainly no more fixations on the completely wrong man.

  Tonight’s meeting was going to be the harbinger of the new, positive direction in her life.

  “Wow,” a voice said from the doorway.

  Lucy jumped. Carlo. She darted a glance at him and went back to straightening the already-straight materials on the chair in front of her. She hadn’t seen him much over the past few days, and she’d been grateful for that. He’d been busy at the Street Beat site and most of their contact had been in brief phone calls and the occasional text message.

  “I like the visual aids,” he said. At the front of the combined conference rooms she’d erected an easel. An enlarged map of the festival grounds sat upon it. Along with pads and pencils, she was putting a hand-size version of the same map on each of the seats. “It looks as if you have everything covered.”

  “Believe it or not,” she replied, moving to another chair, “I’ve been trained to pay attention to details.”

  “Oh, Ms. Sutton, I know not to underestimate you.”

  Ms. Sutton. The two words froze her.

  They really, really needed to stop slipping those Ms. Suttons and Mr. Milanos into conversation. She supposed he hadn’t meant to do it any more than she had, but still, when he used that name…

  She darted another glance at him. He was leaning against the doorjamb in shirtsleeves and loosened tie. His hair was mussed, as if he’d been running his hands through it, and stubble darkened the angular line of his jaw.

  Ms. Sutton. It echoed in her mind, and in a blink, her attention jumped back to that night in his bed. His beard had been in evidence then, too, and her skin prickled, remembering the burn of those whiskers against her neck and between her bare breasts.

  A strangled little moan escaped her tight throat. Her knees buckled and she tried hiding the reaction by sliding into one of the empty chairs, a handful of memo pads clutched against her chest.

  “Lucy?” Carlo crossed toward her. “What’s wrong?”

  She held up a hand, hoping to keep him away. The last thing she needed was him distracting her before she had to face her fifty volunteers. “Nothing, nothing. Just, um, nothing.”

  Wearing a frown, he crossed to a table she’d set against one wall and grabbed one of the bottles of water she’d set out. He twisted off the top and handed it to her as he settled into the chair next to hers.

  She closed her eyes, but that didn’t help much. From here she could smell him, spicy and male, a scent that she remembered from the night in his bed, too. When she’d showered the next morning, that scent had risen off her skin to mingle with the steam.

  “What’s wrong?” His hand settled on her back.

  She jerked away from his touch. “Don’t!”

  His eyebrows rose. “Lucy—”

  “Sorry.” She gripped the bottle. “I’m, um…I’m just a little edgy about tonight.”

  He gazed around the room. “You’ve crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s, Luce. There’s nothing to be edgy about.”

  “Uh-uh.” She jumped up to put more distance between them. “It’s going to be fine.”

  “It had better be,” said a new voice from the doorway.

  Lucy swallowed her groan as the faint scent of Chanel No. 5 reached her nose. Claudia Cox. She posed in the doorway as if she were in an ad for designer wear: tall, thin and wearing her faintly superior smile.

  With a wave of her hand, Lucy acknowledged the other woman. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  Claudia strode into the conference room as if it were a fashion runway. “It’s not that I don’t have complete faith in your abilities but…”

  I have no faith in your abilities, Lucy finished for her. Her stomach gave another little twist and she wondered if the office first aid kit included antacid tablets.

  It’s only fifty volunteers, she reminded herself.

  Fifty volunteers.

  And McMillan & Milano’s reputation.

  And pleasing Claudia Cox, the bloodthirsty huntress in charge of the Street Beat festival.

  The bloodthirsty huntress was striding toward Lucy at this moment, as if she scented fresh prey. She halted in front of her and looked down from the advantage of her fashion-model-plus-four-inch-heels height. Her gaze traveled the length of Lucy’s body and then back up. “She lives,” Claudia pronounced.

  Despite her nerves, Lucy laughed. Yeah, she wasn’t wearing the funereal gear she’d had on the day she visited the concert promoter’s offices. Though she watched Elise head off each morning looking elegant and polished in her tailored-to-the-nines suits, Lucy had decided against going that route any longer herself. It just did not suit—no pun int
ended. Instead she was wearing a silk dress that she’d paired with pumps that picked up the emerald-green in the wild paisley print.

  It was bright, sure.

  But it would keep the attention focused on her during the meeting.

  And it felt like something Lucy Sutton would wear. Not a corporate clone.

  Still, the way Claudia was appraising her through narrowed eyes made her slide a jittery hand down the dress. “Is…is everything all right?”

  Claudia tapped a glossy nail against her red lips. “Wrench—you remember Wrench?”

  “The singer for Silver Bucket. Of course I remember him.” At first it had been thrilling to meet the lead of a band she loved, but quickly she’d determined he fit the egotistical, selfish stereotype. Five minutes in his company and she’d known she wasn’t the least interested in playing groupie to his hot rocker.

  “He mentioned another band to me…the Killer Angels. Do you know them?”

  Okay, so he was a hot rocker with good indie-band tastes. Lucy nodded. “I found them through their Web site and then bought their last CD. All girls, though their lead singer has a bluesy, smoky voice that can go rocker hard or crooner soft. I think they’ve played some small clubs in L.A.”

  “I have a last-minute cancellation for the festival, and I’m looking to fill the spot. It’s not prime time, but they’ve got to be able to hold the interest of a big crowd.”

  Lucy considered. “There’s a nice mix on the CD I have. A couple of ballads, as well as some with a dance beat. And the band has a look. Kind of a hard-edged innocence. If I had a vote, they’d have mine.”

  “If you had a vote…” Claudia murmured, her eyes narrowing again. Then she pulled her cell phone from the slender leather portfolio she carried under her arm. “The Killer Angels it is.”

  But instead of making her call, she paused and slid a look over at Carlo, still standing on the other side of the room. Her gaze came back to Lucy’s face. “Wrench asked about you, by the way.”

  “Me?”

  “Something about maybe getting together with you to party after their gig this weekend.”

  “I—”

  “She’s not going to ‘party’ with that guy,” Carlo interjected. He strode over to join them. “I don’t know where the hell he’d get the idea that Lucy’s interested in him.”