Boss Meets Her Match

by Janet Lee Nye

  “Lena? Are you okay?” Chloe asked tentatively.

  She rocked her head on her arms. “Sure,” she said, her words muffled. “Fine.”

  “What’s going on?” Mose asked from the doorway.

  “Matt was here,” Chloe said.

  “And?”

  “I think he just broke Lena’s heart.”

  “Should I go find him? Beat him up or something?”

  Lena lifted her head to find them both standing in the doorway, staring at her as if they weren’t quite sure what to do or expect. “Don’t you two have jobs to do?”

  Chloe crossed to the desk. “Taking care of you is part of my job. Are you okay?”

  “No, not really. But I will be.”

  “Do you want me to reschedule your meetings this afternoon?”

  “No. Why would you do that?”

  Mose perched on the edge of the desk. “So you can go home, eat ice cream straight from the carton, watch chick flicks and cry like a normal person after a breakup?”

  Lena scowled at them. “And at what point in our acquaintance have you ever found me to be this mythical normal person? Mose, when you and Anna Marie broke up, you went to the gym and beat up a body bag until your knuckles were so swollen you had to go to the doctor. And Chloe, I’m pretty sure the last guy who dumped you had four flat tires the next morning.”

  Chloe raised her hands in the air. “That was not me! That was an impossibly incriminating coincidence.”

  Lena rolled her eyes. The teasing eased the mind-numbing pain. “In other words, the perfect crime. Both of y’all get back to work. I’m fine. Work is what I need right now.”

  Shooing them out, she woke up her sleeping computer. She hadn’t lied. Work had always been a place to hide. She’d hidden in it all her life. Teasing at school? Hide in a book. Culture shock of college? Hide in the library with a stack of books. Being the best. Being the fastest. Being the first. Doing anything and everything she had to do to outrun all her doubts, outrun her past. That was her comfort. Her safe place. As long as she was working, she was going to be okay. Nothing else mattered.

  Except now. Matt mattered. More than she thought. As if she hadn’t realized how much she loved him until the moment she’d lost him.

  But you didn’t lose him. You walked away from him.

  She shook her head firmly from side to side. “For a very good reason. Let it go now,” she said out loud.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  SHE ALMOST LEFT the package there, leaning against her office wall. Some vague idea about texting Chloe and telling her to get rid of it in the morning before she went in to work drifted around her mind. But in the end, she brought it home with her.

  It currently was serving as Sass’s throne. Probably not the best treatment of a Matt Matthews original painting, considering the current market value of his work, but right now she didn’t care. She’d set it down on the coffee table and left it there. After washing her face and changing into yoga pants and her College of Charleston sweatshirt, she glanced at it as she went to the kitchen.

  “Get off there, Sass,” she said.

  Sass ignored her.

  Dropping the tamales her mother had sent home with her onto a baking sheet, she slid them into the oven to warm. She opened a can of cat food. That got Sass off the package. “What do you say, Sass? Get it over with?”

  Sass didn’t care. She had her two-dollar can of rabbit-flavored cat food. Pouring a glass of wine, Lena realized her hand was trembling. She set the bottle down slowly, deliberately and took stock of herself. Shaky hands. Fluttery stomach. Heart galloping away in her chest. She was scared. Nervous. Shaking her head, she scooped up the wineglass and took a sip. Walked to the living room and looked down at the carefully wrapped package.

  He’d painted something for her. She couldn’t ignore her curiosity. He knew she preferred his landscapes over the abstract art that was selling like crazy right now. Was it one of those? She sat at the edge of the couch and reached out to touch the brown paper. She imagined him picking one out for her. There had been one he had been working on the night she’d gone to him. That first night. Her body flushed with heat as she remembered. Oh, she remembered every second of that. But what had been in the painting? Was it a marsh scene? Waterfront Park?

  The delicious scent of warmed tamales made her stomach growl. She hadn’t had much at lunch. It had taken too much energy to be “on” for the women she was meeting with. Her heartbreak could wait. The kids at St. Toribio’s could not. She had smiled and talked, been upbeat and used every last damned leadership skill she could remember. What she had not done was eat more than a bite or two of her meal. But she’d sealed the deal. Two more enthusiastic speakers lined up.

  “After dinner,” she said out loud as she reached down to tap the package.

  She forced herself to sit at the dining room table. To eat her dinner from a real plate using real silverware. Sass sat on the chair at the opposite end to keep her company. “What do you think about all this, Sass?”

  An ear twitch.

  “Yeah, I know. He’s awesome. But I feel like he’s ready to give up on his family. When just a few weeks ago, reconciling with them was the most important thing in his life.”

  She stopped and took a sip of wine. That was the core of it right there. She didn’t want to be the reason he walked away from his family. The very thought of it made her feel sick. Sass put her front paws on the tabletop. Lena pointed at her.

  “Don’t even think about it.” She stood and picked up her plate. “Come on, Sassafras. Let’s do this.”

  She cleaned up the kitchen, refilled her wineglass and sat down on the couch. Sass jumped up beside her and sat down, her warm purring body pressed against Lena’s thigh. Lena reached over to scratch at an ear. “I’m pretty sure it’s a marsh scene.” Lifting the end of the package to her knees, she began to work at the tape on the bottom and back. “I can’t keep this, of course. If Matt won’t take it back, I’ll sell it and donate the money to St. Toribio’s or somewhere.”

  She pulled the paper away and tossed it over the back of the couch. Sass followed it but the sounds of cat claws murdering innocent paper never reached Lena’s ears. She sat, paralyzed, at the edge of the couch. Mouth falling open, she hitched in a quick, shocked breath. Dear God. It was her. A portrait of her. That night. That night she’d gone to him, seduced him. He’d painted her. The streaks of paint across her cheeks, the stripe down her forehead to her heart. Was that how she’d looked? The eyes of the woman in the painting glowed with a fierce heat.

  She set it down quickly, as if it were hot. Her heart was pounding. Her thoughts skittered through her mind. Bringing her hands to her mouth, she continued to stare. Her eyes fell on a single word written on the left bottom corner. Fighter. That’s what he’d said that night. She was a fighter. Strong. Loyal. Compassionate. A blink sent tears streaming down her cheeks. God help her, she loved him. Loved that man who looked at her and saw this. Saw nothing but her soul. She shifted her gaze to the bottom right. Matt5. His signature mark. Wiping the tears from her face, she stood.

  “I have to go, Sass. I’ll be back.”

  She grabbed up her purse and slipped into her running shoes before she could think about what she was doing. Ran to the parking garage. Kept the image of the painting fresh in her mind’s eye as she navigated the narrow, tangled mess of one-way streets that made up downtown Charleston.

  * * *

  “I LOVE YOU,” she said when he opened the door.

  And burst into tears.

  Then his arms were around her, pulling her close, pulling her inside, shutting the door against the cold October night. Rocking her. “Shh, shh,” he murmured. “Don’t cry, Lena.”

  She pushed back and wiped angrily at her face. “I don’t want to cry. I don’t
know what to do, Matt.”

  She looked up into his eyes. Those blue eyes. Reaching up, she pushed her fingers through his hair. Her heart hurt so badly, surely it couldn’t take anymore. “I love you,” she said again. “But we need to figure all this out.”

  He cupped her face and kissed her gently on the lips. “We will. We’ll figure it out.” Taking her hand, he led her to the armchair in the living room area. She sat down, clenching her arms tight around herself, trying to hold herself together. Matt pulled the other chair around so he was facing her. Knee to knee. “Talk to me.”

  “I... It’s all jumbled. I said something to my mother. About what your mother did. I told her it was like a poisonous seed she’d planted in our relationship.”

  Matt put his hands on her knees and nodded. “What did your mother say?”

  “That I could keep watering it and let it grow or the two of us could work together to make it wither and die.”

  “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go with the ‘make it wither and die’ option.”

  She let go of herself and put her hands on his. “Matt. What your mother did, that’s easy for us to unite against. I see that now. But before this happened, you were reaching out to your family. You wanted to mend fences. You wanted to be a part of their lives again. You wanted me to be a part of not only your life, but your family’s life. How is that going to work now?”

  He was shaking his head. “No. That ended it for me. That showed me that what I hoped for in a family would never happen.”

  “But it can’t be like that,” she pleaded. “If you quit on your family to be with me, that’s going to be something more poisonous than what your mother did. Because we can’t unite against that, Matt. If any tiny part of you still wants to make amends, then you will end up resenting me. You’ll end up blaming me.”

  “But I won’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  He turned his hands up so he was holding hers. “There was this guy I knew. Nice guy. He and I were roommates when I first left home. I was eighteen. Got my first job scrubbing dishes in a restaurant. Was trying to save up money to go to college. But he was a party guy. Wanted to hang out, get drunk, chase women.”

  “What does this have to do with us?” Lena asked.

  “I’m getting to that. Like I said, he was a nice guy. I considered him a friend. But I had to walk away from him. He was a toxic person. I think you understand this, Lena. If you have a goal, a plan for your life, you know you have to move away from toxic people.”

  “Yes. But this is your family, Matt.”

  “And my father and I have made our peace. My grandfather? We’re good. My older sister and I are good. We’ve always been best friends. I have the family I need. I wish my mother and my other sister could be a part of my...our life, but until they stop being toxic, they won’t. My decision has nothing to do with you, Lena. I’m doing it for me. For my peace of mind.”

  Lena stared at him. She did understand that. She’d left behind so many people. So many friends who’d given up. Joined gangs. Used drugs. She’d given up the sorority that she’d joined after the first four months because it was a toxic mean-girl environment.

  “Okay,” she whispered. “We can work with this.”

  He tugged on her hands and pulled her onto his lap. She looped her arms around his shoulders and smiled up at him. “We can definitely work with this. I love you.”

  She snuggled down into his arms, pressing her cheek against his chest. “We’ll test out your Viking warrior skills next weekend when you meet the entire family.”

  The sound of his laughter rang in her ears and vibrated against her cheek. She felt everything in her relax into the sound of it. Everything was going to be okay.

  * * * * *

  Be sure to check out the other stories in

  Janet Lee Nye’s

  THE CLEANING CREW miniseries!

  SPYING ON THE BOSS

  BOSS ON NOTICE

  Both available now from

  Harlequin Superromance.

  And look for a new Cleaning Crew book

  from Janet Lee Nye, coming soon!

  Keep reading for an excerpt from THE BABY ARRANGEMENT by Lisa Dyson.

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  The Baby Arrangement

  by Lisa Dyson

  CHAPTER ONE

  HOW WAS BREE TUCKER supposed to relax and kick back when she’d been so obviously abandoned?

  She couldn’t figure out where the heck her friend Roxie had gone. She scanned the other people around the tiki bar once more with no luck. She and Roxie had come over to order drinks, and now she was nowhere in sight.

  Thinking she’d walk around the bar to the other side, Bree took a step back from the bar without looking. She immediately tripped over something and gasped as she fell backward. Somehow she ended up in someone’s strong arms instead of butt-first in the sand.

  Her gasp had heads turning in her direction. Great. She’d managed to attract unwanted attention from the mostly men around the bar. She turned her head to see who’d caught her, and her gaze collided with a pair of deep brown eyes with long, dark lashes. She blinked and slowly disengaged herself from him.

  “Are you okay?” He was probably the nicest-looking man she’d seen since arriving on Isla de la Blanca earlier in the week for a working vacation with her girlfriends slash coworkers.

  “Yes, I’m fine. And thank you for catching me. I’m sorry about that.” She straightened her bright blue romper and tossed back her long hair. “I’m not usually that clumsy.”

  Her rescuer smiled, his eyes twinkling. A neatly trimmed dark beard set off perfectly straight white teeth. “It was my fault. I wasn’t paying attention, and my legs got in your way. I’m the one who should apologize.”

  “But I shouldn’t have stepped back without looking.”

  “Let’s call it a draw,” he suggested.

  “Deal,” she said, then looked around again for her friend. “Have you seen a redhead? I’ve misplaced my friend Roxie.”

  He shook his head. “I haven’t seen her.”

  She whirled around as she checked out the nearby area again. She shielded her eyes from the glare of the setting sun off the clear azure water of the Caribbean Sea. “Did anyone see where my friend went?” she asked the men around the bar. “She’s got red hair and is wearing a dark green top with
white shorts.”

  She’d been well aware that the guys hanging out at the tiki bar had been paying a lot of attention to her, whether they were actually speaking to her or merely ogling. So she decided to use that to her advantage in locating Roxie.

  “I’ll be happy to help you find her,” a sloppy drunk propped on a bamboo bar stool told her with a crooked grin before he belched and reached out to her, nearly falling off his perch.

  Bree took a step back. “That’s okay, I’m sure I—”

  “She has all the help she needs,” said an older man who appeared from nowhere, his Jimmy Buffett Parrot Head affiliation obvious from his Hawaiian shirt and straw hat with a Margaritaville button attached. “At your service, ma’am.” He stepped forward abruptly, his drink sloshing over the rim of his glass.

  “She’s fine,” her rescuer growled from behind her. He took Bree’s elbow. “She doesn’t need anyone’s help.” Before Bree could say a word, the man guided her away from the bar and maneuvered them through the growing number of people looking for fun.

  “Hey, come back here!” called several of the men left behind.

  “Wait! Where are you taking me?” Bree stumbled in the sand and nearly lost a sandal. She jerked her arm away when they were barely fifteen feet from the bar, hopping on one foot while she tried to adjust her shoe. “Stop already!”

  “I was getting you out of an uncomfortable situation,” he explained.

  “What do you mean?” She could hold her own with a bunch of drunks. “What uncomfortable situation?”

  “Those men back there,” he muttered, jerking his head in their direction. “Didn’t you see how they were looking at you?”

  “So what?”

  He continued. “You’re a woman alone with a bunch of drunk and gawking men.”

  “And?”

  “And some might get the wrong idea.”

  She ran her tongue over her bottom lip and squinted at him. “The wrong idea?”

  He shook his head. “You really have no idea what kind of signals you’re giving off, do you?”