by Cat Kelly
Why hadn't she known this? Probably because everyone just assumed it was common knowledge.
Is that why Jack Marchetti had sadness in his eyes?
Not that his past love life should matter to her anyway. He had Alana now, with her girly love of pink, her chic "put together" clothes and her eagerness to match her schedule with his. A professional arm-holder, molding herself to fit the needs of the man at her side. She'd certainly hinted that she had a well-established place in his life, but did she know about her fine, rich, shiny boyfriend's trips to The Club?
Somehow Marianne could not imagine the lovely Miss Alana Shepherd submitting to "Sir" and his demands, getting her hair all messed up and her lipstick smudged.
No, women like Miss Shepherd never got their panties in a bunch.
She typed in a new search and brought up a ton of articles on his girlfriend. It seemed Alana was trying for her own infamy by appearing on a reality show set in the New York City socialite scene. No wonder she'd assumed Marianne would know who she was. Marianne, however, had never watched the show. She only watched TV at night, late, when trying to fall asleep. Most of the time she preferred a book.
Opening her top draw she took out a stick of gum. It was a few years now since she gave up cigarettes, but sometimes, when the stress and anxiety piled up, she still longed to find a forgotten packet somewhere in a drawer or the bottom of her purse. What she really needed right now was a ciggie and a dirty martini. Or two. Juicy Fruit—bless its heart—wasn't going to meet her needs.
Suddenly her door opened. No knock. Bob Rawlings, of course, probably trying to catch her up to no good. Which he very nearly had.
Marianne hastily switched screens, afraid the guilt would show all over her face.
"We've got a meeting with a client in thirty minutes. Her place. Look sharp, Miller."
"Me?" She glanced at her watch. It was almost five thirty.
"It always looks better if I take my assistant along. More professional."
"What about David?" she murmured.
"The client won't have him in her house since he made some comment about her love of kaftans and dared suggest she needed Restalyn and a breast lift. Anyway, this isn't a David thing. I need a plain, unthreatening wallflower who won't suck up all the attention in the room. Hurry up and get your coat on."
As much as she despised Rawlings, he was her immediate boss and refusing to attend a meeting with him would simply cause her more difficulties. In any case, she needed to get her mind off Jack Marchetti's personal life and work was always a good way to clear the mind of distractions. So she grabbed her coat and her portfolio.
* * * *
He didn't usually stay this late in the office, but an international conference call had kept him at his desk tonight. Only when the cleaning staff came in to empty his recycling did he realize most people had gone home by then. Jack popped his head into Mrs. B's office, but the lights were off and she too had quit for the day. He pulled on his coat and walked into the elevator. For some reason he pressed the button for the sixteenth floor instead of the parking garage in the basement. He'd been told she worked late. Maybe he'd check it out, look in on her. See how his apartment redecoration was coming along.
Who was he kidding? He just wanted to see her and talk to her.
But her office was empty. Very neat, everything laid out in precise piles on her desk. Even her sticks of gum were neatly lined up by the phone. He glanced over his shoulder and then slid open the top drawer.
Much to his surprise he found a CD. So Miss Workaholic did have a little playtime occasionally. With her clothes on. And she liked CDs. Most younger people seemed to favor Ipods these days. He took it out and looked at it. Blu Cantrell. Never heard of her. He'd expected something somber and classical.
On her desk there was a framed family photo and he studied it with interest. People's families always fascinated Jack—especially parents— because his own had been so strange and distant. He was eighteen before he realized that most people's fathers and mothers kissed them when they said hello or goodbye. His parents had always shaken his hand.
The distant hum of vacuum cleaners slowly intruded and then he heard something else—a noisy clattering and cursing coming from a small, brightly lit room nearby. He walked over cautiously and looked in.
An enormous copying machine was chewing its way through a ream of paper, filling the air with an odor of overheated ink. A small blonde woman was fighting with a box of toner, her finger tips black.
"Can I help?" he asked.
She dropped the box in shock. "Mr. Marchetti! No. I'm fine." She took a deep breath. "Just this machine. The bane of my life." Her laughter was high-pitched and nervous. He recognized her as Marianne's friend from the elevator.
The copier shook and rattled violently, spitting out paper at greater speed than the plastic collating shelves could handle. "Not Bob Rawlings' and his agendas again?" he asked, amused.
The blonde tucked a loose frond of hair behind her ear and got ink on her cheek in the process. Her forehead was shiny with a thin film of perspiration, cheeks flushed. "The agendas? Yes. How did you know?"
"Oh, I heard about it." He came fully into the room and shrugged out of his coat.
She was staring at him, fidgeting and confused. "It's out of staples again but the door's jammed. And the button to collate isn't working. Says there's an error, but I can't find the code in the book."
He looked at the babbling woman and smiled gently. "Better see what we can do to fix the problem, eh?"
"You really don't have to—"
Jack rolled up his sleeves. "No problem." Truthfully, he loved taking machinery apart, seeing what made it tick and then putting it all back together again. If he hadn't inherited the department stores he always thought he could have been happy as a mechanic.
"This is really nice of you," the blonde blurted, apparently close to tears. "I would have been here all night."
"Hey, we'll figure this out." His smile widened. "Now where's the instruction manual?"
With a grateful sigh she handed him a tome the size of the yellow pages. "You're the first man I've ever known to read a manual," she exclaimed. "Usually they think they know what they're doing without one."
He laughed at that and after a minute so did she, relaxing a little.
"I'm Christie Levinson, by the way," she said and then almost immediately added, "I hope you don't fire me now. I probably shouldn’t have told you my name."
Jack shot her look over his shoulder. "Fire you?"
"Well, they do say that if you know a person's name they're first in line for the firing squad." She put a finger gun to her brow.
He laughed. "Right. Don't worry. You're safe." Jack hunkered down to flip open the machine's control panel. She stood behind him.
"What were you down here for?" she asked. "Come to find Marianne?"
Was it that obvious? "Yes. She left early tonight?"
"Had a meeting with Mr. Rawlings, poor thing."
The machine belched out the last sheet of paper it had in its belly and began to beep peevishly.
"She's a really nice girl—Marianne," the woman muttered behind him.
"Yes," he sighed. "She is." He stared at the panel of buttons and digital numbers.
"Complicated isn't it. Stubborn thing."
"Hmmm."
"Having some trouble figuring it out?"
"Huh?" He looked at her over his shoulder again.
Her eyes twinkled. "The copier, Mr. Marchetti."
"Oh, right." Jack turned back to the machine's innards and flipped open the massive book of instructions.
Chapter Twelve
This Day Sucks
As soon as Rawlings told her to leave her portfolio in the car she knew this wasn't the sort of meeting she'd expected. Then, as they walked into the Upper East Side apartment, they were greeted by a dour-faced butler and a tray of cocktails.
Marianne glared at the man who was holding her elbow
and shoving her through the entrance vestibule. "This is a party, Bob."
"It's work." He wasn't looking at her, already priming his faux smile for the hostess. "She's a client."
She felt sick, furious. The house was too hot. She wasn't dressed for a party, her hair was a mess and she hadn't even refreshed her make-up. She was still smarting from Alana Shepherd's thinly veiled disdain for her clothes. And she was with Rawlings. People might think they were a couple. That was even worse than her lack of chic style.
"Take a cocktail. Loosen up. Sometimes you have to attend a social event like this to please a client, Miller."
But she refused the glass offered to her. "I'm staying ten minutes. Then I'm getting a cab home."
Rawlings laughed lazily. "Whatever." His hand tightened around her arm because he'd just spied the client and now he steered her through the party, further into the crowd. "You're in the big city now, Miller. Time to learn how to play the game."
"I'm not a schmoozer. You should have brought David."
He ignored her and waved his cocktail at the hostess.
For the next half an hour she struggled to stay civil and not let her smile become too tense. But her head hurt and her stomach kept flipping somersaults. The client was a loud, flamboyant woman who wore too much make-up, too much jewelry and too much tan. Clearly she expected to be the center of attention, holding court over her party like a gilded, over-primped Emperor. That must be why David, who could be equally colorful himself, was not considered an appropriate guest tonight. But why Rawlings dragged her out to stand at his side she couldn't imagine.
Well, she could. All too well. He wasn't giving up despite her crushing and pointed rejections. If anything her icy demeanor had the opposite effect to the one she intended.
He was drinking too much, already slurring his words.
"Where's your wife tonight?" she asked at one point as he dragged her over to the buffet.
"Her fucking book club. Why?"
"Maybe I should call her. You need someone to drive you home." No way was she getting in a car with him again, either as a passenger or a driver. She'd met his wife briefly when she came into the office to see Bob. Mrs. Rawlings was petite, quiet, and really very sweet. What she was doing with this asshole for a husband was anyone's guess.
"Who fucking cares what she's doing?" he added with a chortle, reaching for a salmon canape and getting cream cheese on the edge of his sleeve as he stumbled against the buffet table. "You know, Miller, after twenty-five years of marriage things get stale, old. A man has to get his exercise where he can. She knows that. If she wants to keep the peace and her cozy fucking world where the only thing she has to worry about is what dressing she wants on her salad, then she can turn a blind eye to me getting a little hors d'oeuvre on the side, can't she?" He stuffed the canape into his wide mouth and chewed. Through glazed eyes he looked down at Marianne's breasts. "You waltz around in your buttoned up blouses and your skirts, catching Marchetti's eye. Stepping over me to get there, eh?" He sneered, showing dill sprigs stuck to his teeth. "Well it ain't happening, Miller. No one steps over me. You're only way up is with me. You start cooperating with me and I won't stick any spokes in your wheels for the future. No one else will hire you without a recommendation from me and Marchetti will forget about you as soon as he gets on the plane again. You'll just be the slut he slept with. I've been in this business a lot longer than you. Understand?"
"Doing something for a long time doesn't necessarily make you proficient at it. In fact it can lead to complacency."
She began to walk away but he grabbed her sleeve in his sticky fingers. "Did you think I wouldn't find out about the decorating job he gave you? The personal job? Very personal. Thought you could get away with it, didn't you?"
"I'm not trying to get away with anything. I'm just doing a job." She paused. "Maybe if you did your job more often, Mr. Marchetti would have asked you to decorate his apartment, not me."
His lip curled and his fingers twisted the material of her blouse. "But I'm not fucking the boss am I?"
"Neither am I."
"What? You mean he hasn't got inside your panties yet either? You are playing hard to get. I underestimated the country girl."
"Mr. Rawlings I don't approve of histrionics and public displays of temper are more suited to Joan Crawford and black and white movies. But I will slap your face quite loudly and quite hard, if you don't let go of my sleeve. Right. Now."
He squinted at her, evidently not sure, again, whether to take her seriously. She looked down at his fingers and then back at his face.
"And you can go ahead with the spokes in my wheels, Mr. Rawlings. I'm used to pedaling up hill and through obstacles. I've done it all my life and I never expected it to get easier. If you want to waste your time being destructive, that's your call. But just so you know - a desire to ruin someone else's career is usually the mark of a man who's given up on his own."
Finally his fingers slipped from her sleeve and Marianne headed for the bathroom to cool off before she got her coat.
Well, this day turned out to be bloody rotten, didn't it?
* * * *
He waited outside her apartment and stared through the car window as rain fell hard against it. She was late out with Rawlings. He didn't like this. Not a bit. Mrs. Bracknell was right, it seemed, and Rawlings was up to his old tricks again. After the last warning, Jack had assumed the man would get his act together and stop chasing skirt around the office. Only the devil knew how his poor wife put up with it. Or why.
Of course, Jack wasn't around enough to keep a close eye on things. Sometimes he didn't really want to know. He'd avoided the issue of Rawlings for as long as possible, trying to give him a chance to pick up the pieces after the last calamity. Jack believed in giving second chances. And wouldn't it be hypocritical to accuse Bob Rawlings of something he was trying to do himself? Maybe it was just jealousy that had got him in this bad mood.
Aha! A taxicab rolled down the street and stopped by the steps to her building. She got out and paid the driver. Thank god. Relief swept through him. He sat back in his seat and ran a hand through his hair.
"Ok, Tom," he said to his driver. "Take me home."
* * * *
Marianne saw the black sedan again across the street. Just like last time, it started to move away as soon as she walked up her steps. After the day and evening she'd endured, she just wasn't putting up with this. If someone was stalking her, they weren't getting away with it. She turned and ran back down the steps.
"Hey, come back here!" she yelled, bag swinging. "Who the hell do you think you are?"
The car kept moving. She just caught the license plate number, illuminated by a street lamp, before the vehicle vanished into the rain.
Gotcha!
She hurried up to her apartment and called her brother, Mike. He wasn't on duty until the morning, but he promised to look up the license plate as soon as he got on shift.
* * * *
"That's what it says, lil' sis. Looks like your own boss is staking out your apartment." Mike laughed down the phone at her. Apparently he thought she was safe since it was "only" Jack Marchetti sitting outside her building in his car, lurking around. Oh yeah, safe because a man like that would never look at Mike's socially awkward little sister, would he? In all likelihood her brother thought she was making it up, or simply memorized the wrong number. "You want me to come down there and give him a warning?" he chortled.
"Thanks for your concern, Officer Miller."
"Hey, you coming with me next week?"
"Coming with you where?" She sighed, cradling the phone under her chin as she sorted through her desk drawer, looking for her calendar. Marianne still liked to use the old-fashioned paper book kind. Something else old-fashioned about her that people laughed at.
"It's Thanksgiving, dippy-head."
She sank against the back of her chair. Having been so busy, and forgetting how quickly the time crept by, she'd completel
y put the obligatory family dinner out of her mind. Her fingers found the calendar.
"Mom's expecting us for dinner at four so it means an early start for you and me. Ben and Julie are taking the kids up the night before, but I'm working."
Wonderful. Four hours in a car with Mike and Ozzy Osbourne, culminating in over-cooked turkey and another family quarrel.
"I gotta go. Talk later." She hung up without making a commitment either way. Marianne had something else to sort out first. A certain man who was driving her crazy.
As she put her calendar back in the drawer it occurred to her that the Blu Cantrell CD was missing. Tried to remember if she'd taken it home with her. No, she was pretty sure she'd left it in her office to listen to when no one else was around and she worked late. It could be a hard CD to replace and she'd had it for eight years.
The loss of it just rounded off her anger nicely.
On her way through the main office, she checked Rawlings' office and saw it was empty. No surprise he was late in today, but he still had her portfolio in his car. Sweaty Pig. Heading for the elevator she ran into Christie. "Marianne! Oh my god, you'll never guess what happened to me last night—"
"I'm sorry. I can't stop right now."
"But I have to tell you—"
"Later. Ok?" She plowed onward for the elevator.
"Maybe we can meet for drinks tonight?" Christie called out.
Marianne pushed her way onto the elevator without replying, her mind full of things she had to get straight with her boss. For once when someone pushed her, jostling for space, she shoved back, holding her ground.
* * * *
He had his feet up on the window ledge and his back to the door when he heard it fly open. Still on his phone, he swung the chair around and saw Marianne marching toward his desk, eyes firing green and gold sparks across the distance.
