She sighed again, then slapped down the pile of mail and headed along the hall with firm steps.
It was good that he hadn’t tried to call or write. In fact, perfect. She’d get her life back to normal. All her spare time this week would be devoted to searching for the right house. She had gotten behind, what with unexpected dinners, unscheduled pumpkin buying and a full week of avoiding the telephone when it rang, then listening for it to ring when it didn’t.
She might actually get some work done tomorrow with him out of her life.
*
AT FIFTEEN MINUTES before four o’clock the next afternoon, he re-entered Bette’s life, if somewhat obliquely, when Janine Taylor walked into her office and announced she would rather quit Top-Line than spend another second as Paul Monroe’s temporary assistant.
Chapter Six
*
“I CAN’T WORK for that man. Bette, you know I have handled every assignment you’ve given me. I have worked with demanding bosses, with disorganized bosses, even with sexist bosses. But I can’t and won’t work for Paul Monroe.”
“I don’t understand, Janine. You seemed to be getting along fine last week.”
Janine shook her head, and if Bette thought there was confusion in the gesture she also recognized rock-solid determination.
That was one characteristic Bette had considered when she’d assigned this particular assistant. She figured it would take someone determined to keep a rein on Paul. She had told herself Janine’s plainness had not been a factor.
“From the beginning, I knew he was a little different. After all, look at all those calls to you.” Bette felt her cheeks sting. “But today he was …” Janine hesitated. “Odd. Very odd.”
She seemed to be trying to communicate some greater meaning with her eyes, like the player in a TV quiz game hoping to get her point across without giving away the clue.
Bette stared across the desk at the woman who’d been among her most reliable employees, and tried to reconcile Janine’s reaction with the man she’d come to know. Perhaps Paul was not the run-of-the-mill Chicago businessman, but she couldn’t imagine him doing anything to elicit such an extreme reaction from a woman, unless it involved the feel of his lips on hers, the rasp of his skin against hers, the draw of his mouth - and then the woman’s response would be very different from Janine’s.
“Can you tell me what, specifically, he did that made you walk out before the end of your assignment, before, even the end of a day?” She couldn’t prevent astonishment from creeping into her voice. The whole thing was so unlike Janine.
“No schedule,” Janine jerked out. “He wouldn’t give me a schedule, even when I practically begged. And a curator from the Smithsonian - the Smithsonian! - called, and Mr. Monroe said, no, he wouldn’t take the call. He didn’t feel like talking. He just didn’t feel like it. That’s what he said to tell them. I didn’t, of course, but … And he said - He didn’t …” Her fluttering hands, which seemed to be trying to finish sentences her mouth couldn’t accommodate, floated back to her lap and she set her jaw, allowing just one word to escape. “No.”
“No?”
“No, I won’t try to tell you any more. Because if I tell you, you’ll think I’m crazy. Because it’s not what he did, it’s how he did it.”
There seemed to be no answer to that.
“I’m sorry, Bette. I’m truly sorry.” Janine stood and slung the strap of her oversize handbag over her shoulder. “If you want to fire me or put me on suspension, I’ll understand. But I won’t go back there.”
The door hadn’t even clicked closed behind her before it opened to admit Darla.
“Paul Monroe’s on line one,” she announced, then gave a sympathetic frown when Bette cursed emphatically.
“You want to take it or shall I?”
“I’ll take the call.”
“Okay, but you know, I don’t think that man’s nearly as harmless as he might seem on the surface. I saw his face Thursday when you made me tell him you’d left for an appointment with another client, and that’s a stick of dynamite I wouldn’t go playing around with too much.”
Bette grimaced her understanding. She knew. She knew all too well. Defusing the dynamite was exactly the point.
She had her hand on the phone when she stopped, with something tingling along the nerves of her arm, something ringing cheerfully in her head. Uh-oh. She wanted to take this call. She looked forward to hearing his voice. And that was dangerous. Very, very dangerous.
Lighting a dynamite fuse required only a spark.
“Wait a minute.”
Darla turned from the door, and waited for Bette to continue.
“On second thought, you take the call. Tell him we’ll have a replacement assistant in his office first thing tomorrow morning. And tell him, well, you know what to tell him. Then come back in and we’ll have to adjust the schedule to free up Norma Schaff to go there for the rest of the week.”
*
NORMA SCHAFF, IN her mid-fifties and razor-sharp of mind and wit, was made of sterner stuff than Janine.
At least Bette would have sworn to that before Norma Schaff faced Paul Monroe. She lasted two-and-a-half days.
To finish out the week, Bette tried a new approach, sending Jonathan Roiter. He finished out the day, which Darla termed a moral victory, and then said he’d rather swab toilets than go back Monday morning.
“Paul Monroe’s on line three,” Darla announced as she held open the door for Jonathan’s departure. “And before you tell me to take this call, too, I think you should know that he said he wants to talk to you this time.”
Bette stared at the phone a moment, then looked up at her assistant and friend. “I don’t understand it, Darla.”
“Me either, but I think the only way we’re ever going to have a shot at understanding is if you get an explanation from him. You know the odd thing is, he’s charming on the telephone. I wonder what he’s doing to these people.”
Bette waited until the door closed, took a deep breath that should have steadied her more than it did, then picked up the phone.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Bette. How are you? It’s good to hear your voice. Have you had a nice week?”
Darla was right. He sounded charming. Pure irritation swept aside uncertainty.
“I’ve had an absolutely miserable week, as you well know since you are directly and solely responsible for it. What have you been doing to those people we send to your office?”
“Me? Nothing. I haven’t laid a hand on a single one of them. Why?”
Nobody could sound that innocent and really be innocent.
“Why! Because we’ve had three of our best people come back this week - three people in one week! - saying they would never work for you again.”
“Oh, that.”
“Yes, that!”
“It’s just that I’ve been feeling sort of crazy this week -”
“The feeling’s mutual.”
She knew he heard her, but he ignored it.
“But my feeling crazy’s easy enough to fix.”
“Oh, really. How do you suggest we fix it?”
No, no, no, Bette ! Her brain listened, aghast, at the opening her mouth had given him, and she braced to be run over by the Mack truck he would surely drive through it. She could have sworn the phone line hummed with his glee.
“Go out with me.”
As Mack trucks went, that wasn’t so bad. A mere four-ton - or four-word - model. But he didn’t fool her. This truck was just the lead vehicle in a caravan. Because after going out, there would be talking and laughing, then holding hands, kissing in the moonlight, embracing in the dark and who knew what else.
Only she did know what else. Just the thought of it changed the pattern of her breathing and heartbeat. And that was the problem. If she went out with Paul Monroe, the man most likely to be named least likely to be her type of man, she could fall for him hard. More than she already had.
“No!”
“You don’t have to shout.”
She might have overdone the firmness, but “I didn’t shout.”
“Could have fooled me,” he grumbled, and to her dismay she felt her lips quirk.
“No,” she repeated, definitely not a shout, perhaps because the word was mostly aimed at herself.
“I heard you the first time.” Something in his voice made Bette put a hand to her throat, made her want to take all the words back and erase that - was it pain? - from his voice. “All right, so you don’t want to go out with me.” Yes, I do want to go out with you, she thought, but I won’t. I can’t. “Then I guess you’ll just have to send another temporary assistant Monday morning.”
Whatever she’d heard in his voice had disappeared. His last words were almost cheerful. She swallowed, hard. “Yes, we’ll send you another new assistant Monday morning.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
“Have a nice weekend, Bette.”
“You, too, Paul. Goodbye.”
She hung up, but left her hand on the receiver. She knew she’d have an absolutely miserable weekend - for the same reason she’d had a miserable week.
*
SHE WASN’T EVEN surprised when Karen Van Ryland came in Tuesday at 11:30 and announced she wouldn’t work for Paul Monroe.
“That’s it. I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take any more of this, Darla.” Bette pressed her hands on the desktop and rose slowly from her chair.
“What are you going to do?”
Do ? Yes, she had to do something.
The weekend had turned out worse than miserable - it had been unproductive. She hadn’t caught up with the paperwork from Top-Line the way she’d wanted to. She hadn’t investigated the two prospective neighborhoods she’d had on her agenda and she hadn’t attended the real estate open houses she’d targeted.
In fact, all she had accomplished was carving jack-o’-lantern faces into the three pumpkins that had taken up residence on her front steps. Oddly, they all bore a striking resemblance to the mask of tragedy. Her neighbor had remarked that she had the most depressing doorstep in town. She had added that only seemed fitting since Bette’s expression matched that of the jack-o’-lanterns.
Yes, she had to do something. She had to at least try to stop this.
“I’m going to face that maniac on his own turf and tell him he can’t get away with this!”
“Do you think that’s wise?”
She hadn’t told Darla what Paul’s condition for behaving normally was, but she had an uncomfortable feeling the older woman had her suspicions.
“No, I don’t think it’s wise, but I think it’s inevitable.”
As inevitable as it had been that those three pumpkins would get faces.
The phone rang and they looked at the instrument, then at each other. Bette swung her coat on as it rang a second time, grabbed her purse and was to the door by ring three.
“Tell him I will be in his office in fifteen minutes, and then we’ll just see about this nonsense.”
*
“THIS IS RIDICULOUS, PAUL.”
Paul’s gaze followed Bette as she prowled across his inner office for the third time. Her dark green dress was made of some heavy material with just enough swing to caress her curves with each move. Loose sleeves were gathered into tight cuffs that made her wrists look impossibly small.
He could hold both her wrists in one hand with no problem. He would hold them behind her, encouraging her to arch, while he explored the white slender throat that rose from the circle of a scarf tied at the neckline of that green dress.
The warmth gathering in his groin made him grateful he’d assumed his habitual pose when Bette first came in - feet propped against the edge of his desk, knees bent, slouched a bit so the back of his neck rested on the high back of the old-fashioned wooden swivel chair. He’d done it deliberately, emphasizing his calm casualness as a contrast to her high-wired agitation.
Sitting like this was also comfortable, and luckily in this case, it masked certain realities of male human anatomy.
For a week and half, he’d found fantasies involving a certain dark-haired, blue-eyed woman had become increasingly frequent. They’d also become disturbingly realistic. And the trouble was, the fantasies also seemed to be producing increasingly realistic reactions.
It was as bad as being a teenager again. No, worse. As a teenager he’d had no thought of fulfilling the fantasies. Now he had a fairly good idea how incredible it would be if he did.
Just one stumbling block - Bette Wharton.
He watched her slim fingers pick up a framed photograph from the bookshelves to the right of his desk.
He’d wager she wasn’t aware it was the second time she’d picked up that particular photograph, a shot taken his senior year in college, with him, Grady, Michael and Tris on the front steps of the university library. And he’d up the bet to any amount anyone cared to name that she’d deny ever letting the tip of her finger stroke the image of his youthful face the way she’d just done.
If it wouldn’t have raised her hackles, he would have grinned at her. She was weakening.
Maybe he’d missed something by never pursuing a woman before. Or did it only work this way with Bette? He wondered if a tiger on the hunt felt this way as it watched a particularly graceful gazelle graze closer and closer to being within the predator’s grasp - a little sorry for the creature about to become lunch, but at the same time hungry, so very hungry.
She put down the photo with a bit of a thunk and swung back to face him, and he thought maybe the gazelle wasn’t as defenseless as it looked. It certainly had the speed to escape, no matter how delicate its limbs.
“Did you hear me?” Her exasperated tone informed him he’d missed something.
“No.”
She let out a short, irritated spurt of breath that made it harder for him to restrain a grin. It also had the effect of drawing his attention to her mouth, and rekindling memories of the way it had felt against his lips, his teeth, his tongue.
“This has got to stop, Paul.”
“My not listening?” Or my fantasizing?
“Your scaring off my employees.”
“I told you that was easy enough to remedy. Go out with me.”
“Paul -”
The warning sounded clearly, but he didn’t heed it. He’d dismissed the possibility that she was involved with someone ten days ago as he’d sat in his car contemplating her dark house, but the thought came again now. Maybe that was why …
His feet hit the floor with a thud and the old chair creaked upright. “Is there a special reason you won’t go out with me?”
“What do you mean, a special reason?” He could almost see her caution.
“Another man,” he rapped out. “Are you involved with somebody else?”
“No.” The word came too fast, and she was too flustered, for the answer to be anything but automatically honest. But then she faced him, hands on hips, and glared full force. “There’s no ‘somebody else’ about it. I’m not involved with you, either.”
“Yet.” He let himself smile a little as he said the word, more because the tension had eased than anything else.
“Not at all.”
“Why not, Bette?”
“Why not?” she repeated. She sounded more uncertain than outraged. He took that as a good sign.
“Yeah. Why not? It’s not like you could be suspecting I have some horrible secret in my past. You know pretty much all there is to know about my past. You’ve even met my parents. You seemed to like them.”
He let the last sentence linger, forcing her to say something or be rude.
“Yes, I liked them.”
Who would have thought that getting her to agree with him would be such a kick? He had a feeling his fantasies might start including the word yes. “You must have been able to tell that most of the time they think I’m a pretty good guy. I could give you affidavits from a couple fri
ends, maybe even Judi. Surely you’d take a younger sister’s word for it that I’m not a monster.”
“I don’t think you’re a monster.” She sounded almost sullen. The signs were better and better.
Abruptly, he didn’t want to play the game of reading signs anymore. He wanted to know. He wanted her to tell him. “Then why won’t you go out with me?”
For a long, tenuous moment he thought she wouldn’t respond. Willing her to answer, he kept his eyes on her.
“It’s too … You’re too -” she darted a look at him, then off to the side ” - dangerous.”
“What do you mean, dangerous?” An extraordinary relief surged through him, and he couldn’t stop the grin this time - dangerous was a whole lot better than her just not wanting to spend time with him.
When she stiffened, he knew he’d done exactly the wrong thing.
She took a deep, backbone-steadying breath, walked over to the black leather couch under the windows and sat down with dignified composure. If he’d rattled her, she’d recouped. The gazelle had not only escaped, it was prepared to face down its pursuer. He felt absurdly deflated, shut out.
“Paul, I have a business to run. Running it well is important to me. I’ve worked very long, and very hard to build it up.”
“And you’d hate to lose this ‘in’ with Centurian.” He’d accepted that from the beginning, known how she must view the opportunity. It made sense for someone with a master plan. Still, part of him hoped she’d deny it, to say he was more important to her.
She met his eyes. “An account with Centurian would mean a great deal to Top-Line.”
“I already told them I highly recommend Top-Line. So that’s not an issue.”
“Thank you.”
He was the one who broke the look. He was being an ass. Of course her business was important to her. He understood that. He thought about telling her how long and hard he’d worked building his business.
But then he remembered things he’d told her that first night at Mama Artemis’s; she wouldn’t take his protests too seriously. He didn’t generally care to have people know that satisfying his clients, and more important, his own standards, was an issue of self-respect. But he wondered if, this time, he’d made a mistake in passing off the demands of his profession so blithely.
Good Guy Heroes Boxed Set Page 128
