Bringing Up Baby New Year & Frisky Business

by Vicki Lewis Thompson

  Although the jail, a squat brick building in a yard devoid of vegetation, had looked depressingly squalid on the outside, the inside was actually light and airy. The secretary-dispatcher, a cheerful and talkative woman named Peg, had painted the walls white and resanded the oak table that dominated the room. She knew because Peg had told her all about it. When they first walked in, the policeman had mentioned the three cells in the back of the building. Laura’s stomach had flip-flopped, but Peg had shot him a scolding look, and Laura was allowed to sit at the table and wait for Kyle and Harris, a stack of outdated Time magazines to keep her company.

  She hadn’t wanted to call Harris or Kyle to rescue her. Well, that wasn’t true. Her immediate thought had been to call Kyle and ask him to rescue her. She might have resisted, except that her sister was incommunicado, probably on a picnic with her family. Besides, Rand was bringing Kyle’s car to the police station, so Kyle would have to come to pick it up anyway. When the policeman reached Rand, he was ticked, but not ticked enough to say Laura had stolen his car, especially since he had been happily driving around all day in Kyle’s “all-original Austin Healey 3000,” as he kept calling it.

  “I thought you were driving my car,” Laura said when the policeman handed her the phone.

  Rand paused. “Your windshield had an unfortunate encounter with a tree branch in the parking lot.”

  She sighed. “Great.”

  They figured out a plan. Rand would bring Kyle’s car to the station. Harris would bring Kyle to the station, too, but since Harris would get there first, Laura would go ahead and go back to Atlanta with him, leaving Kyle to wait for his Austin Healey and watch over the Randmobile in Where-the-Heck, Georgia. Rand could bring Kyle’s stuff with him, and Laura and Harris could swing by Serene Dynamics and pick her stuff up there, worrying about her car later.

  It made sense to Laura, and it made sense to Rand. It seemed to make sense to Kyle when she explained it to him on the phone, although she wasn’t sure he was really listening to her, hung up as he was on the jail thing. The policeman made it clear that it was the most complicated scheme he had ever heard, so Laura tried to draw it out on a simple flowchart, which he still didn’t follow. Anyway, it didn’t matter if the policeman didn’t get it. It mattered that Kyle got it. And that he wasn’t too upset that Rand was driving his car.

  How was she supposed to know that the car would be the least of his worries? She had scanned all the entertainment, business and social sciences features in the old magazines and was reluctantly tackling articles about NATO when she saw Kyle and Harris pull up in Harris’s beige luxury sedan. “That’s them,” she said to Peg, watching Kyle get out. He wasn’t even using his crutches, hopping with a vengeance.

  Harris introduced himself to Peg and the cop. “You’re the last employee I’d have ever figured on bailing out of jail,” Harris said to Laura. “Or maybe quitting my company has changed you already.” His tone was joking, and he didn’t seem upset at the news of her resignation, or that he had to help her out. She couldn’t say the same for Kyle.

  His tan face was paler than she’d ever seen it, and there were unhappy lines around his mouth. He braced himself on the table where she sat, her mouth suddenly very, very dry as he loomed over her. “How could you do it?”

  “It was just a U-turn,” she said lightly. “It’s been a long time since I memorized the highway rule booklet.”

  “Laura.” She had only heard that tone in his voice one time before: the night before last, in the woods, when she had accused him of using his intelligence and charm only in pursuit of women. “How could you quit? Do you know how this makes me look? It makes me look like some guy who got his job because a girl gave it to him, that’s how it makes me look.”

  So that was it. Gee, for a second she thought he’d missed her! Once again she had tripped over his need to be a Manly Man. Well, sorry. It was one thing to let him drive because it made him feel better, but it was another to make her decisions about her future based on whether or not they made him “look bad.”

  “Are you two okay?”

  Laura glanced up to see Harris, Peg and the policeman staring at the two of them with interest.

  “We’re fine,” Kyle snapped.

  “Is there someplace we could talk in private?” Laura asked Peg, ignoring Kyle’s sputters that he said they were fine, and he meant it, and that certainly meant he didn’t have to go talk about anything.

  “The cell block,” Peg said. “It’s clear this week.”

  Laura stood, offering her arm to Kyle, who said, “I can walk on my own, thanks.” Having a sprained ankle should have made him more clumsy, more likely to bump into her, but he held himself far away from her as they walked down the short hall to the cells. Unlike the bright and open office, this was a dismal, cheerless place, dank with the smell of mold and, she imagined, bad deeds.

  “How can you quit?” He almost spit the last word out, and when she looked into his eyes, they were cold with fury. Today was one time he was not cuter when he was mad.

  “There isn’t room for both of us,” she said, keeping her own voice calm. “If you read the report, you know that things are screwed up with New Horizon. Harris is not going to acquire them, not now. I’m trying to make the choice less awkward for everyone.”

  “That’s not a fair fight,” Kyle said.

  Silly her. She didn’t even know it was a fight. “So you’d rather go back to being rivals, just so you can say you didn’t win by default? Is that important to you?” She leaned toward him as she spoke, trying to look intimidating, but it had the opposite effect. She had forgotten until now that she wasn’t wearing a bra, but Kyle’s eyes strayed to her chest, reminding her, and she felt her skin prickle against her dress. She crossed her arms. “I’m not competing on those terms, Kyle.”

  He gave her a tired sigh and gripped the outer bars of one of the cells.

  “But you don’t have to find somewhere else to work,” he said. “Harris isn’t going to make a decision today or tomorrow or even next week. Just come back and everything will be like it was before.”

  Of course she had already thought of that. She could go back and ride out her employment with Harris, even though she’d admitted it wasn’t working. She’d gone way beyond the call of duty at the firm, so she’d earned the right to coast, doing the minimum required. But that would mean that her main interest in life would become Kyle and doing whatever it took to get him. That was her sister Kate’s way of operating, not hers. When Kate had met her future husband, she had pursued him with such a vengeance that she had become the only elementary education major in the history of her college to have had a double major in computer science. Of course it had worked, and now that the romance thing was settled, she took her teaching job seriously. She had the only second graders in the county who could explain fuzzy logic.

  Fuzzy logic. That was a good term for what she and Kyle were using right now.

  “It can’t be like it was before,” she said slowly. And if you have to ask why, if you can’t figure out that this is the first chance I’ve taken with my life and that I can’t go back to being the office good girl, then you don’t understand me.

  She thought he got it. Then he straightened up and said, “All right, then. I’ll be the one to look for a job.”

  She stared at him. “You’ll what? Why you?” But then, with dread, she realized that she knew exactly what he was going to say. Don’t, Kyle. Don’t do it. Don’t go there. I can’t stand to think that you pity me.

  He went on, oblivious to her warning glance. “Because it’ll be much easier for me to find a job than it would be for you.”

  YOU WOULD HAVE thought he had slapped her. Those deep hazel eyes were filled with such raw pain and anger that a sharp dig went through his chest, but then the hurt in her eyes was replaced with a vacant coldness. Ice Princess Laura was back, and when he looked at her again, he saw no indication that she was anyone he knew, that they had ever melted body
, soul and mind together, that she had been his partner in the most fulfilling romantic experience of his life. She spun around. He caught her on the shoulder as she started to run out of the corridor.

  “Did you think I meant that as an insult?” As though he would say anything like that to hurt her, when it was precisely because he didn’t want her to be hurt that he was going to make sure she got to keep her position at Harris Associates.

  She put her hand on her hip. “‘Gee, Laura, why don’t you keep your job, because you’re too lame to get another one.’ Kyle, if that isn’t an insult, then I don’t know how to calculate mileage for an expense report.”

  “No, it’s just that you’ve never dealt with headhunters and job searches and corporate recruiters. It has nothing to do with how talented you are. You don’t know how to play the game.”

  “Great, a sports metaphor. You know how I love those.” She gave him a shrewd look, and for a scary second he thought she could see right down into his soul. Could she love him if she did? Was there anything there to see? “And you know what? It has everything to do with how talented I am, not what a good game I talk. And that’s why I’m not going to have any trouble finding and keeping another job.” Her sandals clacked on the cement floor as she hurried ahead of him. “Are you ready?” she asked Harris, pushing out of the door before she got an answer.

  “I was waiting on her,” Kyle heard Harris say to Peg. Kyle went through the door after Laura.

  Laura had opened the back door of the car and yanked out the tasteful gift shop sack full of Kyle’s belongings, dropping it on the pavement.

  “Your jeans are in there,” he said.

  “Keep them.”

  “Your necklace from the woods,” he said.

  “Keep it, too.”

  “Your bra.”

  “Kyle, I’m warning you.” She yanked open the passenger door on the front seat, where the report lay in its manila envelope. Kyle grabbed it out from under her before she sat down, brushing against her as he did so, feeling the shock of her skin against him. Reaching for the envelope, she said, “That’s my report. Give it back.”

  “I’m the one stuck here. Let me keep it and read it again.” He took her resignation letter from the back of the envelope. “You can have this,” he said. He got depressed just touching it.

  Laura twisted around in the seat and looked at him with a serious expression. “What are you going to do with the report? Not that I’m interested.”

  “I’m going to figure out how there’s room for both of us at the top. That’s a promise.”

  It was a good thing he knew women as well as he did, because a clueless guy would have taken the look she gave him as symptoms of a headache or indigestion. He, with his superior skills, knew it meant, “Whatever you say, you poor deluded man.”

  Sometimes it didn’t pay to understand women.

  “Kyle,” she said. She reached, as though to touch his arm, then stopped. “Listen to me, because this is the last time I’m going to say it. I don’t want the vice presidency anymore. Even if I could have it. Even if I could have it and you could have it, too. Do you understand that?”

  “Whatever,” he said, making sure she was all the way in the car before slamming the door. He passed Harris on his way back into the building and snarled a response to his boss’s cheerful goodbye. He forced himself not to turn around and watch her go.

  After a quick nod to Peg as he entered the station, he sat down in Laura’s seat and propped his foot up on another chair. His ankle was killing him now. He probably should have asked Laura more questions about any instructions the doctor had left for him. But, then, that would have taken away from the time he and Laura got to spend doing and talking about other things, and he’d rather have this pain the rest of his life than to have given up a second of that. Probably his ankle wouldn’t heal right and fifty years down the road he’d be able to predict it was going to rain just by the ache. And his kids and grandkids wouldn’t believe him, and he’d yell at them…

  Where was this coming from? He had never considered becoming an angry old man. There was no reason to assume that he wouldn’t be a perfectly cheerful old man, since he had until this minute been a happy young one. But that was BL. Before Laura.

  At his sigh, Peg said, “Your ankle or your heart?”

  He looked around and saw that the policeman had gone back into his private office. This place was pretty homey for a jail, wasn’t it? He wanted to thank Peg and the cop for taking such good care of Laura, but understood that if he said that, it meant that he was totally, completely, all the way gone, and that everyone—or at least everyone in Podunk, Georgia—would know it. “Nah, it’s the ankle,” he said, trying out one of the smiles that always worked with his mom. “No danger of a broken heart. I go through hearts like…like used printer cartridges.”

  “Hmmmph.”

  See, Peg saw right through him, to the sensitivity beneath the bluster. All women, young or old, did, except Laura. Why couldn’t she? But then he noticed that Peg was shaking her head.

  “You’ve never changed a printer cartridge in your life.”

  His charm was gone. Laura had probably taken it, too. But then she said, “Would you like some pecan pie?”

  “Yes, please. I can get it,” he said, standing up, wincing as he did.

  “Get real,” Peg said, bustling over to the small fridge on the far side of the room. “You might as well get all the sympathy you can.” She set the pie and a glass of milk down beside him. “I take it that Laura wasn’t impressed with your injuries.”

  Kyle was already several bites into the pie, and Peg got up and retrieved another slice, sliding it onto the paper plate in front of him. “Thank you. Laura—Well, I think maybe I’ve cried wolf to her too many times, you know? She sees right through me.”

  “So a bleeding head wound wouldn’t impress her. What would?”

  He didn’t know. The policeman came back into the room and handed Peg some paperwork, which she tackled right away. Kyle flipped through the Time magazines beside him. In the middle of the stack was a piece of blank typing paper with Laura’s writing on it. Had she left him a note?

  He stared at it for a while, trying to see it as some secret message to him—something along the lines of “Kyle, I’m crazy about you and I know you aren’t really a slacker.” But to his disappointment, it looked like some kind of flowchart. It was. Of all things, it was a chart detailing how Rand was going to get his car back to him. So much for secret messages. He turned it into a paper airplane, sailing it toward the trash can. Then the door to the inner office opened, and the draft caught the plane, sending it into the policeman’s chest as he walked by.

  “Isn’t your ride coming?” the policeman asked.

  “Yes, sir. The details are right there on that paper.” What kind of woman drew flowcharts for fun? The kind of woman who had spreadsheet parties, probably. The kind of woman who looked for substance in a guy, not just style. From having to borrow pen and paper from her at meetings to letting her work on the weekends while he played darts in the conference room, he had given her every reason to think he was a superficial party boy, a good haircut over an empty head, a total waste case. If he were Laura, would he want a deeper relationship with him? No. They’d had amazing sex, but he had such a reputation that she probably thought he had that kind of sex with all kinds of women. No. Only with her had it been like that.

  He had to accept it—he had been a fling. Granted, Laura didn’t seem like the fling type, but that’s what flings were about, going against type. People had vacation flings and shipboard flings and “I’m trapped in a hotel room with a drugged and bedridden man” flings. But he wasn’t the kind of guy she would choose for life.

  He pushed his plate away. What would it have been like, he wondered, if he and Laura had worked as a team from the beginning? If he had gotten to know her, acknowledged his interest in what was behind those eyes? If he hadn’t walked into her place of busines
s, given her a metaphorical pat on the head, and started sucking up to her boss?

  Harris was going to regret that he took her resignation so lightly.

  He rose and went over to where Peg sat. “Could I borrow a sheet of paper?”

  Her eyes crinkled in surprise. “He walks.” She handed him a sheet.

  “I may need a couple.”

  Peg looked at him curiously. “You working or making more airplanes?”

  “I’m working,” he said. “Why does everyone think I never work? It just looks easy. That’s my gift.”

  He took the paper and a cheap stick pen from Peg, then sat back down at the table. He had told Laura he was going to figure out how they could both keep their jobs, and he was going to do just that. Taking out the report, he gave it a quick read through. A stranger would have never guessed that it had been produced by one person in less than a day. It was error-free and perfectly formatted and filled with facts and logical analyses.

  “She eats like Shaggy, she walks like Daphne, but she’s got the soul of Velma,” he muttered to himself. Wonderful—now she had him seeing the world through television reruns.

  What the pristine report didn’t have, though—what Laura didn’t have—was his own gift for reading between the lines. Using Harris’s contact list, she had done an incredible job of collecting confidential quotes from clients and vendors. Because she had quoted many of them verbatim, he was able to read the subtext, to see which of these guys were ticked off beyond the possibility of mending fences and which ones still held some fondness and excitement regarding the firm.