Bringing Up Baby New Year & Frisky Business

by Vicki Lewis Thompson

  What if a better deal was still possible? He wrote down questions that he wanted to ask the people quoted in the report, as well as a master list of the pros and cons of Harris acquiring New Horizon in its current state. Peg left in the early evening, after first bringing Kyle a sack of greasy cheeseburgers from the diner next to the police station. Policeman One left, replaced by Policeman Two, who looked exactly like the first. As the sky outside turned dark and the fluorescent lights buzzed brighter, Kyle heard someone say, “Kyle? Your car’s here.”

  The voice was the only clue that this was Rand. Gone was the starched-and-pressed counselor. This guy was sporting two-day stubble, a torn white T-shirt, and a look of delirium.

  “Rand?” Kyle stood, balancing his weight on his good ankle. “What happened to you?”

  “Total and complete personal transformation, that’s what happened to me.” His eyes glittering, he approached Kyle, who blinked as Rand pulled up the sleeve of his shirt. The bright Serene Dynamics logo glinted from his upper arm. “I was angry at you,” Rand said as Kyle edged toward the door and the parking lot. His car looked great, despite a new Serene Dynamics air freshener and despite having been driven here by a maniac with a head injury.

  Rand continued, “I’ve never had a duo defy my orders the way you defied yours.”

  “Wait a minute,” Kyle said. “We didn’t defy any orders. You left us without a flashlight, then just assumed we had left, not that we were stuck.”

  Rand continued. “But then I realized that you were here to teach me a lesson about the greater gifts that can come to us when our plans go awry.”

  “I like my plans to stay wry, personally,” Kyle said, inching toward his car and freedom.

  “When I was unconscious, I had the most incredible insights into our training programs, our future, everything. And I have you and Laura to thank for that, for teaching me what it’s like to let the unexpected take over our lives.”

  He and Laura had learned that lesson, too, hadn’t they? Only it seemed to be one that Laura now regretted. Well, he was going to see that she didn’t. He was going to show her that he could be the kind of person she could respect. Let Rand become less obsessive and ambitious. It was time Kyle became more so.

  Rand seized his hand, shaking it vigorously. “I want you to remember this,” he told Kyle. “Sometimes it takes being knocked on the head—quite literally—to shake you toward where you’re meant to be.”

  Kyle opened the door to his beloved car. “I don’t know,” he said to Rand. “A sprained ankle and a case of hives, those seem to work pretty well, too.”

  8

  THERE WAS A LIMIT to the amount of television you could watch. This came as a deep shock to Laura, who had assumed that there was no such thing. But when you knew all the episodes of The Waltons, The Brady Bunch, and Little House on the Prairie by heart, you could watch them and still have room in your head to obsess about whatever you were obsessing about. Kyle, mostly. Well, purely Kyle.

  Laura had decided to take her week of leisure and do a real forget-you-slept-with-the-office-hunk blowout, full of chips and popcorn and Hershey’s Kisses. She was going to neglect to spray Clean Shower on the tile walls and let the pizza boxes pile up around her.

  It didn’t work. She found herself obsessively bleaching countertops and scrubbing the kitchen floor by hand. Even the rerun troubles of John Boy and Elizabeth, Peter and Jan, and Laura and Mary Ingalls were not even remotely as interesting to her as the Life of Kyle Sanders, going on now without her.

  He hadn’t called. Well, why should he have called? The last time she had talked to him, hadn’t she been a little dismissive? A little dismissive? She had blown up in his face. Still, the last thing he had said to her was that he wanted to figure out a way they could still both get their promotions. Never mind that she didn’t want that promotion now. It was the thought that counted, the thought that he wanted to see her again. So why hadn’t she called him? Because she feared that as soon as she’d gotten in Harris’s car, Kyle had been struck by a blinding light of “Hey, Kyle, if she leaves, you don’t have to deal with the awkward fact that you made mad, passionate love to that woman while you were under the influence of a massive dose of painkillers.”

  There was also later that night, after the painkillers had worn off. And later again, when she’d felt him reach for her while the room clock blinked 4:00 a.m.

  She felt her face grow hot. If she thought about them making love, her face started to tingle feverishly and her knees grew weak. Oh, sure—gripping, Emmy-winning drama couldn’t hold her interest, but she could spend hours replaying Kyle touching her. Her touching Kyle. Her mouth on his chest. His hands on her breasts. She shook her head, got up and pulled open the blinds to her apartment, surveying it with a critical air. It was a little messy, but nothing like what she’d wanted to achieve. She just wasn’t the kind of woman who could let herself go.

  Except when she was with Kyle. She could let herself go with Kyle, let herself go beyond conscious thought, beyond propriety, beyond her to-do lists and her obligations and into pure pleasure.

  She grabbed an Oreo from the Bugs Bunny cookie jar on her counter. It was a gift from Haley, and there had never actually been cookies in it before. She took one bite and tossed it out, then opened the cabinets and started searching for a can of soup. So much for being bad. She was no good at it. If you didn’t count watching too much television, the only vaguely wicked thing she’d ever done in her life was have a one-night stand with Kyle Sanders.

  Even then, she had a feeling that her constant thoughts of Kyle somehow went against the spirit of one-night stands altogether. Maybe for a split second she had thought she could sleep with Kyle without wishing their relationship was a real one, but it hadn’t happened that way.

  Was a one-night stand a one-night stand if you still held out hope that there would be a second night? And how far apart could night one be from night two for them to be separate stands altogether? If you, every three or so years when the moon was full and the month didn’t have an R in it, made love with the sexiest, hottest man you ever met, could you eventually add all those encounters up and call it a relationship?

  And what would she do between stands? She could marry someone nice and bland—not that a candidate had shown up in the past few years, but now that she had fallen hopelessly for Kyle, fate would decree that Mr. Sweet show up. And whoever he was, would he ever excite her imagination and her body the way Kyle did? No. Better just to live alone, not take advantage of Mr. Sweet. Eventually, she would get a cat. People were always trying to force cats on single women, and someday she would be too tired to refuse. And Kyle liked cats. Maybe she would need tips on cat behavior and she could give him a call.

  Arrgh.

  Maybe she would take a walk in one of Atlanta’s parks. Being outside had made her feel better last weekend, all that fresh air.

  All that fresh air and Kyle.

  She had just grabbed her car keys when the phone rang. She dove for it, only to hear Brandi at the other end of the line.

  “Oh, hi, Brandi,” she said, trying not to let disappointment creep into her voice.

  “I hate to bother you, but some of us were wondering about something. Would you like a going-away party?”

  She couldn’t imagine anything more excruciating. People had left Harris Associates before, but those had been guys who were starting their own businesses or bragging about their better offers. She wasn’t sure a party was an appropriate response to “I just figured out that I don’t like it here anymore.” And where would Kyle be, when they were throwing that party? Avoiding her like crazy?

  She declined as graciously as she could, inquiring about Tricia, who was on maternity leave, telling Brandi that she would come in sometime next week and turn over her files and clean out her desk.

  Things would be easier for the next woman who worked at Harris Associates. Laura was sure about that. On the way back to Atlanta with Harris, she had been su
rprised to discover that her boss knew exactly how difficult it had been for her there, how she had gotten stuck with the grunt work, how she had been underused and unappreciated. He’d had a lot of time to think out on that golf course with Walt and Bill, apparently. He had been sorry she was resigning, but not shocked. Most surprising of all, he had told her that he knew that his firm was somewhat of a cultural dinosaur, and that the old-boy mentality he had used to run it was not going to cut it in the twenty-first century. When he’d asked her if she’d considered working for Mallory Management, she’d confessed that she had. She had expected the fresh-flowers-and-espresso diatribe that he’d given before when he talked about the upscale, woman-run company, but instead he had nodded thoughtfully and said he would write her a sterling letter of recommendation. In turn, she’d promised she would send any suitable job candidates his way. It was a good way to leave the firm, and it came during a naturally slow time, so that she had only a few loose ends to clean up.

  And she was not going to consider Kyle one of those loose ends. Though she couldn’t resist asking Brandi, “How’s Kyle’s ankle? Is he making you wait on him?”

  “No, not at all,” Brandi said. A note of worry entered her calm tone. “I think it’s healing fine, but you should see him. He gets his own Cokes, his own sandwiches. He doesn’t even call me when he needs to find a file on a project, just limps around here doing everything for himself.”

  Whoa, back up. “This is Kyle?”

  Brandi lowered her voice to a whisper. “Laura, he gets into the office before I do, and he actually stays at his desk and works. Not only that, but he actually did his own expense report this time.”

  “He wasn’t doing his own reports before?” Kyle, you fiend, thought his former interoffice rival. Kyle, you charmer, thought the woman who had spent the weekend in and out of bed with him.

  Brandi evaded her question. “He has big circles under his eyes, Laura.”

  Could he be staying awake nights thinking about her the way she was staying awake thinking about him? “Has he said what he’s working on?”

  “Top secret,” Brandi said. She changed the subject. “I heard you have a big interview tomorrow.”

  “Does—” She paused. She didn’t want to accuse Brandi of being gossipy, but she really wanted to know the answer to this question. “Does Kyle know that I’m interviewing somewhere else?”

  “Well,” Brandi said. There was that unhappy tone again, such a rarity for Brandi. “Actually, he leaves the room every time your name comes up. But I’m sure he doesn’t mean anything by it.”

  No, nothing short of wanting her to join the witness protection program for women who needed to conveniently forget that they’d slept with Kyle Sanders.

  “Oh, well, could you tell him—” Tell him I’m going to be perfectly fine without him, even if I never have a chance to feel that cherished, that sexy, again.

  “Tell him what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “I’M HERE TO TALK to you about balance in your life.”

  Kyle looked up from the pages spread across his dining room table to see his mother, clad in a no-nonsense business suit, standing in his living room, holding a casserole dish of what smelled like his father’s killer lasagna. He rubbed his eyes. Had to be a dream. And if so, as much as he enjoyed both his mother’s company and his dad’s lasagna, it was definitely a step down from the dreams he’d been having, dreams of Laura and their night together. Dreams of new nights together.

  Then his mother walked past him on her way to the kitchen, straightening out his shirt collar as she did so. It wasn’t a dream. “Why are you in my apartment?” He thought of a more important question. “How did you get into my apartment?”

  She came into the dining room and sat down at the table with him. He pushed away his pages of notes on the upcoming New Horizon deal. It looked like it might happen. He’d had to sweet-talk the prickly Walt, then sweet-talk Harris, both conversations backed up with extensive documentation. It was cards-on-the-table time in a face-to-face meeting next week. Then Laura would know he was the one who had pulled the deal together, that he was indeed capable of hard work. She might come back. He was so close to that happening that he could feel it.

  “Your sister gave me a key,” his mother said.

  “Mom. You can’t just walk into my apartment.” He grinned at her. He could always make his mother blush. “Mom, I could have someone here.”

  “Not the way you’ve been working, you wouldn’t have someone here,” she said briskly. “Your dad and sister say they haven’t seen you at all in the week since you got back. Jessica misses you. They decided I should stop by on my way home from work to talk to you about balancing your work and personal life.”

  “Mom. Only Dad and Melanie would consider hard work for one week extreme.”

  She ignored the implied insult to the other members of the family. “You’re limping, what happened?”

  “Nothing happened.” He continued walking “carefully” to the kitchen. He lifted the top of the dish, his stomach growling. His dad might be a slacker, but he was a slacker who made one heck of a lasagna. He cut into it and called, “Did you want some or are you just here to deliver a message?”

  She poked her head into the kitchen, her blue eyes, just like his, dark with suspicion. “Are you waiting on yourself? Kyle?”

  He didn’t answer her, merely took two of his four plates out of the cabinet and loaded them with food. He carried them both back into the dining room, his mother following him with silverware and paper napkins.

  “See, about balance,” he said, slicing into his piece. “It’s way overrated. Sometimes what a guy needs is a quest, a big pursuit, something that will make his loved ones proud.” Then remembering that his own dad had abandoned the corporate world for house and home, he said, generously, “I mean, not that all women care about that. You don’t, and you’re great. But other women, I think they want a guy who can bring home the bacon, you know?”

  She burst out laughing. Laughing. You’ve sunk far in the world when your own mother laughs at you. If he didn’t deliver on his promise to Laura, she was going to be laughing at him, too. If she wasn’t already.

  “Kyle, honey, I would have said that you understood women as well as anyone I know.”

  “Thank you,” he said, blowing on the lasagna before biting into it. “I think so myself.”

  “But some woman has plainly thrown off your radar.”

  He scowled at his mother. “She has not.”

  She got up and went to the kitchen, then returned with colas for both of them. “Why don’t you tell me about her?”

  He did. In deference to his mother’s tender ears, he edited his story heavily, but he went through the path of their relationship, from Laura’s initial distrust of him as a job stealer, which he was, to her quitting the firm.

  “And you haven’t talked to her since?”

  “No, because I’ve got to get this deal finalized, prove that she can take me seriously. You know, finish the last part of the quest.”

  “Does she know you’re still on this quest?”

  “Well, I…I don’t know. I haven’t talked to her.”

  “You haven’t called her! Kyle, what must she think?”

  “I can’t call her yet,” he argued, a sinking feeling going through his stomach. “For all she knows, I’m still the same guy she doesn’t respect.”

  His mother closed her eyes. He knew that look, all right. That was the old “I’m shutting my eyes against your foolishness” look. “Kyle. This woman is sitting around right now wondering if you hate her, if you think whatever happened between the two of you was a mistake.”

  After she was gone, he sat back down with his notes. But his thoughts, as always, were on Laura. Was it possible for two people to seem so opposite and yet fit together so well? But what if they only fit together in bed and not in the rest of their lives? Was he a fling for her, or a real “renovate the old farmhouse in
the outer suburbs” kind of love? Or maybe she’d always wanted to live in Midtown Atlanta, in one of those in-town neighborhoods like Inman Park or Virginia-Highlands. That was more expensive, and harder to have pets and kids there. And kids—he didn’t know how many and how far apart and whether she believed in public education or whether he should start saving for private school. Actually, he had already upped his contribution to the company’s 401K plan, just in case. He felt his stomach roil, then the truth hit him like the crack in his ankle.

  He was a coward. He’d had girlfriends—he’d always had many, many girlfriends—but this was what it was like to be serious about somebody, to eat, sleep and breathe thinking about her. He knew that old joke about how a woman could take one look at a man on an elevator and meet, date, become engaged to, marry and divorce him before the third floor. So which one of them was sitting around worrying about their kids’ orthodontics?

  You’ll plan your retirement together, but you’re too scared to actually see her. Well, not anymore.

  HOW LOW has a grown woman stooped when she’s this excited about watching Josie and the Pussycats? What the heck, Laura thought, ripping open the bag of microwave popcorn and pouring it into a large salad bowl. She deserved it. Her interview with the partners at Mallory Management had seemed to go very well, and at the end of the meeting, the elegant Susan Mallory and her business partner, the brasher, older Beth Lunsford, were using phrases like your accounts and when you start to work.

  There had been only one bad moment, toward the end of the lunch, when the three of them had indulged in a bit of light chat about mutual acquaintances.

  “I heard Kyle Sanders was working out quite well there,” Susan Mallory said. “I think it’s the perfect place for him.”

  Laura twirled her spoon through the foam in her cappuccino. “Do you know Kyle?”

  Susan nodded. “I’ve met him a few times, and of course he has quite the reputation in the industry.”