by Jo Leigh
“Well, hell. If you’re going to waste shame on something like having an extra beer, you should give up right now.”
Her laughter warmed him like a hot toddy. “What, you want me to rob a bank? Steal a car? Have an illicit affair?”
“Those are all legitimately shame-worthy, yes. Although I never said that shame had to come along with a prison sentence. You still need to have good judgment. So that leaves illicit affairs.”
“I don’t have anyone to be illicit with.”
“No?”
She grabbed his arm and pulled him close. There wasn’t enough beer in Molly’s to slow down his heart.
“You almost walked into that pole,” she said as she released him.
“Damn, I thought—”
“What?” she asked, and he shook his head. “You thought what?”
“Nope.”
She studied him for a second. “Coward.”
“Yep.”
She laughed. “I could get it out of you if I wanted.”
“Hey, go for it. I welcome the challenge.” Suppressing a smile, he kept walking. She hated a dare, and he doubted that had changed.
“You have some nerve bringing up good judgment,” she muttered. “I’d like to know where you got your measuring stick.”
He had a totally juvenile remark at the tip of his tongue, which only proved how deeply irresponsible he’d been about the beer. Though the pole—that had nothing to do with drinking and everything to do with the illicit-affair remark. “Experience has taught me not to sweat the small stuff.”
This time Shannon stopped completely. “You must be drunk if you’re throwing that old clunker at me. How do you know what the small stuff is? One extra drink could be devastating.”
“But you’re not driving or operating heavy machinery. You’re walking a block to your home, and you’re safely accompanied by a man who knows how to kick the crap out of anyone who might try anything untoward. Therefore, you having a third beer isn’t a big deal.”
“What do you mean you know how to kick the crap out of anyone?”
“I have skills.”
He couldn’t see her smile in the shadow between streetlights, but he would swear on his life he could feel it.
“Would those be mad skills?” she asked in the most smart-ass, taunting voice he could imagine.
“They would,” he said, realizing that with every word he was digging himself a deeper hole.
“Of the martial-arts variety?”
“And if I said yes?”
She poked him in the chest with her index finger. “You still have every single comic you ever bought, don’t you?” Poke. “You store them in airtight containers and don’t let other humans touch them.” Poke. “You don’t have to rent your costume for Halloween. Ever.”
He grabbed her poking hand and walked her toward a streetlight until he was sure they could see each other well. “I do have a hell of a comic collection, which is worth a great deal, by the way. I do store some of them in a temperature- and humidity-controlled storage facility because of their value. I do not have costumes in my wardrobe, however. But I’ve been known to go to comic conventions and I keep up with the industry. I like comics. I like graphic novels. And someday, if you agree not be bitchy about it, I would like to show you why.”
There was a moment of silence. Not just from Shannon, but from the street, from the city. A fleeting lull in the traffic, the subway vibrations, the chatter of pedestrians. He heard her inhale, sharp and startled, as if the last thing in the world she’d expected was his little speech.
He was surprised himself, so that seemed fair. He’d had no preparation, though, for how she was looking at him. As if he was someone unexpected. Someone interesting in a way he shouldn’t be.
Good. That’s what he’d wanted. And if he hadn’t had the extra beer, he’d lean over right this second and kiss her until she cried uncle. But he was tipsy enough to know that he was treading on thin ice, illustrated perfectly by his use of the word tipsy.
Both of them having inappropriate thoughts didn’t mean the thoughts were no longer inappropriate. He had one place he considered home in this world, and to risk that, he’d have to be sober as a judge and twice as sure.
“I’d like that,” she said, her voice a breathless whisper in the quiet. “A lot.”
“Yeah?”
Her nod was slow but it still made that gorgeous hair of hers move forward on her shoulder. He raised his hand, but the last vestiges of good sense stopped him from carrying out the gesture. He was going to be at the Fitzgeralds’ for several weeks. There would be time to figure things out. Time to see where the lines were drawn.
The last thing on earth he wanted was to be ashamed about anything to do with Shannon. So tonight, he’d walk her home and he’d sleep it off.
Tomorrow he might curse himself for letting this chance go by, but better safe than sorry when there was so much at stake.
Dammit, he was going to wake up to his second hangover in two days. The sooner he got back to his real life the better off he’d be. He looked again at Shannon as they reached the steps of the brownstone. Then again, as long as he had to be here, he might as well enjoy the visit.
* * *
SHANNON HADN’T SEEN NATE at breakfast, and she was almost late because she’d dawdled, hoping. Then she’d castigated herself the whole way to the plant. Last night hadn’t been a date. She wasn’t sure precisely what it had been, but not a date.
Despite the extra beer, she’d stayed up far too late. Her brain wouldn’t stop. Thoughts of his voice, his scent, how he looked in a suit were only the beginning. She imagined vividly his friendly touch on the small of her back sliding past her waist until his palm slowly brushed over the curve of her behind.
A smile, then as his gaze hit her lips, the heat of his breath, the brush of a tentative kiss.
An innocent look turned smoldering, unmistakable want.
By the time she’d entered her office, she knew her first order of business wasn’t going to be a call to the deputy commissioner in charge of Union Square Park. That and everything else on her list would wait while she turned her total attention to creating Nate’s trading card. Maybe then she could stop obsessing.
He was going to be staying at the house for several weeks at least, and wouldn’t it be nice and smart to hook him up with one of her friends from the lunch exchange? He’d be otherwise occupied while she pulled a new card or two for herself. The next lunch exchange meeting was coming up soon, and she had six new trading cards to prepare including Nate’s.
She decided to do the copy first. After locking her office door, she opened a blank trading card template and started by typing.
His profession was easy: architect and urban planner. No need to talk about his humanitarian efforts on the card. That information would be much more dramatic coming out when she talked him up.
Marry, Date or One-Night Stand, another simple answer: Date. Only, wait. She deleted that and entered One-Night Stand. Then she deleted that. He certainly wasn’t Marry. Come on, she’d know if he wanted to get married. He wouldn’t be rushing back to Bali as quickly as he could if that were the case. Or would he?
He hadn’t said anything about a woman. Did that mean there wasn’t one? Or was she someone exotic and adventurous, a woman who would steer clear of anything to do with New York. Who lived on the edge. Maybe a doctor from the World Health Organization, someone who put herself at risk to save lives in regions fraught with danger.
That made sense. Nate had changed so much, and wasn’t there always a woman behind that kind of transformation? She should have known there was more to it. He’d probably gone to Indonesia full of the best intentions. But then he’d met her, probably saving a small village cut off from civilization, and he’d helped her, both of them hot and sweaty, sleeping in bits and snatches as they slowly patched together the survivors. They were bound to be hyperaware of each other, especially when he heard her accent. French,
had to be French. She’d be beautiful, naturally.
Shannon sighed as she realized she’d typed a long line of Bs all the way across her document.
Okay, she would go with One Night Stand and move on.
His Favorite Restaurant was easy. It was undoubtedly something in Paris or Hong Kong or Monaco but screw that, she was going with Molly’s Pub. He was certainly comfortable there. He’d laughed a lot. He’d made her laugh. His stories were preposterous and creative. She could thank his comic books for that, she was sure.
That tale he’d told last night about pirates? Seriously, pirates? Yes, she’d read about Somali pirates in the paper, and yes, the frequency and brutality of their attacks on ships had made the waters of the Indian Ocean extremely dangerous, but Nate Brenner, fighting off armed bandits with a cricket bat and a tin gas can? He’d painted quite a picture, even though she knew the pirates he’d been talking about had nothing in common with broadswords and buried treasure.
She scratched out Molly’s Pub. That wouldn’t work. She went there too much herself, and the prospect of having to watch him with a date made her stomach feel a little off. Which was stupid. She’d be the one setting him up with the date so she’d know the woman, and wasn’t that the whole point of the trading cards? Making sure the matches were suitable and safe?
Oh, hell, she’d have to come back to favorite restaurant.
Anyway, next was his Secret Passion. Shannon exhaled loudly, thought about putting down comic books, but she didn’t type the words. Instead, she went to the break room, nodding at the people on the floor. They were doing two very large textbook runs for a university press, which was good, and all but one of the other presses were busy with baseball trading cards. It looked as though the company was standing on a solid foundation. Only she knew the depth of the corrosion of customers slipping away, and how precarious their situation was for the long haul.
No, that wasn’t quite true. Every walk through the plant was full of evidence to the contrary. The long looks, the fear in their employees’ eyes. They knew. They were on the front lines, after all. Especially painful was the change in her relationships with two of her press operators, Daphne and Melissa. The three of them had been close. Now they avoided her gaze and talked about her behind her back.
It was Shannon’s parents who didn’t quite get the dire picture. The two of them weren’t involved in the nitty-gritty of the plant any longer, and she was glad of it. If things went Shannon’s way, they would never know. Because she would fix it. She had a battle plan. At least some of the new customers she’d been working on were bound to come through.
She couldn’t think about it now. She got her coffee, put on a smile and returned to her office. She would finish the cards and scan the photos. Tonight, after hours, she’d do the typesetting and the printing. She’d complete the job early tomorrow, and that would be that. She’d be ready for the lunch exchange, she’d stop thinking of Nate as anything other than family and she’d get on with her job.
Someone had to save Fitzgerald & Sons.
After stopping to answer yet another surly question from Melissa, Shannon entered her office not feeling any better from the break.
She woke up her computer monitor, trading the screen saver for Nate’s card, and almost dropped her coffee. Her heart slammed in her chest at the picture on the screen.
It was a photograph of an obviously abandoned printing plant. No caption, but then none was needed.
A wave of anxiety swept through her, forcing her to turn away from the computer. A press of the intercom brought a quick response from Brady. “What’s up?”
“Can you come to my office, please?” Her voice had wobbled, dammit.
“Shannon? What’s wrong?”
“Just come, Brady. Now.” She disconnected the intercom and took several deep breaths. She wanted to get rid of the image, but her brother needed to see it. This wasn’t the first incident of what—vandalism? protest?—although it was the most brazen. She’d been in the break room for all of five minutes. Enough time to pour, to stir in milk and a sugar substitute. Her conversation with Melissa had been uncomfortable, but brief. Whoever had done this had raced.
Brady had raced, too, because he was at her door amazingly quickly. “What happened?”
She nodded toward the computer.
His sigh held so much of her own frustration. “What do they think this will accomplish?”
She turned to her older brother. He was a redhead, but not like her. His hair was dark and so were his eyebrows. He was also a hell of a decent guy. Of all the brothers, he was the most down-to-earth. He liked running the plant, knew the machines as if they were his own creations. Nothing was too complex for Brady except the human capacity to be cruel.
“They’re scared. They feel impotent and terrified.”
He gesticulated wildly even before speaking, which only happened when he was extremely riled up. “They think this will help save the shop? Save their jobs?”
“That’s just it. They don’t know what to do.”
“But you’ve told them the truth. You’ve been there to help them when they needed it. Just last week you gave Terrance an advance on his wages. Again. At this rate, he’ll never pay us back.”
“It’s for medical bills. Taking away the health plan was a horrible blow.” She inhaled deeply. Brady wasn’t totally on the mark. It wasn’t so much that she’d told the whole truth as she hadn’t lied.
“Would they rather we closed down? Would that be better?”
She shook her head. There weren’t words. She was doing everything in her power, but it wasn’t enough. Never enough.
All she could do was keep trying. So she sat, and she got rid of the picture on her screen, found where it had been loaded on her desktop and deleted it. She’d have to lock her door now, whenever she left, even to go to the bathroom.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. This was a good company. A conscientious company. She wished she could understand how things had spun so far out of control.
She saved Nate’s trading card in her private folder and clicked out of that program. There was no time for frivolous matters. She had to get new customers before it all went to hell.
5
“YOU’RE UP EARLY.”
Nate jumped at Shannon’s voice, although he covered it quickly with a cough. It was 6:30 a.m. and it wasn’t as if he hadn’t expected someone to be in the kitchen—the light was on, coffee made—but he hadn’t seen her sitting at the table in the breakfast nook. For reasons that only made sense when they’d been nine, he and Danny used to sit underneath that table for breakfast every morning until they did something horrible and messy and had to report to the big table in the dining room, where the first and last meals of the day had been family affairs, complete with table settings and lessons in manners.
It was yet another adjustment to find Shannon in the nook, half in shadow, in the now familiar pink robe. “I’m house hunting,” he said, bringing down a large mug from the cupboard.
He’d missed her the past few days. According to Mr. Fitz, she’d been staying late at work, and Nate and Danny had been catching up with friends at old haunts. He’d looked for Shannon, though, each morning. Each night. Hoping he hadn’t spooked her on their walk home from Molly’s. He didn’t think so, he’d shown restraint, but seeing her smile now he knew for certain things were okay between them. And up to him to keep it that way.
“Where are you looking?” Sleep still clung to her voice, lowering the pitch and giving her a sexy rasp he had no business thinking about.
Great. His resolve had lasted all of two seconds. “Starting in the East Village. Then Greenwich and SoHo if there’s time.”
“All town houses?”
“The Realtor convinced me not to be so set on a specific type of building. She’s basing her suggestions on the maintenance companies.”
“That makes sense,” Shannon said, “considering you won’t be around if something bad happ
ens.”
The scent of the coffee was enough to kick him into the next phase of waking up. He hadn’t showered, hadn’t done anything but put on his robe. It was damn cold to be barefoot, but he hadn’t brought slippers and hadn’t thought to put on socks. The chill hurried him to the bench across from Shannon’s. “You should come with me.”
She coughed, having just sipped some of her own coffee. “Just come with you, huh? Blow off my whole day?”
“I’ll buy you a good lunch. And you can say rude things about people’s decorating choices.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
He gave her a look that told her she wasn’t dealing with an amateur. “You couldn’t have changed that much.”
“It’s not rude if it’s constructive criticism.”
“Like hell.”
She smiled at him behind her Gramercy Park mug. Her skin stopped him, his own cup an inch off the table. She looked as if she were made of cream and silk. Something that couldn’t possibly exist in nature. Like the ads in the magazines that made every flaw disappear with the magic of airbrushing. But he was close, and she was as real as anything. He ached to touch her, not just on her cheek, although that’s where he’d start. He could barely imagine the feel of her inner thigh, what it would be like to rest his cheek on her tummy, right below her belly button.
“Okay, that’s pretty creepy,” Shannon said.
He put his cup down. “What?” He knew he’d been staring. So why was he playing dumb?
“You do that a lot,” she said. “There’s a pattern. Am I that different from who you remember?”
“Yes,” he said, and he should have hesitated there. For a few seconds at least.
“Okay.”
She sipped more coffee and, ahh, there it was. The blush. He wanted to watch it evolve in all its heated glory, but he’d already crossed the polite behavioral line.
What he didn’t understand was the reason for the blush. Yes, he’d stared too long, and that was rude, but was she blushing because she was embarrassed at the attention? If he’d been anyone else, would she have blushed or would she have walked away from the situation? Was she reacting to the stare itself, or had she sussed that he was thinking about her sexually?
