Under Contract

by Jeffe Kennedy

  “I’d like that. And maybe we could discuss other projects you might be interested in starting?”

  He shook his head, then caught the keen edge of desperation from her. He could have strung her along with that bait, but business was business. Even if he could get any kind of new landscaping past his board—and good luck with that—the ban on water use meant he had nothing for Celestina’s signature water-focused designs. It would be true for all of her clientele and she couldn’t be a stranger to that disappointment. Better to deliver that sort of pain decisively.

  It wasn’t personal, just business. As in, once they dispensed with business, they could move on to personal. Besides, he knew how desperation motivated people—used it ruthlessly to his advantage—and this could be the opening with her that he needed.

  “Unfortunately, no. You’d be the first I’d call, but with the ban on new water installations we—”

  “Yes.” She cut him off with a flash of impatient anger, the fire he recalled. Then she held up a hand and smiled in apology. A glint of her eyes from behind the polarized lenses showed she’d rolled them dramatically. “Again I apologize. The lack of work has been rough.”

  Her voice had a ragged tone, one he knew well from negotiations. Not just desperation but the sound of a person on the edge. Hating himself for the impulse, as it went directly opposite his desires, he suggested, “You might do better to relocate. Pacific Northwest, perhaps. Or New England.”

  She laughed, not the rich, sultry one he recalled, but slightly hysterical. That turned into a sob. Her lush mouth crumpled and she covered it with her hand, ducking her face but not before she hid the fat tears rolling down her cheeks.

  “Celestina.” He took her by the shoulders, bracing her, keeping her from taking off. “What’s wrong? Can I help?” Perhaps his instincts had led him true after all, to the words that cracked her composure and made her vulnerable.

  “No,” she gasped, clearly lying and trying to make up for it by shaking her head vigorously. “Just...having a bad day. I’m so sorry for this. So embarrassed. I should—”

  “You should come sit down and catch your breath.” Firmly he steered her to the umbrella tables nearby, deserted at this time of day. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  She dragged off her sunglasses and furiously swiped at her eyes. “Look, I appreciate your concern. Really I do, but I’m fine.”

  Patently untrue. Giving her a moment to reassemble the shreds of her dignity—breaking down in front of a client you’d hoped to be pitching work to could hardly be a comfortable experience—he reevaluated the situation. And ruefully discarded his plans to immediately seduce her. Wooing a woman in a shattered emotional state never paid off. He steered clear of boggy emotional ground for good reasons, not only because he knew his limitations. Besides, he might be a determined businessman and a ruthless opportunist, but he wasn’t a monster. At least, not that sort.

  Still, he’d made the decision to have her and he never went back, once he’d set his mind. Failure was one thing. Failing to persist despite obstacles another thing entirely. Solve her problem, then seduction.

  “I can’t help you unless you tell me about it.” He tried to make the demand coaxing, but he wasn’t letting her get away this time. No matter what.

  Chapter Two

  An especially cruel twist of fate to put Ryan Black—one of her best and most high-profile clients, the man who could afford anything—in her path and then snatch even that thin hope away.

  For a breathlessly optimistic moment, she’d imagined that a window really had opened, that Black would offer her some lucrative design job that would at least keep her going another year. Even a few months. But no. His brusque dismissal of the possibility—which, if she’d been thinking clearly, she would have known would be the case—had been the penultimate straw.

  The ultimate one being, of course, his blithe suggestion that she simply move. That’s what people did, wasn’t it? As if her problems could be solved as easily as he waved his dismissive hand in the air. The Pacific Northwest or New England. He might as well have suggested Saturn. Really, it had been the frustration that undid her. Always her Achilles heel.

  When they were eight, she and Ara had been moved into a different math class where they were asked to perform fractions. It immediately became clear to their teachers that she and her sister had somehow skipped over the multiplication tables and they were sent home with a note. Their father, chagrined that any of his family might fail to pass muster, had taken it as a personal slight and taught them their tables in two evenings after dinner.

  Ara, always far better at math, easily memorized the numbers, placidly correcting her errors. But Tina hated making mistakes, being wrong. Numbers never made sense to her. When she tripped over seven times eight for the third time and her father snapped “Fifty-six!” at her, she’d burst into tears and refused to do more. It had taken her mother’s intervention to extract her and an extra evening with her father to get them all down. Though Ara hadn’t needed to, she’d sat with her, pretending to hesitate here and there, even making a few mistakes, just to make her twin feel better.

  To this day Tina had to think twice about seven times eight.

  A thought that did nothing to help dry the onslaught of shameful tears in front of the intimidating and charismatic Black, who’d sat her at the table and looked at her as if he’d considered calling an ambulance—or a mental health crisis team. Then calmly offered to fix her problems.

  Apparently the day could get worse. What next—earthquake? Immediately regretting the thought, she sent a quick prayer that, if so, at least Carly and Josie’s school would not be hit. She even braced herself for it and Black frowned.

  “Afraid I’ll knock you off your chair?”

  She managed a fake laugh and released her grip on the iron armrests. “Bracing for the six-point-nine earthquake that would make my day complete.”

  He smiled slightly, softening his somewhat craggy face. With his boxer’s nose and personal intensity, even in his expensively tailored suits he had a tendency to look like a brute. More like the bodyguard behind the mafia boss. Until he smiled and pulled out that urbane charm. He covered her hand with his. “Tell me about it,” he invited again.

  Oh God. Was there anything more difficult than trying to stay tough in the face of someone else’s sympathy? And then for it to be a business client...in the middle of what was no doubt a very busy day for him. He must think her bad off indeed, to be wasting his time this way. She lifted her chin, pulling her composure together. Be professional, dammit. “Thank you, but I couldn’t possibly burden you with my minor troubles. I’m sure you’re very busy and—”

  “Actually, I’m not. I just finished an early meeting where we signed off on a major acquisition and I thought to take part of the day off to celebrate. I am at my leisure.”

  She sighed, appalled at how uneven it sounded. How perilously close to losing it again she still was. Time to escape, while she had some of her dignity. “Thank you for the offer, but I should go.”

  “Sometimes an objective ear makes all the difference. Maybe I can help. Tell me.”

  Maybe it was the habit of pleasing her clients, going along with what they wanted, but something about the way he demanded her story made her unable to resist any longer. “I lost my job today. Got another for me?” She shouldn’t have snapped at him, but he shouldn’t have pushed her.

  Instead of getting angry, he regarded her thoughtfully. “Rough place to be. Linda can’t have fired you. Or did you screw up?”

  “No.” Her pride stung by that implication, she pulled the envelope out of her jacket pocket and held it up. “Severance and references—glowing, she promised, though I haven’t looked. The firm is closing, for exactly the same reasons you pointed out earlier.”

  “The construction market collapse ha
s taken bigger firms under. A testament, really, that Delaney lasted this long. May I?”

  She waved a hand in permission, not that she expected him to give her a job, but because she just couldn’t find it in herself to refuse him. Before today she’d wondered if the unending numbness meant depression and she’d barely resisted researching the symptoms on the internet. What would she do about it, anyway? She couldn’t afford counseling or medication. Now, though Black had always been a bit larger than life, with his commanding presence and didactic ways, it seemed something other than the inability to act drove her.

  “Not very generous,” Black commented and she belatedly realized the check and terms would be in there, too.

  “It was probably more than she could afford to do.” She took the papers back, feeling the prick of guilt for putting Linda in a bad light, and folded them without looking. “I didn’t mean for you to see that and feel...” She stopped herself from making it worse.

  “Sorry for you?” He gazed at her steadily. “I wouldn’t. It is what it is. Now you make of it what you can. Find another job. Move if you have to.”

  She set her teeth against the desire to snap at him again. “It’s not that easy.”

  “Sure it is.” He sounded brusque, as he had in meetings when someone suggested what he wanted might not be possible. “You don’t even have to pack. Have an estate company sell your things, recover some cash that way, start fresh with low overhead in a friendlier market and build yourself up again. You wouldn’t be doing anything countless millionaires haven’t gone through before you. One company crashes and burns—you extract yourself and make a new one. One thing ends, another begins.”

  She glared at him, anger rising at his terse instructions and pat advice, curling her hands into fists. “You have no fucking clue what I’m dealing with.”

  His flinty gray eyes went stern, face settling into harder lines. Not angry, but intently interested. Something of a challenge in it. “Then explain.”

  “So you can solve my problems for me?”

  “Yes. I’m a problem-solver. That’s what I do—and I’m damn good at it. I could nod and smile and pat your hand, but is that going to help you with whatever has you this distraught? It’s not just the job, I think.”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  He cocked his head, pursing his lips as if considering. “My instincts say no. For some people it would be, but you always struck me as more resilient than that. So what else—the divorce?”

  That sucker-punched her. “How do you know I got divorced?”

  He dipped his chin toward her hands, knotted in her lap. “You used to wear a gold wedding band, chased with a design of interlocking ovals.”

  “How could you have possibly noticed that?” And remembered.

  “I noticed a lot of things about you, Celestina.” Not a man who hesitated to say what he thought. Still the gentleman, but that essential toughness ran under it, a glimmer of something else, too. Beneath the polished veneer, the affable charm, the effortless style of the very wealthy, something predatory showed itself. A chill ran through her, an atavistic warning of the wolf in the shadow of the trees, poised to spring and devour.

  “That wedding band in particular presented an annoying barrier at the time,” he continued. “When I saw you just now without it, I’d thought to ask you out to lunch.” The way he said that carried a sexual intent she’d been blind to up until that very moment. A sensual intention that penetrated her haze and dug into her veins, quickening her heart with a sharp spur of desire she’d long thought herself dead to. How could it resurrect at this broken moment, with this man and his edge of contained violence? He wasn’t handsome, necessarily, with the old acne scars and the nose that looked like it had been broken and badly set. But whatever erotic thoughts went on behind the sensual way he’d said those words transformed him, so all she noticed now were those burning gray eyes.

  “I’m not in a place where I can date,” she told him slowly, feeling much like the mouse under the raptor’s circling shadow.

  He looked irritated. “That much became clear in seconds. I said that’s what I initially planned. It’s not why I’m talking to you now.”

  “Then why are you?”

  “You seem like you need...assistance—and an objective problem-solver. People pay me huge sums for my business advice and I’m offering it to you for free. You’d be foolish to bypass such an opportunity.”

  He had a point there. God knew she could use advice. Perhaps if she told him her troubles, he’d see what a mess she was and give up...whatever ideas he’d formed.

  “Fine.” She smoothed one eyebrow, then the other, willing the stress headache to ebb and the tears to stay locked away. “Six years ago, my parents died—no, don’t say you’re sorry or we’ll be here all day if we have to stop every time for that. Cancer for both, ironically of two different varieties. After fighting it for years, my mother passed. Unfortunate timing, because my father might have survived his, but her death took away all his will and he died a month later. The hospital bills, even after insurance, were enormous and it turned out they’d second-mortgaged the house to pay them. They’d even canceled their life insurance and had less than nothing, so we had to front the money to bury both of them.

  “Ar—” She choked on her sister’s name and decided to skip it as an irrelevant detail. “My sister and I were handling it. We’d made inroads on our student loans, but we both had large mortgages and quite a bit of other debt when the economic downturn hit. With excruciatingly poor timing, my sister and her husband had recently started their own business, which required a fairly significant start-up cost.” That she was supposed to have been part of, too. Big dreams. “They hadn’t been able to qualify for a small business loan on their own.”

  “Tell me you didn’t cosign the loan.”

  “Of course I did.” She returned his exasperated look, refusing to be ashamed of it. That, at least, she’d never regretted, despite everything. “She was my sister. There’s nothing I wouldn’t have done for her. They would have been successful, too, in time.”

  “The past tense is giving me a bad feeling.”

  “In 2012, 2,857 people died in vehicular accidents in California. Two of them were my sister and brother-in-law. Please don’t say anything.” She took a deep breath. “They were in debt and upside-down on their mortgage.”

  “And as a signatory on the loans, the creditors came to you.”

  “Yes, along with my two ten-year-old nieces.”

  “Christ.”

  “Exactly. So, we’ve been forging on. One day at a time and all. But things keep getting worse instead of better.”

  “When was the divorce?”

  She laughed. God, how tragic it all sounded. “He had me served three months after the accident, to the day, just to cement the date in my mind. The rest didn’t take long.”

  “Spousal support?”

  “I just wanted him gone. I signed the papers.” Couldn’t have afforded a lawyer anyway. She stared down his incredulity. She had her pride. “I didn’t want what wasn’t mine. I did get the house.”

  “Any equity?”

  “Also upside-down. I can’t even walk away from that. Another reason moving isn’t feasible.”

  “Not even a short sale?”

  “No. I’ve been to the financial counselors. I was fucked before today and now I’m unemployed.”

  “You’re intelligent—you could get an education in a different field.”

  “Which takes more money on top of time that I could be earning at least something. There’s nothing anyone can do.” She willed him to listen, to stop reaching for a solution that didn’t exist. To let her go on her way, to whatever dismal prospects awaited.

  “Have you considered filing for bankruptcy? It’s there for situations exactly lik
e this.”

  She pressed a hand to the burning spot where her sternum ended and her ribs flared. Probably an ulcer or acid reflux, but she hadn’t wanted to research those symptoms either. “I know. I probably have no other option. It goes against everything I believe in, everything our parents ever taught us about hard work and responsibility.” She glanced at him. He regarded her with that same penetrating expression, weighing her. Like the wolf, still circling. Why? “Worst—though it seems ridiculous to say so, given everything—it stings my pride.”

  “There’s a reason they say that pride goeth before a fall.” His voice lingered over the words, putting her nerves on edge.

  “Yes, well, I’ve fallen hard and yet my pride continues to hang on. Maybe it will take that crucial fatal blow as I apply to work at temp agencies and fast food joints.” Though, who was she kidding? She’d been losing ground with her previous salary. Even working two, three or four lower-paying jobs, she might not be able to catch up. Not to mention the twins would be thirteen soon and showed signs of being gorgeous with it, turning the boys’ heads. No way she could leave them unsupervised that much.

  “I have plenty of money.”

  The bottom dropped out of her stomach, a turmoil of wild hope and crushing humiliation. The tears threatened again and she pressed her lips hard against them. How the mighty had fallen. She straightened her spine. “Thank you, Mr. Black, but I couldn’t possibly.”

  “Don’t decide until you’ve heard me out. How much is your total debt?”

  She squirmed on the hard chair, the iron lattice cutting into her skin through her thin skirt, unable to meet his eye. “I’m not exactly sure,” she muttered at her lap.

  “How can you not know?” he demanded.

  “Because once it gets huge enough, it hardly matters, does it?” she retorted, glaring at him.

  A smile flashed across his face, lightning through a building storm. “Give me a ballpark figure—in the neighborhood of 850 K?”