Riley and His Girls (Mills & Boon Vintage Cherish) (Mills & Boon Cherish)

by Janis Reams Hudson

  “As a heart attack,” he said. “In fact, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about today.”

  “You want me to be your what, secretary? Receptionist? I don’t know anything about those jobs.”

  “That’s not what I need. I need someone who can order supplies, keep track of the different crews, where they’re supposed to be, and when they need to be there. Pay the bills. I need a combination job juggler, supply manager, and drill sergeant, with a little phone-answering thrown in.”

  “In other words, everything but bookkeeping,” she offered.

  “That’s it. You interested?”

  Amy looked around the outer office, with its two desks, one fairly neat, the other a mess of paperwork, a box of ink pens, two unopened reams of copier paper, and a power screwdriver.

  Her hands tingled with eagerness to attack the mess and make order of it. “You’re offering me a job?”

  “I’m offering you a job. I don’t want you to feel obligated to take it because of Brenda. This is just me offering a job to you. I need an office manager, somebody to do everything I don’t have time to do.”

  “Or don’t want to do?”

  A small smile flashed across his face. “That, too.”

  The salary he offered wouldn’t make her rich, but it was more than she’d expected. She doubted anyone else in town would offer her a job she wanted, that she felt supremely capable of doing, for more money.

  Besides, if she worked somewhere else, she wouldn’t get to see Riley every day. Here, she would. That was both the good news and the bad. But she was willing to suffer through being in his company every day. What a hardship.

  She smiled and held her hand out to shake, “Is this my desk? When do I start?”

  Amy showed up for work promptly at eight-thirty the next morning. Not one to worry much over her own looks, but with a nod toward “business attire,” albeit a construction business with a boss who wore denim and flannel to the office, she wore a white shirt with her blue jeans. Practically formal attire, in her book, but she decided it wouldn’t be too much for the first day on the job. She drew the line, however, at tucking in her shirttail.

  Riley was already in the office when she entered. He sat behind his desk in the far alcove—not really a separate room, but definitely separate—with the phone to one ear while he murmured incomprehensible phrases and scribbled numbers and abbreviations on a notepad. His day had obviously already started.

  After hanging her coat next to his on a hook by the front door, she sat at her desk and checked the drawers for space to keep her bag. She found stacks of both new and used file folders, an adding machine with the electrical cord wrapped around it, boxes of pencils and pens, mostly unopened, and one drawer set up with hanging folders, all empty. She found lots of things, but no space large enough for her bag.

  It would have fitted neatly in with the adding machine—for that matter, the adding machine didn’t belong in a desk drawer, but she didn’t see anyplace else to put it for now—if she carried a regular purse, even a large purse. But she was so used to carrying a backpack that she had yet to give it up in civilian life.

  She crammed her bag beneath the desk, then took inventory of the desktop. More stacks of supplies, those same piles of rumpled forms she’d seen yesterday, a black two-line phone, the power screwdriver she’d noticed the day before, and a computer bearing a nice layer of dust.

  Across the room stood the other desk, all neat and tidy, no large stacks of anything. Fanny’s desk. Next to it, on a wheeled stand, stood a fancy laser printer. In another corner sat a copier. A short hall led to the warehouse area behind the office building, with one door on either side, perhaps for restroom and storage. In Riley’s area were several file cabinets, shelves on the walls, rolls of what looked like architectural plans, and a fax machine.

  Riley finished his phone conversation and hung up. He stood and smiled. “Good morning. Welcome to Sinclair Construction.”

  Amy’s pulse gave a little leap. She told it to stop such nonsense even as she smiled back at Riley. “Good morning. And thank you.”

  “I—” The phone rang. “Excuse me.”

  She supposed she should be answering the phone, but Riley didn’t give her the chance.

  “Maryann, what’s wrong? What do you mean, it’s all wrong? What’s all wrong? You’re out at the house now? Okay, just sit tight. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  He hung up, grabbed the plans and his keys from the desk.

  “Problems?” Amy asked stupidly.

  “I don’t know. Maryann’s out at that house I showed you yesterday, claiming the walls are all wrong.” He grimaced as he took a key from his key ring. “Here. This is your key to the front door.”

  When he placed it in her hand, the key was warm and so was his touch. Their eyes met and locked. For a long moment they stood that way, as if frozen, yet there was nothing resembling cold in the room.

  Finally he let his fingers slide from her hand and took a step backward. “If you leave for lunch or at the end of the day, make sure the door into the warehouse is locked from this side. Not that I’ll be gone all day. Sorry to leave you here like this your first day. Just poke around if you want.”

  With his gaze still locked on hers, he placed a hand on the doorknob. “I don’t know when I’ll get back, but Fanny should be in around one or so. She can answer a lot of questions about this place. Will you be all right?”

  “I’ll be fine.” If I find enough air to breathe.

  “All right,” he said. “See you later.”

  He stood there holding her gaze for another moment before finally turning away. Then it was as if someone fired the starting gun of a race. He jerked open the door and left in a rush of sound and air, leaving a vacuum in his wake.

  Amy stood in the middle of the office and simply breathed for a couple of minutes, then snapped out of it and set to work. By the time she realized she was hungry, she checked the clock on the wall and was surprised to see it was lunchtime.

  Hands on her hips, she stood and glanced around. The main office—hers and Fanny’s—looked much better. The dust was gone, and the piles of paperwork were sorted into those heretofore-unused hanging folders. The spare equipment now sat on the bottom shelf in Riley’s office. The CPU of her computer system had a nice spot on a low stand beside her desk in a protected area where the cables wouldn’t be in the way.

  All that was left on her desk now were her monitor, keyboard, mouse with pad, notepad, telephone, a calculator she’d found in the closet to replace the big, old adding machine that had been in her desk, and a tall cup for pens and pencils.

  Now it was time for lunch. She slipped into the restroom to wash her hands. As she was coming out, the front door opened. The woman who entered looked to be in her seventies, with iron-gray hair pulled back in a loose bun, with loose frizzy curls around her face. Her overcoat was thick and red and bore a bright green Christmas ornament beside her left lapel. Beneath the coat she wore a red-and-white knit dress that fell to just below her knees, with red leather high-heeled boots that reached her hemline. She wore creamy white pearls at her neck and ears. Her lips were cranberry red, her eyes a misty blue. With her gloved hands, she gripped the ivory knob of an ebony walking cane and leaned heavily, her shoulders stooped with age.

  The woman closed the door behind her then turned and looked around the room. “Well, I’ll swan. Somebody’s been busy.”

  “Hello.” Amy stepped from the hallway.

  “There you are,” the woman said with a smile. “You must be Amy. Riley called so I wouldn’t think you were a burglar. I’m Fanny. Fanny Lewiston, the bookkeeper.”

  “Hi, Fanny. I promise, I didn’t touch anything on or in your desk.”

  “Oh, not to worry, dear. I wouldn’t have minded if you had. You were in the army with our Brenda, I hear.”

  “That’s right.”

  They spoke for several minutes, with Fanny complimenting her office-cleaning job.
Finally Amy had to take advantage of Fanny’s presence and run out for lunch while someone was there to answer the phone.

  “You go on and eat, dear. I’ll man the fort.”

  Amy pulled on her coat, grabbed her bag from beneath her desk, and left. A cold, sharp wind nearly sucked the breath from her lungs. So much for the mild weather. And so much for walking to lunch. She drove five blocks to the pizza parlor. A half hour later she drove back to the office, chewing gum to get rid of her pepperoni breath.

  Riley’s truck sat next to the door. He was back. When she entered, the office felt considerably smaller than it had when she’d left. There was still plenty of room; the space wasn’t that small. But she seemed to have some sort of internal radar that made her nerves twitch whenever she got within ten feet of Riley Sinclair.

  Chapter Five

  “You’re back,” Riley noted, sounding slightly surprised. “You weren’t gone very long.”

  Amy hung up her coat and stuffed her bag under her desk. “Long enough to grab a slice of pizza. Did anything exciting happen while I was gone?” she asked them.

  The elderly woman winked at her. “Riley came in. That’s always exciting.”

  “Fanny,” Riley drawled, “you keep up that sassy talk, you’ll turn my head. Next thing I know, Albert will be calling me out for making time with his wife.”

  Fanny tittered like a young girl. “Oh, go on with you. You better watch this one,” she told Amy. “He’s a sweet talker, he is.”

  “I’ll watch him. Did you get that problem taken care of this morning?” she asked him.

  “Turned out to be a simple misunderstanding. Maryann thought we were forgetting her laundry room.”

  “You can’t forget a lady’s laundry room,” Fanny stated.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  Amy mentioned the pile of paperwork that she had moved from the surface of her desk into the hanging files and asked what Riley wanted done with them.

  “You filed them?” he asked, a pained look on his face.

  “More or less. Should I not have?”

  “Oh, no, you did fine. I guess I was just hoping you lost them or burned them so we wouldn’t have to deal with them.”

  “And when the IRS decides to audit you…” Fanny finished with a tsk, tsk, tsk.

  “Yes, Mother,” Riley said.

  Fanny let out a huge sigh and smiled. “Very well, then. My work here is done for the day.” She rose and tottered with her cane and her high-heeled boots over toward her coat.

  Amy reached it before she did and helped her into it.

  “Thank you, dear. You’re a sweet one, you are. I’ll see the two of you tomorrow.”

  “Do you need a ride home?” Amy offered.

  “Oh, no, dear, but thank you. I’ve got my car.”

  The only other car nearby was a huge ten-year-old Lincoln, parked at the curb in front of the grocery store next door. Sure enough, Amy discovered as she looked out the window, Fanny made a bee-line straight for the Lincoln.

  Amy watched until Fanny started the car and pulled away from the curb, then returned to her desk shaking her head.

  “She’s something, isn’t she?” Riley asked.

  “I’ll say. Does she always dress like that?”

  Riley blinked. “Like how?”

  “All dressy like that.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t…Never mind.” Men could be so oblivious.

  “I mean,” he offered, “I guess so. Does it bother you?”

  “Of course not. I don’t care what anyone wears. I was just curious. You don’t expect me to dress fancy like that, do you? With pearls and skirts and high-heeled boots?”

  He eyed her carefully, as if wondering if she might bite.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What did I say?”

  “Nothing. It’s just that a man would have to be a fool if he didn’t want to see you in high-heeled boots and a skirt. But I don’t imagine we’re talking about the same thing.”

  Amy arched her brow, her pulse suddenly racing. “No, I don’t imagine we are. Let me rephrase my question. Is my current mode of dress acceptable for the office, or do I need to wear the girl version of a suit? Keeping in mind that if I have to wear a suit, so do you.”

  “Fair enough. You wear whatever you want. But I’m not wearing a suit.”

  While Amy would rather take a bullet than wear ruffles or lace, she sometimes toyed with the idea of learning how to dress a bit more stylishly but she kept that to herself. If she mentioned such an inane thing to Riley, he might think she was fishing for a compliment, or seeking assurance that she was fine the way she was.

  Clothes. What a stupid thing to worry about.

  She and Riley spent the next several minutes going over the things he expected of her regarding the job, and how he thought she might manage the various elements of the office.

  “Of course, I’ve never had an office manager before, so I can’t really say how it should work,” he admitted. “I guess we’ll just make it up as we go. As long as my business gets taken care of and I can find something reasonably fast when I need it, you’ve pretty much got a free hand. Except for Fanny. Fanny has a job here until she or I decide otherwise. She works a couple of afternoons a week and takes off most of December and whenever her great-grandchildren come for a visit.”

  “No problem, but I’ll want to examine what she’s been doing, how the records are kept. I assume you have an outside accountant prepare tax returns.”

  “Yes. Fanny gathers all the information for him and he takes it from there.”

  “What do you do about payroll and accounts payables when she takes off?”

  “Watch the mail for bills, and write a few checks.”

  They went over a few more details, then he walked her through the attached warehouse. “The shop,” he called it. Aside from a small office in the near front corner, and across from it what appeared to be a small storage or utility closet, the entire building was open from front to back, with no walls to break up the space.

  Overhead, large round ducts wrapped in thick insulation crisscrossed the warehouse up in the rafters, leading to several giant vents that would blow hot air to heat the building when it was in use in winter. Right now it wasn’t in use, so no heat. Which was more than obvious. Within a minute Amy was shivering.

  “Cold?” Riley asked with concern. “I’m sorry. I should have made you get your coat.” He placed an arm around her shoulder and pulled her to his side, rubbing his hand up and down her arm.

  Startled by his sudden move, Amy turned slightly toward him and looked up. Finding herself so close, touching him all the length of her body, his face so close to hers as he looked down at her, she sucked in her breath. In the process, three things happened. First, their gazes, barely a hand’s-breadth apart, locked with each other. Second, the side of her left breast pressed against his firm, warm chest, making both breasts swell, both nipples harden and point. Third, his scent, male and fresh and arousing, filled her lungs.

  And none of that took into account that her lips were so close to his that she felt the warm tingling, as if he had already kissed her. As if she was waiting for him to kiss her again.

  In the cold air of the shop, their breath came out in cloudy puffs. He parted his lips, and so did she. Yet neither moved, neither spoke, until finally, they spoke at once.

  “We should—” he began

  “I didn’t—” she started.

  “You go,” he offered.

  “No, you.”

  “I was just going to suggest—” He slipped his arm from her shoulders and stepped back a scant inch, just far enough so that they were no longer touching. “—that we get back to the office before you freeze.”

  Freeze? With the heat from his body so near? Not a chance, she thought. But he was right. They had no business snuggling up together, out here all alone with each other in this big, empty warehouse.

  “You’re ri
ght,” she murmured.

  Once back inside, she got herself a cup of coffee and returned to her desk.

  “How often do you work out there?” she asked. Anything to put them back on even footing.

  “Whenever we have to. We prefer to work directly on site. But sometimes that’s not possible. That’s when I sometimes let a crew use the shop. Sometimes I use it myself. But mostly it’s a warehouse.”

  “Is there an inventory list somewhere?” she asked.

  “Right here.” He tapped a finger to his temple.

  “You’re kidding. That’s it? In your head?”

  “That’s it.”

  She gave him a serious frown. “I’ll be taking inventory in the days and weeks to come and we’ll keep it on the computer. No offense to your memory.”

  He gave her a cheesy grin. “None taken.”

  If Amy thought she and Riley might be more comfortable with each other after that exchange, time proved her mistaken. Over the next days, she found herself going out of her way to avoid eye contact, and making sure she didn’t put herself within touching range of him. She stepped over to look out the window or looked down to study the contents of a drawer more times than she cared to count.

  By the time she realized what she was doing, she realized that he seemed to be pulling the same avoidance maneuvers. Of course, for her to realize he wouldn’t meet her gaze, she had to look at him. If anyone was watching the two of them, they were probably getting a good laugh. There they were, two grown people, so uneasy with each other that they scarcely talked, never got near each other, wouldn’t look at each other, used anyone handy—poor Fanny got it most often—as a go-between. And she looked suspiciously as if she was about to burst into laughter at any moment.

  The thing was, Amy didn’t feel like laughing in the least. The entire scenario frustrated and saddened her. Finally, she waited until Fanny left for the day, then decided to confront Riley.

  She crossed the room into his territory and sat on the chair before his desk. “Do you have a minute?”