At least that explained things, though she flattered herself if she thought he’d want her again, want her badly enough to threaten to tell her husband about them. But there was no “them.” There never had been and besides, the day he had to coerce a woman into bed was the day he’d check himself into a retirement home.
It just plain infuriated him that she’d thought she needed to protect herself by screwing him over. He wanted to tell her that—but she’d already packed up her things and left.
Running out seemed to be Lara’s thing. Well, she wasn’t going to get away with it this time.
Slade shook hands all around. Dobbs walked him to the door.
“We’ll be in touch soon, Mr. Baron.”
Slade nodded. “That’s fine. Oh, by the way…your Ms. Stevens made some references to purchasing procedures that were inaccurate.”
“A diligent young woman, Ms. Stevens.” Dobbs chuckled. “Just between us, I’m afraid she went a bit overboard.”
“Diligent, as you said, sir. But I’d like to correct her about those procedures. Would you know where I might find her?”
“In Finance. Fourth floor. The receptionist there can direct you. Nice of you to want to help straighten her out, Mr. Baron—or may I call you Slade?”
“You may, indeed,” Slade replied, and smiled. “And believe me, Edwin, straightening out Lara Stevens will be a pleasure.”
* * *
The receptionist was obliging, and pointed him in the right direction.
Lara’s secretary was not. “You can’t go in there unannounced,” she said, and leaped to her feet, but Slade had already turned the knob and flung open the door.
Lara was standing at the window. She swung around at the sound of the intrusion, the color draining from her face when she saw Slade.
“Ms. Stevens, I tried to tell this gentleman that he couldn’t just barge his way into your office—”
“Tell your secretary to go away,” Slade said coldly.
“Ms. Stevens, if you’d like me to call security…?”
Slade moved into the room. “Tell her, dammit.”
Lara swallowed. “It’s all right, Nancy.” Her voice was steady and calm. It surprised her, because her pulse was going crazy. She couldn’t let him make a scene. “Really,” she said brightly, “it’s fine. This is Mr. Baron. We, ah, we had some disagreements during the meeting just now…” Lara pasted a smile to her lips. “That will be all, Nancy. Thank you.”
Slade waited until he heard the door close behind him.
“I underestimated you, Sugar,” he said softly.
“What do you want, Slade?”
He dumped his things in a chair and strolled toward her. “Here I’d ticketed you for bein’ nothin’ more substantial than a hot babe lookin’ for a good time…”
Her face was still white as paper but she didn’t move a muscle.
“…lookin’ for a good time and now it turns out you’ve got all the instincts of a shark.”
Lara stepped forward and folded her arms. This was her turf, not his, and she’d be damned if she’d let him intimidate her. “I’m asking you again, Slade. What do you want?”
“Just the chance to congratulate you.” He smiled lazily. “You put on one hell of a fine performance for the boys in the boardroom, Ms. Stevens.” He paused, just long enough to make it count. “Or should that be Mrs.?”
“Mrs….” She caught her bottom lip between her teeth, looked down at the thin band of gold on her ring finger, then at him. “Yes.”
“That’s it? Just, ‘yes’?” Slade leaned a hip against the edge of her desk. “Come on, Sugar. You can do better than that. When did you get hitched? Since we last met?” This time, his smile was all teeth. “Or did you maybe just ‘forget’ to wear your ring when we had our little, ah, encounter?”
That got to her. Her shoulders squared and the look she shot him was filled with loathing.
“I won’t even dignify that comment with an answer. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”
“Who’s the lucky guy? I might just give him a call, invite him for a couple of beers.”
She thought of inventing a name, then thought better of it. “I know it will break your heart to hear this but you won’t have the chance. I’m divorced.”
Slade’s brows arched. “Is that a fact? Married and divorced, all in a year and a half. My oh my, darlin’. You’ve certainly been busy.”
Lara pulled back her chair and sat down behind her desk. “I’m really very busy. If there’s a point to this visit—”
“You’re damned right, there’s a point.” He watched her, his blood pressure easing into the red zone as she yanked a stack of papers toward her and began leafing through them. Okay, so he’d thrown her for a couple of minutes but she was in control again, acting as if he were of no more importance than a speck on the wall. “Dammit,” he snarled, and shot to his feet. “You look at me when I’m talking to you, Mrs. Stevens!”
Lara raised her head. Her blue eyes were hot with defiance.
“You get out of my office, Mr. Baron!”
“I will, as soon as you’ve explained yourself.”
“There’s nothing to explain.”
“There certainly is. I want to know why you ran out on me that night.”
It wasn’t what he’d intended to say. He’d meant to demand she tell him why she’d set him up for failure with Dobbs, why she was so eager to see the last of him, but as he said the words, he knew they were the truth.
“I don’t owe you an explanation, or anything else!”
He looked down at her. Her eyes were bright, almost feverish. Her mouth trembled, and he remembered how soft it had been, under his. He told himself to turn around and walk, to get out now instead of making an ass of himself…
Oh, hell, he thought, and before she had time to move or he had time to think, he came around the desk, took hold of her and pulled her to her feet.
“Yeah,” he said roughly, “you do.”
And he caught her in his arms, and kissed her.
CHAPTER FOUR
HOW could a man be dumb enough to compound one problem with another?
Slade still hadn’t come up with an answer, even though it was Monday morning and he was back home in Boston.
First he’d seduced a woman he’d met during a snowstorm. Not a mistake in itself, he thought, frowning at his image in the mirror over the bathroom sink. It was getting her stuck in his head for the past eighteen months that had not been clever.
He worked up a soapy lather in his shaving cup, then spread it over his dark stubbled jaw.
But he’d pretty much topped that by losing his cool in the Beaufort conference room. Well, not entirely. He hadn’t really lost his composure; he’d just come damned close. His frown deepened as he picked up the old-fashioned straight razor he favored, honed it on its leather strop, leaned over the basin and scraped it down his cheek.
Another couple of clever double entendres, and even old man Dobbs would have figured out that something more than computer-talk had been going on between his number one financial honcho and the guy who was going to design the new Beaufort headquarters.
Slade turned on the water, rinsed the blade and angled it against his other cheek.
But none of that held a candle to that final bit of lunacy. Charging down to Lara’s office. Doing a number on her secretary that probably had the woman convinced he was a certifiable psycho. Confronting Lara over what was, when you came down to it, a non-issue. Two non-issues, in fact. One, that she’d set him up, in hopes he’d stumble during the meeting. Two, that she’d sneaked out of that hotel room…
That she’d left his bed, long before he’d been ready to have her leave. He’d wanted one more hour of holding her. Of kissing her…
The blade slipped. “Dammit,” he snarled, as a bright drop of crimson welled on his chin.
He dumped the razor into the sink, reached down beside the commode and grabbed for a piece of tissue. What w
as he doing, wasting time brooding over this thing? Okay, so he’d overreacted on Friday. So what? It had been anger driving him, not passion. Lara’s phone had rung, jolting him back to reality, and he’d made a quick recovery, putting her from him, turning on his heel and marching out of her office…
But not before he could have sworn he’d felt her mouth softening under his.
Blood soaked through the blob of tissue. He pulled it off, yanked open one drawer after another in the vanity under the sink until he found what remained of a styptic pencil. He scraped the point over the cut, waited for the bleeding to stop, then went into his bedroom to get dressed.
So what? The woman was nothing but trouble with a capital T. He’d gone to Baltimore to win a commission, and he had. By the time he got home, there was a message from Dobbs on his answering machine, telling him the job was his.
What more could a man ask?
Slade’s mouth thinned.
He could ask that Lara Stevens get out of his head and leave him alone.
“Dammit,” he snarled again, and instead of putting on a suit, a white-on-white shirt and a silk tie, he thumbed off his trousers, stepped into his shorts and his running shoes, yanked an ancient Harvard T-shirt over his head and trotted down the stairs, out the door and to the path along the Charles River.
He’d run it once this morning already, but he needed to run it again.
Within minutes, his T-shirt was plastered to his skin. It had been cooler, an hour ago, when he’d done his daily five-mile stint. That was okay. It was fine. Maybe running until he collapsed in a sodden heap would exorcise Lara’s ghost. He was tired of having her image burned into his brain.
He could see her face, hear her voice. He could feel the heat of her, in his arms. He could almost taste her, and all three nights since he’d last kissed her, he’d awakened with the sheets kicked off and the male part of his anatomy threatening to do embarrassing things it hadn’t done since he was fifteen.
Slade felt his lungs start to burn as the distance lengthened. Friday night had gone by, and Saturday, and Sunday. Plenty of time to have put Lara out of his mind.
Except, he hadn’t. And he’d tried.
He’d worked all day Saturday, phoned a knockout blonde at the last minute and smiled to himself when she’d said well, she already had plans…but yes, she’d change them. So he’d taken the blonde to dinner, then to an outdoor concert. And he’d ended up in her apartment overlooking the Green, as he’d known he would—except, when she’d slipped into his arms and started undoing his tie, he’d suddenly wanted to be anyplace but where he was.
“Wow,” he’d said, gently disengaging from her embrace. “I just remembered that I have to, uh, I have to go to my office.”
“At midnight?” she’d said, and he’d said, yeah, right, at midnight…
And he’d fled.
Slade groaned at the memory and pumped his arms and legs faster.
He’d tried again on Sunday by almost killing himself with exercise. He’d run in the morning, danced around with the body bag at his gym for an hour after that, sculled up the river in midafternoon. In the evening, he sent out for pizza and vegged out in front of the TV.
So much for thinking about Lara, he’d thought smugly—until someplace around dawn, when he’d had one of those dreams he didn’t even want to think about. And yeah, now he was running his butt off, panting and sweating as he headed home, thinking about nothing and nobody but her.
Slade stumbled up the front steps into his house and dragged himself into the shower without even taking off his soaked shorts or T-shirt. He turned his face up to the water and—he was still thinking about her, still wondering why he’d kissed her, and what would have happened if that phone hadn’t rung because, no matter what she said, she still wanted to pick up where they’d left off. He’d felt her turn boneless in his arms. He’d heard that sexy little moan, felt the kick of her heart…
What kind of man would marry a woman like that and divorce her, all in a year and a half’s time?
Why should it matter a damn to him? That was a better question.
“It doesn’t,” he said firmly, as he stepped from the shower.
Maybe it was time to take a break from the playing fields for a while. He had the Beaufort building to work on and another proposal coming up, lots of designs and meetings to deal with. In fact, he’d already penciled-in a meeting with Dobbs two weeks from now.
“Come for the whole weekend,” Dobbs had said, “and I’ll introduce you around, at my club.”
It didn’t matter that he’d have to spend two days in the same city as Lara. Thinking about her was a thing of the past, right?
“Right,” Slade said.
He finished dressing, pulled on his boots, knotted his tie and made his way briskly down the stairs.
* * *
By nine, he was seated behind his desk, leafing through his calendar. He had a luncheon appointment, a conference call at three…and a memo in his own handwriting, to phone Travis.
He grinned.
Trav had been roped into some kind of bachelor auction the other night. His office had put a heavy wager on his being the bachelor who’d bring in the highest bid.
Well, why not? Trav had tried settling down and discovered it didn’t work. Big surprise, Slade through wryly. The only guy he knew who’d ever settled down and been happy with one woman was Gage but then, Natalie wasn’t a woman, she was an angel.
Slade put his feet up, crossed them at the ankles and linked his hands behind his head.
Playing the field was what he enjoyed, too. That, and seeing to it that Baron, Haggerty and Levine kept right on growing.
“We’ll do the names in alphabetical order,” he’d said the night he, Jack and Ted had hatched their plans over good pasta and bad Chianti at the little Italian trattoria two blocks from the offices of the giant architectural firm that had hired all three of them straight out of Harvard.
“I’ll bet we wouldn’t, if your name was Zambroski,” Jack had said, deadpan, “but it’s okay. Each time I think of you charming your way through all those Back Bay debs, Baron, I swear I can hear cash registers ringing.”
Slade grinned at the memory. The truth was, he’d have lived with his name coming in last. What he couldn’t have endured was if their new alliance had done the same thing. Making it mattered. He was a good architect, a damned good architect, despite his old man’s reaction to his youngest son’s career goals.
“You want to spend your life drawin’ pictures of houses for other people,” Jonas had drawled, “you go right ahead and do it. Jes’ don’t look to me to finance those pansy dreams, boy.”
It wasn’t a disappointment, it was just what Slade had expected.
“That’s fine, Father,” he’d said. “I’d rather do it on my own.”
His high school grades stunk, no surprise considering he’d spent most of the years between sixteen and eighteen riding motorcycles, horses and women. The Baron name and hopes of a fat endowment were probably the only things that had gotten him into a small Texas college. Once there, Slade had worked his tail off to make all As and Phi Beta Kappa. That had been enough to get him into Harvard Grad School, where he’d supported himself tending bar at an off-campus pub in the financial district.
The job had changed everything. He’d picked up market savvy from stockbrokers tossing back double scotches, opened an account and placed his Dow Jones bets with the same recklessness he’d once shown for women, bikes and broncs. By the time he had his degree, he also had enough money in the bank to impress even him. A year later, he’d dumped every penny of it into the brand-new firm of Baron, Haggerty and Levine.
And B, H and L was a success.
Slade smiled. A huge success. Office buildings that transformed skylines were his specialty. Ted had become an authority on period reconstructions, and Jack was a genius at designing residences for clients who wanted something exceptional and weren’t afraid to pay for it.
&n
bsp; Life was good. Slade loved his work, his city and the life he led. He drove a dark green Jag and a shiny black Blazer. He had a cabin in the Maine woods and a Greek Revival bowfront house in Boston that he was restoring with his own hands, and just as Jack had predicted, he was doing fine—well, better than fine—with the Back Bay ladies. With the ones from Beacon Hill and Cambridge and—why be modest?—from all points of the compass. Slade smiled. Getting on with women had never been a problem.
Until now.
His smile twisted.
Until he’d had the misfortune to get involved with a woman who’d seemed as easy to read as any female he’d ever known and had, instead, turned out to be more complicated than the narrow streets that zigzagged their way through Beacon Hill.
“Mr. Baron?”
Slade looked up. His own secretary was out on maternity leave. The temp was a sweet, competent young woman but she blushed whenever she looked at him. Sometimes he thought about telling her, straight out, that she had nothing to worry about, that he never fooled around with women who worked for him or with him…
Then, what had he been doing with Lara? Kissing her, in her office. In her office!
He sat up straight and cleared his throat.
“Yes, Betsy?”
“This package just arrived, sir. By private messenger.”
Slade thanked her and took it. Interesting. No name. No return address.
“Is there anything else, Mr. Baron?”
“No. Uh, yeah. Some coffee, please. Black, one sugar.”
He opened the package as the door swung shut. There was a small vellum envelope inside. He took it out, sniffed it for perfume, then opened it and took out an elegant, hand-scripted notecard.
* * *
Your presence is requested at
The eighty-fifth birthday celebration
Of Mr. Jonas Baron
Saturday and Sunday, June the 14 and 15
At the Baron Ranch
“Espada”
Brazos Springs, Texas
RSVP
* * *
“Oh, hell,” Slade muttered, and rolled his eyes not just at the invitation but at the note scrawled under the RSVP.
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