Books by Maggie Shayne (52 page)

“If I hadn’t, it would have been my mistake. My loss.”

She held his gaze, her eyes probing. “So how special is she?” she asked flat out. “Special enough to make you want to give up all the others and take her home to the family? Hmm? Or just special enough that you’d like a replay of last night?”

He swallowed hard, feeling as if she’d driven a dagger through his heart to the hilt. “I just want to see her again,” he muttered.

“And what makes you think
she
wants to see
you
again?”

He looked up fast, meeting her eyes. “Doesn’t she?” he asked, startled at the very thought.

Martha Jane looked away quickly. “I don’t know. I haven’t... spoken to her yet. And I... I think we got a bit off the subject here.“

“I guess we did.” He took a step away from her, just to put some distance between them. She had him off balance. Confused. Uncertain. And that wasn’t good. He didn’t like it one bit. He could see that it wasn’t going to be easy to convince his prim Miss Biswell to see him again. No. Not when she seemed to think there was something wrong with a casual relationship like the one he had in mind. Sex wasn’t going to be the answer to this, either—never mind how unbelievably great it was. He gave his head a shake, having no clue what to do. Best to get back to the subject at hand, give himself time to think, to regroup.

“You wanted to borrow a secretary—but not Babs,” he said. “Who did you have in mind?”

“Mrs. Nye,” she said, seeming relieved to be back on safer ground.

“Done.” He said it without giving it a second thought.

Her brows went up. “Just like that?”

“Just like that.” He racked his brain for something to say, because she looked toward the door, and he knew she was thinking about leaving, and he really didn’t want her to do that. Not unless he went with her.

What the hell was wrong with him?

“I’ll need a few minutes,” he heard himself saying. “Then I’ll bring her over to your place myself.”

Martha Jane blinked, licked her lips. And Richard wondered why he’d never noticed how full and sensual those lips were, until last night. Hell, they were even just the tiniest bit swollen this morning. He could still taste them.

“You don’t need to do all that,” she said.

“But I want to. In fact, I’m taking the rest of the day off and spending it with you and Kayla. I’m an old hand at business matters. I can be a lot of help to you two.”

“But, um, I mean—that’s just not... What will your brother do without his partner
or
his secretary?”

“Oh, never fear. He can have my secretary for the day.” Richard wiggled his eyebrows, relaxing again now that
she
seemed to be the one off balance. “Babs to the rescue.”

Martha Jane’s smile appeared like sunshine on a cloudy day, and her eyes sparkled up at him. Damn, so much for his ability to relax a little. Surely she was more beautiful this morning than she’d ever been before. She couldn’t
possibly
have been this incredible before.

But she had been. She always had been. He’d been stepping over a diamond to pick up bits of glass, and he hadn’t even noticed.

Martha Jane was feeling as if she’d stepped out of the ordinary world into some parallel dimension, where nothing was as it should be. By the time she got back to the apartment, Kayla had promoted herself from bathrobe and towel to a sexy red suit and from scribbling on the backs of old bills to keying them in on her laptop computer. She was typing in orders slowly, still not up to speed on the software she’d bought for “someday.”

Martha Jane had barely had time to explain what was going on, when Richard arrived with Mrs. Nye in tow. The older woman knew the program backward and forward, she assured Kayla, and she sent the three of them on their way.

The first stop they made was the bank. And that was where Martha Jane finally realized that her life was never going to be the same again. Because they didn’t get stuck in a hard chair in the lobby, only to be led later to one of the cubicles out there. No. They were taken straight through the doors in the back and into a real office, where a fat man who smelled like cigars smiled at them as if they were his best friends.

He listened to their plans but didn’t make any notes. And when they left his office, they had an unlimited line of credit.

Unlimited.

Kayla was smiling all over, and Martha Jane couldn’t quite absorb it. She blinked in the sunlight outside the bank, and still couldn’t digest it all.

“I have a suggestion, if you want to hear it,” Richard said.

“Shoot! You suggest to your heart’s content,” Kayla said. “I’m too excited even to think straight.”

“Well, the top floor of my building is vacant. We’ve been planning to lease it to local businesses, but the remodeling just wrapped up last week, so no one’s even seen it yet. I’ll tell you, there are some great suites up there.”

Martha Jane shook her head and said automatically, “Richard, we can’t afford...” But she let the words die as she met Kayla’s eyes. “
Can
we?”

Richard smiled at her in a very un-ex-boss-like manner. “Yeah, you can,” he said. “Ladies, the orders you’ve taken this morning alone are ... well, here. Just off the top of my head”—he yanked a calculator out of his jacket pocket and began punching in numbers, muttering as he went— “let’s see, you’ve got orders for about, what, four thousand pieces?” Click, click, click. “I can make an educated guess what it will cost to produce them, and I know what you’re charging for them—it was on the program from the show.” Click, click click. Then he turned the little screen to face them. “Here’s your profit for this morning’s orders. Roughly.”

Kayla looked at it, then looked again.

“So—do you think you can afford office space?”

Kayla looked at Martha Jane. Martha Jane looked at Kayla. They both smiled.

For the rest of the morning, Richard helped them get their offices set up on the top floor of the Gable Brothers Building. Martha Jane, despite her lengthy list of things to do, found herself pausing often just to watch him. He was like a different man. Or maybe she was just seeing him as he really was for the first time. Before, he’d been her boss, her dream, a fantasy beyond her reach. Now, he was just... a man.

He’d taken off his jacket and his tie. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbows, and she couldn’t help staring at his forearms at every opportunity. Strong. Tanned. Dusted with hair. Flexing when he lugged office furniture right along with the deliverymen. She watched him when he crouched behind desks, hooking up computer cables, too. Because she knew the shape and feel of his backside, his thighs, and she couldn’t help remembering.

He was amazing.

It wasn’t fair, Martha Jane thought, that he should turn out to be even more wonderful than she’d thought. She was eating her heart out. Oh, sure, he’d said all those sweet things about his mystery date. But he hadn’t known she was plain old Martha Jane.

“So, this desk is for your office, right?”

Richard’s voice was soft and close to her ear, and it startled her so much that she jumped. He just smiled and laid a calming hand on her shoulder. “Sorry. You must have been a million miles away.”

“I—yes, I was thinking.”

“About what?”

His eyes ... they were so dark and deep, so knowing as they probed hers. Oh, but that was ridiculous. He couldn’t know. She’d die if she thought he knew!

“Why did you stop drawing?” she asked.

He tilted his head to one side, those dark eyes on hers like a touch. “Now, how did you know I ever
did
any drawing?”

“I... I guess ... I must have heard someone mention it around the office. Your brother, maybe.” She spoke fast, wishing she could grab the words from the air and shove them back into her mouth. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

But he only shrugged. “I don’t know why I stopped. But it’s funny you should ask me now that I’ve started again.”

She blinked twice. “You have?”

“Maybe I just hadn’t come across anything worth drawing in a while.”

They stood in what would be the reception area of the office suite. The door behind them led to the hall and the rest of the building. The one on the left wall led to what would be Kayla’s office, and the one on the back wall to her studio, where Kayla was already ensconced and having the time of her life. The double doorway on the right led to the office that would be Martha Jane’s. That was the one Richard had been referring to, and the one he was heading into even now.

“Oh, this is going to be great,” he said. He stood beside the open doorway until she came in, and then he closed it. “Look at the view.”

The entire outer wall was windows, floor to ceiling. “Oh!” she breathed. “My goodness. It’s like sitting on a mountaintop throne, with the whole city at my feet,” she said. “I’m never going to want curtains in here, or blinds, or anything like that.”

Richard smiled at her. “In that case, you’re going to want your desk—” He pointed. “Over here, I think, is best.” As he spoke he walked to the spot. “You can’t really have your back to the door, and if you have the windows behind you, then the glare on the computer screen will make it invisible most of the day. So, here.”

“It’s perfect.”

He smiled, walked back into the reception area, and easily pushed the padding-wrapped desk through the double doors and across the carpet into the proper spot. Then he sat on the floor and began snipping the packing tape and padding away from the sides. With a sigh, Martha Jane began to do the same with the foam and tape covering her chair.

“So what else are you going to put in here?” he asked her.

“I can’t believe you’d really want to know,” she said.

“Well, believe it. The way you decorate your office says a lot about who you are.”

“You think so?”

“Sure.”

Martha Jane looked at him quizzically. “Then what does your choice of office decor say about you?” she asked. “You’ve got all these extreme-type photographs, blown up and framed on every wall. The hang glider, the rock climber, the windsurfer...”

“All the things I wanted to do before I got too old,” he explained.

She lifted her brows in surprise. “And did you?”

“What is that, some crack about my age?” He grinned at her, and she shook her head. “Yes, I’ve done them all. Often enough that they bored me. Everything’s seemed to bore me for a while now.” Then he looked at her. “Well, until lately.”

She cleared her throat and changed the subject. “What about that birdcage you have hanging in the corner with the stuffed parrot inside?”

“That? Oh, that’s there to remind me never to let myself be caged.”

“Like your brother?”

Richard nodded slowly. “That was the idea I had when I put the bird up, yes.”

She averted her gaze. She was right—he would never change.

“So, you didn’t tell me—what are you going to put in your office?”

She looked around the room, thought about her life. “I want a print behind the desk, there. I saw one last week that I haven’t been able to get out of my mind. A woman with three faces, each one representing some different part of her personality.”

“I’ve seen that piece,” he said. “So you’ll put it here to remind people that there’s more to you than what they see?”

She shook her head slowly. ‘To remind myself. I’ve been living a one-dimensional life for a long time. I didn’t even know there was more to me, until— Anyway, I don’t want to forget again.“

He muttered something that sounded like, “I don’t plan to let you.”

She turned quickly, frowning at him. “What?”

“I said, uh, what would you like me to get you? As an office-warming present.”

She shrugged. “You don’t have to get me anything at all.”

“Well, of course I do,” he said, as if it bore no argument. “What else do you have in mind?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Lots of plants, I suppose. Maybe an aquarium. And by the windows I want a giant rock.”

“A rock?”

“Mm-hmm. A pretty one. I saw one in a shop once, amethyst spikes all over one side of it. All pointy and sparkly purple. It would catch the sun in these windows and shine like a diamond.”

“And why would you want a rock in your office? Does that have some significance too?”

She nodded. ‘To remind me that what I want in life is security and stability. Permanence. The occasional walk on the wild side is one thing, but I wouldn’t want to lose sight of what I really want.“

“Walk on the wild side?” he asked. He looked surprised... but the expression seemed contrived somehow. As if he were teasing her. “I never would have guessed.”

She shrugged. “Maybe I should borrow some of your extreme prints,” she said with a smile. “There are a lot of things I’ve never done that I intend to try. Rock climbing, hang gliding...” She could have sworn he shuddered.

“Those things are dangerous, Martha Jane. Besides, I thought you said you wanted stability and permanence.”

“But I don’t have them yet,” she said, smiling a little bit, thinking again about the night they’d shared. “So why shouldn’t I go for the thrills in the meantime?” Then she frowned. “Besides, who’s to say a person can’t have both?”

Richard stood there looking at her as if she’d just confessed to selling government secrets to China. Finally, he shook his head. ‘Tell you what. If you really want to try any extreme sports, you just say so. I’ll take you myself. At least that way I can make sure you don’t break your pretty neck.“

She looked at him and tilted her head to one side. One hand flew to her neck automatically, fingers trailing over her pulse point

“What’s wrong?” he asked, an almost smile tugging at his lips, his eyes, once again, holding that gleam that could give her chills. “Haven’t I ever told you that you have a pretty neck before, Martha Jane?”

She swallowed the lump in her throat.

“You do, you know.”

Was he... flirting with her? With plain Martha Jane Biswell? No. This was all in her head. He’d awakened some primal, sex-craving part of her last night, and that was where all these false impressions were coming from. She was being ridiculous. She had known what last night was before it even began. An adventure, like one of his extreme sports. Dangerous, and thrilling, and very, very brief. A one-night stand. Over and done. It meant nothing to him.
She
meant nothing to him, not as Valentine and certainly not as Martha Jane Biswell. He wouldn’t give his former secretary a second glance.

And it would really,
really
be a huge mistake to see him again tonight. A huge mistake.

Oh, but dammit, how she wanted to. Stability and permanence were fine. But she didn’t have them yet. She’d only been teasing him but now she wondered—what would be so wrong about taking just one more thrill ride?