Falling for Sir (16 page)

Marianne hastily switched screens, afraid the
guilt would show all over her face.

"We've got a meeting with a client in thirty
minutes. Her place. Look sharp, Miller."

"Me?" She glanced at her watch. It was
almost five thirty.

"It always looks better if I take my
assistant along. More professional."

"What about David?" she murmured.

"The client won't have him in her house since
he made some comment about her love of kaftans and dared suggest she needed
Restalyn and a breast lift. Anyway, this isn't a David thing. I need a plain,
unthreatening wallflower who won't suck up all the attention in the room. Hurry
up and get your coat on."

As much as she despised Rawlings, he was her
immediate boss and refusing to attend a meeting with him would simply cause her
more difficulties. In any case, she needed to get her mind off Jack Marchetti's
personal life and work was always a good way to clear the mind of distractions.
So she grabbed her coat and her portfolio.

* * * *

He didn't usually stay this late in the office,
but an international conference call had kept him at his desk tonight. Only
when the cleaning staff came in to empty his recycling did he realize most
people had gone home by then. Jack popped his head into Mrs. B's office, but
the lights were off and she too had quit for the day. He pulled on his coat and
walked into the elevator. For some reason he pressed the button for the
sixteenth floor instead of the parking garage in the basement. He'd been told
she worked late. Maybe he'd check it out, look in on her. See how his apartment
redecoration was coming along.

Who was he kidding? He just wanted to see her
and talk to her.

But her office was empty. Very neat, everything
laid out in precise piles on her desk. Even her sticks of gum were neatly lined
up by the phone. He glanced over his shoulder and then slid open the top
drawer.

Much to his surprise he found a CD. So Miss Workaholic
did have a little playtime occasionally. With her clothes on. And she liked
CDs. Most younger people seemed to favor Ipods these days. He took it out and
looked at it. Blu Cantrell. Never heard of her. He'd expected something somber
and classical.

On her desk there was a framed family photo and
he studied it with interest. People's families always fascinated
Jack—especially parents— because his own had been so strange and distant. He
was eighteen before he realized that most people's fathers and mothers kissed
them when they said hello or goodbye. His parents had always shaken his hand.

The distant hum of vacuum cleaners slowly
intruded and then he heard something else—a noisy clattering and cursing coming
from a small, brightly lit room nearby. He walked over cautiously and looked
in.

An enormous copying machine was chewing its way
through a ream of paper, filling the air with an odor of overheated ink. A
small blonde woman was fighting with a box of toner, her finger tips black.

"Can I help?" he asked.

She dropped the box in shock. "Mr.
Marchetti! No. I'm fine." She took a deep breath. "Just this machine.
The bane of my life." Her laughter was high-pitched and nervous. He
recognized her as Marianne's friend from the elevator.

The copier shook and rattled violently, spitting
out paper at greater speed than the plastic collating shelves could handle.
"Not Bob Rawlings' and his agendas again?" he asked, amused.

The blonde tucked a loose frond of hair behind
her ear and got ink on her cheek in the process. Her forehead was shiny with a
thin film of perspiration, cheeks flushed. "The agendas? Yes. How did you
know?"

"Oh, I heard about it." He came fully
into the room and shrugged out of his coat.

She was staring at him, fidgeting and confused.
"It's out of staples again but the door's jammed. And the button to
collate isn't working. Says there's an error, but I can't find the code in the
book."

He looked at the babbling woman and smiled
gently. "Better see what we can do to fix the problem, eh?"

"You really don't have to—"

Jack rolled up his sleeves. "No
problem." Truthfully, he loved taking machinery apart, seeing what made it
tick and then putting it all back together again. If he hadn't inherited the
department stores he always thought he could have been happy as a mechanic.

"This is really nice of you," the
blonde blurted, apparently close to tears. "I would have been here all
night."

"Hey, we'll figure this out." His
smile widened. "Now where's the instruction manual?"

With a grateful sigh she handed him a tome the
size of the yellow pages. "You're the first man I've ever known to read a
manual," she exclaimed. "Usually they think they know what they're
doing without one."

He laughed at that and after a minute so did
she, relaxing a little.

"I'm Christie Levinson, by the way,"
she said and then almost immediately added, "I hope you don't fire me now.
I probably shouldn’t have told you my name."

Jack shot her look over his shoulder. "Fire
you?"

"Well, they do say that if you know a
person's name they're first in line for the firing squad." She put a
finger gun to her brow.

He laughed. "Right. Don't worry. You're
safe." Jack hunkered down to flip open the machine's control panel. She
stood behind him.

"What were you down here for?" she
asked. "Come to find Marianne?"

Was it that obvious? "Yes. She left early
tonight?"

"Had a meeting with Mr. Rawlings, poor
thing."

The machine belched out the last sheet of paper
it had in its belly and began to beep peevishly.

"She's a really nice girl—Marianne,"
the woman muttered behind him.

"Yes," he sighed. "She is."
He stared at the panel of buttons and digital numbers.

"Complicated isn't it. Stubborn
thing."

"Hmmm."

"Having some trouble figuring it out?"

"Huh?" He looked at her over his
shoulder again.

Her eyes twinkled. "The copier, Mr.
Marchetti."

"Oh, right." Jack turned back to the
machine's innards and flipped open the massive book of instructions.

Chapter
Twelve

This
Day Sucks

As soon as Rawlings told her to leave her
portfolio in the car she knew this wasn't the sort of meeting she'd expected.
Then, as they walked into the Upper East Side apartment, they were greeted by a
dour-faced butler and a tray of cocktails.

Marianne glared at the man who was holding her
elbow and shoving her through the entrance vestibule. "This is a party,
Bob."

"It's work." He wasn't looking at her,
already priming his faux smile for the hostess. "She's a client."

She felt sick, furious. The house was too hot.
She wasn't dressed for a party, her hair was a mess and she hadn't even refreshed
her make-up. She was still smarting from Alana Shepherd's thinly veiled disdain
for her clothes. And she was with Rawlings. People might think they were a
couple. That was even worse than her lack of chic style.

"Take a cocktail. Loosen up. Sometimes you
have to attend a social event like this to please a client, Miller."

But she refused the glass offered to her.
"I'm staying ten minutes. Then I'm getting a cab home."

Rawlings laughed lazily. "Whatever."
His hand tightened around her arm because he'd just spied the client and now he
steered her through the party, further into the crowd. "You're in the big
city now, Miller. Time to learn how to play the game."

"I'm not a schmoozer. You should have
brought David."

He ignored her and waved his cocktail at the
hostess.

For the next half an hour she struggled to stay
civil and not let her smile become too tense. But her head hurt and her stomach
kept flipping somersaults. The client was a loud, flamboyant woman who wore too
much make-up, too much jewelry and too much tan. Clearly she expected to be the
center of attention, holding court over her party like a gilded, over-primped
Emperor. That must be why David, who could be equally colorful himself, was not
considered an appropriate guest tonight. But why Rawlings dragged her out to
stand at his side she couldn't imagine.

Well, she could. All too well. He wasn't giving
up despite her crushing and pointed rejections. If anything her icy demeanor
had the opposite effect to the one she intended.

He was drinking too much, already slurring his
words.

"Where's your wife tonight?" she asked
at one point as he dragged her over to the buffet.

"Her fucking book club. Why?"

"Maybe I should call her. You need someone
to drive you home." No way was she getting in a car with him again, either
as a passenger or a driver. She'd met his wife briefly when she came into the
office to see Bob. Mrs. Rawlings was petite, quiet, and really very sweet. What
she was doing with this asshole for a husband was anyone's guess.

"Who fucking cares what she's doing?"
he added with a chortle, reaching for a salmon canape and getting cream cheese
on the edge of his sleeve as he stumbled against the buffet table. "You
know, Miller, after twenty-five years of marriage things get stale, old. A man
has to get his exercise where he can. She knows that. If she wants to keep the
peace and her cozy fucking world where the only thing she has to worry about is
what dressing she wants on her salad, then she can turn a blind eye to me
getting a little hors d'oeuvre on the side, can't she?" He stuffed the
canape into his wide mouth and chewed. Through glazed eyes he looked down at
Marianne's breasts. "You waltz around in your buttoned up blouses and your
skirts, catching Marchetti's eye. Stepping over me to get there, eh?" He
sneered, showing dill sprigs stuck to his teeth. "Well it ain't happening,
Miller. No one steps over me. You're only way up is
with
me. You start cooperating with me and I won't stick any spokes
in your wheels for the future. No one else will hire you without a
recommendation from me and Marchetti will forget about you as soon as he gets
on the plane again. You'll just be the slut he slept with. I've been in this
business a lot longer than you. Understand?"

"Doing something for a long time doesn't
necessarily make you proficient at it. In fact it can lead to
complacency."

She began to walk away but he grabbed her sleeve
in his sticky fingers. "Did you think I wouldn't find out about the
decorating job he gave you? The personal job? Very personal. Thought you could
get away with it, didn't you?"

"I'm not trying to
get away
with anything. I'm just doing a job." She paused.
"Maybe if you did your job more often, Mr. Marchetti would have asked you
to decorate his apartment, not me."

His lip curled and his fingers twisted the
material of her blouse. "But I'm not fucking the boss am I?"

"Neither am I."

"What? You mean he hasn't got inside your
panties yet either? You
are
playing
hard to get. I underestimated the country girl."

"Mr. Rawlings I don't approve of
histrionics and public displays of temper are more suited to Joan Crawford and
black and white movies. But I will slap your face quite loudly and quite hard,
if you don't let go of my sleeve. Right. Now."

 
He
squinted at her, evidently not sure, again, whether to take her seriously. She
looked down at his fingers and then back at his face.

"And you can go ahead with the spokes in my
wheels, Mr. Rawlings. I'm used to pedaling up hill and through obstacles. I've
done it all my life and I never expected it to get easier. If you want to waste
your time being destructive, that's your call. But just so you know - a desire
to ruin someone else's career is usually the mark of a man who's given up on
his own."

Finally his fingers slipped from her sleeve and
Marianne headed for the bathroom to cool off before she got her coat.

Well, this day turned out to be bloody rotten,
didn't it?

* * * *

He waited outside her apartment and stared
through the car window as rain fell hard against it. She was late out with
Rawlings. He didn't like this. Not a bit. Mrs. Bracknell was right, it seemed,
and Rawlings was up to his old tricks again. After the last warning, Jack had
assumed the man would get his act together and stop chasing skirt around the
office. Only the devil knew how his poor wife put up with it. Or why.

Of course, Jack wasn't around enough to keep a
close eye on things. Sometimes he didn't really want to know. He'd avoided the
issue of Rawlings for as long as possible, trying to give him a chance to pick
up the pieces after the last calamity. Jack believed in giving second chances.
And wouldn't it be hypocritical to accuse Bob Rawlings of something he was
trying to do himself? Maybe it was just jealousy that had got him in this bad
mood.