Just Like a Man (38 page)

"Harry," Pax said flatly.

"Yes?"

"Did anyone ever tell you you're no fun to verbally spar with?"

Harry gave that some thought, too. "No. I don't believe anyone's ever told me that. And actually, I don't think it would be exaggerated to describe myself as captivating. I wouldn't go so far as to say winsome, although I will admit that a lady smitten with my charms did use that very word. Of course, that was years ago, and in a different country. But in this one, I've always been known as quite the interlocutor amongst my peers."

This time it was Pax's turn to reply, "Mm." He gazed at his assistant through slitted eyes. "Interlocutor," he repeated. Though not without difficulty. "I suppose that could be one word to describe you. Another might be—"

"If you won't be needing me this evening," Harry interjected, "I'd like to have a few hours off."

"What makes you think I won't be needing you?" Pax asked.

"The fact that you've so far needed me today only as a receptacle for your bombast."

"Bombast?" Pax echoed indignantly. "Harry, I haven't been bombasting."

"No?"

"C'mon," he cajoled. "You prepared my agenda today. Do you recall, at any time, writing in the mandate, 'Bombast Harry, but good'?"

"Of course not."

"Well, there you go."

"Bombast is a noun. One cannot, by definition, actively bombast another. I would never write such a thing."

Pax decided it would be best to just move things along and make believe he still had the upper hand. "Yeah, okay, you can have the evening off. There's nothing here that can't be done tomorrow. Have at it."

Harry did have the decency—or, more likely, it was just ingrained courtesy, not that he had much of that, either, mind you—to thank Pax as he left the room. Pax was turning his attention back to the laptop sitting on his denim-clad thighs when the phone on his desk trilled softly. It was the ring he'd assigned to the concierge on the first floor of the building, and the guy was probably calling to tell Pax a courier delivery he'd been expecting early this morning had finally arrived. At least he hoped that was what the guy was calling about. He'd needed those documents yesterday.

He glanced at his watch as he rose from the sofa, the well-worn leather releasing him with a softly sighed
wuuufff,
and headed for the phone. Jesus, it was almost seven o'clock. It damned well better be the courier. Not just because Pax needed the info, but because he didn't want to be bothered by any additional work tonight. The concierge confirmed that, yes, the courier was here with a package, and Pax instructed the man to go ahead and send the guy up, since by now everyone else had gone home. Then he settled his laptop on his desktop, saved the work he'd completed so far, and headed out of his office to wait for the guy at the front door.

His penthouse was large, certainly larger than the average suburban home, and his office was located in the back of the dwelling because the room overlooked a park across the street. Not that Pax had the time—or the inclination, for that matter—to do much staring out the window, but the decorator had considered that part of his home a good location for an office, away from the public rooms, where it would be quieter and therefore easier for him to work. Pax frankly hadn't cared where his office was located, since he wasn't the kind of person to open his home to the public anyway. When he socialized, he generally went out. When he had to throw a party for business associates, he hired someone to rent a place and make the arrangements. His home was
his
home. It was personal space. He didn't often share it with others.

Well, except for Harry. But Harry was different. Harry was… Harry. He wasn't personal. At all. Au contraire.

But since Pax's office was at the back of his home, it took him a few minutes to make his way toward the front, a few minutes he spent stewing over how much
more
work he could have finished by now if he'd had that damned delivery early this morning, when he was supposed to have received it. Hell, he could have given himself the evening off, too. Maybe called Selby to see what she was doing. Because seeing her only twice a week was really starting to bug the hell out of him. Which was odd, since normally with women it was seeing them more than once a week that got kind of irritating.

But then, Selby wasn't like normal women, was she? No, she was like Pax.

He still hadn't come to terms with what he'd learned about her at Trino's that night. That she was the kid in school who had been taunted and ridiculed by others, just as he had been. Hell, her experiences had been worse than his own. She'd been physically assaulted when she'd been thrown into the showers. As often as the other kids had jeered at Pax, they'd never laid a hand on him. He'd been a tall kid, and big enough, he supposed, that it made even the bullies think twice about coming after him. Selby, though, as a girl, would have been an easy target. And obviously had been.

But she wasn't angry, he thought. She'd actually been polite to the despicable Deedee. She didn't carry around a chip on her shoulder the size of Gibraltar the way Pax did. She seemed okay as an adult. Unbothered. Happy. As if she'd left the past in the past and was focused on the future. He didn't see how she could do that.

But he wanted to learn.

In fact, over the past several days, he'd come to realize he wanted to learn everything he could about Selby Hudson. Where she really came from, what made her tick. Why she was able to be the kind of person she was—warm, generous, cheerful—having come from the background she had. And he'd realized something else, too, something that had rocked him to his very foundation. He'd realized how much he had come to like her. Even before learning about her experiences in high school, even before discovering the two of them had so much in common, Pax had come to see that he liked Selby. He liked her a lot. And he'd begun to wonder if maybe—

Well, he'd just begun to wonder, that was all. And he didn't usually wonder about women.

He nudged thoughts of Selby away for now, and focused instead on the work that would consume his evening. He tugged on the gray sweater he'd pulled on over jeans that morning, then ran his hands quickly through his ebony hair, fuming again about the lateness of the courier. That was the problem with low-paying menial jobs, he thought as he strode past his bedroom, past the one, two, three guest rooms that were never used, past Harry's room—where he could hear Harry singing "I Gotta Be Me" as he readied himself to go out—past Harry's office, past the media room, the game room, the library, the kitchen, and the dining room. Nobody got paid enough to give a damn about their job performance these days. The courier had probably spent the afternoon riding around on his bike instead of making his deliveries, because it was a beautiful day outside, and hey, who cared if the working stiffs didn't get their stuff on time? Who cared that there were other people in the world who took some pride in their work and wanted to make sure things were done the right way?

Grumble, grumble, grumble.

By the time Pax's doorbell rang, he'd worked up a good head of steam and was ready to give the kid what-for. But it wasn't a guy on the other side of the door, he saw immediately. It was a girl, shorter than he by nearly a foot, her build slight, her head, encased in a red baseball cap, bowed over a clipboard upon which she was writing. He really shouldn't have noticed any more than that about her, and her gender shouldn't have made any difference when it came to his wanting to chew her out. But something about her made Pax hesitate. She was dressed casually, in blue jeans and red high-top sneakers, an oversized red jacket zipped halfway over a white T-shirt. The jacket and hat both were embroidered in black with the logo of the courier service, and she had a fat Tyvek envelope tucked under the arm of the hand that was writing.

"Hi, I have a delivery for CompuPax," she said in a friendly voice as she wrote. "Guy downstairs said I should bring it up here."

The moment she began speaking, the hair on the back of Pax's neck leapt to attention. And when she finally glanced up, a shock wave of heat blasted through his belly. The last person he'd expected to see when he opened his door was Selby Hudson. And judging from the expression on her face, he was the last person she'd expected to see opening it.

"Thomas," she said when she saw him, his name coming out as a soft sigh of surprise. Then she smiled. A curious, confused kind of smile that did something to his insides he wasn't sure he liked.

Selby, it appeared, wouldn't have been available this evening even if Pax had given himself the rest of the night off. Because Selby, it appeared, was working, at yet another job. This made, what… four? That he knew about, at any rate. Did she ever take time off? Why did she work so many jobs? And why, if she worked four jobs—that he knew about, at any rate—could she only afford to live in a crummy apartment in an even crummier part of town?

Maybe Pax would eventually learn the answers to those questions, but right now, he had an explanation to fabricate and a delivery for CompuPax to think about. A delivery for which he had been waiting so long. A delivery that was late. A delivery over which he'd been about to chew the courier's butt off. But as often as he'd fantasized about nibbling on Selby Hudson's behind, this hadn't been quite what he'd had in mind.

And as for his fabricated explanation, how the hell was he going to explain Thomas Brown's presence in the penthouse of the CEO of CompuPax? And what was he going to do if Selby knew the name of the CEO of CompuPax was T. Pax-ton Brown? She was a smart woman. A teacher—among other things. Twice over, at that. It wouldn't be difficult for her to put two and two—or rather T. Paxton and Thomas—together, and calculate the common denominator of Brown.

"Selby," he said. Mainly because that was the only one of billions of thoughts ricocheting around in his brain that he could get a handle on.

Her gaze bounced from his to scan the door and the wall above it for a number or a sign—fruitlessly, since there was nothing to mark the residence—then back at Pax's face again. He wanted to reassure her that yes, she did indeed have the right address. She just had the wrong idea. Not that he for a moment intended to set her straight. No, if Pax had any hope of salvaging anything of their… whatever the hell it was they had—and he decided not to think just then about why it was suddenly terrifyingly important that he salvage it—he was going to have to make sure her wrong idea got even wronger.

"I, uh… What are you doing here?" she asked flat out. "Do you work for CompuPax?"

He couldn't let her think he had anything to do with CompuPax. One niggling little suspicion that he had anything to do with the company, and she'd eventually put it all together. She'd know he'd been lying to her. And then she'd want nothing to do with him. Not just because he was a liar, either. But because she wouldn't want T. Paxton Brown, billionaire, the way she wanted Thomas Brown, dropout. And he couldn't stand the thought of Selby not wanting him.

"I, ah… he began. Yeah, um, I—I'm working, but not for CompuPax. Not, you know, technically."

Woo. Good thing he'd gone back to school recently. His vocabulary in particular needed work.

"I was just, um, I mean, I was, ah…" he continued as articulately as before, "working on the computer," he finished in a fit of ingeniousness. Not to mention honesty. Hey. Cool how that worked out. Maybe he could bluff his way through this without even having to bluff.

"What, you're the computer repairman?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said, that honesty stuff going right up in smoke. "That's kind of what I do. Repair computers. Part-time, I mean. Weekends and evenings, I mean. When I can find the work, I mean. What little comes my way, I mean," he finished. Because, hey, if he was going to be a liar, he might as well be a big, fat liar, right?

And why did the realization that he was such a big, fat liar with Selby suddenly bother him so much? He'd lied to people. Lots of times. Nobody attained the level of success Pax had without telling a few whoppers along the way. And nobody held on to such colossal success by being sincere or fair. He'd never considered virtue a virtue. And integrity? Please. What the hell was that? He'd lied to and misled all manner of people, from housekeepers to IRS agents to captains of industry. And he'd been misrepresenting himself to Selby for weeks. Why, suddenly, did he feel so damned guilty for telling her something that wasn't true?

"So then you do have a job," Selby said, smiling.

He nodded, hoping the gesture didn't look as jerky and panicky as it felt. "Part-time, like I said."

"Well, good," she said. "Once you get your diploma, with experience like that, you should be very employable."

"Yeah," Pax said. And then, because he couldn't think of anything else to say, he added, "Yeah."

And then he gazed at Selby, a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, because even dressed as a courier, she looked so damned pretty, he wanted to pull her into his arms and kiss her again, and part of him knew then that somehow, eventually, this was all going to blow up in his face, and he'd never see her again.

"So… who do I give this to?" she asked, tugging the envelope out from under her arm. She held up the clipboard, too. "Somebody has to sign for it."

"Right," Pax said. "Hang on. Mr., ah… the, uh, the guy who runs CompuPax is home. I'll go get him."

"Okay, thanks."

And before he succumbed to the look of utter bewilderment on her face and told her everything—the
truth,
for God's sake, like
that
was going to help him out—Pax wheeled around and made his way back to Harry's room, where his assistant had finished the final chorus of "I Gotta Be Me" and launched into "I Feel Pretty."
Me, me, me,
Pax thought inanely as he rapped on Harry's door. Everything with Harry always started with both the letter and the word I. And Pax tried not to think about his mother's admonition that whenever he pointed a finger, he had three more pointing back at himself.

"Harry," he whispered harshly as he concluded his rapping. "Open the door."