Sparks Fly (2 page)

“I'm sorry that I gave you that impression, Angelina.”

He thought he heard her sigh before saying, “Susan was adamant, however, about rescheduling our consultation.”

“She was?”

He sounded like a complete moron. The man who could convince investors to give him millions armed with nothing but a speech and Power Point presentation, now appeared to have a vocabulary of about twelve words.
Way to make up for a really bad first impression, pal.

“I agreed to try again. One more time.” Angelina deliberately enunciated each word. “And this time, you need to guarantee me two uninterrupted hours.”

Will’s phone beeped in his ear. It was his CFO.

“Angelina, I need to get this call. Could I call you back?”

“No.”

Will had almost switched over the call when he realized what she'd said.

“No?”

“No,” she repeated. “And I need your agreement to not answer the phone at any point during our next consultation.”

The call went through to voice mail.

It had been a long time since anyone had challenged Will. But instead of being irritated, he felt a grudging respect for how she stood her ground.

“C
ould you come back tomorrow afternoon?”

“I’m booked solid until next Thursday.”

“Great,” he replied without checking his schedule. He’d simply rearrange anything in his way.

He did own the company, after all. Time to use some of the perks that came with the title.

* * *

Angelina hung up the phone and stretched out her neck, rubbing it with her hands. Will Scott gave her a serious headache.

Unfortunately, he gave her something else too, something hot and steamy in a region of her body not used to much action.

Immediately her phone rang again. “Daddy!” Angelina’s face lit up. “I’m so glad you called!”

“I have some big news for you.”

“You’re not sick are you?”

“No.” her father laughed off her concern. “I met someone. Her name is Louise.”

Angelina relaxed back into her chair. “Oh Daddy, that’s wonderful!”

“And we got engaged this morning.”

She almost dropped the phone. “You what?” But as shocked as she was, she wanted to sound supportive. “I’m so happy for you.”

“No one will ever replace your mother...” His voice trailed off.

Wanting to voice what was in her heart, Angelina said, “Mom has been gone for twenty-five years. You deserve love and happiness. You always have.” Striving for an excited tone, she said, “Tell me how it all happened.”

“Do you remember last time you came home for a visit and I asked you for some advice? I did everything you said. I put two pink roses in the vase in the living room, I put up paintings of happy couples, and I got rid of everything from underneath my bed. The next day I met Louise at the local garden show.”

As her father continued to talk about his new love, for the first time Angelina really did feel like a Feng Shui Cupid.

A cupid with an arrow for everyone but herself.

After hanging up the phone, she couldn't stop herself from thinking about the fact that she not only hadn’t been on a date in over a year, but she sure as heck had never found anything even close to the true love her father had been describing.

“Have I been spending too much time working on my clients’ love lives and not enough on my own?” she asked herself.

Blinking hard, she tried to think about whether she’d been hiding behind her business.

Painful memories came at her, instead.

His name was Bryce, and they’d met the summer she turned twenty-one, while she was helping out with her father’s house cleaning business in her hometown of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. She was sure she’d met “the one” and freely gave him her heart and body. But in the end she was just a plaything for a beautiful rich boy: He thought sex with the cleaning staff went hand in hand with having an inflated bank account.

She'd learned a powerful lesson that summer. Rich people were fine to work with as clients, but she would never again make the mistake of trusting one with her heart.

She rubbed her temples with her index fingers as she thought about the handful of men she’d dated in the past five years. They had all worked hard and were attractive, but they had bored her senseless.

And now she was fighting her attraction to a totally unsuitable man, a man who would no doubt stomp her heart to pieces were she foolish enough to give it to him.

The following Thursday, Angelina was halfway up the path to Will's front door when he came around the side yard and called out her name. He saw surprise flash across her pretty face a split-second before she tripped on the edge of a brick that was sticking up a half-inch too high.

Will flew across the lawn as quickly as he could and caught her, glad for the excuse to find out what it felt like to hold her.

It felt good.

Really good.

Angelina pulled away to stand on her own two feet. “Thanks for catching me. I’m not usually this clumsy.”

Will had to fight the urge to pull her close to him again. Frankly, he was still more than a little perplexed by his attraction to a woman who was the polar opposite of his usual Barbie dolls.

Angelina asked, “Are you ready to get started?” snapping Will out of his fog.

“Sure.”

They went inside and she said, “Why don’t you take me through your house and tell me what you like and don’t like about each room. Let’s start with your Foyer. How do you feel about it?”

The first totally inappropriate thought that popped into his head was,
“I love it when you’re in
it,”
but he settled for, “It’s OK, I guess.”

Scanning the room, Angelina moved to stand in front of a painting. “Does this make you happy?”

The truth was, Will couldn’t have cared less if the painting made him happy. But when he really looked at it for the first time, he saw that the artist had used acrylic on canvas to depict a sad man who stood in the middle of a wet, deserted street.

The painting sucked.

“I don't like it.”

“Why don’t you like it?”

“It’s depressing and besides, even I could do a better job than...” Realizing he was saying too much, Will cut himself off.

Angelina pinned him with a questioning look.

Inwardly cursing himself for divulging any information at all about his personal life, Will said,

“Seems like anyone could do a better job than this artist did.”

“Feng Shui is all about living with what you love. When we get rid of the things that bring us down and replace them with things that make us happy, we open ourselves up for good things to happen in our lives.” Grinning, she added, “Don’t be surprised if taking this painting down gets you the woman of your dreams.”

“If that’s the case,” Will said as he reached for the painting, “let’s get this pathetic loser off of my walls ASAP.”

Angelina could barely keep from laughing as she helped Will lift the heavy frame. Men were so predictable.

Will surveyed the new look of his foyer. “It looks better already.”

Angelina was pleased that she could finally grace him with a genuine smile, and right then and there she decided she was going to maintain a nice, agreeable banter with him throughout the rest of the consultation. No matter what.

Getting back to business, Angelina did a quick scan of the kitchen/family room. “You’ve got an awful lot of the fire element in here.”

“The fire element?”

“There are five elements: fire, water, metal, earth, and wood. The fire element is in your red rug, your fireplace, and your electronics.”

“And that's bad?”

“Well, not bad, exactly. Just not balanced.”

“Maybe I should just take all of this to the dump and start over.”

Angelina was surprised by her own chuckle. She'd barely replied with, “Not unless you hate everything in here,” when she made the mistake of looking into his incredible blue eyes.

Her mouth went completely dry. Again.

Oh god, what was she doing? She knew better than to look at a wealthy, good looking man like Will Scott with stars in her eyes. She was a twenty-six year old woman who had never gotten over her broken heart or her deep sense of shame from being so easily used.

And Will definitely had heartbreak written all over him.

* * *

Will was enjoying watching the play of emotions run across Angelina’s expressive face, when she abruptly turned away from him and began to study his living room with renewed zeal.

She pointed to a watercolor hanging in a dimly lit corner of his living room. “Will, this is an incredible ocean-scape. It would be the perfect water element to hang over your fireplace.”

Will was tempted to tell her he had painted it in college. What would it be like, he wondered, to have Angelina’s eyes light up with admiration? But he squashed the thought as quickly as it came. He was CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and if anyone found out he painted, he’d become a laughingstock.

She reached into her briefcase and pulled out a sheet of paper. “This should help with explaining some of the how’s and why’s of what I do. It's called a Feng Shui map.”

Will scanned the page. “For some reason these charts remind me of computer programming.”

It also reminded him of what it was like to balance out all of the colors on a canvas.

Disturbed that he was thinking about painting again for the first time in years, he pushed his fruitless thoughts back into the recesses of his mind, where they belonged.

“Are you a programmer?”

Will was stunned. “You don’t know what I do for a living?”

“We didn't exactly have time for you to tell me the first time we met, did we?”

More than a little surprised that she didn't know who he was, he said, “Again, I apologize for that.”

Giving him a small smile that made his heart beat a little faster, she said, “So, you don't program computers?”

Feeling relieved, thinking that maybe for once he wouldn’t have to be on guard against another woman who only wanted to be with him for the notoriety of dating one of America’s richest, most eligible bachelors, he leaned back against the kitchen counter, perfectly happy to let her think he was just an average rich guy.

“When I was first out of college, I used to program. But I haven’t done any serious coding in years.” He looked pensive and admitted, “Lately I’ve been missing the old days.”

“Why?”

“I used to solve puzzles and create things. Now, I spend all day dealing with problems.”

His inner voice taunted him.
Hey, buddy, it’s pretty hard to be wealthy enough to buy a small
island, isn’t it? Boo hoo for you.

He didn’t know why he was telling Angelina any of this. Usually, he was either focused on expansion and profits, or occasionally hanging out with his business school buddies talking sports.

Even with his ex-wife he had maintained an emotional distance.

Giving Angelina a sheepish look, he said, “I don’t mean to be standing here complaining. Not when I have,” he gestured to his home, “all this.”

“The Western spin on Feng Shui tends to be all about making more money, but it’s really about finding a place where your heart can be happy and at peace.” Looking charmingly self-conscious, she added, “I have a tendency to get on a soap box from time to time.”

“No worries. I don’t see any suds on the floor.”

Angelina gave Will a crooked half-smile that knocked his socks off.

“How about you show me your home office next?”

As Angelina followed Will out of the living room, she tried to reconcile his admission about missing computer programming with her initial picture of him as a spoiled rich boy.

Get a grip, Angelina,
she repeated over and over in her head, training her eyes on the oak flooring instead of the temptation before her.

Caught up in controlling her raging hormones, Angelina plowed into him, hugging him like a spoon, her front to his back, her arms wrapped around his rippling six-pack. And then he turned around in her arms and his mouth was mere inches from hers.

She was about to meet him half-way when her inner voice cried,
Stop throwing yourself at your
client!

Just go away,
she told it, but steadfast in its purpose, her inner voice of no fun turned up another notch.

Don't forget, his ex-wife wants him back!

It was a supreme effort to pull away. Trying to put some distance between them, she stumbled into the foyer’s stair rail.

No longer seared with the heat of Will’s body, Angelina quickly cooled down.

Will looked just as stunned as she felt.

On one level, she wished that she could leap back into his arms, but she knew it was impossible under the helm of their client-consultation relationship.

Clearly, there was only one way for either of them to proceed: They both needed to act as if the almost-kiss never happened.

“My office is right around the corner,” Will said in a slightly husky voice before disappearing into a room to his right.

His telephone had been ringing constantly since her arrival, but true to his word, he had ignored it. Until now. But when she walked into his office, she was so shocked by the utter chaos of the room, she temporarily forgot about her no-phone-calls rule.

It was one of the messiest rooms she had ever seen.

She quickly figured out that, according to Feng Shui, Will’s just-been-hit-by-a-cyclone office sat smack dab in the Reputation area of his house. Odds were he was having trouble getting respect from customers and staff alike. The snippets of conversation that she overheard as she carefully picked her way through the piles of papers and boxes confirmed her suspicions.

Will bit off into the phone, “I’m only going to say this one more time. We are going forward with our plans. I don’t care what Albert is telling the board about competitive repercussions.”

Hanging up, he turned to face Angelina. “Welcome to my office,” he said grimly.

In her line of business, there were times to be gentle and times for tough-love.

This was tough-love all the way.