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Wheeler nodded dispassionately, curling his fingers around the coffee cup, which just went to show how suicidal he began to feel at the mention of his former client. “Yep. Denby’s account was the best one I had. I’m hoping maybe this sketch I’m working on now will win him back.”
“Had?” Miss Finnegan echoed. “Win him back? What are you talking about? He’s still your client.”
Wheeler glanced up, surprised. “He is?”
His secretary shrugged. “Sure.”
“Then...why was he here this morning? Other than acting as your orchid mentor, I mean?”
She shrugged, clearly unconcerned by his worry. “He just needed to get a few things straightened out about the new design you’re doing for him, that’s all. Why did you think Mr. Denby wouldn’t be your client anymore?”
He hesitated before answering. Naturally, it hadn’t escaped his notice that Audrey Finnegan wasn’t the most observant human being in the world. But surely even she could see how badly Rush Commercial Designs, Inc. was foundering. He had, after all, pretty much spelled it out for her that first day. And then there was that small matter of him having virtually no furniture, nor any clients. That seemed to him as if it would be kind of a dead giveaway. But then, that was Wheeler. Always assuming the obvious.
“Well,” he began slowly, speaking his thoughts aloud, “there is that small matter of my having lost nearly every other client I have. I shouldn’t think Mr. Denby would be too different in that respect.”
“Oh, that,” Miss Finnegan said as she sipped her coffee. Amazing. She didn’t grimace once. “Mr. Denby is different, actually. And you didn’t need those other clients, anyway.”
Wheeler rather begged to differ, and didn’t hesitate to tell her so. “Oh, I think, Miss Finnegan, that I did need those other clients. Desperately, in fact. I do have bills to pay.” And lots of them, he recalled.
She wrinkled her nose as she shook her head, and Wheeler couldn’t help but think, for some reason, that the gesture was really...very...well, cute came to mind.
“No, you didn’t need them,” she insisted lightly before enjoying—enjoying—another sip of her coffee.
“I didn’t?”
She shook her head again. “Nah. They were alarmists.”
“They were?”
This time she nodded. “Those kinds of people are ready to bail at the slightest sign of adversity. They have no staying power whatsoever. You would have lost them anyway, eventually.”
“I would?”
She offered him an expression that assured him he was dreaming if he thought otherwise. “Oh, yeah. I’ve been going over your files as I’ve been rearranging them, and—”
Wheeler sat up straight at that, eyeing her in a panic. “You...you’ve been rearranging my files?”
She enjoyed another unconcerned sip of coffee. “Well, of course I’ve been rearranging your files. They were a mess—all alphabetical and everything. They made no sense at all. With all due respect to your former secretary, she could have learned a thing or two about filing.”
Wheeler closed his eyes. Rosalie, his former secretary, had been an absolute whiz at organizing his accounts. Although she wasn’t the biggest people person on the planet—okay, so she’d been abrasive, gruff and borderline obnoxious—her filing system would have been the envy of the Pentagon and the IRS. His associates had always considered her a file Nazi, but Wheeler had been a bit more charitable, thinking her more of a file queen. No, scratch that. What Rosalie had been was a file goddess. And now Miss Finnegan, the pretender to the throne, had “fixed” those files.
Oh, no...
“Anyway,” she went on, “I’ve been trying to familiarize myself with your different clients, and, in my opinion at least, a lot of them were just fly-by-nights. I mean, I know you were starting up a new business, so you had to take whatever came your way, but some of these people, Mr. Rush...they just weren’t the kind of clients you need. What you need to do is focus on attracting a more reliable, more stable account base.”
Wheeler narrowed his eyes at her. She sounded, almost, like she knew what she was talking about. “How so?” he ventured.
She waved a negligent hand through the air. “Don’t you worry about that,” she said. “You just focus on your designs. I’ll handle your accounts.”
Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I don’t think so. “Um, Miss Finnegan,” he began, striving for a diplomacy he was nowhere close to feeling in his surging panic, “I appreciate your wanting to take some of the heat, but honestly, I think you should tell me what you’re talking about.”
She smiled, those luscious lips that he just couldn’t quite ignore looking more tempting than ever. “Just trust me,” she said mildly. “I know what I’m doing.”
That, he thought, was open to debate. “But—”
“Is it okay if I take an extra half hour for lunch today?” she interrupted him. “I need to see about Marlene’s car.”
The change of subject nearly gave him mental whiplash. “No, before we talk about that, I think we need to talk about this other thing first.”
She studied him in confusion. “What other thing?”
“This thing with my accounts,” he prodded. “You’re not suggesting that you—”
“I’ll make the half hour up tomorrow,” she said, still not quite grasping the topic he wanted to put first. “I’ll only take thirty minutes for lunch, so it doesn’t mess up the time thing.”
“No, Miss Finnegan, before the time thing, back up to the other thing...the thing we were talking about a minute ago.”
She squinted at him. “Were we talking about another thing a minute ago?” she asked. “What was it? I can’t remember.”
“That thing,” he repeated emphatically. “That account thing. You know... That thing about how I should be attracting a more reliable account base. I want to talk about that.”
She squinted some more. “Did I say something about an account thing?”
He nodded. Vigorously. And he battled the urge to start pulling his hair out by the roots. “Yes. You did. Or, at least, you started to. And it sounded like what you were going to say about the account thing was going to make sense and be very helpful. What was it?”
She thought for a long moment, putting her entire body into the effort. She shifted her weight to one foot, an action that thrust one rounded hip to the side—and hitched up her skirt in a manner that Wheeler simply could not ignore. And then she crossed one hand over her midsection, a gesture that thrust her plump breasts up even higher, in another manner that Wheeler simply could not ignore.
His secretary might not be the most graceful person on the planet when she moved, he thought, but when she was standing still like this, she had the most elegant lines he had ever seen on another human being. And when she started nibbling her lip with great concentration... Well. Suffice it to say that, even though he was eager to hear her take on his state of business affairs, Wheeler was in absolutely no hurry for her to finish up whatever she might be thinking about.
But after several minutes of contemplation, the only comment she offered was, “Huh. How about that? I don’t remember what I was going to say.”
Wheeler closed his eyes again, feeling his last drop of hope dry up. Ah, well. It had probably just been a fluke, anyway. Miss Finnegan didn’t come across as too awfully savvy when it came to the business world. Without thinking, he lifted his coffee to his lips for an idle sip, and, as utter bitterness filled his mouth, he nearly choked to death.
Miss Finnegan immediately jumped to his rescue, which was unfortunate, because in doing so, she instinctively placed her own cup of coffee on his drafting table—his tilted drafting table—and the entire contents tipped over onto his truly revolutionary idea.
Wheeler watched with an almost detached feeling of defeat as what had promised to be the end of his worries was slowly obscured by a growing puddle of brown. And then, when his design was completely covered by the stain, the coffee, as if not quite finished ruining his life, spilled off the table and ran into his lap. Somehow the entire episode just seemed perfectly appropriate, and the only reaction he felt was one of vindication.
“Oh, no,” Miss Finnegan groaned. “I can’t believe I did that. Here, I can fix it. I swear I can.”
Before he had a chance to object, she was fleeing his office, only to return within moments with a massive collection of paper towels. And although Wheeler’s primary concern was for the design on his table, Miss Finnegan, evidently, was far more preoccupied by her concern for his lap. In any event, that was where she immediately focused her attentions.
And, my, but her attentions were...thorough. Nobody had ever gone after Wheeler’s lap quite the way Audrey Finnegan did.
For a moment he was simply too stunned by her actions to do anything to stop them. Then, for another—longer, more delirious—moment, he found himself not really wanting to do anything to stop them. Thankfully, though, sanity stepped in, in that next moment, and somehow he gathered his wits enough to react. Quickly he reached for her hands to remove them from where they had settled, in a place on his upper thighs that was far too likely to rouse suspicion—among other things—should she venture any farther. Then, as gently as he could, he nudged her away.
“Thank you, Miss Finnegan,” he said, “but I think you’ve done enough for one morning.” Or one lifetime, for that matter, he thought further.
“I am so, so sorry,” she told him.
Purely out of habit he replied, “No problem.”
He turned his gaze to the design on which he’d spent the last thirty minutes and sighed heavily. He could salvage it—it was only a rough draft, after all, and the coffee had merely turned it brown, not obliterated it. That, however, wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Miss Audrey Finnegan, with her clumsiness and gracelessness and appalling bad luck—even if she did have luscious lips and beautiful eyes and legs that wouldn’t quit—was going to drive home what few nails were left in Wheeler’s professional coffin. And she was going to do it in half the time it would take him to botch things himself.
He ought to let her go, he thought, strangely saddened by the realization. There really was no other way. He could call One-Day-at-a-Timers and make up some story about his and Miss Finnegan’s incompatibility—he didn’t want to get her into trouble, after all—and ask the temp agency to send someone else in her wake. At this point, anyone they sent would be an improvement.
But when he looked at her face and saw the abject apology and need for atonement in her expression, he couldn’t quite form the words necessary to tell her she was fired. For all her awkwardness and misfortune, she really was very nice. And in spite of her having wrecked most of his office equipment—not to mention the first good idea he’d had in months—she had rather brightened up the place over the past week. Literally, he thought, when he recalled some of her outfits.
And then, of course, there was the small matter of her aforementioned luscious lips and beautiful eyes and legs that wouldn’t quit, which he assured himself only marginally influenced his ultimate decision.
Wheeler sighed. He supposed it wouldn’t kill him to give her a second chance. Surely they’d hit rock bottom by now. Things could only improve from here.
He ignored the little voice in the back of his brain that reminded him how this was a conversation he’d had with himself pretty much daily since taking on Miss Finnegan. So, technically, she had already exhausted her second chances—more than once, in fact—and he had already watched things go from bad to worse—again, more than once.
Still, he did kind of like her. He didn’t know why, but he did. Maybe because both of them seemed to be in the same boat—one that was fast sinking—where misfortune was concerned. Perhaps if he gave her just one more chance....
“Go ahead and take the extra half hour for lunch today,” he said halfheartedly. “You can make it up tomorrow if you want.”
Her eyes widened, making them appear even larger and greener than before—which was saying something. “O-okay,” she replied, obviously confused by his reaction, but evidently unwilling to draw any more attention to her latest debacle than was absolutely necessary. “Um, thanks, Mr. Rush. For everything. I appreciate it.”
He told himself he should ask her to call him Wheeler. Rush Designs, Inc. had never been a particularly formal business. Even when it was a successful one. He and his former secretary had been on a first-name basis from day one. Of course, Rosalie had been a fifty-six-year-old grandmother of three, but that was beside the point. Still, there was no reason for him and Miss Finnegan to stand on ceremony.
Nevertheless, something prevented him from extending the invitation to call him by his first name, and he forced himself not to ask if he could call her by hers. He wasn’t sure why. It just seemed best to keep their relationship as professional as possible. And even an insignificant, invisible barrier like the use of surnames would remind Wheeler that she was, first and foremost, his employee. He told himself it was essential that he keep that reminder planted firmly in his brain.
In spite of that, when she smiled back at him, somewhere deep inside him, in a place he’d never explored before, a little bubble of heat went fizz. It was the oddest sensation he’d ever felt. Before he had a chance to think about it, though, Miss Finnegan spoke again.
“I am so sorry about the coffee,” she repeated her earlier apology. He had noted that first day her propensity for apologizing more than once. “I should have watched where I was putting it. It was an accident, I swear. I really didn’t mean to—”
“Please, Miss Finnegan, don’t worry about it,” he said, interrupting her. “Let’s just both make a pact to be more careful from here on out, all right? And then let’s just forget it ever happened.”
She nodded vigorously. “Okay. I will if you will. And I promise you that nothing like that will happen again. Ever. I won’t let you down, Mr. Rush. I can assure you of that From here on out, with you and me working together, Rush Commercial Designs, Inc., is headed for great, great things.”
Three
Audrey approached her second Tuesday on the job with an air of caution, which was perfectly understandable, all things considered. She told herself that the previous week had been her warm-up, that anything that had gone wrong during those first five days could be excused as new-job jitters or getting a feel for things or just not being familiar with her new surroundings. But by week two, she thought, things really should start to level off. So, naturally she was very much looking forward to surviving, er, rather, enjoying it.
And in some ways, by that second day of week two, things were already starting to level off—hey, that coffee-spilling incident of the day before could have happened to anybody. In spite of her lack of skills where machinery was concerned—and she worked on those by simply avoiding what office machinery she could—Audrey had people capabilities that were way above average.
So she had focused on those talents instead, had spent much of her time last week contacting what was left of Mr. Rush’s client base to update their files and put a few feelers out as to what they were looking for in a design company. She told herself that was probably something her employer would want to do himself, but he had so many other things on his mind, the last thing Audrey wanted to do was make him rehash everything for her.
So she had spoken to his clients herself, to find out what kind of people and businesses they were and what they were looking for in a commercial design company, had chatted amiably about life in general, and had reassured them that Rush Commercial Designs, Inc., was well into recovery and going like gangbusters. As a result, she’d started feeling a little bit like she was a part of the company herself.
And she’d discovered pretty quickly what a nice feeling that was. None of her other jobs had ever made her feel like she was contributing much of anything. None of them had made her feel as if she were necessary. But Mr. Rush was a man in obvious need of help, and Audrey was, by nature, a very helpful person. Plus, when it came to being down on your luck, she knew all the right moves. She was confident, if of nothing else, that she could make a difference here.
And even after only one week of trying, she was already feeling as if she had.
“Good morning, Miss Finnegan.”
She glanced up from her desk to see Mr. Rush striding through the door, carrying, as he was every morning, a huge cup of coffee, which she just couldn’t understand, because she always had a fresh pot waiting for him when he came in.
“Good morning, Mr. Rush,” she replied cheerily. “Good to see you made it in before the rain.”
He arched his eyebrows in surprise. “Is it supposed to rain today?”
She gaped at him. “Didn’t you notice the black clouds? The Weather Channel says it’s going to be a real doozy. There’s even a tornado watch.”
He arched his eyebrows in obvious surprise. “No kidding?”
Boy, did he need looking after, Audrey thought with a slow shake of her head. How on earth had he made it this far in life all by himself?
“Fortunately,” she told him, “you don’t have anything scheduled outside the office, so you can stay nice and dry inside.”
He looked crestfallen at the news. “Yes, well, that scarcely comes as a surprise, does it?”
“I don’t know, does it?”
He expelled a soft sound of distress. “Miss Finnegan, please. You don’t have to pretend. I know the business is on its last legs, and it’s only a matter of time before the last of my clients has pulled out on me. So you don’t—”
“Actually, you picked up a couple of new clients last week,” she reminded him.
“I know,” he conceded, “but they’re not exactly huge corporations bulging with expendable income, are they? The projects they’ve commissioned will barely cover the month’s utility bills.”
“They’re brand-new businesses,” she pointed out, “starting on the ground floor. You have the opportunity to send them sky-high. And just think how grateful they’ll be to you when you do. Someday they’ll be huge, prosperous companies, and they’ll be indebted to you.”
He narrowed his eyes at her, as if he hadn’t thought about it like that. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “In any event, they’ve paid me money to do work for them, haven’t they? So I’ll do my best by them.”
He started toward his office, then hesitated, slowing his pace until he had stopped completely in his tracks. For one long moment he only stood there, gazing blindly at a blank spot on the wall. Audrey didn’t say anything to disturb him, as he seemed to have his mind fixed intently on something very important that had nothing to do with the nice shade of mauve there. When he turned to look at her, he was smiling, a tentative, secretive little smile that she found very becoming.
“Hold my calls this morning, will you, Miss Finnegan?” he asked quietly, in a voice that told her he was still quite preoccupied. “I think I have an idea for the new Windsor Deli account.” He nodded slowly, then began to walk toward his office again. “Yeah, I do,” he muttered triumphantly. But he didn’t seem to be talking to Audrey. “I have a really, really good idea.”
When he disappeared into his office and closed the door behind him, she smiled with much satisfaction. See? He really did need her. Even if it was just to be a reassuring presence in his life.
She turned in her chair and eyed the computer terminal on her desk with as much confidence as she could muster. Then, after pushing up the sleeves of her fuchsia sweater, she doubled her fists and held them aloft like a prizefighter.
“Okay,” she said to the machine. “You and me, we’re going to have a little session. I’m going to type some letters, and you’re going to let me do it without beeping or booping or going blank on me. Got it?”
The cursor blinked at her benignly, but the computer uttered not a sound. She nodded victoriously. “Good,” she said.
And, humming “You Were Meant for Me” under her breath, Audrey went to work.
It was amazing, really, Wheeler thought some hours later, what you could do with the germ of an idea. As he gazed at the project on his work table, he smiled with much satisfaction. Damn, he was good. He’d forgotten just how good, over the past few months. He remembered now why he’d gone into this line of work to begin with. Because it was interesting. Because it was fun. Because it was what he did best.
He was coming out of his slump now—he could feel it. He didn’t know why or how it had come about, but Rush Commercial Designs, Inc. was about to undergo an upswing. A major upswing. He could feel it. Somehow, he just knew he was on the road to recovery. The two new accounts that had come about last week, even if they were meager, were just the beginning. Best of all, his creativity was back. His brain was functioning again. His talent and skills hadn’t packed up and abandoned him, after all. And now he was ready to recoup the losses he’d suffered.
As if inspired by his optimism, there was a soft rap at Wheeler’s office door that sounded remarkably like opportunity knocking. He smiled at the very idea.
“Yes, Miss Finnegan?” he called out.
The door opened slowly, as if she were being extra careful not to create some debacle that would blow it off its hinges. Thankfully all that happened was that the door got stuck on a bump in the carpet, so she had to shove it a few times—real hard—to get it to open. Unfortunately she wound up putting a bit more effort into her final push than was actually necessary, because the door gave just as her shoulder made contact, an action that resulted in her barreling over the threshold at an alarming speed.
