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That was what Blake had felt here, for the very first time in his life. That his presence in this universe was a joy to someone, instead of a burden.
“Well, don’t forget he pulled the knife.”
“Blake, look at him. He hasn’t let go of his little sister’s hand since he arrived. He’s been helping snotty-nosed kids on and off that pony for the better part of half an hour. I like the cut of his jib.”
“Well, you always see it first, Joe.”
“Don’t I?” Joe said happily. “Go home and make sure that secretary of yours is okay. Though she looks to me like the kind of girl who would know just how to handle a scrawny, scared kid with a knife.”
Blake thought of coming into the office, Tomas weeping against Holly’s slender shoulder, and he sighed heavily.
“I suppose you like the cut of her jib, too.”
“You said it first, not me.”
Three
H olly knew, as soon as she heard the crunch of the Pathfinder’s tires on the gravel outside the office door that, in some part of her that she would much rather not acknowledge, she had been listening for it to return, waiting for the moment Blake would stride back through the door, smile at her, maybe stop to talk for a few minutes about his day and the developments in the water contamination case.
The vehicle door closed quietly, not like their old vehicle that had required a good hard slam. The Pathfinder itself still troubled her. The gesture seemed so unlike her father. It was not that he wasn’t generous—she’d received dozens of expensive gifts from him. Or at least the cards were signed by him.
The gifts themselves had his secretary, Hannah’s demure personality written all over them. Holly suspected her birthday was penciled right on Hannah’s calendar, not her father’s. Which was probably why she felt odd about the gift of the Pathfinder.
Todd Lamb was not thoughtful. Or sensitive. He was not even particularly astute about the good public relations move. He had been reprimanded more than once for making anti Native American remarks.
He was a man who had risen to a high position in Springer because he was smart, tough and ambitious. Her father had told her once, with great pride, that he was the kind of man every company wanted. He could turn one dollar into ten, and he didn’t care whom he ran over to do it. Why would a man who took pride in turning one dollar into ten, insist on repainting the nearly new Springer vehicle from perfectly acceptable white to silver gray?
Not knowing why, Holly shuddered, then put the whole thing out of her mind. She busied herself with the typing, when the door swung open.
She glanced up at just the right moment, and smiled cordially at Blake when he came through the door. The smile hid more than it revealed.
For instance, you would think, after you had seen a man a certain number of times, the novelty of him would wear off.
That you would no longer notice the color of his eyes, the little Dennis-the-Menace rooster tail in his hair, the powerful shape of his shoulders, the easy and effortless ripple of his arm muscles.
You would think, after a while, that the loose, graceful swing of his walk wouldn’t make butterflies take off in your stomach, and that you would be able to look at his lips without wondering what they tasted like and what they would feel like, and if you were ever, ever going to know.
She realized she had been having these thoughts for a long, long time. The crush on the boss wasn’t new, just her admission of it.
He was so handsome. She loved his eyes. She felt like she could look at him forever. She had the awful thought her newly discovered feelings were going to be in her face, that she would stumble over her tongue now, turn red whenever he spoke to her.
Diligently, she looked back at her work, began to type furious nonsense, which she hoped at least wouldn’t say she was in love with her boss.
When he neither greeted her nor went by her into his own office, she glanced up, to see him perched on the corner of her desk, one leg swinging, the other anchored to the floor. He looked at her thoughtfully, his brow furrowed. His normal smile, the one that put the sun to shame, was nowhere in sight.
He looked distinctly…crabby.
“Anything you want to tell me about?” he asked.
She swallowed. No. Even he wasn’t that intuitive, though he was dangerously alert to undercurrents and unspoken things going on all around him.
He shocked the kids with this uncanny ability to look into their hearts.
Ralph, you got something in that pocket I should know about?
Shirley, anything happen last night you care to share with me?
Polly, do you need to talk to me?
And as it turned out Ralph had a joint in his pocket, and Shirley tearfully admitted to escaping from her second-floor dorm window and running across the roof to peek in the boys’ dorm, and Polly had been keeping a kitten under her bed that had turned seriously ill.
But Holly didn’t have any secrets of that nature. Secrets that had witnesses or hard evidence.
How much could he read into a blush, a stammer, a quick lowering of eyes, after all?
“Something to tell you?” she said, pleased with how smooth her voice sounded, just as if she was the same person as she had been when she arrived at work this morning, when in fact she was changed in some way that was so fundamental she knew she could never change back.
“You know. Some interesting detail about your day.” His you-can-confide-in-me voice invited trust, showed genuine interest.
She stared at him, flabbergasted, and resisted the urge to pinch herself. Was he actually showing interest in her personally? It seemed too much to hope for, following so closely on her discovery of the feelings she was harboring in the far and secret reaches of her heart.
Her golden opportunity. To make him smile. To make him see her. All she had to do was think of something clever, or funny, or interesting to share with him about her day.
Not one single thing came to her mind.
She had always performed terribly under pressure. She knew if she was ever chosen to play Wheel of Fortune, she would be one of those people who asked for a letter that had already been used.
“Well?” he said silkily, leaning toward her, something glinting gravely in his eyes.
“Willie died,” she blurted out.
“Willie?”
“The guppie.”
“A fish?” He looked stunned, like he didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, and why should he?
A golden opportunity, blown. She said miserably, “The one named after the whale. As in Free Willie.”
He said nothing.
“I’ll go get another one tomorrow,” she babbled. “Little Flo Henderson was very attached to him.”
“Anything else you want to tell me about? Aside from the unfortunate demise of Willie?”
It occurred to her there was something pointed about his question. That he wasn’t expressing a nice generic kind of interest in her. He was probing for something specific.
Annoyed at herself for hoping too much, and at him for not even being in the same ball park as her, she said crisply, “If there’s something specific you want to know, you’ll have to tell me. I don’t do well at twenty questions.”
“How’s this for specific—”
It occurred to her the glint in his eye that she had mistaken for interest was actually anger. Blake was angry at her.
“—what does it feel like to have the blade of a knife pressed against your pretty little throat?”
“Oh,” she said, deflated, “that.” She wondered if it counted at all that Blake Fallon thought her throat was pretty.
“Oh, that. Hardly worth mentioning.”
“To be quite frank, I’d forgotten about it already.”
“It seems to me I asked you if something was wrong as soon as I stepped into this office and saw you with Tomas. It doesn’t seem to me as if I got a straight answer.”
“The whole thing was already long over by the time you got here.”
“Oh? The way I heard it, the knife was being shoved under the desk by your big toe just as I came in the door. Is it still there, or did Miss Efficient file it already?”
Miss Efficient? “Actually, I did file it already. It’s in the trash. Outside.”
“Not inside, where I might see it.”
She was beginning to feel really angry. This was what his interest in her was about? The first strong emotion he had ever shown to her was annoyance? Anger? She realized she had not totally forgiven him yet for that teasing but still slightly stinging remark he had made earlier.
I didn’t know you were a girl.
And now the brief interest that had lit in his eyes was about this? Even his remark about her neck had been accompanied by that cynical tone of voice.
“I had no interest in hiding the knife from you,” she said stiffly. “I put it in the outside garbage so I didn’t have to see it every time I disposed of a piece of paper.”
“Meaning the episode did leave some impression on you.”
“Some,” she agreed reluctantly.
He leaned very close to her. “In the future, if you are attacked by someone with a knife, do you think it would be asking too much to let me know?”
“I explained to you, it was already over. And it was nothing. I never really felt threatened. I never even really felt frightened.”
“And you didn’t want to get him in trouble,” he guessed softly.
“Now that you mention it, I didn’t want to get him into trouble.”
“Your first loyalty belongs to me, Miss Lamb.”
Now she was really angry. “No, it does not, Mr. Fallon. It belongs to me. You seem quite satisfied with my heart telling me what to do with these kids so far. Tomas wasn’t a dangerous boy, he was a frightened one.”
“And if you had a few years experience with these kids, instead of a few months, you would know that was the most dangerous kind of all.”
She could see he was angry, too. Really angry for the first time since she had been employed by him. She had never even seen him get irritated with the children, but now his voice had a dangerous edge to it, and his eyes were snapping with sparks that had not the slightest thing to do with passion.
She sighed inwardly, but not out loud. Wasn’t that just her luck? Discover the humiliating secret that you were madly in love with a man who was never even going to give you a second look, and then end up in his doghouse on the very same day!
“If that’s all, Mr. Fallon,” she said, looking at her watch, “I really should have gone home half an hour ago.”
Her voice was perfect. Reprimand accepted. Except then she went and spoiled it all. Her lip trembled just a little bit. She ducked her head, but not quickly enough.
The silence filled the room. She refused to look at him.
His hand found her chin and lifted it, and she was forced to look at him. She saw the immediate remorse flash through the gray depths of his eyes.
“I’ve hurt your feelings.”
“Not at all,” she said. Her voice was trembling now, too. It would have been so much better if he didn’t touch her, if his hand was not resting on her chin, his fingertips leathery and tough. Yet his touch was not tough at all. It was everything she had known it would be.
Electric. Strong. Tender.
“Here you are, working extra time, as always, and I come in and blast you.”
His cold, hard anger was much, much easier to handle.
“You were absolutely right, I should have told you about the knife. I just didn’t even think. It won’t—”
“Holly, I think what I should have said was that it scared me. When Tomas told me what had happened, I could imagine you at the end of that knife and it scared the living daylights right out of me.”
She stared at him. He was not a man who looked like anything would scare him. She had seen him face tough, angry kids, big kids, without even a flicker of fear. So what did that mean, that he had been scared for her?
“I’m sorry it happened to you,” he said in a low voice.
Don’t read too much into it, she warned herself. He would have been sorry it happened to anybody. He ran a tight ship. An incident had occurred out of the far reaches of his control. His fear for her had not been personal.
“I guess what I wanted to say was that I don’t want you siding with the kids against me,” he continued. “I need to know what’s going on, and I need to know you trust me.”
“Oh.”
Now that he was being nice, she felt more like crying than ever.
“Maybe,” she whispered, “I need to know you trust me, too.”
“Oh.”
He let go of her chin, thankfully, though her skin felt like it burned where he had touched it. He leaned back and ran his hand through his hair. The rooster tail sprang right back up the instant his hand passed over it.
“You know what?” he said.
She shook her head mutely. Too much to hope that he was going to say, I just realized I’m madly in love with you.
“We’ve been working too hard,” he said instead. “The whole water thing has put an incredible amount of stress on the ranch, and you and I have been carrying the majority of the load. I know you’ve been putting in more time in the front lines than anyone could have asked of you.”
This was looking hopeful. You and I, as in a partnership.
