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Returning the car to the garage with a large hole chopped in its hood would result in a messy divorce, particularly after he tried to explain about the blonde, the boots and the saw.
But the icy blonde had stopped, thank god, at the foot of his car. She shook the buzzing saw at the two men who were standing like captured criminals on either side of his car. Then she whirled around, stomped to the back of the van and ran the saw neatly through the stack of lumber. Wood blocks thunked to the pavement as the saw bit through each two-by-four. At the bottom of the pile, she slowed her progress, the muscles of her arms straining as she controlled the descent of the saw through the wood with delicate skill, until the last piece was neatly trimmed.
When she shut off the saw, the sudden silence was deafening. She slammed the rear doors of the van shut, crossed one pompom-ed boot in front of the other and took a bow.
Then she turned, popped the saw on her shoulder like it was an idle baseball bat, and walked back the way she’d come.
Applause erupted from the lunatics beside his car—hoots and hollers and a “Way to remember safety first, boss!” upon which the go-go girl turned and tapped her enormous, white-framed sunglasses. She grinned at them.
“Next time it’s your heads, boys.”
The voice that emerged from that compact little body was surprisingly low and throaty. It vibrated against his skin, a ticklish buzz that put him in mind of something far less appropriate than the business meeting for which he was prepared.
At least he now knew who the blonde serial killer was. His gaze followed her as she stomped back through the metal doors.
There was no mistaking that voice. It didn’t matter that today she was all 60s glam and last night she’d been a dark-haired grease monkey in mechanic’s overalls with a bandana tied around her head, shouting orders and curses and elbowing him out of the way as she ruled over the chaos of a backstage on opening night.
All he would ever need to recognize Maxie Tyler was one of two things: a glimpse of those midnight-dark eyes, glittering with intensity, or one word in that husky growl of a voice.
He sighed, wondering why he always got stuck coming to his mother’s rescue after the damage had been done. The money she’d sunk into backing a hot new playwright’s work had already been spent, of course, by the time he heard about it. She never called him before she made her next disastrous decision. Just sent out a press release—literally, she had the Tribune, Sun-Times, Chicago Reader and all the rest on speed dial—and then cried for help when her latest project escaped her control. At least this was one loose end he could handle himself, which was the only reason he was here, waiting for a breakfast meeting with a lunatic.
The budget of the play was already spiraling out of control, and the director had insisted that the next crucial step was to hire a brilliant stage manager. The only name on his list was Maxie Tyler.
Nick’s self-assigned duty, with his mother’s grudging approval, was to check her out. If she wasn’t up to the job, he’d make it clear that the golden goose wasn’t laying any more eggs until someone wrestled this train wreck back onto the tracks.
Before he’d arrived backstage last night, he hadn’t even been sure Maxie Tyler was a woman. His introduction to the theater world had been quick and intense, but the first thing he’d learned about the industry was that it teemed with unusual characters. Maxie could just as easily have been the nickname for a three-hundred-pound grizzled old man as this pixie who probably didn’t top a buck-five soaking wet. But at the very least, he’d expected someone a little, well, older.
And a little less dramatic.
And a lot less sex-on-wheels hot.
The van finally drove off down the alley. Nick maneuvered his baby into a nearly empty parking lot behind the building, bumping over cobblestones and chunks of lumber along the way. He made sure to park as far as possible from the giant pickup truck that screamed I’m compensating for my tiny penis.
He shook his head as he walked back to the door into which the go-go girl had disappeared. This entire venture, not just this meeting, was a frustrating waste of his time. If his mother had any sense of restraint at all...
Who was he kidding? He’d spent his entire life wishing his mother possessed some of the self-control and propriety of all the other Gold Coast society matrons. When friends had lamented their cold and demanding parents, Nick’s only thought had been if only. In these past months, ever since she’d met that playwright, the wheels had really come off. His mother had lost her mind. To the tune of several hundred thousand dollars.
He yanked the alley door open, heading down a barren hallway past dimly lit doorways sporting handwritten signs that read like a list of doomed-to-fail enterprises: Abel’s Anytime Carpet-Laying, Darning by Deborah, SnowGlobe: The Magazine.
At the end of the hall, under another roughly sculpted wooden banana that was a miniature of the one outside, he stopped and eyed the words painted on the frosted glass pane.
Carving Bananas, Inc.
He sighed—here was yet another reminder of the eccentricity of theater people—and started to push open the door, freezing in place as a voice he didn’t recognize leaked out through the crack. He nudged the door open a couple more inches and waited.
“—just saying. You couldn’t have played the role of straitlaced businesswoman today? Three-hole punch?”
“I am a straitlaced businesswoman, child. Cabinet, middle shelf, right-hand side.”
“Sure,” the female voice doing the scolding snorted, as metal squeaked on metal.
“See, right where I told you, doubting Thomasina.”
“I wasn’t questioning your bizarrely accurate knowledge of where every little damn thing in your life is placed, you weirdo. I was questioning your claim to straitlaced businessdom.”
Nick grinned in agreement with the scolder. Though if one of his employees spoke to him that way, he’d have them shipped off for drug testing.
Maybe they were both high.
“It’s what I am. That doesn’t have any relation to how I dress.”
“Clearly.”
“That’s it. I’m docking your pay for insolence. Brat.”
“You don’t pay me, remember? I’m an intern.”
“And why do you work here?”
“I think I’ve forgotten.”
“Well, make yourself useful and keep an eye out for Mr. Sharp-Dressed Man, will you? I’m trying to make a good impression here.”
Nick entered the claustrophobic office just in time to glimpse a flash of turquoise and platinum disappearing through an interior door to his right. A floating echo that sounded like “Gotta pee” slipped past the door as it swung shut.
The young woman behind the wood-laminate desk wore a shell-pink twinset, a short strand of pearls, and a velvet hair ribbon. She was still rolling her eyes when she turned back to see who’d entered.
Her recovery when she saw him, the “Mr. Sharp-Dressed Man” for whom she was waiting, was remarkable. She should be paid more...or at all.
“Mr. Drake, I presume?” At his nod, she waved her hand grandly to the one unoccupied flat surface in the room: a metal folding chair huddled between two enormous steel cabinets pasted over with advertisements for dozens of shows. He was sure she guarded the chair with the ferocity of a mother lion. Every other open space in the room was piled high with everything from crumbling bricks to ladies’ satin underwear. “Ms. Tyler will be with you momentarily.”
He twisted his mouth and raised an eyebrow. “As long as she unplugs the saw first, I can wait.”
The girl didn’t drop her smile for a moment. “Ah. So it’s too late for the good impression.” She shrugged philosophically. “Coffee?”
“Who makes it?”
“I do. Fresh ground Columbian.”
“I’m in.”
By the time the click of high-heeled boots approached, he’d discovered that the unpaid intern’s name was Clarissa, that she’d been working full-time for Maxie for six weeks, on top of a full course load in theater management at Columbia College, and that Maxie was the best stage manager she’d ever met. Apparently, the same woman who’d pegged him with the lid from a can of dog food was “surreally talented, kind of spooky and not a little bit of a tyrant.”
Not exactly what he’d been hoping to hear. He was on the lookout for someone solid, understandable and amenable to taking orders.
But when Maxie strode into the crowded office, he turned from the girl, who was now perched on the corner of the desk, to watch as an earpiece of her big white sunglasses slid into the turquoise V of her dress, drawing his eyes down from where they ought to be.
He looked back up to find big, dark-chocolate eyes waiting for him under equally dark brows that somehow worked with the icy white-blonde hair. Her cheekbones were high and sharp and her wide, full mouth was frosted pink.
He held his breath, every muscle in his body tensing at the first drift of her scent—leather and vanilla. Even the smell of her was fascinating.
She held out her small hand.
Enveloping it in his own, he was caught off guard by the strength in her fingers. An electric shock jumped through him at the gentle bite of her white fingernails into the back of his hand. He had a momentary vision of those same fingernails stair-stepping lightly down his spine and his dick stiffened at the thought.
Get a grip, Drake.
“Ms. Tyler.”
“Nicholas Drake.” The look she raked over him was scornful or borderline sexual, maybe both. She held his hand longer than necessary before letting go. “You were trespassing backstage last night.”
“I wanted to see you in action.” He’d certainly done that. She was a martinet, but everything she touched had fallen into place like clockwork.
“I don’t normally take meetings with people who won’t tell me who they’re representing, but I’m always ready to eat. Let’s go.”
She whipped a white trench coat off of an old-fashioned coat rack behind the door, shrugged it on, belted it and left the door open behind her as she plunged into the dim hallway.
Clarissa groaned from behind him.
“I heard that,” Maxie said from down the hall, laughing. “You said it was too late to make a good impression, girl, and I’m starving.”
* * *
Ten minutes later, Maxie was up to her eyebrows in Jamaican jerk chicken with dirty rice and beans and as happy as a kid with a new toy. She watched her “I’d prefer a breakfast meeting, if you don’t mind” nine-o’clock appointment stare with drawn brows at the photographs on the side of the boxy white truck parked at the curb. She’d bet twenty bucks he’d never bought food out of a van before.
Poor, deprived soul.
“Best plantains in the city,” she said and opened her foam container. The lid flip-flopped in the cool morning breeze.
He pushed back the straight, dark hair falling over his brow with an automatic gesture and didn’t seem to notice when it dropped right back into place.
“It’s nine o’clock in the morning.”
“Hey, opening night wrapped up at four and I came straight to work. Haven’t slept yet. Breakfast was hours ago.” He ordered coffee. She shook her head. His loss. She’d brought the man to the best Jamaican outside of Montego Bay. You could lead a horse to water...
“Yes, I’m sure you’ve been hard at work in your—” he flicked a hand at her “—what? Costume?”
“You don’t gotta wear construction boots to wheel a dolly of two-by-fours to the checkout line.” She grinned and winked at him. Like Clarissa said, the good impression window was closed. She might as well have fun. There was no need for him to know she’d worn the sixties sex-kitten outfit because it made her feel like a sexual powerhouse. She’d been restless in the hours before dawn this morning, still feeling his chest under her palms from their split second of physical contact the night before. A little boost had seemed in order. “Who do you think brought those two lunkheads who work for me the lumber? There’s a twenty-four-hour Home Depot just off North Avenue.”
“How did you get it to fit in the van?”
She was pretty sure the curiosity in his voice was unwilling. He looked like the type of man who’d just as soon file her neatly in a box and forget about her.
“I didn’t.” She shoveled a forkful of rice and beans in her mouth and let him wait for a minute while she chewed. She didn’t play around with Jahman’s food. “I picked it up in my truck. It has a longer flatbed, but those two are forbidden to drive it.”
She jerked her head at a bus-stop bench down the sidewalk. He followed and stood looming over her as she sat with her container on her lap and ate. Ignoring him as she dug into her second breakfast for the day, she ploughed through the meal and then sat back happily, having mopped up spicy jerk sauce with the last piece of fried plantain. A perfect bite.
She stretched her arms along the back of the aluminum bench and tilted her face back to catch the weak warmth of the sun on a Chicago spring day.
Cracking one eye open, she glanced up at the man who was watching her, one hand in his pocket, the other lifting the paper cup of coffee to his mouth with mechanical regularity. Just watching. The fine hairs on her arms stood up as she shivered under that gaze.
She crossed her legs and sat a bit straighter, unaccountably irritated.
“Look, Drake, you asked for this meeting, not me. Now would be a good time to start talking, before I fall into a food coma.”
“I represent some people who want to hire you.”
She waited. Nothing. She rolled her eyes and then glared at him. And?
“And I’m not at all convinced it’s a good idea.”
Ouch.
She might joke about not caring about good impressions, but it still stung when someone told you they didn’t think you were good enough. She knew better than to indulge in hurt feelings and was annoyed that she couldn’t find her normal self-control. “What a surprise,” she said. “Like your underlings a little bit more conventional, do you?” The drawled words scratched him back with a not very well-hidden swipe of her claws. Burning a professional contact wasn’t her normal style, but she would already have heard of this guy if he were a name in theater, so she felt free to play a little. Especially since next week’s interview was looking like more of a lock with every day that passed, according to the gossip in her network. She swung her legs up on the bench, just missing kicking him in the knife-sharp crease of his slacks.
To her surprise, he smiled at her. Pulled out his sunglasses and slid them on.
She didn’t like not being able to see where his eyes were directed. Not knowing what he was looking at made her feel as if his gaze was touching her everywhere.
Instead of responding to her taunt, he came back with a question.
“Why Carving Bananas?”
She laughed and stared up at his dark shades, wondering how he’d take her explanation.
Some men took it personally.
“Eisenhower was speaking of Montgomery when he said, ‘I could carve a better man out of a banana.’” She paused for a moment, remembering the old embarrassment. “Or, at least, I thought he did. Turns out the historian who wrote the book I read made that up. Live and learn. Once a two hundred pound carving of a banana has been delivered to your door, you suck it up.”
After a silent moment, he pulled the sunglasses off. The shock of meeting his eyes again, the blue of Lake Michigan in July framed by dark lashes, made her wobbly. He studied her, eyes narrowing. She couldn’t read minds, but she’d swear that he was finally ignoring her outfit and how she talked to him, and looking at her.
“And you’re Eisenhower, I take it?”
She bestowed her grin like a teacher giving a gold star to her favorite pupil.
“You got it.”
Focused on him, she forgot the grooved metal slats under her thighs and the ruffle of cool air against her bare skin. She felt him step a little deeper into her mind.
“More like General Patton, I bet.”
“I’ve got more subtlety and a broader grasp of the field of engagement than that. Besides, have you seen the state of education in this country? Most kids wouldn’t know who Patton was if he walked up and smacked them on the head with his riding crop.”
“I bet you’d like to wear the boots, though.” His mouth quirked into a grin.
A mental picture of herself in thigh-high riding boots and a jacket covered in military ribbons floated up from Maxie’s subconscious and she laughed out loud.
“That might be one look even I can’t pull off.” She stood up, dumped her empty food container into the trash can next to the bench, and scrubbed her hands with her napkin before balling it up and making a rim shot into the open mouth of the can.
