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“We should get back to work,” Nick muttered, after a couple of minutes—or maybe a couple of lifetimes.
Celie felt a little firmer in his arms, now, thank heaven, and a little firmer on her feet. He was no longer afraid she might just crumple into a heap on the floor, as he’d been a minute ago. She’d seemed completely boneless, as if she wasn’t quite real, as if a formless wraith had invaded her body. He loosened his arms cautiously, and was relieved when she didn’t crumple against him.
Still, he was reluctant to let her go.
She felt amazingly good.
Too good.
And different.
Surprising.
He didn’t want an executive assistant who surprised him, and yet every sense told him that this was good. She felt far softer than she looked in her crisp suits. Warmer, too. As warm as if he’d just climbed into bed with her on a winter morning, or as if she’d been toasting herself in front of an open fire moments earlier.
As for the way she smelled…Faintly rose-scented, like soap and shampoo lingering on clean skin and hair. There were some other scents in there, too, but he couldn’t pick them. Good scents. Spring scents. Classic. Not astringent and artificial, but soft.
His face had never lingered this close to her neck before. Who knew that his efficient, unsurprising and utterly reliable executive assistant would feel and smell so warm and soft and sweet in his arms?
Nick let her go at last, stepped back and looked at her, still standing close. She had a fuzzy look around her gray-blue eyes and a new fullness to her mouth, which changed her whole face.
He’d never considered that there might be this side to Celie. Somehow, if he ever broke his own rules and thought about her private life or the deepest emotions of her heart, he always assumed a level of…safety, or something. Secretarial efficiency, even in her heart. Neatly packaged emotions. Cautious affections. Suitable, unthreatening relationships.
After her first month in the job, he’d congratulated himself on getting such a great assistant, and he’d been determined to do everything he could to keep her. She’d probably marry eventually, he’d calculated. Some local man, with a local career. He wanted her still here at Delaney’s when she had pictures of her grandchildren on her desk, her hair still pulled back in its efficient knot, but gray.
He’d always thought her intelligent, capable and practical, but he’d never considered that she might be a deeply passionate person as well. He wondered if she knew this about herself. It seemed possible that she didn’t. So new to him, the hint of this unsuspected passion around her eyes and mouth stirred him to an extent that shocked him, and tilted his balance. He didn’t like it, and he definitely didn’t want it to upset the status quo.
She smiled at him carefully. “Getting there,” she said.
He could almost sense the way her blood beat in her veins. Her hands were clenched into fists at her sides, and her breathing went in and out steady and strong, as if she had to work hard to get it to happen at all.
I’m watching her body, he realized.
He was watching the way her lower lip had dropped open, and the way her breasts moved when she breathed. In eight months he’d never thought about her breasts. Her suits tended to tailor them out of visible existence, but the softer top she wore today above her straight navy skirt hugged her shape much more closely. He couldn’t tear his eyes away, even though he knew it wasn’t right.
In another second she would notice, and of course she wasn’t thinking about anything like that. She was thinking about her mother, and her disturbing, clairvoyant dream.
Nick didn’t believe in psychic dreams, himself. He’d learned early on to believe only in the things he could see and touch and feel for himself. His adoptive parents were practical, rational people who’d worked very hard to rescue him and Sam from the darkness of their early years, and he had enormous respect for their attitude.
His dad had retired a few years ago, and they wintered in Florida, now, so he saw less of them. He still felt they were close, however, and still shared many of their beliefs. Even those he didn’t share, he respected.
From the beginning, his mom and dad had encouraged their boys to respond to the tangible proof of their care—things like home-cooked meals and bedtime stories—and not to go stirring up the murky memories that lay beneath, by reading anything into the bad dreams they’d sometimes had.
No, like Mom and Dad, he definitely didn’t believe in the significance of dreams.
But he could see how upset Celie was, both by what had happened and by the fact that she thought her dream had warned her of it in advance. Of course she was upset!
“Sit,” he urged her, emotional himself, worried about her, thrown off balance. “I’m going to ask Kyla to get you some hot tea and something from the cafeteria. Then we’ll talk about how much time you’ll need. Your mother’s here in Columbus, right?”
“Yes. In Clintonville. They’re taking her to Riverside.” She didn’t sit, she just stood there, leaning her left hand heavily on her desk. Her fingers splayed out fine and neat and long.
“What would you like to eat?”
“Oh, I…I’m not really hungry.” She waved away the idea of food with a graceful right hand that looked limp with shock.
“No, you should,” he urged again. “Even just a muffin.”
“Okay, a muffin.”
“Because I’m not letting you drive like this.”
“Drive?”
“Don’t you want to try and see her before she goes into surgery?”
Her face cleared, leaving her brow wide and smooth, and bracketed softly by the hair she’d left loose this morning. “Yes, of course. Oh, could I? Can you spare me right away? Can Kyla handle the rest of the meeting? I have the files laid out on—”
“Don’t worry about it, Celie. Between us, we’ll manage. Take as much time as you need. A couple of weeks, if you have to.”
“Thank you, Mr. Delaney!” She smiled again.
Celie had a gorgeous smile. He’d noticed it very early on, when she’d just started working for him, and he remembered thinking it was such a huge professional asset it was a shame she couldn’t list it on her resume. Today, the smile was wide and soft and wobbly, far more heartfelt than he’d ever seen it look before. She couldn’t keep it in place, and it faded at once.
“Please save the Mr. Delaney stuff for executive meetings,” he said. “I’m just Nick. How many times have I told you that?”
He took her arm, led her to her ergonomic chair and pushed her gently into it, then called Kyla from the phone on Celie’s desk because he didn’t quite trust what his executive assistant would do if he left her alone, even for a moment. If she thought she had to clear her desk, leave memos, check her e-mail before she departed…It would be typical of her to think that.
“You’re still a lot shakier than you realize,” he told her.
“No, I’m not,” Celie answered. She added more firmly, in order to clear the ambiguity, “I mean, I do realize. How shaky I am. Now. Thanks. The tea will help.”
She watched Nick take the tea and a blueberry muffin from Kyla a few minutes later. “Thank you,” he said. He clicked his tongue at Sam’s assistant, curled his fingers around the disposable cup and cradled the paper muffin plate in the opposite palm.
Something had happened just now. She and Nick hadn’t kissed, hadn’t come close to that, but it was the most potent hug that Celie had ever experienced. She could still feel Nick’s body against hers, and smell his scent—clean male, mixed with professional laundry—on her skin. She could feel the throb of secret places inside her.
He’d felt so solid and strong and steady, and she’d needed that, after the shock of the prescient dream and her mother’s pain. She’d made no attempt to let him go, even when her dizzying weakness began to ebb.
And then he’d told her she was free to go to her mother right away. She’d never needed time off at short notice before, and wouldn’t necessarily have expected such care from him. She knew how driven he was. A lot of men as successful as he was would have been far more ruthless with their staff’s personal time. It turned out he didn’t have total tunnel vision, however.
She remembered how she’d let her head rest against his chest, listening to his breathing and his heart, and how she’d wrapped her arms around him as close and tight as they would reach. She’d felt the prickle of his belt buckle against her stomach, and the squashy nudge of her breasts against his ribs. While it was happening, she’d felt too shocked about her mom to react as a woman, but as she relived the moment now, in a slightly calmer state, her skin began to tingle.
“Okay. So,” Nick said. “Do you need extra cash? I’ll write you a check.”
“I don’t need it, Nick,” she answered. “I just need the time. You’re giving me that, and I’m grateful.”
“Don’t come back too soon.”
“No, I won’t. Thank you again. So much.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just take care of your mom.”
Celie didn’t see Nick for a week.
She barely saw her apartment, either, as her mom needed a lot of time, at first in the hospital and then at home. After a week, her mom still wasn’t too confident on her crutches, but by this time Celie’s sister, Veronica, had organized to come up from Kentucky, with baby Lizzie, for as long as she was needed, which meant that Celie could go home and back to work.
The apartment sent out its silent “Good to see you” message, the moment she walked through the door. The clock on the side table had stopped, the air was a little stale and surfaces needed dusting. On the windowsill, Celie found a torn shred of white broderie anglaise fabric, left there like a message on a Post-It note.
A message for her.
She had no doubt of that.
But where had it come from, who could have put it there, and what did it mean?
“Hey, what’s going on here? Why are you doing this to me? I’m not the right person for it,” she said aloud to the room, and when she turned, she almost expected to see the woman fixing her hat in front of the mirror, wearing a broderie anglaise blouse.
But no one was there.
I’m talking to my apartment, she realized. How weird is that?
At least the solution to this problem was obvious, and within her control.
Don’t do it.
Celie hadn’t had any memorable dreams while at her mom’s, but tonight they again cut through her sleep. The baby cried. Or was it a doll? She kept seeing strange figures and forms, some of them reassuringly like people, others just the suggestion of a human shape. What were they made of? Plaster? Metal? None of the images stayed long enough for her to identify them. Bright lights flashed, startling and dazzling her, and she thought there must have been an explosion.
Where was the baby in all of this? Was it in danger?
She jumped out of bed and rushed to look for it.
No, not it.
Him.
Nick’s baby was a boy. Hadn’t the woman in front of the mirror said so, last week? Celie sniffed the air, in search of the acrid, firecracker smell of explosives but, thank goodness, couldn’t detect it anywhere.
Couldn’t find the baby, either. His cries still shrilled in her ears. Why didn’t Nick go to him tonight? His inaction distressed her. The baby was his. The woman had implied it, and Celie somehow knew it herself, in any case.
The baby belonged to Nick, only tonight Nick didn’t seem to be around.
“He doesn’t know,” she told the woman frantically. “Nick doesn’t know the baby’s crying. He doesn’t know about the baby at all.”
“He will,” she answered, with the calm smile that made Celie feel as if everything was all right. “He’ll find out. You can tell him, if you want.”
“And the explosion?”
“It’s not an explosion. The baby is miles from there, anyhow, on the other side of town. No one’s in that kind of danger.”
And this meant that Celie could sleep, so she did. This was very easy, because of course she’d been asleep all along. None of this was real.
In the morning, it felt great to be back at work, and even better to be busy—back the way life used to be, in this job, very safe and structured and efficient, with no time to think of Nick Delaney as anything except Celie’s driven, demanding employer. She wore her severest navy pinstripe suit and rocketed through the tasks Nick had given her with barely a pause to sip her coffee.
He had scheduled a long day. Meetings and conference calls ran until five, ahead of tomorrow’s demonstration of proposed new menu items by the resident team of Delaney’s food scientists and chefs. Delaney’s rotated its menu seasonally, four times a year, and although Ohio was currently clothed in spring colors, the new offerings for the coming fall were already in planning.
Celie wasn’t surprised, midafternoon, when Nick announced, “I’m going to go visit a couple of the restaurants tonight, check out the atmosphere.”
Nine years ago, there had only been one Delaney’s, and Nick and Sam had been able to check out the atmosphere in that establishment for sixteen hours of every day. Now, with ninety-eight existing locations and twelve more planned to open this year, the chain was so large and so successful that they risked losing touch with the ambiance they’d worked so hard to build. It must be more than seven years, Celie guessed, since Nick had personally thrown a steak on a Delaney’s grill, or poured a Delaney’s beer.
“You want to take notes?” she asked him. “You want me to come along?”
“I’d like you to come along. I don’t know if we’ll need to take notes. I just want to get the feel. Sam’s doing the same with Kyla, over near his place, at Delaney’s Franklin Street.”
Nick didn’t mention Sam’s gorgeous red-haired wife, Marisa. He rarely did, these days, and Celie had always gotten the impression that he didn’t like her. Celie had trouble with the woman’s snobbish attitude and social climbing instincts, herself.
They left Delaney’s company headquarters at just after five, and drove to Delaney’s Mill Run in Nick’s very average-looking American car instead of the chauffeur-driven limo, with Nick himself at the wheel. Celie suspected that he kept the car especially for times like this. He hated to be recognized as co-owner of the corporation when he dropped in at one of the restaurants. Getting any kind of special treatment would defeat the whole point of the exercise.
A perky college student showed them to a booth in the bar section, and as Nick had hoped, she had no idea who he was.
Although it was only midweek, the place already had a Friday-night mood, with groups and couples laughing and talking over appetizers, cocktails and beer. The decor was fresh and clean, and diners could choose booths or tables, lounge chairs or bar stools. In towns and cities all across America, Delaney’s was the kind of place where a man could bring a woman, confident that she would like the atmosphere and he would like the beer.
Up in a high corner across from their booth, a big television showed news and sports, but it didn’t dominate. Nick took a seat with his back to it, and didn’t even spare it a glance. Celie knew what he must be thinking. How many people in here? What was the gender balance? The age mix? The ethnicity? How many people ate in the bar section, and how many had one drink here, first, before moving to their table in the restaurant itself?
The Delaney’s marketing division had facts like these at their fingertips, but Nick liked to sample the data in a more personal way. He and Sam both believed that this was the way to pick up on trends and apply them successfully.
“Who’s watching the TV?” he asked Celie, when her club soda and his light beer had arrived. “I don’t want to turn ’round and stare.”
“Three guys. No, four. There’s news coming on, now.”
“TV in a bar is a real guy thing, isn’t it? Figures show a significant difference in the demographics we get when the layout of the restaurant is—”
He stopped. Celie tried to smile, to encourage him to go on by showing him that she was listening, but she couldn’t. All at once, the image on the television screen had her vision and her concentration in a tight lock.
Reporters were jostling to get close to a politician so they could ask questions. Cameras flashed, lighting up the screen like explosions.
Camera flashes.
She’d seen camera flashes in her dream about Nick’s baby in Cleveland last night. She’d interpreted them wrongly until this moment, but she knew they were significant all the same.
“Cleveland,” she said aloud. The baby was in Cleveland.
She stood up automatically, as if the cameras were flashing in her own face and the reporters wanted to interview her, wanted to put her picture in the newspaper. Then she sat again, just as abruptly, as the strength drained from her legs. That message about Cleveland and Nick’s baby was suddenly so clear—far more clear than she liked. She didn’t want this to be happening to her. She wanted her life, and her subconscious, to stay just the way they were.
“Cleveland?” Nick asked. His voice came from far away, and he shot a quick look behind him, toward the television screen, following the direction of Celie’s gaze. “No, that’s Washington, D.C. Some political scandal. What’s the matter, Celie?”
“I—had a dream last night, with cameras flashing in it,” she answered, her gesture at the television as limp as a wet rag. “I didn’t realize until now that that’s what they were. I thought they were explosions. They mean something. They’re important, somehow. And the dream has something to do with Cleveland.”
Your baby is in Cleveland, Nick.
Should she tell him this?
