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Mindy knew she had to get control of the butterflies that were dive bombing around her as-yet visually undetectable twins or she was going to make an absolute fool of herself and throw up right in front of Jason. Trying to pull herself above this newest unforeseen wrinkle in her life, Mindy pressed a hand to her stomach, hoped he wouldn’t notice this very maternal gesture and tried to sound as professional as possible under the circumstances. “Ms. Dixon hired me.”
“Oh, she did, did she?” Jason raised his voice as he called out his partner’s name, “Nathalie.”
The effort wasn’t necessary. His learned and usually very levelheaded business partner, not to mention close friend—at least up to this point—materialized in the doorway of her office which was next to his. There was an amused expression he didn’t appreciate creasing Nathalie’s lips.
“I see you’ve met our new administrative assistant.” Nathalie’s eyes shifted from Jason’s handsome, tanned face and almost permanent sober expression to the rather shocked look on their new employee’s face. Nathalie sighed. “Oh, God, Jason, you’re not frightening the help already, are you?” She offered Mindy a broad smile. “Because I picked this one to last.”
In response, Jason took hold of Nathalie’s arm, mumbled a barely audible “excuse us” to Mindy and shepherded his partner into her office. He managed to shut the door before demanding, “What the hell are you doing?”
Jason and she went back a ways, back to the first elementary business course at Columbia. She’d begun her education later than most and because of their age difference, treated Jason like a younger brother who needed occasional emotional support. She’d seen him through his wedding and the unsteady years that followed, and she knew him as well as, if not better than, anyone.
“Trying to run an efficient office while you make predictions from the top of Mt. Sinai, my friend, why?” She seemed to scrutinize his face, as if trying to discern what was really up. “We decided to split the tasks, remember? I was going to handle the mundane things, like getting the office to run in a timely fashion and schmooze with the clients while you were going to handle the research that has made our company a household name among the famous and rich who want desperately to remain that way.” She glanced past his shoulder toward where the outer office was. “Now, Mindy Richards seems like a very bright, capable young woman who just needs a chance to show us her stuff without being raked over the coals in the first ten seconds of your entrance.”
Richards? Was she married? It occurred to him that he hadn’t looked at her hand. He’d been too stunned to look at anything but her face.
Of course she was married. Probably in the first ten minutes after graduation. Someone like Mindy had her pick of men.
He couldn’t bank down the feeling of sadness that suddenly rose up and filled him.
Nathalie was looking at him as if he was some kind of science experiment that had gone awry. He forced his mind forward. “How could you hire her without asking me?”
“Simple. I never asked you before. And,” she reminded him diplomatically, in case he missed this salient point, “I never said very much when you sent them all fleeing into the hills. But I swear, Jason, you send this one packing and we are going to have a very, very serious talk about adjusting this attitude of yours.” Her voice softened a little. “I know where this is coming from, but it’s been over a year since—”
The look in his eyes was the darkest she’d ever seen. It cut her off midbreath.
“That has nothing to do with it.” Nathalie was closer to him than anyone else ever had been, but even she was not allowed to cross a certain line.
“It has everything to do with it. With you and the way you’ve become.”
Jason could feel himself shutting down. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t bring himself to discuss Debra’s death or the effect it had on him. Just as he couldn’t talk about how the empty sham of a marriage had unmanned him. “Drop it, Nat.”
She sighed. Stubborn though she was, even she knew when to stop hitting her head against a brick wall.
“All right—for now. And only because we both have work to do,” she added in case he thought he’d won. “But I want you to behave around that girl, hear me? She needs this job.”
Why, he wondered. Why would Mindy need a job that was so completely out of the realm of what she’d gone to school for? And if she was married, wouldn’t her husband be able to provide for her so that she could find work in her field?
It didn’t make any sense to him.
Jason looked at his partner. “Why?”
Nathalie stared at him. “Since when do you care about the personal life of anyone?”
“That’s not fair.” Damn it, she made him sound like some kind of self-absorbed despot. Feeling unaccountably restless, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his Italian custom-made slacks.
“All right, it’s not. You’ve been good to me.” Reaching up, Nathalie placed her arm around his shoulder in big-sister fashion. “But I worry about you, Jason,” she confessed. “About what all this enforced solitude is doing to you.”
He knew she meant well, but he wasn’t in the mood for this. He shrugged off her arm. “I just got back from a convention of three thousand people—”
“It’s very easy to be alone in a crowded room. All you need is a mind that isolates you.” Tilting her head, she studied him for a moment. Then her eyes widened as a realization seemed to come with the suddenness of a fireworks display on the Fourth of July. “You know her, don’t you?” When he made no immediate denial, she advanced to the next plateau. “What is she, an old girlfriend? Someone you had a wild, secret fling with?” The grin nearly split her face. “Oh, Jason, I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“I don’t. I didn’t.” Damn it, where did she get off, making these wild assumptions? Well-meaning or not, sometimes Nathalie really got on his nerves. “She’s just someone I used to know.”
She cocked her head. “Know how, in the biblical sense?”
“In the elementary sense, as in high school. We went to the same school, that’s all,” he emphasized. He peeled off his jacket. It was suddenly very warm in the office. “Get your mind out of the gutter, Nat.”
“Don’t be so judgmental, Jason. Under the right set of circumstances, the gutter can be a very nice place to visit once in a while.” The wink she sent his way was a broad one. Nathalie cleared her throat. “All right, so now that we’ve established that this is a prior mysterious acquaintance—”
Damn it, why did she insist on digging this way? “Not mysterious, Nathalie, I just told you—”
She was quick to cut him off. “Oh, but it’s what you didn’t tell me that I’m more interested in, Jason. One doesn’t look like that if one runs into the kid who sat beside you in homeroom and once borrowed your pen so they could finish their English homework.” The look she gave him was a knowing one and all the more infuriating for it. Nathalie had never cared for Debra, although he’d found that out only after the fact. And she had been trying her damnedest to get him to go out again no matter how often he told her to butt out of that part of his life. “I’d wager there was more to it than that.”
“Then you’d lose, Nathalie.”
“I never lose.” Nathalie tossed her head, sending her vibrant auburn hair cascading over her shoulder. “I just suffer temporary setbacks that will eventually be overcome if I just hang in there.” It was a great motto for a firm that specialized in stock market finances. It was also the motto that Nathalie lived by.
“Excuse me, is anything wrong?”
In unison, they turned around to the source of the question. To the young woman standing now in the open doorway.
Self-conscious, Mindy dropped her hand to her side. “I knocked—twice—but I guess you didn’t hear me,” she explained.
Mindy had sat at her desk, pretending she didn’t hear the raised voices or that her future might not very well be hanging in the balance with what was being said. But it was. Since she’d arrived back in New York, she’d gone to a score of companies in response to almost any ad she found in the paper that didn’t list working out in the open fields in its job description. In desperation, she would have even gone for that, but her present stamina wouldn’t allow it. The tone of the interviews that had been conducted all wound up being the same. Hopefully positive, until her own code of honor forced her to be truthful with her perspective employer and admit that, although she didn’t look it, she was three months pregnant with twins.
And really, really needed this job, she would add silently.
Granted her parents were more than willing to take her in, but that wasn’t the way she wanted to start her new life here—indebted to her parents. It was enough that they gave her emotional support and had floated her a loan so that she could put down the first and last month’s security on her tiny apartment. The latter was the size of a moderate walk-in restaurant refrigerator, but it was hers and that meant a lot. So did earning her own way.
Up until this job, no one had room for a woman who was going to expand before their eyes in the coming months and whom they felt might or might not be back once she gave birth, despite all her assurances that she would be. But Nathalie Dixon had been sympathetic and understanding and willing to take a chance on her, which meant the world to Mindy. She’d instantly taken a liking to the other woman.
But it was obvious that she was going to have to convince the man from her past that she was up to this. Funny how things turned out.
She wondered how much Nathalie had told him. But Jason’s eyes weren’t traveling to her belly, so maybe he didn’t know.
Which was just the way she wanted it for now. One battle at a time.
“No,” Jason said curtly, sparing a look at Nathalie before he turned to face Mindy, “nothing’s wrong. Let’s see about getting you to work, Mindy.”
She smiled, relieved. Maybe this was going to be all right after all. “That sounds good to me.”
We’ll see, Jason added silently. We’ll see.
Chapter Two
Jason glanced at his watch. It was nearly five o’clock. Finally. All day it had felt as if the minutes were dragging on the back of an arthritic turtle.
He hadn’t been able to concentrate for more than ten, fifteen of those slow-moving minutes at a time. No matter how hard he tried to block out everything, his mind kept wandering back to the woman sitting some thirty feet outside of his office.
His lack of self-discipline surprised and annoyed him. It had been years since he hadn’t been able to throw a rope around his thoughts and rein them in.
He had even managed to contain the pain and guilt he felt over Debra’s death, placing the emotions in a sealed area so that he could get on with his work. That had been the important thing then. Work had been his main goal, his main purpose for existing and his salvation, all wrapped up in one—much to the relief of the great many investors that his company handled who had come to depend very heavily on his knowledge and his savvy.
Without him a lot of people would have found themselves adrift in financial waters that seemed to keep insisting on changing course without giving the slightest warning to them.
He wasn’t much good to any of them now, least of all himself, Jason thought darkly, thoroughly disgusted with himself.
With a sigh he closed the folder containing the reports he’d been staring at without success for the past half hour. Pushing away from the desk, he dragged a hand through his hair.
The July sun was shining brightly into his window, and he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the glass. He doubted that anyone looking at him would have had a clue what was going on inside of him, just as they wouldn’t have been able to tell back in the days when he was in high school. He’d learned early on how to mask his feelings from the outside world.
But that didn’t make them any less real to him.
This had to stop, he told himself. But at the moment, he didn’t see how. It couldn’t end by dismissing Mindy. He hadn’t expected it, but she was good. She’d taken to the work like a proverbial duck to water, absorbing everything he said. Unlike with the temps who had paraded through the office, he hadn’t had to explain anything to her twice. What was more, she didn’t act as if he was speaking in some unfathomable foreign language. The world of finance left a great many people anesthetized, but Mindy just looked at him with those bright-blue eyes of hers, and he could see she understood. In his book, that made her a very rare person.
But then, he already knew that.
Jason massaged his forehead. The shadow of a headache was playing hide-and-seek with his temples, threatening to take over. What he needed, he thought, was a stiff drink. He didn’t indulge often, but this definitely felt like one of those times men announced that they needed a drink.
Nerve endings tightened as he heard the knock on his door. Nathalie rarely knocked, she just strolled in. The fact that it could be one of the interns whom he kept to pore over every bit of news data that affected the market, never even occurred to him.
He knew it was her. “Come in.”
And he was right. The next moment Mindy was standing in the doorway, her hand resting on the doorknob, a somewhat uncertain expression on her face.
He wasn’t accustomed to seeing her that way. The Mindy Conway he remembered was the last word in confidence, in vibrancy.
But she wasn’t Mindy Conway anymore, she was Mindy Richards, he reminded himself.
Looking at her now, it seemed as if someone had put out her light, and she was struggling to strike at least a small match again.
What had happened to her? he wondered.
Mindy cleared her throat. The last time she’d felt this awkward, she’d accidentally put on two different-colored shoes and hadn’t realized it until she was halfway to class.
“Um, it’s five o’clock and I was going to…”
The words didn’t feel right even as she said them. They felt stilted on her tongue. Everything since she’d walked in on Brad, in his plush insurance office, body wrestling with his secretary, had felt stilted to her. As though she was walking around in someone else’s dream.
Or someone else’s nightmare. It certainly wasn’t hers.
Mindy bit her lower lip and tried again. The words still didn’t feel right. Or maybe it was just the situation. Here she was, playing office with someone she’d once envisioned dressed only in a loincloth. She’d heard from someone in high school that Jason had a killer body. She had a feeling he still did.
“I was wondering, will there be anything else before I go home, um, Mr. Mallory?”
She saw him frown. Had she said something wrong? When he’d given her instructions today he’d been even more reserved than she’d remembered. At least back in high school she’d caught him looking her way occasionally. Enough times to set her heart racing. This time he was acting as if she was some kind of annoyance he was forced to deal with because of circumstances.
Jason’s frowned deepened at her use of his last name. The chasm between them felt even wider than before. “Don’t call me that.”
She pressed her lips together. “What should I call you?”
“Jason.” He fairly snapped out his own name.
She tilted her head slightly as if considering the directive. And then she shook it. “But you’re my boss, it doesn’t seem right.”
He laughed shortly, the words escaping before he could think them through. “It doesn’t seem right me being your boss.”
“Are you going to fire me?” Her breath made a pit stop in her throat and stayed there.
He looked as her as if she’d just suggested his alter ego was Spiderman. “What gave you that idea?”
Was it going to be like this every day? Was she going to feel horribly uncomfortable every time she was in his presence? She’d tried her damnedest today to be bright and cheery and eager, hoping to win him over, but he’d just seemed to become progressively worse every time he talked to her.
Mindy felt as if she was digging a deeper hole for herself with every word she uttered. But she had no choice but to respond. “Well, for one thing, you’re frowning.”
“He always frowns.”
Mindy almost sighed with relief as she heard Nathalie’s voice behind her. Turning, she saw the woman pausing in the doorway, obviously on her way out.
Nathalie’s eyes were smiling as she turned them toward her. “You know how when you were a kid and your mother warned you not to make funny faces because it would freeze that way? Jason didn’t listen.” With a throaty laugh at her own joke, Nathalie patted her on the shoulder. “Just wanted to tell you you did a great job today, Mindy. Keep it up.” She looked significantly at Jason. “Well, I have to go. I’ve got a date,” she announced.
Jason glanced at his calendar, as if to assure himself that this was Monday, the beginning of a work week. “A date?”
“Yes, a date.”
Nathalie leaned into the office, her eyes on Jason. She tossed her hair, obviously knowing the lighting would catch some of the red highlights her hairdresser had slaved to put in.
“Some of us have a social life.” She winked at her partner. “See you tomorrow, smiley.”
Nodding at Mindy, she sailed out of the room and out of the suite of offices.
Nathalie left silence in her wake. Jason shifted in his seat. He and Nathalie needed to have a long talk soon about her less-than-subtle hints.
“Well, you’re probably in a hurry to get to your husband, so I’ll see you tomorrow.” He was already looking down at the report he couldn’t seem to read.
She was being dismissed, Mindy thought. A lot better than being fired. Still, something wouldn’t allow her to leave this way. “That won’t be possible.”
Jason raised his eyes from his reading material and caused a tidal wave in her stomach. She hoped the twins were able to grab on to something stable to weather the storm out.
“I won’t see you tomorrow?”
“No, I mean it won’t be possible for me to hurry to my husband.”
Having gone through the trauma himself, the first thing that occurred to Jason was that her spouse was dead. And he’d just told her to hurry off home to him. Quickly he tried to make amends.
“Hey, I’m sorry—”
She had no idea why he felt he had to apologize. “Nothing for you to be sorry about.” Unable to stop it, the mental image of Brad’s limbs tangled around that two-bit, anorexic flake he’d supposedly hired to take dictation flashed across her brain. “Brad, of course, is another story.”
