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There, he’d said it, albeit silently. He wanted her. Wanted her in every sense of the word. That was no way for an employer to feel about someone who worked for him. That embodied the cornerstone of sexual harassment.
Except that he hadn’t, of course. Hadn’t touched her, hadn’t harassed her. Had hardly said very much of anything that wasn’t absolutely work related after that first day. The way he treated her, she might as well have been a stranger who had come in off the street.
Except that she wasn’t.
Still, it was doing her a huge disservice to try to fire her when she was so damn good, so damn eager. She actually looked as if she liked what she was doing. Nathalie was already saying that Mindy was invaluable and she didn’t know how they’d gotten along without her all these years.
Nathalie would say that.
Having someone competent as an administrative assistant freed her up to enjoy her own life a little more. Not that Nathalie had conducted her life like a cloistered nun before Mindy had come on the scene. Twice married, and divorced just as many times, Nathalie knew how to kick up her heels and enjoy life to the fullest. None of the inhibitions that plagued normal men and women seemed to have been woven into her makeup.
That he behaved like a monk in a secluded mountainside monastery had always been a source of discontent for her. Nathalie acted as if getting him to come around was her own personal crusade. He was certain that the temps she’d hired before Mindy had all been chosen not for their office proficiency but for their looks. Each seemed to have been more pretty than the last. And all had been largely empty-headed.
Which brought him back full circle to Mindy.
Beauty and brains. It was a hard combination for a man to resist, and he found himself less and less inclined to do so with each day that went by. If it wasn’t for the fact that he had a disastrous marriage in his background, he’d be sorely tempted to break self-imposed employer-employee regulations and ask Mindy out.
And ask for trouble along with it.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?
And right now, Mindy Richards was the best thing that had ever happened to Mallory and Dixon since they had opened their doors. If he didn’t want to scare her away, he knew he should just keep on going the way he had. Silently.
He had no business thinking what he was thinking. Had even less business getting up from his desk the way he was doing and proceeding to the outer office as if he was on automatic pilot.
Maybe he’d be lucky and she would have left for the day. For the weekend.
But he knew even before he set foot outside his own office that Mindy was still sitting at her desk. For one, she never left without saying good-night, her very words ensuring that at least it would be, as long as he could continue replaying the sound of her voice uttering them in his head.
For another, there was her perfume. It was still as gut-stirringly present as ever. He wondered if there was some way he could get her to stop wearing it so that it would stop haunting him.
He was right. She was there, in the process of powering down her computer and getting her things together. For a second he just stood and watched her. Why did every movement she made seem like poetry?
This was no way for a grown man to think, he told himself.
It didn’t stop him.
He had to say something before she turned around to see him staring at her. He didn’t want her to think he was stalking her. Even if they did belong in the same office at the same time.
Not wanting to startle her, Jason cleared his throat. “Getting ready to go home?”
He could see by the way she jumped that he’d startled her, anyway.
His deep voice shimmered along her skin, melting into her consciousness. Mindy swung around in her chair to look at him.
Jason hadn’t talked to her very much these past four days. Just small sound bites aimed at whatever detail he wanted her to see to. And then he’d been gone, lingering like smoke in her mind but not in fact.
She half thought she imagined the sound of his voice now, but there he was, in his doorway. The next moment he was walking toward her.
Mindy nodded toward the clock on the wall. “It’s after five. I thought I’d close up shop.” Nathalie had already left for what she’d announced was going to be a very long, very sexy weekend, hinting that she probably was going to spend most of it in bed. The vibrant woman had punctuated the last remark with a significant look aimed at Jason that neither he, nor she, had missed.
Her purse hovered over the drawer as she held it aloft. “Unless you need me for something.”
He couldn’t help it. The remark made him laugh. If she only knew, he thought.
Jason saw a wide smile crease her lips in response. “I forgot you could do that.”
He wasn’t following her. “Do what?”
“Laugh. Not that I heard you do it very often in high school,” she confessed. The times that she had, it had sent warm ripples through her stomach. It was the kind of deep, sexy laugh that pulled you in, painting improbable, unattainable scenarios in your head.
Surprised, Jason leaned a hip against her desk as he folded his arms before his chest. He probed a little. “I didn’t think that you were even aware of me in high school.”
“I asked you to sign my yearbook,” Mindy reminded him.
That had made an impression on him, but one that he’d thought was fueled only by his own imagination. He’d never possessed a bloated ego. “I thought you were asking everyone.”
She looked at him for a second. Was he serious? Didn’t he know how many girls would have loved to have gone out with him? That he’d been the school’s brooding man of mystery? They’d all held their breaths to see who he’d ask to the prom. And when he didn’t ask anyone, or attend, they’d all thought that was so typically Jason, to be above mundane things like proms and graduation parties.
“There was hardly room in my book for everyone. Just the people I wanted.” God, did that sound as much of a come-on as she thought it did? She sincerely hoped the blush she felt forming inside her wouldn’t rise up to color her face.
He lifted a shoulder, letting it drop. She was just being polite, nothing more.
“Our paths didn’t exactly cross.” She’d been part of every major event that took place in high school, while Jason had simply kept to himself, his focus on his goals. Only, his mind had remained on her.
Maybe he didn’t remember, she thought. Maybe she’d only imagined that he’d look her way. Maybe it was someone else who had caught his attention and she’d only been in his line of sight, as invisible as air to him. Still, her pride made her remind him. “You were in my math class. And in economics.”
He was really surprised that she’d even noticed that, much less remembered it. He truly doubted that she was aware of the fact that he used to come in early just to watch her walk through the door. And wish he were one of the guys who clustered around her.
But it wasn’t in his nature to cluster, and the risks he took were never truly risks, but completely calculated actions. Putting himself out there, exposed, was not the way he operated.
“Really? I don’t remember.”
To say that she did, that she even remembered some of the outfits he wore, like that black turtleneck sweater he seemed to favor and those tight jeans that had caused her to actually snap her pencil in two the first day she’d seen him walking into class wearing them, would have placed her in an awkward position.
So instead, to save face, something that she had very little of these days, Mindy merely shrugged her slim shoulders. “You were kind of hard to miss.” In case he got the wrong idea, she quickly added, “You sat in front of Terry Malone.”
Terry Malone. Tall, blond. Rich. Perfect. With three track-and-field letters adorning his school jacket. Had he been able to find a picture of the guy, Terry’s face would have adorned the dartboard on the back of his bedroom door.
“Right. Your boyfriend.”
Mindy looked at him sharply. Jason couldn’t have known that, if he’d been as unaware of her as he was leading her to believe.
A little ripple of satisfaction danced through her.
She smiled. “It all seems like such a very long time ago.”
“Yeah, well—”
Straightening, Jason looked toward the outer office door. He should be going. Now. Before he said something stupid and had to have his foot surgically removed from his mouth.
He was going to leave, Mindy thought. To go to whatever life he had outside of this office. Her evening and the weekend that was to follow was going to be spent trying to make the tiny one-room apartment she rented into a home.
Suddenly she didn’t feel like going there, didn’t feel like being alone.
She could always go to Manhattan Multiples, she supposed. There was always someone there to talk to, even as late as ten o’clock. She could even take Lara Mancini up on her offer, if the woman was there tonight.
Or she could go to see her parents. That was always a viable option. Her parents always made her feel welcome and wanted.
But she didn’t want to be someone’s patient or someone’s daughter tonight. She wanted to feel the way she used to, like someone who could have the world at her feet if she just applied herself.
Like someone whose husband hadn’t run her self-esteem into the ground and cheated on her. Like someone whose husband hadn’t said, “that’s tough,” when she’d told him she was pregnant.
She wanted the bright, shining life she thought she had when she’d graduated high school.
Without realizing it, Mindy allowed a sigh to escape her lips.
She might not have realized it, but Jason did. He heard her. It stopped him in his tracks and made him turn from the door. And say something he had absolutely no intention of saying.
“Would you like to go somewhere and get a cup of coffee?”
He watched Mindy brighten like a thirsty flower turning up its head toward the first spring rain. “I’d love to.”
Big mistake.
The warning echoed in his head. But the sound of her response drowned it out. So he smiled, ignoring the former, replaying the latter, and said, “Then let’s go. Places around here tend to fill up fast with people escaping to the first leg of their weekend.”
Purse in hand, she was on her feet instantly. “Let’s,” she agreed.
Chapter Four
Sitting outside at a table for two at a nearby trendy restaurant, Jason solemnly watched the late-afternoon sun making shimmering patterns on the surface of his coffee.
The noise of the city pushed its way in, surrounding him and Mindy. The silence that existed between them was all he was aware of.
He had to admit that he hadn’t thought this out.
Being moved exclusively by the desire for Mindy’s company, he’d forgotten that in order to share it comfortably, he was going to have to talk with her.
Talking, when it didn’t involve the care and feeding of investment funds, was not his long suit. It never had been. He had never been accused of being one of those people blessed with a golden tongue. Not even fool’s gold. And right now, his tongue felt as if it had been forged out of two tons of lead.
“So,” was all he could manage before he had utterly depleted his supply of words. It sank to the bottom of his cup of coffee like a stone.
Mindy smiled at him, looking over the rim of her recently stirred cup of foam and decaf, her eyes stirring him.
“So,” she echoed, waiting for him to make some kind of stab at conversation.
Well, that had gone nowhere, he thought darkly. When in doubt, ask questions. That way the spotlight was focused somewhere other than on him.
He took a sip of the strong, black cup of unaffected coffee, let it wind its hot, dark path down his throat and through his chest, then ventured forward. “Care to fill in the blanks?”
She tilted her head in that way he’d always thought hopelessly endearing. “Excuse me?”
He was going to have to stop talking in bits and pieces, he thought, and make sense before she thought he was hopelessly sentence challenged.
“The blanks between walking on stage to get your diploma and arriving at Mallory and Dixon on Monday morning.” He did a quick subtraction. “That leaves us with what, eleven years?”
Eleven years. The simple statement stunned her. My God, was it really all that time? Had that many years actually gone by since she’d left for Northwestern, determined to set the world on fire?
It didn’t seem possible.
She felt as if the distance between then and now was a little more than a blink of an eye. A year, maybe two, no more than three. Eleven? How had that happened?
“Eleven years,” she echoed out loud. Her mouth curved in a self-deprecating smile. “That suddenly makes me feel very old.”
He hadn’t meant to do that. “Someone once said everyone has to grow older, but you don’t have to grow old.”
She recalled reading that someplace. Mindy thought for a second, then her eyes brightened as she remembered. “George Burns, I think.”
He was surprised that she knew something like that. But then, she’d been surprising him all week. He took another sip of coffee, wishing there was something in the drink that would transform his stilted tongue into a glib one. He began to understand what had driven Christian to approach Cyrano and ask the character to do his talking for him.
“Good words to live by.” He allowed himself to study her face for a moment. He’d noticed women looking in her direction enviously as they walked by. “In any case, I don’t think you have anything to worry about in that department for a very long, long time.”
She raised her eyes to his, and for one moment he forgot to breathe.
“That’s very sweet of you.”
Embarrassed, not knowing what to do with his face, his eyes, his hands, Jason shrugged. “Just stating a fact.”
Sweet. Who would have ever thought that Jason Mallory could actually be described that way? Mindy mused. Tough, rugged, sexy, yes, but sweet? That was a new one.
She sat back, enjoying this lovely island of time that had materialized out of nowhere, not unaware of the envious looks she was garnering. She would bet that every woman who walked by wished that she was in her place.
The conversation had stopped again. Searching for something to move it along, Jason looked down at her hand. He heard himself asking another personal question before he had a chance to think it out. “So, are you divorced, or—?”
“Or,” she replied. It was a state of limbo, really, not quite married anymore, not yet divorced. “It’s not final yet.” Anyday now, she thought.
The sun was pushing its way into the restaurant, brushing against the wide gold band, highlighting it. “Oh, I was just wondering because you’re still wearing your wedding ring.”
Mindy looked down at the gold band as if it had somehow managed to offend her through no fault of its own. She wasn’t wearing the ring because of any real sentimental attachment. The truth was, the only part of her that had gained weight since she’d become pregnant was her hands. Actually, not even her hands, just her hand. Her left one.
The fingers of her left hand had swollen just enough to make easy removal of her wedding ring an impossibility. Tugging at it was futile. Like a guest who had intentionally overstayed their welcome, the ring refused to be dislodged. The only way to rid herself of it was to cut it off, and she really wasn’t ready to do that at the moment.
Somehow that would have underscored the mistake she’d made in giving her heart to Brad and putting her life on virtual hold. Cutting the ring off would have symbolized her making a complete break with that part of her life, and though she was struggling to be independent now, she wasn’t ready to bury everything just yet. But soon, very soon, she promised herself. And then she was going to have to send it back to Brad.
But she didn’t want to tell Jason any of this.
She thought of a movie she’d once seen. The heroine pretended to be married in order not to have anyone hit on her.
