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Kit watched each of her old friends file out the door, shaking Cal’s hand and smiling as they left. Who were these people? It was as if she hadn’t known them at all. She half wondered if there were pods in the basement of the building, like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Lucy took her envelope, opened it and gave a delighted exclamation, as if her Pepsi bottle cap had just declared her a winner.
Jo gave Kit a look, then stood up.
“Are you really going to do this?” Kit asked her.
“I don’t have any choice,” Jo said. “Look at that guy.” She nodded toward Cal. “He means business. You can see there’s no compromise there. He walked into this building intending to fire every one of us today and that’s just what he did.”
Kit felt as if she might cry. But she wouldn’t. No way. “I’m going to change his mind about that.”
Jo put her arm around her friend. “I bet you will, too. I know this is really important to you, but don’t forget there are other opportunities out there if you can’t make this one work. You’ll find a job and get that house.”
There was no sense in pointing out that she needed this job now in order to get this loan at this interest rate. “What about you? Did you win the lottery or something? How come you don’t need to worry about work?”
“I do, Kit, but I’ve been thinking about leaving this job lately anyway. I don’t want to be Mr. Fix-It forever. There are better things out there for me. And if I get to leave here with a good recommendation and a severance package, I’m better off than I thought I’d be two weeks ago when I started seriously thinking of quitting.”
Kit hadn’t even realized her friend had been so close to quitting.
“Listen,” Jo said, “if you want to stay and battle this out, I’ll take Johnny home. We’ll go to dinner and swing by your place later, okay?”
“Thanks,” Kit said. For a moment she’d forgotten Johnny was still waiting in her office.
That was the kind of thoughtfulness that was going to make Kit really and truly miss seeing Jo at work every day. She’d been so lucky to work with her best friend for so long.
Now Kit was on her own. And she was going to go forward and change Cal Panagos’s mind no matter what.
One by one the Home Life staff went until there were only two heartbeats left in the room: hers and Cal’s. And she was pretty sure hers was faster.
Cal turned from the doorway and looked at Kit with what she saw now, on closer inspection, were piercing pale blue eyes. They were Newmanesque. This guy could be a movie star.
In fact, if he’d chosen that route, Kit would have been a lot better off.
“There’s just one envelope left,” he said to her in a voice that had probably melted lots of foolish women’s hearts.
“Let me guess.”
He gave a quick smile, the unexpectedness of which took her aback, and held the envelope out to her. “Thanks for your work, Ms. Macy.”
She took a bracing breath and said, “I can’t take that.”
He cocked his head slightly. “I’m sorry?”
“I can’t accept your severance package.” She swallowed hard. She was suddenly self-conscious about her small, mousy self standing in front of him. She’d been in such a rush today that she hadn’t done anything with her wild tangle of auburn hair. And she hadn’t done the laundry in a few days and was wearing her Emergency Work Clothes, meaning gray pants that would have been a lot more flattering if she’d ever been able to stay on the South Beach Diet for more than two or three days.
Still, she had to work with what she had and she had to pretend she had confidence, even if at this particular moment she didn’t.
“I need this job,” she finished simply.
It was clear he hadn’t been expecting an objection from anyone. He cleared his throat and said, “Well, I’m honestly sorry about this, but—”
She took a gamble. “Moreover, you need me.”
He gave her look of dry query.
She nodded at his unasked question. “You do. I’m the only person who knows how to run this magazine. Okay,” she conceded quickly, “things have been a little rocky here financially, but I know where we are with assignments right now and who needs to be contacted and so on. You wouldn’t want to be sued for breach of contract.” Shoot. She shouldn’t have said that. She should have stopped while she was ahead.
From the look he gave her it was clear that Cal Panagos was not a man who liked being threatened, even in a veiled, passive-aggressive way.
He took a moment to straighten the lapel of his Italian-tailored dark gray suit. It fit him perfectly, both physically and metaphorically. It was perfect and cold.
“Everyone needs to be contacted and all assignments need to be canceled,” he said coolly. “My secretary can do that.”
“Can your secretary find her way around the filing maze Lucy created? Some of our legal papers are filed under L for legal, but others are under S for serious legal.”
Cal frowned as if he was trying to figure out whether Kit was on the level.
“Can your secretary figure out kill fees, which are different for each assignment and which are based on past history with each writer? The files are in a spreadsheet on my computer, but there are a lot of them to figure out. More to the point, do you want to pay her—or him—for the hours she’ll have to spend trying to find her way through that maze? Or do you want to keep on the one person who can expedite it?”
He frowned again, drawing a dark shadow across the expression in his light blue eyes. “It may be hard for you to imagine, Ms. Macy, but, yes, I think I can do all of that—and more—without you.” He tilted his head slightly. “After all, we’ve only just met. I’ve managed a much bigger publication than this without any guidance at all.”
She’d taken the wrong tack. She needed to back off quick and try something different.
Maybe plain old honesty would do the trick.
It wasn’t as if she had a lot of other options.
“Look,” she said, “I’m not saying you and your staff aren’t capable of these things. I’m just saying I’m already up to speed, so it makes a lot more sense, economically and timewise, to keep me on.” She looked into his eyes, feeling as though she was swimming against the current in the turbulent ocean of his eyes. “It would benefit both of us.”
His expression softened almost imperceptibly. Perhaps a slight turning of the tide. “Things are changing around here. A lot.”
“I can change.”
He raised an eyebrow slightly. This was a man who knew how he looked at all times and used it to communicate everything he wanted to say. “Are you willing to commit to doing it my way, even before you know what that means?”
She didn’t have any choice. “Yes. Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it. I’m a professional.”
He nodded thoughtfully.
“Please.” She bit the bullet so hard she wouldn’t have been surprised if her teeth shattered. “I really need my job.”
He was still holding the manila envelope with her name on it. He looked at it, then back at her. A long moment passed before he dropped the envelope on the desk.
“This goes against my better judgment,” he said.
Hope lurched in her chest. “Some of the best things in life begin with that very statement.”
He raked his gaze across her. “You’re a persuasive woman, Ms. Macy.”
She smiled. “That will work to your advantage.”
The smallest hint of a smile played at the curve of his mouth. “That particular feminine quality has occasionally worked against me in the past.”
“Presumably you’re referring to pleasure, not business.”
He hesitated, looking at her. “Sometimes it’s hard to separate the two.”
A frisson of electricity zapped through her chest, and gooseflesh raised on her arms and against the cotton of her shirt. There was nothing to say he was talking about sex—he could have meant that he enjoyed his work so much that it was always a pleasure—but something about the way he looked at her gave Kit chills she didn’t want to attribute to his sex appeal.
So she assigned it instead to a cool blast from the air conditioner.
Even though it was so muggy in the office that she couldn’t be sure the air conditioner was even on.
“Well, I intend to make sure that working with me is a pleasure.” Kit fumbled, hearing—probably at the same time he did—the clumsiness of her sentiment. “I mean, I think we’ll work well together.”
“There you go with that persuasion again,” he said, with a smile that lit his pale blue eyes.
The air conditioner had to be on and she must be standing directly in front of a previously undetected vent, because she was positively getting chills. “Does that mean you’re willing to give me a try?” she asked.
He gave a short laugh. “It’s certainly tempting.”
“I’m talking about the job.”
He nodded for a long moment, then smiled and said, “Okay, you’ve got two months to prove yourself. If I can live without you by then, you’re outta here. Period.”
“Fine.” She turned on her heel to leave when she remembered the call from the bank.
Oh, this wasn’t going to be easy.
She turned back to Cal. “There’s just one more thing,” she said.
He looked at her wearily and let out a breath. “Don’t tell me you want a raise.”
She shook her head. “Just a letter to the bank assuring them that I’m gainfully employed.” She gave a small shrug. “And if you could leave out the part about it being for two months, that would be great.”
Cal watched the feisty redhead leave the room and shook his head. The girl was trouble, every nerve in his body told him so. The way she raised that chin and leveled those Kelly-green eyes at him—she was like a kitten, irrationally brave in the face of the wolf who could eat her alive.
Then she’d flounced out of the place, after having the nerve to ask him to put in writing that he employed her, with her long tangle of hair swinging behind her like spun copper. He had to admire her nerve, as crazy at it was. Hell, he was tempted to tell the bank he was paying her four times what she earned just because she’d taken the chance on asking him.
She was a nervy little thing.
And he could eat her alive all right.
For the time being, though, he’d resist that. She could flit around the office and pull files and make calls. He could use that. Maybe she’d even live up to her own advertising, though in Cal’s experience it was rare that a woman that pretty had the smarts to back it up.
His only real concern about keeping her was that she might prove to be too much of a distraction to him. He had a lot to do and almost no time to do it. In the past he’d had the leisure to flirt and enjoy the chase. He’d also had the security of a large number of personnel, so when the flirting was done and the chase was over, he could disappear back into the excuse of business and that would be that.
But at the moment Kit Macy was his only employee, and given the modest—no, meager—budget Breck Monahan had allowed, he wasn’t going to be able to hire more than fifteen or twenty more.
Hardly the sort of numbers that would allow him to back off gracefully at the end of a fling.
So there would be no fling.
He could live with that.
He got up and went to the back room where Ebbit Markham had pointed out a hundred-odd years’ worth of back issues of the magazine. It was musty and dark, and it occurred to Cal that he might be better off just lighting the whole lot on fire or locking the door and throwing away the key.
The unpleasantness of the room—of the whole damned chaotic and failing office, actually—was the perfect metaphor for the present state of his career.
How the hell had he let this happen? All his life Cal had succeeded wherever he’d tried. A psychologist could have a field day with his motivation— Cal’s father had died when Cal was just seven, leaving him alone to be the man of the house for his mother and sister—but whatever the reason, he’d always felt really good about his success. He’d enjoyed winning, whether it was class valedictorian or the Presidential Young Entrepreneur Award or a full scholarship to Stanford.
Winning was who he was. Who he’d always been.
And all the stuff that went with it now—the nice coop, a good car, thirty-year-old scotch in the cupboard—was proof of his achievements. The stuff itself wasn’t his goal, it was just the certificate on the wall.
He’d grown to appreciate it for that.
Now not only were his finances on the line—he could always make money again—but it was also his reputation. The reputation he’d spent a lifetime building, polishing.
If that went down in flames with Home Life he might never recover it.
So what was he doing in this crummy old building downtown trying to resurrect a business that had been terminally ill for half a century? Sure, he’d made a mistake—and it was just that, a mistake— but did he really deserve this kind of punishment?
If he’d had any time at all, he might have really felt ticked off about it. But as it was, he had to just step up to the plate and knock one out of the park.
So he’d do what he could, beginning with the one employee he had so far.
He’d gone to the archives with Kit Macy in mind. Now that she was gone and he wasn’t diverted by her obvious physical…assets, he could look at her work and try and determine if in fact there was any promise there.
Hell, maybe she could help him rescue this dog of a magazine. She probably couldn’t hurt.
Unless he let her.
His libido had gotten him into trouble before, God knew, and even today he’d tried to stop himself from letting Kit stick around and make his life harder. But in the end he just hadn’t been able to do it. There was something about her—he really couldn’t even say exactly what it was. It didn’t even matter now because he’d already said he’d give her a chance.
So maybe, just maybe, he’d find something in her work that would make him feel as if for once his head and his libido were both right about the same woman.
Chapter Four
“As we sit with our toes in the hot sand, it occurs to me that our lives are reflected perfectly in nature. The ebb and flow of the ocean mirrors our lives in the most straightforward way possible. There is good and there is bad, there is high and there is low. The only thing you can truly count on is you will face both. Over and over again.” Cal stopped reading and set last month’s issue of the magazine down on his desk before looking Kit in the eye. “This is what you’ve been doing these past five years?”
“No. Two and a half. When Edith died, I took over the job until we could find someone new, but then—” she shrugged “—I just kept doing it. We decided to just keep her byline on it.”
“Did you have any writing experience prior to that?”
“I majored in English in college,” she offered, knowing instantly that he thought that was feeble. “And of course I’ve done a lot of editing on the magazine.”
“So this woman died and you inserted yourself— someone with no writing experience—in her place? No interviews? No trying to get the best person for the job?”
