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“And this, I believe, is yours, not mine.” She pivoted, picked up a massive black wicker basket he hadn’t noticed earlier and thrust the thing into his arms. Skulls and crossbones decorated the outside, along with words like “never again” and “make hate, not love”.
Inside the basket were all kinds of goodies. A voodoo doll with spiky dark hair that he suspected was supposed to be him. Stuffed and tortured with pins and red X’s marking the mortal wounds. A half-dozen dead, shriveled black roses, a copy of Men Who Are Jerks and The Women Who Dump Them, a can of dog food with a spoon taped to the side, and a pint-size bottle of Lester Jester’s Eau de Skunk.
“Guess she wanted to get her message across,” he said.
“You must be one heck of a boyfriend.”
“I’m actually a very nice guy.”
She arched a brow at him. Apparently it was too late to make a good first impression.
Carter glanced again at the voodoo doll and noticed the hat pins sticking out of its eyeballs. Granted, that didn’t speak well for him. “I don’t get it. Tell me how my breakup ruined your life.”
“This—” she pointed at the basket “—was delivered to me.”
“I’ll be sure to complain to the delivery company.”
“Too late. I already ended a perfectly good relationship because of this thing.”
“Did it breed in your living room? Or were you totally overcome by the fumes of Lester’s skunk aroma?”
“I thought it was from my boyfriend.” She glared at him as if every glitch in the universe was Carter’s fault. A few he’d lay claim to, but not this one. “So I broke up with him.”
He smirked. “A preemptive strike?”
She colored. Clearly Daphne Williams didn’t like having the tables turned on her. “Yes.”
“Didn’t you read the card?”
“I didn’t open the box until…after.”
He tried to bite back his laughter but gave up the effort. “You broke up with your boyfriend, thinking he was breaking up with you, and you hadn’t even opened the box?”
She parked her fists on her trim little hips. “I have had a very bad day.”
“Well, so have I.” He grinned. “But you just made me laugh, so it’s starting to improve.”
She gave him a glare. “I don’t find this funny.”
He raised the can of liver-flavored dog food in her direction. “I can’t believe you ruined a relationship over this.”
“It’s your fault.”
“It is not.”
“If you hadn’t been such a horrible boyfriend, Cecilia wouldn’t have sent you this and I wouldn’t have thought it was meant for me and ended things with Jerry.” She threw up her hands. “You have no idea how this throws a wrench into all my plans. I needed Jerry, and not just for a little dim sum on Friday nights.”
He shook his head, needing a second to follow her long-winded logic. He hadn’t had any dinner and the lack of sustenance had his brain firing in the wrong directions. “First off, I wasn’t a horrible boyfriend.” He thought a second. “Well, I wasn’t exactly a horrible boyfriend. Second, you breaking up with Jerry was your choice, not mine. So I don’t see why I owe you anything at all.”
“I truly don’t care what you think, Mr. Matthews. The way I see it, you owe me a favor. Two, in fact, because I lugged this thing all the way up to the fourth floor to deliver it to the right recipient.”
“I disagree. I say Jerry was just waiting for an excuse to break up. My basket happened to be handy. So there’s no favor required here at all.” He started to shut his door.
She blocked him with a dark blue two-inch heel. “That’s not true. I was a wonderful girlfriend.”
He gave her a sardonic grin. “If you were so wonderful, then why did he let you get away so easily?”
Carter Matthews looked at Daphne Williams’s furious, silent face and thought he’d never seen anything so pretty as a woman who didn’t have a ready retort. She stepped back, sputtering and steaming, but not a single word came out.
“Have a good day, Miss Williams,” he said, and shut his door.
Then he realized winning the battle didn’t seem quite so victorious, considering he was left alone with a faux dead cat and a basket full of hate messages.
And a few truths about himself that weren’t so fun to face.
Daphne stomped her way back to her apartment, considering various methods of torturing and killing Carter Matthews. She rejected drawing and quartering as too kind.
The man had the gall to make an analysis of her life when he was the one being sent a pin-stuffed voodoo doll? She’d been a darn good girlfriend to Jerry, even putting up with his endless obsession with Mortal Kombat, figuring the man had a dream and she should support him as he supported her.
Well, he didn’t exactly support her. Or understand what she did. Or listen to eighty percent of what she said, because he called her work as a creativity coach “way above his mental ability level.”
That part might have been true.
In the beginning, Daphne had found him distracted, and endearing. Then, in the last few weeks, his inattentiveness had become annoying.
Hurtful.
But he had been behind her idea of building a creativity center for children. It was the one thing that drove Daphne, fueled her desire to create all that she had never had as a child. A center like that could be a place of mental freedom, allowing kids to open their imaginations to the world.
To have fun, to create. And maybe, to feel like their ideas, their creations, were welcomed.
Jerry, the indulged only child of wealthy parents, had pledged to give her the start-up funds, then continue his support through the family foundation. Groundbreaking was scheduled to happen in two weeks—
Or had been anyway.
She’d had her funding and a comfortable relationship that demanded nearly nothing of her, until she’d made that rash—
Preemptive strike.
Whatever. She refused to use Carter Matthews’s words, even if her mind might betray her.
Her doorbell rang and Daphne crossed to it, half hoping Jerry would be there, ball cap in hand, calling the whole thing a silly mix-up. And half hoping he wasn’t.
Maybe the Breakup Basket had been a sign—or an open door—to force Daphne to change her life. To do more than go to work and come home to an empty apartment and an empty heart.
She shook off the thought as she opened the door. All she needed was a minute to recoup and get her plans back on track.
“How was Reno?” Kim, her best friend from kindergarten on up, stood on the other side of the door, a steaming bag from Garden Palace Chinese in one hand and a bottle of Jose Cuervo ready-mixed margaritas in the other.
There were many reasons why Kim was her best friend. And she was holding two of them.
Daphne opened the door wider, waving Kim in and relieving her of her burden. “The creativity convention in Reno was fine. It was the trip home that stunk. My direct flight was delayed—twice—then forced to land in Sioux City when the pilot’s appendix burst. They lost my luggage somewhere over the continental United States, I lost my lunch in the turbo-jet’s bathroom during ungodly turbulence and then finally lost my car.”
“Your car?”
Daphne nodded. “I forgot where I parked it in the Indianapolis lot. Even the guy who ran the lot couldn’t find it. So he gave me a phone number and told me to call the manager after nine tomorrow.”
“Wow, talk about a bad day.”
“I came home to worse.” Daphne sighed, grabbing some dishes, then sinking into a chair at her kitchen table and telling Kim about the basket, her mistaken call to Jerry, and the mix-up with Carter Matthews. “That man is an evil monster, Kim. We should hang a warning poster about him outside the building.”
Kim laughed, her blond ponytail swinging and her bright green eyes dancing as she did. “Aw, he’s not that bad. He’s the guy who just moved into 4-B right?” Daphne nodded. “The women around here have been buzzing about our new neighbor and trying to outdo each other to snag one of the last bachelors standing.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you read the paper? He’s a frequent flyer in Gloria’s Gossip and Gab column. You know, one of those moderately wealthy, handsome guys who think marriage is for wimps. If that’s what evil monsters look like, sign me up for the movie.”
Daphne thought of Carter Matthews’s dark brown hair, the way the waves were displaced when he ran his fingers through it, leaving him looking like he just tumbled out of bed. His eyes, deep and blue, the kind most women fantasized about. Most women, though. Not her. And not Cecilia anymore, either, apparently. “Looks can’t make up for bad personality.”
“But they sure help.” Kim winked. “So, what are you going to do about Jerry?”
Daphne sighed. “Honestly, I’m relieved. Jerry wasn’t exactly Prince Charming.”
“Then why did you stay with him for five months?”
She shrugged. “I guess I thought he had all the qualities I wanted, or maybe did, somewhere in there. He was like a houseplant—a little time and some sunlight and he’d grow into what I needed.”
Kim laughed. “That man needed way more than a little fertilizer.”
“You’re right.” Daphne poured them each a margarita, then took a couple sips of her own before going on. The tequila hit her brain fast, skipping right past her empty stomach. “He was just so supportive of the creativity center, I thought—”
“You could turn ground chuck into sirloin?”
Daphne laughed. “I’ll never tell Carter Matthews this, but he did me a favor. It was time to break up with Jerry. I just wish the creativity center didn’t have to be part of it, too.”
“You don’t think he’ll look past this and still put his money into it, out of a sense of civic duty or something?”
“Nope. He made that really clear.” Daphne dished up some Chinese food for each of them, then toyed with a fortune cookie. “Do you know what I really want, Kim?”
“Besides hitting the lottery?”
“A man who cares about me. About what’s important to me. Someone who…” She paused a minute. “I don’t know, fills in the gaps.”
“Are we replaying the dialogue from a Tom Cruise movie?”
Daphne laughed again. “No. I guess it’s more that I want to have fun, but I never seem to do it. I go to work, I come home and I live the same day three hundred and sixty-five days a year.”
“Something you’ve been doing for a long time,” Kim said with the soft tones of a longtime friend.
“Yeah.” Daphne shook off the thoughts. “Anyway, I’ve just had a heck of a day. Makes me all melancholy. I think once I find a new supporter for the creativity center, I’ll feel better.”
Kim’s hand covered hers. “Don’t worry, Ducky, you’ll think of something,” she said, lapsing into Daphne’s childhood nickname. When she’d been a child, it had started out as the second half of Daffy Duck, a tease from kids who paired her first name with the cartoon character. As she’d gotten older, the Ducky part had stuck, because, as Kim said, Daphne had this uncanny ability to bounce back from anything and always ride above a disaster. She’d turned companies around with her creativity training and usually managed to keep a sunny perspective on life.
Until Carter Matthews had ruined everything.
Now the duck was starting to sink. Well, she wasn’t going under without taking someone else along for a well-deserved drowning, too.
CHAPTER TWO
ON WEDNESDAY morning, Carter had resolved to make things better, to once again try on that CEO hat. Maybe even take a step forward from yesterday’s disaster.
He hadn’t. If anything, he’d made things worse.
Before he’d left his apartment, his best toy designer had called, irate that Carter had rejected Cemetery Kitty. The toy designer had pitched a tantrum of epic proportions, saying he was quitting and in the process, gave Carter an angry, rambling speech about working with idiots and a corporate culture worthy of sewer workers.
That had stung. Sewer workers were probably more creative than his team, damn it. At least they unplugged problems, instead of creating them.
The call had put him behind schedule, and if there was one thing Carter didn’t want, it was a disruption in his schedule. His new, as of today, highly responsible schedule.
He was going to make this thing work—even if it took getting to the office at the crack of dawn and staying till ten—p.m., instead of his usual ten a.m. quitting time.
This morning, he’d hoped to be in the parking garage at seven-nineteen in the morning, in his office by seven-thirty. He glanced at his watch. Eight-oh-seven.
Great. Just what he needed. To be late and one toy designer short.
This CEO business had turned out to be far more time consuming than Carter had expected. It wasn’t about the missed golf games, the canceled dates, or his forgetfulness to restock his fridge. It was the way the business seemed to consume his every thought, haunting him even when he wasn’t there. Now he understood why his twin brother’s work life had nearly cost him his marriage.
Cade had seen the light, however, and exited the law work he hated in favor of supporting Melanie’s business. Now Cade was home with Melanie every night, rekindling the flame that had nearly gone out in their marriage.
Somewhere along the way, Carter had gotten the idea that he could prove himself as a responsible person, too. Considering how TweedleDee Toys was going, all he was proving was his ability to fail.
He’d avoided the office all these weeks because of the certain knowledge that despite his best intentions, he didn’t have what it took to rescue the company. Every attempt he made to improve—reduce the bottom line, increase production, shore up morale—had been met with resistance by employees too used to being on their own—
And far too familiar with Carter’s indulgent past.
Carter pushed the thoughts away and stepped out of the building and into the bright, warm sunshine. Daphne Williams stood in the parking lot, her keys in one hand, cell phone in the other, and an exasperated expression on her face. “What do you mean, you towed it? I didn’t see a No Parking sign when I left it in the long-term lot.” A pause. “That wasn’t the long-term lot? Since when?” Another pause. “If you’re going to completely reconfigure the airport parking lot, you could at least put up a sign. Mail out a flyer. Let people know so they don’t—” She let out a huff at being interrupted. “Of course. I’ll be sure to fill out the comment card on my next visit to the airport. You can count on that.” Then she clicked the phone shut and let out a half-scream/half-groan of frustration.
“Having a good day?” he asked, teasing her. Because he couldn’t resist and because, hell, he was already late.
She wheeled on him. “If you must ask, and I can tell by the glint in your eyes that you must, no, I’m not.” Her voice broke on the last words and for a moment, he felt awful. “I have to be at a meeting in twenty minutes and my car isn’t where it’s supposed to be, and the place that towed it isn’t open until ten.” She drew in a breath, seemed to steady herself, then her face brightened. “Well, I always did enjoy the adventure of a cab ride before breakfast.” Daphne flipped out her phone and started to scroll through the programmed numbers, muttering to herself as she did. “What was the name of that taxi company?”
Guilt came in many forms, Carter realized. Some of them brunette and slim and with a crushed, vulnerable look in wide chocolate eyes. “Where’s your meeting?”
“Seventh and Vine.”
“My office is on Eighth. Let me give you a ride.”
She glanced up from the phone. “Why?”
