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“You know I’m right. Do you want me to talk to him again?”
“Can’t hurt. And maybe you can help line him up some other prospects.”
“No.” Her voice was firm. “I can’t recommend him to anyone when I know what he’s like.”
“He’s your brother, Janey.”
“Yes! He’s my brother, and therefore my own reputation is on the line when I put in a good word for him. It’s embarrassing when he gets fired.”
“Just promise me you’ll think about it.”
I am thinking about it. That’s why I’m slowly going insane. “So how are you doing, Dad? Are you cheering up a little?”
“Well, you know. Darn weeds keep growing in the walkway, no matter what I put on ’em. Got moles in the front lawn. And the Jets are gonna get the snot kicked out of them tonight, you mark my words.”
“I’ll bet the hardware store has something to take care of the weeds and moles. I can’t help you much with your team, though. You just might have to pick a different one.”
“I’m no fair-weather fan, Janey. I stick with my boys!”
I know, and your loyalty is one of the things I love most about you. But judging by their current stats, that means you’re going to be depressed until basketball season starts up.
She didn’t say it aloud. “Why don’t you get out into the sunshine and take a walk, Dad? It’ll make you feel better.” And how about some nice Prozac?
“Unnh.”
“Really.”
“Unnh.”
Well, this is progress. “What would you like me to bring for dinner on Sunday?”
“Unnh.”
“Meat loaf? With mashed potatoes and peas?”
“Unnh.”
Jane decided he’d answered in the affirmative. “Okay, then. I’ll see you Sunday.”
She placed the receiver back in its cradle, and her thoughts returned to Dominic Sayers. Unfortunately the thoughts were not of a professional nature: he was shirtless, displaying a tan, six-pack abs and a wicked grin. He was also beckoning her to come sit on his lap—which she did very happily, disengaging his buckle, pulling off his belt and using the leather to strap him to the chair he sat in. Then she—
Jane O’Toole, get a grip on yourself! You’ve obviously been working too hard and are in desperate need of a date.
She tried to remember how long it had been and then decided she didn’t want to think about that.
Wiping her mind clean, she opened a new file on her laptop and stared at the blinking cursor for a moment before typing in his name. Under it she wrote:
Attitude problem. Bullheaded. Seems to thrive on confrontation. Blames others (boss) for current predicament. Arrogant. Aware of physical attractiveness. Competitive streak several miles wide.
Treatment plan:
1. Exploit and then control subject’s hostility; get him to relax and open up.
2. Establish more about subject’s background. Does he have an underlying anger at women?
3. Observe subject in office environment. Gather examples to show him how his behavior negatively impacts his relations with coworkers. Pay special attention to interaction with females.
4. Bring up these examples in a nonthreatening way and explore alternate scenarios for subject to employ next time.
5. Using the above examples, get subject to admit he has a problem and that he can solve it.
6. Do not allow subject’s looks or your own libido to sway you from your objectives!
Jane stared at the computer screen. Now where had number six come from? She needed to remember that Sayers was not a nice guy. He had likened himself to a pig.
That scent of his wasn’t at all porcine, though—woodsy, male, a hint of clove—and it still hung in her office. Jane spun in her chair to face the credenza, from which she pulled a can of Lysol. She depressed the nozzle and walked it around the room on full blast.
Take that, Sayers. I’ll figure you out. And then I’ll fix you like a bad habit.
SUNDAY DINNER WAS ITS USUAL barrel of laughs. How could you love two people so much and be so frustrated by them? Jane reminded herself that even a graduate degree in psychology couldn’t answer a question like that.
“The potatoes are dry,” her dad muttered. Gilbey said nothing as he helped himself to a slab of meat loaf, placing it in the center of a lake of ketchup on his plate.
Jane contemplated what this said about her brother as she methodically scraped her father’s portion of mashed potatoes back into the serving bowl and added butter and cream. As she reached into a cabinet for the electric beaters, her dad said, “Now don’t make ’em too fattening, Janey.”
She plugged the beaters in. “Adding water won’t make them taste very good.” The noise drowned out any possible response from her dour dad. When she was done, Jane scooped a healthy portion of mashed potatoes back onto his plate and watched with satisfaction as he began to eat them with obvious enjoyment—not that he could allow himself to acknowledge it.
“Probably’ll gain five pounds,” he groused between bites.
She just smiled. He was on the skinny side and had abnormally low cholesterol. She wasn’t worried.
Her gaze returned to Gilbey, who was now turning his plate to make sure the meat loaf was truly centered in the ketchup. “Perfect,” he announced to nobody in particular.
Did he want a compliment for his skill? “You know, Gil, most people put the meat loaf on the plate first and then the ketchup on top.”
“I’m not most people.”
Truer words had never been spoken.
“Why do you do it that way?”
“Because it works better.”
Jane shook her head, but as she watched him eat, she was struck by the fact that it did work better—at least for him. Gil had a hard time with accepted structure. He was always questioning traditional ways of doing things. She’d called him stubborn and exasperating many times. But maybe he was just creative.
Gilbey, in his own way, was as unique as Shannon. But if Shannon marched to an alternate orchestra, Gil shambled along to an alternate grunge band.
Jane stuck a piece of meat loaf into her own mouth and tried to catch her brother’s gaze, but he wouldn’t look at her. He was ashamed at the loss of another job. Well, he should be, darn it!
“Your critical side is not your most attractive side,” she heard her mother say in her head. Jane all but rolled her eyes. Yeah, but you can’t be blind to people’s faults, either.
She fought against her judgmental side, she really did. She used it to help people, to fix their problems. She was good at that. She’d founded a company to do it. Her critical side would end up being her most lucrative side. Most companies steadily lost money for the first three years they were in business. Thanks to her, Finesse was close to breaking even in nine months.
Jane’s thoughts turned to her mother again, now dead of breast cancer twelve years. Mom would never have bought meat loaf and mashed potatoes. She’d have made them—and not the powdered kind either, as Jane suspected these were.
Dad hadn’t been surly and depressed when she was alive, and Gilbey hadn’t been quite such a mess—she’d had him doing all kinds of landscaping for her, even building a rock waterfall by hand. Jane still remembered him then, totally absorbed in his task, working twelve hours a day with only a twenty-minute lunch break. Gilbey loved to work with his hands. She understood that.
That’s why the last three jobs she’d gotten him had involved manual labor. But he’d walked off the construction job, put all the parts together backward on the assembly-line job and butted heads with the foreman on this latest one, a position in an electronics company.
What am I going to do with you, Gil? It simply never occurred to her that he wasn’t her problem.
On the other side of the table, her dad put down his fork and rubbed his belly. “Feel like I swallowed a bowling ball.”
“Did you enjoy the meal, Dad?”
“Unnh.” But he nodded.
She picked up his plate and wished that men of his generation would acknowledge the arrival of feminism and do their own dishes. Yeah, right. Dad would clean up the kitchen the same day he mowed the lawn en pointe, in a pink ballerina tutu.
In that one regard, it was a good thing that Gilbey still lived with him. Jane took the plates to the sink and rinsed them. To the mental list in her head she added: antidepressants for Dad, another job for Gilbey. The men in her life always needed help.
That night, to her shame, Jane dreamed of a hot, naked Dominic Sayers who needed help finding his clothes. Funny, but she refused to give them to him.
In fact, she had hidden them herself and she taunted him with a single sock…for which Dominic had to chase her down. Laughing, he pinned her against the wall and demanded his things, threatening to take hers if she didn’t return them.
When she refused, he opened her blouse with his teeth, scattering buttons across her bedroom floor. Next he pulled down her bra, wedging it under her breasts and taking the nipples into his mouth.
Jane moaned and tried to free her hands, but he wouldn’t let her go—just captured both her wrists in his right hand and pulled up her skirt with his left. Then his fingers crept under her panties, skimming over hidden curls and caressing, teasing, rubbing her most secret places. He cupped her with a warm palm and slid back and forth, back and forth….
Jane shuddered, gasped for breath and awoke disoriented, breathing heavily. It was dark. The clock read 3:33 a.m., and her body vibrated with—no other word for it—horniness. She ached with lust. Her brain felt foggy. And no way in hell would she fall back asleep before dawn. Crazy though it was, she’d inhaled Dominic Sayers like a virulent flu. Would she recover anytime soon?
3
JANE STOOD IN HER OFFICE, hands on her hips, in front of the hairy flower arrangement. There had to be a way to dust the darn thing without making it disintegrate. The coffee was brewing, and this was her challenge of the moment—the one she felt she could triumph over before having to follow the annoyingly sexy, butt-headed Dominic Sayers around his office like a Labrador retriever. Well, a Lab with opposable thumbs, a notepad and a definite agenda.
She went to the closet that held cleaning supplies and stood there looking at the array of possibilities for cleaning flowers. Furniture polish? Soft soap? Disinfectant spray? Nope. And she’d already ruled out the vacuum. Could she swish the flower heads around in the toilet? I don’t think so.
Finally her gaze settled on a mini fan, which she pulled out and set on the floor near the offending arrangement. She plugged it in, turned it on and aimed it satisfactorily. The flowers began to rattle in the breeze, and a gazillion dust motes swirled into the air in a mini tornado. There!
The door opened to admit Lilia, who took one look and assumed an expression of kindly tolerance for the insane.
“Did you bring doughnuts?” Jane asked hopefully.
“Of course. I have a dozen in my four-by-six inch pocketbook.”
The article in question was a little quilted number that hung from Lilia’s shoulder by a thin gold chain. Definitely no edibles in there, darn her sarcasm.
“If we ate doughnuts more than once a week, we’d all be barn-size, Jane.”
Yeah, well. Barns were peaceful. They lounged about on golden prairies under blue skies and didn’t have to tangle with dangerous, sexy, six-foot-two attitude problems. Barns didn’t worry about depressed relatives, cash flow, client referrals or hairy flower arrangements.
“But I didn’t get any of the crèmes,” she heard herself whine.
Lilia shook her head at her. “Would you like some coffee? I’ll bring you some.”
“Thanks. Travel mug, please. I have to head to Zantyne today and evaluate that client in the workplace.”
“Well, I hope you have better luck there than with that vase of dried flowers. What exactly are you trying to achieve?”
“I’m dusting them,” Jane said proudly.
“Mmm.”
The tone of Lilia’s voice suggested that she check on her project. Jane squinted in disbelief. The fan had taken care of the dust, all right. But it had also blown off all the petals and leaves on the left side of the flowers, leaving the ones on the right intact. They looked partially shaved, and she had a huge mess to clean up off the floor and coffee table.
Jane switched off the fan, turned the bald side of the flowers to the wall and threw the appliance back in the closet. She determined to write a letter to HGTV right away, begging for their advice. There just had to be a way to dust dried flowers.
THE CONNECTICUT HEADQUARTERS of Zantyne Pharmaceuticals was a rectangular brown monstrosity that reminded Jane of a monumental loaf of bread. Clearly extra funds were channeled into R & D and not atmosphere.
The inside walls of the place were painted the shade of provolone cheese, and the reception desk was a mossy green. Jane decided she’d stepped into a rather unappetizing corporate sandwich. She asked politely for Dominic.
“Mr. Sayers?” said Zantyne’s receptionist into her headset. “Ms. Jane O’Toole to see you.” She paused, then nodded. “I’ll do that.”
Jane wondered if her unwilling client had issued orders to kick her butt right out the door. She unconsciously braced herself for two burly men in security uniforms to appear, but it didn’t happen. The sleek blonde got to her feet and said, “Right this way.”
Jane followed the pink-clad, entirely too pert globes of the receptionist’s rear end as they twitched through a set of wide double doors and down a taupe-carpeted hallway, until she stopped at an office on the right. Miss Pink flipped her hair over her shoulder and gushed, “Here she is, Dom. Can I get you two anything?”
Oh, maybe a couple of pistols, thought Jane. Or better yet, lances—so we can run each other through with more gore.
“Thanks, Jeannie, but I think we’re all set.” Dom flashed her a surprisingly tusk-free smile as he stood up from his desk, his powerful sex appeal sending much of Jane’s blood rushing south.
With a little moue of her lips that made a couple of cute dimples appear, the receptionist wiggled back to her post. Jane was positive Miss Pink had practiced that lip thing in a mirror. Hmm. Maybe she should try it?
Sayers turned the smile upon her now. “Jane!” he said warmly. “Good to see you again. How are you today?”
She stared at him, wary. Embarrassed that you managed to star naked in my dreams last night. “Uh, fine,” she said. “How are you?”
“Couldn’t be better, thanks.”
Did someone spray happy mist in your Wheaties this morning? Add amphetamines?
“Would you like something to drink? Coffee?”
She shook her head, unable to look away from a sexy little mole in the middle of his left cheek.
“Tea?”
“No, thank you.” And don’t say “me” next, either. Where is your evil twin? The one I met yesterday?
