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“I’m glad company policy meets with your approval.”
It was surprising, considering her unfortunate and all-too-recent experiences with James, but it wasn’t until that moment that Amanda realized that she hadn’t checked Jordan’s hand for a wedding band. She glanced at the appropriate finger, even though she knew it would be bare, and saw a white strip where the ring had been.
“Like I said, I’m a widower,” he told her with a slight smile, obviously having read her glance accurately.
“I’m sorry,” Amanda told him.
He speared a piece of sweet-and-sour chicken. “It’s been three years.”
It seemed to Amanda that the white space on his ring finger should have filled in after three years. “That’s quite a while,” she said, wondering if she should just get up from her chair, collect her book and her coat and leave. In the end she didn’t, because a glance at her watch told her it was still forty minutes until the next bus left. Besides, she was hungry.
Jordan sighed. “Sometimes it seems like three centuries.”
Amanda bit her lower lip, then burst out, “You aren’t one of those creeps who goes around saying he doesn’t have a wife when he really does, are you? I mean, you could have remarried.”
He looked very tired all of a sudden, and pale beneath his tan. Amanda wondered why he hadn’t gotten around to shaving.
“No,” he said. “I’m not married.”
Amanda dropped her eyes to her food, ashamed that she’d asked the question, even though she wouldn’t have taken it back. The experience with James had taught her that a woman couldn’t be too careful about such things.
“Amanda?”
She lifted her gaze to see him studying her. “What?”
“What was his name?”
“What was whose name?”
“The guy who told you he wasn’t married.”
Amanda cleared her throat and shifted nervously in her chair. The thought of James didn’t cause her pain anymore, but she didn’t know Jordan Richards well enough to tell him just how badly she’d been hoodwinked. A sudden, crazy panic seized her. “Gosh, look at the time,” she said, pulling back her sleeve to check her watch a split second after she’d spoken. “I’d better get home.” She bolted out of her chair and put her coat back on, then reached for her purse and the bag from the bookstore. She laid a five-dollar bill on the table to pay for her dinner. “It was nice meeting you.”
Jordan frowned and slowly pushed back his chair, then stood. “Wait a minute, Amanda. You’re not playing fair.”
He was right. Jordan hadn’t run away, however much he had probably wanted to, and she wouldn’t, either.
She sank back into her seat, all too aware that people at surrounding tables were looking on with interest.
“You’re not ready to talk about him,” Jordan said, sitting down again, “and I’m not ready to talk about her. Deal?”
“Deal,” Amanda said.
They discussed the Seattle Seahawks after that, and the Chinese artifacts on display at one of the museums. Then Jordan walked with her to the nearest corner and waited until the bus pulled up.
“Goodbye, Amanda,” he said as she climbed the steps.
She dropped her change into the slot and smiled over one shoulder. “Thanks for the company.”
He waved as the bus pulled away, and Amanda ached with a bittersweet loneliness she’d never known before, not even in the awful days after her breakup with James.
When Amanda arrived at her apartment building on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill, she was still thinking about Jordan. He’d wanted to offer to drive her home, she knew, but he’d had the good grace not to, and Amanda liked him for that.
In her mailbox she found a sheaf of bills waiting for her. “I’ll never save enough to start a bed and breakfast at this rate,” she complained to her black-and-white long-haired cat, Gershwin, when he met her at the door.
Gershwin was unsympathetic. As usual, he was interested only in his dinner.
After flipping on the lights, dropping her purse and the book onto the hall table and hanging her coat on the brass-plated tree that was really too large for that little space, Amanda went into the kitchenette.
Gershwin purred and wound himself around her ankles as she opened a can of cat food, but when she scraped it out onto his dish, he abandoned her without compunction.
While Gershwin gobbled, Amanda went back to the mail she’d picked up in the lobby and flipped through it again. Three bills, a you-may-have-already-won and a letter from Eunice.
Amanda set the other envelopes down and opened the crisp blue one with her sister’s return address printed in italics in one corner. She was disappointed when she realized that the letter was just another litany of Eunice’s soon-to-be-ex-husband’s sins, and she set it aside to finish later.
In the bathroom she started water running into her huge claw-footed tub, then stripped off the skirt and sweater she’d worn to the mall. After disposing of her underthings and panty hose, Amanda climbed into the soothing water.
Gershwin pushed the door open in that officious way cats have and bounded up to stand on the tub’s edge with perfect balance. Like a tightrope walker, he strolled back and forth along the chipped porcelain, telling Amanda about his day in a series of companionable meows.
Amanda listened politely as she bathed, but her mind was wandering. She was thinking about Jordan Richards and that recently removed wedding band of his.
She sighed. All her instincts told her he was telling the truth about his marital status, but those same instincts had once insisted that James was all right, too.
Amanda was waiting when the bus pulled up at her corner the next morning. The weather was a little warmer, and the snow, so unusual in Seattle, was already melting.
Fifteen minutes later Amanda walked through the huge revolving door of the Evergreen Hotel. Its lush Oriental carpets were soft beneath the soles of her shoes, and crystal chandeliers winked overhead, their multicolored reflections blazing in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors.
Amanda took the elevator to the third floor, where the hotel’s business offices were. As she was passing through the small reception area, Mindy Simmons hailed her from her desk.
“Mr. Mansfield is sick today,” she said in an undertone. Mindy was small and pretty, with long brown hair and expressive green eyes. “Your desk is buried in messages.”
Amanda went into her office and started dealing with problems. The plumbing in the presidential suite was on the fritz, so she called to make sure Maintenance was on top of the situation. A Mrs. Edman in 1203 suspected one of the maids of stealing her pearl earring, and someone had mixed up some dates at the reception desk—two couples were expecting to occupy the bridal suite on the same night.
It was noon when Amanda finished straightening everything out—Mrs. Edman’s pearl earring had fallen behind the television set, the plumbing in the presidential suite was back in working order and each of the newlywed couples would have rooms to themselves. At Mindy’s suggestion, she and Amanda went to the busy Westlake Mall for lunch, buying salads at one of the fast-food restaurants and taking a table near a window.
“Two more weeks and I start my vacation,” Mindy stated enthusiastically, pouring dressing from a little carton over her salad. “Christmas at Big Mountain. I can hardly wait.”
Amanda would just as soon have skipped Christmas altogether if she could have gotten the rest of the world to go along with the idea, but of course she didn’t say that. “You and Pete will have a great time at the ski resort.”
Mindy was chewing, and she swallowed before answering. “It’s just great of his parents to take us along—we could never have afforded it on our own.”
With a nod, Amanda poked her fork into a cherry tomato.
“What are you doing over the holidays?” Mindy asked.
Amanda forced a smile. “I’m going to be working,” she reminded her friend.
“I know that, but what about a tree and presents and a turkey?”
“I’ll have all those things at my mom and stepdad’s place.”
Mindy, who knew about James and all the dashed hopes he’d left in his wake, looked sympathetic. “You need to meet a new man.”
Amanda bristled a little. “It just so happens that a woman can have a perfectly happy life without a man hanging around.”
Mindy looked doubtful. “Sure,” she said.
“Besides, I met someone just yesterday.”
“Who?”
Amanda concentrated on her salad for several long moments. “His name is Jordan Richards, and—”
“Jordan Richards?” Mindy interrupted excitedly. “Wow! How did you ever manage to meet him?”
A little insulted that Mindy seemed to think Jordan was so far out of her orbit that even meeting him was a feat to get excited about, Amanda frowned. “We were in line together at a bookstore. Do you know him?”
“Not exactly,” Mindy admitted, subsiding a little. “But my father-in-law does. Jordan Richards practically doubled his retirement fund for him, and they’re always writing about him in the financial section of the Sunday paper.”
“I didn’t know you read that section,” Amanda remarked.
“I don’t,” Mindy admitted readily, unwrapping a bread stick. “But we have dinner with my in-laws practically every Sunday, and that’s all Pete and his dad ever talk about. Did he ask you out?”
“Who?”
“Jordan Richards, silly.”
Amanda shook her head. “No, we just had Chinese food together and talked a little.” She deliberately left out the part about how they’d gone to the minitherapy session and the way she’d reacted when Jordan had asked her about James.
Mindy looked disappointed. “Well, he did ask for your number, didn’t he?”
“No. But he knows where I work. If he wants to call, I suppose he will.”
A delighted smile lit Mindy’s face. Positive thinking was an art form with her. “He’ll call. I just know it.”
Amanda grinned. “If he does, I won’t be able to accept the glory—I owe it all to an article I read in Cosmo. I think it was called ‘Big Girls Should Talk to Strangers,’ or something like that.”
Mindy lifted her diet cola in a rousing roast. “Here’s to Jordan Richards and a red-hot romance!”
With a chuckle, Amanda touched her cup to Mindy’s and drank a toast to something that would probably never happen.
Back at the hotel more crises were waiting to be solved, and there was a message on Amanda’s desk, scrawled by the typist who’d filled in for Mindy during lunch. Jordan Richards had called.
A peculiar tightness constricted Amanda’s throat, and a flutter started in the pit of her stomach. Mindy’s toast echoed in her ears: “Here’s to Jordan Richards and a red-hot romance.”
Amanda laid down the message, telling herself she didn’t have time to return the call, then picked it up again. Before she knew it, her finger was punching out the numbers.
“Striner, Striner and Richards,” sang a receptionist’s voice at the other end of the line.
Amanda drew a deep breath, squared her shoulders and exhaled. “This is Amanda Scott,” she said in her most professional voice. “I’m returning a call from Jordan Richards.”
“One moment, please.”
After a series of clicks and buzzes another female voice came on the line. “Jordan Richards’s office. May I help you?”
Again Amanda gave her name. And again she was careful to say she was returning a call that had originated with Jordan.
There was another buzz, then Jordan’s deep, crisp voice saying, “Richards.”
Amanda hadn’t expected a simple thing like the man saying his name to affect her the way it did. It was the strangest sensation to feel dizzy over something like that. She dropped into the swivel chair behind her desk. “Hi. It’s Amanda.”
“Amanda.”
Coming from him, her own name had the same strange impact as his had had.
“How are you?” he asked.
Amanda swallowed. She was a professional with a very responsible job. It was ridiculous to be overwhelmed by something so simple and ordinary as the timbre of a man’s voice. “I’m fine,” she answered. Nothing more imaginative came to her, and she sat there behind her broad desk, blushing like an eighth-grade schoolgirl trying to work up the courage to ask a boy to a sock hop.
His low, masculine chuckle came over the wire to surround her like a mystical caress. “If I promise not to ask any more questions about you know who, will you go out with me? Some friends of mine are having an informal dinner tonight on their houseboat.”
Amanda still felt foolish for talking about James in the therapy session, then practically bolting when Jordan brought him up again over Chinese food. Lately she just seemed to be a mass of contradictions, feeling one way one minute, another the next. What it all came down to was the fact that Dr. Marshall was right—she needed to start taking chances again. “Sounds like fun,” she said after drawing a deep breath.
“Pick you up at seven?”
“Yes.” And she gave him her address. A little thrill went through her as she laid the receiver back on its cradle, but there was no more time to think about Jordan. The telephone immediately rang again.
“Amanda Scott.”
The chef’s assistant was calling. A pipe had broken, and the kitchen was flooding fast.
“Just another manic day,” Amanda muttered as she hurried off to investigate.
2
It was ten minutes after six when Amanda got off the bus in front of her apartment building and dashed inside. After collecting her mail, she hurried up the stairs and jammed her key into the lock. Jordan was picking her up in less than an hour, and she had a hundred things to do to get ready.
Since he’d told her the evening would be a casual one, she selected gray woolen slacks and a cobalt-blue blouse. After a hasty shower, she put on fresh makeup and quickly wove her hair into a French braid.
Gershwin stood on the back of the toilet the whole time she was getting ready, lamenting the treatment of house cats in contemporary America. She had just given him his dinner when a knock sounded at the door.
Amanda’s heart lurched like a dizzy ballet dancer, and she wondered why she was being such a ninny. Jordan Richards was just a man, nothing more. And so what if he was successful? She met a lot of men like him in her line of work.
She opened the door and knew a moment of pure exaltation at the look of approval in Jordan’s eyes.
“Hi,” he said. He wore jeans and a sport shirt, and his hands rested comfortably in the pockets of his brown leather jacket. “You look fantastic.”
Amanda thought he looked pretty fantastic himself, but she didn’t say so because she’d used up that week’s quota of bold moves by talking about James in front of people she didn’t know. “Thanks,” she said, stepping back to admit him.
