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“No. I won’t.” She pushed her hair back behind her ear and looked at him sideways. “This has been coming for a long time. You know that. I’ve made it clear, I think. And now any decision has really been taken out of my hands. I have no choice. And neither do you.” She smiled tremulously. “You do realize what this means, don’t you?”
“No,” he said stubbornly, avoiding her gaze, looking restlessly into the parking lot. “What?”
“I’m not going to be working for you anymore, Carter. I warned you.”
His head swung around and he stared at her, stunned. She was making it sound as though it was final. He’d been prepared for a short break in her presence at work, but nothing permanent.
Oh, sure, she’d been threatening to quit, and even written up resignations to taunt him with, but he’d never taken her seriously. He had always been sure that she valued their collaboration as much as he did. Now he was beginning to realize she was talking about a complete abandonment of her responsibilities. That just couldn’t be. What was he going to do without her?
“What are you talking about?” he asked, his voice low, his gaze intense.
She took a shaky breath. “I promised my sister I would take care of her children.”
He nodded tersely. “Of course you did. And we’ll spare no expense in finding the best child care—”
“No.” She shook her head adamantly. “I’m not going to leave them with strangers. I’m going to move into Meg’s house and be with those children night and day until their mother and father are well enough to come home to them.”
“We’ll see how long you last,” he said, managing to look more confident than he felt.
Shaking her head, she gave an exasperated sigh and said, “Carter, read my lips. I quit!”
Their gazes held for a long moment. Then she turned on her heel and left him.
Carter watched her walk toward where the car was parked, and for a moment, he couldn’t move.
This was not possible. There had to be another way. Why he couldn’t think of something right now, he wasn’t sure. Maybe he was too jet-lagged. Maybe he was just too unprepared for such a thing as was happening. In any case, his mind was fuzzy and his stomach was growling and he didn’t have a clue how he was going to get her back in the office. He only knew he was going to do it. Because he had to.
Amy lay very still, staring at what she could see of the ceiling. There it was again. A scratching sound. She knew what it was, what it had to be. But that didn’t make it any less chilling to hear.
Scratch, scratch. Scuffle, scuffle. Fred was riffling through the closed closet. And she knew it was going to be her job to catch him.
The children had told her about Fred the day before.
“He’s gone!” Scamp had cried, his eyes huge and filled with horror. “I on’y left the door open fer a little to get him water and he go’d away!” He’d clutched her around the knees, tears threatening. “Aun’ Amy, don’ let that mean ole cat get him!”
Fred was a white mouse. A very pretty little mouse, from what she’d heard. But Fred was on the lam.
Amy shuddered. She didn’t have a lot of experience at catching little white mice. A nice trap would have been her preference. But this was a beloved pet, so traps were out. She was going to have to catch him carefully, so as not to hurt him. How the heck was she supposed to do that?
Sighing, she rolled onto her side and closed her eyes, firmly determined to get a little more sleep before another day broke over her like a giant ocean wave. That was what the day before had felt like—surfing on the big ones at Makaha Beach—something way beyond her experience and capabilities.
Taking care of children wasn’t as simple as it seemed. Oh, she’d known it wouldn’t be all that easy. But she hadn’t realized caring for them would leave her drained, both physically and emotionally, and wondering how most mothers did it.
But women did do it, and most did it very well. In bygone ages, they did it without modern plumbing and washing machines and fast-food restaurants. Could you imagine? Not even Sesame Street. What she had was a cakewalk compared to what most women had gone through over the ages.
But that only made her feel even worse. If she was having this much trouble when it was so much easier than it had ever been in history, what did that say about her?
Oh, grow up, she told herself impatiently, rejecting the impulse toward self-pity. After all, she’d only been doing this for a little more than twenty-four hours now.
She’d raced over and collected the children from where they were being kept that first night. Paul Hanford, the man Meg had been trying to get her interested in, was the neighbor taking care of them. She’d taken the steps up onto his front porch slowly, feeling a lot of trepidation, anxious that the children wouldn’t want to go with her, and that she would have a hard time getting them to accept her as their interim parent. After all, the last time they’d seen her they hadn’t actually been brimming with friendliness toward her.
But when the chips were down, they had surprised her.
“Aun’ Amy!” Scamp had cried, peering though his wispy bangs of white-blond hair when she’d appeared in the doorway of Paul’s house. “Deedee, it’s Aun’ Amy!”
And the two children had run to her, with Scamp actually throwing his arms around her knees with so much force he’d just about knocked her down.
“I guess blood really is thicker than water,” she’d murmured to herself as she went down on one knee to embrace them both.
A warm feeling of affection curled through her, along with a strong sense of empathy for two young ones who had to be scared and very confused about what had happened to their parents. She must look like a comfortingly familiar face under these circumstances. And luckily, she wasn’t dressed to kill—in a business sense—as she had been days before. They’d at least recognized her for who she was.
“Hey, I just talked to your mother,” she told them, brushing Scamp’s hair back off his forehead and noticing, suddenly, how much like her sister he looked.
Pictures in albums saved from the childhood she and Meg had shared portrayed a little girl whose face was a very close model for this young boy in front of her. That made her want to hug him again.
“Your mother sends you her love and she promises to be home just as soon as she can.”
“Does she have a boo-boo?” Scamp asked solemnly.
Amy nodded, blinking quickly to hold back the tears that threatened to come again. “She has a bunch of boo-boos. And so does your daddy. The doctor is going to fix them right up, though. So don’t you worry.”
Scamp thought about that for a moment. “I got a boo-boo on my arm,” he offered at last, showing her the scab. “Is that like Daddy’s?”
Amy hesitated, then smiled at him. “Sort of,” she allowed. “Just a little worse.”
Scamp nodded wisely, showing he understood. “Are you gonna take care of us, Aun’ Amy?” he asked her, his blue eyes hopeful.
“Of course,” she told them, smiling warmly. “I’ll stay with you until your mother comes home. I promise.”
Deedee sighed happily and cuddled in close, while Scamp pulled back, seeming to suddenly remember that he had his young male pride to consider.
“I’m really glad you’re going to be able to do this,” Paul told her, smiling down at the picture she made with the little dark-haired girl in her arms. “I’ve got a sales trip to Omaha tomorrow and I won’t be back for three or four days. Otherwise, I would have been glad to take over for Tim and Meg.”
“Oh, no,” Amy said quickly. “They’re my family. I’ll take care of them.” She hugged Deedee closer, then put her on her little feet. “Run get your things, kids. I’m going to take you home.”
She rose, waiting for the children to leave the room before saying quietly to Paul, “I really haven’t heard all the details yet. Where were they when the accident happened? And where were Meg and Tim going? Do you know?”
Paul nodded. He was a pleasant-looking man with slightly thinning blond hair and a nice smile. “They were going to lunch to celebrate Tim’s promotion. Did you know his law firm just made him a partner?”
“No,” she said softly, feeling again a sense of having been woefully inattentive to what was going on in her sister’s life. “How great for him.” She swallowed. “So the kids were at home?”
“Yes. Cheryl Park, an older lady from down the street, was sitting with them. But she had to get home, so I took over and brought them over here.”
“Thank you so much,” she said earnestly, holding out a hand to shake his. “I—we all appreciate it. You’ve been a big help.”
“Any time,” he said, holding her hand a little too long and beaming at her significantly. “As soon as I get back from Omaha, I’ll be able to help a lot more.”
Her smile wavered as she witnessed the intensity of his and she pulled her hand away.
“Yes,” she said quickly. “Well…” She turned, looking toward where the baby slept in a travel chair. “I guess I’d better get them home. It must be way past their bedtime by now.”
“Yes, of course.” He looked pleased with something and she wasn’t sure why.
Deedee and Scamp came running up, ready to go home. Amy helped Deedee into her sweater.
“’Bye, Pooky,” Scamp called back at the huge orange-colored cat sitting on a pillow in the far corner of the room. “See ya tomorrow.”
“’Bye, ’bye,” Deedee said, copying her brother and waving at the animal.
The cat blinked its golden eyes and lashed its tiger-striped tail and didn’t say a thing.
“I’ll come with you,” Paul offered. “I’ll help you carry the baby, help you get the other two to bed.” He gave Amy a comforting smile. “You’ll need help, all right. They are a handful.”
“Are they?” Suddenly her confidence began to show some wear around the edges. Was she going to be up to this job? She’d never taken care of children before, never even baby-sat as a teenager. She was always too busy entering competitions and running for class office to have time for things like that.
And she hadn’t visited with Meg and her crew often enough to get a feel for it. Whenever she was over, Meg was a whirlwind of activity, usually ordering Amy just to sit and talk to her, tell her everything about what it was like to live in the fast-paced business world.
“Oh, sure,” Paul said happily as he headed out on the porch, baby in tow. “They’re not bad kids, mind you, but they are very, very active. But don’t worry. You’ll get the hang of it right away.”
“Will I?” she had whispered to herself as she followed with the older children. “And what happens if I don’t?”
Snapping out of her reverie, Amy willed herself to drift off to sleep. She knew she’d need all her energy to face another day.
Chapter Three
You’ll get the hang of it, Amy told herself encouragingly as she watched the morning sun begin to form a light pattern on the bedroom wall. Just give it some time.
But there was no more time—the baby was stirring. She could hear the little murmurs that would soon grow into a full-throated cry. For just a moment she longed for her usual mornings, awakening to her clock radio, lingering over coffee and the newspaper, dressing in something sharp and business-like and arriving at the office in time to get a morning glance, along with a cynical comment or two, from a suave and debonair Carter.
Carter. She felt an ache of regret that twisted inside her. Instead of that grown-up, sophisticated way to start her day, she had to share a bedroom with a noisy white mouse. There had been a time when she’d dreamed of sharing such a room with Carter.
But the baby’s noises were getting more insistent. No time for nostalgia. Sighing, she threw back the covers and rolled out of bed. Time to start the day.
“Carter, we really have to get the final numbers on the Milan estimate. They’ve been calling all week and I put them off because you were in France, but they know you’re back and…”
Carter looked up from the papers he’d been staring at and frowned at Delia, his secretary. Middle-aged and motherly, she ran the office with a fine efficiency and attention to detail; she liked her boss a lot, but didn’t necessarily approve of everything he did.
“I don’t have those numbers,” he told her. “Pendleton was working on those.”
“I’ve looked through her desk, but I can’t find them.” Delia waited expectantly, her large brown eyes earnest.
He hesitated, then shrugged impatiently. “Give her a call,” he suggested.
Delia set her lips and put her hands on her hips. “Mr. James, I will not bother her with office business. She doesn’t work here anymore. We have to do this without her.”
Carter stared out across the room at the desk where his administrative associate was supposed to be. There was an interloper sitting in her chair. A short, eager young woman with a head of bouncing red curls sat looking through files where Pendleton ought to be. He had an impulse to growl like a guard dog seeing an intruder, but he reined it in and managed to speak calmly to his secretary.
“I’ll work on the Milan figures later,” he told Delia. He held up a piece of onionskin-thin paper. “Right now I need someone to interpret what this letter from the Lee Group in Singapore is all about.”
“Well, give it to Martha. If she’s going to be your associate, she’s going to have to learn to do these things.”
He gazed at Delia as though she’d advised him to call in a palm reader.
“She won’t have a clue,” he told her scornfully. “Pendleton was the only one who ever knew what these screwballs were saying.”
Delia shrugged. “She’ll have to learn sometime. And you’re going to have to teach her.”
He groaned, almost writhing in his chair.
“You taught Amy,” Delia reminded him sternly. “She didn’t know anything at first, either.”
“Maybe not,” he rumbled. “But she had an instinct for the business like no one I’d ever seen before. I’ll never find anyone else like her.”
Delia threw up her hands. “You are resistant to change, aren’t you?”
Change? Was that what he was resistant to? He scowled at the woman. What was she so cheery about, anyway? She was going to miss Pendleton, too. He couldn’t believe she thought this Martha person was a fitting replacement any more than he did.
“Oh, she’ll do fine, in time,” Delia assured him as though she’d read his mind. She turned to leave. “Give her a chance,” she flung back over her shoulder.
He didn’t want to give her a chance. He wanted Pendleton back. He wanted to look out across the room and see her sleek blond head bent over a problem, see her jump up in excitement when she’d figured out an answer, see her striding toward his desk with a look of triumph on her beautiful lips…Where the hell was she, anyway?
Looking out at where she ought to be, he felt something painful in his chest. “Gas pain,” he told himself hopefully. “I’ll get over it.” But he knew better.
The day seemed to drag. Even sparring with his nemesis in Finance, Gary Brown, tight-fisted holder of the travel advance purse strings, didn’t perk him up much. He spent an inordinate amount of time staring at the telephone and thinking of different things he needed to say to Pendleton. But he couldn’t call her. That would be like…well, like admitting defeat or something.
Or admitting that you need her, said a little voice in his head.
But he’d already admitted that. In fact, he’d pretty much taken out billboards to make sure she got the message. So why not call her? Why not?
And then Martha, his new associate, was coming toward his desk, a look of eager expectation on her cute little face. She was so young, so earnest, so…so un-Pendleton.
“Mr. James,” she said brightly, her smile fixed. “I need to find a file on land prices in Australia. It’s listed in the file index but it’s not where it’s supposed to be.”
Ignoring the smile, he frowned at her. “We were just using that file recently. Have you checked the copy room? Someone might have left it in the copy machine.”
“That was the very first place I looked.”
His frown began to fade. “Have you looked through the desk?”
“Yes, sir. Twice.”
Carter leaned back in his chair. He glanced out at where Delia usually sat. Her desk was empty. A faint smile began to play at the corners of his wide mouth.
“I guess we’ll have to call Pendleton,” he said slowly. “I can’t see what else we can do.” He gave his new associate the first genuine smile she’d ever seen from him. “But there’s no need for you to bother about it. You just go on back and do some typing or something.” He sat up straight in his chair and flexed his shoulders. “I’ll make the call.”
Martha blinked at him uncertainly, then quickly went back to her desk. Carter stared at the telephone for a long moment, anticipating, then reached for it.
Amy felt like a woman under siege. If yesterday had been difficult, today was impossible. It had started out badly and just gotten worse.
