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“Find out if they know anything at all about her. Does she come here often? Work in this building? If nothing else, find out if anyone saw which way she went.”
“Yes, sir,” Miss Harriman said, and began jabbing numbers on the phone with the pencil eraser.
“Oh, and if the coffee shop doesn’t have any answers, try the newsstand in the lobby.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And if that doesn’t pan out, you might go down and see what you can learn from Henry, the fellow who gives the shoe shines.”
“I will, sir. Whatever you say.”
“Find her and there’s a big bonus in it for you, Miss Harriman.” He wrapped his knuckles on her desk and pivoted to head into his own expansive office.
“It always comes down to money with you, doesn’t it?” Baxter practically nipped at his heels through the door, their footsteps dramatically hushed by the plush carpet as they entered the private sanctum of Clark’s immense business domain.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Baxter,” Clark said, rolling the miniature baby bootie in his pocket between his thumb and forefinger.
“You’ve seen some woman, undoubtedly the object of your next conquest—”
“Conquest?” Clark smirked to himself at the outdated and ridiculous term. “You make it sound like I plan to climb on top of her, plant my flag and claim her as my personal territory.”
“Well, you do, don’t you? All possible sexual metaphors aside—”
“Yes, that’s how I prefer my sexual metaphors, actually. On the side.” Clark plunked down on his chair, the leather sighing as he settled in. He withdrew the small charm that had started the day’s turmoil.
Baxter ignored the joke, which came as no surprise to Clark whatsoever. “When you see anything you want, whether it’s another business or a new opportunity or a person, you’ve come to expect that all you have to do to get what you want is to throw money at it or them or him...or her. And once you’ve got them, you seal the deal with more money. Then you plant your flag, my friend. You plant it deep and you plant it good.”
Clark cocked his eyebrow. “I had no idea my reputation for that kind of thing was so renowned.”
Again, Baxter ignored the innuendo. “In business, you do it with your company name, your emphasis on employee empowerment and your fancy benefits packages.”
“I should be shot.”
“With your friends, you do it with loyalty and generosity, and don’t forget jobs.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“More than one poor sucker who happened to have grown up in your neighborhood or went to college with you or even some kid who used to deliver your paper, you’ve rewarded with a high-paying job and fat expense account, myself included.” Baxter began to pace, his long, gangly legs taking him swiftly from one end of the room to the other. “You do it with charities, too. You buy them equipment and hand out grants. Why, just this week you’re launching a scholarship program at our old university.”
“That? I just want to give back some of the opportunities that helped me succeed. It’s my way of coming full circle, of wrapping things up in a neat little package.” He sat forward in his chair and pressed the buzzer on the office intercom. “Miss Harriman, any luck yet?”
“No, sir, not yet,” the voice crackled back at him.
“Well, buzz me as soon as you find out anything.”
“Yes, sir.”
Where was that girl? How could she have just vanished like that?
“And women, too,” Baxter raved on. “You do it with women. You most certainly do.”
“I can’t help it. I happen to like women.” He sat back in his chair, glanced at Baxter and smiled. “That kind of thing is genetic, they say.”
Baxter didn’t even crack a smile.
Clark didn’t care. His mind was elsewhere—with that girl. He could still see the look of stupefied innocence and outrage in her sparkling eyes, the tinge of red flushed over her peaches-and-cream complexion.
He glanced down at the charm. A baby bootie. A token representing her own child? He thought not. No woman who had become someone’s mother would allow herself to get so easily flustered by a seductive wordplay and a predatory glance by a stranger.
Besides, a mother who’d lost a sentimental token like that would have waited there by the elevators for him to bring it back to her. He’d tried, gotten off at the next floor and come back down, but she’d already taken off. Maybe it didn’t mean as much to her as she wanted him to think. Maybe she’d expected him to offer a large remittance for damage to the trinket and when he did not offer that instantly...
“You’ve got it all figured out with women, too.” Baxter created a flourish with his hand. “You lavish the women in your life with gifts and take them on luxurious trips and pamper and spoil them—”
“The poor dears, and I practically have to force them to accept.”
“And when it’s all over, do they want to scratch your eyes out? Write tell-all books about their horrific experiences? Slap you with palimony lawsuits?”
Clark started to push the intercom button again, then curled his fingers into a fist. Someone had to have seen that girl. Her appearance alone drew enough attention to her to insure that, and the scene she’d made, not to mention her last threat to him...
“No, any woman you’ve tangled with always wants to stay friends. They actually still like you even after you’ve treated them like goddesses and given them their every desire!”
“Imagine that. They must be deluded.”
“Yes, they are, and the sad fact is they don’t even know it.”
“If you were deluded and you knew it, you wouldn’t exactly be deluded, not in the strictest sense, would you?”
“They think they’re happy!”
“But they’re not?”
“No! How could they be? They’ve all been run through the Clark Winstead patented self-integrity shredder.”
Clark frowned. “Which one of my companies makes that one?”
“Make fun if you want. But I’m telling you the truth. Look out this window.” Baxter swiveled Clark’s chair around so that he had a view of the street below. “Any other person would look at all those people there and see the pride and accomplishments, boredom and despair, the little joys and deep-seated depressions that are all part of the human condition.”
Clark gazed at the smudges of color through the rain-speckled glass. She was out there, somewhere. A wounded kitten who thought her claws made her a tiger. How was he going to find her?
“But does Clark Winstead see those things? No, he does not!”
Clark scanned the bustling crowd, wondering if he might be able to pick her out from this distance.
“Clark Winstead sees every human being with a price tag on them.” Baxter straightened up, his neck lengthened, his chin up. He gave his head a shake like a rooster getting ready to crow. “And if he likes what he sees, he has no problem meeting that price to get his way.”
Clark blinked, then twisted his head toward his friend. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that all of us, every employee who takes a frivolous bonus or accepts a bigger salary than they earnestly merit, every woman wearing a piece of jewelry given by you—and not a one of them a wedding or engagement ring in all your thirty-nine years, I might add—”
“The first few of those thirty-nine years they had to settle for candy necklaces, I’m afraid.”
“Every charity that names a Clark Winstead scholarship winner or dedicates a Clark Winstead memorial wing,” Baxter went on with dogged determination to finish, “every friend who takes a handout and company that gets treated to one of your affable takeovers, we’re all walking around with your flag blazing over us—planted right square in our backs—like the proverbial dagger.”
“I’ll have to see if our insurance covers that kind of thing.”
“We all know, deep down, that you’ve got us. We’re bought and paid for and we owe you. As much as we like you, we do owe you. We’ve sold out, and no man—or woman—can be truly happy knowing that about themselves.”
Clark considered that a moment.
“That’s why I think you’ve never married, my friend.”
“I’ve never married—I never intend to marry—because I do not personally believe in the institution. I saw how it destroyed my parents and I want no part of it.” He started to turn his attention back toward the window.
“Had!”
Clark gawked at Baxter.
“You’ve never married, Clark Winstead, ol’ pal, because you know what I just said is true. You know that you could have any woman you want, but you don’t want any woman you could have because in your heart you’d know it was just another sellout. Ironical, isn’t it?”
“What’s that?”
“That good ol’ Clark Winstead is trapped in the same illusion as he’s created for the rest of us. He thinks he’s happy, but because of who he is and what he’s got, he can’t be—”
“Then I’m content in my anguish,” he lied, feeling all but content in his impotence at finding this girl with the wayward charm.
“Ha!”
“What is your point, Baxter? What?” he finally snapped. Baxter had it all wrong about him. He really did bear the scars of a terrible childhood. Watching his parents squabble and then drag him into the middle of the fray made him vow that he would never go through that again. Most of all, he would never put another child through it. To hear his hidden pain made light of on top of the incident with the girl did not put him in a sterling mood. “listening to you, a person might think I’m some kind of devil.”
“Worse.”
“Worse than a devil?”
“Yes, much worse because you’re not just a devil...”
Suddenly, a splash of blue and pink out the window caught his eye, then the outline of an umbrella shaped like a squatty teapot. Her! She was standing there on the street corner, her head bent over her cupped palm.
“...you, Clark Winstead, are the worst kind of devil. You are a decent man.”
“Hold that thought, will you?” Clark stood so fast his chair spun halfway around and slammed against his leg. In two long strides he was at his office door.
“Hey, where are you going?”
Clark grinned and gave the door a mighty push. “Off to corrupt another soul.”
Chapter Two
“Twenty-five, thirty-five, thirty-six...forty-six...” Becky flicked her fingernail through the change in her hand and muttered, “Give me back my charm, that’s what I should have said.”
The wind plastered her thin coat against her back. The umbrella that balanced over her shoulder rustled in the wind. Rain from the flapping awning overhead splashed the back of her neck and made her shiver. She lifted her head, suddenly on alert. People hurried past her as if she did not exist.
In the past five months, she’d grown accustomed to that feeling. But even after that amount of time on her own in the city, she could not accept getting stepped on or having something of hers so blithely whisked away.
That arrogant jerk’s attitude still galled her and if he were here right now she’d probably... The image of him, this virile suit-and-tie man with a supercharged aura of confidence, to-die-for eyes and a quick, wicked grin, filled her mind.
She’d probably stare at him like the big, uncultured goof that she knew in her heart she was, she thought. Her shoulders slumped forward. Maybe her brother had the right idea. Maybe she should go back to Woodbridge, marry a guy like Frankie McWurter and have a bunch of bucktoothed kids with big ears who all looked like their hairy-backed, knuckle-dragging father.
Becky shuddered at her own meanness toward poor ol’ Frankie and at the prospect of marriage to a small-town Lothario. On the other hand, she thought, maybe she’d stay in the city and give finding a job another shot. After all, after a day like today, how much worse could it get?
She inched in farther under the awning, closed her umbrella and propped it against her shin. She narrowed her gaze again over her cluster of coins. “Forty-six plus another twenty-five, that’s—”
Kaching.
“Seventy-one,” a deep masculine voice intoned.
“My missing charm,” she whispered, raising her gaze from the slightly mangled baby bootie to the man who had just dropped it into her palm.
“No, it’s my charm that’s been amiss today.”
Her heart did a little kaching of its own, skipping out an erratic rhythm at this first slow, enthralling look into that man’s eyes up close. “You? You!”
“Me. Me.”
“I looked all over for you in there.” She pointed lamely to the building across the way. “Even got in the very next elevator to try to catch up with you.”
“And I got on the very next one coming down.”
“You did?”
“Of course, what did you think? That I’d tromp on your trinket and then not see that you got it back?”
She had thought exactly that. “Um, no, I—”
“I’m surprised our paths didn’t cross in the building, though. I came right back and looked around for you, but you seemed to have disappeared without a trace. Instead of wasting too much time trying to seek you out, I went up to my office and had my secretary start an all-points search for you.”
“Y-you did?” Wow, she thought, her and her little charm had caused all that?
“I did indeed. She didn’t have any luck, either. Why was that? Did you take the stairs coming back down?”
“No.” She lifted her face and inhaled the smell of rain and exhaust from the street mixed with just a hint of masculine cologne from his expensive overcoat. “I, um, I had no idea where you were headed, so I, kind of, well, I...I pressed every button in the elevator, and when the doors opened, I stuck my head out to see if there was any sign of you.”
“I’m sure that made you very popular with the elevator crowd.”
“Well, when you look slightly unbalanced, people don’t tend to voice their complaints.” She held out her arms a bit, offering herself as evidence.
He took a long, leisurely look at her, not the least bit hesitant in showing how his gaze traveled from the tips of her waterlogged shoes to the top of her haywire hairdo. A subtle smile played over his hard lips at the parts in between. Nothing leering, just a hint of appreciation that carried over into his voice as he said, “I think you look very nicely balanced.”
She giggled. Giggled. That’s a great way to impress a suave man like this, she chided herself.
