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No doubt about it. Trouble. Capital T.
“This way.” She opened the door to her office and ushered him inside, gesturing at a guest chair. He sat and she went to her chair behind the beautiful desk he’d had built just for her. “Now,” she said, sounding brisk and businesslike and feeling anything but. “What’s up?”
He studied her for a moment before he spoke. She felt his gaze as if it were a physical touch. At last he said, “You’ve done an amazing job with this project. I didn’t really believe you’d succeed in doing what you’ve done here—not in two and a half weeks, anyway.”
She couldn’t resist reminding him, “I believe you chose the time frame.”
He gave her one of those regal nods of his. “I did. I like setting impossible goals. They make people try harder. And you did.” Another regal nod, then he said, “Well done.”
“Thank you.” So. He’d only taken her aside to give her a pat on the back for the work she’d done.
That was good. She was pleased. He wasn’t putting any moves on her and she wanted it that way.
Too bad she felt so let down.
He asked, “Aren’t you glad now that I wouldn’t leave you alone until you agreed to go for it?”
To her, the question had more than one level of meaning. She reminded herself not to go to those other levels. “Yes, I am. It’s worked out beautifully.”
He slid a hand into the inside pocket of his suit coat and produced a red leather jeweler’s box embossed with gold.
Another gift.
Well. So much for a purely professional pat on the back. Damn him. She had told him not to—
“Don’t,” he said, as if she had spoken her objections aloud—which she hadn’t. Yet.
“Fletcher, I asked you not to—”
He raised his free hand for silence as he set the red box on her desk. “Open it.”
“No.”
Her refusal didn’t faze him in the least. “All right. I’ll open it for you.” He took the box again, raised the lid and set it down facing her so she could see what waited inside.
A watch. White gold or maybe platinum, with a black alligator band. A small, oh-so-tasteful row of diamonds running down either side of the square face and the single word Cartier beneath the upper numerals. A go-anywhere watch. Gorgeous and simple and absolutely perfect.
And very, very expensive.
He explained, “It’s engraved on the back with the date and ‘KinderWay at Impresario’—and don’t look at me like that. Yes, it’s a gift. A strictly professional one. To commemorate a job much more than well done.”
Strictly professional. Did she believe him?
Yes. No. She didn’t know.
She did know that the watch was beautiful and she had done a hell of a job in the past weeks and … yes, she wanted it.
What did that make her? A professional justifiably proud of her latest accomplishment? Or a woman finally saying yes to a man’s slow, relentless seduction?
Or both?
The really scary thing was that it didn’t matter what it made her. Whether this gift was strictly professional or not, she was keeping it.
Her doubts fell away. She knew at that moment that she would have to break up with Danny. And that someday soon Fletcher would ask her out to dinner again. And when he did, her answer would be yes.
No qualifications. And no restrictions. Simply, completely, yes.
She picked up the box and removed the watch, turning it over, reading the inscription, which was just what he’d said it would be. “Thank you,” she said for the second time. “It’s an important day and now I have something to remember it by.” She laid it over her wrist and caught the tiny diamond-studded buckle to clasp it.
“Let me….”
She started to refuse—and then stopped herself. What good would refusing him such a small thing do her? In the end, she would say yes to everything. She understood that now. And her intuition told her that the man across from her had always known, from that first day when she met with him in his office. He had always known … and he had been right.
She extended her wrist to him.
He stood. It took him only a moment to hook the delicate pin into the buckle. He held on a few seconds longer than necessary. “It looks good.”
She met his eyes without wavering as those now-familiar sensations of heat and longing danced beneath her skin. “Yes. Thank you again.”
With obvious reluctance, he released her. “And I have to go.” He waited for her to rise and come around the desk. When she did, he fell in behind her. It was only a few steps to the door.
She felt him acutely at her back. She wanted him. She’d tried to deny it, but the wanting did not go away. So she was yielding to it, finally, her capitulation at last complete—so much so that she almost stopped in midstep and turned to him and …
No.
Not here. And not now.
She had come to the point where she realized what was bound to happen, where she even accepted it. But not today, not in her office. And most important, not until she’d talked to Danny and told him goodbye.
Still, she simply couldn’t resist turning back to Fletcher as she opened the door to the outer room. “I am glad,” she conceded. “That you kept after me. That it’s worked out so well.”
He took a long time to answer—sizzling, delicious seconds during which heat shimmered in their shared glance. “I’m pleased, too. Very much so,” he said at last, and they both knew he referred to more than KinderWay.
She leaned back against the open door and allowed it to happen—for one more sweet, seductive moment before he left her, to get lost in his beautiful, dangerous eyes.
Then, with a slow sigh, she turned back toward the outer room. And blinked in guilty horror at what she saw.
Danny.
He was sitting on the sofa against the wall opposite Rae-Anne’s desk with a heart-shaped box of candy in his lap.
“You have a visitor,” said RaeAnne.
Danny took the box of candy in his beefy hand and stood. “Hey. Got home early.” His soft, dark eyes took it all in: Cleo standing stunned in the doorway and the tall, commanding, beautifully dressed man behind her. “Thought I’d drop by and see how things are goin’.”
Chapter Six
Danny understood in an instant what Cleo had refused to accept for nearly a month. He kept it calm and low-key, shaking Fletcher’s hand when Cleo introduced them, even smiling that sweet, open smile of his. The two men exchanged a few quick words of greeting and then Fletcher took his leave.
Danny followed her into her office, but he didn’t sit down. The minute she shut the door, he set the box of candy on the credenza and said, “I think we really gotta talk.”
“Of course. Danny, I—”
He put up a hand. “Not here, okay?” She swallowed and nodded. “I’ll be over tonight. Eight o’clock.”
What could she say? Nothing. Except, “I’ll be there, Danny.”
“All right, then.” He left without another word.
She took the box of candy out to RaeAnne and told her to share it with the staff. Cleo didn’t eat a single piece herself. She couldn’t.
Her doorbell rang at eight exactly. Danny looked so somber when she let him in.
She offered, “Are you hungry? I could …” She didn’t know how to finish. His expression broke her heart. It was infinitely gentle and much too wise.
“I didn’t come here to eat and I think you know that.”
So she led him to the living room. He took the easy chair and she perched on the edge of the couch.
He got right down to it. “Since that night I came for dinner and saw that little blue box—the one you wouldn’t open—I been getting the picture, getting the feeling there was someone else. I kind of figured it might be the guy who sent you that box, might be Fletcher Bravo—and it is, isn’t it? I knew it today, when you two came out of your office….” He seemed to run out of words. In the silence he just looked at her, waiting for her to answer him.
She felt about two inches tall. “Danny, I swear to you, I never went behind your back. Not with anyone. I would never do something like that.”
“I know you wouldn’t.” He gave her the kindest, most tender little smile and she wanted to cry then, just bawl her eyes out. But she held the tears back. After all, she wasn’t the injured party here. “You’re not that kind of woman,” he said. “And I know that you loved me—or at least, you thought that you did.”
“Danny, no. I did love …” She cut herself off. She couldn’t go on, not with the way he was looking at her, both knowing and disbelieving at once.
He shook his head. “I always knew that you wanted to love me, that I’m the kind of guy you think will be good for you, the kind of guy you’re gonna feel safe with. The kind of guy who’s nothing like the high rollers and big shots who messed your mom over so many times. And you know what? That was enough for me, to be the one you could count on, to be the guy you could trust, until … well, until now. Until I saw you today with a guy you’re crazy for.”
She longed to argue, to stand up and say, No, Danny. I’m not crazy for Fletcher. Not in the least.
Too bad she couldn’t get her mouth around such an enormous lie.
Danny said, “You been pulling away from me for weeks. You been tired every time I touch you. You know that you have.”
“I know. I’m so sorry….” She felt like a total creep, too awful to look him straight in the eye. She dropped her gaze.
He got up from his chair and came to stand over her. “Hey.”
She tipped her head back and made herself meet those kind eyes and realized that it wouldn’t be right, wouldn’t be fair, to keep saying how sorry she was. Sorry just didn’t cut it. She swallowed and sat up a little bit straighter and said with real regret, “I’ll miss you, Danny.”
“And I’ll miss you. But Cleo, the way you looked at that guy …”
She swallowed. Hard. “Yeah. I know.”
He pointed at her wrist. “He give you that watch?”
“Yes. Today.”
“And you took it.”
“Yes, Danny. I did.”
“I think you’re in love with him. Are you?”
“Oh, Danny …”
“You know what? Don’t tell me. I don’t need to know.”
And that was it. There was nothing more to say except, “I’d better get your things….”
He shoved his hands in his pockets, lifted a shoulder in a half shrug. “Yeah. Okay.”
So she got up and went to collect his spare razor and toothbrush from the bathroom, his blue windbreaker from the hall closet. “I think this is all of it.” She handed everything over.
“Thanks.”
She opened the door for him and closed it quietly as soon as he had stepped through.
And then she returned to the living room and sat down on the sofa and couldn’t believe what she had just done. She’d said goodbye to Danny, her best friend, the man she had been so certain would one day be her husband and the father of her children. Danny, the exact right man for her, good and honest and true.
She sat there alone on her sofa and wondered which was worse: that she’d lost the sweetest guy she’d ever known, that she was actually relieved that Danny ended it—or that Danny was right. Somehow she’d gone and let herself fall for Fletcher Bravo, a man who was everything she’d sworn never to fall for.
It occurred to her that maybe she was more like her mother than she’d ever let herself admit. Now there was a seriously scary idea. It wasn’t as if all the hard lessons had faded from her mind. Uh-uh, they were with her, still fresh and vivid and full of pain.
She could close her eyes and see Lolita now—at three in the morning, standing in the doorway of the bedroom they’d always had to share since there was never money to “waste” on a two-bedroom place. Every spare penny had to go to headshots and building their portfolios, to hair and makeup and killer clothes and the endless series of dance lessons.
Oh, yeah. Cleo could still see her mother now: Lolita Bliss, standing in the bedroom doorway, the light from the hallway behind her falling on her platinum-blond hair, making a halo effect around her shadowed face….
“Baby, you up?” Lolita whispered—a stage whisper loud enough to wake Cleo if by chance she had been sleeping.
Cleo dragged herself to a sitting position, squinting against the bright hallway light. “Yeah, Mom. What?”
And her mother came dancing in, smelling of Joyperfume and Max Factor and something else—something musky and thick: sex, though Cleo hadn’t realized it then.
Lolita dropped with a happy giggle to the edge of the bed. “Oh, darling. It’s happened. It’s happened at last. I’ve met him. My own real-life Prince Charming. He’s rich and he’s so handsome and he can’t take his eyes off me—not to mention his hands.” Another throaty giggle escaped her, followed by along, dreamy sigh. “Oh, honey, he loves me already.” Lolita held out her arms, wiggling her fingers. “Come on. Come here.” And Cleo moved closer, into the warmth of her mother’s supple, sculpted body and those mingled smells of perfume and makeup and sex. Lolita hugged her so tight and whispered against her hair. “Cleopatra Bliss, our lives are about to change big-time. You’d better believe it.” Her mother’s long, lean dancer’s arm squeezed her harder. “Say you do.”
“I do, mom,” Cleo lied.
“Say it again. Please …”
“Mom, I do.”
Her mother’s lips brushed her hair. “Oh, sweetheart, he’ll make everything good for us. Just wait. You’ll see….”
But their lives didn’t change. And the men came and went, each of them breaking her mother’s heart when he left her.
And Cleo grew up dreaming of an ordinary life—a life where her kids ate three square meals a day, where they went to bed at a decent hour and woke up at daybreak and Cleo cooked them all a nutritious breakfast. In Cleo’s dreams, she lived in a real house and everybody had her own bedroom and Cleo’s husband was a good man, a regular, down-to-earth guy, both steady and true.
