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“I understand what you’re doing,” she admitted as they moved slowly toward the front doors of the company. Familiar doors to her, doors that she’d actually seen put up when the building had been redesigned ten years earlier. “The question is, what are you and Mr. Holden doing with LynTech now?”
“Trying to fix it.”
“And is it working?”
“Well, cynic that I am, I wouldn’t be sticking around to throw money down a black hole, would I?”
“And money is the name of the game.”
That brought that laugh, sudden and deep, a rich sound that felt as if it was slipping around her. “You got it,” he said as the traffic inched down the street.
She had never met anyone who could laugh and make her feel like laughing, too. She looked away from him again, and out at the city streets. “So, you’re in it for the long haul?”
“Zane is, but I’m just here until everything’s in place.”
“Then what?” she asked.
“Another challenge,” he said. “There are millions of them out there, it’s just a matter of finding them. But first, I need to get past this, and that means I’ve got a night of work ahead of me, if we ever get out of here.”
“Do you want to park and walk?” she asked.
He laughed again, soft and sensual. She stared very hard up the street, concentrating on the way the Christmas lights danced on the polished finishes of the cars ahead. “Just lock the car and walk away?”
“Why not? It’s like a parking lot out here.”
He motioned ahead. “Once we get past the bus stop, it should move better.”
She glanced up farther and saw the bus stop with a single bench and an overhead protection roof decorated with Christmas garlands. Two people were on the wooden bench, and as they got a bit closer, she recognized one of them as the boy who had come to her rescue in the center. “That’s him,” she said, sitting forward to get a better look at the boy, slouched down on the bench, staring at the ground, his hat on backwards.
“That’s who?”
“The boy from tonight,” she said pointing to him.
The woman sitting by him was thin and dark, with a deep scowl on her face as she spoke to the boy. “I guess that’s his mother with him.” Not a loving mother, that was for sure.
“Poor woman,” Matt muttered.
As they passed by, Brittany was shocked to see the woman slap the boy on his shoulder, and he moved to get away from the blow. He looked at her, his face twisted with anger, but he didn’t move again. “She hit him,” Brittany said. “Stop the car!”
“Stay out of it,” he said as he kept going. She reached for the door handle, but Matt caught her other arm. “No. Don’t do it. You don’t know what’s going on.” He looked back over his shoulder. “And he’s okay. He probably did something that got her crazy.”
They were past him now, and she sank back in the seat, jerking her arm away from Matt’s touch. “How could you just let her do that?”
He slowed the car, pulled out of traffic and stopped. He turned to her, one hand on the steering wheel and one resting on the console. “Okay, what do you suggest we do to stop her?”
She sank back in the seat, resting one arm on the door frame and pressing her other hand to her eyes. “I don’t know. Call the police.”
“And they’d come, take a report, then send them home together where she could really do some damage. She’d be angry and embarrassed and take it out on him.”
She lowered her hand and looked at Matt and hated him for his perfect logic. “Do you think so?”
“I know so. I grew up around that kind of stuff, and you wouldn’t help him if you stepped in right now.”
He moved a bit closer to her as people rushed by outside, carrying bright Christmas parcels and going to their homes. “B.J., the kid is in a situation you can’t change. No one can change it. Leave it alone.”
She swallowed hard. “Just like that?”
He moved slightly, his hand lifting, and this time he touched her cheek, the contact of his fingers lighter than a feather’s kiss, but riveting. “Just like that,” he said in a low voice. “Walk away. You’ll never see him again.”
“You can do that?” she asked.
“I’ve done it all my life, and I’ve survived.” He smiled slightly, a shadow at his lips, and it made her heart lurch. “I’d like you to survive, B. J. Smythe not Smith.”
She’d known him an hour tops, and as he repeated her lie back to her with that smile, she felt her heart sink. It was no secret that he’d like to do away with Brittany Lewis.
Chapter Four
Matt didn’t know why he was doing this, touching her, and experiencing this overwhelming need to fix whatever was “broken.” He wasn’t a rescuer of people. Companies, yes. People, no. He gave them a wide berth, and that’s what he should have been doing with B.J. right then. This whole thing felt awkward and alien to him. And when she moved quickly, turning away from him and breaking that contact, he let her do it.
“I’ll survive,” she said, pushing toward the car door. “I just hope that kid can.”
“He will. He’s tough,” he said, turning from her to look over his left shoulder at the traffic. It had thinned some and he slipped easily out into the road.
“You sound so damn sure,” she said.
He didn’t look back at her. He didn’t want to start that craziness all over again. “I am. He’s a survivor.” He negotiated a lane change and sped up to a normal speed finally. “Now, ask me whatever it is you need to know about the center.”
“If he isn’t going to the center, could he?”
“I meant a change of subjects,” he said.
“I want to know.”
He gripped the steering wheel, smoothing the leather with his hands and wondered why he could still almost feel the silky heat of her skin on his fingertips. “If someone in his family works for LynTech, he can.”
“And if no one in his family works there?”
“Then he can’t, at least until it opens in the new facility where we were. Then it’s going to go public and be available to people working in the neighborhood.”
“For a price?”
“It needs to get some capital to help keep it going. That’s a given.”
“I know, money is the bottom line, even with the kids.”
“If it was up to Lindsey, she’d let all kids in for free, even a kid like that.”
“There you go again. He might be a good kid, just impulsive. A lot of people are impulsive. He’s not about to hot-wire some car and go for a joyride.”
“Give him time.”
“What is it with you pigeon-holing people you don’t even know?”
He glanced at her and was a bit taken back to see a real degree of anger in her face, even with the lights of Christmas touching the sweep of her throat as her chin lifted a bit. This was crazy. He was tired of defending himself to her. “All things being equal, I should be at my place working, and if I hadn’t been kept late waiting for…” His words trailed off and he looked back at the evening streets. “I’m not going down that road.”
“You can say it. If Brittany Lewis hadn’t kept you waiting you’d be doing something exciting like balancing figures.”
He narrowed his eyes on the road, thinking that after meeting B.J. anything would be anticlimactic. “Now I have to figure out how to tell her father she never showed. He’s not going to be a happy camper.”
“Maybe she got held up somewhere?”
“You’re probably right,” he conceded, rerouting his thoughts to something less complicated. Something very simple. “She probably got held up trying to figure out which color lipstick looks best with wedding gowns,” he said, turning toward the middle of the city.
“Why did you bring up wedding gowns?”
“I guess it’s not big news when she dumps another fiancе,” he murmured. “But being a no-show for a job that her father knocked himself out to set up for her seems pretty self-absorbed and petty. She’s probably never worked a day in her life, then her dad gives her a chance to do something productive, and she bolts. She’s probably on her way to some exotic place to lie around in the sun until the urge to work goes away. And her father’s going to feel betrayed and angry and—”
“Her father told you all of this?” she asked, cutting off his rambling dissertation.
“Not verbatim, but it’s obvious. He’s just trying to do something to salvage the situation. He’s her father, for heaven’s sake. How’s he supposed to feel? She’s put him through the wringer, and the poor guy just wants things to be okay.”
She was silent for a moment before saying, “You…you never know. Maybe she just got delayed.”
“Doing what?”
“I don’t know, but I can’t imagine she’d come all this way and not be busy doing something. Paris isn’t just a ‘hop over the pond,’ no matter what Europeans say about it.”
She glanced at him and found him studying her with a tight frown. “How did you know she was in Paris?”
She shrugged, looking away from him. “I must have read it somewhere, or you probably mentioned something about Paris. And…and, it just figures that she’d be on her way. I mean, what would be the point of her making her father even angrier? She has to care about him.”
“That’s up for grabs, but no matter what’s going on, she isn’t here, and with any luck she won’t show up. That would make things simpler all the way around,” he said as they drove on. “There’s so much going on, and I don’t have time to babysit.”
“And you, with your take on kids, you’d be some babysitter,” she muttered.
He shot her a look, but she was still staring out the windows, her hands pressed flat to the purse on her lap. “It wouldn’t be my idea of fun,” he said, turning away from her to look out at the early-evening streets. Then he heard himself admitting a truth he hadn’t expected to say to her. “You have this knack for getting me way off the topic and I’m not sure how you do it.”
“My father never figured it out, either,” she said. “He gets so annoyed when I—” She cut off her own words, then said, “Sorry, I’m doing it again.”
“I wasn’t complaining,” he murmured, and meant it. She kept him on his toes.
“I think it’s because I was brought up to be ‘seen and not heard.’ Look pretty and be quiet. Make a good impression, but don’t ask questions.”
He glanced at her. “You’re an only child?”
“An only child brought up by my dad.”
“And you never gave him any trouble?”
“I wouldn’t say that. I’m no saint.”
“Well, join the crowd,” he murmured.
“You weren’t kidding about joyriding at twelve?”
“I did it from time to time.” Matt concentrated on his driving, instead of on words that were there, words that he’d never said to anyone before. Not even Zane. Yet he was on the verge of telling a woman who was almost a perfect stranger about himself as a twelve-year-old. He stopped himself before he went down that path. Enough was enough. “And we’re off the subject again.”
Gratefully, she let the subject of saints and sinners go. “You’re right. Let’s see,” she murmured as if trying to think of something to ask him. “So, the center, yes. Are you committed to making it work or are you in a wait-and-see position, and you’ll cut your losses if it fails to perform?”
He was taken aback again to hear words of “corporate speak” coming from this woman. “I guess that about sums it up.”
“I should have gone up to take a look at the original center to see how it’s decorated.”
He drove off when the light changed. “It’s done in Mother Goose sort of stuff.” He tried to think, but was having a bit of a hard time focusing when she shifted, sighing softly, and he knew she was looking right at him now. He grasped for what he could remember about the center. “The Big Bad Wolf, Three Little Kittens. Lindsey did most of the decorating herself. She did everything with the original program. And Mr. Lewis was behind her a hundred percent. I think it might have been his idea to begin with, maybe a way of making up for the shortcomings of his own parenting.”
This time there wasn’t a sigh, but a rush of air, and he knew what she was going to say before a word was uttered. So he cut her off at the pass. “Okay, okay,” he said with a chuckle. “I’m sorry. I’m jumping to conclusions.”
“Amen,” she breathed.
He flashed her a look, half expecting a smile, but there wasn’t any humor there. The soft light exposed the cut of her high cheekbones, the fullness of her bottom lip and the anger in her expression. Despite that, her image stirred him. And he realized that he actually owed Brittany Lewis for not showing up, for making him late, for setting up the circumstance for him to meet B.J. But that didn’t mean he had to like the woman.
They were getting close to where B.J. lived, and he turned to concentrate on where he was going. “I suppose you want me to give Brittany Lewis the benefit of the doubt?”
“It wouldn’t hurt.”
“Even if she never shows up?”
“I’d even bet that she’ll show up.”
“Oh, you do, do you?”
“Yes, and I’ll even bet that she’ll be sincere and willing to work.”
“Now, that’s a sucker bet,” he said. “She’ll never show up and even if she does, she’ll be more worried about color coordinating her wardrobe with her office than doing any work.”
“Do you want to make a bet?” she asked.
“How long do I have to wait tomorrow for her to show?”
“What time do you go into the office?”
“Usually around seven, but I’ve got some off-site meetings and won’t be in until ten.”
“Okay, ten it is.”
“Why are you so sure of this?” he asked, his fleeting glance finding her looking at him intently.
“Is it a bet?” she asked, matching a question for a question.
