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CHAPTER TWO (#ub98c4e84-44d0-574b-97fb-54dcb654c4a4)
“WHERE is everyone?” Meg asked as they entered Fieldman’s Furnishings the next day.
Etienne looked around the big, empty office with weak sunlight filtering in through the streaked and dusty windows high overhead. It shone on the mottled blue carpeting that was worn thin in places. There was a crack in one of the walls, and despite the fact that people still worked here, the place smelled of neglect. “I gave them the day off,” he said.
“Excuse me? You did what?” Meg turned to him, her brown eyes open wide. She was wearing some wild red and white thing that hid a lot of her body, but wasn’t camouflage enough to hide the fact that she was shapely and generously curved.
He frowned at her reaction. “I sent them home. With pay,” he clarified. “Don’t worry, Meg. I didn’t turn your friends out without compensating them.”
Meg shook her head. “I didn’t mean that. I wasn’t accusing you of cheating Edie and the others. And I know this is so out of line, but I was just…The company is dying and you sent the workers home? Why would—I’m sorry for asking, but I just don’t understand why you would do that.”
He smiled suddenly. “Meg, see what a great help you’re going to be. Look, you’re already questioning my methods.”
Instantly she looked contrite. A lovely pink crept up from the neckline of her white blouse. “Don’t,” he said suddenly. “There’s no need to be embarrassed about the fact that you’re questioning me. It’s a good thing.”
She frowned. “I’m not embarrassed.”
“You’re blushing.”
“I never blush.”
But she was. And in a very pretty way. The bloom continued to spread, the faint rose accenting the full curve of her cheeks. Etienne raised one brow. “Yes. You’re blushing. If we’re going to work together, we need truth between us.”
Almost as if she couldn’t help herself, Meg reached up and touched her face. The pale, almost indiscernible scar that ran three inches from the corner of her lip toward her ear was now the only part of her face that wasn’t a delightful pink. There was something very…erotic about that small white scar, something that made a man think about placing his lips against that thin line and moving outward, kiss after kiss.
Etienne caught himself again and stopped that train of thought as quickly as he could. What on earth was wrong with him? The woman…Meg wasn’t wearing anything vaguely suggestive. In fact, her clothing looked somewhat sacklike. Her shoes were made for comfort rather than to accentuate her legs. And yet he had been thinking…well never mind what he had been thinking. Or why. He didn’t even want to know about the why. Instead he cleared his throat and flipped on a computer in the still, empty room. The sound of the machine booting up filled the silence. He looked at Meg.
“I wasn’t lying or trying to be coy,” she insisted. “I’ve never been a blusher.”
“Good, then. It’s something new in your life. These next few months are going to be all about new things. Unlike these out-of-date computers.”
“You have a time frame?”
“I have a goal. Not only to bring back your business in the United States but to expand beyond your shores. There’s a small business expo in Paris two months from now. Make an impression there and international business will flow in. That’s our target date to be up and running again full speed.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you? Two months seems so short. Not that I’m doubting you can do it. You’re the genius of La Défense.”
Etienne snapped to attention at Meg’s mention of Paris’s business district. “The genius of La Défense? And you surmised that how?”
“Um…you told me?” She looked up at him without guile, those big brown eyes as innocent as a newborn lamb’s, even though he knew he had never told her the nickname given to him by the French press.
“Meg…” he drawled.
An instant expression of guilt shadowed her countenance. “All right, I looked you up on the Internet. I’m sorry if I intruded. I just…I don’t really know you and I wanted to know if you were for real.”
He wanted to smile at her forlorn tone. He felt very real staring at her right now, but…the Internet?
The urge to smile disappeared. He was from an old, well-known family. There had been articles written about Louisa’s death. But that wasn’t something he felt he could discuss. Despite the three years that had passed, the pain, the guilt was still like a flame inside him. “And what did you discover?” he asked, careful to keep his tone casual.
“I discovered that…you are real,” she said simply, which said so much and so little at the same time. She hesitated. Then she took a deep breath. “So, can even a genius like you pull Fieldman’s together in only two months? What can we accomplish in such a short time?”
Etienne felt a huge sense of relief. He wouldn’t be asked to discuss Louisa. He wouldn’t have to give evasive answers to mask his pain. If Meg had chanced upon that story, and she most likely had, she wasn’t saying anything. For several long seconds he studied her carefully. She gazed back at him directly, unflinchingly. Only the way her fingers fidgeted with the cloth of her dress gave away even a hint of discomfort. All right, she probably knew his history. But she was ignoring it. He would, too, and he would be grateful. In other circumstances, he would be kissing her feet.
Which called up an image of something he knew he could never pursue.
“What can we do?” he asked, skirting all the issues except the only one he would allow himself. “Many things. When a company begins to fail, it’s not enough to simply go back to the old ways. And yes, better accounting practices will help, but they won’t get Fieldman’s the attention we need to pique customers’ curiosity. What we need are some quick, very visible, highly touted changes. We want a spark to intrigue the customers and fire up the employees. We want something to attract publicity.”
He caught a smile on her face. “What?”
“I assume your changes won’t be like the ones Alan made,” she said.
Etienne laughed. “Well, I was thinking bunny rabbits. With carrots. Very eye-catching.”
“Ah, I see you really do need me, after all,” she said. “No bunny rabbits.”
He tried to look wounded. “What do you suggest, then?”
For half a second, she looked self-conscious. Those pretty caramel eyes flew open wide. “All right, you don’t want to go back to what Fieldman’s was doing when Mary was in charge.”
He slowly shook his head. “The world moves on. We have to move with it.” It was a good reminder and more for himself than for Meg. He was a man constantly on the move, and he needed to be that way. There was no way to change the past. All he could do was move away from it.
“Your job takes you all around the world, doesn’t it?”
“I never stop moving. It helps that I’m not married or likely to be. It wouldn’t be fair to ask a woman to put up with a man like me who is never around.”
Which was far more direct than he felt comfortable being, but he had learned that being direct was the only way.
Meg didn’t even blink. In fact she smiled slightly. “I’m not a family woman, either, or likely to get married.”
Which meant something bad had to have happened to her at some point.
“Someday I’ll want children, but since I don’t have them yet, I’m free to spend as much time on the job as necessary.”
Children. Etienne’s heart started thudding. He had once wanted a child.
He didn’t speak. Memories rushed at him. A conversation with his wife. She hadn’t wanted the baby. He had. But she was the one who lost her life due to the rigors of pregnancy and an undetected heart defect.
And he was obviously not hiding his reaction to her declaration well. Meg was looking at him with what could only be called concern in her expression. Etienne shook off the past. It was done. It was over. And he was making Meg nervous. That wasn’t acceptable.
“But we don’t need to spend time talking about my plans,” she said quickly. “We need to discuss the company and…I understand what you said, but we don’t want to toss out what worked completely, do we?” she asked. “That is, isn’t my knowledge of what was working part of why you hired me?”
She licked her lips nervously. Etienne’s pulse jumped. His body reacted…the way any man’s body would react. And suddenly, standing here staring at those berry lips, he wondered for a second why he had hired Meg. She wasn’t pretty in the common way at all—some might even call her plain—but there was something…some light in her eyes, something very full about those lips that made her very tempting, and temptation was never allowed to be a part of his dying business reclamation projects. Yet, here he was examining Meg as if he intended to do something that was out of the question.
He nearly swore. No doubt he’d simply been depriving himself of female companionship for too long. He was clearly going to have to watch himself around Meg Leighton. And she was still waiting for an answer to her question.
“Yes, you have the keys to what made Fieldman’s work before. Let’s take that and give it a twist.”
“Something classic but fresh,” she said.
“Fresh and enticing,” he agreed.
“Maybe…” Her whole face lit up.
“What?” He watched her, but she suddenly looked self-conscious.
“No. Maybe I’d better let that idea sink in and think it through a bit, let it play out and mature before I share it. I have an awful and longstanding tendency to jump in and do things without waiting for common sense to kick in, to react or speak without thinking. Bad habit.”
“Not always.”
She gave him a look that said he was clearly wrong. “For me it is. That’s part of what I want you to help me with. How to think on my feet without saying or doing something tremendously terrible or embarrassing.”
“What kinds of things have you said and done?”
She shook her head. “No. I am so not sharing my most embarrassing moments. It’s bad enough that they happened in the first place. I’ve taken numerous classes to improve myself. I’ve tried to learn how to ski, how to skate, how to enter a room, and I know the basic concepts. I’ve even been taught how to fall gracefully several times, but when it comes down to the wire, I’m still the person who steps on the banana peel and ends up in an embarrassing heap with absolutely no grace. Or the one who yells something loud and embarrassing just as everyone in the room stops talking. I live in fear that someone will catch me on a camera phone and I’ll end up on the Internet as one of those ‘most watched videos.’” She threw out one hand in a gesture of remorse. “You don’t happen to carry a camera phone around with you, do you?”
Etienne couldn’t stop himself from chuckling. “Yes, I do, but I would never use it against you, Meg. That would be trop…I mean too unfeeling of me.”
She gave him another look. “Ah, so you’re a gentleman. Not the type of man I meet every day.” Which made him wonder what her experiences with men had been. “So…about that idea for the company…How do you feel about leather?”
Etienne nearly choked. Ah, her so-called habit of saying something without thinking about how her audience would hear it…now he understood a little bit. Still, in this case, it was a charming addition to her personality. This woman was a delight, was all he could think of. Despite her original reluctance to work with him, she had clearly jumped in with both feet now that she’d made up her mind to commit. “Leather?” he asked, reminding himself that she was talking about furniture, not something kinky. “I like leather. What man doesn’t?”
“All right. I’ll keep that in mind. Tomorrow I’ll bring you ten ideas.”
“Of ways to use leather creatively.”
They had been moving deeper into the office, but now she stopped and faced him. Though her eyes only met his chin, she tipped her head back and gave him the kind of look a woman gave to an errant schoolboy. “Are you making fun of me, Etienne?”
No. He was enjoying her. Immensely. In a quite improper way that he knew darn well he was going to regret. Later. “I might be,” he conceded. “But I mean it only in the very best way. I think you’re unique. I like the way your thought process works.” And that, he suddenly realized was the key to Fieldman’s future success. There was always a key. Finding it was the challenge. And here she was, standing right beside him. The woman who was going to make the difference in a way that hadn’t occurred to him earlier.
“What?” she said. “Why are you looking at me that way?”
“What way?”
“I don’t know. As if…I don’t know. You’re smiling. A lot. And I know I didn’t even say anything remotely funny or weird. At least not this time. Did I—have I torn something again?” She looked down at her blouse, fussing with the material, clearly embarrassed.
Oh, yes, Meg was definitely it. But he didn’t want to frighten her or to make her think that he was looking at her in a suggestive way. That wasn’t fair. He was very careful not to even hint that he was offering things he wasn’t offering or that he wanted things he couldn’t be allowed to want.
“It’s nothing overt you’ve done. I’ve just come up with a new part of our plan, the most important part.”
“Wonderful. What is it?”
“You.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand. I’m already here.”
“No, not like this. Fieldman’s needs to be fresh, different, exciting. You asked me yesterday to take you on as a student of sorts. So, let’s do that. In a major way. Let’s make you the new face of Fieldman’s.”
If he had taken her to a horror movie, Etienne could not have surprised a more shocked and terrified look on Meg’s face. “That is so not going to happen,” she said. “That would be such a mistake.”
“No. It’s not a mistake. Meg, look at me.”
She looked, and those big beautiful, terrified eyes nearly tore his heart out.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, but she looked as if she didn’t believe him. “I wouldn’t do that. Believe me, I’ve hurt people in my life and it’s not the kind of thing I want to repeat. Ever.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking me. You want me to stand up in front of people.”
“I do. I want you to be the new symbol for the company.”
“I can’t do that. I have ‘being the center of attention’ issues.”
Somehow he refrained from smiling. She really was frightened.
“Any other kinds of issues?”
“Trust.”
“I have trust issues, too.”
“You do?”
“Yes. I try not to ask people to trust me, and I’m not going to do that now, but I will tell you this. I won’t send you out to speak or have your picture taken unless I’m right there with you. I’ll be there to guide you and to shield you. And if anything happens that you don’t like, I’ll whisk you right out of there.”
“Even if it hurts Fieldman’s?”
“Even then.”
She took a deep breath. “And you think this will help the company.”
“There aren’t any guarantees, Meg, but I know this much. A personality always gets more attention than a piece of furniture ever will. Mary was, I understand, a personality, and half the reason people bought from Fieldman’s. We need someone to take her place, and you fit the bill perfectly, especially since you were Mary’s protégée. If Fieldman’s is going to rise again and to succeed, you’re the best bet we have.”
She hesitated, but only for a second. “All right, if you think it will help the people here, I’m in. I’ll consider it my duty.”
Etienne nearly groaned at her choice of words. “Don’t do it for duty. That’s something you do because you feel you have to. It robs you of your control and your joy and in the end may leave you with nothing.” Which he knew better than anyone.
And which was obviously saying too much. Meg Leighton was studying him carefully, possibly seeing damaged parts of his soul that he didn’t want exposed.
“Consider your spokesperson role to be part of our agreement. On the job training,” he suggested.
She blew out a breath. “Okay, all right. Yes. So…what do we do now?”
“We get started.”
“On me?”
Such guileless eyes. No wonder she had trust issues. Some wolf could waltz right past her defenses and hurt her. But it wouldn’t be him.
“Let’s start with the building first,” he said. “Show me everything you know.”
