Hardly Working

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My heartfelt thanks to Yule Heibel and her family, my Canadian and Italian families, Elizabeth Jennings, Jean Fanelli Grundy, Marie Silvietti, Helen Holobov and Kathryn Lye.

For Brock Tebbutt and Joe Average

Contents

November

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

December

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

January

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

February

Epilogue

Chapter One

Friday

“So… Dinah. The big THREE OH,” said Jake.

My mind hurtled back from the dreamy place where I’d been idling. I slammed my hand down on the mouse. The Ian Trutch page closed and up came the brochure I was supposed to be working on for the important December fund-raiser. The event would also be an opportunity to award the year’s most generous donors and present the pilot project we’d been trying to push through for the last two years, the ecological aquatic waste treatment system, affectionately nicknamed “Mudpuddle” by those of us at Green World International.

“Hi, Jake.” I swiveled around to look at him.

Jake Ramsey, my boss and the office’s token male, hovered, filling up the doorway to my tiny office. He hid a nervous laugh with a nervous cough. “So…you’ve got your great big thirtieth coming up in a couple of days. How are you going to celebrate?”

“Shhh, keep it down, Jake.”

“What? What’s the problem?”

“That three oh number. I didn’t expect it so soon.”

“Life’s like that. You just turn around and there you are. Older.”

“Terrific, Jake. So who finked about my birthday?”

“Ida.”

“I should’ve known.” As small, sweet and wrinkled as a hundred-year-old fig, Ida worked the switchboard at the front desk. She was the employee nobody had been able to force into retirement. Well past the average employee’s spontaneous combustion age, she was very good at her job. Irreplaceable really. She took half her pay under the table in the form of gossip. It was, she said, excellent collateral.

“Well, don’t tell anybody else,” I whispered. “I was planning on staying twenty-nine for another couple of years.”

Probably too late. If Ida knew then everybody knew.

Jake looked expectant. “Big party planned, eh? You have to have a big party.” His reformed alcoholic’s eyes brightened with longing.

His own thirtieth birthday had sailed by a couple of decades ago, leaving him with a pear-shaped torso and an ex-wife who blamed him for everything from her lost youth to the hole in the ozone layer.

He often let us know that his only passion these days was his La-Z-Boy recliner positioned in front of the sports network. He was immune to women, he said, and no woman would ever trick him again. But Green World International was an office full of women. We weren’t fooled.

“I don’t know about a party. The trouble is,” I said, “my birthday falls on the Sunday, and we’ve got Mr. Important CEO from the East coming in on Monday morning, haven’t we?”

“We sure do. Ian Trutch,” sighed Jake, his features clouding over.

Ian Trutch was higher management. In our office, all higher management was referred to as The Dark Side.

The sudden announcement from the main branch about Ian Trutch had come just the week before and everybody was on edge. Trutch would be arriving in Vancouver to do a little monitoring and streamlining around our office. In other words, there might be a massacre.

As soon as Jake had let the Trutch bomb drop, I’d gone into a state of panic. I wanted to keep my job. The downside of working here was the pitiful wages, cramped ugly offices, weird volunteers, and all that unpaid overtime. The upside was the altruistic goals and the great gang of fellow party anima…uh…employees.

So I immediately Googled Ian Trutch, then called the scene of his last slaughter to try to get information on him. When I finally got Moira, my connection in Ottawa, on the phone, she nearly had to whisper. “Listen Dinah, he’s ruthless…last month there were four more empty desks…lower-level employees. You think they’re gonna touch The Dark Side? No way. I don’t even know if I should be talking to you…Big Brother might be watching…and he has cronies… I’ve gotta tell you what happened to a woman here…uh-oh…one of his cronies has just come sleazing in…gotta go.” The phone slammed down. I sat there a little stunned. I knew Moira was overworked and probably needed a vacation—bad. But four empty desks were still four empty desks.

So maybe he was ruthless. And if his Web-site picture was any indication, he was also first-class material.

Ian Trutch was beautiful.

The beautiful enemy.

Green World International’s in-house magazine had run a long article on him. It stated that Ian Trutch had been hired by GWI to bring the organization into the twenty-first century, that his aim was to make GWI into a smooth-running and profitable machine.

Profitable and machine were two words that did not fit Green World’s profile at all. We were an environmental agency, for crying out loud.

GWI’s current interest was biomimicry, which studies the way nature provides the model for a cradle-to-cradle, rather than cradle-to-grave, use of natural capital, or the planet’s natural resources. Our mission was to redefine “sustainable development,” make it less of an oxymoron, promote biodiversity as a business model, and the idea that a certain kind of agriculture was killing the planet, and that the flora and fauna of a forest or an ocean did not need human intervention or human witnesses to be a success as a forest or an ocean. We were trying to talk world leaders and policy makers into letting the planet’s last few resources teach us all how to live.

Simple, really.

If you happened to be God.

My job was in PR and the creative department, finding as many ways as possible to pry donations out of tight corporate fists. And I was good. My degree in environmental studies enabled me to scare the wits and then the money out of people, because the world picture I painted for the future was scientifically backed up and not pretty. Not pretty at all. And let’s face it. Having a world-famous scientist for a mother may have helped a little. The biggest problem was making that first contact with the right people.

And now there was the whole water business. In the last year since Jake had been promoting the Mudpuddle model to our international counterparts, the office had gone crazy. We’d moved to bigger premises. They were still shabby as hell but bigger. Communications with the other Green World offices, in Moscow, Barcelona, Rome and Tokyo, had been flying back and forth.

And the best part of all? We’d finally found Tod Villiers, the superdonor we’d been seeking. The government was going to match his donation one hundred per cent and it was a sum that ran close to half a million.

Tod was a venture capitalist in his late forties. He was fat, sleek, bald, olive-skinned, and had the most unfortunate acne-scarred skin and bulging pale-brown eyes. But the bottom line was that he loved the project, recognized its worth, and wanted to invest. He’d written a check that amounted to a teaser. So lately, I had to keep his interest inflated until the second and largest part of his donation was processed and his contribution awarded at the fund-raiser in the spring. Because although we’d also received the final check, it was post-dated. I wasn’t worried though.

It did mean that all of a sudden, the spotlight was on us in a way it never had been before. We had begun paying fanatically close attention to anything that had to do with H2O. National Bog Days and World Water Forums were suddenly big on our agenda. Never again would we take a long deep bath, use the dishwasher, jump into a swimming pool, or run the water too long while brushing our teeth, without feeling horribly guilty.

Green World was experiencing a huge growth spurt and this, according to head office, was why Trutch was being sent in. To do a little strategic pruning before the branches went wild.

“Listen, Jake,” I said, “when this Trutch guy arrives on Monday morning, send somebody else out to get the coffee and donuts. Weren’t we going to be democratic about the Joe jobs? Send Penelope.”

Jake perked up and asked, “How are things working out with Penelope anyway?”

A deep, languid female voice broke into our conversation. “Jake, darling, the next time you decide to hire someone who’s good at languages, make sure they’re old enough to drink alcohol and get legally laid first.”

It was Cleo Jardine, GWI’s Eco-Links Officer, and social co-conspirator to yours truly. Cleo is part Barbadian and part Montrealer, a wild-haired woman with coloring that makes you think of a maraschino cherry dipped in bitter chocolate.

She draped a slim dark arm around Jake’s neck and half whispered in his ear, “Little Penelope has a trunk full of brand-new pretty little white things for her wedding night, Jake. She’s got it all figured out. The perfect pristine little life. In any other situation I might find it charming.”

“Huh?” Jake looked slightly startled. Then he laughed. “I know she’s young, but she’s very talented.”

It wasn’t the young and talented part that bothered us.

Well.

Maybe it did.

Just a tiny bit.

“The kind of talent we need in this office,” said Cleo, “pees standing up. And if you had to hire another female, Jake, why couldn’t you have hired somebody with a face like a pit bull but a nice disposition?”

“I couldn’t find a pit bull with her qualifications,” said Jake.

The new talent, Penelope Longhurst, was a very smart twenty-two-year-old. She’d graduated from Bennington College, summa cum laude, at the age of twenty. She was very pretty, too. She had big green eyes and shiny honey-blond hair. But if her necklines got any higher they were going to choke her. She was a self-proclaimed virgin and proponent of the New Modesty and Moralism Movement.

Every office should have one.

Since Penelope had come to work at GWI three months ago, we could sense her getting more superior by the minute, filling up with smugness. Any day, she was going to burst, and purity and self-righteousness would fly all over the office.

“It’s fear,” Cleo observed. “Penelope’s just afraid. She’s sensitive. You can tell she is. She just needs to get over that hump. No pun intended.”

So it was sheer synchronicity that when I left Jake and Cleo and went down the hall to the ladies’ room to splash cold water on my face and fix my makeup in the mirror, that Penelope, Miss Virgin Islands herself, happened to burst out of one of the cubicles in that moment.

She moved with maniacally nervous energy. I couldn’t help thinking that a few orgasm-induced endorphins would have done her good.

For crying out loud.

They would have done all of us good.

She planted herself in front of the mirror next to me and fiddled with her buttons and hair and the lace at the top of her collar. Her fingers wouldn’t stay still. They skittered all over her clothes like policeman’s hands performing a search.

“Hey, Penny. Something wrong?”

She shook her head and huffed.

“So how’s it going?” Bathroom mirror etiquette requires that one must at least make an attempt at friendly chitchat with fellow colleagues. I popped the cap off my new tube of cinnamon burgundy lipstick.

Penelope’s expression was strange. She looked at me as if I were applying cyanide to my lips.

“Like this color?” I asked.

She stared at my mirror image and remained motionless.

I kept it up. “I figure you never know when some gorgeous specimen might come into the office, right?”

Her mouth became small and brittle.

I’m not a person who gives up easily. “Have to be prepared for any eventuality, I always say.”

Now you would think, with Penelope being younger than everyone else, and new to the job, that she might try to get along?

Be nice?

Speak when spoken to?

Even suck up a little?

But do you know what she said? She fixed me, one superior eyebrow still raised, and said, “You know what you are, Dinah? You’re a man-eater.”

I stared at her.

A man-eater?

A man-eater was something out of a forties movie.

An extinct animal.

And furthermore, Penelope knew nothing about me.

There was nothing to know.

Well, almost nothing.

In some ways my life was so narrow you could have shoved it through a mail slot. I was just plain old Dinah Nichols who three years ago had left her ex-fiancé, Mike, over on Vancouver Island, and exchanged her cozy and familiar little homespun angst for the big cold new angst in the city of Vancouver. I had been badly in love with Mike. Sloppily, sweetly, desperately, wetly, thrillingly, forever in love with Mike. And then I had one of those revelations about him. It came as a lightning flash from the overworked heavens. In twenty-four hours I had my bags packed and was ready to leave for Vancouver. I didn’t even give Mike the satisfaction of a fight.

During my last three years in the city, I’d been operating on a tight budget, both financially and emotionally. I had a pared-down existence of work, home, home, work, apart from my occasional clubbing forays with Cleo and my next-door neighbor, Joey Sessna. Joey was the only man in my life. I’d spotted him at one of the GWI fund-raisers a few weeks after I started working there. He was the one guest who didn’t fit the profile for that occasion (millionaire and over ninety). Joey was in his late twenties and remorselessly gay (he’s quite appetizing in the smoldering Eastern European overgrown schoolboy sort of way, with his straight dirty-blond hair, his pale blue eyes, and his pearly but crooked teeth). The day I first set eyes on him, he had snuck into the event through a side door and was shoveling hors d’oeuvres onto his plate with the kind of style and abandon you only see in starving actors. I managed to wind my way over to him before anybody else could kick him out, and by the time the fund-raiser was over, Joey had performed his entire repertoire of imitations and given me a lead on the apartment I have now.

I tried to play things up. If I wasn’t always having as much fun as I’d planned to, I at least tried to give the impression of somebody who was having more than her share of good times.

Whereas Penelope, as far as I could tell, had everything, and could have been having an authentic blast. She was fully financed by her wealthy parents, owned an Audi, credit cards, and could book airplane tickets whenever she felt like it. There were rumors of a nerdy, virginal boyfriend back East, and more rumors that he would pay a visit in the near future, no doubt to indulge in some heavy petting and assure himself that his Penelope hadn’t been accidentally ravished by one of the office Alphas.

Through my lunchroom eavesdropping I knew that Penelope, before university, had been to a Swiss finishing school and it was there that one of the worst moments of her life occurred.

Penelope confided to Lisa that in the school’s elegant dining hall, she was served rabbit on Crown Derbyshire plates. Nobody had been aware that those same rabbits had been her best friends, her furry confidantes, and that every night she’d gone down to the rabbit hutches to tell them all her woes (until they became dinner, of course).

She’d had no other friends at school. Penelope wasn’t like the other girls, that bunch of hoydens who slid down the drainpipe to hitch a ride into town to meet boys and neck and grope and have unprotected sex in the back of a car.

To hear Penelope going on about it, the Swiss finishing school had been torture to a soundtrack of cuckoo clocks. She’d watched from the sidelines as the other girls acted out their fantasies all around her, experimented with their commandment-busting sexuality, destroyed their best years through carelessness.

How tempted I was to cut in and challenge Penelope. I wanted to ask, “When in history have the teenage years ever been the best years for anybody? The teenage years suck.”

And then there was her mortification with the results of her schoolmates’ adventures. At first it was the smaller things, the broken hearts and first disillusionments, and then came the bigger things, the STDs, the pregnancies and designer drugs.

But Penelope had kept her head above water while the other girls had been drowning. She’d kept her corner of the room tidy and her virginity intact. She was able to replace her furry friends with books in other languages. They hadn’t been hard to tackle at all. Everybody in Switzerland spoke at least four languages. And she had a taste for music, poetry and literature. In the lunchroom, I’d overheard her droning on endlessly to Lisa about her favorite books, Le Grand Meaulnes for its hopelessness and romanticism, and Remembrance of Things Past for the lost world she would have preferred to this modern one.

I had the impression that Penelope was like a new-age geisha, cultivated in arts and languages and femininity, putting everything on offer except the sex.

As for me, well, perhaps I’d overdone the whole business of single girl fending for herself. Because there had been offers of help from my mother but I didn’t take them up. Our family’s wealth had been dwindling for quite a while.

I stared back at Penelope’s reflection in the mirror. Maneater. It was a silly, outdated thing to say. I had to think about it for a second. Was it a backhanded compliment? Penelope must have made a mistake. She’d mixed me up with Cleo. Fearless Cleo Jardine, who saw the entire masculine population as her own private buffet.

I said to Penelope’s reflection, “You’ve got the wrong person.”

Penelope replied, “No I haven’t. I know about you.”

“I have a Green World question for you, Penelope. How do you say home, work, work, home in Russian?”

“Dom, robotya, robotya, dom.”

“As in robot?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Penelope, for that depressing bit of information. Now I’m going to say this to you once, and you better believe me. My life is dom, robotya, robotya, dom.”

“I meant what I said. I know about you. You’re a man-eater.”

I didn’t know how to defend myself. I’d grown up on the edge of a boreal rain forest and been homeschooled with a small motley crew of children, the progeny of artists, scientists, and freethinkers seeking an alternative existence. Now that Penelope was standing in front of me, I regretted never having been involved in a schoolyard scrap.

How could I tell her that it had been ages since I’d devoured a man, that I’d barely nibbled on one in over a year? Sure, I was hungry enough, but since breaking up with Mike, men had been getting harder and harder to digest.

Okay, I admit I may have given her the wrong impression. Accidentally on purpose. It had been my idea to get Ida at the switchboard downstairs to give the Code Blue signal any time a hot guy entered the building. And perhaps that could seem a little predatory to the uninitiated. Or the undesperate. But every woman in the Green World International office except Penelope put their shoes back on, slabbed on the cover stick, fumigated themselves with their favorite perfume and got ready to scope when Ida gave the Code Blue.

And I confess that it had been my idea to provoke Penelope a little once we understood her position regarding the opposite sex. She had no position. Not in bed, anyway.

Maybe she was still thinking of the day I got Joey to pick me up for lunch. I stayed away for two hours, then came back to the office with a rose in my hand, a little chardonnay dabbed behind my ears, and my dress on inside out. I stood in front of Penelope’s desk for at least five minutes, so that she couldn’t possibly have missed those great seam bindings.

She’d avoided me for the rest of the day. She hadn’t understood that it was just one of our little office tests.

To see if she had a funny bone.

But the test had resulted negative.

And really, one ersatz male morsel during the lunch hour doesn’t qualify a woman as a man-eater.

Sunday

Here it was, two hours and twenty-five minutes to the official end of my thirtieth birthday and I was still brooding on Penelope’s words, wishing they were a bit true. I was still having trouble imagining me, Dinah Nichols, as a man-eater. Penelope clearly needed to get a life.

Cleo and Joey were late. We were supposed to be having a birthday drink together at my place. I’d even dusted.

Thirty was so big, so critical, so depressing now that I was minus a boyfriend, that I decided maybe it was something I would just brush off lightly.

Okay.

Deny completely.

It didn’t matter, I told myself, that my closest friends had better things to do on my birthday. I’d just stay at home, holed up by myself and meditate on my singleness.

Okay, to be fair, both of them were very busy.

The office had sent Cleo down to the Urban Waste Congress in Seattle. Joey had gone down with her to do an agent audition there and they’d be driving back together.

Joey’s film and TV roles were mostly very, very small and nonspeaking. He’d been lucky. He’d worked a lot over the last few years in sci-fi and police drama series. In the course of his career, he’d been slimed to death, machine-gunned in the street, set on fire, pushed off the side of a building, had his eyeballs drilled by Triassic creepers, had himself disintegrated into fine white talcum powder, and been sucked violently up a tube.

Ever the perfectionist, trying to improve himself in his craft, Joey often begged me to critique his performances. What can you say to a guy who has basically been fodder for extra-terrestrials? “Excellent leg work. Fantastic squirming, Joey. You really look like you’re being mashed to a pulp.”

I made some popcorn to stave off the gloom and settled back into the couch to wait for my friends. Some irrational part of me expected a sign that I’d reached that scary thirty benchmark, like an earthquake or a total eclipse of the sun. But it had been a very quiet Sunday, filled with vital activities like scouring the rough skin off my feet and giving my hair a hot oil treatment. By evening, I’d slumped onto the couch to wait for Joey’s immortal three seconds in an ancient X-Files rerun. I was going to have to resign myself to a life of solitude and strawberry mousse.

Then the phone rang.

I jumped up from the couch too fast and tripped over the plastic bowl on the floor, scattering salty buttered popcorn all over the Persian carpet. It wasn’t too late to hope. Someone had remembered after all.

Some ex-boyfriend from my past?

Or Mike—my ex-true love?

Or an ex-boyfriend-to-be from my future? Some guy I’d met at a fund-raiser then forgotten about, who might be a friend of a friend of a friend and had gone to a lot of trouble to get my number?

Or Thomas? My therapist? For all the money I was paying him, he was supposed to be making me feel better, wasn’t he? And a little birthday call would make me feel better.

And then I remembered.