Too Hot To Handle

3

DEAR ALEX:

What a gorgeous bouquet! Thanks so much. It was far too large for my apartment, so I put it on the table in the front hall where all the tenants in my building could enjoy it.

It was very nice to see you again. Unfortunately, I won’t be in town next weekend. I have a new client in…

Sarah halted, her pen poised, thinking of unlikely, out-of-the-way places Alex wouldn’t dream of suggesting he join her. It wasn’t easy. In spite of his wealth and sophistication, Alex had his own interesting way of fitting in everywhere, seemingly as relaxed at the small round table in Aunt Becki’s cottage or eating hamburgers in a greasy spoon as he was in the massive dining room of Eleanor Asquith’s Bel Air mansion.

It was called noblesse oblige, or you could call it plain good manners.

Extensive travel with his mother and her entourage had made him flexible. He could handle cold weather, hot weather and rainy season in the tropics, mountains, deserts and forests.

One thing he hated was inconvenience. Waiting. He liked his trains to run on time, so to speak. So…where could you almost not get to from San Francisco? Someplace you might not choose to go in the first place.

It struck her that Dubuque, Iowa, might be the perfect solution. A quick Internet check showed her that although Dubuque wasn’t impossible to reach from San Francisco, it could not be reached very directly.

…in Dubuque, Iowa, and must make a trip there on Friday. Perhaps another time.

Again, thank you for the magnificent bouquet.

Most sincerely,

Sarah

She paused again, then added “Nevins.” Alex would read her message—“shove off” —loud and clear in her formal language and the use of her last name. He liked getting his own way, yes, but he also had an inner dignity that would keep him from pushing.

Not daring to give herself time to think it over, she licked the envelope flap, pounded it down with her fist, slapped on a stamp and raced for the corner mailbox.

She’d waited until morning to decide how to react to Alex’s floral offering, and felt she’d handled it well. As she sauntered back to her building, she saw that a crew had arrived to do their annual maintenance to the carefully preserved slate roof of the nineteenth-century town house.

At least her apartment house was managed by a responsible, sensitive building management firm, quite unlike the skinflints who managed her office building. She paused for a moment to admire the broad, muscled back and spectacular buns of the man who was directing his workers to the back of the building where a scaffolding was already in place. Wouldn’t it be great if she could lure him into her home for a brief interlude before her own workday started?

It was one thing to entertain such a delightful thought, and quite another to emerge from the shower a short time later and see a man’s face looking through her bathroom window.

Sarah opened her mouth to scream. The neighborhood had been plagued by a Peeping Tom in the last few years. Maude, who claimed to have sighted him twice, had warned her to keep her windows closed and locked and her shades down as the scaffolding provided such easy access to all floors of the building, but had Sarah listened? No, and here she was, facing the Village Voyeur himself!

“Whoa!” the man said through the open window, just before her scream emerged.

She clutched her bath sheet tighter and glared at him. “What do you think you’re doing, looking in my…”

All of a sudden she realized she was seeing the front of the very man whose back she’d been admiring earlier. He gave her a broad, brilliant smile and tipped the bill of his cap. “I’m the roofing contractor, ma’am. Don’t mind me. I’m just on my way up.”

His words trailed off as his gaze focused directly on her. The scene took on the misty quality of a romantic movie as she gazed back. Tall, dark, handsome, deeply tanned—and he was a roofing contractor. Perfect, simply perfect.

Before the fantasy ended, they’d made a date to go out for Thai food that very night. By nine o’clock that evening she wished she had remembered to pull the shades down. The roofing contractor might be breathtakingly handsome, but he was not going to become her man-for-the-moment. Not even for a split second. He told terrible jokes terribly, quizzed the waiter relentlessly until he was sure he hadn’t ordered any Thai food that had any Thai seasonings in it, and she had a deep-seated suspicion he’d neglected to mention he was married. His line, delivered in a low, sexy voice while his eyelids drooped in a manner he must have thought was suggestive, was: “How about we head up to your apartment for a quick one before I hit the road to Brooklyn.”

As the word Brooklyn came across the table, Sarah conceded that the misty quality of their accidental morning meeting was entirely due to steam from the shower. “I don’t drink after dinner,” she said, then added, “Tonight’s my treat.” She whipped out her billfold.

“I wasn’t talking drinks, foxy lady, I was talking…”

Foxy lady? Bleah-h-h-h. She knew perfectly well a drink was not the “quick one” he had in mind. She handled the transaction so swiftly, estimating the tip, rounding it off on the high side and paying in cash, that she was off in one direction and he in another before he had time to absorb the situation.

Not that she was giving up on the idea of finding a man. She would demand to have her office windows washed at once or the management company could look for a new tenant.

She said as much to Annie on Monday morning after a frustrating, unproductive weekend. A worried look came over Annie’s face.

“Uh, I’ll tell them that, but it’ll be an empty threat.”

“How so?” She strongly felt the management company owed her a crew of muscled hunks, just for letting the windows go for such a long time.

“You can’t afford to move.”

She knew it, of course, but Annie’s expression told her there were other things she needed to know. In addition to supplementing Jeremy’s design work, Annie kept the Great Graphics! books.

“What’s our financial situation?”

“I don’t know how you’re going to meet the payroll next month.”

“That bad?” Sarah’s other frustrations fled as a sick feeling settled into the pit of her stomach. “Well, for starters, I won’t pay myself. I can manage for a while.”

Macon stuck his head through the doorway. “I can manage for…well, forever, I guess.”

“Oh, Macon,” Sarah said, “I pay you little enough as it is.”

“But you let me keep my consulting business. I’ve been making money working with computers since I was thirteen,” he told her, “and apparently not spending it.” He frowned, as if he were wondering what on earth other people did with their money. “Except on more computer equipment.”

“We can take it a month at a time,” Annie said, giving the printout of her spreadsheet a steel-eyed gaze. “If you two can forgo salaries next month, I’ll lean on the Zweig Company for the money they still owe us, and if that doesn’t do it, we can hit Ray and Jeremy up for the next month.” She gave Sarah an apologetic look. “Rachel and I are both living right on the edge as it is.”

“We will not ‘hit up’ anybody else,” Sarah said. “I’ve got to get out there and drum up more business.” She didn’t miss the sidelong glance that passed between Macon and Annie. They already had all the work they could do, but the jobs were small ones with a low-profit margin. She was in deep trouble, and at the moment, lacked the necessary backbone to get herself out of it.

IT SEEMED NOTHING SHORT of a miracle to learn that the window-washers had arrived at the office building. Sarah found it particularly annoying to pick up the telephone just as she was looking over the crew and find Alex on the other end of the line.

Rachel was a wonderful office manager and general factotum, but the announcement, “Guy on the phone wants to talk to you about some work,” was not the sort of briefing one needed before speaking with the enemy.

“Sarah. Hello.”

Sarah took a deep breath. He must have lied to Rachel, and she wasn’t going to let him get away with it.

“Alex.” Well done. She was as cool as a mint Lifesaver. “Did I pick up on the wrong line? Rachel said a potential client was calling.”

“That’s me. Alex Emerson, potential client.”

She blinked. “Oh. Well. What can I do for you?” Or to you, you scum on a picture postcard English pond.

“Actually, the reason I’ve been so persistent about dinner,” Alex said, “is that I have a project I want to talk to you about.”

He’d said the magic word. “A project?”

“Yes. My promotional materials. I don’t like the product I’m getting now. I’ve told the ad agency to contract the work to somebody different, but I’ve been asking around myself, too, and somebody mentioned your name. Said he’d been happy with your work.”

“Who?”

“Si Harper. The guy at Super Shuttle. That’s the new airline that runs shuttles from New York to…”

“I know Si. I know what Super Shuttle does.” She hoped he hadn’t heard her gasp. How had he found out she did Super Shuttle’s work?

“Carol, my person here, tells me I can take the company jet as far as the Midway Airport…”

She hadn’t been thinking. Of course he would have his own plane. No place on earth was too inconvenient for Alex to reach.

“…but I can’t land it in Cedar Rapids. The private strip is closed for construction. So I’ll take a taxi to O’Hare, get on a United shuttle to Cedar Rapids, then rent a car and drive up to Dubuque.”

When he mentioned O’Hare, Sarah felt tempted. As a hub of air travel for the continental United States, Chicago’s O’Hare was a wonderfully chancy airport. An electrical storm on either coast and O’Hare came to a standstill. If she had a thousand dollars for each person she knew personally who’d had to spend a night in that airport, she’d have the down payment for a two-bedroom apartment. She relished the image of Alex stretched out on waiting-room seats, only half-covered by a scratchy gray airline blanket, a thread of mozzarella from his dinner—a slice of cold pizza—hanging from the corner of his mouth.

That was the other thing Alex hated—the loss of his dignity.

But Alex would consume a slice of cold pizza in the same graceful way he did everything else, without drooling, and if he absolutely had to sleep, he’d do it sitting up. Without snoring. Besides, with her luck, he’d probably arrive in Dubuque without incident, only to find out she was a liar.

“I’ve cancelled the trip to Dubuque,” she admitted. A brainstorm struck. “I convinced the customer there was really no need for a face-to-face meeting. We can handle everything fine by phone and e-mail.” She warmed to her theme. “Just as I can handle your account, if you’re serious about needing to have some work done.”

In the brief silence that ensued she imagined she could hear Alex thinking. Instead, she heard, “Forget Dubuque, Carol,” and then, “Oh, I’m very serious. But the design firm our ad agency has been using has the same attitude you just described, and I’m more of a hands-on person.”

How well she knew that. His hands-on policy had awakened her to sensations she could never have dreamed of, to pure, hot, insistent…

“I was hoping your firm might take a more personal approach to your clients.”

“We do, of course,” Sarah said. “We want to be sensitive to our clients’ perceived needs and self-images.” She trailed off, distracted by an odd echo on the line.

“I have very strong feelings about my investors, the companies I invest in and everything that goes out under my name. I require periodic face-to-face discussions, whether I’m buying or selling. It means a lot of travel, but it’s worth it,” he said.

“I see.”

“I’d insist on an initial meeting at the very least.”

“What’s your print budget?” It was a rude question, but he was gaming her, dangling a carrot in front of her nose, and she needed to know how sweet that carrot was before she bit into it.

“A million and a quarter, give or take.”

With great difficulty Sarah kept herself from saying, “Dollars?”

Now she faced a new distraction. Jeremy crept into her doorway and mouthed, “Take it!” Ray moved up behind Jeremy, nodding vigorously. Annie thrust herself between them, giving Sarah a pleading expression complete with a Virgin-Mary-clasped-hands pose. There wasn’t room in the doorway for anyone else. Rachel had clearly left the line open and the speakerphone on, and the whole staff was begging her not to turn down a plum contract simply because she was too chicken to see Alex Emerson again.

They did work for peanuts. Their deal with her contained no definition of overtime and therefore no compensation for it. And still, cutting every corner, the firm was barely keeping its head out of the minestrone.

She owed them this contract. And to get it, she’d have to get it on Alex’s terms. The customer, damn him, was always right.

“I suppose one meeting would…”

Victory signals came at her from the doorway. She frowned.

“…get the basics worked out.”

A hand, either Macon’s or Rachel’s, shot through the doorway to wave a small American flag with a white hanky of peace tied to it.

“Saturday, then. At seven.”

She hung up slowly. The breeze from the collective sigh of relief that emerged from the doorway lifted the tendrils of hair off her suddenly hot forehead.

SARAH EYED HERSELF in the full-length mirror in her bedroom, turned to the left, then to the right. After, she picked up a hand mirror to get a rear view.

This wasn’t the right dress, either. It would be the fourth dress she’d brought home and taken back.

She knew she wasn’t behaving rationally, but self-awareness was a long way off from behavior modification and she didn’t have time to travel that road.

Curse Alex and his British correctness. Of course, he would insist on picking her up and bringing her home. She could protest until she turned blue that the modern woman was perfectly capable of getting herself to and from a restaurant, but her reasoning wouldn’t work on Alex.

So she’d volunteered to make dessert.

Now why the hell had she done that?

Because Alex would insist on paying for dinner, and the only way she could strike back was to offer dessert, coffee and brandy.

Because Alex had a legendary sweet tooth.

Because by the sheerest coincidence, desserts were the only cooking she did, and she’d gotten pretty good at doing them.

Sarah buried her face in her hands. Dusk was falling on this Thursday night in early June. The wedge of sky she could glimpse through her bedroom window was such a thrilling mix of terracotta pink and orange, it seemed irreverent to think of it as merely pollution from a million cars crossing bridges, threading through tunnels on their way to the New Jersey and Connecticut suburbs.

That’s what she’d like to do—leave town. Instead, she had to get back to Loehmann’s before it closed, return the dress, then scour the grocery and specialty stores for dessert ingredients.

The cold lump in her stomach grew larger. Which dessert? Crème brûlée for sure.

A memory drifted through her mind, sharp, clear and bittersweet—Aunt Becki making crème brûlée for her lover, just in case he might be able to come to dinner that night.

“What do you think, sweetheart?” she could hear Aunt Becki saying in her sweet, laughing voice. “Have I got it? A little browner, do you think, or is it just right?”

Todd had not been able to break free from his family and come to dinner that night. “It was good practice,” Aunt Becki declared, as cheerful as ever, although her glow had dimmed a little. “Let’s try it out on Alex when he picks you up tonight. See what he thinks. He probably knows exactly what a crème brûlée should be.”

Alex had licked his lips over the crunchy broiled brown-sugar top and the creamy interior of the dessert and pronounced it to be the model against which all other crème brûlée should be measured. At Aunt Becki’s insistence, he’d taken one home to Burleigh, the butler who’d been like a father to fatherless Alex, a man who’d seen, heard, experienced and eaten everything in his position with the formidable Eleanor Asquith, Lady Forsythe at the time Sarah met her.

She wished she’d asked Alex how Burleigh was.

Slowly her attention returned to the immediate problem. Maybe she didn’t want to remind Alex of the past. Personally, she was hungry for an almond zuger kirsch-torte, layers of fluffy white cake baked with meringue on top and put together with tons of buttercream frosting.

Some people didn’t like cake.

Or a clafoutis. Alex could watch her stir up the batter and pour it over the fruit, and while it baked they could…

Scratch the clafoutis.

Some people didn’t think it was dessert unless it was chocolate. The warm chocolate cake would present the same timing problem as the clafoutis, the timing problem being time alone with Alex. Her fudge pecan pie would cover the chocolate front.

On the other hand, Alex might have developed an allergy to chocolate.

She groaned. First, Loehmann’s.

THE SOUND OF THE BUZZER set Sarah’s heart to pounding painfully. Her hand shook as she picked up the house phone. “It’s Alex,” he said, as if she might not recognize his voice.

What she could do was simply not push the button that unlocked the front door. Then she could go out the back window and down the fire escape, grab a taxi on Sixth Avenue, go to a car rental agency and leave for someplace cool, quiet and Alex-free. Like the Yukon.

“Come on up. Fifth floor,” she heard herself say, then watched herself push the button.

After hanging up, she stared at the phone. Then she heard a knock at the door.

“Sarah.” He was there too soon, filling her living room with his size and strength, with the power he still held over her. “For you.” He handed her an armful of apricot-colored roses with lush, heavy heads still tightly closed.

Sarah cast a nervous glance around the room, noting all its peachy-apricot accents, wondering if he’d known, how he’d known. “Thank you,” she murmured. “They’re beautiful. Just let me…”

She was grateful to have an excuse to flee to the kitchen. She stuck the roses into the biggest container she could find—a crystal ice bucket she’d inherited from Aunt Becki that was large enough to chill champagne for a small party. Taking a deep breath, she went back to Alex.

She found him gazing slowly around her living room with its cream walls, the pale-blue ceiling she’d painted herself. “So this is where you live,” he said. “It looks so much like—”

“Aunt Becki’s cottage,” she interrupted him.

“Yes. I always felt good there.”

The unexpected words stopped her in her nervous, darting tracks, the vase filled with roses still clutched in her hands. “You did?”

“More comfortable than I felt anywhere else.” He reached out a hand and touched the lace that bordered one of the many pillows on the sofa, which was slipcovered in a fabric Aunt Becki herself might have chosen, a faded floral pattern of blues, greens, and apricot colors, similar to those of the roses Alex had given her, against a cream background. Had he remembered? Had he chosen the roses because they reminded him of the past?

She put the roses on a small antique table, forcing herself to speak naturally. “I felt good there, too. When she died, Todd—” She broke off. “Did you ever meet Todd Haynes? Aunt Becki’s—”

“Friend,” Alex said. He hesitated. “Yes. Once. He came to our house for dinner.”

Alex had never told her this. “But not with Aunt Becki, I imagine.” She managed a smile.

Again, he spoke reluctantly, but seemed determined to be honest. “No. With his wife. Haynes produced one of Mother’s movies. Mother and his wife saw each other at industry parties and had become friends.”

Eleanor Asquith must have known about Todd’s long-standing relationship with Becki Langley. Aunt Becki had not merely been a kept woman, but “the other woman” in Eleanor’s eyes. But hadn’t Eleanor Asquith been “the other woman” often enough herself?

This was a business dinner she was having with Alex. It wasn’t in her best interests to start off angry. “I see,” she said. “Well, anyway, Todd insisted on giving me everything that had been hers. I put it in storage, and when I was settled here, I sent for it.”

“It suits the room.”

The rooms of her apartment were tiny but high-ceilinged. This one was a twelve by twelve by twelve-foot box. Aunt Becki’s pretty, feminine things did suit the room, and had made Sarah feel instantly at home, as well.

“It suits you, too.”

For a minute she thought he was about to move toward her. Instead, he glanced out one window at the fire escape, where an exuberance of purple and white petunias bloomed beside pots of geraniums with salmon-colored blossoms. He smiled, and went to the tall, narrow front windows. “The street’s so quiet you’d never know you were in Manhattan,” he said.

“The burglar bars on the house across the street might give you a clue.”

He flashed a different kind of smile at her, and she felt that he was pulling himself back from memories of the past, just as she was. “Who’s the gorgon you’ve got guarding the door down there?”

Gorgon? “Oh, you must have met Maude. Maude Coates.”

“The Maude Coates? Who writes the thrillers?”

“The very same.”

“Damn. I’m reading her latest book. I could’ve gotten her autograph. She scared the hell out of me. Thought I was going to get bitten. I gave her half the roses I was bringing to you as a peace offering.”

“Was Broderick with her?”

“The depressed-looking basset hound?”

“That’s Broderick. Named for Broderick Crawford, not Matthew Broderick. Broderick wouldn’t dream of biting anybody.”

“Wasn’t Broderick I was afraid of.”

Wasn’t Broderick she was afraid of, either. Alex was too handsome in his dark suit, too charming. She had to keep her guard up, have nothing on her mind except getting this contract into her life and Alex out of it.

STAY CALM. DON’T SCARE HER. She was like a bowstring drawn back so tightly that one jostle and the arrow would fly—straight for his chest.

She wore a short black dress with a small white jacket. On her feet, sandals, nothing more than shiny little black straps on skyscraper heels. Her toenails were pink. No stockings. The heat that consumed him just by imagining the small pair of panties she’d be wearing under the silky dress was almost more than he could handle. He wondered if, under that jacket, the dress looked like a slip. Was there anything between it and the small, perfectly shaped breasts he remembered so well?