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“Huh.” Ellie made a face. “You look furious.”
Derrick let out a long breath. “So, Spence.”
“Definitely Spence,” Ellie said with a nod.
Well, they weren’t wrong. Derrick and Spence were brothers and her bosses. But still. “I don’t know how you two are related.”
“We’re actually a lot alike.” Derrick smiled at first but when Abby stood there, not moving, Derrick bit his bottom lip. “But I can see that’s the wrong answer.”
“Did something happen?” Ellie patted an empty space on the bed, inviting Abby farther into the room to take a seat.
Seeing the two of them, with Derrick’s arm resting on the pillows behind Ellie and his fingers slipping into her hair and massaging her neck, struck Abby with the force of a slap. A pang of something...jealousy, regret, longing...moved through her. She couldn’t identify the feeling or grab on to it long enough to assess it. But the idea that she was interrupting did crash on top of her.
She was about to drop the brownies and run when she saw both of their faces. The concern. Derrick was the big boss and he deserved to know Spence hadn’t really done anything wrong. This time.
She shook her head. “Nothing, really. He walked onto my job site unannounced.”
Derrick winced. “Yeah, about that.”
Ellie’s head slowly turned and she pinned Derrick with a you’re-in-trouble glare. “What did you do?”
“With you being on bed rest—”
“Don’t blame me,” Ellie warned.
“Let me try again.” Derrick, the tough, no-nonsense boss who sent employees scurrying, cleared his throat. “Since I can’t be in the office as much as usual right now—”
Ellie’s sigh echoed around the room. “You’re still blaming me.”
They were so cute, so perfectly in sync, that Abby took pity on Derrick. “Let me guess. Spence is overseeing some of the projects now that he’s back in town.”
Derrick closed his eyes for a second before opening them again. Relief poured off him. “Thank you and yes.”
She wasn’t willing to let him all the way off the hook. “Like the one I’m in charge of.”
“The key phrase there is that you are in charge. Spence watching over the project is in line with office procedure. It’s purely a we-need-to-know-what’s-happening check. You know that.”
“That was a lot of words,” Ellie said in a stunned voice.
“I wanted to be clear.”
This time, she rolled her eyes at him. “Uh-huh. You’re sure you’re not doing something else?”
Derrick smiled. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Abby got it. Derrick rarely explained himself. He’d gone into an office-manual description with his answer. That immediately put Abby on edge. The idea of Derrick playing matchmaker or trying to push people together to talk...forget it. That was ridiculous. He wasn’t that great with people, which is why his assistant, Jackson Richards, worked nonstop and everyone ran to him for everything.
It also explained why the entire office celebrated when Derrick fell in love with Ellie. Everyone hoped love would soften him. It had, except for the palpable panic that now hovered around him due to the endangered pregnancy.
Still, shortly after Spence left town, Abby had been promoted. She’d seriously considered turning the offer down out of fear of it being perceived as a payoff to get her to keep quiet about the Jameson men shenanigans. Then she decided she qualified for the position and needed the money because there was no way she was staying at Jameson for long.
She went from assistant to project manager. Now she had a seat at the manager’s table. She didn’t need a full-time babysitter, and certainly not that full-time babysitter. “Spence showed up at a site meeting unannounced.”
“He does have access to your calendar,” Derrick said.
Ellie patted Derrick’s knee where it lay curled on the bed beside her. “I love you but you’re not very good at this.”
Loyalty. Derrick and Spence had it. Abby got that.
“No, it’s fine.” She tried to keep her voice even but knew she failed when Derrick frowned and Ellie’s eyes widened.
“Really?” Ellie snorted. “Because that tone did not sound fine.”
Derrick had stopped massaging Ellie’s neck but he started again. “I think she’s afraid she’ll upset you if she launches into her why-I-hate-Spence speech.”
Ellie waved the concern away as she turned the television from muted to off. “Nope. Jameson family gossip is ridiculously delicious. I’m always happy to hear it.”
Hate Spence. If only. Abby’s life would be so much easier if she did hate Spence. She’d tried. Her mind spun with all the ways he’d failed her. How he hadn’t believed her or let her explain. She could call up a ton of hate for the elder Mr. Jameson and heaps of anger and disappointment for Spence, but that was it. And seeing him again...her normal breathing still hadn’t returned.
She’d heard his deep, rich voice in the hallway at work and ducked into the closest office to avoid him. Then there was his face. That gorgeous face. The straight black hair and striking light brown eyes. He’d been blessed with those extraordinary Jameson genes, including a hint of his Japanese grandmother around the nose and cheeks. Tall, almost six-two with impossibly long legs and a trim waist, Spence was a bit more muscled than Derrick. Spence’s shoulders, and that pronounced collarbone, cried out for kisses.
Not that she noticed.
She was trying really hard not to notice.
With a shake, she forced her mind back to work and the best way to survive being in the same building as Spence. “Well, hopefully it was a one-time thing and I can submit reports or tell Jackson and make Jackson talk to Spence.”
Derrick frowned. “That sounds like an efficient use of office resources.”
“It might keep Spence alive.” Ellie slipped her fingers through Derrick’s as she spoke. “Just saying.”
The gentle touch seemed to spark something in Derrick. He sat up a bit straighter as he looked at Abby. “If it’s a problem to deal with Spence, I’ll switch projects with him. I’ll be the silent Jameson looming in the background on yours.”
As if she could agree to that. Saying yes to the offer suggested she couldn’t handle pressure, and that was not a message Abby wanted to send.
Ellie visibly squeezed his hand. “That’s not really how you run the office, is it?”
“No,” Derrick said.
Abby shrugged. “Sort of.”
For a few seconds, no one spoke. They all looked at each other, back and forth, as the tension rose. Abby wasn’t clear on what was happening. Maybe some sort of unspoken chat between Ellie and Derrick. But Abby did know that the cool room suddenly felt suffocating. Even the cream-colored duvet cover with the tiny blue roses—an addition she would bet money moved in with Ellie—didn’t ease the mood.
“Everything okay in here?” Spence’s firm voice boomed into the silence.
He hovered right behind her. Abby could almost feel the heat pulse off his body. When he exhaled, his warm breath blew across the back of her neck.
Time to go. That phrase repeated in her head until it took hold.
“Spence.” Ellie smiled. “Look, it’s Spence.”
“I do live here. Temporarily, but still.”
In the bedroom down the hall. Abby knew because she’d walked by it a few days ago and glanced in. Saw a bag and hoped it meant nothing. Then she recognized Spence’s tie from the day before flung over the unmade bed.
“For now.” Abby meant to think and not say it, but she managed to mumble it.
Of course Spence heard and placed a hand on her lower back. “Meaning?”
The touch, perfectly respectable and so small, hit her like a live wire. Energy arced through her. She had to fight the urge to lean into him. To balance her body against his. “I’m sure you’ll be on your way again soon.”
Spence’s exhale was louder, more dramatic this time. “That’s not—”
Derrick stood up. “As fun as it is to see you two work things out by lobbing verbal volleys at each other, Ellie does need her rest.”
“I’m having fun.” Ellie caught Derrick’s hand.
Abby silently thanked Derrick for giving her the easy out. Once she maneuvered her way through the three-story brick mansion, she’d be gone.
She put the box of brownies on the bed and pointed to them. “I just wanted to drop them off. Don’t eat them all at once.”
“You’re very sweet.” Ellie went to work on the tape holding the sides of the box down. “I make no promises about how fast they’ll be gone.” She shot Derrick and Spence a serious look. “So we’re clear, I’m not sharing.”
“No one would dare defy that order.” Abby could not escape fast enough. “I’ll text you later.”
She pivoted around Spence and practically raced down the hall. Moved as fast as her stupid spiky heels would let her without wiping out in an inglorious sprawl. The humming in her head blocked out all sounds. She didn’t realize she’d been followed until she reached the bottom of the intricately carved wooden staircase and heard footsteps behind her.
She turned around just as she left the steps. Spence was there. Of course he was.
With his palm flattened against the wall and his other on the banister, he stopped. She couldn’t help but stare. His body was an amazing mystery to her. A package she ached to unwrap. How long were his arms, anyway?
His expression stayed blank as his gaze searched her face. “What are you doing here?”
“Visiting Ellie.” Not a lie. She’d brought a treat and everything.
Spence finished coming down the stairs. Slipped his body by hers until they stood side by side. “How do you even know her?”
He still towered over her. She stood a good five-eight and with the heels could talk to anyone without feeling as if someone was trying to intimidate her. But Spence still towered, though he did stand a few steps back, giving her space.
“I do work at the company,” she pointed out, not knowing what else to say.
“A lot of people work there. None of them show up at the boss’s house.” Spence folded his arms across his middle and stared her down. “What’s really going on?”
He had to be kidding with this. “Do you think I’m stalking you?”
“Are you?”
She was doing the exact opposite, whatever that was called. Hiding from him? Sort of. Trying to find breathing room to center her control and ease the disappointment that clawed at her every time she thought about him and what could have been. “Lately, when I come over I text first to make sure you’re gone. Happy?”
His arms slid down until they hung at his sides again. “Isn’t that a bit extreme?”
“No.” It was self-preservation.
She refused to get snared in another Jameson trap. She trusted Derrick. He’d delivered on every promise he’d made to her back then, when he begged her to stay with the company after...Spence.
“Sooner or later, we’re going to need to talk to each other,” Spence said.
“I disagree.” Not her most mature answer ever but probably the most honest one.
“Abby, come on.”
The tone of his voice suggested he was done playing games. Well, that made two of them. “It’s fascinating that you ran off without saying a word months ago, but now you want some big chatty moment with me. I guess us talking is fine so long as it’s convenient to you.”
“We’re adults.”
Lecturing. Great. Just what she wanted from him. “One of us is.”
With that, she turned and walked out. She’d reached her maximum load on Jameson testosterone for one day. She needed her shoes off and her feet up. Some wine. No Spence.
A Spence-free zone. The idea made her smile as she walked down the hall then closed the front door behind her.
* * *
“She’s not wrong,” Derrick said as he slowly walked down the stairs.
“You want to clue me in here?” Because Spence felt deflated and empty. The gnawing sensation refused to leave him. He’d blown out of the office all those months ago. Traveled around. Helped out on random building sites across the east. Lived a life so different from the spectacle he’d grown up in. All that competition. How his father pitted the three of them against each other. How Derrick always tried to protect them from Dad’s wrath, especially Carter, the youngest.
They lost their mom to cancer. Their father didn’t even have the decency to let her live out her life in peace. No, he moved her to a facility then marched in there one day and demanded a divorce so he could marry his mistress. He thought she was pregnant but she wasn’t, so he quickly dumped the mistress, too. Then he ran through others. He was on wife number four and insisted this one had changed him. Yeah, right. The man treated women as disposable and his sons as property.
All that playing, all that acting at being a Big Man, and he let the business slide. Derrick had stepped in and saved it years ago. They all had to work there from the time they were teens. It was a family requirement, but Derrick was the one who rescued them all—including their father—and restored the family checking account when he took over the day-to-day operations four years ago.
That incredible turnaround was one of the reasons Spence stood on Derrick’s first floor now. He owed Derrick. He also loved Derrick and wanted to help. That meant sticking around. Worse, it meant facing his demons and dealing with Abby.
Spence wasn’t good at standing still. He’d always been the brother to keep moving. Go away to school. Go farther to a different school. Try to work somewhere else. Delay full-time work with the family as long as possible.
The Jameson name choked him. He didn’t find it freeing or respectable. Forcing his feet to stay planted was taking all of his strength. He didn’t have much left over to do battle with Abby.
“Are you admitting you’re clueless? That’s a start.” The amusement was right there in Derrick’s voice.
At the sound, some of the churning in Spence’s gut eased. He had no idea how to handle Abby, but he could do the fake fighting-with-his-brother thing all day. “Don’t make me punch you while your fiancée is on bed rest. She shouldn’t see you beg and cry right now.”
“Are you quoting from a dream you once had? Because that’s not reality.”
They’d physically fought only once. It was years ago, over their mother. Spence had been desperate to keep her in the house with nurses. Derrick, barely in his twenties, had tried to make it happen but couldn’t. Spence had needed an outlet for his rage and Derrick was right there. The perfect target.
There was an almost three-year age difference between them, but Spence still got his ass kicked. And he’d deserved it because his anger really should have been aimed at his father. Spence was thirty-three now. In theory, he knew better.
“Spence, she’s one of the best we have.” Derrick sat down on a step a few from the bottom and started counting out Abby’s attributes on his fingers. “She can multitask and oversee projects, keep things moving. She’s smart. She’s a great negotiator.”
It was an impressive list, but Spence already knew it by heart. Every time he tried to run through her sins in his mind, the image of her face would pop up and his thoughts would stumble. “I feel like you’re reading her résumé to me.”
“Don’t scare her away.”
There was no amusement in his tone now. Spence got the message. “You do understand she screwed me, right?”
“I don’t know what happened back then because you bolted and when I tried to talk with her, in part to make sure we weren’t going to get sued, she refused to say one single negative thing about you.” Derrick threw up his hands before balancing them on his thighs again. “Hell, I can name twenty bad things just sitting here and without thinking very hard, but she protected you.”
“She sure has no problem listing out my faults now.”
“Do you hear what I’m saying?”
“That you’re nosy as hell.” Spence dropped down on the step two down from Derrick and stretched out sideways so he could look at Derrick. “What’s your actual point?”
“Maybe you got it wrong back then.”
Spence leaned his head back against the staircase railing and stared up at the ceiling. “I saw her kissing Dad.”
“Right, because our father never set anyone up or did anything to mess with us.”
That got Spence’s attention. His head lowered and he looked at Derrick. “I don’t—”
“When rumors were going around about me in an attempt to convince Ellie to dump me, Abby’s name came up.”
“What?”
“Some people think the two of us had a thing. There are whispers, none of them true, but they’re out there.” Derrick shrugged. “Ellie heard, wanted to apologize to Abby for dragging her into our personal mess, they met and, honestly, it’s like they’ve known each other for years.”
Derrick and Abby. Fake or not, there was an image Spence never wanted in his head. But Abby and Ellie? No one was safe if those two put their powers together. “That’s just great.”
“For you, no. Abby is going to be around here for Ellie. And she’s a big part of the managerial team at work.” Derrick dropped his arm and touched the step right by Spence’s shoulder. “I want you here and I will do anything to keep you in the office and in town, but even I can’t work miracles. You have to fix this because I can’t.”
“I’ve never heard you admit that before.”
“You’re going to run into her.”
Derrick sounded so serious. Spence wanted to make a joke or ignore the whole conversation. He knew he couldn’t do either. “I can handle it.”
“I’m wondering if the rest of us will survive it.”
Suddenly, so was Spence.
Three
Abby sat in a conference room on the fifteenth floor of the swanky office building where Jameson Industries was located. A glass wall with the glass door fronted the room, facing into the hall. The room was reserved for relatively few people in the company because it connected to Jackson Richards’s office next door. He used it. Derrick used it. Today, she used it.
She looked at the stack of papers in front of her, then to her laptop, then across the small round table to Jackson. He was Derrick’s right-hand man and the most accessible person on the management staff. He was also tall and lean with a runner’s body and, if rumors were correct, the one every single woman in the office named as the most eligible and interesting man in the office. There hadn’t been an actual poll, to her knowledge, but she got asked at least a few times a week if he was dating anyone. Not that Abby saw him in a romantic way. She didn’t.
She considered Jackson one of her closest friends, if not the closest. After a relatively solitary existence growing up—just her and her mom and the apartment manager who watched her when her mom worked the night shift at the diner—dating here and there, keeping attachments light in case she needed to get up and go, Jackson acted as a lifeline for her. They even lived in condos next door to each other, which was more of an accident than anything else. But when you heard about a good deal on a downtown DC property with a doorman and reasonable monthly fees, you jumped on it. Jackson sure had.
But right now she was at work and out of patience. She beat back the urge to knock her head against the table. “If I have to read one more email from Rylan, my brain will explode.”
The man sent her the most mundane emails. The status check today, which he sent a day earlier than he said he would, was to tell her nothing had changed. Yeah, she guessed that much. But with emails clogging her inbox and her mind on constant wandering mode these days, she needed something solid. Jackson was it.
“Good thing we have good health insurance here,” Jackson said as he closed the file he was reading.
She snorted. “I’m pretty sure head explosion isn’t covered.”
“He is persistent.” Jackson glanced at the conference room door as it opened. “Speaking of which...”
“Hello.” Spence stepped inside. He didn’t make a move to sit down. He stopped and rested his palms on the back of the chair nearest to him.
That fast, the oxygen sucked out of the room. The easy banter with Jackson gave way to suffocating tension. It pressed in on Abby, proving what she already knew. Seeing Spence grew harder each time, not easier.
Jackson smiled as he moved some of the files and papers around to make room in front of an open chair. “Hey, Spence.”
As far as Abby was concerned, all of that accommodating was unnecessary. She had no interest in sitting there, explaining her projects to Spence. She had a file made up with the relevant information and emailed him the rest. She’d done her part to keep the machine running.
“Right.” She shut her laptop, careful not to slam the cover down, and stood up. “I’m going to head back to my office.”
“I need to talk to you for a second.” Spence’s gaze moved from her to Jackson.
Jackson sighed. “Why are you looking at me? I’m supposed to be in here. I’m not leaving.”
“Help me out,” Spence said.
Jackson shook his head as he stood up. “Did you not hear my dramatic sigh?”
“It was tough to miss.”
“That’s because I spend half my life rescuing Jamesons from certain disaster.” Jackson ended the back-and-forth with a smack against Spence’s shoulder.
Some of the tension drained away as Jackson and Spence fell into their easy camaraderie. That sort of thing always amazed Abby. Men could argue and go at each other, but if they were friends or related, they seemed to have this secret signal, heard only by them, that triggered the end of the battle. Then all the anger slipped away.
She wished she possessed that skill.
She glanced at Jackson. “You deserve a raise.”
“Hell, yeah.” Jackson winked at her as he walked out of the conference room through the connecting door to his office.
A second later, Spence slid into the seat Jackson abandoned. He flipped through a whole repertoire of nervous gestures, none of which she’d seen from him before. He rubbed the back of his neck. Shifted around in his seat. Put a hand on the table then took it off. But he didn’t say a word.
After about a minute, the silence screamed in her head. “You’re up, Spence. You’re the one who wanted to talk.”
Fight was probably more accurate. They couldn’t seem to be civil to each other for more than a few minutes at a time since living in the same town again. They verbally sparred. Every conversation led them back to the same place—he believed she came on to his father. The idea made her want to heave.
He let out a heavy sigh that had his chest lifting and falling. “We got off on the wrong foot.”
“When?”
He frowned. “What?”
“Now or back then?” She was having a hard time keeping up, so he was going to need to be more specific. “Maybe when we were starting to go out and had plans for our first official date that Friday. You left on Thursday without a word.”
The memories flashed in her brain and she blinked them out. She refused to let the sharp pain in her chest derail her. This close, right across the table, she could see the intensity in his eyes, smell that scent she associated with him. A kind of peppery sharpness that reeled her in. In the past. Not now. She wouldn’t let it happen now.
“You are determined to make this difficult.” He had the nerve to look wounded.
She pushed down her anger and lifted her chin. “Do you blame me?”
“Actually, yes.” He sat back in the chair. The metal creaked under his weight as he lifted the front two legs off the floor. “You kissed my father.”
And there it was. The only point he could make, so he did it over and over until it lost its punch. “So you’ve pointed out. Repeatedly.”
“Okay. Enough.” A thud echoed through the small room as the front legs of his chair hit the floor again.
“I agree.” She stood up. Her vision blurred. She struggled through a haze of anger and disappointment to see the stacks of documents and folders in front of her.