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“Because Grandma Edna is my responsibility. She’s my mom’s mom and the only real relative I have left,” she allowed, though she might not have added the latter had she not been where she was. If the elevator fell, there wouldn’t be anyone to see that the increasingly eccentric older woman was properly cared for. Edna could be a handful. Jill couldn’t stand her.
“Can we talk about something else, please? Tell me about your company,” she suggested, desperately wanting not to think about falling down the shaft. “You must be excited about pulling it all together. Is having your own firm something you’ve always wanted?”
J.T. didn’t know which caught him more off guard just then; her obvious resignation to her position in the company, the abrupt change of subject, or her assumption that he felt any excitement at all about his possible venture.
She’d also just confronted him with the sudden need for an acceptable explanation for his own circumstances.
He could hardly tell her that the idea of starting his own company had nothing to do with realizing a dream. It had simply been the logical thing to do, given what his father had thrown at him. He couldn’t tell her, either, that once he’d decided what he had to do, that he’d approached the task with the same methodical, get-it-done attitude he intended to tackle in his pursuit of Candace-the-potential bride. There had been nothing resembling excitement involved.
The thought gave him pause. Standing there with the dark masking his disquiet, he couldn’t honestly say he felt energized, eager or enthusiastic about much of anything he did anymore. Even his last climbing trip in the Swiss Alps had left him oddly dissatisfied and restless. It almost had been as if pushing himself to conquer yet another mountain was no longer enough.
He didn’t care at all for that unexpected thought, or the strange, empty sensation that came with it. Certain both were there only because he was being pushed to do things he didn’t want to do, he dismissed the matter as inconsequential—and simply told her what he could of the truth.
“I didn’t start thinking about my own firm until a couple of months ago. It just seemed like it was time.”
“To break out on your own?”
“Something like that.”
“Then, this isn’t a goal you’ve worked toward for a while.”
He hadn’t been prepared for the conclusion in her voice. Or, maybe what he hadn’t expected was her insight.
A hush fell between them, long seconds passing before her soft voice finally drifted toward him.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Overstepping myself. I didn’t mean to pry.” Sympathy joined the apology in her tone. “I just assumed that starting your own firm was something you’d wanted to do.”
She clearly recognized that it was not.
For a moment J.T. couldn’t think of a thing to say that wouldn’t sound like confirmation—or like too much of a protest. He handled his life the same way he played poker. Straight-faced and close to the vest. He wasn’t given to showing his hand. Yet, in a matter of seconds, this quietly unassuming woman had recognized his ambivalence and pretty much called him on it.
Feeling exposed, not caring for the sensation at all, he dismissed her perception as a fluke. At least, he did until he considered what he’d learned about her job and realized she might well be wrestling with her circumstances, too. The inherent unfairness in her situation did strike a vaguely familiar chord.
“What would you do if you didn’t have to work for the agency?”
Amy shifted against the wall, uncomfortable with having trespassed onto sensitive ground. She wasn’t usually so straightforward with a client. Not that Jill had her deal with any of them directly very often. Most of her contact was over the phone or by mail. It was just that this man’s vague responses had left her with the feeling that his new venture had been precipitated by something unexpected. A divorce, perhaps. Or a problem within the firm he now worked with. Personality problems within the partnership. Cutbacks.
Whatever the reason, he didn’t seem to her to be at all enthused about striking out on his own. She’d simply responded to that. Much as she’d responded to his touch moments ago, and the tension she sensed in him now.
That faint tension seemed to reach toward her, wrap itself around her, increase her own.
Not at all sure what to make of her reactions to him, she tried to ignore them all. “If I could do anything…”
A faint thud sent her heart into her throat.
Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“It sounded like something hitting metal.”
“Might have been a door. Is the stairwell near the elevators?”
“It’s just around the corner.”
“They’re probably evacuating the building. Go on,” he coaxed, sounding far less concerned than she felt. “You’d… what?”
The elevator doors were too thick to hear much of anything else going on beyond them. It was also possible that they were stuck between floors, which meant they were further insulated by the six or so feet of crawl space and whatever else existed between the building’s various levels from anyone who might pull the doors open from the outside.
Thinking of how big he was, how quietly powerful and confident he seemed, she inched closer to his voice. “Get a degree in marine biology,” she said, “find a research position, then tackle the rest of my life list.”
More concerned with being stuck while everyone else was leaving than with the list she’d barely begun to complete, she strained to see if she could hear anything else.
All she heard was the curiosity in Jared’s voice. “Life list?”
“It’s a list of things I want to do before I…” die wasn’t a word she wanted to use just then. “Before I’m too old to get around,” she concluded.
“Getting your degree is at the top of it?”
“At the top was to buy my own home.” Having her own home had been at the top of her list ever since her father had married Jill and sold the one she’d grown up in. She’d promised herself then that she’d someday have a home no one could take from her. “I did that a few years ago,” she told him, ever grateful for the down payment allowed by the modest insurance policy her father had kept for her.
Trying to stay focused, she thought about the next item on the old piece of blue notepaper she kept tucked in her nightstand drawer, and skipped right over it. Admitting her hope—her need—to have a family of her own felt far too personal, especially since he was undoubtedly only trying to distract her from thoughts of where they were.
“Next is to dive off the coast of Australia,” she added, thinking her odds of accomplishing any of that roughly equal to acquiring a fairy godmother. She had neither the prospects, the time nor the money her dreams required. Given her present obligations, she wouldn’t for a very long time. “And in the Bahamas and Hawaii.” It was also a wish list, after all.
The curiosity in his voice remained as he asked how long she’d been diving. She told him her dad taught her when she was eleven, but that she hadn’t done much in the past couple of years. “No time,” she explained, thinking she’d love to be on any of those islands just then. Anywhere to be away from where she was.
Maybe she was a little claustrophobic after all. Or maybe the unease she felt was fear of falling.
She didn’t realize she’d spoken her last thoughts aloud. At least, not until she felt him move closer and his hand touched her arm.
The moment it fell away, she realized what he’d done.
He’d let her know he was right there, close enough to reach, if she needed him.
“You’re doing fine,” he assured her.
“Do you think we should try to get out?”
“Doing anything other than staying where we are for a while would probably just get us into bigger trouble. They know we’re here,” he reminded her.
“In the movies, they show people going through the little door up there.”
“What they don’t show in those movies is that the hatch is usually bolted from the outside. Even if this one isn’t, I’d rather not crawl around on top of this thing trying to find a way out in the dark.” J.T. didn’t mind an adrenaline rush. He’d hang off a cliff face suspended by ropes and gladly spend the time working out his next move and enjoying the view. But that kind of risk was different from hanging onto greased cables while standing on a box that would start moving the instant the power came back on. He’d have little control in that situation. Being in control was what his life had been about for as long as he could remember.
“I wouldn’t have a clue where I was in relation to anything else,” he admitted, willing to bet the best Bordeaux in his cellar that she didn’t really want to crawl around up there, either. “I have a thing about wanting to know my next move.”
“So we forget the hatch,” she murmured. “What about prying open the doors?”
“The problem there is if we’re between floors and one of us is crawling out when the power comes back on.” Had he been alone, he probably would have already tried that. He’d risk his own neck. He didn’t care to risk anyone else’s. “The car will move. The floor remains stationary. It’s too easy to get crushed.”
He thought she shuddered.
“And you know these things because you’ve worked with elevator companies,” she concluded flatly.
“Call it a perk.”
Amy swallowed. “Thank you for sharing.”
He liked her bravado. Most of the women he knew would be in need of major hand holding by now. “Let’s give them a while. If we start needing food and water, I promise, we’ll come up with something.
“So,” he continued, thinking it best to move on from the scenarios he’d planted in her head. With the time being wasted just standing there, he would have thought he’d rather be anywhere else at the moment, too. Almost. “Why diving?”
It wasn’t often that he met anyone he found particularly intriguing, much less anyone who truly surprised him. Never would he have imagined her wrestling air tanks and weight belts to play tag with eels off the Great Barrier Reef. As docile as she’d first seemed, he wouldn’t have thought there was an adventurous bone in her slender little body.
“Because I like the way I feel when I’m doing it.”
“How’s that?”
“Free,” Amy said easily. She no longer cared what he asked her while they waited. She was just grateful for the distraction he offered, and for his solid presence. Had she been trapped there alone, she might well be huddled in a corner by now. “I don’t feel that anywhere the way I do in the water. There are no restraints. It’s just you and this whole other world. It’s all just so…different. So…natural.” So peaceful, she started to add, only to go silent as awkwardness abruptly crept through her.
Describing the abandon she felt in all that unhurried quiet didn’t seem as simple as telling him about goals that probably weren’t extraordinary at all to someone who seemed as urbane as this man did. Even in the dark, she ducked her head. “It’s hard to explain to someone unless they’ve been there themselves.”
Moments ago she’d moved closer. Not by much, J.T. thought. Just close enough that every breath he drew now brought her subtle scent with it. He couldn’t figure out what it was. It seemed too light to be perfume. Her shampoo, maybe. Body wash.
Already more aware of her than he wanted to be, he thought about moving himself. She was clearly growing more uncomfortable, though, and trying her best to mask it. So he stayed where he was. Despite whatever discomfort or awkwardness she felt, she also seemed to feel safer near him.
“You don’t have to explain it to me.” He offered the assurance as he turned from the back wall, edged to the wall adjoining it. She was right there, presumably with her back against the panels. With his arms crossed, he let his jacket sleeve rest lightly against her upper arm. She could move closer if she wanted. Or away, if she chose. “I know what you mean.”
Though he sensed hesitation, she stayed where she was.
“You do?”
“I haven’t been diving in years,” he admitted, wondering if he hadn’t just felt her relax a little. He preferred to be on the water, pushing for speed and battling the wind for control. “But I sail for the same reason.” Especially to an island that I want to build a home on someday, he thought, and overlooked the agitation that came with the idea of potentially losing access to it. “I haven’t had time to indulge myself lately, either.”
“Did your father teach you?”
That agitation seemed determined to be felt. She couldn’t possibly know that his relationship with his father bore no resemblance whatsoever to what she’d apparently shared with hers. He just wasn’t about to tell her how many times Harry had raised his preteen hopes about them doing something together, only to attend a meeting instead. How many times he’d fallen asleep outside his dad’s office to show him something he’d made or a paper for which he’d received an exceptional grade only to have a housekeeper wake him and tell him his dad had left. Old Harry had been far too busy building his technological empire to bother with anything so mundane as what might matter to a kid.
“I learned with a friend. We borrowed his brother’s boat and basically taught ourselves.”
He’d been grounded for a week when Cornelia had discovered what he’d been doing and told his father about it. He’d been grounded for another week for risking his neck because Cornelia had insisted they could have capsized the boat and drowned. He’d never been worried, though. By the time she’d found out what he’d been up to, he’d become a pretty good sailor.
“How old were you?” he heard Amy ask.
“Twelve.” He hadn’t thought back so far in years. “I decided then that I’d have my own sailboat someday.”
“How long was it before you bought one?”
The smile in her voice seemed to say that she didn’t doubt his determination for an instant. Drawn by that, he might well have told her about the series of boats that had led to the forty-foot sloop he currently kept docked in Seattle. But even as he opened his mouth he remembered that he needed her and everyone else in the ad agency to think him a relatively average guy. He had no idea what she and her stepsister did or didn’t share with each other, but he didn’t want to say anything he wouldn’t want repeated. He strongly suspected that a modestly successful architect wouldn’t trade-in million-dollar sailboats the way most men did cars.
Grateful once more for the dark, he told her only that he bought a small one when he was eighteen. He wasn’t sure why he was telling her any of this as it was. He wasn’t in the habit of talking about his childhood to anyone. There’d been good parts and bad. He’d survived it. End of story. But he was spared having to wonder at how easily the young woman beside him had drawn him out when the elevator jerked.
Amy’s breath caught as she grabbed for him. Jared’s hands clamped around her upper arms. In the awful seconds while she waited for whatever would happen next, she didn’t know if he pulled her to him to keep her from losing her balance, or if he was simply bracing them both. All she knew for certain was that he’d pulled her into his arms, that his body felt as solid as steel, and that she could do nothing but hang on.
With her heart battering her ribs, she buried her head against his chest.
Beneath her feet, the floor remained still long enough for her to become conscious of being surrounded by his heat—an instant before the elevator started to descend. Slowly. The way it always did.
Her pulse still racing, she opened her eyes, drew a quick, decidedly cautious breath. The scents of citrus aftershave and warm male filled her lungs as she blinked at the strip of cashmere between the soft wool lapels fisted in her hands.
The lights had come back on.
“Are you okay?”
His voice came from above her, the rich sounds of it a quiet rumble beneath the strains of the Muzak once again filtering through the speakers.
Looking straight ahead, all she could see was the wall of his very solid chest. She didn’t want to move. For that unexpected, too-fleeting moment, she felt very safe where she was. Sheltered. Protected. She hadn’t felt anything remotely resembling that alien sense of security since long before her father had died.
The feeling vanished with her next heartbeat.
Glancing up, her eyes met his. With her head tipped back, she was close enough to see shards of silver in cloud gray eyes, the carved lines bracketing his beautiful mouth. Already aware of the compelling feel of his arms, she nearly forgot what he’d asked.
He’d gone as still as stone. Or maybe it was she who failed to move as his glance skimmed her face and settled on her parted lips.
For one totally surreal instant, it seemed as if he was about to close the negligible distance between them. Yet, even as her heart nearly stalled at the thought of his mouth on hers, a muscle in his jaw jerked. His hold on her eased.
Releasing her grip on his lapels, she stepped back just as he did.
It was only then she remembered that he’d asked if she was all right. Considering the knotted state of her nerves, she most definitely was not.
“I’m…yes, of course,” she murmured, jamming awkwardness beneath a thin layer of composure. He was watching her, rather curiously from the feel of his eyes on her as she scooped up her stack of mail while the elevator continued its descent. “I’m…fine. I’m just sorry you had to wander under the little black cloud that’s been following me around all day. That’s probably why I nearly ran you over in the office, and why you got stuck in here with me now.” Refusing to consider what else could go wrong, she aimed a commendably calm smile at the cleft in his chin. If she’d learned anything from her years in advertising, it was that perception was everything. If you appeared in control, everyone thought you were. “The good news is that it’s me, not you, and that bad days get better.”
“What about bad weeks?”
“Those are the ones that build character.” Or so her grandma said.
“Bad months?” he asked, and watched as her smile made it to her eyes. Something knowing shifted in those doe-brown depths.
“That’s when you need to find something to do that takes you away from your problems for a while. Whatever you’re dealing with won’t go away,” she warned him, “but for that hour or that day, you’ve taken away its power over you.”
The elevator stopped. Even as her smile fell away, the doors opened to a lobby crowded with office workers. Before J.T. could ask what sort of thing she would suggest as an escape, or what else had happened to her that day, she’d slipped into the mass of people grumbling about having had to walk the however-many flights they’d taken to get to the ground floor, only to now have to wait for an elevator to go back up.
He moved into the crowd himself, stopping a lawyer-type in a three-piece suit to ask what had happened to the power. The man told him that one of the building’s floors was being gutted and remodeled. A worker had apparently shorted an electrical line and tripped the building’s main breaker.
J.T. had barely thanked the guy before he glanced back to see if he could catch a glimpse of short and shining brown hair. He saw no one familiar, though, as he moved through the surge of people and out the building’s tall glass doors.
Frowning at himself, he stepped out into the early fall air. He was on the brick-paved transit mall. MAX, the commuter train, rattled by on its light-rail line. A bus idled at the light on the corner. He couldn’t believe how close he’d come to kissing her. With her mouth inches from his, her scent and the feel of her coltish little body drawing him closer, he’d come within a heartbeat of seeing if she tasted as sweet as she looked.
Sweet. He’d never met a female he would have described that way.
He shook his head, plowed his fingers through his hair. He really needed to focus here. He fully intended to get to know her stepsister. Even if Candace hadn’t seemed to be an excellent candidate for the hunt, Amy wasn’t at all the sort of sophisticated, worldly female that normally attracted him. The sort of woman who’d developed a certain cynicism about the opposite sex herself. When he entered the game, he preferred an equal playing field. The young woman he’d just spent the past hour with probably didn’t even know there were rules. One of which had always been that a woman not get too close.
It occurred to him, vaguely, that the way he’d played for years might need to change. For now, though, all he cared about was that he’d caught himself before he’d done anything foolish. Circumstances had pretty much thrown her into his arms was all. With his first priority being to save his position at HuntCom, he had more to worry about than a young woman who possessed far more insight about his feelings for his backup project than he was comfortable with.
Amy hurried past a curved, Plexiglas bus kiosk, her arms wrapped tightly around her bundle of envelopes as she glanced back over her shoulder. She saw no sign of Jared Taylor on the tree-lined sidewalk. As tall and imposing as he was, he would stand out in any crowd, but he’d already disappeared.
She could still almost feel the strength in his hands when he’d helped her to her feet back in the office—right after she’d plowed into him and scattered files at feet. Just as she could almost imagine that same warmth filling her whole body when he’d held her in the elevator—moments after she’d practically crawled inside his jacket when the elevator had lurched. When he’d let go of her, the way his broad brow furrowed had made it abundantly clear that he’d wondered what on God’s green earth he’d been doing. At least he’d been gentleman enough to pretend nothing unusual had happened while she’d rattled on about having had a bad day.
She turned the corner to the post office, trying to shake off the entire unsettling encounter. She just hoped he wouldn’t say anything about her to Candace. She especially hoped he didn’t let it slip that she’d mentioned having to take care of her grandmother or make a comment about her having had a less-than-stellar day. The last thing she needed was to give Jill’s admittedly beautiful, undeniably well-intentioned daughter any reason to caution her about maintaining professionalism with their clients, or to give her a pep talk about what she needed to do when things weren’t going right.
Candace’s solution for everything was either a new man or a shopping trip. While Amy loved to hit sales, the home where her grandma lived had raised its rates so her budget had become tighter than ever.
As for finding herself a man, she was beginning to think she might be in the home herself before that ever happened. It seemed as if every female she knew was married, engaged, involved or on the mend from a broken relationship and had sworn off for the duration. Candace always had a man in her life. She went out more in a month than Amy had in the past two years. It was just that Amy’s obligations to Jill, the agency and her grandma—and the fact that her frequent visits to Edna seemed to be a turnoff for some men—had kept her from getting beyond a few first dates and casual friendships. Then there was what Candace called her totally naive belief in happily-ever-after instead of happy-enough-for-now.
She’d always wanted the fairy tale. She wanted a man she loved who loved her back. She wanted family to be as important to him as it was to her. She wanted to have children with him, to share with him, to grow old with him. As long as she was thinking about it, it also would be nice if the guy made her feel what she’d so fleetingly experienced with Jared Taylor. Even the pleasant sensations she’d felt from a couple of the more charming frogs she’d kissed hadn’t touched her in as many ways as just being held by that man.
For now, though, she’d just take care of the mail, hurry to the printers to pick up the copies of the family photos she’d had made for Edna with the hope of jogging her failing memory—and promise herself that the next time she saw Jared Taylor, she wouldn’t let preoccupation with her personal concerns embarrass her again. It had been worry about her grandmother distracting her when she’d so unceremoniously plowed into him by the reception desk.