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“He wouldn’t let me ride.”
“I believe you.” Kit toted Johnny along the sidewalk toward the old building that had served as Home Life’s headquarters since 1948. “But I’ve told you before to avoid that kid. If he’s playing with something, you have to find something else to play with. If he’s not near you, he can’t fight with you.”
“But I was there first!” Johnny’s voice rang with the injustice of it. Obviously he’d had to explain this to Ellen, too, because his face crinkled the way it always did when he was truly frustrated.
“Then you should have walked away.” Kit heard her own advice and stopped. To hell with hurrying back to work. This was more important.
She knelt down in front of her son on the grungy sidewalk, holding his slight shoulders in her hands. “I take it back, Johnny. You shouldn’t have. You can’t walk away every time a bully tries to take something from you. You did the right thing. I’m glad you stood up for yourself.”
A dent formed in the perfectly smooth skin over his brow. “You are?” His blue eyes went dark with confusion. “But you just said—”
“I know, baby. But I was wrong. It’s easier to walk away from bullies sometimes, but it’s not always right.” She pulled him close for a hug, reveling in the soft, soapy smell of his skin and hair. She kissed the cottony-soft blond head and drew back. “Okay?”
“I don’t want to go back there.”
It broke her heart. He was there for her convenience, not because it was best for him. There was no pretending otherwise. She was best for him. And since she couldn’t be there all the time, she was going to have to find something else. Something that wasn’t Mizzzzzzz Phillips. “Remember how I told you I was going to try and put you in that Montessori school near our new house?”
“School?” His eyes lit up. He was enamored with the idea of school in the way only a person who had never been could be.
She nodded, but fear surged in her heart rather than the hope she saw in his. What if it didn’t work out? It didn’t bear thinking about. “Well, the application came in the mail today and I’m going to send it back to them this afternoon. Well, tomorrow afternoon.” After she was paid. The seventy-five-dollar application fee was nonnegotiable.
She knew because she’d tried to negotiate it.
“My new school,” he said with a small nod and the kind of smile that made her determine right there and then that she’d get him into the school even if she had to rob a bank to do it. “And Kyle Cherkins won’t be there, right?”
“No, he won’t.” She stood up again and took his little warm hand, leading him into the office. “Okay. Here we are. You know the drill. Sit quietly and color. No talking, no running, no interrupting me when I’m on the phone and no asking why Miss Pratt’s ankles are so wrinkly. Got it?”
“I know, I know.”
“Mommy! Mommy, Mommy.” Tap, tap, tap on her arm. “Look, Mommy.”
Kit held her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and shot Johnny a shut up look. She returned to her call. “So you’re saying you lost all of the documentation?”
The bank official on the other end of the line cleared his throat. “Your former loan officer left in something of a hurry. We don’t know exactly where she put all the files she was working on. It’s caused quite a backup, I must say.”
Kit’s heart lodged in her throat. “I’m not going to lose my interest rate, am I?”
“I sincerely hope not.”
Kit’s stomach dropped. “Wait. Sincerely hope not isn’t good enough. I need to know.” Or what? Or she’d go to another company? Although her credit was good, there were a few tiny glitches—a forgotten department store credit card that she’d once been thirty-one days late in paying, a collection effort on the part of Big Jugs magazine for a subscription she’d never ordered—that she’d had to clear with Best State Mortgage. She did not want to start the process over again.
“We’ll do our best, Ms. Macy. If you could just get your bank statements, tax forms, W-2’s and employer’s statement to us, we’ll get right on it.”
“Employer’s statement?” Unbelievable. They needed something new every single time she talked to them.
“Just something stating your year-to-date earnings and projected income.”
“Okay.” She glanced at Johnny. Maybe it was a good thing she’d already gotten him, because now she was going to have to stay after and hope the editor, Ebbit, had time to write something up. “Anything else?”
“It’s all on the checklist.”
There was a beep on the line. The phone said it was in-house. Ebbit himself. “Okay, Mr. Black, I have copies of everything else, so I’ll just overnight them to you again.”
“No need to hurry.”
“No need to hurry?” Her voice leaped toward hysteria. “I’m supposed to close on the house in twenty-eight days.”
There was a nerve-racking pause.
Then the sound of papers shuffling on the other end of the line. “I’m sorry, did you say twenty-eight days? I have you down for September.”
Johnny tapped Kit’s arm and she pulled it away, turning her office chair around. “No, it’s this month. July 30.” It was all she could do to stay calm. If this stupid company prevented her from getting her house because one person screwed up, she’d—
“I’ll make a note of it,” the loan officer said noncommittally.
Kit’s phone beeped again.
She thought her head might explode.
“All right. I have to take this call, Mr. Black, so I’ll just collect the information and you’ll have it in the morning.” She clicked over to the other line.
“We have an urgent meeting this afternoon at five,” Ebbit Markham told her.
“Okay.” She glanced at Johnny. There was going to have to be some serious bribery involved in trying to keep him sitting quietly in her office during an editorial meeting. “Actually I’m glad you’re staying a little late because I need you to give me a written statement that I work here.”
Silence.
“Ebbit?”
“Why do you need that?”
She tapped her pen on the desk. “It’s not a big deal. The mortgage company just wants proof that I’m employed.” She gave a casual laugh. “You know how it is—they don’t want to lend you money until you can completely prove you don’t need it.”
Again nothing.
“Oh! Yes, yes, well…” What was with him? He sounded as if she’d shocked him out of sleep or something. “I’ll just, uh, I’ll see you at five.”
“Okay.” She hung up the phone thoughtfully.
“Mommy.” Johnny tapped her again. “Are you off the phone now? Look at my picture.” He produced her May bank statement, replete with indelible ink scribbles. “It’s our new house. Do you like it?”
“Yeah, honey, that’s nice,” she said, distracted.
Johnny tugged on her sleeve. “You didn’t look at it. You have to look at it!”
She looked.
Oh, no. Oh. No. No, no, no. The bank statement. All those numbers.
In her mind’s eye she saw herself spending the evening with a bottle of Wite-Out, removing every line he’d added. And even then she ran the risk of it looking as if she’d somehow doctored her books.
But Johnny looked so proud, so pleased with his work, that she couldn’t bear to let out the anger that bubbled in her chest. “It’s good,” she said in a tight voice. “But, honey, next time ask me for paper, okay? Don’t write on something that already has writing on it. That’s really important, got it?”
“You don’t like it?”
She took a long breath. “Yes, I do, it’s just…” She sighed. “It’s just great.” She produced a pile of paper from her printer tray, looked at it and added a few more sheets. “Here. Do some more. I’ve got to go in the room next door for a meeting in a little while, and you’re going to stay here, so why don’t you draw all your very best friends for me. If you run out of paper, get more from there, okay?” She pointed to the printer tray.
He barely glanced at it, said, “’Kay,” and set about drawing immediately.
She looked at her clock again.
It was four-forty.
Kit always thought that if Samantha Stevens had twitched her nose and turned an old basset hound into a man, she’d have ended up with Ebbit Markham. Today he looked even more basset houndish than usual, his face drawn and white.
The staff of Home Life was collected in the conference room. Ebbit’s lifelong secretary, Miss Pratt—no one was sure of her first name—was handing out coffee in foam cups, her shaking hands sloshing the hot liquid onto laps, shirts and the floor.
“What’s going on?” Kit asked her friend Joanna Sadler, aka Joe Sadler, Mr. Fix-It, another monthly columnist as well as the permissions editor.
“Don’t freak” was Joanna’s first response.
Kit quirked her mouth into a smile, belying the nervous tremor in her stomach. “Okay, now that I know it’s freakworthy, what’s going on?”
“I think the magazine’s been sold.”
“What?”
“It’s just what I heard. I could be wrong.”
How could this happen without her knowing something was up in advance? “Who bought it?”
Joanna shrugged. “Some idiot who wants a century-old monthly that’s hopelessly outdated and losing readers by the score every day, I guess.”
It was a fair assessment, Kit knew. The once venerable publication had become so desperate for readers that it offered subscriptions for the cost of postage. Every time she’d suggested to Ebbit that maybe they should become a little more contemporary, he gave her a lecture on tradition.
Lucy came up next to Kit, her small, tanned face tight with worry. “They sold the magazine? What’s going to happen to us?”
“Hang on—we don’t know anything yet,” Kit said, trying to inject reason. “As far as we know, this is just a regular editorial meeting.”
In her gut she knew it wasn’t.
The door opened and a tall, slick-looking man with dark hair, light eyes, a square jaw and a suit that probably cost almost as much as her monthly salary walked in.
Everyone made their way to their seats around the conference table and turned to face Ebbit at the head of the table like obedient schoolchildren.
He stood behind his chair rather than sitting down. “As you all know,” he began, clutching and unclutching the back of the chair with gnarled hands. “I have been working for Home Life for over fifty years. I began in the mail room and worked my way slowly but surely to where I am now.” He glanced at the man with him. “Or, that is, where I was until today.”
This was not good.
Ebbit mustered a smile. “Home Life has been sold, along with her sister publications, to the Monahan Group. If the name sounds familiar to you, it’s because they own and operate such publications as Sports World, Kidz and Celeb Dish magazines.” He looked at the man with him. “With the new management comes a new direction for all of us. As of today, I am entering into that wonderful state called retirement.” His voice wavered over the word retirement. “I plan to do a lot of fishing and gardening and generally get on Connie’s nerves.”
There was a small wave of polite laughter in the room.
“Anyhoo,” Ebbit said in his wrapping-it-up voice, “this is Cal Panagos.” He gestured toward the man. “Cal is the former editor of Sports World. Now he’s the new executive editor of Home Life.”
Ebbit stepped aside, and Cal Panagos stepped behind the chair as if it was a grand podium. “Thanks for the welcome,” he said, giving Ebbit a stiff but technically courteous nod. His bearing was positively regal. His looks were as strikingly sultry as one of the Calvin Klein underwear models who routinely looked over Times Square with long-lashed bedroom eyes. But it was his air of confidence that struck Kit the most.
He set his expensive-looking leather briefcase on the table and opened it up. “I know this is a surprise to many of you.”
Kit’s stomach turned over. Her heart pounded as if a boxer was caught in her rib cage. This couldn’t be happening. Yet it was.
She was losing her house.
Cal continued. “Personally I’m excited about the challenge this presents.”
Kit noticed he tensed his jaw for a moment. It was a gesture that hardened the planes of his face and made him look even more manly.
“My plan is to start this magazine over from the ground up, and I’m bringing in my own people for the task, so…” His expensively clad shoulders rose a fraction of an inch, then dropped. “I thank you for your years of service to Home Life and, if you’ll make your way to Ebbit’s former office, you’ll find your severance packages waiting for you.”
The room responded with silence. No gasps, no objections.
“I believe you’ll find the terms generous,” Cal finished. “Thanks for your time and your service to the magazine.” He gave a brief—and Kit thought insincere—smile.
And with that he turned and left the room.
Chapter Three
This was not happening. It couldn’t be happening. Surely God, Thor, Zeus and the rest of the Divine Justice League weren’t so ticked about Kit’s minor sins of the past—an overdue library book here, a little white lie about a man’s prowess in bed there— that they’d let this happen.
Now of all times!
Well, she just couldn’t let this happen. She didn’t know how she was going to stop it, but she had to.
She remembered her own words to Johnny—was it just this afternoon? You can’t walk away every time a bully tries to take something from you.
She couldn’t walk away. She couldn’t just let this guy pull her job out from under her. But how on earth could she stay? She’d been fired, for Pete’s sake!
She watched, numb, as her friends and colleagues collected thick manila envelopes from a makeshift desk manned by a glossy-haired buxom brunette Kit had never seen before.
“Are you really going to take this without a fight?” Kit asked Lila Harper, author of a sewing column that had, perhaps, contained a few too many crocheted sweater-vests.
“The man said he doesn’t need us anymore. No sense in fighting. Plus, I don’t need the work, dear,” Lila Harper said, patting Kit’s shoulder with a thin paper-white hand.
No, of course she didn’t. Neither did half the people here. They all either had other careers, well-paid spouses or retirement pensions. All the other staff members were in their twenties with no dependents or urgent considerations. For one ugly moment Kit felt as if she was the only one who really cared about keeping this job, the only one who needed it.
She continued to watch in disbelief as several of her other coworkers took their envelopes one by one and left as if they’d won some kind of prize. A slip-knot tightened in her stomach. It was over. She’d lost a battle without even realizing she was fighting.
Her house.
The little yard.
The school one block away.
The community pool with two diving boards.
All of it gone. Unless she could pull off some kind of miracle with this unapproachable man who seemed to have ice water running through his veins.
“Can you believe this?” Kathleen Browning asked, interrupting Kit’s thoughts.
Kit looked at her and was gratified to see that the copy editor looked unhappy about the turn of events.
“No, I can’t. I’m going to fight it,” Kit said.
“How?”
The answer seemed so obvious. “I’m going to talk to this Panagos guy. I’m going to tell him I want to keep my job. Come with me. There’s power in numbers.”
Kathleen looked doubtful. “I don’t know. Men like that make me nervous.”
“Men like what?”
“He’s so—” she sucked in her breath “—great-looking. If I try and talk to him, I’ll probably just get nervous and pass out at his feet or something.”
“Kathleen,” Kit returned impatiently. “That’s ridiculous. Look, I’ll do most of the talking, you just come and agree with me.”
Kathleen shook her head. “I don’t think so. Actually I saw an ad for a fiction editor just last week and I think I’d like to try moving in that direction.”
Wimp, Kit thought irritatedly.
“We’ll get together soon,” Fiona Whitcomb, the etiquette columnist, was saying to Lila as they shuffled behind Kit. “First Derek and I will probably go to Palm Springs for a few weeks of glorious sunshine.”
Kit watched each of her old friends file out the door, shaking Cal’s hand and smiling as they left. Who were these people? It was as if she hadn’t known them at all. She half wondered if there were pods in the basement of the building, like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Lucy took her envelope, opened it and gave a delighted exclamation, as if her Pepsi bottle cap had just declared her a winner.
Jo gave Kit a look, then stood up.
“Are you really going to do this?” Kit asked her.
“I don’t have any choice,” Jo said. “Look at that guy.” She nodded toward Cal. “He means business. You can see there’s no compromise there. He walked into this building intending to fire every one of us today and that’s just what he did.”
Kit felt as if she might cry. But she wouldn’t. No way. “I’m going to change his mind about that.”
Jo put her arm around her friend. “I bet you will, too. I know this is really important to you, but don’t forget there are other opportunities out there if you can’t make this one work. You’ll find a job and get that house.”
There was no sense in pointing out that she needed this job now in order to get this loan at this interest rate. “What about you? Did you win the lottery or something? How come you don’t need to worry about work?”
“I do, Kit, but I’ve been thinking about leaving this job lately anyway. I don’t want to be Mr. Fix-It forever. There are better things out there for me. And if I get to leave here with a good recommendation and a severance package, I’m better off than I thought I’d be two weeks ago when I started seriously thinking of quitting.”
Kit hadn’t even realized her friend had been so close to quitting.
“Listen,” Jo said, “if you want to stay and battle this out, I’ll take Johnny home. We’ll go to dinner and swing by your place later, okay?”
“Thanks,” Kit said. For a moment she’d forgotten Johnny was still waiting in her office.
That was the kind of thoughtfulness that was going to make Kit really and truly miss seeing Jo at work every day. She’d been so lucky to work with her best friend for so long.
Now Kit was on her own. And she was going to go forward and change Cal Panagos’s mind no matter what.
One by one the Home Life staff went until there were only two heartbeats left in the room: hers and Cal’s. And she was pretty sure hers was faster.
Cal turned from the doorway and looked at Kit with what she saw now, on closer inspection, were piercing pale blue eyes. They were Newmanesque. This guy could be a movie star.
In fact, if he’d chosen that route, Kit would have been a lot better off.
“There’s just one envelope left,” he said to her in a voice that had probably melted lots of foolish women’s hearts.
“Let me guess.”
He gave a quick smile, the unexpectedness of which took her aback, and held the envelope out to her. “Thanks for your work, Ms. Macy.”
She took a bracing breath and said, “I can’t take that.”
He cocked his head slightly. “I’m sorry?”
“I can’t accept your severance package.” She swallowed hard. She was suddenly self-conscious about her small, mousy self standing in front of him. She’d been in such a rush today that she hadn’t done anything with her wild tangle of auburn hair. And she hadn’t done the laundry in a few days and was wearing her Emergency Work Clothes, meaning gray pants that would have been a lot more flattering if she’d ever been able to stay on the South Beach Diet for more than two or three days.
Still, she had to work with what she had and she had to pretend she had confidence, even if at this particular moment she didn’t.
“I need this job,” she finished simply.
It was clear he hadn’t been expecting an objection from anyone. He cleared his throat and said, “Well, I’m honestly sorry about this, but—”
She took a gamble. “Moreover, you need me.”
He gave her look of dry query.
She nodded at his unasked question. “You do. I’m the only person who knows how to run this magazine. Okay,” she conceded quickly, “things have been a little rocky here financially, but I know where we are with assignments right now and who needs to be contacted and so on. You wouldn’t want to be sued for breach of contract.” Shoot. She shouldn’t have said that. She should have stopped while she was ahead.
From the look he gave her it was clear that Cal Panagos was not a man who liked being threatened, even in a veiled, passive-aggressive way.
He took a moment to straighten the lapel of his Italian-tailored dark gray suit. It fit him perfectly, both physically and metaphorically. It was perfect and cold.
“Everyone needs to be contacted and all assignments need to be canceled,” he said coolly. “My secretary can do that.”
“Can your secretary find her way around the filing maze Lucy created? Some of our legal papers are filed under L for legal, but others are under S for serious legal.”
Cal frowned as if he was trying to figure out whether Kit was on the level.
“Can your secretary figure out kill fees, which are different for each assignment and which are based on past history with each writer? The files are in a spreadsheet on my computer, but there are a lot of them to figure out. More to the point, do you want to pay her—or him—for the hours she’ll have to spend trying to find her way through that maze? Or do you want to keep on the one person who can expedite it?”
He frowned again, drawing a dark shadow across the expression in his light blue eyes. “It may be hard for you to imagine, Ms. Macy, but, yes, I think I can do all of that—and more—without you.” He tilted his head slightly. “After all, we’ve only just met. I’ve managed a much bigger publication than this without any guidance at all.”
She’d taken the wrong tack. She needed to back off quick and try something different.
Maybe plain old honesty would do the trick.
It wasn’t as if she had a lot of other options.
“Look,” she said, “I’m not saying you and your staff aren’t capable of these things. I’m just saying I’m already up to speed, so it makes a lot more sense, economically and timewise, to keep me on.” She looked into his eyes, feeling as though she was swimming against the current in the turbulent ocean of his eyes. “It would benefit both of us.”
His expression softened almost imperceptibly. Perhaps a slight turning of the tide. “Things are changing around here. A lot.”
“I can change.”
He raised an eyebrow slightly. This was a man who knew how he looked at all times and used it to communicate everything he wanted to say. “Are you willing to commit to doing it my way, even before you know what that means?”
She didn’t have any choice. “Yes. Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it. I’m a professional.”
He nodded thoughtfully.
“Please.” She bit the bullet so hard she wouldn’t have been surprised if her teeth shattered. “I really need my job.”
He was still holding the manila envelope with her name on it. He looked at it, then back at her. A long moment passed before he dropped the envelope on the desk.
“This goes against my better judgment,” he said.
Hope lurched in her chest. “Some of the best things in life begin with that very statement.”
He raked his gaze across her. “You’re a persuasive woman, Ms. Macy.”
She smiled. “That will work to your advantage.”
The smallest hint of a smile played at the curve of his mouth. “That particular feminine quality has occasionally worked against me in the past.”
“Presumably you’re referring to pleasure, not business.”
He hesitated, looking at her. “Sometimes it’s hard to separate the two.”
A frisson of electricity zapped through her chest, and gooseflesh raised on her arms and against the cotton of her shirt. There was nothing to say he was talking about sex—he could have meant that he enjoyed his work so much that it was always a pleasure—but something about the way he looked at her gave Kit chills she didn’t want to attribute to his sex appeal.