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He told them to hurry, then shoved the phone back in his pocket, and started for the door himself. He knew what damage could be done in ten minutes, heaven knew he’d done enough damage in ten minutes when he was a kid. He approached the door, never a fan of confrontation, but more than able to take care of himself. He’d never developed a love for fighting, the way a lot of his old friends had, the friends who had ended up dead or in prison. But he could take care of himself.
He reached the door, pulled it farther back, hesitated as he looked into the broad hallway that lead to the center of the complex and saw nothing but shadows. He listened, then stepped inside. He knew the area by heart, a hallway with rooms off it, leading to a large central space with more private rooms off it, another hallway that led to the front of the building and the reception area. It was all being redone for the day-care center, with painting and restructuring. Right now it was in shadows. He felt for the wall switch, flicked it, but nothing happened.
He waited, then continued through the hallway, a faint glow coming from somewhere ahead. He went toward it. The smell of paint was heavy in the still air. He went farther, strange shapes materializing before him, something that looked for all the world like a tree of dark shadows. He was about to step into the large central area, nearing the tree-looking thing, when he sensed movement to his left. He spun around, and the next thing he knew someone was running into him, hands striking his middle and he was being pitched backwards.
Things he’d never forgotten from his misspent youth came back in a rush, and he grabbed at his attacker, catching at flailing hands, jerking the person back with him. He twisted and as they hit the floor together, he was on top with his body weight pinning his attacker under him.
“Fire, fire!” someone was screaming at the same time he realized that the hands he’d captured were fine-boned, and the body under his was slight, although tall, and the scent of flowers and something else were infinitely female. Soft, warm, breathing as rapid as his, and a woman’s voice still screaming over and over again, “Fire!”
The woman was twisting without stopping, and as his hold grew slack from shock, her hands were free and striking out at him. He let go completely, scrambling back to get out of reach of the stinging slaps on his face, arms and chest.
With a man it would have been different. He would have decked him. But a woman? He might have been a hoodlum when he was younger, but he’d never hit a woman and never would. So his only recourse was to try to grab at her hands again, to capture them to stop the blows. Despite the fact that he was battling a blurred shadow, he got the suggestion of wild curls, slenderness and real strength.
He grabbed for her hands, but before he could make contact, he was blindsided by someone on his left, the impact sending him reeling to his right, his head and shoulder striking an ungiving wall. He ignored the jarring impact, spun around, scrambling to his feet and took a punch to his middle.
As he lurched backward, he heard what sounded like a kid’s voice screaming at him. “Hey, you jerk, you let her go!” And the owner of the voice was running at him again. “You stop hurting her!”
Kids and women, Matt thought at the same time he managed to catch the kid by his shoulders and hold on for dear life while he managed to evade most of the punches and kicks coming at him. Then the woman was there too, grabbing at him, jerking hard on his arm, still yelling, and the madness of the moment seemed to be suffocating him.
The screams echoed all around him until his own screams were mixed with them. “Stop it!” he yelled at the top of his lungs, then pushed the kid away from him. He felt the wall behind him, relieved that he wouldn’t be attacked from the rear. “That’s enough,” he yelled, “That’s enough! Stop. I give up.”
There was a sudden silence as Matt managed to make out the shape of the child to his right, then the woman, not more than three feet in front of him. Even in the shadows, he could see her standing with both hands up, but not in surrender. She looked ready to deliver a karate chop as she spoke at a thankfully reasonable level in a husky, very female voice, “You’d better not move. Not one move.”
“I’m not planning on it,” Matt muttered.
The kid moved and Matt turned to protect himself, but instead of another blow being delivered, the kid turned on the overhead lights. The flash of brightness blinded Matt for a moment. Then he finally saw his attackers.
Chapter Two
Matt saw the kid first, maybe eight or nine years old wearing baggy jeans, a hooded sweatshirt and grabbing a faded Yankees baseball cap from the floor. He put it on backwards over thick black hair that curled at the ends, and he watched Matt carefully with dark-brown eyes in a tanned face. Both hands came up in front of him, and both were balled into fists.
Then Matt saw the woman.
His first impression was a tangle of wild auburn curls around a stunningly beautiful face dominated by eyes that he could have sworn were a deep green. She was tall and slender with improbably long legs defined by tight jeans worn with suede boots and topped by a loose navy sweater. If she hadn’t looked so earnest and so unsettlingly beautiful, he would have laughed at her “karate” attack stance.
“Don’t…don’t you move at all,” she said, both hands up, long fingers pressed tightly together, no doubt ready to “chop” if they had to. She never looked away from Matt as she spoke to the boy. “Go and get help. Get security at the front desk.”
But the kid didn’t go anywhere. Instead, he came a bit closer, his dark-brown eyes narrowed on Matt and his hands still in tight fists. “What you up to, mister?” he asked. “You’re ripping the people off or what? You stealing stuff from this place, or you gonna hurt the lady?”
He had to be from the day care upstairs, but he didn’t look like the kids that had been coming in and out since Matt had been here. “No, I’m not ripping people off,” he said as he realized there was a tree in the room, right in the middle, an almost cartoon-like thing, with holes in it and branches that were chained to the ceiling with what looked like platforms on them. A real tree house, he thought as he looked back at the boy, then down at the floor and saw his briefcase.
“Sure,” the kid said with heavy sarcasm.
His briefcase had landed upside down against the wall by his feet. “Well, I’m not, and I’m not stealing and I’m not going to hurt—” He reached for the briefcase as he talked, but the kid moved faster than he did, kicking at the case, and sending it flying ten feet across the floor. It ended up near the strange-looking tree. “No, you don’t, mister!”
“Oh, come on. That’s my briefcase…what’s left of it,” he said, eyeing the heavy scuff mark on the side of the case.
“Can you prove it?” the kid asked.
He looked at the boy, then the woman. They hardly looked like a gang, but they were ganging up on him. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m supposed to be here. The question is,” he said as the woman moved a bit closer and he could see that her eyes really were a deep, almost emerald green, “why are you two here?”
EVEN AS BRITTANY braced herself to do whatever it took to fend off this mountain of a man in front of her, she knew it wasn’t right. With the bright lights on, there was no furtive criminal in front of her, but a large man, dressed all in black, wearing clothes that weren’t cheap, and frowning at her and the kid as if they were aliens.
“We…we should get Security.” She glanced at the boy she hadn’t even known was in the complex until he joined in the attack. “Go and get help, please.”
“Yes, get Security,” the man said quickly in a deep voice.
“We don’t need no police in here,” the boy said as he glared at the man. “I can take care of him.” He moved a bit closer, his fists raised. “No problem.”
She would have laughed if the kid hadn’t seemed so serious and the man hadn’t seemed so angry. “No, you go and get help. I…I’ll…” She stumbled over her bravado as she looked back at the man. He was huge.
Dark eyes were on her, angry eyes in a sharply chiseled face. Sandy-blond hair, worn longer than was fashionable, was mussed, only adding to a strangely edgy feeling that the man seemed to radiate. Big? Shoot, he was a mountain and probably outweighed her by eighty or a hundred pounds. She remembered the feel of him against her, over her, controlling her and she inched back a bit, aware of how impossible it would be to control him.
All she’d seen was a flash, someone there, then there was impact, her body tangling with his, strength everywhere, and she’d had a flash of terror that she was being attacked, or even kidnapped. Her father had told her often enough when she was growing up that she had to take precautions against some nutcase thinking he could make money by kidnapping her. And she’d been told when you are attacked never to stop fighting. But it all seemed foolish now.
If the man hadn’t been off balance in the first place, she never would have been able to upset him, let alone keep him from doing whatever he wanted to do. But the longer she looked at him, she knew that nothing made sense. He was obviously color-challenged, but his clothes were expensive, as expensive as the black boots he wore with them. And the briefcase on the floor wouldn’t be carried by a thug.
“Security can figure this out,” she said, her voice lower now.
“No,” the kid said immediately.
But the man just shrugged his massive shoulders, leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms on his chest. After one glance at his watch, another less-than-cheap thing about him, the dark eyes were on her. “That’s fine by me.”
She wished she was controlling this, but knew she wasn’t. She knew she’d never controlled anything about this encounter. “Okay,” she said, and turned to the boy, but he wasn’t there. She looked back at the front doors, but there was no one in sight. He had gone to get help, and she hadn’t even heard him move.
She exhaled with relief that help was coming, that the kid had done as she’d originally asked, but that was short-lived when the stranger murmured, “He took off.”
“He’s getting Security.”
“Not in this lifetime,” the man said in a deep voice as he narrowed his eyes on her.
“Where did he go?”
“I didn’t see him go, but trust me, he’s long gone.”
“No,” she said quickly, looking back over her shoulder at the empty area around them. “He’s gone for help.”
“He’s your kid?”
“No. I don’t even know him,” she admitted as she looked back at the stranger. “But he’ll get help.”
“You trust that kid?”
She hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but she’d never been cynical, either. “I think he’ll come back.”
“He could, but speaking from personal experience and not being the trusting sort, why would he come back if he’d just been caught where he shouldn’t be and had attacked someone he shouldn’t have attacked?” His eyes flicked over her, making her stomach tighten. “My guess is, it’s just you and me now.”
Brittany took a step back, and knew she didn’t want it to be “just you and me,” with any man, especially not with this giant of a man who was looking at her with an intensity that made her thought processes amazingly scrambled.
She knew she should get out of there. She should run like hell. She looked for her purse, and saw it, right behind the stranger, the heel of his boot either pressing it against the wall or stepping on it. She couldn’t tell. And she wasn’t going closer to get a better look, either.
“Hey, what’s going on here?” someone yelled from behind them.
She turned and saw a security guard rushing into the conference area. “See, I told you he was getting help,” she said to the stranger.
He looked past her. “Not unless he’s wearing overalls now.”
She turned back and saw the guard coming toward them, followed by a tiny, dark-haired woman in pink overalls, but no sign of the kid. The guard stopped when he saw the two of them, but the woman didn’t stop until she was right by them. She looked from Brittany to the stranger, then settled on the man. “I was in the security room when they said you called in. I came to see what was happening.”
“That’s what I was trying to figure out myself.” The man stood a bit straighter and Brittany was vaguely aware that her purse fell to one side.
“Where’s the boy?” Brittany asked as she turned back to the guard.
The middle-aged man in the gray uniform shrugged. “Boy? What boy?”
Brittany looked past him. “A boy, maybe eight or nine years old, in baggy clothes, a baseball cap?” She looked back at the guard. “He went to get you.”
“No, ma’am, never saw a kid.” He motioned to the stranger. “Mr. Terrel here called Security and Mrs. Blake was there when the call came, and then we heard the commotion.”
Mr. Terrel? Brittany turned to those dark eyes still holding steady on her. Matthew Terrel? A C.E.O.? He wasn’t like any C.E.O. she’d met in her life. No three-piece suit or pinstriped shirt. Shoot, and she’d attacked him, the man she was supposed to meet, the man who was going to “watch out for her” for her father. Shoot and double shoot.
“I thought there was a break-in, and I had visions of graffiti all over the place.” The pink-overalled woman looked around as she spoke. “I couldn’t bear it if this was spoiled. That tree’s perfect and everything’s going so well.”
“Amy, don’t worry. I think everything’s okay. I saw the back door was open, called Security then came in to check.” Matthew Terrel looked back at Brittany, and she was startled to see what might have been the shadow of a smile in his dark eyes. He couldn’t be starting to enjoy this. “I barely got inside before I was attacked. Some kid who must have been staying late at the day care got me, right after she did.” He motioned toward Brittany and she barely hid a flinch when his hand almost struck her shoulder. “She came out of the shadows screaming something about a fire.”
“You hit me first,” she said, then realized how truly ridiculous that sounded. Matthew Terrel attacking someone? That was the wrong road to go down, and she knew that it was time to stop the madness. “I’d tried to turn on the lights and couldn’t find a switch that worked, then I ran into someone and he…he grabbed me, and it scared me, and I was just protecting myself.”
“But screaming fire?” he asked, and, yes, she knew that he was on the verge of smiling now.
“I was told to yell fire, because people ignore other things or don’t want to get involved, but if they think they’re going up in smoke, they pay attention.”
The smile came to light then, a lifting of his lips and crinkling of lines at the corners of his dark eyes. “Well, I have to say, you got my attention, Miss…?”
She opened her mouth to say who she was, that she was here to meet with him, that she’d been delayed and maybe even apologize for hitting him. But before she could get anything out, the security guard who had gone to look around was back. “Nothing bothered, Mrs. Blake. Everything looks just fine.”
“Thank goodness,” Amy sighed. “Today has been so crazy, what with the kids and fabric swatches and toy designers.”
“Is there anything else, sir?” the guard asked. He eyed Brittany, then said, “How about her?”
“I’ll take care of this. Just keep an eye on the doors.”
“Yes, sir,” the guard said, then left.
Brittany watched the man, swearing she could catch a hint of the scents that had surrounded her when they’d fallen to the floor together. A mellow aftershave, heat and something else that oddly reminded her of when she was a kid and went to the office with her dad. That was weird. “Are you okay, Matt?” Amy asked.
“I’m fine. I was just trying to get out of here. I had an appointment that never showed, and just destroyed whatever time line I was trying to keep intact.”
“Yeah, I heard about that meeting. She never showed?”
He moved as Amy spoke, lightly brushing Brittany’s arm as he passed her. She moved back a step and watched him cross to the tree base to get his briefcase. He picked it up, then brushed at the expensive leather. “No. Not even a call.” He came back, stopping near Amy. “Not that I expected one. Mr. Lewis said she wasn’t thrilled with having to actually work, but he was sure she’d be here on time. He thought they had an understanding. But he’s the father and probably wants to think the best of his only child.”
Her heart sank. They were talking about her. She saw Amy grin at him, a sense of familiarity between the big man and the tiny woman. They seemed so easy together, so connected as they spoke, and a part of Brittany felt a crazy jealousy that a man and woman could be so comfortable together. Then she remembered that the guard had called her Mrs. Blake. Were they just friends, friends close enough to have an inside joke running about her? She cursed the fact that her face felt hot and she brushed at her cheek as they kept talking.
“Her idea of work is getting engaged,” Amy said. “I doubt that she’ll show up here.”
“I hope she doesn’t. The only reason I agreed to hire her on was that her father’s been so decent about things. And I could tell it meant a lot to him. He’s got the idea that if she just sits behind a desk, that something will kick in and she’ll show what she’s made of.” He laughed then, a rough sound that jarred Brittany. “Poor guy, hope springs eternal, I guess. She’s got to be in her twenties and he’s watching out for her as if she’s a teenager getting summer work.”
“She acts like some spoiled teenager,” Amy said.
“You’ve got that right, and just what I need. Babysitting a recalcitrant brat. If she shows I’ll have Rita put her in an office as far away from me as she can and lock the door.”
Brittany wanted nothing more than to go up to him, slap him across the face and walk out. But that would only feed into what he was saying. How she wished she had her father’s way with words, knowing just the right thing to say to bring grown men to their knees. That was another trait of his that had eluded her.
“He’s her father,” Amy said. “Parents always hope for the best. And maybe she’ll find someone else, get engaged again and this time make it to the altar, then she’ll be another man’s problem, and get her father off the hook.”
“Sure, and pigs fly,” Matt muttered, taking one last swipe at a huge scuff mark on his briefcase.
She’d had enough of their condescending ridicule and she was ready to leave. No agreement with her father was going to make her stay anywhere near this man. She moved quickly, made a grab for her purse, and would have just walked out if Matt hadn’t spoken to her.
“I’m sorry. I got sidetracked.”
She turned and saw thankfully that there was a buffer of space between them. “I guess so,” she muttered.
“I’m Matt Terrel. Now, why were you here?”
“I came to see about a job.”
“In here?”
Before she could say that she’d always thought this was the conference complex and not some crazy area with a fake tree in the middle of it where she’d been told to meet him, a smiling Amy came closer to her.
“Oh gosh, I know who you are.”
But there was no embarrassment for what she’d been saying about her. “You do?”
“Of course I do.” She held out her hand. “I’m Amy Blake, the person you were supposed to meet with. But I left a message for you that I had to cancel and would call and reschedule.”
She glanced at Matt, who was watching her. “I thought you were doing the interview? And I never heard anything about canceling.”
“Me? No, I have a totally hands-off policy when it comes to the day-care center. And I never heard about any of this.”
None of this was making any more sense than their attack scene moments ago. “A day-care center?”
“Well, anyway, you’re here, although I thought you’d come up to see me at the old center.” Amy motioned around the room. “But this is great. You can see the new place. There’s much more space, and the play tree. Lindsey’s idea, actually, for the kids. There’s a real kitchen, two of them and we’re going to have an outside play area when we figure out the best place for it.” The woman was in rapture over the place. “It used to be a conference complex, but Mr. Holden rethought his plans and decided that the conference rooms would be better on the sixth floor and the day-care center could be put down here. They’ve almost got the transition finished. We hope by the new year that we’ll be on track for the switch.”
All of that was of no interest to Brittany. Kids weren’t part of her world, and she certainly wasn’t going to allow Terrel to assign her to do some babysitting chores. “That’s all very nice, but—”
“Oh, of course, this is where you come in,” Amy said, walking to the closest plain white wall. “It’s here.” She motioned to the wall, then the ceiling. “Maybe even the ceilings. The woman who actually started the center wants this place to be magical, to be nourishing for the kids. And to be nearly indestructible.” She came over to Brittany again. “So, what do you think? Tell me it’s doable. It was my idea to hire a graphic designer for this, to get it into professional hands for the murals. Tell me you can make this all happen.”
Brittany pieced together what she thought was going on, that this woman thought she was someone looking for a job doing some graphic art on the walls of this place. She loved art, always had, and in her meandering path through higher education, had had a lot of classes in both traditional art and graphics. The thought was intriguing. It was too bad she wasn’t here for that job instead of a desk job under this man’s eagle eye.
“It’s got real possibilities,” she said, turning slowly in a circle to look at the space.
“You’ve got ideas already?” Amy asked.
As Brittany looked around at the partially domed ceiling over the tree, and the way the branches were suspended toward both side walls, she knew she did have ideas. Ideas that tumbled over each other. “It’s a babysitting thing, like preschool?” she asked.
“Day care. Both all day, and before and after school, so the kids range from babies to preteen.”
It could be great. She looked back at Amy, trying to ignore the man watching her so intently. “You want art on the walls and ceiling?”
“Both, or just the walls, whatever you think would be the most stunning and appropriate. It’s for the kids. Period. It doesn’t have to please adults.”
Pleasing adults. That phrase brought her dad into the picture. She could do this. She knew she could, and her father hadn’t said just what she had to do here. But as she glanced back and caught Matt’s eye, she knew that he’d never let her do this. He’d never turn her loose with paint and bare walls. Never. She looked away from him, glancing at a short hallway that she knew led out to the reception area.
“I could do this,” she said, as much for herself as for them. “I’d like to try.” And as she spoke, she knew this was the only way she’d get a chance without her father stepping in and calling in more favors. “I really would like to try,” she said, looking back at Amy and trying to ignore the man in black. “I’ve got some ideas.”
“Okay, but the last person who came in wanted to do wild animals all over the walls, and…” She motioned to the ceiling. “He wanted to do panthers on the ceiling as if they were coming out of the trees. I don’t mind telling you it gave me the chills. Can you imagine what it would do to a child trying to nap and seeing that?”
Ideas were coming to her fast and furious. “I wasn’t thinking of wild animals.”
“What do you see this all becoming?” Amy asked.
She told her with growing enthusiasm the images she was getting. “If it’s for the kids, I see the kids on the walls, circles of them, dancing, playing. The real kids. You know, the ones who are regulars here. They’d be in the art, part of it, and ringing the walls, as if playing ‘Ring Around the Rosey’ in a play yard.” She looked up. “And the ceiling, it’s the sky, just a simple sky, a pale blue, maybe a rainbow on the far side, and clouds, puffy balls of white cotton suspended by fishing line from the ceiling. All about the kids. As if it was their world.”