by Lisa Jackson
Five
Joanna and Ryder spent the next few weeks locked in a frozen truce.
It was worse, she decided, than all-out war. At least in a war, battle lines were drawn and anger expressed. Ryder’s icy politeness, his policy of speaking to her only when absolutely necessary made him unapproachable, and the distance between them grew.
Every day at the office she felt him watching her with a disparaging eye, certain that he was silently analyzing and criticizing everything she said and did. They continued to work late into the evenings, but their previous camaraderie was missing.
They didn’t even order their take-out dinners from the same places anymore, though Ryder did insist on paying for her meals. Joanna was on a spicy chicken burrito kick and ordered them every night, while Ryder selected a different entrée from a plethora of international cuisines, as if to counter the constancy of her choice.
“How can you eat the same damn thing every single night?” he finally demanded, after her fifteenth straight burrito dinner was delivered to the office.
The cold anger in his tone did not invite her to share any facts about her impaired sense of taste, and his glare seemed to accuse her of consuming burritos solely to provoke him.
So Joanna merely shrugged. “I just can.”
Their rift coincided with a particularly busy time. The ambitious, energetic new hires in Ryder’s PR and marketing department had done a good job of spreading the word about the revamped Fortune’s Design. Their efforts had brought in dozens of inquiries, many of which had turned into new contracts for the company.
Joanna knew it would’ve been difficult for her to keep up with the increasingly complicated and demanding workload, even in an atmosphere free of tension. But Ryder’s coldness and attitude of reproach intensified the pressure.
She was positive he was waiting for her to royally screw up so he could righteously sack her. He must be hoping she would make an error of such magnitude that no one, not even his cousin Michael, could possibly fault him for getting rid of her.
As the tension between them continued to build, Joanna worried that it was only a matter of time till that monumental blunder occurred.
On the day after St. Patrick’s Day, Miss Volk arrived even later than her customary 10:00 a.m. and announced to Joanna that she was quitting her job. Immediately. Forget the customary two-week notice, Miss Volk was out of there!
The reception desk was deserted, the phones went unanswered and the public ungreeted after Miss Volk left the building. The task of breaking the news of the receptionist’s hasty departure to the boss fell to Joanna.
“Miss Volk’s sister who lives in Pittsburgh won a hundred thousand dollars in the Pennsylvania Lottery yesterday,” she began. “Miss Volk said they have the luck of the Irish without being Irish.”
“Mmm.” Ryder, engrossed in the thick report in front of him, did not even feign an interest in the Volk sisters.
“Both Miss Volks decided to move to Florida and buy a condo together. They’ve already contacted moving companies and intend to head south right away. This week, in fact. Miss Volk officially quit Fortune’s Design this morning.” Joanna eyed him uncertainly. “She’s—uh—gone.”
Ryder’s head jerked up. “Miss Volk is gone?”
Joanna nodded.
“Dreams really do come true,” he marveled, his expression thunderstruck.
“She says she’ll sue if you try to withhold her severence pay because she didn’t give advance notice,” Joanna passed on Miss Volk’s parting threat.
“Withhold it? I intend to give her a bonus for going!” Ryder leaned back in his chair and smiled broadly. “I feel like dancing around the desk singing ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.”’
“I liked Miss Volk,” Joanna said tightly. His reaction felt like a vicarious slap, because she was sure he would behave exactly the same way if she were to announce that she was leaving. “I’ll miss her.”
“I won’t, and neither will anyone else.” Ryder was emphatic. “Miss Volk had a sour expression and a grievance to air for everybody who crossed her path. She’s a veritable conduit of negativity.”
“Well, she loves her sister and her cat, so she can’t be all bad,” Joanna countered.
Ryder rolled his eyes heavenward. “Didn’t they say something like that about Stalin?” He glanced at his watch and began to gather up a sheath of papers. “I’m leaving for my meeting with Ike Olsen, our patent attorney in St. Paul.”
Joanna watched as he carefully placed the documents into his dark leather briefcase and snapped it shut.
“Since the hallowed Miss Volk is no longer with us, will you handle the reception desk and the phones for the rest of the day, Joanna?” It was an order, not a request. “Route all incoming calls to voice mail, with one exception. Remember that my great-aunt Kate is supposed to call sometime today, and you know I don’t want her dumped into the voice mail system. Remember our policy. If her number shows up on the display, pick up the phone and tell her I’ll return her call as soon as I get back.”
“I remember. I’ll go out to the reception desk now,” Joanna agreed. The assignment pleased her. She’d subbed for Miss Volk before and had never made a single mistake while doing it.
“And Joanna, while I’m gone print up my e-mail for the past two weeks.” Ryder’s voice halted her at the door. “I’ve been so busy preparing my segment of the panel discussion for the Los Angeles conference at the end of the month that I haven’t had a chance to respond to any messages. I plan to do it this afternoon when I get back from lunch.”
Joanna noticed that he didn’t add how he’d taken care to make his own plane reservations for the L.A. conference, a snide reference he managed to mention at least once a day. The omission seemed significant, and so did his unexpected smile. Her heart turned over in her chest. For the first time since that tumultuous night at Surf City, he seemed…less than glacial toward her.
Her eyes met his, and she was the first to look away.
“I’ll handle the reception desk and incoming calls and print the e-mail,” she said quickly, though she felt a prickle of anxiety. She would be running between Miss Volk’s desk in the reception area and Ryder’s computer in his office. Uh-oh.
“I almost forgot—add a breakfast meeting with Hathaway on April eleven to my electronic schedule,” Ryder tossed off the final order as he strode from the office.
Simple enough, Joanna reasoned, but she approached his computer with trepidation, feeling pressure building inside her. There was a lot at stake here. The stalemate between her and Ryder finally seemed to be coming to an end, and she didn’t want to alienate him all over again by not completing the tasks he’d assigned to her.
It was a lucky break for her that Ryder was so delighted by Miss Volk’s departure he’d even decided to extend his goodwill toward his idiot assistant. After nearly three endless weeks, he had addressed her normally again, the veiled hostility finally absent from his tone.
Joanna sat down at his desk, in his oversize leather chair still warm from his body heat. She knew that Ryder’s electronic schedule and his e-mail were kept in password-protected files, with two different passwords. Something to do with security precautions, she remembered, though the long session with the electronic security expert had been taxing, and she’d had a hard time staying focused.
With a pang Joanna remembered her preaccident days and how easily she used to pick up knowledge and skills, how quickly she had been able to adapt new information to new situations. How she’d taken it all for granted. If Ryder only knew how smart she’d been back then….
Joanna shook her head. She didn’t want Ryder to know anything about her past. Better that he considered her inept due to carelessness and a capricious nature. She didn’t want him to know that she was truly defective.
Nobody had ever spoken the word aloud to her, but Joanna didn’t let herself forget it. Everyone who’d taken care of her after the accident had urged her to face the truth
about her injuries and move forward. Which she had done. She’d had to, because the truth was she would never be the same again.
No, she didn’t want Ryder to know. Joanna bit down on her lower lip until it hurt more than the thought of Ryder Fortune pitying her.
The phones began to ring, and she checked the numbers displayed, looking for Kate Fortune’s, to spare her a trip into the annoying labrinyth of the voice mail system.
Meanwhile, Ryder’s computer seemed to have hatched a diabolical plan to keep her from gaining access to his electronic schedule file and his e-mail. “Access Denied” kept flashing on the screen as she tried first one password, then the other.
It occurred to her that she must’ve mixed them up, but try as she might she couldn’t seem to make a correct hit. It was as if the machine itself deliberately kept scrambling them!
The phones rang nonstop. Everybody in Minneapolis—maybe the entire world?—had suddenly decided to call Fortune’s Design. Joanna checked every number, hoping none of them belonged to Ryder’s beloved great-aunt and benefactor. Because she was starting to get the numbers as mixed up as the passwords.
Perspiration beaded on her brow as she dashed back and forth from Ryder’s office to the reception area, feeling trapped as a rat in a maze. The similarities worried her. Did the rats ever get out of those mazes, or did they just keep running around, accomplishing nothing?
And then, sweet miracle, she gained access to both files. Though she would’ve preferred to open one at a time, rather than both simultaneously, she didn’t dare cross the computer that had finally deigned to grant her entry.
But something was wrong. Though she hit the essential command, the printer was not activated. The e-mail remained unprinted.
“E-mail is a mixed blessing,” she quoted Ryder to herself. He was ambivalent about it. When he’d gotten his MBA, e-mail hadn’t been so pervasive, but when he’d returned from his life of adventure e-mail ruled the workplace. Perhaps as an unconscious protest, Ryder—normally a most conscientious executive—was uncharacteristically lax with his e-mail. He let it accumulate before he ever looked at it; he forgot to save messages…
Had he saved these messages? The thought struck her just as she moved to the other file, to insert Ryder’s appointment with Hathaway into his schedule, but her addition didn’t show up on the screen.
Annoyed, Joanna hit the commands again. If she’d mixed up the files—But how? There was the e-mail, there was the calendar.
She hit a few more keys and suddenly the monitor went blank. Bewildered, Joanna stared at it. The long scroll of e-mail messages had disappeared. Every space on the electronic calendar was empty.
The phone rang again, and Joanna glanced at the number displayed. It was Kate Fortune’s. Wasn’t it? She took the call.
“Can I talk to Ryan?” an aggressive male voice demanded over the line, while Joanna coped with the dawning horror that instead of being printed, two weeks’ worth of e-mail had been deleted. Not only that, every scheduled appointment in Ryder’s electronic calendar from January to December had been erased, as if by magic.
Black magic, Joanna thought dolefully. Accidentally practiced by her.
She tried to figure out what had happened. In her rush to intercept Kate Fortune’s call, had she mixed up the icons on the screen or the commands on the keyboards—or maybe in a spectacular goof, somehow done both—consigning the e-mail and the schedule to the trash file instead of the printer?
Even worse, her mistake had been for nothing because the caller wasn’t Kate Fortune. Joanna recognized the brash insistent tone of a stockbroker on a cold call—one who hadn’t even gotten Ryder’s name right.
“Ryan’s not here!” she snapped and forcefully slammed down the phone. Who had time to worry about a broker’s feelings when she’d committed a drastic error? Or more.
Panic swept through her. Joanna tried to remember what she knew about computers. Wasn’t there a way to get things out of the trash? She pushed the mouse around and pressed all sorts of commands on the keyboard, to no avail. It was as if the contents of those files had been totally obliterated.
What if they had been?
She raced out of the office, down to Marketing to seek help. Warren and Aaron, two nice guys she’d befriended there, agreed to try to retrieve the lost files. The three of them trooped back into Ryder’s office.
The phone rang again, but Joanna was too engrossed in the current crisis to notice.
Warren did. “Let whoever it is go straight into voice-mail purgatory,” he joked. “We gotta save our little Joanna’s neck from the hanging noose.”
It wasn’t until the phone stopped in midring that Joanna noticed the display number and realized that the caller whom they’d just relegated to voice-mail purgatory was none other than the revered Kate Fortune. Whose call she’d been commanded to take.
“What a mess!” Groaning, Joanna sank onto her desk chair, clutching her head in her hands.
“Hey, we all have our bad days,” Aaron offered a few consoling words. He and Warren were both hunched over Ryder’s computer, rapidly hitting commands on the keyboard. “Computer foul-ups can happen to anyone.”
“That’s tactful of you to say, but it’s not true,” Joanna lamented. “Grade-school kids are savvy enough not to trash what they want to print. Gracie, my niece, is as comfortable with computers as she is with crayons.”
“Strangely enough, the trash is empty,” Warren murmured, frowning.
Joanna flinched. “Does that mean that I…I permanently deleted everything?”
“Let me try this one last-ditch thing.” Warren’s fingers flew across the keyboard and his frown deepened. He glanced up at her and cleared his throat. “Uh, look at it this way, Joanna. If any of those e-mail messages are of vital importance, the senders will post them again. I’ll bet most were just junk, anyway,” he added hopefully.
He didn’t comment on the lost calendar. There was no way to downplay the seriousness of all those lost appointments.
“Why would RF want his e-mail printed, anyway?” puzzled Aaron. “Seems like a waste of ink jet and paper to me. He should read them straight from the monitor.”
“Except he can’t because I sent them into oblivion.” Joanna’s breath caught in her throat. “Is everything gone forever?”
She could tell by Warren and Aaron’s wrinkled foreheads and matching grimaces that the retrieval effort had failed, but she needed to hear it said. To douse that tiny flare of foolish hope that still flickered within her.
“Gone without a trace,” confirmed Aaron. “Sorry, Joanna.”
“You said you tried all kinds of things to retrieve the files before you came to get us,” Warren said slowly. “Somehow, some way…” His voice trailed off, leaving the obvious unsaid.
Whatever she’d done was unable to be undone. Her vestige of hope was officially quashed. “Oh, what am I going to tell Ryder?” Joanna cried, aghast.
“Well, you could point out there are always unexplained glitches that occur,” suggested Aaron.
“But I made the unexplained glitch occur.” Joanna choked out the words.
“There is no actual proof of that.” Warren tried to cheer her up. “No incontrovertible evidence was left behind like DNA on a crime victim. It’s within the realm of possibility that a computer virus could’ve been at work here.”
“That’s the story to go with,” seconded Aaron. “Warren and I will back you all the way, Joanna. I have some outdated files of my own that I could make disappear to add credibility to the virus theory.”
“The virus is Joanna Chandler. And I can’t ask you guys to lie for me.” Impulsively she hugged first Aaron, then Warren. “But thank you both for trying to help. I really appreciate it.”
“I’ll be glad to help you anytime, Joanna.” Warren prolonged the hug by tightening his arms around her.
Joanna managed to gracefully extricate herself from his embrace. “I’d better get back to the reception desk. W
ithout Miss Volk here—”
“Being Volk-less calls for a celebration!” exclaimed Aaron. “A bunch of us are going out to this hot new club tonight. Come with us, Joanna. After a day like this, you could use a night of fun.”
“And Surf City is supposed to be ‘Fun Taken One Step Further,”’ Warren flashed a promising smile while quoting the club’s latest advertising slogan.
Joanna remembered the music blasting at hearing-loss decibels, the unseasonable beachwear, the claustrophobia-inducing crowds. So that was Fun Taken One Step Further? She’d had a better time alone at home watching sitcom reruns on cable.
But tonight she would be unemployed, and sitting alone in her apartment held no appeal. Jenny and Wendi would be out; that was a given, they went out every night.
Joanna envisioned the evening that awaited her, alone in her apartment, worried sick about finding a new job so she could remain independent rather than sponge off her sister, who’d already done so very much for her.
Maybe an evening at Surf City, where it was virtually impossible to think, let alone worry, didn’t sound so awful after all.
The first thing Ryder noticed when he entered the building was Joanna seated behind the reception desk…and two young hotshots from the marketing department hanging all over the desk. Vying for Joanna’s attention. All but drooling over her!
And no wonder. She was wearing her dark strawberry-colored suit, the one with the short skirt and fitted jacket, the one that drove him crazy every time she wore it because it revealed hints of tantalizing curves while discreetly concealing them. His rational mind appreciated the garment as a masterpiece of product design—except the sight of Joanna wearing it effectively rendered him irrational.
He stopped at the desk, a fixed smile on his face. “Slow day, huh?”
The tone of his own voice startled him. He had intended to sound jovial, like one of the guys. What he’d heard was his father, in full executive mode, about to deliver an admonishment on the perils of wasting time.