by Shirley Jump
“You’re hopeless. One bad relationship is no reason to become a hermit.”
One bad relationship? Finn had fallen for a woman who had stolen his top clients, smeared his reputation and broken his heart. That wasn’t a bad relationship, it was the sinking of the Titanic. He’d watched his parents struggle through a terrible marriage, both of them unhappily mismatched, and didn’t want to make the same mistake.
“I’m not having this conversation right now.” Finn’s gaze went to Ellie Winston again. She had moved on to another group of colleagues. She greeted nearly everyone she saw, with a smile, a few words, a light touch. And they responded in kind. She had socializing down to an art. The North Carolina transplant had made friends quickly. Only a few weeks in the city and she was winning over the crowd of their peers with one hand tied behind her back. Yes, she’d be an asset to his company and his plan. A good one. “I’m focused on work.”
“Seems to me you’re focused on her.” Riley grinned.
“She’s a means to an end, nothing more.”
“Yeah, well, the only ending I see for you, Finn, is one where you’re old and gray, surrounded by paperwork and sleeping alone in that sofa bed.”
“You’re wrong.”
For a while, Finn had thought he could have both the life and the job. He’d even bought the ring, put a downpayment on a house in the suburbs. He’d lost his head for a while, a naive young man who believed love could conquer everything. Until that love had stabbed him in the back.
Apparently true love was a fairy tale reserved for others. Like kissing the Blarney Stone for good luck.
Finn now preferred to have his relationships as dry as his wine. No surprises, no twists and turns. Just a dependable, predictable sameness. Leaving the roller coaster for the corporate world.
He suspected, though, that Eleanor Winston and her standout maroon dress was far from the dry, dependable type. She had a glint in her eye, a devilish twinkle in her smile, a spontaneous air about her that said getting involved with her would leave a man…
Breathless.
Exactly the opposite of what he wanted. He would have to keep a clear head around her.
Ellie drifted away from her companions, heading toward the door. Weaving through the crowd slowed her progress, but it wouldn’t be long before she’d finished her goodbyes and left. “She’s leaving. Catch up with you later,” he said to Riley.
“Take a page from my book, brother, and simply ask her out for a drink,” Riley said, then as Finn walked away, added one more bit of advice. “And for God’s sake, Finn, don’t talk business. At least not until…after.” He grinned. “And if you get stumped, think to yourself, ‘What would Riley say?’ That’ll work, I promise.”
Finn waved off Riley’s advice. Riley’s attention had already strayed back to the waitress, who was making her way through the room with another tray—and straight for Riley’s charming grin. His brother’s eyes were always focused on the next beautiful woman he could take home to his Back Bay townhouse. Finn had much bigger, and more important goals.
Like saving his company. He’d made millions already in architecture, and hopefully would again, if he could make his business profitable again. If not, he could always accept his grandmother’s offer and take up the helm at McKenna Media. The family business, started a generation ago by his grandfather, who used to go door-to-door selling radio ad space to local businesses. Finn’s father had joined the company after high school and taken it into television, before his death when Finn was eleven. Ever since his grandfather had died three years ago, Finn’s grandmother had sat in the top chair, but she’d been making noise lately about wanting to retire and have Finn take over, and keep the company in McKenna hands. Finn’s heart, though, lay in architecture. Tonight was all about keeping that heartbeat going.
Finn laid his still-full glass of beer on the tray of a passing waiter, then straightened his tie and worked a smile to his face. Riley, who never tired of telling Finn he was too uptight, too stiff, would say it was more of a grimace. Finn didn’t care. He wasn’t looking to be a cover model or to make friends.
Then he glanced over at his brother—no longer chatting up the waitress but now flirting with a brunette. For a second, Finn envied Riley’s easy way with women. Everything about his little brother screamed relaxed, at home. His stance, his smile, the slight rumple in his shirt.
Finn forced himself to relax, to look somewhat approachable. Then he increased his pace to close the gap between himself and Ellie. He reached her just before she stepped through the glass doors of the lobby.
“Miss Winston.”
She stopped, her hand on the metal bar, ready to exit. Then she turned back and faced him. Her long blond hair swung with the movement, settling like a silk curtain around her shoulders. The short-sleeved crimson dress she wore hugged her curves, and dropped into a tantalizing yet modest V at her chest. For a second, her green eyes were blank, then she registered his face and the green went from cold emerald to warm forest. “My goodness. Mr. McKenna,” she said. “I recognize you from the article in Architecture Today.”
“Please, call me Finn.” She’d seen the piece about his award for innovative building design? And remembered it? “That was more than a year ago. I’m impressed with your memory.”
“Well, like most people in our industry, I have an absolutely ridiculous attention for detail.” She smiled then, the kind of smile that no one would ever confuse with a grimace. The kind of smile that hit a man in the gut and made him forget everything around him. The kind of smile that added an extra sparkle to her green eyes, and lit her delicate features with an inner glow.
Intoxicating.
Get a grip, McKenna. This was business, nothing more. Since when did he think of anything other than a bottle of single malt as intoxicating? Business, and business only. “If you have a minute, I wanted to talk to you.”
“Actually I’m heading out.” She gestured toward the door. A continual Morse code of headlights went by on the busy street outside, tires making a constant whoosh-whoosh of music on the dark pavement, even though it was nearing midnight on a Tuesday night. Boston, like most cities, never slept. And neither, most nights, did Finn McKenna.
“Perhaps you could call my assistant,” she said, “and set up a meeting for—”
“If you have time tonight, I would appreciate it.” He remembered Riley’s advice and decided to sweeten the pot a little. Show her he wasn’t the cold business-only gargoyle that people rumored him to be. Hawk indeed. Finn could be suave. Debonair even.
His younger brother could charm a free coffee from a barista; talk a traffic cop into forgetting his ticket. Maybe if Finn applied a bit of that, it might loosen her up, and make her more amenable to what he was about to propose. So he worked up another smile-grimace to his face—and tried another tack.
“Why don’t we, uh, grab a couple drinks somewhere?” he said, then groaned inwardly. Casual conversation was clearly not his forte. Put him in a board room, and he was fine, but attempting small talk…a disaster.
Damn Riley’s advice anyway.
“Thank you, but I don’t drink. If you ask me, too many bad decisions have been made with a bottle of wine.” Another smile. “I’m sure if you call in the morning—”
“Your schedule is certainly as busy as mine. Why don’t we avoid yet another meeting?”
“In other words, get this out of the way and then I can get rid of you?”
He laughed. “Something like that.”
“It’s really late…”
He could see her hesitation. In a second, she’d say no again, and he’d be forced to delay his plan one more day. He didn’t have the luxury of time. He needed to get a meeting with Ellie Winston—a private one—now. In business, he knew when to press, and when to step back. Now was a time to press. A little. �
�I promise, I don’t bite.”
“Or pick over the remains of your competitors?”
“That’s a rumor. Nothing more. I’ve only done that…once.” He paused a second. “Okay, maybe twice.”
She threw back her head and laughed. “Oh my, Mr. McKenna. You are not what I expected.”
What had she expected? That he would be the stern predator portrayed in that article? Or that he wouldn’t have a sense of humor? “I hope that’s a good thing.”
“We shall see,” she said. Then she reached out and laid a hand on his arm, a quick touch, nothing more, but it was enough to stir a fire inside him. A fire that he knew better than to stoke.
What the hell had been in that beer? Finn McKenna wasn’t a man given to spontaneous emotional or physical reactions. Except for one brief window, he’d lived his life as ordered as the buildings he designed. No room for fluff or silliness. And particularly no room for the foolishness of a tumble in the hay. Yet his mind considered that very thing when Eleanor Winston touched him.
“I’m sorry, you’re absolutely right, it is late and you must want to get home,” he said, taking a step back, feeling…flustered, which was not at all like him. “I’ll call your assistant in the morning.”
Riley had said to say what he would say. And Finn knew damned well Riley wouldn’t have said that.
“No, I’m the one who’s sorry, Mr. McKenna. I’ve had a long, long day and I…” She glanced back in the direction of the closed double doors, but Finn got the sense she wasn’t looking at the black-tie crowd filling the Park Plaza’s ballroom, but at something else, something he couldn’t see. Then she glanced at her watch. “Midnight. Well, the day is over, isn’t it?”
“If you want it to be, Cinderella. Or you could continue the ball for a little while longer.” The quip came out without hesitation. A true Riley-ism. He’d been spending too much time with his brother.
Or maybe not, he thought, when she laughed. He liked her laugh. It was light, airy, almost musical.
“Cinderella, huh?” she said. “Okay, you convinced me. It would be nice to end my day with some one-on-one conversation instead of an endless stream of small talk.” She wagged a finger at him and a tease lit her face, made her smile quirk higher on one side than the other. “But I’ll have tea, not tequila, while I hear you out on whatever it is you want to tell me.”
“Excellent.” He could only hope she was as amenable to his proposal. Surely such an auspicious beginning boded well for the rest. He pushed on the door and waved Ellie through with one long sweep of his arm. “After you…Cinderella.”
“My goodness, Finn McKenna. You certainly do know how to make a girl swoon.” She flashed him yet another smile and then whooshed past him and out into the night, leaving the faint scent of jasmine and vanilla in her wake.
Get back to the plan, he reminded himself. Focus on getting her to agree. Nothing more. He could do it, he knew he could. Finn wasn’t a distracted, spontaneous man. He refused to tangle personal with business ever again. He would get Ellie to agree, and before he could blink, his company would be back on top.
But as he followed one of his biggest competitors into the twinkling, magical world of Boston at night, he had to wonder if he was making the best business decision of his life—or the worst.
CHAPTER TWO
SHE had to be crazy.
What else had made Ellie agree to midnight drinks with Finn McKenna—one of her competitors and a man she barely knew? She’d been ready to go home, get to bed and get some much-needed sleep when Finn had approached her.
There’d been something about his smile, though, something about him charmed her. He wasn’t a smooth talker, more a man who had an easy, approachable way about him, one that she suspected rarely showed in his business life. The “Hawk” moniker that magazine—and most of the people in the architecture world—had given him didn’t fit the man who had teasingly called her Cinderella. A man with vivid sky-blue eyes and dark chocolate hair.
And that intrigued her. A lot.
So Ellie settled into the red vinyl covered seat across from Finn McKenna, a steaming mug of tea warming her palms. So far they’d done little more than exchange small talk about the weather and the party they’d just left.
She’d never met the fabled architect, the kind of man talked about in hushed tones by others in the industry. She’d read about him, even studied a few of his projects when she was in college, but they’d never crossed paths. If she hadn’t been at the helm of WW Architectural Design, she wouldn’t even have been at the event tonight, one of those networking things designed to bring together competitors, as if they’d share trade secrets over a few glasses of wine. In reality, everyone was there to try to extract as much information as they could, while revealing none of their own.
“Was that your brother you were talking to in the ballroom?” she asked. Telling herself she wasn’t being curious about the contradictory Finn, just conversational.
Finn nodded. “Riley. He’s the youngest.”
“He looks a lot like you.”
Finn chuckled. “Poor guy.”
“Is he in the industry, too?”
“Definitely not. He tagged along for the free drinks.”
She laughed. “I can appreciate that. Either way, I’m glad that cocktail party is over.” She rubbed her neck, loosening some of the tension of the day. “Sometimes it seems those things are never going to end.”
“You seemed to fit right in.”
“I can talk, believe me.” She laughed, then leaned in closer and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “But in reality, I hate those kinds of events.”
“You and me both. Everyone trying to pretend to be nice, when really they just want to find out what you’re up to and how they can steal that business away from you,” Finn said. “I think of them as a necessary evil.”
She laughed again. “We definitely have that in common.” She’d never expected to have anything in common with Finn McKenna, whose reputation had painted him as a ruthless competitor, exactly her opposite. Or to find him attractive. But she did.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m much happier behind my desk, sketching out a design. Anything is better than trading the same chatter with the same people in an endless social circle.”
“You and I could be twins. I feel exactly the same way. But…” She let out a sigh and spun her teacup gently left and right.
“But what?”
“But I stepped into my father’s shoes, and that means doing things as he did.” People expected the head of WW to be involved, interactive and most of all, friendly, so Ellie had gone to the event and handled it, she hoped, as her father would have. She had thought taking over her father’s position would be a temporary move, but after the news the doctor gave her yesterday…
Ellie bit back a sigh. There were many, many dinners like that in her future. Henry Winston’s heart attack had been a bad one, leaving him with greatly diminished cardiac capacity. The doctor had warned her that too much stress and worry could be fatal. A return to work was a distant possibility right now. If ever. It all depended on his recovery. Either way, Ellie was determined to keep WW running, and not worry her father with any of the details. He came first.
“Have you ever met my father?” she asked Finn.
He nodded. “I have. Nice guy. Straight shooter.”
“And a talker. I inherited that from him.” Ellie smiled, thinking of the father she’d spent so many hours with in the last few years, chatting about design and business and life. Her father had worked constantly when Ellie was young and been gone too much for them to build any kind of relationship. But ever since Ellie went to college, Henry had made a more concerted effort to connect with his daughter. Although she loved her mother dearly, Ellie wasn’t as close to Marguerite, who
had moved to California shortly after divorcing Henry when Ellie was eighteen. “My father likes to say that he never knows where his next opportunity might come from, so he greets the cashier at a fast food place as heartily as he does the owner of a bank.”
“People like that about him. Your father is well respected.”
“Thank you.” The compliment warmed Ellie. “I hope I can live up to his example.”
“I’m sure you will.”
The conversation stalled between them. Finn turned his attention to his coffee, but didn’t drink, just held the mug. Ellie nursed her tea, then added more sugar to the slightly bitter brew.
She watched Finn, wondering why he had invited her out. If he wanted to talk business, he was taking his time getting to it. What other reason could he have? For all the joking between them earlier, she had a feeling he wasn’t here for a date.
Finn McKenna was younger than she’d expected. Surely a man with his reputation had to be ten feet tall, and ten years older than the early thirties she guessed him to be? Heck, he seemed hardly older than her, but his resume stretched a mile longer. What surprised her most was that he had sought her out—her—out of all the other people in that room. Why?
He had opted for coffee, black, but didn’t drink from the cup. He crossed his hands on the table before him, in precise, measured moments. He held himself straight—uptight, she would have called it—and kept his features as unreadable as a blank sheet of paper. He wasn’t cold, exactly, more…
Impassive. Like the concrete used to construct his buildings. The teasing man she’d met in the lobby had been replaced by someone far more serious. Had that Finn been a fluke? Which was the real Finn McKenna?
And more, why did she care so much?
“I heard WW got the contract on the Piedmont hospital project,” he said.
“We haven’t even announced that hospital deal yet,” she replied, halting her tea halfway to her lips. “How did you know about it?”