"This is a lovely office," she said, casting about for something safe to say. Even a proper Bostonian couldn't object to an innocuous comment about his taste in interior decoration, and the office was lovely. "And the view…" She moved away from him, toward the bank of tall windows behind his desk, and looked out over the strip of parkland that ran down the center of the street below. "It's fabulous. It must be very soothing to look out at grass and trees in the middle of a hectic business day."
"Yes, very soothing," Reed agreed, although he hardly ever paused long enough to notice the view. Besides, right now the only view that interested him was the one he had of her legs.
She had trim, elegant ankles and slim, rounded calves, both shown to advantage by the black heels she wore. There was a slit up the back of her narrow skirt, not deep, but it went high enough for him to see the tender back of her knee when she moved. She wasn't wearing seamed stockings, which was mildly disappointing, but he still had high hopes for the garters and the frilly corset. She looked like the kind of woman who would wear them … the kind of woman who should wear them. Otherwise, what were fantasies for?
"Don't you think we should get started?" she said, turning from the windows to face him as she spoke.
"Started?" In the second or two it took Reed to change gears, he had a full-blown fantasy of getting started on the desk. It produced an erection that was almost painful, and completely surprising. It had never happened in his office before. Never. He didn't know quite how to react. "Ah … yes, certainly," he said, falling back on protocol and good manners. "Let's get started. Why don't you sit here."
He pulled out a chair at the small oval dining-cum-conference table, standing behind it while she crossed the room. She reached out as she approached and set her purse on the table, then turned and seated herself. The scent of violets drifted up to him and he bent his head, eyes half-closed, breathing it in as he gently pushed the chair in behind her knees.
"Thank you," she murmured, turning her head slightly to smile up at him.
Her hair brushed the back of his hand, soft as a whisper. The tiny filigreed amethyst teardrops dangling from her earlobes swayed enticingly. Her scent beckoned him to come closer. It was all he could do not to give in to temptation—not to grasp her by the shoulders, haul her out of the chair and kiss her senseless.
But there were rules about that sort of thing, he reminded himself. This wasn't a Saturday afternoon in Bruno's Pub. This was his office. She was here on business. Even more to the point, she was here, in essence, to apply for a loan. Oh, yes, there were very definite rules. Rules that said he shouldn't even be thinking about what he was thinking about until business was settled, one way or the other. Under the circumstances, even what had happened at Bruno's on Saturday shouldn't have.
Reed took a deep breath, uncurled his fingers from the back of her chair and circled around the table. He seated himself at a ninety degree angle to her and pulled his chair in close, making very sure he was situated so the edge of the table concealed his condition.
"All right, let's get to it then, shall we?" he said, slipping into his businessman mode in an effort to hurry along the demise of his body's response to his guest.
The sooner they got this business settled and out of the way, the sooner he could get on with the more important business of getting Zoe Moon into his bed.
He inserted his hand into an inside pocket of his suit coat and extracted his reading glasses. He slipped them on and flipped open the manila file folder on the table in front of him, his eyes intense and focused as he perused the first page.
Zoe watched the transformation from elegant man-about-town to no-nonsense financial guru, fascinated by this glimpse at yet another side of him. The man was a quick-change artist, slipping seamlessly from one persona to another. It was a bit disconcerting. And endlessly intriguing. It made her wonder just exactly how many sides there were to Reed Sullivan IV.
"Your credit report," he said, handing it to her. "It's excellent, by the way. No overdue accounts. No judgments or liens. Not much of anything beyond your monthly rent and a couple of credit cards, all paid on time and usually in full. That's an impressive feat in this age of runaway credit. And you paid your college loans off in record time." He tossed her a quick, approving glance. "Very impressive."
Zoe put the document aside without looking at it. She'd seen any number of variations on the theme in the past couple of months; bank officers loved credit reports.
"Not what you expected from a con artist, is it?" she said, giving him her slanting, sideways look.
He glanced at her over the tops of his glasses. "I've apologized for that," he said in a tone both patient and annoyed. "Is it going to be necessary for me to do it again?"
"No, that's all right," she said, chastened by his quiet words. "Once was enough. Really. Go on with what you were saying. What else have you got in that file?"
She wondered if he'd bring up the private investigator he'd sicced on her.
He didn't. Not directly, anyway.
"Your work history." He handed her another sheet of paper. "Substantially less impressive. You've had—" he counted silently, skimming a fingertip down his copy of the report "—seventeen, no, eighteen jobs in the last six years." He glanced up briefly, his expression severe. "My first question has to be why? This kind of job hopping doesn't give the impression of the kind of stability investors are looking for."
As if she didn't already know that all too well!
"I get bored easily," she said, and then thought better of her answer. Financial types didn't appreciate levity, even when it held a grain of truth. More than a grain, in her case. "I'm just not cut out for the traditional nine-to-five routine," she explained. "I like variety, meeting new people, trying new things. Part-time work has that. It's given me the opportunity to try out a lot of different fields and meet a lot of people, as well as providing me with a more-or-less steady income while I got New Moon up and running. And if you'll look at the dates a little more closely," she advised him, "you'll see that it's not quite as bad as it appears at first glance. I held a lot of those jobs concurrently, sometimes three at a time."
He took another quick look at the list of jobs, checking the dates a bit more closely than he had the first time. "'A lot' does seem to be the operative phrase," he agreed after a moment, impressed in spite of himself. She had to be a real go-getter to work two jobs at once, let alone three. Maybe she wasn't quite as flighty as she appeared at first glance. "Salesclerk, telephone solicitation, a couple of clerical positions, several stints as a waitress, dog walker, makeup consultant, tour guide, personal shopper—" he looked at her over the tops of his glasses again, his expression amused this time "—clown?"
"I did children's parties, school fairs, that kind of thing. It was fun, but when New Moon finally began to take off, I just didn't have time for it anymore, even on a part-time basis."
"And New Moon finally started to take off when?" He ran his gaze down the list of figures again, rechecking the date of her last employment. "About six months ago?"
"Yes, about that." She gave a little nod that set her earrings swaying. "Yes, I'd say it's definitely been at least six months since I had to take a part time job to make ends meet."
"And you've worked exclusively on New Moon since then? It's been completely self-supporting?"
"Yes, completely," she said, and then paused, rethinking her answer, wondering if his definition of self-supporting and hers could possibly be the same. "I've been able to pay my bills without taking on extra work," she added, just so there'd be no question later of what she'd meant by the term.
He nodded absently, as if to himself, and reached for one of the sharpened #2 pencils protruding from a leather pencil cup in the center of the table. After making a brief note in the margin of the report, he put the pencil down, took his glasses off and lifted his gaze to hers. His expression was serious as he regarded her across the table.
Zoe instinctively braced h
erself for some hard questions.
"Given your work history—" he tapped the report with one finger "—and your admitted penchant for variety in your work environment, what assurances can you offer that you won't get bored with New Moon in another couple of months and decide to go on to something else, leaving my great-grandmother with nothing to show for her investment aside from a possible tax write-off?"
Zoe pondered how to answer that for a moment, wondering what she could say to convince him that New Moon wasn't just another temporary, part-time job for her, that it was anything but.
"The only assurance I can offer is that it won't happen because New Moon is mine. It's my baby. I've been working toward it since my junior year in college, when I started making skin-care products for myself because I couldn't find what I wanted in the stores. I developed the formulas. I mix them. I bottle them. I market them. I show people how to use them. I'm involved in every aspect of New Moon—I am New Moon—and I've never found it boring, even for a second. No, that's not strictly true," she admitted, striving for absolute honesty. "I find the bookkeeping extremely boring." She pursed her lips in a little moue of distaste. "But I still do it."
He quirked an eyebrow at her, surprising her with the gleam of humor in his eyes. "I could argue that point. But I won't." He slipped his glasses back on and handed her another sheaf of papers. "These are the preliminary reports I've had compiled out of the raw data you so mistakenly refer to as bookkeeping."
"Raw data?" Zoe's forehead crinkled up for a moment. "Oh, you mean the stuff in my shoe boxes."
"The stuff that was in your shoe boxes. It's been organized and refiled into something a little more professional and efficient. I'll explain the system to you later. It's very simple and straightforward. Before we get into that, though, I want to go over these reports with you and see if we can fill in some of the blanks."
But Zoe wasn't quite ready to move on. "Does this mean you accept my assurances that I'm in this for the long haul? Because I am, you know. Whether Moira invests or not, whether anybody ever invests, I intend to build New Moon into a thriving business."
"It means that I can see you're sincere and I'm reserving judgment for the time being, until I get to know you and your business better."
"Or until you get Mr. Davies's full report," Zoe said shrewdly, letting him know she knew he'd hired a private investigator.
He didn't even have the grace to look guilty. "So you know about Leland Davies, do you? How did you find out?"
"The owner of the Ristorante Marcella isn't just my landlady, she's my surrogate grandmother. Her last name is Molinari," she said significantly.
"Ah," he said, his facility for names allowing him to put two and two together almost instantly. "She's related to your friend Gina."
"Yes. And she wasn't pleased to have some strange man asking questions about one of her bambini. She was sure it meant somebody was up to no good."
Reed felt a tiny spurt of guilt at that. He was definitely up to what he was sure any young woman's grandmother—surrogate or not—would consider no good, although it had nothing to do with the private investigator he'd hired. "I hope you assured her that it's just business. I'd investigate anyone or anything my great-grandmother was thinking of investing in."
"Yes, that's exactly what I told her. It's strictly business." Zoe looked down at the sheaf of papers he'd given her, deciding they'd better get back to it. "What kind of reports am I looking at here?" she asked.
The expression on her face made him think of a child who'd just been offered a new vegetable and was already sure she wasn't going to like it. "Cash flow. Assets and liabilities. P&L. That's profit and loss," he clarified when her forehead crinkled. "These are only preliminary figures, of course. Obviously, there wasn't enough information to come up with anything concrete at this point."
"Oh, obviously," Zoe said, nodding sagely as if she had any idea at all what he was talking about.
"The income and expense transactions report has a lot of holes in it, too. I'm going to need a lot more input on these—" he tapped his stack of papers with his forefinger "—before we can go any further. Most of your receipts were impossible to categorize without a more thorough knowledge of your business. We'll have to go over them together, item by item, and assign each one to a category before it's filed." He speared another look at her over the top of his glasses. "After we determine just what those categories should be," he said sternly, then paused, as if waiting for some kind of response.
Zoe nodded again. "Sounds reasonable to me," she said, wondering just how many categories he envisioned. As far as she was concerned, there were two; money came in and it went out, and the trick was to make sure the former amount was greater than the latter. Everything else was bean counting. That unenlightened attitude was undoubtedly why she'd had problems convincing bankers to give her the money she needed; they liked counting beans and had myriad ways of doing it that she didn't even begin to comprehend.
"That will be the easy part. The rest gets a bit more—" He broke off, frowning at the soft knock on his door. "Yes?"
The door opened to admit Mary Ellen, followed by a young woman holding a large silver tray. On it was a silver carafe, two gold-rimmed, white china cups and saucers with matching creamer and sugar bowl, a napkin-covered, silver filigree basket and three little crystal pots of what Zoe assumed were various jams. No wonder he hadn't wanted his pregnant secretary to carry it. The tray alone looked like it weighed a ton.
"You can put it right there," he said, gesturing at a spot on the conference table. "Thank you … it's Miss Fulton, isn't it?"
"Yes, sir." The young woman nodded, blushing a little as she set the tray down. "Cindy Fulton."
"Thank you, Cindy." He smiled, looking directly into her eyes as he spoke. "I appreciate your taking the time from your regular duties to help us out here."
Cindy bobbed her head. "Welcome, sir," she mumbled.
Zoe halfway expected her to drop a curtsy, as if he were royalty, but the young woman just stood there, staring at him with an adoring, awestruck look on her face. Reed didn't notice; the king of this particular castle had already turned his attention back to the open folder in front of him.
Mary Ellen noticed, though. "Come along, Cindy," she said dryly. "You've got filing to do."
With a last, lingering look at her oblivious employer, Cindy allowed herself to be herded out of the office.
"I'd watch that, if I were you," Zoe said, when they were alone again.
"Hmm?" Reed said absently, without even glancing up. He'd picked up the discarded pencil and was making check marks beside selected items on one of the reports. "Watch what?"
Zoe removed her purse from the table, setting it on the empty chair at her left, and reached for the silver carafe. "If you smile at her like that very often, she's going to fall in love with you," she said as she poured out two cups of coffee. "Cream and sugar?"
"Just sugar," he said, then looked up, startled, as he realized what else she'd said. "Who's going to fall in love with me?" he demanded, feeling a strange, unsettling leap in the region of his heart before he realized she couldn't possibly be talking about herself. "What are you talking about?"
Zoe couldn't help but smile at the befuddled look on his face. The man wasn't just gorgeous, he was adorable, too. There was nothing more appealing than a man who didn't know how appealing he was. And Reed Sullivan IV didn't appear to have a clue, at least in this instance.
"Cindy." Zoe gestured at the closed door. "Miss Fulton?" she added, when he just sat there, staring at her. "The woman who brought the coffee?"
"I know who Cindy Fulton is." He looked at Zoe over the top of his glasses, his expression both baffled and annoyed, silently demanding that she explain herself—and quickly. "What I don't know is what you're talking about."
Zoe might have gotten just the tiniest bit annoyed herself at his peremptory tone, if she hadn't been so amused by his obtuseness.
"It's a classi
c scenario." Remembering how he'd taken his tea, Zoe added a single cube of sugar to his coffee and pushed it toward him. "Practically a cliché," she said as she poured a heavy dollop of cream into her own cup of coffee. "Secretaries are always falling in love with their bosses."
It took a full five seconds for him to fully absorb her meaning. "That's ridiculous," he declared, as if issuing an edict. "Miss Fulton isn't my secretary. She's a file clerk."
Zoe shrugged, enjoying herself. It was kind of reassuring to realize the king of all he surveyed had a blind spot. "File clerks fall in love with their bosses, too."
"M.E. is her immediate superior, not me. Besides, our employee manual specifically forbids interoffice relationships."
"Oh, well, that should certainly take care of it, then." She reached out as she spoke, lifted a corner of the heavy damask napkin covering the filigree basket and chose a miniature croissant from the varied offerings. "But I'd watch where I smiled if I were you. Just a friendly warning," she said, and bit into the croissant, wondering if she ought to warn him about the possibility of clients falling in love with their financial advisors, too.
She almost choked on the flaky piece of pastry. Love? Where had that come from? There was absolutely no danger of her falling in love with him. It was lust she was falling into. Simple, uncomplicated lust, and she, womanlike, was trying to pretty it up and make it more acceptable. And that was stupid. Very stupid.
"Zoe? Is something wrong. Are you all right?"
"Yes, I'm fine," she lied. "I just realized there's something… That is, I think we should…" Very carefully, she placed the croissant on the rim of her saucer and pushed it away from her. "Kiss me," she said, surprising herself as much as she did him.
* * *
7
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"What?!"
"Kiss me," she said calmly, as if it were a completely reasonable request. "The way you did at Bruno's last Saturday."
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