At Your Service (Silhouette Desire)

by Amy Jo Cousins

  “You’re damn right we do,” she muttered as she pulled her clothes on. “We have a deal, and I’ll even beat my deadline. Just give me a few more weeks to clear things up, and I’ll come clean in before Thanksgiving, buddy, not December thirty-first.”

  As she gathered her things and then scraped the remaining dirty plates and started the dishwasher running, Grace was aware of that other, more cautious, voice in her head. And she listened, because it was making sense.

  The best thing she could do, right now, would be to go find Tyler and tell him the truth about everything. Today. Immediately.

  Because the worst thing that could happen right now would be for Tyler to find out the truth about her from someone else. Anyone else. If Grace could explain herself to Tyler, one on one, she just might be able to make him listen long enough to understand why she’d done all this. Lied to him about her name and history. Lied to his family. Run away from her own family and job. Let him think she was hiding from an abusive boyfriend and not a wealthy fiancé. And Tyler might possibly believe and understand her.

  But only, let me repeat only, if you are the one to tell him, Grace. If he finds out from anyone else, well, can we say “fat chance”?

  Tell him today.

  The telephone handset was at her ear and she’d punched in most of the digits needed to call up Tyler at the bar when another truth of the situation occurred to her. She paused for a moment and then placed the handset back on its base.

  The last thought to run through her head before she picked up the phone was how happy she was to be able to tell Tyler the truth, and how grateful she would be for the help and support he’d be sure to provide her in dealing with this mess of her family and business. She knew she would be able to rely on him completely, and that was a relief.

  And then came the thought that stopped her cold.

  Of course she would be able to rely on Tyler. That’s what he did. He helped people in need, particularly women, even if he wasn’t asked to do so. If she went to him now and told him about her slew of problems, he would be mad, yes, but his innate compassion would soon take over. He would jump at the chance to take care of her, at that point, and would start seeing her as someone who needed his protection. Tyler would help her patch up her life, and by the time he’d saved her, would probably decide he was in love with her. The relationship between them was already heading in that direction.

  Grace remembered when she’d first questioned whether Tyler’s feelings for her might be based on the protectiveness that sprang up naturally in him at the sight of a young woman, obviously on the outs, living in dangerous circumstances, looking for work and on the run from a bad relationship.

  Wouldn’t this simply be more of the same uncertainty?

  If she went to Tyler, problems in hand, she would always be afraid that his feelings for her were based on concern and compassion, not love. And, although it had taken her a while to get here, Grace finally knew that she didn’t want to be protected. Or loved because she needed protection.

  She needed to be able to come to Tyler as her own person, needing nothing from him, but wanting so much more. She needed Tyler to love her for who she was, a woman in her own right, with her own life, and not a set of problems that needed him to solve them.

  A quick run-through of her plan convinced Grace. All she needed was time. Just a few weeks, maybe less, and she would be able to go to Tyler as an adult, a woman asking for his understanding and his love, not his help.

  It was risky. Grace acknowledged that. The safest course would be to confess everything now and make her own peace later with the uncertainty she felt regarding Tyler’s affection.

  But I’ve been playing it safe for most of my life. The first risky thing I ever did was to try to talk my way into an under-the-table job at Tyler’s. And that’s turned out pretty well so far. So if it comes down to taking a chance, in order to do what’s right both for myself and for my relationship with Tyler, then I guess I’m up for that chance.

  Decision made, Grace picked up the phone again, this time to call Paul. She needed one last favor from her close friend, and then she’d do her best to make sure he never had to worry about the future of his kitchen again. What she wanted him to do was easy enough to explain.

  “Yes, chérie, your idiot fiancé still comes here, to his so-called ‘office’ every day. He pretend to be making phone calls and such, but mostly he sticks his dirty little fingers into my pots until I throw the knife at him.”

  “I need another favor, Paul.”

  “Anything, especially if it will get that peacock-head out of my kitchen.”

  Her next call was to her attorney. Grace hadn’t contacted him since the day she’d left everything behind, other than to send him a note explaining specifically that she was taking a brief hiatus to mourn her grandmother and that she would be contacting him in a reasonable amount of time.

  Perhaps most people would not consider several months to be reasonable, but the word was vague enough to make it impossible for anyone to act in her stead.

  “Hello, Franklin. It’s Grace Haley.”

  Somewhat to her surprise, Franklin did not sound particularly enthused to hear from her after such a long time. Perhaps he was understandably frustrated over the position in which she’d placed him. She was sure her family had tried to intimidate him into acting as her representative, knowing he possessed the authority to make a wide range of independent business decisions on Grace’s behalf.

  She got right to the point and explained what she planned to do.

  “A gentleman named Paul Montcrasse will be calling you with the list of people to be contacted. You should hear from him this afternoon. Please arrange for those people to meet with me, as soon as possible, although I understand that many of them will need to travel quite a distance to get here.”

  “But, Ms. Haley, that could take weeks. And your fiancé—”

  Boy, was she getting sick of that word.

  “Make it clear that I expect them, or their representatives, immediately. We will use the penthouse suite at the Drake Hotel. In fact, put them all up at the Drake, Franklin, as a gesture of my appreciation for their trouble. I’ll pay the bill personally.”

  “But, Ms. Haley, I know that Mr. Huntington would want to meet with you before you make any rash decisions.” Franklin’s voice cracked with his agitation.

  “Good God, Franklin. Anyone would think you were Charles’s attorney, not mine.” She couldn’t prevent the irritation from rising in her voice. She tried to squelch it and was mostly successful. “Just set it all up please, and don’t worry about Mr. Huntington. He will be taken care of, have no fear.”

  Eight

  Pressing ice wrapped in a rough towel to the corner of her battered and bleeding temple, Grace decided that her official story for the bruised face was going to involve a car door, or perhaps an inauspiciously placed lamp. Anything but the truth.

  That she’d been clocked in the head by a cell phone-wielding attorney was rather embarrassing.

  That she’d very nearly been beaten up in a bar brawl that ended with a very small, but clearly annoyed, Chihuahua peeing on her, was simply humiliating.

  She was definitely going with the car door story.

  Pulling the towel away from her head for a moment, she grimaced at the sight of blood smeared on the cloth. Lovely. No doubt the bruised-and-bloodied look would go over well at the meeting she’d set up tomorrow at the Drake Hotel. She would be the picture of an accomplished and in control executive. Ha.

  She wasn’t even going to try to kid herself that makeup would be able to cover this.

  And the week had started so promisingly.

  She’d made full use of her second day off, taking Monday afternoon to touch up her roots and to hit the shops on Oak Street in search of a designer suit to spend every last penny of her savings from waiting tables on. It might be superficial, but Grace was fully aware of how much easier it was to command respect in a roomful
of business people when you were wearing a fifteen-hundred-dollar Chanel suit. She considered the money well spent on her armor.

  When she caught herself sneaking up the stairs of their apartment and praying that Sarah wasn’t home, to notice and wonder at the suit bag emblazoned with the world-famous interlocking Cs, Grace decided that she would be very happy when her days of pretending to be someone else were over. The tension, and fear of getting caught in all her skullduggery, was weighing more and more heavily on her nerves as the clock ticked down to her day of resolution.

  She reminded herself to find out if Sarah would be out of the house on the day of her meeting with the would-be restaurant buyers. Otherwise, she would have to rent yet another room at the Drake for herself, so she could dress in private, which verged on the ridiculous.

  Using her condo as a base of operations for the day would solve many of her problems, but she didn’t feel quite ready to go home yet. And she was certain that the minute she set foot in the front door, someone on staff would be calling Charles to alert him to her return. No doubt he paid well for that sort of information.

  No, she would stay in hiding for just a little bit longer.

  Monday evening, she had paced around the apartment, wondering if she should have stopped by the restaurant to see Tyler, and then thinking that she shouldn’t assume they would be spending every night together from now on. A minute later she was scooping Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream out of a carton with a spoon, standing in front of the open freezer door, convinced that the previous night was definitely a onetime thing that Tyler probably didn’t care about repeating.

  When the phone rang and she’d shrieked, startled by the sudden noise, Grace had decided that her nerves might be the teensiest bit shot. She’d yanked the receiver off its base.

  “Hello?”

  “Why aren’t you at my house?” Tyler’s voice had been a low rumble in her ear.

  She’d smiled and felt the heat of her own blush. “I didn’t want to assume—”

  “What? That I wouldn’t want to come home at three in the morning and find you sleeping in my bed?” The words were a smooth caress. “Darlin’, you can assume I’d like that every night of the week.”

  “All right, then.” She’d set out to tease. “I hope you don’t mind that I prefer to sleep in the nude.”

  He’d groaned. “You’re trying to torture me, aren’t you?”

  “Is it working?”

  “Just get your butt over to my place, will you? You’ve got the spare key.” She had heard his grin over the wire. “I’m not quite up to crawling into bed with you when my little sister is sleeping down the hall, but I’ll do it if you make me.”

  “I won’t. Close up quickly. Darlin’.”

  “I’ll try to get there as early as I can, but—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I know what it’s like, remember? You’ll get here when you can.”

  She could almost hear his surprise over the telephone. He’d thanked her and hung up and she’d known that someone in the past hadn’t understood his willingness to devote himself to his work. She’d felt sorry for the woman who’d missed out on this man.

  Not that she’d give him up if someone came knocking.

  Since that evening a week ago, she had slept at Tyler’s apartment almost every night, coming home with him after closing up the restaurant, making love before falling asleep in a tangle of arms and legs and breath.

  One day she arrived at work to find out that Tyler’s growing staff had been increased by the addition of Jack, a skinny but undeniably good-looking young man, who quickly picked up the routine. He turned out to be a whiz at charming ladies, particularly those who were old enough to be his mother. But after the fourth time he showed up more than an hour late for his shift, she decided to sit down with Tyler.

  “It’s not that I don’t like him. When he’s here, he definitely works hard, but…”

  “But?”

  “When he’s here,” she admitted. “I just don’t think being here on time, or at all, is a big concern for him. He told me today that he was late because the girl he picked up last night wanted one last, uh, session.”

  “Really?” She suspected Tyler’s mouth was twitching from amusement, not irritation.

  “Yes, really. He told me that he’s too young to turn down sex.” At this, Tyler laughed out loud. Grace fumed. “I told him that when you’re older, you learn how to set the alarm clock early enough to fit in sex and getting to work on time. His job should be important enough to him for that.”

  “I agree. So, that does it,” he said, wringing out a bar towel over the sink.

  “Whoa, wait a minute! I wasn’t trying to get the kid fired.” She should learn to keep her mouth shut. Tyler looked at her oddly.

  “You didn’t. And you can’t,” he said after a moment’s pause. “Although I’m surprised you don’t want to, since he’s just making your job more difficult. But only Jack can get himself fired, which will happen if he comes in late again after getting a warning.”

  “Okay,” she said, after thinking it over for a minute. “That seems fair.”

  “I’m so glad you approve.”

  A few days later, she hoped he meant those words when Tyler returned to the bar after a bank appointment to find that she’d fired Jack in his absence.

  “You what?”

  She’d acted at the time without thinking, and knowing that made her even more uncomfortable now.

  “I only did what you would have done. He was over an hour late, he didn’t call, and I fired him.”

  “You fired him.”

  Hurrying on, before Tyler could threaten her with the fate she’d recently dealt out to young Jack, she continued, “But don’t worry, we’ve got a new waitress coming in for training tonight. We’ll be fine.”

  “You fired Jack, and you hired someone? Who?”

  Even to her own ears, this was sounding worse and worse.

  “That girl you interviewed last week. Anita.”

  She could see him trying to remember, and the expression on his face when he did was not pleasant. “That girl? She was so nervous talking to me I could hardly make heads or tails of anything she said. Have you completely lost your mind?”

  “Of course not. But we chatted after you were through.” She lost some of her nervousness at this point. One thing she knew she did well was hire staff. That she had no real right to do so at this restaurant was irrelevant, she told herself. “She was scared because she really wants this job. She needs it. I’ll train her and she’ll knock herself out to do a good job, Tyler. I promise you.”

  “I don’t know why I even bother coming in anymore. You’re running this place just fine without me,” he grumbled as he walked behind the bar.

  “Sorry. I know I overstepped my bounds today.” She tried to look sheepish, which seemed to amuse Tyler more than anything else.

  “I ought to fire your butt,” he said. Then he leaned over the bar, grabbed her face and attacked her mouth with soft, nipping kisses. She felt the roller coaster dip of sex bloom in her stomach and opened her mouth to his. His tongue tangled with hers and then he pulled away slowly, sucking gently on the curve of her bottom lip. “But you’d probably stop sleeping with me.” As she sputtered, he went on. “Besides, you did the right thing. If Anita drives all my customers away with her stuttering, though, I’m taking it out on your hide.”

  She grinned, relieved that she was getting off so easy.

  “Promise?”

  “Witch. Get to work.” He snapped a bar towel at her and jerked his head at a table of newcomers.

  From that moment on, although Grace managed to refrain from taking any similarly large liberties with Tyler’s business, she knew he wouldn’t be fazed by anything she did on the job. Privately, the incident seemed to somehow bring them closer, too.

  One Sunday morning, she made him pancakes for breakfast, letting him laugh at how closely she read the instructions on the box.
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br />   “You thought I was kidding about the no-cooking-without-a-recipe thing,” she said, and laughed as Tyler’s guilty look confirmed it. “Don’t worry. As long as the recipe’s in English or—well, I promise not to poison you.” She turned her back on him and leaned over her pans on the stovetop. Catching herself before saying Or in French was all well and good, but sooner or later she’d let something slip that would force Tyler to question her more closely.

  “I’ll take my chances,” he murmured in her ear, stepping up against her back and tucking her hair aside to kiss her neck. Her hands shook as she poured the batter into the sizzling pan, spattering pancake polka dots across the hot surface. Her neck arched involuntarily as his hand skimmed up her side to cup her breast beneath the T-shirt she’d stolen off him. She searched for his mouth with her own as he leaned over her shoulder, her hands fumbling blindly at the range top dials to shut the damn stove off.

  She twisted frantically in his arms and attacked him. His hands under her bare bottom urged her up and with a jump she wrapped herself around him, legs hooked around his waist.

  “Pancakes.” She said the word in between kisses.

  “Some other time,” he muttered as he walked with her out of the kitchen, heading to the bedroom.

  “Mmm, hmm.” She was too busy running her mouth and her hands over every inch of his bare skin she could reach to answer.

  After he left for the restaurant, she called her attorney. The meeting had been arranged for the following week.

  “Call them back and make it for Friday noon. And anyone who can’t make it will be notified by mail as to the results. I can’t take this much longer.”

  “But, Ms. Haley—”

  “Don’t argue with me, Franklin. Just make it happen.”

  With seventy-two hours to go before her meeting, Grace began having a little trouble. The near slip while cooking breakfast was the beginning of a string of incidents in which she slid closer to the tricky slope of revealing herself by her words and actions.