“This will be all over the media in twenty-four hours.” David rubbed his eyes, but it would take more than a brief massage to stay the headache he felt building.
“What can we do?” Jack had never wanted to be the CEO of Hanson, but apparently he'd inherited enough of his father's competitive streak not to let the company die under his leadership.
“We try to make this better, and if we can't, we go shopping for another high-profile charity.” Jack winced. “That sounds worse than it is,” David assured. “Hanson has never supported an organization we didn't believe in. We're going to have to do some serious media schmoozing. You up for it?”
“Whatever it takes. Samantha will be onboard, too.”
David nodded. He folded the letter, knowing he needed to get back to his office and start making phone calls. He felt overwhelmingly weary, though, a far cry from his usual response to business challenges.
Wandering to the wall of windows in Jack's office, he gazed at downtown Chicago. “Nice view,” he murmured to Jack, then without any segue at all, asked, “How are things between you and Samantha?”
Turning to watch his nephew's reaction, David found himself fascinated by the transformation of Jack's features. Apparently the mere thought of the woman he loved was enough to wipe the concern from Jack's face. David didn't even need to hear the response, which was a simple “Great.”
The sweeping restlessness that had plagued David lately hit again full force. Immediately he thought of Nina Baxter and her family, and of the feeling he'd had in their home…or, rather, he thought of the feeling in their home. The life, the exuberance, the familiarity among them.
He knew why he'd pushed so hard for Nina and her children to move in with him: He was like a leech, trying to feed off their happiness.
He had a disconnected family, and though he'd been physically intimate with women, he didn't feel that close to anyone.
“Do you want to come to dinner tonight?” Jack asked, clearly entertaining the idea on the spur of the moment. “Samantha's trying her hand at lasagna.”
“Is she a good cook?”
“No. This recipe feeds ten. She's afraid she might ruin it if she cuts it down, so there'll be plenty.”
David tried to remember the last time he'd had a non-business dinner with one of his nephews. Clinton had been in office.
Being an uncle to George's three boys had never come naturally. It might have gone better if the position had come with a job description. Or if David had figured out first what it meant to be a brother. As it was, despite being only nine years older than Jack, the oldest of his nephews, he'd always felt a bit awkward. A little too…formal.
Thank you, Nina, he thought wryly, for giving voice to my conscience.
He would definitely have dinner with Jack and Samantha. But not tonight. Tonight he would be awful company, and Jack didn't need an uncle who was moody and distracted. This time, he wanted to get the uncle business right.
“I think I'll let you do the first lasagna taste test,” he said. “I'll take a rain check, though. Soon.”
“All right. Deal.” Jack gestured to the letter in David's hand. “Anything I can do to follow up on that?”
“I'll take care of it for now, but when the serious schmoozing starts, I'll let you know.”
Jack nodded, but he was staring at the phone and fiddling with some wooden beads in a bowl on his desk, his mind obviously elsewhere.
“The reading of my father's will is coming up.”
My father's, David thought, not Dad's. Jack's worried frown elicited a similar expression from his uncle. If I had kids, I'd want them to call me Dad, even after I'm gone. And I wouldn't want them to look tense or nervous when they spoke about me.
“What's on your mind, Jack?”
Exhaling forcefully, Jack said, “Evan and An drew.” He picked up a handful of the wooden beads then chucked them angrily back into the bowl. “My brothers haven't responded to Father's lawyer or to me. They were too busy to take an interest in the business. Now they're too 'busy' to be bothered with the will.” Jack muttered an expletive.
Concern for his eldest nephew sparked David's irritation at Evan and Andrew. The younger Hanson brothers seemed to be MIA from the time they were old enough to say, “See you later.” If they harbored resentment toward George, who had been a better boss than a father, that was one thing. But they were allowing Jack to shoulder the entire family burden, to upset his own life path in order to save a business that would ultimately benefit them, too. That was a circumstance David found intolerable.
Perhaps it was time to exercise an older relative's authority. Assuming this older relative had any.
“Have Mrs. Wycliff give me their contact information,” he said to Jack, his tone sharp enough to indicate that he would not take no as an answer when he summoned his nephews home. “They'll be present for the reading of the will.”
Jack nodded, obviously relieved to share one more burden he'd taken on after his father's sudden passing. “You don't mind dealing with this and the check?” He indicated the temporarily forgotten letter in David's hand.
“I don't mind,” David assured. He felt fatigued by the problems his family continued to have, yet he realized that helping Jack made him feel more like an uncle, especially when he saw his nephew's shoulders relax. “You should take the rest of the day off,” he said, surprising Jack and himself, too. “Help your fiancée make lasagna.”
Jack's lips betrayed vestiges of the love-sodden smile he acquired now whenever Samantha was mentioned.
Exiting the office, David tried to focus on business and not on his rapidly plunging mood. Ordinarily the letter he held would burn itself into his hand and his brain; his mind would wrap around that challenge and little else.
He told his secretary to hold all calls as he entered his office, but when he picked up his phone, it was not the charity's number he dialed.
Nina sat curled on one end of her couch, a magazine borrowed from the library in her lap. The article she'd been reading-“Six Home Businesses that Made a Million“-had turned out to be of little use. Unless she intended to conduct corporate headhunts out of her kitchen or mass-produce DVDs about achieving multiple orgasms, it was back to the drawing board job-wise. She glanced again at the article about multiple orgasms. Definitely not her area of expertise.
Closing the magazine self-consciously, she looked at her kids, who were home this Friday for a school in-service day. They sat in the living room with her, finishing their homework so they'd have the weekend free. Izzy used the family computer to write a book report and Zach was immersed in math. They each had a mug of hot apple cider and a toasted bagel sandwich next to them. As usual, Zach had eaten only the filling of his sandwich. It was a cozy scene. Nina sighed. She was such a good mother.
Except that she wasn't sure where they'd all be living next month and still hadn't mentioned her job loss to her children. She supposed she was still holding out hope for this Sunday's classifieds.
“Mom, how do you spell porcupine?” Izzy asked without looking up.
Zach jumped to the answer first. “P-o-r-c-u-p-i-n-e. Porcupine.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
Nina smiled, but weakly. Her children liked to study, God bless them. They deserved to go to college. They deserved music lessons and dance lessons and a class trip to New York to see The Lion King onstage.
After her own parents had died and she'd moved in with Bubby, there had been little money for extras. To save Bubby from worrying about her, Nina had pretended not to want to go on “juvenile” school trips or to continue her “boring” violin lessons. She had watched her friends continue to be kids while she had grown up overnight. She didn't want her own children to face such concerns.
But how could she afford the extras when she was worried about keeping a roof over their heads?
Was it horrible of her not to leap at the opportunity David Hanson offered?
“Zach, do you want any more of that
bagel?” she asked. In the past few days she'd gone from a nervous inability to eat to a nervous desire to eat everything in sight.
“Nope,” her son answered.
“Toss it here.” Part of her was so attracted to the idea of living in someone else's home with someone else's too-high rent and someone else's leaky faucets. She liked the idea of not worrying about the details for a while.
But she liked the idea of general peace of mind better, and she would not gain serenity by becoming dependent on the idea of David Hanson. And that's what would happen.
Because she'd been fantasizing about him all week already.
Burrowing more snugly into the corner of the couch, as if she thought she could hide there, she bit down hard on the chewy bagel. David Hanson was sophisticated, awkward, social, reserved, formal, funny-a study in contradictions. He was also solicitous, yet when he'd dropped the bomb about her moving into his apartment, he'd seemed forceful and protective.
And she'd liked that.
Shifting again and shoving the magazine with its money-making “multiples” idea between the sofa cushions, she thanked her lucky stars that Bubby was in a keno tournament at the senior center this week. Had she been able to hover over her granddaughter, the astute septuagenarian would have picked up immediately on Nina's restlessness and ambivalence.
David had stated that Nina's living situation was a concern because he needed her on call in the evenings to oversee business parties, and he knew she would be more comfortable if her children were close by. Also, he didn't want her to be distracted by housing issues, which would certainly come up again. Even if she hadn't been laid off, she'd have struggled with the rent increase, and she couldn't imagine finding lower rent in a decent neighbourhood.
Nina didn't know if David was a control freak or boss of the year. She didn't know whether to accept his offer and deal with the disturbing thoughts she'd been having about him or to reject the job outright and put the Hansons-David especially-out of her mind. Socially, he was way out of her league. Romantically, they weren't even on the same planet. She'd married at eighteen. He was still single at forty-four.
Why was he still single at forty-four? Nina frowned, working her jaws around another big bite of the bagel. Was it a chronic condition? Lord knew he hadn't suffered for a lack of exquisite female companionship over the years. He'd been photographed with some of the loveliest women in Chicago.
Photographed with them. But never married. Nina couldn't recall even a rumor about an engagement. Did David Hanson date for publicity? Could he be-
Nina looked at her children, making sure they were focused on their work, as if they'd be able to read her thoughts if they looked at her.
Gorgeous, formal, a little awkward, never married…
What if David Hanson was gay and trying to hide it?
She began to chew the bagel with nervous intensity. The more she thought about it, the more it made a kind of sense. Hanson Media garnered much of its financial support from family-slanted groups. The kind that typically frowned on alternative lifestyles. And certainly, after the problems with his brother and the Internet gaffe, now would not be the time to come out of the closet.
If David Hanson turned out to be gay, Nina wouldn't have to brood a bit about her silly attraction. Or that odd feeling of wanting to be taken care of. All that would be a moot point.
In that case, she could kind of, almost, sort of see herself accepting the job offer.
“I'll get it!” Izzy jumped up.
“Get what?” Nina said around a cheekful of bagel before she realized the phone was ringing.
Call it a sixth sense, which she'd never really possessed, but somehow she knew who was on the phone before her daughter returned, holding out the receiver.
“He asked to speak with 'Miss Baxter,'” Izzy said in a stage whisper that left much to be desired, and grinning girlishly as if this were hysterically funny.
Nina didn't bother to ask who? “Well, I'm not married anymore,” she reminded her daughter as she unfurled from the sofa and stood on cramped legs. Shooing her nosy child back to the computer, she stumbled to the kitchen before her knees had warmed up and held the receiver to her ear. “Hello.”
“What should I call you?”
David's voice was smooth and rich, as always. And, as always, she detected a little frown in his tone.
“Miss Baxter is fine,” she said. She kept her married name because it belonged to her children, too, but asking people to call her Ms. was too much trouble. Most people called her “Mrs.”; she didn't bother to correct them. “Or you can call me 'Nina,'” she added. “Your brother always called us by our first names.”
“Yes.” Nina heard him sigh as if the mention of his brother were a heavy weight. “He should have run the PR department.”
“You seem to do all right.”
“Apparently not,” David countered. “I can't even get prospective employees to phone me.”
She winced. “Guilty. Sorry. I've been…” she hesitated.
“Busy?” he supplied. “Searching the classifieds? Ambivalent?”
Tucking the phone between her shoulder and cheek, Nina smiled reluctantly as she opened the refrigerator and poked at a defrosting chicken. “All of the above,” she admitted.
“Hmm. And did you find anything in the classifieds?”
Why lie? “No. Not yet.”
“And you are still searching, because…?”
Leaving the poor chicken alone, she shut the refrigerator and walked to the window to put a little more distance between her and the living room. Quietly she said into the phone, “Because having an office job and my own apartment would be less complicated than working and living in someone else's home.”
“Not if you can't find a job or an apartment to suit your situation,” he said with a characteristic businessman's confidence. “My offer is actually less challenging than trying to find and maintain housing given Chicago rents and the fact that you need at least a two-bedroom place. And very few office jobs will allow the adequate time and flexibility to parent your children without significant child care. I'm sure you've already come to that conclusion, which must be why you haven't phoned to categorically reject my offer.”
“Well, now that we've worked that out,” Nina mumbled, gazing out the window at the old neighborhood in which they lived.
He was correct about thing: She and her children were going to have to move. She couldn't come up with the rent the new owners of the building had requested. She'd already asked for a break on the basis of being a good tenant of long-standing. It was a long shot, but she'd had to try. Unfortunately she'd received only a swift and politely worded response thanking her for her loyalty to the apartment complex and rejecting her request.
“I have more questions,” she told David. “About the job. And the living situation.”
“Name the time and place,” he said, understanding before she said a word that she didn't want to discuss this over the phone.
“Your schedule is fuller than mine. At the moment.”
“Tonight. Seven o'clock.”
The one night she had restrictions. “It's Shab bat-the Jewish Sabbath,” she said. “The kids and I are serving shabbos dinner at my grandmother's senior center. The other servers are down with the flu, so I can't cancel.”
The pause on the other end of the phone was brief. “Need an extra pair of hands?”
The pause on Nina's end of the line was quite a bit longer. “You?”
“I'm free tonight.” He sounded offhand, as if he volunteered to serve challah and Manischewitz wine to seniors whenever he had an open Friday. “Just give me a street address and a time.”
“I don't think that will be the best place-”
“Serving usually requires some cleaning. That ought to give us a few minutes.” She heard him shuffle papers. “I've got to go. Give me an address and a time, and I'll meet you there. You can ask your questions or watch me wash dishes while you come up
with an alternative meeting.”
“Wouldn't it be easier to just-”
“Address and time, Miss Baxter. I'm on the clock.”
She came up with the requested information, and they hung up.
Nina gazed out the window and amended her opinion of David Hanson. He might be concerned and genuine, but he was also wily and persistent and surprisingly skilled at getting his way.
Once more, she wanted to kick herself in the tush for being charmed by his tactics.
She shook her head and tried to ignore the desire to race to her closet and try on clothes. She wasn't sure what else she was going to discover about David tonight or how it would affect her decision to take the job. But suddenly, that was not her greatest worry. She was far more concerned with all the things she was discovering about herself when David was around.
Chapter Five
Fifteen minutes into Shabbat, Nina decided David had to be gay, after all. No straight man she'd ever met was as willing to have his cheeks pinched by senior citizens as he was.
Bubby was overjoyed to see her “Davy.” She introduced him to her friends as “My Nina's David. You know, used to be her boss. He likes to come visit.”
Likes to come visit may have been an overstatement; they'd only seen him twice outside of work in thirteen years, but the comment had the desired effect on Bubby's friends. For years, the denizens of the Wilkens Senior Center had read about the Hansons, Chicago's upper crust. Bubby had made sure of that. She'd brought in every newspaper clipping that had anything to do with the Hansons since Nina had started working for the company in 1993. Now her women friends were meeting a Hanson in person, and they were positively giddy. Only bringing in Oprah would have been a better show-and-tell.
One of Bubby's octogenarian gal pals tried to coax David into sitting down to dinner, but he declined, reminding her that he was there to serve, not to be served. In all these years, it was the first time Nina had seen him turn on the charm, and she realized he had an abundance of it.
The Boss and Miss Baxter Page 6