by Nancy Warren
After the crotch-glance/ smirk combo the fellow said, “G’day, ah’m Peet.”
A quick glance at the list of people he’d requested meetings with clued Mark in that Peet must be Peter Moorehead, the company’s in-house accountant, who’d been on holiday for the last couple of weeks.
“Hi, Pete,” he said, shaking hands and coming away with more sand. These people must be hell on computer keyboards. They were certainly hell on the eyes of the unwary. “I need to ask you a few questions about how you do your tax accounting.”
“Righto. Ask away.”
And to give the young guy credit, he certainly knew his stuff. After half an hour, they’d gone from the general to the specific, and Mark asked, “And do you code different colors under the same product code?”
“Dunno, mate. You’d have to ask Cam’s sister about that.”
“Cam’s sister?”
His gut bubbled like an underground geyser at the mention of the man. He’d thought he was free of Cameron Freakin’ Crane for the first couple of weeks he was here, and now it turned out he had a sister working here? Well, whoever she was, he’d avoid her like the man-eating crocodiles he’d read about.
“Yeah. Bronwyn Spencer.”
He felt like someone had just encased him in ice. Mark couldn’t move, not even his lips; he couldn’t so much as blink. Unconcerned, Pete lifted a sandaled and rather hairy foot to his knee and picked sand out from under a toe ring the size of a plumbing fixture. The resulting sand hill on the industrial carpet caused Pete to rub the sand into the pile with a crooked and wholly unapologetic grin.
“Sorry, mate. The surf was beaut this morning. I didn’t have time to shower before coming to work.”
“Bronwyn Spencer is Cameron Crane’s sister?”
“Yeah.”
“Excellent,” Mark said, pulling himself together with an effort and pulling his notes into a neat right angle with hands that hardly shook at all. “That’s great, Pete. Thanks. I think we’re done here.”
“I thought you also wanted to know about how we file with the government?”
“Maybe later. Thanks.” He rose, and with a shrug, his sandy friend rose also and shuffled out of the temporary office.
If Mark had ever been this angry, he didn’t remember it. He’d been pretty near gutted when his fiancée broke up with him over the phone, but that had been nothing like the crimson tide of anger that washed over him now. He stormed out and in the general direction of where he’d last seen Bron. If he were being sensible, he’d go for a walk, calm down, and speak to Bron when he could see straight. The hell with that. What he had to say couldn’t wait.
Chapter 7
“No. That’s the wrong pink,” Bron sighed, looking at a trio of samples from a supplier. “I want surfie-chick pink, not the color of something you take when your guts are churning.”
“I’m not sure they understand the sort of color you have in mind,” the hapless sales rep said.
“Well, it’s bright, but not too bright; pink, but not too pink. Wait a sec. I’ve got a lipstick that shade, I think.”
She scrabbled through her shoulder bag, past the extra set of keys to Cam’s car that she thought she’d lost, a few crumpled ticket stubs from the train, a small flashlight she was pretty sure needed new batteries, a couple of squat colorful bottles of nail polish, and, in the bottom, a selection of lipsticks.
“There you are,” she said in triumph. “That’s the color I want. Here, you can take it.”
“I’m not sure we can do this shade, Bron.”
She leaned back and held out her hand. “No worries. Harry Welsdon has been begging for a chance to quote on our jobs. I’ll see if he wants to give it a go.”
When her current sales rep didn’t hand back the lipstick, she knew she had him. “I’m not saying—” He never finished whatever it was he wasn’t saying, for the door opened as though a cyclone were on the other side of it and in stormed Mark, looking a little like a natural disaster bent on destruction himself.
“What are you—”
“Sorry to interrupt,” he managed, “but I need to see you right away, Bronwyn.” Without giving her any time at all to decide whether to ditch her meeting right when she was about to get exactly what she wanted, he walked up to her and took her arm. “It’s really important.”
“Okay.”
Mystified at both the heat in his hand and the wild expression in his eyes, she wondered if he suffered from some mental condition no one had bothered to tell her about. A second glance showed that his eyes weren’t wild; they were perfectly sane, just blazingly angry. Her stomach sank. Oh, she was going to kill Fiona. Her little white lie about his package seemed to have got back to him.
Deciding that the last thing she wanted was an audience when he blew, she said, “Okay, Joe. See what you can do with the color and let me know. Can you find your own way out?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Letting Mark pull her out into the corridor, she tried to think of the closest place she could drag one steamingly irate man where, when he blew, he wouldn’t be overheard by too many people, keeping the embarrassing damage to a minimum.
“Where are we going?” she asked, realizing that he was still dragging her.
“I’m taking you to lunch,” he said from behind clenched teeth.
“It’s ten-thirty in the morning.”
“We won’t be eating.”
And with that he dragged her past a startled looking Fiona. Traitor. Even as she was frog-marched past, she managed a pretty lethal glare in blabbermouth’s direction. The morning sun was bright and merciless, and, naturally, she had no purse or sunglasses with her. It was too hot to walk this fast, but Mark didn’t seem to notice. Okay, he was angry. He had a right to be, and her justification was weak at best. They sprinted past a pub, closed at this time of the day, with some tables and chairs set out on a brick patio. She dug her heels into the sidewalk like a stubborn hound and this time she did some dragging, pulling Mark into the relative privacy of the patio area. She could berate him for no doubt bruising her arm, and she could act innocent of starting such malicious gossip, but she was, at heart, honest. She’d done a stupid thing, been caught out and it was time to apologize. God, she hated apologizing.
“Mark,” she said, drawing the first full breath since he’d grabbed at her in her office, “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” he hit a high note that couldn’t be good for him, and startled a lorikeet into squawking and flying out of the tree above them. “You’ve made a complete fool of me. How could you do that?”
She squirmed where she stood. How could she have let the office think those things about him? “I was just trying to protect you from Fiona. She’s a man-eater,” she said, feeling how feeble a defense that was for undermining his manhood. Oh, boy, was she in trouble. “I’ll go back in there and tell her that you’ve got a donkey dick.” Instead of looking appeased he merely looked confused.
“Would you please stay with the subject at hand?” A blush of mortification began at her baby toe and started to work its way up. Was it possible they were talking about two different things?
“Could you tell me specifically why you are so angry with me?”
“You didn’t tell me you were Cameron Crane’s sister!” he thundered.
This is what he was so pissed off about? “The subject never came up.”
Instead of appeasing him, this only made him more furious. “You don’t have the same name. Why would I ask?”
“We’re half-sibs. It doesn’t make any difference. I’m an adult. My actions have nothing to do with Cam.”
“It makes a difference to me. My behavior was completely unprofessional. I seduced—unknowingly, mind you—I seduced the sister of the man who hired me.”
“Not to burst your bubble, mate, but I seduced you.”
“Well, that’s it. I’m sorry, but it’s over. I thought . . . I never intended to—I mean I didn’t want—”
&nbs
p; And suddenly it was as though the anger did some complicated atomic switcheroo, for she was now as blazingly furious as the man in front of her had been a second ago.
“Oh, I know what you didn’t want,” she shouted back. “You didn’t want me. Or at least not only me. You wanted to shag every girl in the city. And now you’re all full of righteousness because I’m related to Cameron Crane so you’re giving me the flick. Fine. But don’t fool yourself, because you’re not fooling me. You’re getting rid of me because your precious Jennifer Talbot is coming over with Cam and you don’t want her knowing you’ve been having it off with his sister.”
“Jen has nothing to do with this,” he yelled.
“She’s got everything to do with it. What are you planning? To win her back?”
There was a painful silence. Mark looked so hurt and confused a part of her wanted to kiss him better, and he was so blind to what was right under his nose she wanted to haul off and smack him. That was her trouble, she realized. She’d been literally under his nose the entire time he’d been here. There’d been no wooing, no romance, no effort at all required. She’d wanted him, he’d wanted her. They’d gone to bed. From the first moment she’d known he was special, but she realized he’d never had a similar epiphany. And whose fault was that? She was there every bloody minute. She’d stopped seeing other men because she was only interested in Mark. Well, no more.
“Don’t worry. I’ll move my stuff out today and clear the way. Maybe you can win back the woman who dumped you for another man. Maybe you’ll even want her. All I know is, I was wrong about you. I thought you were special, but you’re not. You’re pathetic. You’re just so pathetic.”
For a second they stared at each other. He was angry, hurt, confused, and so bloody, completely useless she couldn’t believe it. And she was so hurt that he thought of her as disposable that she felt tears threaten.
“Bronwyn . . .”
Bron didn’t cry. And the thing she most especially didn’t cry over was men. Before such foolishness could emerge, she turned on her heel and stalked back the way they’d come. Only this time she was alone. She was almost at the Crane building when he yelled her name.
“Bron.”
She ignored him and sped up her pace.
“Bronwyn!” Mark yelled louder, and she picked it up to a jog. “Would you hold up a minute?” He caught her arm as she opened the door but she yanked it out of his grasp and stormed into the reception area. Her gaze hazy with anger, she focused on the woman sitting behind reception staring at the pair of them coming noisily through the door.
“Bron,” he said urgently.
“Fiona,” she said in a loud, clear voice, “I lied. Mark here is the eighth wonder of the world in the sack. Hung like a stallion, tireless, your kind of bloke.”
There was a moment of deafening silence. Then a voice she knew all too well. “What have you been up to this time, Bron?” asked her brother Cam.
She turned, hoping against hope that he was alone, but of course, he was standing with the altogether too-perfect Jennifer Talbot, who was looking not at Bron, but behind her where she felt Mark’s presence.
“Oh, shit,” she said, torn between trying to escape out the front door, blocked by Mark Forsythe looking like he was the last man standing after an attack by aliens, and going forward to hide in her office. That way was blocked by Cam looking like he wanted to break something with his bare hands.
Chapter 8
“My office, Bron. Now.”
Mark’s reunion with the man who’d ruined his life wasn’t a fortuitous one. Cameron Crane looked the same as he had the one time Mark had met him: scruffy, unshaven, cocky, and arrogant, but his usual expression of sleepy womanizing was replaced by the sort of look an irate father would give a delinquent teenager. And Bronwyn, care-for-nobody, I-do-what-I-like-when-I-like Bronwyn, transformed into a sulky rebel before his eyes.
He couldn’t let Bron take the responsibility for what was essentially his fault. He’d let her stay in the corporate house against his better judgment, then he’d slept with her—and even if he hadn’t known she was Cam’s sister he had known she was a Crane employee and for that reason alone he should have kept his hands off. And, finally, he’d been the cause of her turning the reception area of Crane Enterprises into a burlesque show.
“Just a minute,” he said, walking forward to face the man wearing the scowl.
“I’ll deal with you later.”
He was amazed at the primitive urge for violence that swept through him, but he knew that would only make things worse. Somebody had to keep a cool head around here. “I’d like a minute alone with you first.”
“Get stuffed,” said Bron.
“You’ll be having that word with me,” Jennifer said, and he realized she was part of this comedy-drama, too.
With a helpless glance toward Cam and Bron, both of whom ignored him as well as each other as they stalked by, with a similarly athletic stride, to Cam’s big office, Mark realized that Bron didn’t want his help.
“Fine,” he snapped and followed Jen. She led him to the spare office he’d been using and paused in the doorway. “Oh, they’ve set you up in here?”
“Yes.”
She looked good, he thought. Her hair was a little longer than it had been the last time he’d seen her and the humidity was adding some curl he could tell she’d been at pains to eradicate. She looked as slim and beautiful as ever. And he knew they had a lot to talk about, but right now he couldn’t spare the time. He couldn’t bear the thought of Bron being hauled on the carpet by big brother Cam, not when it was his fault she’d blown her top.
“Look, I really need to get in there and explain.”
“Bron’s a big girl. She can do her own explaining. You need to do some explaining of your own. To me.”
She paused and he realized she was angry. Her jaw had a certain pinched look and the way she held her shoulders, he knew they were knotted with tension. In the old days, he’d have rubbed them for her.
“I asked you to take this project on because you are the best and I trusted you. How could you make such a spectacle of yourself?”
“I . . .”
How had that happened? Why had a fun-loving, all-for-laughs party girl like Bron told everyone he’d been short-changed in the sexual equipment department? Come to that, there was something odd about how women had treated him every time she was around. And why had she thrown all that stuff in his face about Jen? Looking so angry he’d thought she was going to cry? Because she’d been right. His entire strategy had been to get Jen back. And now that he stood here with Jen in front of him, he realized he didn’t want her back. The woman he couldn’t stop thinking about was Bronwyn.
“I hurt her,” he said, recognizing that while he’d been trying so hard to live a wild, carefree existence, an incredible woman had given him back something he’d lost. And he’d hurt her.
“You’re sleeping with her.” Jen’s gaze clouded, and he watched her lean back against the wall as though she needed the support.
“Yes. I’m sleeping with her.” He tried a smile and it wasn’t nearly as painful as he’d supposed. “It’s surprising how much it hurts, isn’t it?”
Jen nodded.
“I guess I imagined it would take you longer to get over me,” she said softly. “Even though I have no right.”
“I’ll tell you something. A little part of me will always love you.”
She raised her gaze and he saw sadness there, and maybe some regret. She nodded. “Me, too.”
“But we weren’t right together.”
She shook her head.
“Cameron Crane, for reasons that are a complete mystery to me, is the man for you.”
“And Bronwyn?”
“Bronwyn will probably never speak to me again.”
“Whoever the right woman is, she’s out there. And she’s special,” Jen said huskily and opened her arms to him. He hugged her and realized that this, for him, was
goodbye.
“That bastard better be good to you.”
She hugged him hard. “He is. And I’m good for him.”
He loosened his grip. “I’ve got to go. We’ll catch up later.”
For the second time that day he couldn’t get to Bron’s office fast enough. But when he got there, nothing but silence greeted him. The lights were off and, as far as he could tell, her bag was gone. His next stop was the front desk, where he asked the goggle-eyed Fiona where Bron was.
“She’s gone.”
“You mean she won’t be back until tomorrow?”
“She won’t be back for two weeks.”
“What? She didn’t say anything to me about a holiday.”
Fiona shrugged and answered a ringing line. He stood for a moment undecided, then turned on his heel. Cameron Crane had caused enough trouble in his life. It was time they got things straight, man to man. Crane’s door was closed, but it didn’t stop Mark. He threw the door open without knocking and found Jen in there, perched on the edge of his desk and leaning over, whether to talk intimately or in preparation for a necking session, Mark couldn’t say. He took a step in and shut the door ungently behind him.
“Mark. What are you doing?”
He ignored Jen. “What did you do to her, you bastard?”
Cameron Crane didn’t look any happier to see him than he was to see the boogie board king himself. “She’s my sister, and my employee, so why don’t you piss off?”
“Cam!”
Still ignoring Jen, Mark took a step closer, and Crane rose from behind the desk. Mark was pleased to see that though the Aussie was stockier of build, he topped him by a good four inches.
“She may be your sister, but she’s my lover, and I won’t have you hurting her.”
“Listen mate.” The unshaven mug jutted belligerently his way. “I don’t know what you were getting up to while I was away, but I’m back, and I look after what’s mine.”
Mark wasn’t a back-alley-brawl kind of man. He believed in conflict resolution, in calm deliberation, in compromise. But not here and not now. At this moment all he wanted to do was ram his fist into that too-many-times-broken-to-count nose. He didn’t even realize he’d fisted his fingers until Jen’s voice splashed over him like ice water.