by Lauren Esker
The worst part about dealing with Chloe and her family was that he couldn't ever seem to win. They outflanked him every time he tried, no matter how hard he fought. They had more money. They had better lawyers. They had underworld connections that Fletcher knew he wasn't supposed to know about. If things kept going the way they'd been going, unless he could come up with an angle of attack the Sperlins couldn't counter, he was going to lose.
Hell, if he thought they'd agree to it, he would have happily taken on Cas Sperlin in single combat, winner take all. Fletcher might wear button-down shirts now, but he'd grown up in a rough neighborhood, and he knew schoolyard brawling tricks that he was pretty sure Cas and Chloe had never heard of. They might play rough in the business world, but if it ever came to an actual, physical fight, Fletcher knew how to fight dirty in ways they could only dream about.
Of course, if he tried that, Cas would just shift into a viper and bite him ...
He literally couldn't win.
"I told Olivia I'd look at her doll," he told them. Cas was blocking the doorway, so Fletcher walked straight toward him, not flinching, forcing Cas to give way if he didn't want to be walked over. "I'm going to go see my daughter now. And I'll be back to pick her up this evening; remember, I get her tomorrow."
"As if I could forget," Chloe said, her tone cool.
Cas fell back with a look of contempt. He was a couple of inches shorter, which Fletcher took some pleasure from. Just let me get you in a back alley sometime, he thought, striding away as if he couldn't feel the snake shifter's eyes burning into his back. I'll knock that smirk right off your face.
***
Still fighting down anger from the argument with Chloe and her brother, he got to the office by half past nine, much later than he preferred to come in. On his phone in the lobby, he'd put out a couple of fires via email, but it was still going to be another day of dog-paddling as hard as he could just to keep from going under. After the divorce was final, he told himself, he'd get back on track. The business would be in the black again. Everything would be just fine.
He slowed to stop at the sight of a figure sitting cross-legged in the hallway outside the closed and locked door of Sperlin-Briggs. A head with a tawny mane of blonde hair was bent over the small glowing screen of her phone.
"Ms. Fallon?"
"Oh, you decided to come to work, did you?" She scrambled to her feet. As she stood up he caught a flash of something ... off ... about one of her ankles. He'd only glimpsed it for a minute, something bulky above the straps of her heels, now hidden by the loose cuff of her slacks. A brace of some kind?
But it vanished as soon as she got her feet under her, which meant he was staring at her feet—pretty feet, displayed in strappy high-heeled shoes, dark green to match her pantsuit—and he wrenched his eyes up to her face. Yesterday's champagne-colored ensemble had brought out the highlights in her hair, but this one caught the green in her eyes and made it glitter.
Or possibly that was irritation.
"Are you the only person who works here? No wonder your company is losing money."
"I had an appointment," he said shortly, unlocking the door. "And my office manager is out with a sick child." He'd had another voicemail from her this morning, frantically apologetic, asking if she could have another day to stay home.
"Leaving the office to shut down without her? I suppose you fired the wrong employee," was Debi's unsympathetic reply. "Some people have no thought for their responsibilities."
"To her job, or to her son?" Fletcher shot back. "Her kid has an immune system disorder. She'd been fired from four jobs in six months when she came to work for me, because of the constant sick days. That was three years ago. She's an excellent office manager—" When she's here. "—and we work around her personal life because that's the kind of business I've always tried to run."
He was braced for Debi to fire off another volley about that, but instead she looked at him in surprise, as if she was seeing him for the first time. And then her thoughts seemed to turn inward, and she didn't say anything else.
The sudden retreat left him suspicious, but she went off quietly to the bookkeeping office. He started a pot of coffee in the break room.
The scent of her vanilla perfume lingered in the air. He could still smell it when he took a cup of coffee back to his office and got started on his day.
***
When did I turn into such an asshole?
Normally Debi had little trouble losing herself in her work, but this time her thoughts kept circling around her earlier argument with Fletcher. She lost her place on the spreadsheet and had to start over.
It was just a stupid, offhand comment, she told herself. What did it matter if a human mother stayed home with her human child, thereby inconveniencing Debi? The inconvenience was the important thing.
Except it wasn't, not really. Any lion shifter would rather lose a job than abandon her pride. And humans had their pride-sense, too. She didn't have to be human to appreciate it. For all his flaws, Roger had always tried to be a good boss to his employees, human and shifter alike.
Except for the ones he'd taken out in the woods and hunted ...
It doesn't affect me, she told herself. It didn't matter what kind of boss Fletcher was. She didn't work for him. She was doing temporary contract work with his office, and when she was gone, she'd never see him again.
She finally managed to get into the swing of the work, only to have a tap on the door break into her concentration some indeterminate time later, in the middle of trying to reconcile two mismatched spreadsheets. She whipped off her glasses out of habit before looking up.
"Lunch," Fletcher declared, flourishing a bag and a large cup of coffee.
"What?" Debi said blankly.
"I said I'd buy if you worked through lunch, remember? It's after one, and I was hungry, so I figured it was just as easy to call in two orders rather than one."
"Oh." She'd lost track of time again. Her eyesight was blurring from overstrain, and she resisted the temptation to rub at her eyes. She was farsighted, not nearsighted; she only needed the glasses for close work, but it helped to get her eyes off the computer occasionally.
Fletcher set the items on the end of her desk. "With meat, as requested. I forgot to ask about coffee preferences, so I got it for you black, and I figured you could add whatever you like. There are a number of creamer options in the break room."
Debi had to pull herself back from the numbers bouncing around in her brain to recall proper social niceties. Her first inclination was to brush him off and continue working, but it was hard to do that when he was smiling at her; his smile was gorgeous. And now that she caught the smell of food and coffee, she realized she really was very hungry.
"Thank you," she said, mustering a smile in return.
"De nada." With that, he left.
The bag contained a bottle of water, plastic utensils folded in a napkin, and a takeout box of teriyaki beef over rice. She ate while she worked, dividing her attention between the Sperlin-Briggs accounts and bites of lunch.
When she'd polished off every last bite, she felt ... good. Much better than before. She had to stop this habit of working all day without eating.
The coffee was lukewarm by now and intensely bitter after the sweet-spicy teriyaki sauce. She got up, stretched, and took it into the break room, where she microwaved it and added a packet of sugar. She didn't normally put sugar and creamer in her coffee, but when she thought about it, she wasn't sure if that was because she liked it black, or because Roger used to mock her when she put anything in it. She had been a chubby child, and even as an adult her physique ran naturally to curves. She'd struggled all her life to keep her weight down.
Ironically, in these months since Roger's death, she was thinner than she'd ever been ... because she was too miserable to eat properly.
But Roger wasn't around to make fun of her anymore, and the sugar did help take the edge off the bitterness in the coffee—and someh
ow seemed to make her feel sweeter, too, though that was probably just the energy rush from lunch hitting her bloodstream. Should she thank Fletcher? He was only doing what he thought would make her work better. But nothing in his contract with Chang & Luntz said he had to feed her.
She went down the hall to Fletcher's office, the coffee cup warming her chilly hands. His door, as usual, was half open. This time she knocked and waited for his "Yeah?" before coming in.
It was the first time she'd come into Fletcher's office without a business-related reason for being there. Somehow that changed things, made her feel shy and uncertain as she stepped onto the plush carpet. She caught herself noticing details about the office she'd never noticed before, including the plants in front of the window and the big framed picture of what looked like a run-down apartment building on the wall behind his desk. It didn't look like sort of thing someone would take a picture of, blow up huge, and pay to have framed. In fact, it reminded her unpleasantly of the apartment building she was currently living in, except this one had deteriorated under an additional decade or two of lousy maintenance. She could even read the profanities in the graffiti tagging one of its peeling walls.
As he leaned back from his computer, stretching, Fletcher noticed her looking up at it. "You're probably thinking that's an interesting choice for office decor."
"I'm not an expert on art," she demurred.
"Neither am I." He stood up and stepped away from his desk so he could see it from her vantage point. "That's a picture of the first property I acquired under the Briggs Enterprises umbrella."
"Not Sperlin-Briggs?"
His smile was brief and wistful. "Not yet, not then. I was twenty years old, not even old enough to drink, and I had a tiny nest egg I'd made from flipping houses as a teenager—uh, am I boring you?"
"Not at all."
They were standing side by side, so close that if he took a single step sideways, his arm would brush hers. He'd taken off his suit jacket again; it was thrown over the back of his chair, leaving him in a slightly rumpled powder-blue business shirt. She wondered if it was just her imagination that she could feel the heat of his body. When he looked her way, she was very aware of the dark lashes framing his brilliant eyes, the flash of his white teeth when he smiled.
"Do you know what I mean when I talk about flipping houses, Ms. Fallon?"
She wished she could tell him to call her Debi. The words hovered on the tip of her tongue, but it felt too intimate when she was already in his office for no specific reason she could name. "Sort of," she said. "It's when real estate investors buy cheap houses at auction and sell them for more than they paid." Not an activity that she normally associated with twenty-year-olds.
"Basically, yeah." He sat on the end of his desk, face bright and animated as he warmed to his topic. "I was sixteen when I first figured out this could be done. One of our neighbors offered to pay me to do some carpentry work on his house that he was fixing up to sell. My dad used to be a contractor—"
Debi filed away that used to be, and the veiled flash of sorrow that went along with it. Fletcher wasn't old enough that his father should have died yet, unless something tragic had happened.
"—so I knew the business, and I've always been a hard worker. It went well enough that our neighbor gave me a small share of the sale price in lieu of wages. And that's when I realized you could make a living doing that. Fix up old houses and sell them for more than you bought them for. Lots of people do it. The trick was getting in. I couldn't even get licensed as a carpenter in this state without a two- to four-year apprenticeship, and it wasn't like anyone was going to just let a sixteen-year-old walk in and drop a down payment on a house, even if I'd been able to afford it."
"What did you do?"
Fletcher shrugged, and his brilliant smile glimmered at her again. "What I've always done, I guess. A lot of determination, a lot of elbow grease, and not incidentally, the old man helping me get to know some of his buddies in the construction trade. Talking him into it might've been the toughest sell of all, because he really wanted me to go to college. I didn't want to. I would've had to work my ass off for scholarships, and I'd rather work toward what I really wanted, which was owning my own business. Being my own boss."
"I can respect that," Debi said quietly. I wasn't that, even when the pride was together. I envy you, Fletcher Briggs. Your fate might be running a small real estate company in Seattle, but I've never been the master of mine.
"So basically I got friends of my dad to take me on to do the work while they owned the title and took the financial risk—and got the lion's share of the profits." Debi flinched. Lion's Share had been the name of her family's company, but of course Fletcher had no way of knowing that. "By the time I got around to buying that apartment building, I'd socked away some money, got my own business license, and I was ready to be the front man for a change. I just needed investors, and that's where the Sperlins came into the picture."
"Oh!" Debi said. Something about the name Sperlin had nagged at her memory from the beginning. Now she was pretty sure Roger had done business with them from time to time. "They're real estate investors?"
"Among other things. They have their fingers in a lot of pies in this town ..." Fletcher's gaze drifted out to the spectacular city view through his floor-to-ceiling windows. He gave a sudden, rueful laugh and looked back at her. "But listen to me telling you my life story, when you came in here to say something. Did you have a problem?"
Debi had never noticed until now how laser-focused Fletcher could be when he looked at a person. It was a predator's look, not in the sense of being fierce or terrifying, though she had a feeling that Fletcher could be both of those things when he wanted to be. It was a simple matter of focus, as if he could take his entire being and distill it down to pure concentration, and all of it was now directed at her.
She hardly even knew Fletcher Briggs, but he could look at a person as if they were the most important thing in the world, and make them believe it.
It sent her brain into a flurry of panic-induced scurrying. After all of that, she couldn't open her mouth and say I came in here to thank you for lunch. It was stupid. It was inane.
... it was also true. And he'd just told her a lot of very personal stuff about himself. The least she could do was give him a tiny piece of truth in return.
"I came in here to thank you for lunch," she said, with a smile. Fletcher looked startled, and her courage collapsed like a crushed paper cup. "Thank you for lunch, and for telling me about the apartment building, and—uh—" She was starting to feel like a schoolchild reciting from a script. "And that's all," she finished quickly, and fled back to the bookkeeping office.
***
Fletcher stared after Debi. She must think he was a babbling idiot. But she hadn't looked at him like he was an idiot. She had been listening intently the whole time. At least, he was reasonably sure she had been. During his career, through many meetings with investors and city planners, he'd had plenty of practice at telling when people were fake-listening to be polite and when they were really listening. Debi had really been listening, really interested.
And the way she had looked at him at the end ... he had to drag his mind away from it. For the first time, she'd looked at him not with impatience or annoyance or weariness, but instead with a warm light in her eyes, and it had made his heart flip over.
But he couldn't let himself go down this road.
She was comfortable to be around, was the problem. Comfortable was one thing his relationship with Chloe had never been, even back in the beginning when things were good. He'd only known Debi for a couple of days, yet he felt more relaxed around her than around most people he'd known for years, more so than he ever had with Chloe in their entire relationship.
He had opened his mouth and the whole story of the origins of his company had spilled out. If he'd kept going, he would probably have unloaded everything: his feelings about Chloe, about her family, about the divorce ...<
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The divorce which was still going on—and that pulled him back to reality like a bucket of cold water in the face. He liked Debi, really liked her. And that was exactly why he had no business dragging her into the middle of a legal and emotional mess. He had no business making a single move toward getting involved with one woman while still technically married to another one. Even though he and Chloe had been separated for years, even though their legal termination was coming any day now ("God willin' and the creek don't rise," as one of his dad's friends used to say)—he couldn't drag Debi into this when Chloe, and all the uncertainty she brought with her, still held him down like an anchor.
But as he worked through the afternoon—teleconferencing in to meetings, calling suppliers, setting aside paperwork for when he actually had a functional office staff again—he was intensely aware of Debi's presence just a few doors down the hall. When he went to the break room to refill his coffee mug, her vanilla perfume hung in the air. Had she just been there a few minutes before him, her hand on the handle of the coffee pot he was picking up now?
Half amused and half annoyed, he told himself, You're acting like a kid with a crush.
It wouldn't go anywhere. There was no way it could. In a week or two, she would have finished the accounting mess he'd dumped on her and she would be gone. He would still be in the throes of a nasty legal battle. Even once that was wrapped up, he didn't have time to get involved with someone new. Between his daughter and the business, his life was more than full enough already. How could he hope to cram a relationship in there?
But maybe it could work, a traitorous corner of his brain whispered, with someone who's just as workaholic as you are. Maybe that's the only way it could work.
Stupid brain.
And yet, on his way back to his office, his path curved like the trajectory of a comet drawn by a moon's gravitational pull, bending toward Debi's office. It was almost as if he didn't have a choice. His steps wanted to go there.