by Lauren Esker
"What are you going to do with your daughter?"
He grimaced. "Since she's been kicked out of daycare, the only thing I can do. I'll tell Janice she can work from home for the rest of the day, so she doesn't accidentally see Olivia shift, and then keep Livvy here with me. Between me and Chloe, we ought to be able to keep her out of trouble and still get some work done."
"You know, I don't mind if you need a—a break," Debi offered. "I mean, it wouldn't be a huge imposition, if you wanted me to take her for an hour or two."
"Really?" He paused in the doorway. "You don't seem like a kid person."
"I'm not," she admitted. Damn this honesty thing. "But she's a nice kid. So let me know if you need me to do that. After all ... I'm staying for an extra week anyway."
Fletcher's smile flashed, a lightbulb flicker of white teeth. "I'll let you know."
***
It was strange having Chloe there. In just a few short days, Debi had grown used to the silence when the only people in the office were herself and Fletcher, aside from an occasional delivery person dropping by or a temp coming in for a few hours.
Now there was the sound of typing coming from Chloe's office, an occasional brusque female voice speaking into the phone, a shadow moving now and then behind the half-open door. Going down the hall to the break room felt like running a gantlet.
Even when she kept herself secluded in the bookkeeping office, she heard voices now and then as Fletcher and Chloe spoke back and forth between their two offices. Sometimes there were childish giggles and once the patter of small feet running down the hall, with larger footsteps in pursuit. Debi never knew if the pursuing parent was Fletcher or Chloe; she felt too shy to look out and see.
It made her feel like an outsider, and that realization brought misery and anger, because—she was an outsider, wasn't she? She wasn't part of Fletcher and Chloe's family unit. She had just barely gotten to know Fletcher well enough to be on a first-name basis with him.
Anyway, you're jealous of a woman who's divorcing him with extreme prejudice and who you just watched have a screaming public fight with him. You're really envying a relationship like that?
Yes, she thought bitterly, slapping down a ledger of old receipts. Yes, I envy that, because at least she has a relationship with Fletcher. I don't. What I have is a tracking monitor and a temporary contract gig with the company that'll be up as soon as I finish organizing this goddawful mess in here.
It was already looking a lot more organized, outwardly at least. She'd turned the mess of scattered paperwork into soul-soothingly tidy stacks arranged by year, type of expenditure, and various other criteria. At the moment she was checking physical receipts against the past year's computer records, with neat piles of receipts stacked in rows on her desk and on top of several file boxes she'd spread out to create a makeshift table, since every other surface was buried in collated files.
A giggle from the doorway broke into her concentration.
Debi looked up just in time to see a tangle of brown curls vanish from sight. With feline patience she kept watching, staring at the door like a cat watching a mousehole, and sure enough, a moment later the little girl's face slid back into view. Seeing Debi watching her, Olivia burst into giggles and ducked out of sight.
"You know I'm trying to work here, right?"
The only answer was more giggles. Debi entertained unkind thoughts about people who brought their children into their workplace and made it impossible for other people, namely herself, to do their jobs. She didn't mind if Fletcher wanted to ask her to watch Olivia for an hour or two; what she minded was being constantly interrupted. She took her glasses off and left them folded on the edge of her desk before getting up and going over to close the door.
As soon as she appeared in the doorway, Olivia squealed in delight and covered her face with her hands.
"I'm not playing hide and seek with you, got that?" Debi crouched down. "I'm a very mean lion. If I caught you, I'd eat you." For emphasis, she made claws with her hands and growled.
More delighted squealing. Debi could feel herself starting to smile. Damn it.
"I'm a snake," Olivia reported, peeking from between her sticky-looking fingers.
"I know. I saw you shift."
"Snakes go hisssss." Olivia stuck out her tongue, which was dyed bright donut-frosting pink, accessorized with chocolate. Debi tried not to cringe.
"How many donuts have you had?"
"A lot," Olivia declared. "I want to show you my house."
"I'm working. You can show me later."
Olivia's small hand closed on hers. Just as she'd suspected, the fingers were sticky.
"Come see it now!"
"Okay ... fine ... five minutes and then I'm going back to work, okay?"
"Five minutes!" Olivia announced.
As she was dragged down the hallway by her hand, having to bend over to match Olivia's diminutive height, Debi wondered if five minutes had any meaning when you were four. Also, she wished Olivia's hand was a little less sticky. They went not to the break room, which she was expecting, but into one of the conference rooms.
"What did you say you were going to show me?"
"My house!"
Olivia had been very busy, and apparently unsupervised for some time. Half the chairs in the room had been dragged into a rough circle. Inside the ring of chairs, the "house" was furnished with a variety of items acquired from all over the office: plastic cutlery, a coffee mug, file folders, an unused roll of toilet paper still in its paper wrapping, a couple of empty boxes, a small potted plant, and, of course, the box of donuts, now thoroughly demolished. If these were meant to be housewares and other furnishings, they were scattered around in a completely haphazard way, not arranged in any sort of order. Debi's eye twitched.
Olivia dragged a chair aside and solemnly went through a routine of wiping her little buckle shoes before she stepped inside.
"You can come into my house. No, not there!" she protested as Debi started to follow her. "This is my door. That is your door. Because you are too tall for my door." She said it with firm conviction and the implication that Debi was too dense to have figured out that she couldn't use the same invisible door.
"Oh ... kay." Debi moved to the place that was indicated.
"Wipe your feet," Olivia commanded, hands planted on hips.
"I am, I am." She went through the foot-wiping routine and stepped inside. "May I sit down, ma'am?"
Olivia giggled. "Okay."
Debi sat cross-legged on the floor. Warm memories of childhood tea parties with her sister Mara came back to her. As the elder by several years, Mara always got to veto any games she didn't want to play, but she'd had a surprising amount of patience for sipping from tiny plastic teacups at a table where all the guests were her baby sister's stuffed toys. In retrospect Debi thought that her sister, who had always loved pretty clothes and typically "girlish" games of all sorts, had probably enjoyed having an excuse to keep playing tea party and other little-girl games after her teen dignity otherwise wouldn't have let her.
Mara ... who was currently in shifter prison and had refused to speak to her for the past year. Debi shoved the memory forcefully aside. "Are we going to have a tea party?" she asked.
"No," Olivia said. "What's that?" She pointed to Debi's ankle.
A cold shock sank through the pit of Debi's stomach. Her pants had hiked up when she sat down, and the edge of the anklet was visible, peeking out from under the hem. "It's an ankle bracelet," she said. She gave the hem a sharp tug and, for good measure, shifted her position so her left leg was tucked under the other, hiding the ankle from view. "I like jewelry. See?" She displayed her hands for the child's inspection. Her jewelry collection was greatly reduced from what it used to be, but she still tried to select a few pieces each morning that were tasteful and coordinated with whatever she was wearing. Today she wore a slim bracelet, its delicate links made of 22-karat gold, and a ring set with an emerald.
; The ring turned out to be a sufficient distraction from the anklet. "That's very pretty," Olivia announced, reaching for it.
Debi tried not to grit her teeth as sticky fingers planted themselves all over her ring. And then she thought, why not? It was only a thing. She couldn't even remember when and where she'd gotten it. She had so many pretty things that she couldn't fit them all into her tiny, crappy apartment. She'd gotten rid of clothes and jewelry by the boxful when she'd lost her condo.
So why did it matter if this ring, however expensive it was, got sticky child fingers all over it? "Here," Debi said. She took it off her finger. "Do you want to try it on?"
As soon as she slipped it onto Olivia's thumb, Debi had a moment of doubt: were children that young in danger of choking on something so small? Apparently not, because Olivia didn't try to take it off.
"It's very pretty," she said shyly, twisting it around and around. Even on her thumb, it was large enough to be in danger of falling off.
"It's an emerald. I like green stones because my eyes are green." So were Olivia's, Debi noticed for the first time—not the same vivid green that ran in Debi's family, but a muted brown with greenish hints, more hazel than her dad's eyes but clearly on the same spectrum.
And now she was thinking about Fletcher again. Dammit.
"Olivia!"
The voice was female and worried. "There you are." Chloe strode to the ring of chairs and through the gap that Olivia had designated a child-sized door.
"You're supposed to wipe your feet!" Olivia protested.
"You were supposed to stay in my office and play games on the tablet I gave you while I did my conference call." Chloe scooped up Olivia before Debi could say anything.
"Look, Mommy, this is Debi's ring."
"Why do you have Debi's ring? For that matter—" Chloe swept a withering look at the mess around them. "Why are you letting my daughter destroy the conference room? Did Fletcher tell you to babysit her? Is this what you call responsible babysitting?"
"I wasn't babysitting. She wanted to show me what she'd made." Debi scrambled to her feet, her pride stinging viciously.
"What she's making is a mess. Aren't you, punkin?" Chloe asked, wrinkling her nose and bumping it against Olivia's. The child giggled and gave a little squirm. "Why did you have this woman's ring? What—is this thing real?" She slipped the ring off Olivia's finger and turned a glare on Debi. "What do you think you're doing, giving my four-year-old daughter thousand-dollar pieces of jewelry?"
"I wasn't giving it to her," Debi snapped, retrieving her ring. The whole ring was sticky now, and she dropped it into her pocket to clean later. "She admired it, so I wanted to show it to her. I was being—"
"Inappropriate, is what you were being." Chloe swung her body around to interpose herself between Debi and the little girl in her arms. "Who are you? You don't work for us."
"She has an ankle bracelet," Olivia told her mother.
"I'm a CPA from the accounting firm your company deals with," Debi said quickly, not at all eager for the conversation to drift to her "ankle jewelry." "I'm doing the books for—"
"Why is Fletcher letting a CPA babysit our daughter?"
"I'm not babysitting, idiot," Debi snapped. She could just about deal with taking orders from humans ... barely. But the constant tickle of Chloe's shifter nature gave her an overwhelming urge to assert her dominance over her own kind. She was a lion. No snake shifter could order her around.
"What did you call me?"
"I'm not a babysitter, as I already told you. I'm a CPA. I took five minutes away from my own work to pay attention to your daughter, which you clearly couldn't be bothered to do, and now I'm going back to it."
"Get back here and clean up this mess!" Chloe demanded as Debi strode out of the conference room.
"Clean it up yourself!" Debi shot over her shoulder. "It's not my mess!"
She firmly closed the door of the bookkeeping office, fully expecting either Chloe or Fletcher to show up a few minutes later and throw her out. However, no one came. She heard raised voices down the hall, followed by silence.
She wished she'd thought to visit the restroom to wash her hands, which were now sticky from sugared-child contact. Using a tissue from her purse, she wiped it off as best she could and got back down to business.
It was harder than usual to lose herself in her work. She kept thinking about Olivia, Chloe, and Fletcher. Mostly Fletcher. She wished they'd met under different circumstances. She didn't think the attraction was one-sided; she'd smelled Fletcher's arousal, the intensification of his spicy male scent, on the very first day they'd met.
Being around him made her feel good, and there weren't very many things that made her feel good these days.
So why not? she asked herself, clipping papers together. It'll probably crash and burn, but everything else I've ever done with my life has gone straight to hell, so it's not like I don't have experience at it.
The time readout on the computer had just flipped over to five when Debi peeked out of the office—look both ways before crossing the hall in case of rampaging ex-wives. Chloe's office door was closed, with no sounds from within, but she could hear typing from Fletcher's. She went quietly down the hall and tapped on his door, waiting until he waved her in.
"Don't worry," he said when he saw her, flashing a quick smile. "It's just us. Chloe went home with Olivia."
"Ah." She took a chair in front of his desk. "I wanted to—"
"If you're going to say 'apologize,' please don't. You didn't do anything wrong. I'm sorry you got caught up in this, and I wanted you to know that I had a talk with Chloe about the way she treated you."
That "talk" was probably the yelling Debi had heard. "I can take care of myself, thanks."
"I'm sure you can, but as long as I still have half ownership in this company, nobody gets reamed unless they deserve it."
This was accompanied by another of those warm smiles that kindled a fire deep inside her. Debi started to clasp her hands nervously between her knees, decided it made her look like a schoolgirl in the principal's office, and put them on the desktop instead, folded loosely together.
"Fletcher, there's something I'm wondering about." Her heart tripped a rapid tattoo in her chest, so loud he could surely hear it. "May I ask you a personal question?"
He'd turned back to his computer; now he looked up again, his gaze neutral. "Sure, go ahead."
"Are you and Chloe ..." She wasn't sure if she could ask it. But she needed to know or she would never be able to ask the next question. "Are you through? Your relationship, I mean."
"Yes," he said instantly. "Yes, completely. We haven't been together for two years. The only reason why we still talk is because of Olivia. If it weren't for that and the company, we would long since have severed ties."
"There's no chance you'll get back together, try to reconcile for Olivia's sake?"
"No. None."
"Because today, you looked ... sometimes you were ..." She broke off, realized she was drumming her fingers on the edge of his desk, and made herself stop. She hated that her nervous tics had gotten so much worse since Roger's death. Partly it was stress; partly it was that Roger wasn't around to snap at her about them anymore.
"If you're wondering whether Chloe and I are reconciling because we weren't yelling at each other for the entire time she was here ... no. No, we aren't." He didn't seem to mind being asked about it; the only look she could discern on his face was one of wistful sadness. "We can't scream at each other every waking minute. Especially when Olivia's around. We both try to behave like sensible human beings instead of deranged howler monkeys for her sake. But there's nothing there anymore, Debi. I think ..." He picked up a monogrammed pen from a holder on his desk and worked it back and forth between two fingers. "I think what I feel for Chloe now is a dim nostalgia for something we once had. And that's all I feel. The love is gone. Sometimes I wonder if it was ever there at all."
"That seems ... like a reasonable
way to look at it." She'd started to say Good!, but it was possible to have a little too much honesty. However, the door was now wide open for her other question. "So I was wondering if you'd like to have dinner with me tonight."
Shock registered on his face. She hoped it hadn't been too much of a non sequitur and bulled forward before she could lose her nerve.
"I know you're not going to ask me. And I know why. So that's why I'm asking you. Are you busy? Would you like to?"
Fletcher's mouth had fallen slowly open. He closed it and cleared his throat. "Debi, you just saw what I'm in the middle of."
"Yeah, I know that's why you'd never ask. But I live with a lot of regrets, and I don't want this to be one of them. If you're not interested, all you have to do is say no, and we'll never speak of it again."
For a long, still moment, neither of them moved or spoke. Then his hand twitched toward her, almost of its own accord. He touched the back of her hand and stroked two fingertips across her knuckles. "I'm not not interested," he said, his voice husky.
"Well, that's the kind of enthusiasm that really gets a girl hot and bothered." But it came out breathy, because he was still touching her hand, nothing but the dry brush of his fingertips, and yet it shivered all the way up her arm.
"Debi, are you sure?"
"For God's sake, Fletcher, I'm not suggesting marriage and a house in the suburbs. It's just dinner." And more? Right now, with his fingertips resting against her knuckles, she desperately wanted more—not a commitment, not that, but another body to warm hers under the sheets. Hands on her heated skin, fingers tangled in her hair, Fletcher's mouth on hers ... anything that could get her out of her own head for awhile, make her feel less alone.
She wasn't sure if any of that showed in her eyes, but Fletcher had to tear his gaze away from hers, his breath quickening. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, that's ... uh ... I don't have anything else planned, no. Do you want to go home and freshen up first?"
Her mouth was opening to say Yes—she could already picture herself in the dress she wanted to wear, a hot little red off-the-shoulder number she'd brought with her from the condo, unworn since the family's fall—but the words died in her throat as she remembered why she hadn't worn a dress since Roger, the pride, and everything they'd built had come crashing down.