by Jenny Jacobs
She hung up and turned to Tess with a smug, superior smile. “And that, kid, is how it’s done.”
“Uh huh,” Tess said. “How what’s done?”
That, Greta reflected, her pleasure at winning dimming a little, is a very good question.
Chapter Four
“What’s wrong with displaying my carefully gathered collection of tchochkes?” Ian asked. He had a root beer in one hand and a slice of pizza in the other and ordinarily he would not be thinking about interior decoration under the circumstances. But he had become a bit obsessed.
He and Michael were watching Monday Night Football in Tess’s crowded living room, which no decorator had ever touched, not withstanding the fact that she was Greta’s business partner. Unlike Greta, apparently Tess did not think her entire life should revolve around her work.
Right now, she was on the sofa, snuggled against Michael, a magazine open in her lap, but she seemed more interested in giving her husband-to-be adoring looks than in reading the articles. Watching Tess, he tried to imagine Greta giving a man adoring looks. His imagination failed. No, not just failed but was defeated utterly. Crushed. Pulverized.
Yet once the idea entered his mind, he couldn’t shake it loose. What would it be like to see affection in Greta’s eyes? To change that frosty disapproval into warm acceptance? To convince her to trust him, to settle down, to build a life together. It would take a very special man to manage that, a man impervious to danger and fear —
He ran a hand through his short hair. Build a life together? He was nuts. It came from hanging around Michael and his family-to-be. Tess, it turned out, came equipped with a daughter. Ian had met Belinda before Tess had scooted the little girl off to get ready for bed, and she had been curious about him, asking question after question until Tess laughed and hugged her and said it was time for a bath. Michael mentioned that he’d already started the adoption paperwork, which meant he’d thought it through — schoolwork, braces, puberty — and hadn’t reconsidered. Plus he’d already set a wedding date, at least according to the invitation Ian had gotten in the mail. Michael seemed perfectly willing to embrace his fate. Seemed rather happy about it, in fact.
Ian narrowed his eyes at Tess. Of course, if your fate included a cuddly gorgeous creature who adored you, well, he’d heard of worse tortures. Experienced some himself.
Still, he’d reached the age of — well, never mind — footloose and fancy free and he intended to stay that way. Yup. No dark eyed charmer would ensnare him. He did not need cuddles or looks of adoration. The very thought made him squeamish. Not that he blamed Michael for succumbing. Any man might: women did not fight fair. But Ian was an Army man, and he wasn’t about to surrender, no matter how cuddly the reward. A vision of a perfectly coiffed blonde raising an immaculately groomed eyebrow at him flitted through his mind. There was nothing in the slightest cuddly about her. That was the danger. That was the exact appeal. She didn’t smile at just anyone the way she had smiled at him in the storage unit, when she had understood about the table.
Nonsense. That was a deadly line of thinking, that they could make something special. That was exactly how Michael had come to find himself hog-tied and thrown.
“Greta dislikes them.”
Ian started, disturbed from his ruminations, frowned and took a bite of his pizza. What had they been talking about? Ah, his collection.
“Why does she dislike them?”
“She thinks only a person who lacks imagination uses them as decorating accents,” Tess explained.
“Lacks imagination?” Ian asked, a sharp tone in his voice. Lacks imagination? Why did the accusation outrage him so? Army men weren’t exactly encouraged to develop their imaginations. That was why he’d hired a decorator in the first place. Still, lacks imagination rankled. He’d show Greta he had an imagination. He would —
He would not. He controlled himself and gulped more root beer.
“Sure,” Tess was saying. She’d stopped adoring Michael and was now leaning forward to talk to Ian, her voice and face earnest as she articulated Greta’s position on the use of tchochkes in interior decorating. “It’s the easy way out. Slap a curio shelf on the wall, instant personality. Greta hates that. Real design requires real thought, she says.” Tess gave him a challenging look, as if he would rise to the bait and argue that real design did not require real thought. But Ian was not an idiot.
“This is a great collection,” he insisted. Instant personality! He was not the kind of man who went around looking for the easy way to do something. If he had wanted the easy way, he wouldn’t have hired Greta in the first place.
“I’m sure it is,” Tess said in a way that made Ian grind his teeth.
“It’s not like I picked them up at Pier 1,” he said. He detected the defensive note in his voice and he was suddenly less sure of himself, which was not a feeling he enjoyed experiencing. He always knew what he was doing and when he didn’t, he was confident that whatever he did would be the right thing to do because, well, it was him doing it. He disliked circumstances under which he questioned his own judgment.
“How’s the new job working out?” Michael asked, changing the subject without giving any indication that he’d even been paying attention to it in the first place, showing the kind of instinct about dangerous waters that he obviously hadn’t demonstrated when Tess had wandered into his life or he wouldn’t be in his current predicament. Not that he seemed worried about his predicament, or even considered it to be one. It occurred to Ian that Michael had been fully capable of avoiding his fate if he had wanted to. Apparently he hadn’t wanted to.
What if something like that happened to Ian?
Now there was a disturbing thought. Ian immediately squashed it, the way he did anything remotely disturbing.
“The job is going well,” he said to Michael, glad to have the change of subject and thankful that he didn’t have to continue arguing his case with Tess. He’d already lost to Greta. Why did he think it would be easier to persuade her sister? “I’m actually enjoying it more than I thought I would,” he admitted. He’d thought that a life where he wasn’t getting shot at might prove a little dull but so far it wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. Greta was making up for all the bullets that weren’t being propelled in his direction.
“What exactly do you do?” Tess asked. She’d settled back on the sofa, Michael’s arm around her shoulders.
Ian didn’t think she was all that interested in hearing about his job. Probably she just wanted to get off the subject of interior design. Well, so did he. “I train business executives in understanding cultural differences,” he said. “Actually, it’s not just business people. We’re developing programs for anyone doing any kind of work or business overseas, even just studying in other countries. My area includes most of Asia.” Now he was starting to sound like a brochure. He cleared his throat. “You know, so they don’t derail a deal or get fired from a job because they inadvertently insult their host.”
“Sounds interesting,” she said, clearly trying not to yawn. “You must have to be pretty knowledgeable and diplomatic to be successful at it.”
“I’m pretty good at judging situations and not acting precipitously,” he said modestly.
Tess gave a sudden wide smile that counteracted the yawn and made Ian forgive her for it. “I would be a dead loss at that,” she admitted.
Michael hugged her closer to him. “I’m glad you’re just the way you are,” he said with such a look of affection in his eyes that Ian’s jaw dropped. Quickly averting his eyes, Ian focused on the football game. He heard the distinct sounds of kissing and leaned closer to the television.
“I think we’re embarrassing Ian,” Tess said breathlessly when Michael let her up for air.
“I can’t hear you,” Ian said. “I’m not noticing anything. How ’bout them Chiefs?”
&n
bsp; • • •
Tess swung the bedroom door open and charged into the room, making enough commotion to rattle the lamps. “He’s camping out,” she said. The drama in her voice made Greta, well accustomed to Tess’s exuberances, look up from her laptop.
“He who?”
“Ian, of course.”
Of course. Did she care about anything Ian was doing? She did not. She turned her attention back to the laptop.
“He’s got a sleeping bag on the floor of his bedroom,” Tess said, as if an Army man hadn’t experienced far worse privations in the course of his training and his deployments. “I went to double-check the dimensions of that bay window, like you asked me to, and I saw it.” She sounded like she’d spotted him sleeping on the sidewalk under the bridge.
As she spoke, she marched over to the drapes and pulled them open as if to emphasize the contrast between Greta’s surroundings and Ian’s. The autumn Kansas sun poured into the room, mellower than the summer sunlight but still bright enough to make Greta blink. Occasionally she had to think hard about why she’d invited Tess to be her business partner. Her days would be significantly quieter — not to mention dimmer — if she hadn’t.
“I thought he was living in an extended stay hotel until the house was ready,” Greta said, shifting position on her lavishly furnished king-sized bed and not for a moment considering the difference between her comfy pillow-top mattress and a sleeping bag on the floor.
“He claims he’d rather be uncomfortable at home than uncomfortable in a hotel.”
“Hmm,” Greta said. That sounded precisely like Ian. It was also exactly how she, in the same situation, would feel. But she wouldn’t under any circumstances stoop to using a sleeping bag. He was doing that just to goad her. She gave an elaborate shrug of unconcern. “Not my problem,” she said. If he thought the fact that he was sleeping on the floor would stir her to quick action, he was gravely mistaken. She had other clients and took care of them all equally. Some more equally than others, she admitted, but who could blame her?
“But he’s coming over all the time,” Tess said, flopping onto the bed. She hadn’t brought the morning coffee. She was probably too annoyed over Ian to want to waste time standing quietly in line when she could be complaining to Greta. Yet Greta would find dealing with said complaint far easier if she had a cup of coffee in her hand. Tess couldn’t be expected to think of everything.
“He’s over there all the time,” Tess emphasized. “And I hate to ask Michael to tell him to stop … ”
Ah. Greta peered over the tops of her glasses at her sister. Now the reason for the drama — and the foregone coffee — became clear.
She marveled at Ian’s plan. It was the perfect way to pressure her into moving faster on the job. She admitted that she hadn’t precisely made his project a priority, and it did keep slipping to the bottom of her to-do list somehow. But still. He was good at finding a person’s weaknesses, she had to give him credit for that.
No, she didn’t have to do any such thing. There was nothing to admire in a manipulative man, unmindful of other people’s feelings. There was nothing likeable in that, or in him. Right? She did not like him at all. Not the devilish gleam in those gray eyes, not the appraising look he got in them when he thought she wasn’t watching, not the easy chuckle when she did or said something that surprised or amused him, not the decisiveness with which he made his choices and the confidence with which he stood by them. Even when he was absolutely wrong, as with the curios.
She couldn’t help the grin that tugged at her lips. There was more to him than the surface appearance.
No. She turned the grin into a frown. There was not. He was obstinate and manipulative and she would not give him the satisfaction of pressuring her into acting in a way she would not ordinarily do. She disliked all of him, top to bottom, surface to interior. All of him.
Then she looked into Tess’s troubled eyes. If she didn’t relent, Tess would suffer, though she wouldn’t complain to anyone (other than Greta) about it. She would never give Michael an ultimatum, and she was still in the wanting-to-please-her-man stage, which Greta felt she could very well get over. Boundary-setting was imperative in any healthy relationship.
So was compromise. The thought popped into her head and try as she might she could not dislodge it.
With a sigh, Greta dug deep and found a charitable excuse for Ian’s behavior: he didn’t realize he was imposing on Tess. He was just spending time with an old friend while his house was being put into order, and he didn’t realize how disruptive his presence was.
Did she believe that? Grr. She took a deep breath. She would believe it, at least for the amount of time it would take to finish the project. Ian was unaware that his presence was an imposition. Michael, for his part, was glad to see an old friend and didn’t realize that Tess found Ian an obnoxious boor — though she hadn’t exactly said that. Ian was not a sensitive man. You couldn’t expect better from him. She might just have a tiny talk with Michael.
“Why don’t we make the master bedroom our next priority?” she suggested and relaxed a little when she saw Tess’s obvious relief. “We can get someone out right away to turn that extra bedroom into a home theater.” She named a local electronics store that she always relied on for anything to do with home entertainment, though personally she disapproved of the entire concept. “We can put a microwave on a cart in the kitchen until we have a chance to get to it. He isn’t going to be doing any gourmet cooking in the next few weeks anyway.” If she knew men, and she did, he’d be subsisting on takeout and frozen burritos long after his kitchen was fully equipped and totally operational. “That’ll cover the three main necessities.”
“Food, sleep, and?”
“Football.”
“Right,” Tess said, looking surprised.
“I understand men perfectly,” Greta said crisply. She saw Tess smother a smile, which she prudently ignored. She reached for the folder labeled with Ian’s name. “What does he have in the way of bedroom furniture?”
“Just a futon,” Tess said, taking the folder from her and leafing through the photos she’d taken to find the one that showed it. She pulled it loose and handed it over.
“No,” Greta said, putting it aside on what she immediately designated as the garage sale pile. “No one should have to sleep on a futon once he or she is out of college. Not even Ian. That’s worse than a sleeping bag.”
“What if he insists on keeping it?” Tess asked.
Greta looked at her.
“Oh, right,” Tess said.
Greta flipped through the stack of photos in the folder, looking for suitable bedroom furniture, then stopped and tapped one with her fingernail. “What is this? Is this a real armoire or a television cabinet?” The piece of furniture had gracefully curving lines and an attractive reddish finish accented with gold leaf. It was possible that he had deliberately chosen such an attractive piece with an appreciation of its grace and fine proportions, but it was more likely that it represented accidental aesthetics. Occasionally even an individual with no sense of discernment whatsoever got it right, through no fault of his own.
“I don’t know,” Tess admitted, glancing at the photo. “I didn’t think to open it up to look.”
Greta would have, but perhaps not with Ian hovering nearby. She’d have wanted to finish as quickly as possible, too. “That’s all right. I need to take a closer look at this — ‘collection’ I guess we can call it — anyway. I haven’t even begun to conceive of what his living room is going to look like.”
Tess opened her mouth to make a suggestion. Greta could tell from the twinkle in her eye that it wasn’t something she wanted to hear. She glared at her sister, hoping to forestall comment. Tess cleared her throat, then asked, “Shall I call him and ask him to meet you over there?” Although she’d obviously changed her mi
nd about the remark she intended to make, the twinkle did not leave her eyes as she reached for the phone.
“Not me,” Greta said. “Us.” Tess had gotten her into this in the first place. She could darn well act as moral support and deflect some of Ian’s unsettling attention away from Greta. “I’m not spending any more time alone with him than I absolutely have to.” Even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t because she disliked him but because the blasted man was worming his way under her skin. She sucked a frustrated breath in. She did not like the feeling of Ian worming around under her skin. Next thing she knew, she’d be looking forward to seeing him flash that charming smile. She’d recognize that he was manipulating her and instead of cutting him to the quick over it, she’d smile indulgently at the behavior.
No. She would never allow it to come to that. She knew better. She was going to choose better. She was going to choose wisely. Never dating is not breaking the cycle, Greta, Tess said in her head. Greta glared at the Tess standing in front of her. “You’re coming with me.”
• • •
The gracefully curving doors of the armoire opened to reveal shelves for a television and DVD player with holes punched in the back panel to make room for power cords. Greta shook her head regretfully as she closed the doors. “We could use a real armoire in the master bedroom,” she said, turning away from the rejected piece and assessing the non-rejected pieces within view, crossing her arms in what she knew was an unreceptive posture. Tess stood at her elbow, pen and sketchbook at the ready.
“I don’t mind having a television in my bedroom,” Ian said. He stood a respectful three paces behind her, his hands shoved in his trouser pockets, like he was a child who had been warned not to touch anything. He was pretending to be suitably cowed into acquiescence, but Greta knew better. Nothing on God’s green earth could cow Ian into submission, not even Greta, and she knew it.
“I understand that a television might make you feel less lonely,” she cooed. “However, we want the bedroom to be a restful place. A cocoon against the incursions of the outside world.”