by Heidi Betts
He thought about making a smart remark, telling Ethan to mind his own business, but he’d come here with the sole intention of getting a little advice from his best friend. Or at the very least, spilling his guts and hoping the sour taste in his mouth would finally go away.
“Lucy,” he said simply, noticing the way her name caught in his throat. He had to swallow hard before he could even take another sip of his beer.
“What about her?” his friend asked, filling a segmented tray with bits of fruit and olives for mixed drinks.
“She left me.”
“For another job, you mean?”
A beat passed before he answered. “Yeah.” Among other things. “She quit and went to work for somebody else.”
“Lucky bastard. She’s a real treasure, that one. So what did you do to run her off?”
At that, Peter’s brows lifted, then turned down in annoyance. “What makes you think I ran her off?”
“For one thing, you slept with her. And I know you, buddy. You’re not big on commitment. The women you date and take to bed may all look different—tall, short; stacked, petite; blonde, brunette, redhead—but they have one thing in common: they’re easy to pry yourself away from. You don’t promise them anything more than a couple of good rolls in the hay and maybe a photo op or two when you take them along to social events, and they don’t expect it.”
“What’s your point?” Peter asked, wondering why he stayed friends with this guy when he was turning into such a colossal pain in the ass.
“My point, Mr. Grumpy Pants, is that Lucy isn’t like those other women, and you damn well know it. You knew it before the two of you ever got stuck in that elevator together. She’s not the kind of girl you can just have sex with and then not call in the morning. The kind who’s good for a thrill, but who won’t expect more. Lucy isn’t clingy or demanding, but she’s also not looking for a fling.”
With a huff of frustration, Ethan slammed down a jar of maraschino cherries, then braced his hands on the edge of the bar. “Holy heck, Peter, when did you get so damn dense? She’s in love with you, for God’s sake. Probably has been since the day she started working for you.”
Peter felt as though his friend had just dropped a ton of bricks on his head. He couldn’t have been more stunned if Lucy had materialized at that very moment in a G-string and pasties and started dancing on the countertop for dollar bills.
“What are you talking about? Lucy doesn’t have those sorts of feelings for me. She’s a great gal, don’t get me wrong, but her problem with our sleeping together wasn’t that she was in love with me, it’s that I was also her boss. The conflict of interest made her uncomfortable.”
Ethan rolled his eyes and muttered some truly creative curses beneath his breath. “‘Great gal,’” he repeated. “‘Conflict of interest.’ Man, I’m surprised you can dress yourself in the morning. Did all that booze I served you kill off your last functioning brain cells?”
He leaned across the bar, so close Peter’s eyes nearly crossed trying to keep him in focus.
“Haven’t you ever noticed the way she looks at you? Or the way she cleans your house and takes care of you?”
His head ached and his memory was becoming suddenly fuzzy. “She doesn’t look at me any differently than she does anyone else. And as for cleaning up…that’s part of her job.”
“Blind as well as dumb,” Ethan mumbled with a toss of his head. “She looks at you like the stars in the night sky were your idea, Peter. She’s certainly never looked at me that way. She also thinks you’re the smartest, most talented man ever to design a computer game. Now, granted, you’re good at what you do, but to hear Lucy tell it, you might as well be Bill Gates, Mahatma Gandhi, and the president of the United States all rolled into one.
Ethan pulled the towel from his shoulder and wiped cherry juice off the bar. “And she cleans up after you and makes sure you have everything you need or want because she cares about you, not because she thinks she’s being a good little assistant. She’s in love with you, you big blockhead.”
Peter’s chest tightened. His heart was pounding a thousand beats per second and his lungs refused to draw in oxygen. Ethan was wrong. He had to be.
Peter had met women like that before, diamond rings dancing in their eyes. He identified the look immediately and always managed to keep them at bay.
If Lucy had harbored feelings for him all this time, he would have noticed. His force fields would have gone up, and he damn sure wouldn’t have let himself get involved with her, no matter how badly he might have wanted to sample her luscious body.
“No,” he said, shaking his head in acute denial. “No, I think you’re wrong.”
He knew Lucy wanted the big picture from whatever man she eventually ended up with, but he hadn’t gone so far as to assume love was involved.
“Oh, yeah?” Ethan seemed amused now. He pushed away from the bar and leaned back against the low shelf of colorful liquor bottles. “Maybe this will get through to you, then. I’m Lucy’s new boss. She came home from New York alone and upset, and I offered her a job here because she said she couldn’t stand the thought of working with you every day for the rest of her life. She’s upstairs right now, in the office.”
“What?” Peter leapt to his feet, the bar stool teetering at the speed with which he left it.
Ethan took a menacing step forward. “Don’t even think about it,” he warned in a low voice. “She doesn’t want to see you, and I promised her I wouldn’t tell you she was here, so if you move so much as an inch in that direction, I’ll have to ask Archie to take you out back and pummel you a while.”
Archie was Ethan’s head bouncer, built like an eighteen-wheeler, and Peter searched for a glimpse of him as he turned his attention to the glass-fronted office on the second floor of the nightclub. He didn’t see any signs of Lucy because the blinds were drawn, but the urge to climb the curved staircase at the back of the room and find her was strong.
Ethan came out from behind the bar and laid a hand on Peter’s shoulder. “You’ve screwed this up royally, buddy, and I’m not real sure it can be fixed. But before you do anything, you need to go home and sleep off your little drinking binge. I already called a cab. When you wake up, take a long, hard look at this thing and how you feel about Lucy, then maybe you can talk to her.”
Feeling like he was walking through a thick fog, Peter nodded. His friend’s words didn’t make complete sense at this very moment, but he knew Ethan was looking out for his best interests. Even if he had hired Lucy behind his back, he wouldn’t give Peter bad advice. They’d been friends too long for that.
With a nod, he let Ethan lead him outside and put him in a bright yellow taxi.
“Get some rest,” Ethan told him in an understanding tone. “We’ll talk later, and I’ll take good care of Lucy until you decide what you’re going to do.”
Even as exhaustion swept him and his eyes fell closed, Peter realized that’s exactly what he was afraid of—someone else taking care of Lucy because he was too screwed up to do it himself.
Lucy peered through a slit in the vertical window blinds of Ethan’s office, careful not to let Peter see her. She suspected Ethan had already told him she was up here, otherwise he wouldn’t have been staring so intently in her direction. But he didn’t start forward, didn’t storm up the stairs to confront her about quitting her job with so little advance warning. If he had, she’d have probably gone running, escaping through the emergency fire exit at her back.
Instead, Ethan laid an arm across Peter’s shoulders and steered him toward the entrance of the club, presumably to send him home. She hoped Ethan had called him a cab, considering the amount of alcohol Peter had consumed since arriving only a few short hours ago.
A frown marred her brow as she considered that. Peter wasn’t a big drinker. He might have a glass of wine with dinner or the occasional scotch and soda at the end of the day, but other than that, his main vice seemed to be gallons upon gallons o
f sugary-sweet cola. Today, she hadn’t seen him order so much as a ginger ale.
That bothered her, probably more than it should have. She didn’t work for Peter any longer, which meant his eating and drinking habits were none of her concern.
But she still loved him, despite her best efforts to lock him out of her heart, so she supposed it was only natural to wonder about him and worry that he wasn’t taking good enough care of himself.
Ethan came back inside alone and headed directly for the polished onyx stairs that led to his office. Lucy let the blinds fall from her hands and darted back to the desk, managing to take a seat and look busy just as the door opened.
She glanced up and smiled, pretending she’d been working on his books all along. “Hi.”
He didn’t return her greeting. “Peter just left,” he reported flatly.
Her eyes widened as she feigned a sense of startlement. “He was here?”
One corner of his mouth curved in mock amusement. “Peter may have been too drunk to notice you peeking through the blinds, but I sure wasn’t.” He shook his head. “You two are really something. Both so desperate to pretend you don’t feel anything for the other that you’re sort of missing the point.”
Lucy bristled slightly at his chastising tone. He’d been so supportive up until now, she’d hate for him to suddenly turn critical of her feelings for his friend. “What point would that be?”
“That you love each other. You should be together, celebrating that love, not working this hard to come up with ways to hide it.”
“And you’re such an expert on the subject?” She made it a question because she knew all about Ethan’s reputation as a ladies’ man and his track record with women.
“No. That’s just it. I haven’t had much luck in the romance department myself, but it’s always easier to see the truth of a situation when you’re not personally involved. And it’s pretty darn clear from where I’m standing that you and Peter feel the same about each other, you’re just too damn stubborn to admit it or take a chance on being shot down.”
Her eyes welled with sudden tears at Ethan’s words. Was he right? Was she being a coward? If she walked up to Peter and told him exactly how she felt, would he surprise her by admitting he loved her, too?
Her gut told her no, that he would stick to his long-held beliefs that he couldn’t open himself to a relationship and still be a successful entrepreneur. But a tiny voice in her head asked what if?
What if she was wrong?
What if he did feel something for her?
What if she held her tongue out of fear when all it would take was one well-placed question to possibly make all her dreams come true?
But was she brave enough to risk it? She didn’t know. Ethan had given her something to think about, though, and she promised herself that she would.
Blinking to disperse the dampness fringing her lashes, she inclined her head to let him know she heard what he was saying.
“Do you know why Peter won’t let himself get involved?” she asked, wondering if they were close enough for Peter to have shared his past with his friend.
“Yeah, I know,” Ethan said with a derisive curl of his lip. “And if you ask me, he doesn’t give himself enough credit. But I have a feeling that when he finally stops worrying about turning into his father, he’ll discover he’s not half bad at juggling his software company and a family.”
Lucy swallowed hard, trying to dislodge the lump in her throat. “I’ve always thought the same thing.”
“So tell him,” Ethan said simply. “And then make him believe it.”
Eleven
Three days. Three days without Lucy and he had yet to sleep, eat, or change his clothes. He hadn’t showered or shaved, and had barely touched the case of soda she always made sure to keep in the refrigerator for him.
As soon as he’d gotten home from The Hot Spot, instead of taking Ethan’s advice and sleeping it off, he’d stripped down to his boxers and undershirt and gone straight to work on a new computer program.
He’d worked for hours, days, but nothing seemed to go the way it was supposed to. Ideas were slower to come, codes harder to write, and solutions more difficult to find. His mind kept wandering—always to Lucy and how much he missed her. To what might have been.
Without her here, his house was a just a big, empty building, with cold walls and even colder rooms. The entire place was dark because she wasn’t around to flip on the lights.
The phone rang, but he didn’t pick up. There was no one in the world he wanted to talk to right now except Lucy, and he doubted she would be calling anytime soon.
Ethan had told him he needed to think things over, decide what he really wanted. Since then, all he’d done was think, but he still didn’t know what to do.
He knew what he wanted, but only in general terms: Lucy. He wanted her to come back to work, be in his life—and his bed—again. But he was smart enough to realize that as far as going back to the way things were, that ship had sailed. He couldn’t go to her and say, Hey, how about being my lover and my assistant again, but without all that pesky emotional baggage? He suspected that would go over about as well as a Yankee fan at a Red Sox home game.
And to be honest, he wasn’t positive that’s what he wanted any longer, either. He still didn’t think it was a good idea to mix business with pleasure.
His father had been an abysmal failure when he’d tried to handle the jobs of both father and businessman, but Peter was beginning to wonder if trying and possibly failing in the long run still wasn’t a better alternative than never trying at all. Especially if it meant the difference between having Lucy in his life or not having Lucy in his life.
Because not having her was becoming unbearable.
He pictured his life ten years from now, without Lucy being a part of it, and all he saw was darkness, sadness, misery.
Oh, he might be sinfully rich and famous for his games and software designs, but most likely he would also be a lonely hermit.
His assistants would be pimply-faced college interns from the local university who didn’t stick around long enough for him to learn their names.
Women would flirt with him at social events or drop by with baked goods to try to lure him out, but none of them would be as attractive or interesting as Lucy. And he already knew with complete conviction that no other woman would ever touch him the way she had, emotionally or physically.
So what are you going to do about it, smart guy? a voice in his head whispered none too subtly.
Good question. He didn’t have an answer just yet, but since it didn’t look like he’d be going to bed anytime soon, he certainly had time to figure it out.
Lucy stood on the stoop outside Peter’s front door, breathing deeply, concentrating on not hyperventilating. She didn’t want to be here, had half hoped he would ship the last of her things so she would never have to see him again.
No, that wasn’t quite true. She wished on a daily basis that she could see him…not to mention touch him, smell him, hear his low, rumbling voice.
God, she missed him, and they hadn’t even been apart a week yet.
Her stomach took a tumble and she locked her teeth together to keep from throwing up. Lord, she was nervous. She’d come to collect her things, but only if Plan A didn’t work out.
Ethan’s way was Plan A because she hadn’t been able to get his comments out of her head since he’d told her to go down fighting, instead of feeling sorry for herself and giving up like she had when she’d flown home from New York.
So here she was, preparing to confront Peter and lay all her cards out on the table, regardless of how he might react. Her heart would shatter like glass if he rejected her or told her again that he couldn’t get seriously involved because it might influence his work. But she was willing to risk it on the off chance that Ethan was right. Even if the odds were a zillion to one, she had to know for sure.
Swallowing the knot of dread lodged in her throat, she
lifted her hand and rang the doorbell. She still had a key, but didn’t feel right using it when she no longer worked for him.
She waited for Peter to answer the door and braced herself for the sight of him, but he never came. Seconds ticked by and she pressed the bell again.
This time, she heard the thump of footsteps on the staircase and mumbled curses. The door swung open before she was fully prepared, stealing the air from her lungs.
Peter stood on the other side of the threshold, fully dressed in a light blue suit and pale yellow tie. His shoes were polished to a high shine, his hair neatly combed. It was enough to stun her into speechlessness.
“Lucy.”
Her name burst from his lips in a rush, breathless from more than just the race downstairs, she suspected.
“Peter. I, um…came for my things.”
Coward! she chastised herself. Wimp. You weren’t going to say that.
But he took a step back, motioning her inside. “Come in. I’m glad to see you,” he said as he closed the door behind them. “I was actually planning to come by The Hot Spot soon to talk to you. I guess you’ve saved me the trouble.”
She gave a weak smile, not sure how to respond to that. She suppose she should be grateful she’d decided to come over, somewhat prepared, before he could catch her off guard at the club.
At the look on her face, he stumbled. “Jeez, I didn’t mean it that way. Going to see you wouldn’t have been an inconvenience at all. I just meant…we must be on the same wavelength for you to show up here at about the same time I was getting ready to come see you.”
Her grin grew a little then, becoming more sincere as he rushed to correct himself and reassure her. This was the Peter she knew, always aware and courteous of her feelings. The suit had thrown her off at first, but the hair, the eyes, the lips, the shape of his well-shaven, chiseled face were all familiar and dear to her heart.
She curled her fingers into her palm, resisting the urge to reach up and smooth a stray lock away from his forehead.