by Anthology
When Claire was little, she would hold her breath when she skinned her knee or stubbed her toe, as though filling her lungs and holding completely still would somehow mitigate the pain. Staring out the drizzly windshield, she finally forced herself to exhale and take a deep, clean breath as she put her key in the ignition.
She pulled out of the parking lot and merged into traffic on Route 1, heading south to Greenwich, where she worked for the most exclusive public relations firm in Connecticut. Not that Claire herself did much in the way of PR. No. She was one of two IT consultants hired to secure critical data and systems owned by Global PR. She was one. Jamie was the other.
She winced, her heart clutching uncomfortably as his face appeared in her mind. Forcing another deep breath and blinking back the burn of unfamiliar tears, she glanced at the little bag of doughnuts on the passenger seat beside her.
By tomorrow it will be bearable.
Tomorrow, when he was legally and officially married and her stupid, silent fantasies were forced to die, she would reset herself. Tomorrow, when the vows had been said and the reception was over, she would start to move on. Tomorrow, when he left for his honeymoon, lost to her in every way that mattered, she would begin the arduous task of putting her broken heart back together.
At a red light she flicked a glance down at her white knuckles. Easing her grip on the steering wheel, she sighed softly, a desperate mewling sound of despair lingering in the quiet of the car.
Love had come quietly for Claire, who hadn’t known much romantic love in her life. Quietly but certainly—in part, no doubt, because of sheer propinquity, their desks facing each other in the tiny glass office that had been built for one executive, not two employees. A three-month remodeling project had originally forced them to share, and an overstock delivery of six computer monitors in large boxes had claimed Claire’s cubicle space when it was finally ready. She’d never moved. Two single twentysomethings trapped together for eight hours a day in a fishbowl. It was inevitable, wasn’t it, that she should have fallen for him?
There was even a time, several months ago, before Phoebe Taylor Torrance had swept into their office with her perfect hair and winning smile, that Claire had actually wondered if Jamie might, one day, care for her. After three months of working closely together, she noticed a slight change in him: the way his hand would brush against hers when he handed her something, the times she caught him staring at her over his computer monitor, looking away hastily when caught. There was a time or two when she wanted to show him something on her monitor, and he’d stood behind her, leaning over her, so close she could smell his aftershave and feel his warm breath near her ear. They’d even gone out for beers one night after an especially long day, but their relationship had remained firmly in the friends/coworker zone where it belonged, despite how much Claire quietly longed for more.
Though she couldn’t help how she felt, she was wrong to want more. Global had a strict no-dating rule for its employees, and Claire, who eschewed confusing shades of gray for the comfort of clear-cut black and white, was a die-hard rule follower.
Turning into the parking garage, she found her assigned spot, cut the engine, and looked up at her face in the rearview mirror. A brutal case of teenage acne had left the terrain of her face permanently scarred, and she’d never quite gotten the hang of putting on makeup. The light blue eye shadow—chosen from a plastic bag of samples her sister had given her—looked garish on her when it might look edgy on the right woman.
A woman, for example, like Phoebe Taylor Torrance.
She dropped her gaze and grabbed her coffee from the center console and the doughnuts from the passenger seat.
Look on the bright side, she tried to comfort herself as she shut the car door with a bump of her hip. Looks aren’t everything. You’re smart, Claire. That’s got to count for something.
Except it didn’t.
It counted for nothing today.
And since it counted for nothing today, when everything good in her life was about to end, she kind of doubted it would count for anything ever again.
“Claire!”
She turned to see Mariah Henry, the director of publicity, walking behind her, high high heels clacking on the cement floor of the garage. Mariah was the tall, gorgeous owner of Global. She was demanding, but she’d always been relatively kind to small, unfashionable, computer dork Claire.
“Hi, Mariah.”
“Good morning! Excited for tomorrow?”
Knowing that Mariah expected a smile, Claire tried to offer one, but she delivered an awkward grimace instead, and her boss’s pretty grin faded.
“. . . or not, I guess. Always so serious and gloomy,” said Mariah with a sigh. They continued their walk, side by side, toward the lobby entrance.
Claire held the door for Mariah, who swept through in front of Claire, leaving her in a cloud of expensive perfume.
Mariah turned to face her, shaking her head. “It’s a wedding! That’s a happy event, Claire! And he’s invited the whole office. You’ll know everyone there. It’s going to be fun!”
Deep breath.
“I guess,” she whispered.
At the elevator, she looked away from Mariah and pressed the up button. She stared miserably at the chrome door, willing it to open and swallow her whole.
“You guess?” parroted Mariah. “I don’t get it. Why aren’t you more excited?”
Because he is marrying someone who isn’t worthy of him.
Because I love him and he isn’t marrying me.
Either answer would have been honest, but the lump in her throat made it impossible to speak. Not to mention that Claire, who wasn’t always certain of what to do in social situations, knew that unburdening your heart to your boss wasn’t acceptable.
“Earth to Claire . . .,” said Mariah in a singsong voice.
The elevator door opened, and Claire stepped inside and cleared her throat. “I, um . . . I woke up with a headache. That’s all.”
“Well, take some Advil, for heaven’s sake! No more doom and gloom!”
Claire made another grimace then stared at the floor, grateful that Mariah didn’t want to talk anymore.
Arriving at the fourth floor, Claire beelined for her office. She placed the bag of Jamie’s favorite doughnuts on the credenza between their desks and sat down in her ergonomic chair. For just a moment she closed her eyes, remembering the day Jamie had requested the chair, two months into their assignment at Global.
“Morning, Sadie,” he’d said, winking at Claire from his desk as he spoke on the phone to the head of human resources. “Jamie MacAllister here. Right. New IT security director. I’ve been meaning to ask . . . How come I have a new chair and Clara doesn’t? Clara? Claire. Claire Higgins. Sweet little brunette with huge blue eyes . . .”
Her face had flushed a million shades of red when he said that, and she looked away from him, busying herself with a corrupted data file like it was her life’s mission to repair it.
“Is that right? Well, I’ll be more careful then. Claire Higgins. IT consultant. She needs a better chair. Uh-huh. Right. Well, be a love and order her one, eh?” His lips twitched with merriment as he winked at her again. “Ah. Right. I won’t say that anymore either. She’s not sweet, and you’re not a love.” She looked up at him, and he raised his eyebrows, stifling a giggle. “So many rules here in the States. Yes. Yes, I’ll do that. I’ll come fill out a requisition form in a bit. Thanks a bunch, Sadie.”
After Jamie hung up the phone, he cleared his throat and said in his light Scottish burr, “Apparently, you cannae be called a ‘sweet little brunette,’ and Sadie cannae be called ‘a love.’” He grinned at her like he was clever and knew it. “But you’ll have a new chair by next week. That one’s shite.”
Maybe that was the moment, she mused, shrugging out of her beat-up denim jacket, which she hung on the back of her chair. Maybe that was the moment she’d started falling in love with James Cameron MacAllister III.
> He’d been hired from SecurityExperts Inc., a crackerjack IT security firm in Edinburgh, to beef up Global’s firewalls and servers. At first, Jamie’s company was going to send one of their gifted employees, but Mariah had doubled the yearlong consulting fee to retain Jamie himself, and Claire, who’d been hired as a web developer the year before, had been promoted to assist him.
At first, she’d been taken aback by his nonstop chatter, barely noticing what Mariah called his “exceptional good looks”—dark hair, light beard, and hazel eyes—and “divine” accent, which, initially at least, was a charm lost on Claire, who was forced to ask Jamie to repeat himself constantly as she became accustomed to his brogue. Over the course of their first month working together, Claire learned that, in addition to co-owning SecurityExperts Inc., he was the grandson of a Scottish baron, a position that afforded him no rank, but made him positively mouthwatering to the other women at Global.
Neither his looks nor his bloodline mattered much to Claire. He was her boss, and she was eager to be of use and to earn the extra dollars that came with the unexpected promotion. That he turned out to be very smart and very kind had a much bigger impact on Claire’s heart than his looks and his position combined.
As days turned into weeks turned into months, she adapted to him, coming to love the cadence of his voice, melodic and sweet. When he tapped his pencil on the edge of the desk, he was trying to solve a problem, and the way called her Clara, with long, rounded a’s curled her toes. She knew when he was talking on the phone to his mother, whom he called Mum, and when his sister, Fiona, called, because he fairly sang while speaking, which made her heart seize with longing.
Only when he was concentrating very hard was he quiet, but even then, there was such joy in the quiet camaraderie of working together. Indeed, those moments felt like heaven—and all she wanted in the whole world was to work quietly beside Jamie forever. It was perfect. It was enough.
Until it wasn’t, she thought, looking out through the windows of their fishbowl office, seeking his dark head over the tops of a dozen cubicles. Until it wasn’t perfect. Until I wanted so much more.
Which was, calamitously for Claire, right around the time Phoebe Taylor Torrance walked into Global PR.
Phoebe, a fashion maven, trust fund socialite, and reality TV star.
Phoebe, a big fish that Mariah had finally landed at Global.
Phoebe, who was very recently finished with fiancé number two and desperately on the hunt for number three.
Phoebe, who couldn’t take her eyes off Jamie MacAllister, especially once she’d discovered that his grandfather had been a baron.
Phoebe, who’d somehow gotten him to propose two months ago, rushing their winter wedding because, she said, she wanted to be a bride before she turned thirty, in the spring.
Phoebe Taylor Torrance, from Greenwich, Paris, and Milan, with whom mousy computer nerd Claire Higgins could never, in her wildest dreams, hope to compete.
By tomorrow it will be bearable, she thought again, wishing it was so.
Deep in her unhappy thoughts, Claire didn’t see him walking through the office toward her, his soft hazel eyes locked unerringly on her face. She missed his final unmarried stroll into Global, and felt the terrible weight of the lost moment as she turned and raised her eyes to his.
“Jamie,” she said softly, trying her best to conceal her anguish. “You’re here.”
“Mornin’, darlin’,” he said, pausing at the threshold of their shared workspace to smile at her. “How’s my Clara today?”
2
CHAPTER TWO
How things had gotten to this point, Jamie still wasn’t a hundred percent certain.
All the way to work, he’d tried to get his head around it: that his sister was flying in this afternoon to be at his wedding tomorrow . . . that by tomorrow he’d be married. He’d have a wife. There would suddenly be a Mrs. James MacAllister III on the face of the earth when there was none before.
Frankly, he barely remembered proposing.
Probably because he hadn’t.
One minute, he was asking Phoebe how she felt about a week in Aruba after the holidays, and the next minute, she was calling it “the perfect spot for a January honeymoon.” He should have said it then, shouldn’t he? That he wasn’t angling for her hand in marriage, just a companion for a beach holiday. But suddenly she was kissing him and calling people, and before he knew it, she had asked her father for her grandmother’s ring and placed it on the fourth finger of her left hand with almost alarming efficiency. And there he was, numb in the center of it all, nodding as florists and bakers were paraded before him, asking if he preferred chocolate lilies or vanilla roses.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like Phoebe. He did. Phoebe was a fine girl—very pretty, with a good sense of humor and her own money. Dynamite in the sack. Always up for a fun time. But he didn’t love her, and he highly doubted she loved him, though she threw the words around like one-dollar bills in a strip club. At first it had seemed like a bit of an adventure: not Aruba . . . but marriage! And then, as the reality of his passive behavior became more apparent and low-grade panic set in, he ignored it. Perhaps if he ignored it, it would go away and he wouldn’t have to tell Phoebe that he’d never intended to propose by suggesting a holiday to Aruba. But it didn’t go away. There had been a shower for her and an overnight bachelorette party at a ski resort in Vermont. And meanwhile, Jamie had simply gone into work every day and pretended that his reality was a sharp-witted partner whose heart was the sweetest and most genuine he’d ever known. . . that his reality wasn’t Phoebe, but Clara.
“How’s my Clara today?” he asked her, smiling at her like it didn’t hurt.
“Fine,” she murmured, looking away from him.
That makes one of us, he thought.
“Good. Good.” He spied the little brown bag on the credenza and clenched his jaw. His favorite doughnuts. “Were you able to debug that—”
“Yes,” she said. “After you left . . . I . . .” Her voice faded.
“You . . .?”
She looked up, blinking those wide blue eyes at him. “I debugged it, and then reinstalled the software from the mainframe. It’s fine now.”
“Excellent. You’ll have everything in shipshape while I’m away, won’t you?”
“Of course. I won’t let you down. I, um, I have to, um, go to the bathroom.”
He watched her go, as he had hundreds of times before, though there was an unmistakable poignancy today, an urgency to remember everything about her while he was still unmarried. Her waist was slim, though it was hard to tell under the too-big jeans that concealed her figure and pooled around her black boots. And as per usual, she hid her unbelievably lush, sexy breasts under a blousy, black T-shirt. Everything about the way Claire dressed vouched for her lack of confidence in her looks.
Most men, he’d learned over the course of the past year, didn’t look twice at Claire, because men were, as his mother and sister often reminded him, “all bum and parsley.”
It was true that Claire was not conventionally pretty. But her face, which had suffered the same rough fate as Fiona’s, was all the sweeter to him because the slight pocking on her cheeks was familiar. She was short and—compared with Phoebe or Mariah, who stressed out over a mere bite of something sweet—a little overweight, with rounded hips and a womanly ass. Her dark brown hair fell just to her shoulders and often shrouded her eyes as she hunched over her keyboard.
That was a bloody shame, because her eyes were mesmerizing. Bright, clear blue, surrounded by the longest, thickest dark brown lashes he’d ever seen, Claire’s eyes were so lovely, he’d often gotten lost in them. Indeed, there were days he wished he could stare into them forever.
But the pièce de résistance? Simply this: a woman who knew computers as well as Claire was rare—a marvel, a red diamond, a mint-condition Amazing Spider-Man #1. Add some hot curves and bright blue eyes? It was no wonder he’d fallen for her. The crap of it
was, though he occasionally caught her staring at him, he had no solid evidence that she was interested in more than friendship. Besides, she’d never date him. She’d made that crystal clear. Her job was the most important thing in the world to her, and she wouldn’t dream of jeopardizing it by dating someone she worked with.
He scrubbed his hands over his face, trying to pinpoint the moment he realized that his feelings for her weren’t of camaraderie or friendliness, but something deeper and more tender. Maybe it was homesickness, or the way the rest of the world slipped away when the two of them were working in their little bubble, but as days turned into weeks turned into months, he’d slowly but surely fallen for her. She didn’t laugh often, but when she did, it was a low, sooty chuckle he’d come to covet, and he hated any man who was occasionally able to wrangle the sound from her (like Ted—feckin’ Ted—who worked with Sadie in HR).
He had become accustomed to her scent, an unfussy mix of soap and baby powder that made her smell fresh and clean and had become his favorite smell in the whole world. When she was hard at work, she hummed softly—sometimes the Beatles, sometimes the Beach Boys. On exceptionally good days, when she smiled a lot, making her blue eyes twinkle, she pulled out the Sam Cooke, softly singing “Bring It on Home to Me” or “You Send Me,” which made goose bumps rise up on his skin. Always some sweet, sappy song from the 1960s that his mother had played throughout his happy childhood in Aberdeen. Always made him feel like anything was possible.
Almost anything.
He’d thought back to that night about a million times, wondering if he could have misunderstood her, or if she had somehow misunderstood him. But her words had been concise and clear. There’d been no ambiguity in how she felt about mixing work and romance.
They’d just bettered a particularly difficult virus that had popped up on Mariah’s computer as she downloaded celebrity pictures, had finally cleared the hard drive of all threats, and retired to the bar across the street for a celebratory beer.