“Sam? Are you listening to me?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. ’ricia, hand me your glasses.”
“Why?”
“They’ve got a little smudge on them.”
She pulled them off and inspected them.
“Here. You can’t see it,” he said, reaching across the desk and snatching them. He pulled a tissue out of the box on the credenza behind them.
He looked at her, studying her closely. Yeah, if she was in his shoes, Rex wouldn’t give a thought to whether her personal life was stable and secure. She was as sure as the Rock of Gibraltar, as on time as the birds of Capistrano and as certain as the yearly visit of Santa Claus.
She blinked back at him.
A devilish thought developed, atom by atom, in his troubled brain.
Sam had always been a problem solver. He had always been one to overcome the odds. Anyone who knew about his early life would say, in fact, that he was a never-give-up-hell-bent-for-leather kind of guy. He put the unopened aspirin bottle back in the middle drawer of his desk—this was manageable, he thought with rising confidence. He could get through this.
“Patricia, would you say that we’re friends?”
She blushed scarlet and her lashes fluttered down like a curtain over her tourmaline eyes. He wondered if he had gone too far. But before he could retract his words, she jerked her head high and announced “yes” with a great deal of emphasis.
“I think we’re good friends,” she said, nodding vigorously. “We get along. We laugh at each other’s jokes. We work together well. Yes, I would definitely say we’re friends. Why do you ask?”
Sam took a mental inventory, little hearing her carefully chosen words. She was pretty, in a winsome, innocent way. But she wasn’t too young—he wouldn’t be thinking the thoughts he was thinking if she were too young. She could dress a little better—the gray suits she favored were more corporate than Phoenix. But when they had gone to Fort Lauderdale to recruit the incoming class of assistant managers for the Barrington resorts, he recalled her fetching, yet never vulgar, cutoffs and T-shirts. And when she had pulled her hair out of its too-tight ponytail—she had pulled a respectable share of head turns and wolf whistles at the beach.
“Patricia, do you think friends should do favors for their friends?” he asked, putting her glasses on the desk—out of her reach.
“Of course,” she replied cautiously.
“Am I the kind of friend you would do a favor for?”
As soon as he asked it, he knew that was a stupid question. Of course she did favors for him. She had brought him his work and a selection of Chinese food every night for two weeks when he twisted his ankle playing baseball at the company picnic. She had joined his Thursday-night basketball team when one of the men dropped out, and she didn’t play so bad. She had picked up his dry cleaning when he was too busy, and had helped plan the dinner he gave for Melissa and her family when they announced their engagement.
He tried to think if the favors he had ever done for her measured up. He had gotten her a good-size office with a view of the desert. He had persuaded Rex that she deserved the largest merit raise in the department. But he would have done that for any assistant who worked as hard as Patricia did.
The scales of friendship were clearly weighted in her favor.
“Let me ask this another way. Are you...involved with anyone?” he asked, realizing for the first time that he didn’t know nearly as much about her as she did about him.
“No,” she said. “I was actually going to ask you if...”
She froze, looking like a deer blinded by the headlights of an approaching car.
“You were going to ask me what?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Absolutely nothing.”
He was sure, at that moment, that he heard her whisper the word wimp or maybe it was shrimp or limp.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she repeated. “Why did you ask if I was involved?”
“I wouldn’t want to ask my next question if there was another man,” he said cautiously.
She opened her mouth—he had never noticed how her lips were naturally the soft color of pink roses. She started top speak and then her shoulders rounded, her jewel-green eyes widening like a cat’s. Her breasts strained against the architecturally starched shirt.
“What...question?”
He took a deep breath, wondering if he was making a mistake. But then that drumbeat in his head grew louder.
Marriage.
Marriage.
Marriage.
He thought of how much Rex had done for him. He thought of the poverty of his childhood, the taste of stale bread and sour milk, the smell of whiskey on his father’s breath, his mother’s funeral and the cheap coffin that had made him furious at his own weakness, that he, at eleven, couldn’t provide something better for her last rest
And all Rex II wanted was that his vice president of personnel be married.
“Patricia, what would you think about being my fiancée?”
Joy, so innocent and heartfelt that it could not be hidden, suffused her face, and Sam wondered if he had made a terrible, terrible mistake.
Chapter Two
“Did you just say ‘fiancée’?”
Oh, great, Patricia thought. I’m sounding like a complete idiot. Of course he said fiancée.
Fiancée. Fiancée. The most beautiful French word the English language had ever borrowed.
“Was it a rhetorical question?” she added quickly. “Because if it was, I want you to know that any woman would be very blessed to be your fiancée. And as a matter of fact, when I walked into this office, I had something that I wanted to tell you that was kind of in the same subject category.”
Sam blankly met her flustered gaze.
“It wasn’t a rhetorical,” he said.
Patricia swallowed.
“You mean, you were asking me if I wanted to be your fiancée because you want me to be your fiancée?”
Is it possible that he’s felt something toward me, something he couldn’t express...? She took a deep breath and suppressed a smile. No, not just a smile—a megawatt, five-alarm grin that she had to stop. Because this was a man who had just broken up with a woman and no doubt feeling lots of pain and wasn’t in his right mind.
Oh, yessirree, Bob! He is in his right mind! a rebellious voice protested. He’s finally noticed. Finally noticed me!
“Fiancée,” Patricia repeated, not letting him off the hook even when he looked away uncomfortably. “You said you wanted me to be your fiancée. Don’t you think we should take the relationship a little slower?”
He looked up sharply.
“Forget it,” he said. He reached for the file folder on the top of the stack. Patricia was quicker—a proprietary hand shot out and covered Sam’s. He retreated, shaking his head. “It was a thought, Patricia, a really stupid thought. My fault entirely. I shouldn’t have brought it up at all. Now what were we supposed to do this morning?”
He blessed her with a boyishly wry smile, the one that made the corners of his gray eyes crinkle. A lock of light brown hair fell down his forehead and Patricia had to remind herself not to ask for his autograph because he looked handsome enough for motion pictures.
“What was the thought?” Patricia insisted, thinking it couldn’t be all that stupid if it involved the word fiancée.
He looked out the window, to the morning heat just now slithering up from the roofs of the cars in the parking lot.
“I’m in some trouble,” he said at last.
Patricia let out a breath she hadn’t even known she had been holding. Trouble. Not passion. Trouble. Not awakening love. Trouble. She felt a flash of anger, feeling a little like a mouse who has been toyed with by a ferocious but disinterested cat. For any other man, the anger would have swelled—bringing with it a stern lecture and an indignant exit. But a familiar surge of affection for Sam kept her glued to her seat.
She guessed. “Does this trouble have
to do with Melissa?”
“A little,” he said, grimacing. “We broke up.”
“I heard.”
“You did?”
“I was at a baby shower for Olivia. From the legal department,” she said. Sam nodded. “The woman who is handling the RSVPs for the retirement party mentioned to me that you and Melissa weren’t together anymore.”
Patricia left out the heartfelt conversation that had followed—how the women she had come to think of as her closest friends had giddily coached her on taking a chance, on asking him out, on making a move on the only man who had interested her in the six months she had lived in Phoenix.
“It wasn’t working out.” Sam said.
“So you’re feeling grief?”
Sam considered this.
“No.”
“Sadness?”
He shrugged inside the broad shoulders of his khaki-colored suit jacket
“Not too much.”
“You miss her?”
“Not really.”
“You broke up with her?”
He nodded sheepishly.
“Is she upset?”
“Yes. She slapped me. But not very convincingly. She’ll go shopping and forget this ever happened.”
“Then...what’s the trouble you’re in?”
“Rex. Mr. Barrington.”
Patricia thought of her encounter with the president and wisely decided to keep it to herself.
“Why would he be involved in this?”
Sam put his head in his hands.
“He wants to meet my fiancée. He was just in here and he asked me to introduce her to him at the retirement party.”
“Tell him you’ve broken up.”
He looked up, his normally tan and relaxed face stricken, his dove-gray eyes wide and sad.
“I didn’t have the heart to do that.”
Patricia could understand that. Although she herself was not close to the founder of Barrington Corporation—in fact, she was pretty sure he didn’t know her name—she knew others who felt as close to him as they would their own fathers. Sam had played golf with Rex, had been invited to his home for dinner, had even worked on the same fund-raiser with Rex. And she didn’t think it was just corporate ambitions that motivated Sam—he talked about Rex II with real affection.
“You’re so nice to him.”
“It’s not niceness.” Sam corrected sharply. “I’m not a nice person.”
“You are.”
“Don’t start that again. This is the only thing we argue about. I’ve always told you that I’m decent—which is the minimal requirement for not being a jerk. But nice—no, I don’t think so.”
“I do. But let’s agree to disagree on that.”
“Patricia, I didn’t say anything to him because of my own self-interest. He said that he was worried about leaving the personnel department in the hands of someone whose personal life isn’t rock solid. As in married. So when he said he wanted me to introduce him to my fiancée, I didn’t tell him that we’ve broken up.”
“You’re saying that your motivations weren’t purely selfless.”
“Patricia, I was completely selfish. I was thinking about my job.”
“No, you weren’t. You were thinking of Rex’s feelings. And besides, everybody does things for a mix of reasons—some selfish, some not so selfish.”
“How do you know?” he challenged. “You weren’t even here when he was talking to me.”
“I know you, Sam. I know that you love this job and that you’d do anything to succeed at it. But I also know that you are a kind man who is a good friend.”
Sam combed his fingers through his cappuccino-colored hair.
“Sam, a good friend sometimes does strange things in the name of friendship.”
He sighed heavily.
“Want to know the worst of it?” he asked, draining his coffee cup. “The first thing I thought of when you walked in was that you and I could... oh, it’s too ridiculous.”
“No, tell me.”
“I thought you and I could go to his party as if we were engaged. You pretending that you’re my fiancée, me pretending that I’m yours. I would call that pretty damned mercenary of me.”
Patricia swallowed hard. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. There was supposed to be music and moonlight and Sam on his knees. He wasn’t interested in her as anything but a friend. But he was in trouble—and she loved him and considered him a friend even if she wished for so much more.
A friend in trouble needing her help.
Of course, she’d do anything to help him keep the job that meant so much to him.
But her motives weren’t any purer than his had been when he had not told Rex about his broken engagement
Because a devilish voice in her head posed a simple question.
A girl could dream, couldn’t she?
And maybe turn fool’s gold into a real wedding band.
“Sam, I don’t think it’s such a terrible idea,” Patricia said, and she squelched her natural aversion to any kind of subterfuge. “In fact, I don’t have an objection to doing it. I’m probably the best woman for the job of being your fiancée. We work together so closely and we spend a lot of time together even outside of nine to five. Rex would think it was quite natural that the two of us would become... involved.”
Even if Sam couldn’t imagine it, Patricia thought
“Have you told Rex anything about your fiancée?” she prodded.
“No. I’m not sure I’ve even mentioned who she was. The woman handling the party got her number from me, but didn’t pass along the name to Rex because he certainly couldn’t remember it just now.”
“I’ve heard you’d had a lot of girlfriends before you became engaged to Melissa. He probably can’t keep the names straight.”
Sam looked stricken.
“I’m not that much of a playboy.”
Patricia impatiently tapped her pencil on her stack of files.
“Okay, okay, maybe a little bit of a playboy,” Sam admitted. “But my reputation is much worse than the reality.”
“And your reputation is why Rex is so interested in seeing you married and settled down.”
Sam abruptly stood up, and Patricia wondered if she had gone too far.
“It’s ridiculous,” he said, pacing the soft red Navaho rug. “I should march right into his office and tell him that I broke up with my fiancée two days ago and he can do with that information what he chooses.”
“And break his heart.”
Sam stopped dead in his tracks.
They both knew Patricia was right. It would break Rex’s heart. He liked to know his employees were happy, and he fretted over every one of them.
“Besides, you can’t do this,” Sam said. “You’re too young.”
“I’m twenty-nine.”
“I’m not talking about years.”
“Well, I think I can judge whether I’m old enough.”
“Why would you want to do it?” Sam asked with just a trace of suspicion. “If you think your job’s on the line, you’re absolutely wrong. It’s mine. In fact, if I lost my job this morning, they’d be nailing your nameplate to the door of this office by noon.”
“I know that.”
“You could be vice president.”
“No, thanks.”
“Why would you want to do this for me?”
“I’m your friend, remember?” Patricia asked. “And we’re talking about being engaged for a few weeks at most. When Rex is on his world tour after the retirement party, we’ll quietly announce that we’ve broken up. When he’s on a beach in Tahiti, your marriage plans are not going to be his top priority. And with the new boss coming in...”
“Oh, yeah.” Sam said.
Nobody at Barrington needed to be reminded that Rex II’s mysterious son, Rex III, would be moving into the president’s office—and job insecurity was high.
Patricia pressed her point.
“With Rex the
Third coming in, it probably would look good for both of us to look like we’re stable, loyal members of the Barrington team.”
“But we are.”
“I know that. You know that. But neither one of us has met the Third. He doesn’t know anything about us that his father doesn’t tell him. And if his father tells him how pleased he is with you—and me—both our jobs will be secure.”
Sam sat down at the desk.
“So we’re engaged,” he said.
Patricia nodded uncertainly.
“Yes, I suppose we are. Now we are. Officially.”
He reached across the desk and shook her hand. “Congratulations.”
“You’re supposed to offer me best wishes,” Patricia corrected, snatching her glasses from his desk. “The groom-to-be gets congratulated because he has won the prize of the woman’s heart. The bride-to-be is offered best wishes because marriage is supposed to be a more difficult enterprise for women than men.”
“Gotcha,” Sam said, pulling the stack of file folders towards him. “All right, let’s take a look at the first one here. Oh, by the way, what’d you have for breakfast?”
“Granola and a diet cola. I always do.”
“Sounds easy to remember. What do you sleep in?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“What do you wear to bed?”
Patricia opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Closed it again. She was sure she looked like a fish.
There was no way she was going to confess to an extralarge Tweety Bird T-shirt with a frayed hem. She was trying to come up with what a sophisticated woman might wear—Chanel No. 5 and nothing else?—when Sam shook his head.
“Patricia, I’d know these things if I were your man.”
Just the way he said “your man” was enough to put a flame-hot blush on her face.
“You know, a woman could get hurt in a setup like this,” Sam said. “A man, too, for that matter. If there were any misunderstandings.”
“I don’t misunderstand a thing,” Patricia said defensively. “This is just a business thing. And we’re pretty clear about the limits.”
“For instance, no sex. I wouldn’t want you to think of me as unprofessional—although heaven knows this is the most unprofessional thing I’ve ever asked my assistant to do.”
The Marriage Merger Page 2