1
LAURA EVERETT HAD practiced this speech a hundred times in her bedroom mirror. But now that it was time to deliver it to her boss, she was faltering.
“Harris, I’d like to talk to you about the project I’m assigned to. I’d like to work on something a little more, um, high-profile. I mean, I know that you have some projects picked out for Kyle Sanders….” The name of her too handsome office rival stuck in her throat, and, too late, she thought she shouldn’t have brought him up at all. “But I really want…”
Her portly boss stared at her. “You want what?”
I want a job that doesn’t suck, she screamed inside her head. That was the way more than half of her practice speeches had ended, and she bit her lip now to keep from saying it aloud.
Chances were, though, that even if she had said it, her boss simply wouldn’t have heard her. His attention was already gone, as he searched for something on the plush gray carpeting under his seat. When he raised up, he asked, “Have you seen my napkin?”
“Your what?”
“I need a napkin. Where did mine go?”
Maybe a company baby shower for his secretary wasn’t the best place to get Harris alone, Laura thought, gazing at the head of the conference table where Tricia, the mama-to-be, was tackling another box of professionally wrapped loot. But Laura had to talk to Harris now. It was the only time she’d seen him all week without Kyle Sanders, Boy Wonder, hanging on his every word. Laura knew that yes-men had their attractions. This yes-man, in particular, had lots of attractions, like being tall, fit and handsome, which Laura did her best to ignore. Laura knew that what her boss liked best about Kyle was his can-do attitude and his sunny optimism. Well, of course he did. Positive people were nice. Laura liked positive people. But sometimes caution, not optimism, was the best reaction to a situation. Pointing that out, though, always made her look like Ms. Can’t-Do to Kyle’s Mr. Go-Getter.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a chorus of “Oh, how adorable!” as Tricia held up a tiny Atlanta Braves baseball cap.
Harris stopped his napkin search and glanced at Tricia, then back at Laura, staring at her intently. Finally, he’s taking me seriously.
“Who got that cap?” he asked her. “I could keep some around to give to clients when they say their wives are going to have another rug rat.”
“I don’t know,” Laura said. It was hard to decide which she knew less about, baseball or babies. “But I could find out for you.”
“Nah, Tricia can do that. Tricia,” he shouted. “Order up a dozen of those guys.”
Tricia simply smiled at her boss. Amazing. No matter what Harris did or said, she always responded with that same sweet expression. Laura was never sure whether to nominate the secretary for sainthood or hit her up for some of whatever she was on.
“Who’s it from?” Harris asked again.
“It’s from me.” Laura heard Kyle Sanders’s smooth baritone from somewhere over her left shoulder. Well, of course it was. If the sun rose in the morning and the little birdies sang, Kyle Sanders was in on it somehow.
Go away, go away, she ordered silently. Instead, her body tensed as he took the chair next to hers, and she waited for the bump or kick he always managed around her. Boom. He jarred against her as he sprawled his legs out under the cherrywood table.
“Sorry,” he said.
“No problem,” she answered, forcing herself not to turn around. Not only did she not want to be distracted by him, but her chance to have Harris hear her out was slipping away. But before she could make plans to finish their talk later, Harris had angled around her to address Kyle. “Where’d you say you got that hat?”
Plan B. A girl should always assume an interest in her boss’s hobbies. Years ago, that Seventeen magazine advice had been applied to dating, not working, but she’d had many more opportunities to use it in the corporate world than at romantic Italian dinners or in the back seats of cars. She swiveled around, ready to fake a good show of enthusiasm. But the second she looked at Kyle, she regretted it.
No one, but no one, could take up as much physical space as Kyle Sanders. It was baffling, considering he wasn’t even that big. He was tall, and he was buff, but seeing him on the street, you’d never dream that he could make a whole quarter of a room his own just by the way he stood or walked or lounged. Laura knew it was a trick of perception—she supposed she practiced her own version of it with her high heels and stylish power suits.
But Kyle Sanders didn’t need the props. She’d seen him look just as confident, just as powerful, on a working Sunday afternoon, wearing baggy khaki shorts and a faded University of Georgia T-shirt. Right now he had on an obviously expensive white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his royal-blue silk tie loosened and hanging slightly askew. His thick brown hair curled above the back of his shirt collar, and a wayward lock across his forehead lent added interest to a devilishly good-looking face. The outfit made his blue eyes even bluer and played up the bronze of his skin. If she didn’t know that he was a regular Mr. Outdoors, she’d suspect him of sweet-talking some peroxided young thing out of her tanning bed appointment. Or talking her into letting him share it.
Danger, Will Robinson, she thought, turning back in Harris’s direction as Kyle named the store where he’d gotten the hat. Among the secrets she hoped to take to her grave was the way the thought of Kyle Sanders, always and inevitably, led to the thought of…well, Kyle Sanders. Kyle Sanders in contexts that were definitely outside the boundaries of their working relationship.
She wasn’t even someone who normally noticed stuff like that. Stuff like well-defined arms, bright eyes, a smile that moved from slow to dazzling in six seconds. Her previous relationships, the couple she’d had before she let her job become her life, had been based on the guy’s intelligence or compatible life goals—not what he looked like in jeans. If that had made them a little dull, well, so be it. While all her girlfriends could chat about the contours of men’s derrieres as though they were talking tomatoes at the Fresh Market, she’d never even looked twice at a man’s butt until she’d caught sight of Kyle’s.
This physical attraction to Kyle was nothing more than a case of crossed wires. The first time she’d seen him—six months, four weeks, two days and two hours ago, not that she didn’t hate herself for remembering that—her immediate response had been, That man is a threat to my career. There was something about the casual way Kyle leaned against the doorway, or the way his eyes went to the slate-gray walls of the hall, as though sizing up how his own picture would look there. True, she was a little paranoid, since she was the only female Harris had ever made a full-fledged consultant, and she had long suspected that she was about to hit some kind of special glass ceiling Harris had created just for her.
Here was where her natural pessimism proved right once again. Shortly after he had hired Kyle, Harris had started playing with the “warring tribes” theory of employment, the idea that employees stayed on their toes by being competitive with each other. The stakes in this competition were pretty high—the firm was large enough only for one vice president, a position Harris was going to fill, one day, with one of them. Harris Associates specialized in remaking high-tech firms, with a growing sideline in the lucrative health care industry. Some of the firm’s most notable successes had been on her watch, but she was past expecting anyone to notice that. Kyle had worked for several of their competitors, while she’d stayed with the first organization who hired her out of graduate school. She’d had offers, but she was loyal, not like Mr. Take the Company Car and Run. Why couldn’t he run out of here so that Harris didn’t have to choose? This continual waiting was like always being on the wrong end of eeny-meeny-miney-mo.
Unfortunately, just as she’d realized he was a shark circling her warm and safe position in the company, she’d also realized that Kyle was the best-looking man she’d seen since she broke herself of buying People magazine and started buying Fast Company instead. Her subconscious, a little slo
w on the uptake and obviously way too chummy with her hormones, had taken in her anxiety and attributed it not to the threat to her career, where it belonged, but to the threat to her celibacy, where it didn’t.
Her subconscious was a twit.
“You have icing on your shirt,” Kyle said. He leaned in front of her, close enough for her to smell the spicy scent of his shampoo. She looked down, and as she did, he tipped her nose. A trick straight out of third grade, and not a touch that could be in any way responsible for the curiously warm feeling that coursed through her.
“I meant Harris,” he said.
“Oh.”
Harris glared at her. “I told you I was looking for my damn napkin.”
As if by magic, Kyle, who hadn’t even had any cake, produced a paper napkin. Why hadn’t she given her own napkin to Harris? Then it registered that the napkin Kyle was offering was hers. He’d already slid her Pooh-decorated paper plate, with its untouched cake, to his seat.
“Is that my cake?” she asked as the napkin changed hands in front of her.
“You don’t eat supermarket cake, do you?” His tone was deceptively innocent. “I thought you saved your calories for quality desserts.”
The couple of other women in the room put down their plates of half-eaten cake. The stares they gave her could only be described as murderous. Even Tricia’s lip curled a little, though she quickly went back to one of her bright smiles.
“It’s not that—” Laura began.
But Tricia cut her off, saying, “Kyle, you didn’t get any cake.” She made as though she were going to stand up, but he waved her way.
“No, no, I’m just going to eat Laura’s cake, take temptation out of her way.”
With one sentence, he had managed to make an endearing little used-cake martyr of himself and reinforce the idea to all the women there that she was above the siren call of gooey, sticky white icing.
Brandi, the receptionist, jumped up and grabbed the knife, quickly commandeering an extra large corner piece with one and a half blue roses for Kyle. She walked over and set it in front of him.
“Eat them both,” she said.
He was already polishing off Laura’s piece. “Thanks, I think I will,” he said.
The man had the metabolism of an army of Huns.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” he told Laura. Just before sticking the fork in the second piece, though, he looked around, then started to stand, very slowly, in a way Laura had learned to identify as “Kyle has no intention of really getting up, confident that someone will take care of his needs.” She’d seen this move, too. As usual, someone fell for it. She kept her attention on him, telling herself she was only interested in who the sucker would be, not that she liked to watch him move and stretch and stand.
“What do you need, Kyle? Do you need some coffee?” Brandi asked. She’d been on her way back to her seat, but now she stopped, waiting.
He paused in midstand. “We don’t have any milk, do we?”
“Sure, there’s some in the break-room fridge.”
“Great. I’ll go—”
“No, I will. No trouble at all.” And away Brandi flew.
Unbelievable. Yet when one of the other guys asked Brandi where something was, she wouldn’t budge from her seat to help, even when it became clear that they were fully incapable of locating the heads screwed onto their scrawny shoulders. Laura had even had to rescue a few of them from the supply closet herself, after Brandi had left them stranded there. But if Kyle needed so much as a square inch of tape, she would, instantly, whip out the office supply catalog and order a jillion cases, so he would never be without again.
Part of it was his looks, sure, but it wasn’t totally a lust thing. It was a response to the little-boy side of Kyle, some kind of instinct that said he needed protecting from the big bad world outside. Poor thing, so defenseless.
Defenseless as a king cobra.
Kyle thanked Brandi as she returned with the milk. Now, with his mouth full and Harris’s attention restored to this end of the table, Laura knew she should reach some kind of closure on her muddled conversation with Harris. Instead, she found herself trying to explain to Kyle about the cake thing.
“It’s not that I don’t eat dessert or anything. It’s just that I travel so much…”
He swallowed, nodding sympathetically. “How do you keep them in lard and sugar after they’ve tasted real cream?”
“No, no,” she said. “But if I’m going to splurge on something, I want it to be something worthwhile.”
“You have to plan for spontaneity,” he said, still nodding.
The man was impossible.
“No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying I like being in control of my whims.”
“But if you’re in control of them, are they really whims?” His voice was agreeable, but his deep-blue eyes were intense. This was Kyle-in-for-the-kill mode, her left brain registered, but all the other parts of her mind and body were acting as though that attentive gaze belonged to her and her alone. Snap out of it, she told herself, but instead she kept staring at him as he said, “When is a splurge a splurge and when is it something you’re calling a splurge, because you’ve heard you should have one every once in a while?”
“I don’t—” she began, flustered, but was saved by the sound of Harris’s low chuckle. She looked up to see him shaking his head.
“If you two could only work together instead of fighting with each other, I’d have a hell of a team,” he said. He stood up and started to walk away. Laura was about to follow him, but then he stopped, turned around and stared at her and Kyle.
He had an odd, quizzical expression on his face. Frankly, he looked possessed. Linda Blair could be handing him an Oscar right now. She shrank back in her seat and glanced at Kyle. Of course he was trying not to betray visible alarm, but she noticed with satisfaction that the last bit of cake was going down hard.
“If you two could work together instead of fighting with each other, I’d have a hell of a team.” This time Harris said it in a detached, nearly Zenlike tone, the kind people used when they wanted to tell you they had found the universe in a grain of sand and would soon be carted away for their own safety. Everyone else in the room had shifted their attention to him, and Laura saw Brandi, carrying Kyle’s glass of milk, shrink back from the doorway.
Now Harris’s voice held more than a hint of anger. “If you two could work together instead of fighting with each other, I’d have a hell of a team.”
“You already said that,” Laura and Kyle chimed. She looked at Kyle, surprised by this moment of rare accord, and felt his arm come down hard around her shoulders.
“See what a team we were just then? Right, Laura?”
“Right, Kyle.” Great, she sounded like a newly minted six o’clock anchorperson. And Harris wasn’t convinced, she could tell. Tricia was standing up now, making murmurs about Harris’s blood pressure, but his stare was relentless, his bushy eyebrows knitted together on his forehead.
“I need to talk to both of you,” Harris announced. “Tricia, I need to talk to both of them later.”
This is it. Today he tells us who’s the VP and who gets to be the one who takes over “in the event that the winner cannot fulfill the duties of the position.” If Kyle didn’t get to be vice president, he would leave the company. Would she? She would have to, for her pride. Just the thought of trying an unfamiliar environment made her stomach start to wiggle and her ears grow hot.
Hot ears. The last time she’d had hot ears was in college, when she’d found herself on a frat house couch next to her longtime crush while his girlfriend threw up in the bathroom. Surely Kyle’s arm around her wasn’t causing this reaction?
“I’d be glad to have a meeting with you and Laura, Harris,” Kyle said. His arm around her grew nicely, but alarmingly, heavy. It could even be said that he caressed her shoulder slightly. Trying to rein in a sudden wave of lust with a stern inner lecture, Laura
only half heard him say, “But I’ve also got some ideas I’d like to run by you. Is there a good time for that today?”
See, Laura chided herself, there you go, getting all hot and bothered over a man whose only purpose in touching you is to render you speechless while he steals your audience with Harris. All that fiend had to do was pat her on the shoulder, and she was ready to break her vow of abstinence.
Well, she had never actually taken a vow of abstinence—her life had just sort of worked out that way, and after a while it was easier to pretend that it had been intentional. Did an unwilling state of virtue count as much to her general good person points as a willing one would have? She was ready to start a furious internal argument with herself over this when the one tiny part of her brain that was still rational registered what Kyle Sanders had said.
I’ve got some ideas I want to run by you.
“No,” she said, more loudly than she’d meant to, wrenching her shoulder away from Kyle and jumping up from her seat. She knew how she sounded on those rare occasions when she lost her temper—she made Cruella De Vil look like a gap-toothed Brownie scout. But she couldn’t stop herself.
“No, you may not talk to him alone today,” she said to Kyle. “I’ve been trying to arrange a meeting with Harris all afternoon.”
“You were sitting right by him,” Kyle said. “Why didn’t you ask him?”
Because he wasn’t listening to me and then you came in and made me go all hormonal. She couldn’t say that. So instead she said, “You can’t have my cake and eat it, too.”
“I got an extra rose, so you get a meeting with Harris before I do? That’s a pretty good consolation prize.”
My life is one big consolation prize. But before she could snap back something at Kyle, Harris bellowed, “Enough. I said I would see you later.”
Laura sat back down. When Harris got angry like that, he looked an awful lot like Brian Keith playing Uncle Bill in Family Affair. She watched her sixtyish boss stomp out, red-faced, and decided she wasn’t going to stop him to tell him that.
Bringing Up Baby New Year & Frisky Business Page 17