“Levity will get you nowhere,” Rand said. “We take our team building very seriously.”
Alienating the counseler was not a good way to start their retreat.
“Rand,” Laura said, “I don’t want you to think this situation is more extreme than it is. For instance, I wouldn’t say we’re insanely competitive.”
“That’s not what J. Herbert Harris told me on the phone,” Rand said. “Although, frankly, I don’t usually see this dynamic between a man and a woman.”
I don’t like you, Laura thought, but then Kyle surprised her by saying, “That’s because most organizations aren’t secure enough to promote a woman as competent as Laura.”
Did he mean that, or was this just a clever way of throwing her off track? Not so clever, if she saw right through it, but if it weren’t a trick, then she’d just discarded a perfectly good compliment. So which was it?
Rand answered for her by making a little “huh” noise in his throat. Laura knew that noise. She used it herself. It meant, “I know better, but since you aren’t listening to me, why waste my breath?”
Surely it didn’t sound so unpleasant when she made it?
“What?” she asked Rand. “What were you going to say?”
Kyle looked at her. “What makes you think he was going to say something?” he asked her, as though Rand weren’t still standing there.
“That little noise he made in his throat.”
“You make that little noise in your throat, but you never say anything after it.”
“Because no one ever asks me what I was going to say.”
“So why were you asking him?” Kyle looked back at Rand, then toward Laura again. “Did you want to know?”
“Yes,” she said. “I wanted to know. Rand?”
Rand, she noticed, seemed suddenly very pleased with himself. He shrugged delicately. “Just that we see a lot of reverse psychology here. One minute he’ll be passing out compliments, the next he’ll be hiding your food supply.”
Food supply? The brochure hadn’t said anything about a food supply. She had a multigrain fruit-filled breakfast bar in her purse, but that was it. Newly alarmed, she looked at Kyle, and saw his jaw tighten and his blue eyes grow cold. He looked like an action hero—kind of thrilling, really.
“Why don’t you just tell us what we have to do?” he finally said.
Rand started reciting from the Serene Dynamics brochure, which Laura had already memorized. She tuned him out while she surveyed the cabin. Most of the square footage was devoted to one central room, paneled in knotty pine, and dominated by a scuffed card table and a lumpy couch. Angling around Kyle a little, she saw that the two bedrooms branched off one side of a short hallway. She was going to be sleeping one thin wall away from Kyle. What if she could hear him snore? What if she snored? Her niece had told her she snored, but then until last year she had also believed that small people lived inside the television set. As Rand droned on about the years of research that had gone into developing their program, Laura interrupted.
“Is there a reason Kyle and I are sharing a cabin?”
She watched as Rand mentally held his place in his memorized lecture. “In an intensive program like this one, cohabitation breaks down initial barriers.”
Kyle looked at Laura, as if she could translate. She obliged. “We’re getting The Parent Trap treatment.”
“How scientific,” Kyle said, grinning at her. She smiled back, a little surprised at their camaraderie.
The thrill was short-lived. “Go ahead. Bond over your resentment of me,” Rand said. “That’s an important first step. You’ll need to be at the main lodge in fifteen minutes. We’re going to have an icebreaker, followed by lunch. Then I’ll tell you about the rest of your afternoon.”
He tapped his clipboard. “As I said, I’m also going to need your pagers, cell phones and planners. Plus your car keys and wallets.”
“I don’t remember you saying that,” Kyle said.
Rand looked exasperated. “I just did.”
“I wasn’t listening. Why should I give you my stuff?”
“It was in the brochure,” Laura said. He gave her a look that said she should know better than to assume he’d read it. “It’s to stop you from bringing the office with you.”
“And to remove the trappings of corporate power,” Rand added.
She could have told him that was the wrong thing to say.
“I’m not the one obsessed with the trappings of corporate power,” Kyle began, but Laura stopped him.
“It’s fine, Kyle. Let’s just do this.” Under normal circumstances, she would be pleased that he was the one playing grump while she cooperated. But she didn’t get any points for his behavior—if they didn’t both cooperate, both of them lost out.
Kyle was obviously still skeptical. “How do I know you aren’t just someone who wandered in here off the street, pretending to work for Serene Dynamics? How do I know you aren’t going to steal my car?”
If she had said something like that, Kyle would have teased her that she was watching too many Scooby-Doo reruns—how do we know the real Rand wasn’t bumped over the head and stuffed in a closet somewhere? Then, of course, she would have panicked, wondering if he knew that she really did, occasionally, before she went to bed, indulge in an episode or two. She had to get rid of her cable hookup. And she had to keep reminding Kyle that they were trying to impress Rand with their eagerness to change, not alienate him.
“Kyle, do you think any self-respecting impostor would agree to put that shirt on?”
So maybe that was an example of what not to say to Rand. Still, she was rewarded by a big grin from Kyle.
“I don’t need your car,” Rand said. “I have one of my own.”
“Let me go ahead and give you my stuff,” Laura told the facilitator, staving off another tussle between the two men. At least worrying about Kyle’s state of mind gave her an excuse to postpone her feelings of Acute Gadget Withdrawal.
She understood about giving up her business toys. Rand could say what he wanted about Serene Dynamics’s cutting-edge personality theories, but she had seen this same scam in a dozen made-for-TV movies about cults, not to mention An Officer and a Gentleman. First, you took away all the symbols of someone’s old identity, then you put a new identity, with new symbols, back in its place. Since she knew all that, it wasn’t going to work with her.
Take my planner, she thought as she trotted back to her Toyota. But don’t think it means you’ve got my soul.
“DAMN.” Kyle reacted to the sting as a bush full of thorns sideswiped his knee.
“You shouldn’t have worn shorts into the woods,” Laura said from somewhere on the trail behind him.
“Thank you, Eddie Bauer.”
“Can we stop for a second?”
“Gladly.”
He didn’t know why he was so surly. Well, yes, he did. First there were all these idiotic rules the retreat had, like having to give his stuff up, although he’d kept his radio and headphones safe from Rand, at least, along with a couple of candy bars. And he was already feeling weird about sharing a cabin with Laura, especially after the first thing he’d done when they’d gotten there was pipe up about how competent and smart she was. Then there was that awful icebreaker at the lodge, where they got secret identity tags taped to their backs and he had to go around asking giggling strangers demeaning questions like “Am I a man?”
Still, he would have pretended to stay stumped longer if he’d known Rand was going to drag the early finishers into a stupid role-playing exercise where different hats represented different parts of your personality. The other participants looked delighted as hell to be decked out in Dr. Seuss headgear or velvet berets, but when Rand tried to stick a purple-feathered number on Kyle—“perfect for those who take themselves too seriously”—he’d snapped. He must have scared the counselor, because he and Laura had been given hiking gear and shoved onto one of the retreat’s longer trails—before he’d had
time to change into long pants. It had been a while since he’d gone hiking, but he knew better than to walk out here with his flesh exposed to every known bug and bramble in the Georgia highlands. He was just leaning over to inspect the damage already inflicted when Laura said, “I have some iodine in the first-aid kit. Would you like to put it on the scratch?”
He wanted the iodine. But just as there were women who had never been forced to open their own beer bottles, Kyle Sanders had never had to tend to one of his own injuries. He couldn’t help it that women liked to take care of him—he’d popped into the hospital nursery with an aura that sent all the labor and delivery nurses flocking to his bassinet. He’d then come home to an older sister who thought he was the coolest baby doll Mattel had ever produced and a mom who treated him like the Young Sultan of Suburbia, at least until she went back to work when he was a teenager. If he put iodine on in front of Laura, he was going to look like a dolt and a klutz. He looked at her—hair pulled back in a smooth ponytail, makeup intact. Her only concession to sweat was a charming debutante’s glow.
“Save it,” Kyle said. “Are you ready to head on?”
She nodded, drawing a hardbound blank book out of her backpack, followed by a tattered softcover wildlife guide. “We haven’t identified any plants or animals yet, although I don’t think the guide Rand gave us is very comprehensive anyway. It only has three kinds of lizards identified, and I’ve already seen at least four.”
Kyle stared at her for a second. “I’ll bet when you used to baby-sit, you called Dr. Spock ‘the instructions.”’
She looked up at him, her bottom lip puckered in concentration. Then she reddened and said, “Everyone does.”
“Yeah, but not everyone has to consult Betty Crocker to boil eggs.”
He shouldn’t keep teasing her. Wasn’t that what got him here in the first place? But he was rewarded when she said, “You know, it’s a lot more complicated than just putting some eggs in water.”
“Gotcha.” He turned around to say it, but immediately bumped into her, getting close enough to see the flecks of green in her hazel eyes and smell the floral scent of her perfume. He scooted out to the edge of the narrow trail, barely avoiding another bush.
She waved the journal and the guide in front of his face. “Rand wanted us to collect information about what we see. I think it’s odd that he would send us on this mission with nothing more than this outdated guide.”
Kyle rubbed his hand through his hair. Was Laura deliberately obtuse or did she just play it that way? “We’re not Lewis and Clark—”
“Lewis and Clark weren’t naturalists. You’re thinking of William Bartram.”
She wanted him to ask who William Bartram was. So he wasn’t going to.
“This stuff,” he said, taking the journal and the guide out of her hands—for effect, but also because his face and other body parts were safer from her gesturing if he did—“is a prop. Rand doesn’t care if we say we saw the yellow-breasted booby hatcher. We’re supposed to start out talking about mushrooms and end up talking about our feelings.”
She looked as terrified as he felt by that prospect. “So this whole walk is a fake?”
“If the walk were fake, I wouldn’t be sweating,” he said. “It’s busywork. Like when you wait tables, they’ll spend the whole first day showing you how the fries should be in the nine o’clock plate position, garnish on the three. After your first shift, you realize the plates never look like that.”
She looked completely puzzled. Of course she’d never waited tables. She was probably like all the women he’d dated, born with a silver Cross pen gripped between her fingers. But then she said, “Mine did.”
“Your what?”
“I always made my plates look like those pictures. I couldn’t understand why the cooks didn’t do it right the first time.”
She wasn’t obtuse. It was worse than that.
For the first time since he’d met her, Kyle understood how truly without guile Laura was. He’d always thought it was just a deliberate exaggeration of her personality—like the way he played up his own fun-and-games persona. But now he saw that it wasn’t an exaggeration at all.
She believed in the hike, believed that if they got along, Harris would magically grant them both their coveted positions and they would live happily ever after. Kyle knew that if trekking through the woods was what it took today to keep this job, then he would trek, but if tomorrow he needed to go to a martini bar and feign interest in old jazz standards, he’d probably do that, too. Laura still thought that tangible work, the day-to-day progress reports and numbers crunching, would guarantee her a slot. She might accuse him of being all style, which he wasn’t, but she was all substance. And she didn’t have a clue about why that wasn’t enough.
In a strange way, that made him feel responsible for her success on this trip. He wasn’t sure he liked that. He needed to get along with her, but not to the point where he was dulling his own instincts.
Laura got ahead of him, and to his own dismay, he let her. See, I’m already weakening, he thought, watching her stop to run her palm over the bark of a tree. He wouldn’t have pegged her as a toucher. He wouldn’t have guessed she looked so good in jeans, either, since he’d never seen her in a pair before today. Even when they had to come into the office on weekends, when he made it a point to wear his most casual clothes, to remind everyone that he was taking his own precious time off to do the company’s work, her idea of dressing down meant flats instead of heels, and a flowered skirt instead of solid one. Besides the jeans, she had on a red Polo shirt that was a twin to his dark-green one. It did a lot more for her than it did for him. Before he had a chance to think about it, he said, “You know, you should wear jeans more often.”
She turned around and grinned at him. A real smile. “No, Eddie Bauer, thank you.”
All right, he deserved that one. He fell into step beside her again, and he noticed, as he had at the cabin, that her tennis shoes took something off her height, so that she now fit comfortably right under his arm. He bumped her again, and to cover it up, said, “So why don’t you?”
Great. Now he was The Grand Fashion Inquisitor.
“I don’t know.” She knelt down and stared at a bright-purple mushroom on a log, then looked back up at him, her nose wrinkling. “I don’t want to pretend I’m…sporty.”
The idea of being somehow uncomfortable in his body, of not being able to fall back on using his muscles and his stamina as an escape from the world’s chatter, was totally alien to him. When he’d looked at Laura before, he’d seen someone who wore her business garb as armor. Now he saw someone who looked at ease in her own skin, and he couldn’t understand why she felt self-conscious about it. “What’s wrong with being sporty?”
She stood up. Gracefully, he noted. “Nothing wrong with it. It’s just not me. In gym class, when we played volleyball, I was told to never move, because I might get in the way of someone who could actually hit the ball.” She started walking again, turning around to say, “You’re quite the jock, though, right?”
“It sounds so ugly when you say it.”
She looked honestly stricken. “I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just a term. Haven’t you called me a nerd or a bean counter before?” Without waiting for him to tell her that nerd hadn’t been one of his words, she said, “I thought so. I guess I should be glad that I don’t have to play golf with Harris anymore since you came along.”
But you don’t know that my playing golf with Harris is what allows me more access to him than you have, he thought.
“I hear you have quite the swing,” she continued.
He shrugged, uncomfortable with his thoughts. “I went to college on a golf scholarship, so I guess I ought to.”
She stopped, and he stopped too, this time a safe distance away to keep himself from bumping into her. A leaf on the forest floor caught her eye, and he took the opportunity to stare at her as she bent down, her shirt hugging the outlines of her b
ody, the sun playing tricks with her golden-brown hair. Even in jeans, she exuded elegance and class. So why had he told her he had a golf scholarship? She already thought he was a stupid jock, brawn instead of brains.
But when she rose and turned back to him, she said, “There is no such thing as a golf scholarship.”
So she wasn’t making fun of him; she was calling him a liar.
“Yes, there is. I endorsed the checks to the university.” He should have guessed how she felt about sports. “Are you one of those ‘no funding for college athletics’ kind of alumni?”
“No. I mean, I don’t watch football, but I understand that money comes in from the people who do. But who would pay you just to play golf?” As soon as she’d said it, she grinned at him, slowly, and there, again, was that glint in her hazel eyes. “Besides your boss, I mean.”
He wondered, once again, whether he had seriously underestimated this woman.
3
LAURA HELD a dandelion in front of her face and concentrated. This one, finally, she was going to blow away with just one puff. One, two, three—
“Damn it. Plastic piece of crap.”
Startled, she snorted sharply, sending some bits of white fluff into her nose and her mouth but mostly just leaving them on the stem. Coughing, she turned to see Kyle bashing his portable radio against the flat rock beneath him.
When they’d reached the clearing that Rand had told them was the end of the trail, Kyle had taken a radio and headphones out of his backpack and sat down on a large rock to listen to a ball game. She thought the headset was against the rules, and told Kyle so, even though he tried to bribe her with a Snickers bar, a move that would have worked better if the melting chocolate hadn’t made a small spot on her shirt.
Kyle told her that they were only supposed to get rid of business things, not recreational things. But, she had reminded him, they were supposed to be working on their journal. Well, Kyle had said, if she sat her little butt down on the grass, she’d probably see lots of ants and beetles and bees and maybe, if she was lucky, a butterfly would come by and she could spend the next half hour ignoring it while she looked for its picture in her stupid book.
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