She looked at Kyle, who was shaking his head.
“You brought me here to offer me my old job back?”
“I think it’s romantic,” Walt said. “She gets hives for you, you get a crappy job for her.”
Kyle pointed toward the door. “Out, all of you,” he yelled. The three men snapped to attention and hustled out, leaving Laura staring at Kyle.
“This is your big secret? Kyle, I don’t need a job. I have a job. I’m touched that you’re worried about me.” She sat down in one of the leather chairs. “Well, actually, I’m sort of insulted that you didn’t think I could get a job on my own, that you have to rearrange the company to get me one.”
His jaw tightened and his eyes grew cold. She was just going to have to control the urge to sleep with him until she found out what was behind this scheme of his.
“You think I’m a waste of a perfectly good office.”
“Kyle, I never said that.”
“That’s what you used to think.”
She forced herself not to look in his eyes. “Okay, I thought that for a while.”
“I wanted to show you that I could keep my promises. That I could roll up my sleeves and do some hard work.” He fidgeted with his sleeve as he said it.
She wanted to know why. She wanted to ask. She wasn’t going to be too scared to do it. Kyle had taught her that she had instincts and whims, impulses that were best yielded to, even if you didn’t know what was going to happen afterward.
“You did this for me?” She heard her voice, too soft in the plush room. She made it stronger as she asked, “Why?”
He stared at her in such an intimate way that she thought he must be privy to every thought she had ever had. He knelt down next to her, his arms around the chair where she sat.
“Because I love you,” he said.
She kissed him then, breaking off the kiss only to say “I love you so much. But Kyle, I would have loved you even if you hadn’t kept this promise. You know that?”
“I wanted to be the kind of guy you wouldn’t be worried about marrying.”
Was that…
“Will you?” he asked. “Marry me?”
“Not because you completed this task,” she said. “Not because you crossed something off on your to-do list.” She touched his face. “I’m marrying you for you.”
He grinned at her, and it was that patented Kyle Sanders grin. Only now she knew how much substance there was to the man behind it. “Even though we did everything backward?”
“Even though we did everything backward.”
“But when we have kids,” he said, “we want them to meet and marry in the normal way.”
“I don’t know,” Laura said. “They just might have their parents’ talent for a wisely chosen whim.”
Epilogue
“LOOK HOW GOOD Laura looks since she quit,” Harris said. “We should all quit. Tricia? Don’t you think so?”
Tricia smiled her same benign Tricia smile, made even brighter by the presence of her new baby asleep in a carrier on one of the chairs. She kept loading slices of cake onto paper plates. Laura had no idea what the etiquette was for a bridal shower at your former place of employment, and whether or not it differed from the etiquette for a bridal shower at the place where your fiancé was now a company vice president.
“Can I help?” she asked Tricia, but Brandi, coming in with the cups and punch, shooed her away.
“You’re the guest,” she said.
Guest. It felt…weird. But good.
“It feels weird, doesn’t it?” She heard Kyle’s voice over her shoulder, a welcome sound. He pulled out the chair next to her and took it, and she braced herself for the inevitable kick in the leg. It didn’t come. He’d gotten surprisingly adroit since their engagement. She was going to have to ask him about that. He leaned over and kissed her, and she marveled again how strange and wonderful it was to be in this room and not have to convince herself that she was not attracted to her sexy co-worker.
And how wonderful it was to be able to see him somewhere other than this room. On her couch on weeknights, watching VH1 Pop up video. In the park with her on weekends. In her bed every night.
Her job was working out beautifully. She had interesting projects, great resources at her disposal and no one had ever asked her to play golf.
Kyle said they missed her gift with numbers, but Weaselly Walt had come on board and had turned out to be a whiz with numbers, sort of an idiot savant.
Speaking of savants… “Is Stan going to be able to play at the wedding?”
“Guitar in hand,” Kyle said. “Your sister asked me if it was going to be a hippie wedding.”
Laura smiled. “I have plenty of wedding gaffes to mention to her, thank you.”
“Walt and Bill are going to give you a couple of nights free at Bellamy Island,” Harris said.
Tricia and Brandi frowned. “You aren’t supposed to tell.”
“It’s okay,” Laura said. “Our nieces couldn’t keep their gift a secret, either.” With help from their parents, they’d had the withered daisy chain framed in a shadowbox.
“I even told Kyle what I’m getting him. A cat,” she said, as everyone looked up in surprise.
“To keep the dog in line,” Kyle explained.
“You don’t have a dog,” Harris said.
“What do you think I’m getting Laura?” Kyle asked. “Besides a little crocheted cozy for her remote control.”
She kicked him.
“Ow, that was my bad ankle.”
“You don’t have a bad ankle. You have a formerly sprained ankle that healed just fine.”
“Says you,” Kyle said. “I get no sympathy from her,” Kyle told Tricia and Brandi, who shook their heads in unison. They started to hand him a piece of cake, but he said, “Let Laura have the first piece.”
“I didn’t think you ate cake, Laura,” Tricia said.
“I do now,” Laura said, smiling at her future husband. “I do now.”
HARLEQUIN DUETS
ISBN: 978-1-4268-6130-7
BRINGING UP BABY NEW YEAR
Copyright © 1999 by Vicki Lewis Thompson
FRISKY BUSINESS
Copyright © 1999 by Tracy Jones
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