by Liz Peters
“Well, you’ve got a damned good woman who moved about a jillion miles to be here with you. She’s still getting a pretty new business going, and you got pissed because she was late for dinner. It’s pretty damned stupid if you ask me. She’s working to make sure the two of you have a future.”
Reid started to open his mouth but Matty cut him off.
“Yeah, I know you’re working too, but shut up a damned minute. You didn’t change shit for her, except for the fact that you gave up being a man whore for a good woman. That was the first smart move you made. But she quit her job, moved, bought a house, started a business, got married. She did a bunch of shit to make this work. The least you can do is put off dinner for an hour or two so she can finish work.” He still hadn’t changed his expression much, in spite of the fact that what he was saying could just have easily been yelled. Matty was just kind of matter of fact about it all. Reid was struck stupid.
“I…” He stopped and leaned against the closest fence post and took a breath before it hit him that he hadn’t even bothered to check his phone throughout the day. He didn’t make a habit of texting anyone while he was working, but he did check on it during the course of most days to make sure nothing was going wrong with Sam that he could help. Matty had a point. Reid just wasn’t sure he was willing to admit it yet.
Instead, he pulled his phone out of his pocket, glancing down at the screen to see a single text message from Sam on it. A simple “morning” and nothing else. No, I love you, no fuck you. Nothing but one word. He didn’t know how to get a read on that, just like he hadn’t known how to get a read on Matty either. He was off-kilter this morning, and there was really only one way to fix it.
“Yeah, you fucked up, but if it helps, I happen to know that woman loves you for some reason. So get off your dumb ass and apologize. Make her dinner tonight and remind her why you married her before someone else does it for you.” Matty didn’t wait for a reply. He just walked away across the field, leaving Reid behind to figure out what he was doing with the rest of his day.
He still had a lot of work to accomplish around the ranch before he was going to be able to leave to go home, but there was more to it than that. He needed to get his head on straight before he went home, and he needed to figure out if and how he was going to reply to that text message that Samantha had sent him. The sun was rolling higher in the sky, and lunch was quickly approaching, but Reid didn’t have much of an appetite for lunch. Besides if he worked through his break, it meant he would just be able to leave here earlier, and he had a plan brewing for how he was going to make everything better. It was just going to take some time to put it into action.
Chapter Six
Debbie had a full day in front of her. Spending the morning chatting with her best friend meant that she needed to do twice as much work in the time she had left to get everything done for the day. On top of that, she was scheduling an interview with the potential office manager she’d found. Jamie hadn’t answered the phone when Debbie had called, but the email that Debbie sent had gotten a quick reply. When Jamie asked to come in for an interview today, Debbie could only agree. It meant she was going to have even more work to do today, but it also meant that she could hire someone sooner to take some of the load off of both of them.
As far as Debbie was concerned, the sooner the two of them got to something more like a normal life, the better. There were just a few things that needed to happen first. She needed to hire someone to take the load off, she needed to make sure that everything between Sam and Reid was going to be all right, and she needed to get her whole life in order between school, work and whatever the heck she had going on with Professor Brennan. That man wasn’t going to give up any time soon, so she was just going to give in and let him have his chance. At least she was telling herself that was the reason she’d agreed to meet him for dinner tonight after work. He had wanted to take her out to lunch, but she had too much work in front of her here to even think about trying to skip out for a long lunch date. Dinner was just going to have to do.
The new office manager she was interviewing was due in fifteen minutes, and Debbie was honestly as nervous as she would have been if she’d been the one interviewing for a job. This was her first time doing any of this, and Sam had left it all up to her. She just needed to make sure that she didn’t screw this up. They needed an office manager, and if this person was worth their salt, then Deb was going to hire her, plain and simple. Now she just needed to show up on time.
The front door to the office opened, and in came a guy clearly in his mid-thirties. He had thick, dark hair, though his eyes were a piercing blue. Deb was a little surprised since she’d been expecting her interview to walk in next, but if this was a new client she wasn’t going to let it throw her off her game. He was handsome, more than handsome really. He could have been a model. There were a lot of good-looking guys in town, every one of them was a cowboy, a ranch hand or a ranch foreman. This guy was vastly different. His suit looked like it was cut for him, and he didn’t have a hair out of place. Debbie had to drag herself away from admiring him to make sure that she greeted him without saying something stupid.
“Good afternoon. Can I help you?” Debbie stood up from her desk to greet the new arrival who walked over and leaned against her desk.
“I hope so. I’m Jamie Halston, and I’m here for a job interview.”
Debbie froze. This was the last person she’d been expecting to come in for this job. Jamie should have been a woman’s name, but instead, it belonged to this gorgeous man who stood in front of her desk. The first thing about his voice that had caught her attention was the accent. It was clearly Southern, even deeper with worse of drawl than most of the people around here. She was getting used to the accents of the people who came in and out of that door every day since moving to the country, but this guy had a drawl that she would have placed somewhere like Louisiana.
The second thing that hit Debbie was his name — Jamie Halston. This was the man she was supposed to interview. She was scrambling internally to get her head on straight. She had no clue why she’d just assumed that Jamie was a woman’s name. Maybe it was because she’d never actually known a guy named Jamie, but it was a guy’s name just as much as a woman’s. How was she supposed to sit across the desk from this gorgeous man and grill him with the list of questions she’d prepared. At least she’d written them down because as soon as she started to speak everything she’d been thinking went right out of her head.
“Of course…” She paused for a moment, trying to remember where she was planning to do this interview when she remembered the empty office that she was setting up to use as her own as soon as she really started to work with Sam on the cases that came in through the door. For now, it was full of boxes stacked in corners and an entirely empty desk that had been left behind by the previous owner. It wasn’t much to look at, but it was more private than doing the entire interview out here in the waiting room. It just meant that Debbie was going to be in a confined space with this guy who her body was suddenly screaming to be closer to.
Debbie remembered her manners just about the time she stood up from the desk and held out her hand for his to offer him a shake.
“Excuse me. I’m Debbie MacIntyre, and I’ll be the one interviewing you for the position. If you’ll just follow me.”
She watched his eyes go wide for a moment, though he recovered about the same time he reached out and took her hand. His was just a little rough, but not nearly as bad as most of the guys who she’d met around here, but they were warm and huge. He could have wrapped his hand entirely around hers if he’d wanted to. On top of that, he was tall. Debbie wasn’t exactly short, but this guy towered over her.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Debbie.” She held his hand a little longer than necessary without moving towards the office that she knew was going to be their final destination.
“So are we just going to stand here holding hands all day? Or should we get this inter
view on the road?” The look on his face was one of amusement, but Debbie felt the heat rising in her face as she fought to push it back down. She was a redhead and had the complexion that went along with it. There was no way she was going to be able to hide the blush once it got started. All she could do was pretend it wasn’t happening and pull her hand away to slide it into the pocket on her skirt as she grabbed the folder off the top of her desk and a pen to take with her into the office.
“Forgive me. It’s been a heck of a day. Follow me.” She was cursing her stupid gut reaction as she walked away, turning her back on Jamie. It at least gave her the opportunity to gather her wits as she lead him into the office.
Debbie showed him to a chair, waiting for him to sit down before she closed the door behind them and made her way around to the other side of the desk. This was a small building, but there was a total of three offices in here. At the moment, they were only using the one Sam had chosen as her own. The other two were used for storage. There was also a conference room in case they needed a space that could hold more than two or three people.
This building was an old house, and the bedrooms had been turned into offices, the dining room was the conference room and the front parlor had become the waiting room. That just left the kitchen at the back that had gone untouched, and Sam and Debbie had been using it as a break room. They might have been in this building for a few months, but they were still settling in. There were boxes along the walls here, still packed with books and random files that Sam had brought from the office back in the city. It was just about then that it hit her how much they really did need an office manager. She just needed to get through this interview to make sure that Jamie was the right one. She had to do it without making an absolute fool of herself over this guy.
“Excuse the mess in here. We’re still getting moved in.”
“You’ve been here a few months, right? I guess you really do need an office manager.”
Debbie sighed as she settled into the chair on the opposite side of the desk. This guy was blunt. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but the response did set her on edge a little bit.
“Well, that would be why we’re here. Unless you’re the wrong Jamie Halston?” She raised an eyebrow as she opened the folder she’d just placed down on the desk. She had Jamie’s resume in there along with the list of questions that she’d intended to ask him. Something told her that this interview was going to go off the rails pretty quickly, but she planned to stick to the list for as long as possible.
“No, I’m the right man. Trust me.” He leaned in, catching her eyes with his piercing blue ones. She was going to have to keep herself from being distracted as much as possible, but if he was going to keep looking at her like that then she wasn’t sure how well she was going to get on with this process.
“Good.” Debbie tore her gaze away from his and put her focus back on the piece of paper in front of her, tapping her pen on the white space just below the first question where she hadn’t intended to take notes through the process back when she thought she was interviewing Miss Jamie Halston. This guy had better be damned good at his job or else it wasn’t going to be worth the torture of trying to force herself to work with him every day.
“Tell me why you think you’re the right man for this job then, Jamie.” She tried to throw his name back at him like a dagger at the end of the question.
“Besides the fact that you clearly need me?” He raised an eyebrow and leaned back in his chair, crossing his legs in front of him as he replied, trying to look relaxed, but she could see that there was something tense about him.
“Yes, besides that. There are other office managers out there, Mr. Halston.”
“Fair enough, Miss MacIntyre. I’m good at what I do.” He folded his hands in front of him and rested them on his lap. “And things around here clearly need to be whipped into shape.” He glanced at her, dragging his eyes along her entire frame when he said that last sentence, and it was almost her undoing. She wasn’t certain if he was talking about the office or her, but some part of her really wanted to see if he was able to whip her into shape. She tried to get it out of her head before she asked the next question, but that hint of flirtation in his tone crept right into her as she moved on.
“And just exactly how do you plan to whip things into shape?” Instead of leaning back in her seat, Debbie leaned forward, resting her elbow on top of the desk in front of her and her chin in her hand.
“Well, I suppose that all depends on exactly what you need. I’m very flexible, and I have a wide variety of skills I can employ to make sure that everything is done entirely to your satisfaction.” She could practically taste the back and forth game of cat and mouse that the two of them were playing. The double entendres they were flinging at each other told her everything she needed to know about how tense this situation was going to be with him working here. Part of her craved it, and the other part of her knew it was going to be some kind of torture.
Debbie tried to swallow discreetly and sat back in her seat. She knew that showing Jamie any sign of her being attracted to him was going to give him the upper hand. Instead, she turned her attention back to the list of questions that sat in front of her and tried to turn the focus of the conversation back to his resume.
“So, I see that you’ve had previous experience with being an office manager for a law firm.” Maybe putting attention on his last job was something that she could use to turn the tide of the conversation and keep herself from wanting to crawl over the desk and plop down in his lap.
“Yeah, about ten years of it. It was one of my first jobs out of high school, and for the last seven I’ve been with the same firm.” She could see his expression change when he talked about this last job.
“And do you mind if I ask why you left your last job?” Debbie watched as Jamie’s brows knit together. This might have been a touchy subject, but it was something she needed to know. If he was leaving his last job for anything like a drug issue or something else serious, there was no way she was going to hire him. On the other hand, if he was leaving for reasons beyond his control, it moved him closer to being hired.
“Honestly, legal reasons.” Debbie frowned. That answer was a bit nebulous. There were a million things it could have boiled down to. Part of her wanted to push him on it and find out the details. The other part of her wanted to just let him go at that since it seemed to be something he didn’t want to elaborate on.
“And do you mind if I call them to get a reference for you?” She glanced up from the piece of paper curiously, waiting for him to answer.
“You can call. Just make sure you tell Marcia I said hello when you call.” The corners of his mouth turned down slightly when he said that name. It just made Debbie want to know more about the entire situation.
“Marcia?”
“My ex-wife. She owns the practice, so she’s probably going to be who you speak to if you call.”
“Ex-wife?” Debbie felt like an idiot. Her questions were slowly dwindling down to single words and short phrases, but this story was becoming something she was interested in. It had nothing to do with the fact that she was looking to hire this guy, and everything to do with the fact that she suddenly found herself overly interested in his personal life.
“We’re recently divorced. She and her partner in the firm have a wedding date set for early January, just after new year’s if you’re interested in sending them some china or silverware to celebrate the occasion.” Debbie could hear the irritation in his voice. She’d pushed the subject too far and immediately felt like an ass about it. She put her pen down on top of the file in front of her, looking over at the man across the desk from her and trying to make her expression as sincere as she felt when she started to apologize.
“Jamie? I’m sorry for pushing that. I didn’t know, and I just wanted to understand why you were leaving such a longterm job with that kind of pay. I can’t offer you that much. We’re just starting
out here, but I can offer you a job. Truth be told, I was going to hire you as long as you weren’t a psychopath just based on your resume alone. We’re in a bind here. Samantha Crawford owns the practice. She just got married a few weeks ago. I’m going back to law school to get my degree and become an attorney myself while interning here. Neither of us has run a practice on our own before, and we need someone who knows what they’re doing on the business side of things to make sure that everything gets done properly, and to make sure that Sam can go home to her husband in time for dinner most nights.”
Debbie knew she was being entirely too blunt and upfront with this guy, but there was something about him that made her want to just tell him everything. This might have been a mistake but she was planning to offer him the job if he would have it.
Jamie raised his eyebrow again, letting that expression of frustration that had been building on his face fade away into one of amusement while Debbie babbled away about their situation.
“So you mean to tell me I’m being interviewed by the intern?” He laughed softly and shook his head. “You guys do need an office manager as much as I need a job. I don’t have a problem working for less money. It’s not like I’m going to have to pay her alimony or anything. I just need to be able to get my own place and move out of the guest house in back of my wife’s place… my ex-wife’s place, I mean. Moving out here to Colleston would be a nice change of scenery. Trust me.”
Debbie could feel the relief wash over her. She hadn’t realized how tense she was, but she’d half expected him to turn down the offer when she wrote down the amount of salary she was going to be able to offer him. It was nothing close to what he’d been paid before at the last firm he’d managed, but that had been a huge firm. This place was just the two of them and Debbie hoped he’d accept her offer.