She glanced up at Zane, swallowing the lump. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” she spat. “Talking about me behind my back.”
“Ellie—”
“Don’t you Ellie me,” she snapped. “Meagan doesn’t know me well enough to judge me like that. She has no right. Not any more than I have the right to judge you because you’re a chicken farmer!” She took a step closer to him, feeling her anger burn in her cheeks. “And as for your little comment about me being just some real estate agent you wanted to do some work for you—I just want you to know that I appreciate you warning me right up front that you were never interested in me, only what I could do for you!”
“Ellie—” Zane shook his head, taking a step toward her, his hand out.
She sidestepped him. “Thank you for the afternoon. I had a lovely time.” She strode away, headed for the back door. “You can keep the damned mushrooms!”
Still seething, Elise marched into her apartment, down the hall and into her office. Spotting The Husband Finder checklist with Zane’s name scrawled across the top, she balled it up in both hands, ignoring the word “good heart” written in her own handwriting.
“I knew this wouldn’t work. It was a stupid idea,” she muttered, throwing the ball of paper into the trash can. Then, like a true Montgomery, she sat down to work. She retrieved the messages from her voice mail and made a list of who needed return phone calls and what properties she wanted to schedule to show in the next week. She wrote her update for her Web page on Waterfront Realty’s Internet site and e-mailed it to the Web master.
Still online, her fingers lingered over the keyboard. She thought about the boat trip the previous day and what a great time she had had. She tried not to think about Zane and how good he had made her feel or how wonderful his kiss had been. This was her own fault. The minute she found out he was a farmer and a family man, she should have dropped him. The Husband Finder was very clear in saying that men and women with similar work and home backgrounds made better partners. They simply had more in common, more to talk about. What did she have to say about chicken farming? What did Zane know about a woman working in a man’s world, a man’s business, and trying to get ahead? And what had made her think for a second that she could fit into a big family of in-laws?
Then Elise thought about Grandpop Keaton. About the beautiful land she had seen from the boat. She’d told him she would look into whether or not the property was going up for sale. It was a stupid thing to say; the old man probably hadn’t heard or at least understood a word she’d spoken.
But she’d promised.
She typed in one of the best Web sites for information on properties soon to go on the market and reached for her computer mouse. She was doing this for Grandpop Keaton, she told herself firmly, not Zane.
“Sorry I’m not great company, tonight,” Zane said, tucking his grandfather’s dirty clothes into the hamper next to the bathroom door of his room in the nursing home. “It hasn’t been such a great day.” He walked over to the hospital bed where the elder Keaton sat on the edge, bony bare feet dangling.
Zane began to button up his grandfather’s plaid pajama top. “Isn’t it funny how you wake up some mornings thinking it’s going to be one of the best days of your life—” He studied the cloudy blue eyes that seemed unseeing. “And then they turn out to be one of the crappiest?”
Zane buttoned the top button and smoothed the soft, worn fabric over his grandfather’s thin shoulders. “I guess you know that girl I invited, Ellie, left in kind of a huff.” He looked away, for some reason unable to meet the old man’s gaze when he said it.
“Meagan and I were talking in the kitchen and Ellie overheard. She got pretty pissed off. You know Meagan and how overprotective she can be. She was afraid I was getting myself into another relationship like with Judy. It’s not true, really. Ellie’s not anything like Judy was.” He paused. “Meagan’s right, though. Ellie’s whole life seems to be her job. She wouldn’t have time for me. It’s silly for me to get involved with her.”
Zane met his grandfather’s gaze. Was his grandfather looking at him? Really looking at him?
“The thing is, Pops, I really liked her.” Zane couldn’t tear his gaze from the cloudy blue eyes. “She made me feel…I don’t know, different. I liked myself when I was with her. And she was funny. And she was incredibly smart. And for such a smart girl, there are so many things she’s never done. Can you believe she’s never been crabbing?”
Zane crouched down, pressing his hands to his knees to look up at his grandfather. “What, Pops? Is there something you want to say to me?” He paused. Smiled when his grandfather didn’t answer. It was probably just his imagination.
“Well, none of that matters anymore because Ellie gave me what for, and left. We won’t hear from her again. And it’s for the best, right?”
Then there it was again. Those eyes.
“You think I should call her?” Zane groaned. “I could apologize, but then what? She already thinks I’m a jerk. I start giving her this whole spiel about how afraid of career women I am because my mother abandoned us for a cigarette campaign, and my fiancée left me for a promotion and Elise will be giving me the name of a good psychiatrist.”
Zane sat down on the edge of the bed beside his grandfather again. “No. It’s for the best. I know you liked her, Pops, but Ellie and I, we just aren’t meant to be. So I don’t want to hear any more about her from you. Deal?”
Zane grabbed Grandfather Keaton’s hand to shake it, but the old man wouldn’t even squeeze it. He just kept staring and somehow Zane felt like a heel.
Chapter Five
For the contemporary woman, finding the perfect mate is not about emotion, it’s about intellectual reason. Don’t be undermined by untrustworthy, messy sentiment.
Elise sat at her desk in her private office at Waterfront Realty, stared at the phone number written on her message pad, and chewed on the end of her Mont Blanc pen. Zane’s number.
She needed to call him because he’d been absolutely right; the land where his grandfather had grown up was going up for sale sometime in the next two to three weeks. If Zane wanted to buy it, she knew his best chance would be to make a fair offer before it was officially for sale. Once it hit the market, a development company might come in and offer an outrageously high price to turn the bayside property into an exclusive housing development or condos.
The phone number seemed to leap off the page at her. It was his office number. There was no way she was going to call him at home. After all, if he had wanted to talk to her for personal reasons, he would have called sometime in the last week.
So why was she hesitant? This was strictly a business call, like one of the many she made every day. She and Zane had pretty much agreed last Saturday in his kitchen that they were not compatible. Just because he wasn’t going to be her boyfriend, her “perfect mate,” that didn’t mean she couldn’t be his agent and make a healthy commission off the sale of this property.
“This is ridiculous,” Elise muttered to herself. “I’m not in junior high anymore.” She punched the phone buttons with the end of her pen. “Come on, Ellie, you’re a professional.”
Ellie? Where did that come from?
“Farmer in the Dell Enterprises, how may I direct your call?” asked a pleasant receptionist on the other end of the line.
Elise had a crazy impulse to just hang up and gripped the phone tightly in her hand. “I am not in junior high,” she lipped silently as if that was her mantra.
“May I help you?” came the voice again.
“Umm, yes, Zane Keaton, please. This is Elise Montgomery.” It suddenly occurred to her that he might not take her call. “Returning his call,” she finished quickly.
“One moment, please.”
Elise sat in her leather chair behind her desk listening to a kiddy version of the song “Farmer in the Dell” coming through the line. “Cute,” she muttered sardonically. “Really cute, Zane.”
Th
e phone clicked on the other end. “Hi, Ellie?” It was Zane’s way-too-sexy voice, confused at the moment. “The receptionist said you were returning my call?”
“I apologize for misleading her,” she said coolly in her best professional tone, “but I needed to speak with you, and I was afraid you might not take my call if you heard it was me.”
“Don’t be silly, I’m glad you called.” He paused for a second. “Listen, I really wanted to call you this week and apologize again for Saturday. I—”
“Zane, this isn’t a personal call.”
“Well, I’m making it a personal call!”
His words took her by such surprise that she didn’t have time to respond before he went on.
“The truth is, I wanted to call you and I should have. I’ve just been really busy.”
He took a breath, and it was the perfect place for her to jump in. Just tell him she wasn’t interested in what he had to say because she wasn’t interested in him, and then jump right in with the information she had on the property, but he was too quick for her.
“No,” he went on. “I haven’t been that busy. I have your phone numbers in my pocket, and I’ve looked at them so many times in the last week that I’ve got them memorized. The truth is, I was just afraid you wouldn’t want to talk to me. You were pretty angry when you left my place.”
His voice sounded so sincere, so genuine. A man who could actually say he was afraid of rejection by a woman? Elise could feel her resolve weakening, but she fought it. Maybe because she was even more afraid of rejection than he was.
“Zane, I didn’t call to talk about our disastrous date. I have a meeting in five minutes that I need to get to,” she lied, “so do you want to hear about the property or not?”
“The property?”
“The property you showed me when we were out on the bay. You said you wanted to buy it when it came up for sale”
“Pops’ land?” He sounded so surprised. “I can’t believe you still looked into it.”
“I’m a woman of my word,” she said indignantly. “I told you I would and besides, I promised your grandfather.”
“I know, but after that fiasco at my place, I just assumed—” He halted in midsentence. “You promised my grandfather?”
She took a deep breath, feeling silly. No, not silly, just uncomfortable. For some unknown reason her chest had tightened with emotion. There was something about Zane’s grandfather that had touched her. Touched a place in her heart that she didn’t know very well. “We were just talking…well, you know what I mean and…I don’t know, I told him I would look into it.”
“Wow,” he said, only the word came out tender.
Elise barreled ahead; there was way more messy sentiment involved in this phone call than she had intended, and she wasn’t very good with emotion. Another Montgomery trait. “The land was owned by a Mr. Leonard Jacobs, but of course you knew that because he’s probably the man you tried to talk to about buying it.”
“The man with the chicken grudge,” Zane interjected.
“Anyway, he died a few months ago, and his heirs are getting ready to put the property on the market.” She doodled on the legal-size pad she kept notes on.
“You’re kidding me! That’s great. I mean, not great that he died, great that the heirs want to sell.”
Elise looked down at her notepad to see that she had written Zane’s name next to hers and drawn a heart around it. She couldn’t believe she had done such a thing! She scribbled it out frantically. “I called to let you know that if you’re interested in having me represent you, I can make arrangements for you to meet with the Jacobs’ family estate lawyer.” She hesitated. “Of course if you’d rather work with someone else, I can suggest Liz—”
“Rather work with someone else, of course not! And yes, I’m interested, very interested. Wouldn’t that be something if I could take Pops out to his old place? Push him around in his wheelchair under the same trees where he played as a boy?”
Zane sounded more like a kid than the CEO of what Elise had learned this week was a multimillion-dollar company. All she’d had to was Google him and the information had popped up. President and CEO of Farmer in the Dell Enterprises, an organic poultry and poultry products conglomerate that sold goods worldwide. Somehow the idea that he was such a successful businessman had knocked her for a loop. The only truly wealthy men she had ever known, besides her father, had been his colleagues and they had all been cookie-cutter cutouts of Edwin Montgomery. Every one of them was a workaholic with great business sense and no people skills. Cold fish right down the line, even with their own families.
Zane was nothing like her father.
“So when can we get started?” Zane asked, knocking her out of her zombie world and back to the present.
“Umm.” She was flustered now and that was so unlike her. Nothing ever flustered her; she was at her best under pressure. “I’ll have to make a couple of calls and get back to you.”
“Sounds great. You have my home and work numbers, but let me give you my cell number.”
Elise wrote down the number beside the crossed out heart on her notepad. “I’ll get back to you,” she said anxious to get off the phone before she said something she shouldn’t, like I’m really sorry about the other day, too. I can understand where you’re coming from because I apparently have some preconceived notions that might not be accurate. Want to get together for dinner and talk about it? Better yet, would you just like to come to my place and make out? Instead she said, “Have a good day.”
“You, too. And hey, Ellie?”
The way he said her name made her heart skip a beat. She wondered if maybe she was premenstrual. This whole physical reaction to Zane was so unlike her; she never even cried at Hallmark card commercials. “Yes?” Her voice sounded oddly breathy in her ear.
“Thanks so much. I can’t tell you how much this means to me. What it will mean to Pops.”
“You bet.” Elise dropped the phone on the cradle as if it were too hot to handle and then stared at it for a second. For the first time in the past five minutes she felt as if she could catch her breath again; she exhaled slowly.
So that was that. Although Zane had apologized once more, he didn’t say anything about seeing her again. Not that she would have agreed to go out with him. She was following The Husband Finder’s advice and wasn’t wasting her time anymore with relationships that could go nowhere. It was just that…
“Get back to work,” she told herself. “Work is where it’s at when you’re a Montgomery.”
So Elise kicked her high heels off under her desk and threw herself into her day’s to-do list. She didn’t come up for air until two hours later when she heard a knock at her door. “Elise?”
She looked up from her desk to see Liz dressed in a sharp gray suit with her hair pulled back in a tight chignon. “Bring it in,” Liz said to someone behind her.
Elise’s eyes grew wide at the sight of a huge bouquet of bright flowers in a crystal vase, carried by a deliveryman.
“Oh, my gosh,” Elise breathed, slipping her feet into her shoes under her desk and getting out of her chair.
“You’ve been holding out on me,” Liz sang. “And you said you didn’t think you’d go out with Bob the Broker last night. Start a fresh Husband Finder checklist did we? Must have been a nice evening.” She drew out the last word as if Elise had found the man of her dreams.
“I didn’t go out with Bob. He had appointments, I had appointments…” She let her voice fade away, unable to stop staring at the flowers as she pointed for the young man to set them on her credenza. Who could they be from?
Zane. They had to be from Zane. Only Zane would send a girl a vase of wildflowers. The most beautiful flowers Elise thought she had ever seen. They looked as if they had been picked from a country roadside.
“Thank you,” she breathed as the deliveryman left.
“So who are they from?” Liz snatched the card with the name of the florist i
mprinted on it from the plastic holder before Elise could get to it. “You’re the best. Love, Zane and Tom?” She arched a plucked brow.
Elise fought a grin as she snatched the card from her friend’s hand. “It’s not what you think,” she said tartly, sliding into her leather executive chair and slipping the card into the center drawer of her desk.
Liz planted her hands on her slender hips. “No, then what is it?”
“Business. Nothing more.” Elise reached for her notepad and her pen.
“You sure?”
Elise didn’t look up, but pretended to scan the paper in front of her, carefully covering the scratched out heart with her and Zane’s name in it with her hand. She’d just die if Liz saw it. “I’m sure it’s just business, now will you excuse me? I have some calls to make.” She reached for her phone.
“You’re making a big mistake,” Liz sang as she sashayed out of the office. “It will never work. That book was right about one thing, you know, you have to go for men who are your type and that chicken man is definitely not your type.”
Elise glanced up. Ordinarily, she would have just held her tongue and let that comment go by, but she couldn’t. “How do you know what type of man is right for me? I’m not even sure I know. What if what I thought I wanted isn’t really what I need in a man at all?”
“Honey.” Liz leaned on the door frame. “Do you hear yourself? A man’s not supposed to change you. He’s supposed to complement you—like a nice pair of designer shoes or a purse.”
Elise glanced down at the notepad under her hand.
“You know what kind of woman you are and you certainly know what kind of man Zane Keaton is,” Liz continued, an edge to her voice. “Look at him. Look at that sister of his. He doesn’t want an equal. He wants a wife he can keep barefoot and pregnant down on the farm.”
“That’s unfair, Liz. You don’t know him.”
Barefoot and Pregnant? Page 6