by Lori Wilde
Their jobs would be a snap if everyone else would do theirs right. It was only Wednesday morning, and the week already felt ten days long.
At least it wasn’t raining anymore. The site was a muddy mess, and the forecast was for more cool, wet days.
“Hey, boss,” one of the carpenters yelled, opening the trailer door a crack to be heard. “You got a visitor.”
“I’ll be right out,” Zack said absentmindedly as he jotted down the results of his call.
“Maybe you want to, you know, meet in private.”
The door slammed shut before Zack could ask why. He was pretty sure he heard a muffled laugh through the partially open window. What was up now?
“Oh, no.” He had a bad feeling. If this was another delivery, any driver who dared come onto his worksite would soon find a new use for cardboard boxes.
He slammed his chair into a file cabinet in his hurry to get outside. He cringed. Why was he so het up?
Danbury was wearing black spiked heels and a tan trench coat and holding a brown paper grocery bag. He stepped on the temporary walkway of old wooden planks and gave her a stony-faced look.
“You’d better find a firmer place to stand or, better still, leave. You’re sinking.” He nodded at the heels sinking into soft ground.
She pulled one foot free and tried to step forward, but the second shoe stayed put, stuck in the muck. Her bare foot came down, causing mud to ooze between her toes.
“This place is a swamp,” she said.
“We like it that way,” he said dryly, with no intention of retrieving her lost shoe.
She turned slowly, then bent and got it herself, her tightly belted trench coat taut over her shapely backside. It was ungentlemanly to notice, but he noticed anyway.
“I need to see you in private.” She stuck her muddy toes into the ridiculously high-heeled shoe. She might be a girly-girl, but she was determined. He’d give her that.
“I’m swamped with work.” Not entirely a lie. “Anything you have to say, you can say right here.”
“It’ll only take a minute.”
“What is it?” He scowled and folded his arms over his chest.
“In private,” she murmured and just when he was about to say no, she added, “please” in that sexy, breathy voice of hers, and he was toast.
“Woooh,” catcalled one of his Neanderthal employees.
Zack gave the guy a step-off stare and turned back to Megan. “All right, but you only get a minute.”
Her eyes brightened. “Thank you!”
“C’mon on in, but fair warning, I’m not changing my mind about appearing on your show.”
“All I ask is that you keep an open mind,” she said.
“You’re lucky I’m hearing you out at all,” he growled and narrowed his eyes.
“Point taken.”
He escorted her into the trailer, but the moment the door shut behind them, he realized it was a mistake. He was suddenly so aware of her. Resolutely, he plunked down in his chair, leaving her standing in the middle of the room.
“There is nothing, absolutely nothing, you can do to get me on your show,” he said emphatically. “I would rather crawl through broken glass.”
“You really do have bad stage fright, don’t you?” A look of pity crossed her face.
“I’m more afraid I’d strangle you on camera.”
She did the worst possible thing then—she smiled, making it impossible to properly vent his opinion of showbiz silliness.
“I’m not going to give up. The show is history, and so are Ed’s job and mine if we can’t sign you. Mr. Gunderdorf wants you for some unknown reason. Me? I’d rather have a performing baboon, but he’s the boss.”
“So, insulting me is how you plan on convincing me?” He leaned back in his chair and kept his arms folded, a tight barrier between them. “Because it’s not working.”
“No.” She curled her fingers around the big brown paper bag.
“If that’s another present,” he said. “You can forget it. Bribery won’t work.”
“How about nostalgia?”
Huh? “What are you talking about?”
From the paper bag, she took out an intricately designed bridge constructed from Popsicle sticks. The second he saw it, Zack’s heart gave a strange little twist. Tentatively, she came across the room and settled the wooden bridge on his desk.
Possessively, he cradled the bridge between both palms and stabbed her with a stare. “Where did you get this?”
“I called your brother, Cole.”
“You called Cole?”
She nodded.
“Why?”
“I needed to get through to you. Cole told me this was the first thing you’d ever built. Pretty impressive for a seven-year-old.”
“But how?” Zack was bumfuzzled. “My grandfather stomped this bridge to smithereens because I was building it instead of paying attention to his lecture on Bailey’s Baby Products.”
“Cole had a picture of it…and he’d saved the pieces. Your brother is a packrat…thank heavens. I took the photo and the pieces to a friend of mine who owns a craft shop, and he put it back together.”
Zack swore under his breath even as his heart melted. “You did all that for me?”
“I had to show you how serious I am about this.” She pressed her palms to her chest. “Please, Zack. Please come back on the show.”
He swallowed and toyed with the bridge, remembering how much fun he’d had putting it together. And how devastated he was when Marsh smashed it. Then he remembered just how much he’d disliked being on her show.
Staring into her wide doe eyes, Zack found himself mumbling, “I’ll think about it.”
4
Megan dug two fingers into some blue gel and finished smearing on the face mask. Gunderdorf was in Milan looking at a pasta plant he might buy and hadn’t fired her yet. She was using the reprieve to catch up on all the things a girl should do before job hunting in a field where twenty-eight was considered ancient.
She closed the lid and rinsed her fingers, but no amount of busy work could make her forget she’d made a complete idiot of herself. It was Saturday, and she still hadn’t heard from Zack.
While she buffed her nails and waited for the timer to tell her when she could remove the gel mask, she couldn’t stop thinking of Zack. Would her grand gesture of reconstructing the bridge he’d built in childhood do the trick? Or was he a hopeless case?
She couldn’t even get sympathy from her big sister and favorite confidante. She couldn’t tell Georgia that Ed’s imminent unemployment was her fault.
The doorbell interrupted her miserable thoughts. A visitor was about as welcome as the chicken pox, and she wanted to ignore it.
Unfortunately, it could be Ed bringing bad news he didn’t want to deliver from his phone where Georgia might overhear. She was going to be beyond upset when Ed lost his job. Megan hoped her sister wouldn’t go on a record eating binge and gain back all the weight she’d worked two years to lose.
She yanked tight the belt of her robe and reluctantly went to the door. It was a measure of her glum mood that she didn’t even bother to check the peephole before opening the door.
“Danbury. That is you under the zombie makeup, isn’t it? Can I come in for a minute?”
Why had Zack tracked her down in her Southfield apartment? She didn’t have a second thought, only a moment of panic before the reality kicked in. She’d rather face an invasion of killer termites than this clean-shaven version of him.
“Or we could talk here on the landing,” he said.
She glanced across the narrow space at the top of the stairs that separated her door from the Woodruffs’. They were a dear couple, but unfortunately, the joy of their retirement years was keeping track of every other tenant in the cluster of two-story buildings around a central court. She didn’t want Bailey’s visit to be the topic of the day.
She motioned him inside and closed the door. “Why are you here?”
“You do have an affinity for mud,” he said, ignoring her question and staring at her face mask.
He walked into her living room and looked around, taking in the small kitchen off to the right with black marble countertops, stark white appliances, and black-and-white checkerboard flooring.
Her apartment was small but uncluttered. The living room, bedroom, and small combination guest room and office were carpeted in tweedy gray and white, which made it easy to pull together her small collection of furniture—a sleek modern couch and chairs and a maple bedroom set her mother left behind when she moved to Florida.
The spare room had a wrought-iron daybed with a burgundy-and-pink quilted spread, a file cabinet, and a desk she’d assembled herself. She’d also put together bookcases and a black desk chair. It was neat and functional. It was her.
“Nice place. Good floor plan. The building is cheap construction, but it’s livable if it’s well maintained. No security, though.”
He was right about that. The street door was always unlocked and led to a small hallway with mailboxes and doors to the first-floor apartments. The building was on a slight rise so there were two stories in front and three in back with a laundry room, basement apartments, and open-fronted parking slots on the lowest level.
“Thank you for your professional appraisal,” she said to cover her discomfort.
It was bad enough to answer the door with a blue face. She wasn’t exactly dressed for company, either. She was swathed in a pink terry-cloth robe with enough material to cover two of her, but he made her feel undressed. Fresh from the shower, she hadn’t bothered to put on underwear yet.
He walked to the sliding glass door of her balcony where she’d yet to plant summer flowers in a row of earthen pots.
When he didn’t explain why he was there, she spoke again.
“How did you find out where I live?”
“It wasn’t easy tracking down a local celebrity like you, but I have friends.”
“I’m not a celebrity.”
“But you’d like to be one, wouldn’t you?”
“No, I’d just like to meet my career goals.”
The timer sounded in her bathroom, the signal to rinse off her mask. She didn’t know whether to ignore it and risk having her face pucker up like a prune or leave Zack alone in her living room without knowing why he was there. The desire to get rid of the clown face won out.
“I need to rinse my face.”
“I’ll vote for that.”
“Have a seat,” she said, wishing she could wave a magic wand and make him disappear.
She hurried into the bathroom, conveniently out of sight of the living room, and pushed the door half-closed with her knee. She wanted to put on real clothes as much as she wanted to lose the blue hue, so she ducked her face in the basin in her haste to scrub it.
“What is that stuff supposed to do?” Zack startled her so badly she shrieked. “Allow me.” He handed her a towel hanging on the rack.
“Get out of my bathroom.” She buried her face in the towel, so angry she was stuttering.
He didn’t budge.
“Why? You’re wrapped up like a mummy.”
She automatically folded her arms across her chest, letting the towel fall to the floor.
He retrieved it with a grin she wanted to sand off his face.
“I made a terrible mistake expecting you to be a gentleman. It will never happen again,” she said. “Now go away.”
“Gladly, but first I have a proposition for you.” He backed out of the bathroom and sat himself down on the edge of her bed.
“In your own words, no, no, no.”
“Proposition was a bad word choice. Let’s say it’s a business proposal.”
“Out.”
He settled more comfortably on her heirloom bedspread embroidered with baskets of flowers and crossed one leg over the other like a man who planned to sit awhile.
“This is something you need to hear,” he said stubbornly.
“At least have the decency to wait in the living room while I get dressed.”
“I can do that.”
He gave her an evil grin and sauntered out of the room.
She couldn’t decide what to wear. If she wore a nice outfit, he might think she’d dressed to impress him. She locked her bedroom door and put on the designer jeans she’d worn for his disastrous appearance on her show. Just to be sure he didn’t think she cared what he thought, she slipped into old clogs and a red plaid flannel shirt she used for dirty jobs and buttoned it up to her throat.
“This had better be good,” she said, returning to the living room where he was staring through the balcony door at the concrete courtyard.
He turned slowly and looked her up and down with an appraising stare.
“Well,” she prompted, “what do you want?”
“The way I see it, we agree on one thing—we can’t stand each other. Right?” If he wanted something, he had a peculiar way of leading up to it.
“Yes, we agree on that.”
“Good.” He sat on the edge of the couch and stared at her in that same appraising way. “Would you marry me?”
“What?”
“You want something from me. I want something from you.”
“There’s nothing on this earth that could persuade me to marry you.”
“Good. Let me lay this out for you.”
He stood again. She took it as a sign he wasn’t all that comfortable with what he was going to say.
“You want me to be on your show.”
“Yes.” She gave him the side-eye, not trusting him one bit.
“I’ll make more guest appearances if you help me out with a small problem.”
“Small?”
This conversation was too weird. Considering what she’d gone through to get his attention, she didn’t want to deal with anything weird again.
“Small, in that it won’t inconvenience you much. Obviously, it’s a major problem to me, or I wouldn’t consider making an idiot of myself again.”
“You were a hit. I don’t call that being an idiot,” she argued.
“Which is why you’re ideal for this proposal. There’s no possibility we’ll ever be anything but opponents.”
“I can agree but get on with your prop—proposal.”
She nearly said proposition, not a word she wanted to use with a hundred and eighty or so pounds of lean masculinity emitting pheromones like heat from a blast furnace. Not that she was the least bit attracted to Zack.
“I have this marriage-pushing grandfather…”
She snapped to attention. “The same grandfather who smashed your bridge to smithereens?”
“That’d be the one.”
“You’re not alone.”
“Huh?” His face scrunched in confusion.
“I have a pushy grandfather too. His mission in life is to turn me into his idea of a happily married woman.”
“I don’t think Marsh cares a hoot whether I’m happy or not. He wants what he wants.”
“Marsh?”
“He doesn’t like to be called Grandpa. He wants his three grandsons married and on the board of Bailey Baby Products. Cole got his third of the shares when he married Tess. Nick, our half-brother, is still in college, so now it’s my turn.”
“If this is some bizarre marriage of convenience thing—”
“No. I’d pick someone I like if it was.”
“Thanks so much.”
“I hate the family business, and I want a wife like I want jock itch—”
“Feel free to be blunt.”
“Anyway, our mother is CEO of the company, but Marsh owns it and is chairman of the board. He’s threatened to sell out to strangers if we don’t toe the line. That means getting married. Mom lives for her job since Nick Senior, Cole’s and my stepdad, died a couple of years ago. Her chances of keeping it are slim to nothing if Marsh sells controlling interest to outsiders.”
“He’s making you get married
to keep your mother’s job. Is she his daughter-in-law?”
“No, his daughter.”
She could tell he hated revealing family problems, so she didn’t understand why he was. “I still don’t see where I come in.”
“Cole and his wife, Tess, are eager to start a family. If they succeed, we hope to persuade Marsh to settle my share of the stock on the baby and forget about coercing me into marriage. I don’t care anything about the business. I intend to make my own money, and I sure as hell don’t want to be on the board of directors of Bailey Baby Products.”
“Then why pretend you’re going to marry me? It will be pretending?”
“Absolutely.” He snorted. “I can’t imagine marrying you in real life.”
“We’re agree on that.” She tried to snort but sniffed instead.
“In fact, we don’t even have to pretend to be engaged. I just need a serious girlfriend, one I can use to block the old boy’s matchmaking mania. She has to be someone nice. Marsh’s brother ruined his life by marrying a wild woman—Granddad’s word, not mine. And you seem nice enough to meet the bar.”
“Thanks.” She rolled her eyes. “But how can you pass me off as a serious girlfriend if you don’t even like me? You’re no actor.”
“Granted, but I don’t see all that much of Marsh. I just want a reason not to date the women my grandfather digs up. He came by the site just the other day after you left to ask how the wife search was going. The only way to hold him off is to say I’ve already met the perfect woman.”
“Me?” She put a hand to her chest.
“You.”
“Make someone up.”
“Ha. He’s too sharp for make-believe. He would probably check out anyone I invented. I need a live body. He can see you on TV and make up his own mind about you.”
“But no dating?”
“Be serious.”
“Hmm…for this you’ll sign a contract to do one guest appearance per week for twenty-six weeks?”
“Twenty-six. I don’t have time for six, let alone twenty-six. All those men you so effectively distracted from their work with your visit depend on Cole and me for paychecks. Summer is our busy season.”
“We take a break from taping later in the summer. The twenty-six episodes would run into next year.”