The Last Groom On Earth
The Last Groom On Earth
Kristin James
HERE COMES THE GROOM? So what if everyone thought Bryce Richards would make the perfect husband? Angela Hewitt had fought enough childhood battles with him to know better. But when her sexy nemesis came to her rescue, she suddenly felt like a damsel in distress - heart palpitations and all! Now she was dreaming of forever with the last man she'd every marry!Bryce wondered what had come over him - kissing Angela of all people! He wasn't even sure why he was trying to help out this reckless, exasperating, irresistible woman. Falling in love with her was out of the question!Bryce wouldn't marry her if… if… Well, okay, maybe he would… .
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u279fe455-bef3-55e8-9d17-e9a1278b87c3)
Excerpt (#u07c2c258-7d9c-52da-aea6-2e299645e646)
Dear Reader (#u82aa395a-a8d0-580f-9e2c-916f8bdeda40)
Title Page (#uf0a78dcc-fe7c-5c29-82ea-9e376edfe125)
About the Author (#u5598bdaf-d66c-5bb0-9fea-be797d46f4ed)
One (#uac061466-7152-5ae6-966b-63241c068443)
Two (#ue807615e-daac-5dee-803d-0f49da8ed713)
Three (#ub389b93d-7707-5900-8590-48ab8ad4b9fb)
Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“You’re Not At All My Type,”
Angela said as her thumb traced the line of his upper lip.
“No,” Bryce agreed. “Nor are you mine.”
His hand sank into her hair at the nape, holding her head immobilized, and he leaned toward her until his face was only inches from hers. “I’d have to be crazy to get involved with you. But I’m tired of being sensible,” he growled. “Tonight I don’t want to be careful. I want to take you to bed. To feel your body under mine.”
Angela shivered. “What if I said yes?”
Award-winning author Kristin James “touches readers’ hearts.”
—Romantic Times
Dear Reader,
Welcome to the wonderful world of Silhouette Desire! This month, look for six scintillating love stories. I know you’re going to enjoy them all. First up is The Beauty, the Beast and the Baby, a fabulous MAN OF THE MONTH from Dixie Browning. It’s also the second book in her TALL, DARK AND HANDSOME miniseries.
The exciting SONS AND LOVERS series also continues with Leanne Banks’s Ridge: The Avenger. This is Leanne’s first Silhouette Desire, but she certainly isn’t new to writing romance. This month, Desire has Husband: Optional, the next installment of Marie Ferrarella’s THE BABY OF THE MONTH CLUB. Don’t worry if you’ve missed earlier titles in this series, because this book “stands alone.” And it’s so charming and breezy you’re sure to just love it!
The WEDDING BELLES series by Carole Buck is completed with Zoe and the Best Man. This series just keeps getting better and better, and Gabriel Flynn is one scrumptious hero. Next is Kristin James’ Desire, The Last Groom on Earth, a delicious opposites-attract story written with Kristin’s trademark sensuality.
Rounding out the month is an amnesia story (one of my favorite story twists), Just a Memory Away, by award-winning author Helen R. Myers.
And next month, we’re beginning CELEBRATION 1000, a very exciting, ultraspecial three-month promotion celebrating the publication of the 1000th Silhouette Desire. During April, May and June, look for books by some of your most beloved writers, including Mary Lynn Baxter, Annette Broadrick, Joan Johnston, Cait London, Ann Major and Diana Palmer, who is actually writing book #1000! These will be months to remember, filled with “keepers.”
As always, I wish you the very best,
Lucia Macro
Senior Editor
Please address questions and book requests to:
Silhouette Reader Service
U.S.:3010 Walden ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269
Canadian:P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3
The Last Groom
on Earth
Kristin James
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
KRISTIN JAMES
is a former attorney married to a family counselor, and they have a young daughter. Her family and her writing keep her busy, but when she does have free time, she loves to read. In addition to her contemporary romances, she has written a number of historicals.
One (#ulink_f32c8e67-1c9e-5f74-83df-c63f11a4b2ea)
Bryce Richards had thought he was ready for anything when it came to Angela Hewitt, but he found that he was wrong. He was not prepared to walk into the offices of H & A Enterprises and find a witch standing on a stool in the middle of the room.
He stopped, struck dumb, and simply gaped at the woman on the stool. Another woman knelt at her feet, mumbling something as she fingered the hem of the witch’s dress. Bryce wondered for one mad moment if he had stumbled into some sort of pagan ceremony. Then the kneeling woman let out a yelp of pain and reached up to remove the pins she held clenched be tween her teeth.
“Would you stop wriggling?” she asked irritably. “I’ll never get this hem fixed at this rate.”
Bryce realized with relief that the woman on the floor was measuring a hem on the “witch’s” dress. He looked more closely at what the “witch” wore. It was long and flowing and black, clinging tightly to her torso, then floating out loosely below her hips in layers of some diaphanous material. The edges of each layer were cut in a zigzag fashion so that it hung in points, and the ends of the loose sleeves were cut in the same way. It was this cut and the color of the dress that had made him think immediately of a witch’s costume. Now, looking at the plunging V-cut neckline of the dress, he realized that it must be some sort of odd evening gown. It was, he told himself, much too sexy for riding broomsticks and casting spells.
His eyes lingered on the neckline. The woman’s breasts were full and creamy white, pushing up and out of the black material in a way that made his fingers itch to curve over the lush flesh. He dropped his gaze lower, moving over the material that clung to her breasts, waist and hips as if it were a second skin. His loins tightened in response. Who was this woman, and what on earth was she doing dressed like this and standing in the middle of a business office?
Then he looked up, and he knew. It was Angela Hewitt herself. He could not see her face; her head was bent as she peered down at the woman working on her hem. But that shock of curling red hair could belong to only one person. He remembered it clearly, even if it had been almost fourteen years—and even if it now hung in burnished, inviting curls instead of braids or a wild tangle. He should have known, Bryce thought. Trust Angela Hewitt to be under investigation by the IRS and yet be unconcernedly trying on evening gowns in the middle of her office.
Angela glanced up at him, then turned and called out, “Hey, somebody’s appointment is here!”
Bryce glanced around the room for the first time. It was large, the wide main hall of the old house near downtown Raleigh in which H & A Enterprises was located. A receptionist’s desk, vacant at the moment, stood to one side of the elegant curved staircase. The rest of the hallway was empty, sweeping back in a dazzling expanse of gleaming gold oak flooring to a swinging door at the opposite end. On either side of the hallway, several doors stood open. A few heads popped out of the doors at Angela’s announcement, and the swinging door in the back opened, and a man peered out.
Everyone looked at Bryce blankly. Then they turned to look at Angela.
“Hey, Angie, looking good,” one of the young men commented, and another let out a wolf whistle.
Angela grimaced at the man who had whistled. “I don’t know. Somehow, I don’t think Maladora is really me. I mean, whoever heard of an evil sorceress with freckles and red hair?”
One of the women watching chuckled and said, “Then why don’t you go as Princess Alicia?”
Bryce’s cool gray gaze swept over the scene. This hardly looked like a well-run business, with the employees hanging in their doorways, the owner creating a distraction in the middle of the office, and all of them sounding like the inhabitants of a madhouse. He suspected that their accounting procedures were just as lax. No wonder the IRS was breathing down their necks.
“Nah, I was her last year,” Angela answered offhandedly. “I was a medieval lady the year before. And I think a Southern belle is way too overdone.”
She turned to Bryce and asked seriously, “What do you think? Do I look like Maladora to you?”
“I don’t know,” Bryce responded crisply, “since I have no idea what or who Maladora is. Miss Hewitt, if I could speak with you…”
Angela looked at him, slightly puzzled, then her eyes narrowed. “You!” She spat out the word in recognition. “You’re Bryce Richards!” From the tone of her voice, she might have been saying, “Jack the Ripper!”
“Yes.” He nodded his head in greeting.
“What are you doing here?” Angela frowned at him darkly.
“Your parents asked me to—”
“Arrgh.” Angela made an exasperated noise deep in her throat and, holding up her skirts, lithely hopped off the stool. “I might have known they’d do something like this,” she announced to no one in particular, then turned, with an eloquent swish of her skirts, and stalked toward the stairs.
Bryce followed her. She whirled at the foot of the stairs and glared at him. “Go away. I don’t need you. Nor do I need my parents sending their flunky down here to pester me.”
“I can see that you still have the same charming personality,” Bryce began, then stopped. He reminded himself that he intended to hold onto his temper. He was determined not to let Angela get to him, as she had done so many times years ago.
“And I can see that you are still the same prig you always were,” she snapped back. She drew a breath to say more, but then she glanced up at the top of the stairs, where several more interested spectators had gathered, and she shut her mouth with a snap.
Angela cast him a withering glance—just as if, Bryce thought with a growing sense of indignation, it had been he who was creating this scene. Then she turned and stomped up the stairs and into the room at the top, closing her door behind her with a loud crack.
Angela was furious. She reached back, unzipped her dress and ripped it off, wadding it into a ball and hurling it at a chair in the corner of the room. She might have known, she thought. Trust her parents to decide that she was too incompetent to handle this problem and then send down their Boy Scout to tell her what to do.
Damn Bryce Richards! She hadn’t even thought about him for years. Now he showed up, and all the old feelings of inadequacy, resentment and rejection came flooding in on her.
Angela set her jaw as she stalked over to her desk and jerked on the jeans and T-shirt that she had been wearing before she tried on the costume. She remembered that first day when she had come into the den of her family home in Charlotte and found Bryce sitting with her mother, discussing some horribly boring math problem that Angela hadn’t even understood, and her mother had been beaming at him like a proud parent with a precocious child. Angela’s heart had immediately dropped down to her socks.
All her life she had never fit in with her family. Her mother was a professor of accounting of some note, and her father was a banker. Both sides of the family were littered with hardheaded businessmen, engineers, actuaries and scientists. All of them were levelheaded, logical, systematic people whose every decision was based on a rational analysis of the options.
Angela’s sister, Jenny, had fit in with them; Angela could remember her actually becoming excited when she figured out the key to a difficult math assignment. Grown now, she worked in the bank and had married a chemical engineer.
Angela, on the other hand, had been flighty, daydreaming and impulsive. Her decisions were made on an instinctive, gut-level feeling, and she found math courses boring. Her favorite subject was literature, and she preferred to spend her days hidden in some nook or other, reading about knights and fair maidens, adventure and romance. She remembered once, when she had been sitting in front of the television, enthralled in an old black-and-white swashbuckler, her science homework open and forgotten on her lap, her mother had come into the room and found her. Marina Hewitt had said nothing, simply stared at her daughter in dismay and astonishment. Angela had felt like crying. It wasn’t simply that her mother disapproved of her neglecting her homework to watch an old movie. What was more upsetting to Angela was that Marina could not comprehend why anyone would even want to do such a thing.
Angela had never felt quite a part of her family. By the age of twelve, when Bryce Richards came on the scene, she was convinced that everything about her was wrong. Though she had wanted and tried all her life to fit in with the other Hewitts, she had never been able to, and the attempt to do so had made her miserable. The years of intensive math courses ahead of her, which her parents had planned on, seemed like sheer punishment. She didn’t want to be methodical; she didn’t want to plan out her high school, her college and then her life. She wanted to be free and easy, to go where the winds of fortune took her. Yet at the same time, she felt guilty for rebelling against her parents, for not wanting to be another model daughter, and she could not squelch the old desire that her parents love her just as she was.
Then Bryce, Mr. Perfect, had come along. He was one of her mother’s students in a night course she taught at the local university, and Marina had taken him on as her protégé. He had come over to visit frequently. Her parents invited him to dinner, sometimes took him with them on family outings, spent long hours talking to him. He shared her parents’ interests. He admired and respected them. Or, as the twelve-year-old Angela had seen it, he spent most of his time buttering them up. In Angela’s opinion, he was a gawky, thin boy of nineteen, a dopey numbers nerd—the epitome of everything she disliked. Worse than that, it was obvious to her that her parents adored him, which only confirmed what kind of feeling they must have for her, his opposite. Her parents were taking him in, a sort of surrogate son, and as a consequence she would be, she knew, squeezed even further out of the family.
In short, in Bryce Richards she had seen her enemy. The battleground was her house, and her parents, the prize. She played childish tricks on him at every opportunity, and the scoldings and groundings she received from her parents for those tricks only made her dislike Bryce more. The harder she tried to defeat him, the more she was separated from her family. Finally, after a year, she had given up. She admitted to herself that he had won, and she had lost. She withdrew into her own interests, spending hours curled up in her room reading science fiction and fantasy or zapping enemies with her joystick in front of the game console and TV set. When Bryce was around, she made it a point to stay out of sight. By the time she was fifteen, Bryce had graduated from college and gone to another city to work. He and her parents had always stayed in touch, but Angela had never inquired about him. She had not seen him again until today.
She groaned and buried her head in her hands, leaning her elbows against the desk. What a time for him to pop up again! It was the last straw to have to put up with him when she was already under the stress of a threatened IRS investigation—and with her latest project only half done and her deadline a few more weeks away. What made it even more awful was the fact that her parents had told Bryce about her problems, had asked him to come rushing down here and save her—indeed, she was sure that they must have begged him, in order to get him to help her.
She had enjoyed a better relationship with her parents the past few years. They hadn’t been able to argue with the obvious success of her business; all the silly impulsive things she had done, which they had moaned over, had turned out to be highly profitable in the long run. And with the miles between Raleigh and Charlotte to separate them, she and her parents had achieved a certain friendliness, almost adult to adult.
That they had turned around and spilled all her troubles to Bryce Richards was a betrayal of that newly achieved closeness. And they had asked him to come save her, too!—as if she were a baby, an incom petent. It was humiliating. Bryce was the last, the last person she wanted helping her. Not only did he probably share her parents’ assessment of her as a scatterbrained nincompoop, but she also felt sure that he thoroughly disliked her, as well. After all, she had been mean to him as only a hurt twelve-year-old can be, and she doubted whether he had forgotten. He had a memory like an elephant’s—worse, like an accountant’s.
There was a loud rap on the door, and a fraction of a second later, it opened, framing Bryce Richards in the doorway. He was frowning, his mouth tightly compressed, and his face looked carved out of stone. He was certainly no longer the gawky young man she remembered, Angela thought to herself. It was no wonder that it had taken her a few moments to recognize him. He was tall, of course, but his body was rock-solid now, and he moved with confidence and surety. She had not remembered him as being so handsome, and she wondered if it was maturity that had changed his face or if she had simply been too blinded by her dislike of him to notice the clean-cut lines of his face. His eyes had always been intense, but fifteen years ago, she had not realized how attractive their odd silvery gray color was.
“What are you doing following me?” Angela snapped, irritated at the foolish way her thoughts were wandering. Even as she said it, she realized how childishly petty she sounded. She blushed, embarrassed and even more irritated that she could so easily fall back into long-ago patterns.
“I drove all the way down here from Charlotte because Marina asked me to. I’m not going to turn around and drive back just because you’re too pigheaded-”
“Well, you could have saved yourself the trouble of the trip,” Angela retorted, “if you had bothered to call me first. I would have told you that I don’t need your help.”
His eyebrows rose in a sardonic expression of disbelief, and he moved forward into the room. He sat down in the chair in front of her desk and folded his hands, looking at her with a galling air of patience, as if she were a child or mentally defective.
“You don’t need help when the IRS has your company under investigation?”
“Mother had no right to tell you about it.”
Bryce shrugged. “She was concerned about you.”
Angela wanted to snap back that Marina was concerned because she thought that Angela couldn’t do anything, but she kept her lips shut tight against the words. Both she and Bryce might know that that was her mother’s opinion, but she wasn’t about to admit it to him.
“We’ll manage just fine without your help.”
“Wait a minute,” a voice said from the doorway.
Angela looked up to see a short, slightly balding man with a round face and a warm smile standing outside the doorway, peering in interestedly. Angela groaned inwardly.
“Who is’ this guy? What’s he talking about?” the man went on.
“Yeah.” A blond woman who had been standing just to the side of the door stuck her head inside, also. “I’m not sure we want to turn down help quite so quickly.”
Angela sighed. “Hello, Kelly. Tim. Can’t a person have a private conversation around here?”
Kelly cocked her head, looking judicious, then said, “It’s hard. Particularly when your door’s open.”
“And you started your argument downstairs in front of everyone,” Tim added.
“All right. Tim, Kelly, this is Bryce Richards. He’s a friend of my parents. Bryce, this is Timothy Allen, my partner, and Kelly Beeckman, our chief financial officer.”
Kelly grinned and amended, “Head bookkeeper, in other words.”
Tim smiled at Bryce and reached out to shake his hand. “Nice to meet you. You’ve known Angela a long time?”
“Since I was twelve,” Angela said shortly. “I was just telling Bryce that we can handle the IRS problem. We have the C.P.A. who did our taxes, and we hired a tax attorney.”
“And with their help, you’ve gone from an ordinary audit into a full-blown investigation.” Bryce pointed this out casually.
Angela shot him a fulminating glance. Tim’s round face grew worried, and Kelly began to chew at her lower lip.
“Look, Angela, if Mr. Richards thinks he can help…” Kelly began.
“My parents are interfering, that’s all.”
Tim ignored her and turned toward Bryce. “What makes Mr. and Mrs. Hewitt think you can help us?”
“Because I’m an auditor. I’ve worked for the IRS and as an auditor for the Feds. Now I have my own company in Charlotte, and our specialty is fiscal investigation.”
“Fiscal investigation?” Tim looked blank. “What’s that mean?”
“Well, basically, it’s that we find errors and fraud. We’re sort of a security company in the financial arena. We study corporate systems of accounting and set up ways to avoid theft and fraud. We find leaks and duplications of work. We outline plans to trim the fat.”
Tim’s eyes widened. “Why, that sounds like you could help us.” He turned to look inquiringly at Angela.
“We don’t need him.” Angela crossed her arms defensively. “Besides, it’ll cost a fortune, and we’re already paying for that expensive tax attorney—and the whole reason the IRS is suspicious is because they think we aren’t making enough money! How can we afford to hire him?”
“I’m not charging you.” Bryce interrupted quietly. “I’m doing this as a favor to your mother.”
“Oh.” Somehow Angela felt even more irritated by this fact. “I’m not a charity case,” she told him coldly. “If we need your services, we’ll pay for them.”
“Of course. It isn’t as if we haven’t made any money the past few years,” Tim said jovially. “We just had higher expenses the last year—more staff, more development costs, that sort of thing. But we’re still strong. We’re making good money. Angela’s just upset.”
Angela made a strangled noise in her throat, and Tim glanced over at her. “Well, it’s true, Angie. Everyone is. How could we not be with the government sniffing around like we’re some kind of criminals? I think we ought to let Mr. Richards try, see what he can come up with.”
“I don’t know…” Kelly said doubtfully, looking at Angela, then back at Tim. “If there’s something wrong, we would have found it already. Maybe the IRS is on a wild-goose chase. They haven’t told us what they expect to find, have they?”
“No. They’ve been frustratingly tight-lipped.” Angela was pleased that Kelly was supporting her. “They’re just poking into our records and making a nuisance of themselves. I don’t think they even know what they’re looking for.”
“Maybe they don’t,” Bryce agreed. “But if you think that the IRS is going to look at a few records, then shrug their shoulders and leave, you’re incredibly naive. Once they’re on your trail, they’ll be after you till they get you.”
“But there’s nothing to get!” Angela burst out. “We’ve paid our taxes every year. We reported all our income. Our deductions are legal.”
“That’s true.” Tim nodded. “I mean, everything we’ve done is aboveboard, so we really shouldn’t have anything to worry about. It’s a nuisance, but in the end they’re bound to find out that there’s no basis for their suspicions, and they’ll drop the investigation.”
Bryce turned his cool gray eyes on him for a moment, then began to shake his head. “I think all three of you are in for a rude awakening. The IRS is like a terrier with a rat. Sticking your head in the sand is not going to make them go away.”
He paused for a moment. All three of the others in the office stared back at him. Finally he shrugged and stood up. “All right. I can’t beat you over the head to make you do it. It’s your business.” He turned and looked directly at Angela. “I‘ll tell your mother you prefer to go it on your own. Goodbye, Angela.” He nodded at them all. “Good luck.”
He didn’t need to add the next line. “You’ll need it.” His expression as he turned away from them made that opinion clear.
He closed the door behind him. Angela leaned back in her chair with a sigh and closed her eyes. “The past few months,” she said softly, “have been the worst of my life.”
The IRS had begun an audit of their company in January. At first it had seemed perfectly ordinary, and Angela had not been worried, as she was sure that their record-keeping would bear them out. But as the thing went on, it had seemed to mushroom, until Angela had begun to be afraid—so much so that she had divulged her worries to her mother last week on the telephone.
“Amen,” Kelly agreed, plopping down in the chair Bryce had just vacated.
Tim began to rub his chin in a familiar nervous habit. “Come on, you guys, cheer up. It’ll turn out okay. It has to.”
“No, it doesn’t.” Angela opened her eyes and looked at him. Tim was a sweet guy and a good friend, not to mention an absolute whiz at computers, but he was not a person who liked to face reality. He was more likely to deny an unwelcome truth and ignore it than to try to change it or adapt to it. “What if Bryce is right? What if we are being ostriches? We could lose our whole business.”
“Don’t say that!” Kelly squeaked.
Angela looked over at the blonde. They had been friends for over ten years. In fact, she had met Kelly before she even knew Tim. Kelly had lived in her dorm at the University of North Carolina, and they had met in the cafeteria. Much to Angela’s amazement—she had never dreamed she could have anything in common with an accounting major—they had become fast friends. Three years later, when the tiny business of computer games that Angela and Tim had started had grown so big that they needed someone to handle the accounts full-time, Angela had pulled Kelly into the business. Her levelheadedness had proved to be the perfect complement to Angela’s and Tim’s dreamer tendencies. Over the years, as their business had grown, so had Kelly’s job; she presided over the entire business end of H & A Enterprises: orders, shipping, and accounting. Angela and Tim both agreed that whatever their creativity had produced, the business would never have boomed as it had without Kelly.
“Kelly…” Angela began thoughtfully, “why did you say you didn’t think we needed Bryce’s help?”
Kelly shrugged. “It seemed pretty clear to me that you didn’t like him. That you didn’t want him to be messing in our business records.”
“You’re right, I didn’t.” Angela got up and began to pace the room.
Her instinctive reaction had been to get rid of Bryce. But now she was beginning to wonder if she had acted in a hasty and childish manner. Her parents had been worried enough about her situation to send him&—and whatever else one might say about the elder Hewitts, they knew the business world. They were not likely to panic or act impulsively; they were logical and coolly analytical to a fault. They also knew exactly how good Bryce Richards was at his business. If, in their opinion, he could help H & A Enterprises out of this trouble, then he probably could.
“Maybe I was wrong to kick him out so quickly,” Angela admitted with a sigh. “Maybe I should have given him a chance to see if he could find anything.”
“Your opinion is good enough for me,” Tim responded, smiling at her reassuringly. “You know him better than Kelly and I do. I’m going to leave the decision up to you.”
“I agree.” Kelly chimed in.
“Thanks.” Angela smiled at her friends. It warmed her heart that they had such confidence in her. People had told her that it would be impossible to be partners with a friend, but time had proven those doom-sayers false. She had worked with Tim and Kelly for almost eight years, and both the business and their friendship had flourished.
Still, today was one time when she would have wished that they were not so quick to rely on her judgment. She was open-minded enough to admit that her dislike of Bryce was not rational, but emotional, and she worried now that she had made a mistake that might hurt their business.
Tim and Kelly returned to their offices, and Angela settled down behind her desk to work. But after several minutes of staring at her blank blue computer screen, she realized that working was impossible at the moment. Her mind was like a hamster on its wheel, circling endlessly.
With a sigh, she planted her elbows on the desk and sank her head onto her hands; she stared down at her desk, thinking. She disliked Bryce Richards, and she did not want him here at the office, poking his nose into everything. But, on the other hand, she would never forgive herself if he could have found the key to their financial troubles, and she had not let him just because of an old childhood antagonism.
Finally she picked up the phone and dialed her mother’s number in Charlotte. A few minutes later, she was in her car heading toward the Radisson Hotel.
Two (#ulink_d321c6ff-028e-5d89-8c39-60e2de7a3353)
Bryce leaned back in his chair and massaged his temples wearily. He had checked into his hotel and started work on his presentation for CompCon tomorrow, just as he had planned, but he found it difficult to concentrate on the numbers strung out across the sheets in front of him. His meeting with Angela had left him irritable and dissatisfied.
He made a noise of disgust and got to his feet. That woman! He got up and began to pace the room. Angela Hewitt was as great a pest as she had been as an adolescent. He could remember with great clarity the silly tricks she had played on him when he came to visit her mother. A slightly chubby girl with wild, curly red hair and a mouthful of braces, she had seemed to delight in making Bryce feel foolish and out of place. And, of course, he thought, remembering his own gawky, uncertain self, he had been the perfect foil for her tricks. He had already felt ill at ease just being in the Hewitts’ house. It was gracious and obviously expensive, but without a breath of ostentation, a jewel of old-money taste. Being inside their house had been a glimpse into an entirely different sort of life for him, a life that he had wanted with every fiber of his being. At the same time, he had been terrified that he might break something in his awkwardness or that he might make some gauche mistake that would reveal his ignorance.
Angela seemed to have understood that with the instinct that children have, and she had played on it. Bryce had never been sure when he might find a whoopee cushion on his seat or a plastic bug in his drink. She was prone to tell him stories about her family, which he was never sure were true or not. He had believed the first one, that Angela’s aunt was a famous pianist, and had mentioned something about her to Marina, who had looked at him blankly, then told him that she didn’t have a sister. He had felt a fool and after that he was sure never to repeat anything Angela told him unless someone else had confirmed her story.
A reluctant smile twitched at Bryce’s lips as he remembered her wilder concoctions. No one could ever accuse Angela of lacking imagination. Looking back on it now, he could see that her tricks were merely adolescent buffoonery. Someone with more confidence than he had at the time would have shrugged them off. But he had been a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, with nothing going for him but his brain, and he had wanted desperately to fit in.
Of course, he was nothing like that boy now. He was powerful and confident, used to moving in circles of great wealth. Coming down here, he had told himself that Angela had changed, too, that she would no longer get under his skin. After all, he simply would not allow it.
It had taken him less than five minutes to realize how wrong he had been. Angela Hewitt was as infuriating as ever. Oh, she had changed, all right-changed in a way that made his heart speed up and his loins begin to throb in a most annoying manner. The pudgy girl with a mouth of metal was gone; in her place was a curvaceous woman whose curling mass of red hair made a man want to sink his hands into it. Bryce had found that his eyes returned again and again to Angela’s soft, high breasts—all too visible in that ridiculous costume she had been wearing—and his palms had itched with a desire to follow the curve of her buttocks. Even now he couldn’t keep his mind off her full, soft mouth; his mind had drifted off his presentation figures several times to contemplate exactly how those lips would feel beneath his.
But that intense, vibrant desirability did not ease Bryce’s irritation with her; if anything, it made it even worse. He hated the fact that he had responded physically to a woman who grated so on his nerves. Bryce had never been one who let his hungers intrude on his professional life. It was his policy never to date anyone with whom he worked—employee, boss, or client—and it was a policy from which he had never strayed. Oh, he would notice when a woman in his office or in one of his client’s was exceptionally pretty or sexy. He was, after all, a man, and he was stirred by the sight of long, well-shaped legs or a deliciously curved figure. But it was never more than a passing thought. He noticed it, then dismissed it from his mind. Nor was he ever interested in a woman whom he disliked or who irritated him, at least not for longer than it took for her to get on his nerves.
But today, standing there with Angela Hewitt, irritated as he was by her obstructive, naive attitude, he couldn’t keep his eyes off her, couldn’t help thinking how delightful it would feel to have those legs twined around his back. It was disturbing to have been so attracted yet so annoyed by her. Bryce Richards did not like anything illogical, and his wayward thoughts about Angela certainly did not make sense.
It was just as well, he told himself, that she had not wanted his expertise. It would have been difficult working with the woman, given his conflicting emotions. He would be better off not being in her office—yet it was thoroughly exasperating to have her deny his offer of aid.
There was a knock on the door, and Bryce turned, relieved, thinking that it was room service. He had called them and ordered dinner a few minutes earlier. No doubt much of his turmoil and lack of ability to concentrate was due to the fact that he was hungry. Once he had eaten, he would feel like his old self again.
He opened the door, smiling in anticipation, only to find that the person outside his door was Angela Hewitt. His face fell in disappointment.
“Oh. It’s you.”
“Why, thank you,” Angela returned sarcastically. “Nice to see you, too.”
Bryce grimaced and stepped aside, motioning for her to enter. “I was expecting room service. Besides,” he went on as she walked into the room, “our last meeting did not leave me with a great deal of eagerness to see you again.”
“For Heaven’s sake…” Angela gave an airy wave of her hand and went to the window to look out at the view. “Can’t anyone disagree with you without your holding a grudge?”
Bryce found himself watching the action of her hips beneath her tight jeans as she walked, and that irritated him as much as her words. He closed the door with a snap. “I’m not holding a grudge, I simply hoped I wouldn’t have to see you again.”
Angela turned. “You’re so stuffy. You were stuffy even when you were nineteen.”
“Yes, and you were a pest. I’m sorry to say that you haven’t changed much, either.”
Angela lifted her chin in a defiant gesture. She hated apologizing—and to have to do it to this man, of all people! Gritting her teeth, she said, “I came to tell you that—that I was wrong. This afternoon when you were at our office, I was…”
“Rude?” Bryce suggested.
Angela flashed him a disgusted look and said, “Abrupt. I should not have dismissed your help so peremptorily.”
“Your partners ganged up on you to accept?”
“No. In fact, Tim told me to do whatever I think is best. He and Kelly trust me, you see. However, when I thought about it, I realized that I wasn’t acting in the company’s best interest. I was simply reacting to—” she made a vague gesture toward him “—the past. And my parents. I hate to accept help from them. It confirms their opinion of me.”
Bryce looked puzzled. “And what is their opinion of you?”
Angela gave him a look that indicated that she doubted his mental powers. “That I’m a flake. Ditzy and incompetent. All they see in any business is numbers, and they know how I am with those. So they figure that I’m bound to fail.”
“I don’t get that impression from them. I think they’re rather proud of you and your success, actually.”
Angela stared. “Are you sure you’re talking about my parents? Everett and Marina Hewitt?”
A faint smile touched Bryce’s lips. “Yes, I believe those are the ones.”
“I think you’re mistaken.”
“No. I imagine I know them a lot better than you. They may not understand you or what you do—”
Angela let out a dry chuckle. “That’s the understatement of all time.”
“—but they love you and are very proud of you. That’s why they’re concerned about this problem with the IRS.”
“Yes. My little problem.” Angela made a disgusted face and turned away to gaze out the window again.
When it appeared that she was going to say nothing else, Bryce prompted, “How did you find me?”
“I called Mother. She told me you always stayed here when you were in Raleigh, and she said you planned to spend the night because you had a presentation to CompCon in the morning. They’re a good company, by the way, but you have to handle Jason Willard with kid gloves.”
He gave her a stiff little bow of his head. “Thank you for the advice.”
“You’re welcome,” Angela replied, ignoring the note of sarcasm in his voice. She crossed her arms and looked at him.
Standing outside Bryce’s door, her stomach had been jittery with nerves. But now, seeing the mulish expression on his face, Angela felt, perversely, more relaxed. Bryce obviously did not like her being here. That fact made it easier for her to admit that she needed his help.
“Anyway,” she said, sitting down and crossing her legs, “I’m sorry. I thought about what you’d said, and Tim and Kelly and I talked it over. I decided I had been wrong to turn down your offer.” She gazed up at him a little defiantly, more as if she were being scolded than admitting that she had made a mistake. Bryce found it strangely appealing.
“I came to ask you if your offer still held,” she said. “Are you willing to find our problem?”
Angela could see from his face that he would have liked to turn her down, but she was counting on his promise to her mother to keep him from doing what he wanted.
Finally, grudgingly, he said, “Yes. I suppose I am—though, God knows, I’ll probably regret it. I can imagine what your records are like. You probably keep all your invoices in a shoe box.”
Angela grinned impishly. “I’d love to tell you that they were, just to see the smoke come out of your ears, but I can’t malign Kelly. She keeps excellent records. She’s not at all like me.”
“Obviously.”
Angela made a face at him. She watched him, more relaxed now that she had choked out her apology. She wondered why she had not remembered how handsome he was. Even if he had filled out, surely the bare bones of his good looks had been there: the firm, well-cut lips, the strong bones of his face, the dark-lashed gray eyes.
Bryce walked over to the table and sat down across from her. Angela could see the wary look on his face, and she wondered what he thought she was going to do. She decided not to help him out. She gazed back at him with wide eyes, swinging her foot and waiting for him to make the first move.
“All right,” he said, taking out a yellow pad and pencil and settling down to take notes. “Let’s get some basics. I need to know about your business.”
“Mother didn’t tell you?”
“She said only that you made computer games.”
“That’s right. Fantasy sort of games, mostly, some flight and road simulation sort of things. We’re beginning to move into the CD-Rom area. Our mainstay and what we started out with are the Concordia games and others like them.”
“Concordia games?” Bryce raised his eyebrows.
“You’ve never heard of them?”
“I don’t play computer games. I use my computer for work.”
“Of course. How silly of me.” Angela’s smile flashed, creating a dimple in her cheek.
There was something definitely sexy, Angela thought, about Bryce’s serious, intense gaze. The silvery gray eyes seemed to go right through her. She wondered if he brought the same single-minded intensity to his lovemaking as he did to his work. The thought sent a shiver through her.
She glanced away from him quickly. She couldn’t believe that she was thinking about Bryce this way. Bryce Richards, of all people! It was crazy; they could hardly manage to string together three or four civil sentences to each other. The thought of ever going to bed with him was sheer insanity. He was not her type, and she felt sure that Bryce would run as fast as he could the other way if he thought that she was interested in him. He had made it very clear what he thought of her.
“The Concordia games are quest games,” she said quickly to get her mind off her strange thoughts. “They are set in a fictional kingdom, Concordia, in some past time, vaguely medieval. There’s a king and queen and their beautiful daughter, Princess Alicia. Their enemy is an evil sorceress, Maladora.”
“Ah!” Bryce’s brows flew up in a look of enlightenment. “That’s who you were dressed as this afternoon.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Oh. For Tim’s party…it’s a week from Friday. A big charity costume party he throws every year for this children’s charity he’s involved with.”
“Oh.” His face cleared. “Okay. So what does this Maladora do?”
“Anyway, Maladora is very powerful, and though, of course, she’s defeated in each game, she always finds some way of coming back. In a weird way, people are probably more attached to her than to the princess or even Sir Leopold. He’s the knight from another country who came to Concordia and released the royal family from the enchantment that Maladora had put them under. That was our first game, Concordia. Our second was Concordia: Maladora Returns and the third was Concordia: Alicia’s Escape, and so on. Right now I’m working on the seventh. I’m going to introduce a new villain and have Maladora on the same side as the royal family for once. The games are humorous, particularly the contemporary series. We always put in little tongue-in-cheek things. They’re not the violent ones where you kick and stab and shoot your way to the end—you win by figuring out clues and collecting things along the way, then using them at the right time.”
“I see.”
From the expression on his face, Angela doubted that he did, but she let it pass. Bryce, she suspected, simply didn’t understand games; they were beyond his scope. That was the way her parents were. Numbers made sense; fantasies and entertainment did not.
“And these games are successful?”
“Very.” Angela bit back a smile at the faint tone of amazement in his voice. “People love them. They’re interesting and complex—you can work on them for days. One gets fun and a sense of accomplishment out of them. That big open room downstairs in our office, the one that has all the little cubicles with people with headsets?”
He nodded, remembering glancing into the room.
“Those are our telephone support lines. People who buy the games call to get help in using them. The support staff help customers if they’re having trouble setting up, and if they’re stuck, they’ll give them hints and ideas. The support lines are busy all day long. We’re grossing millions.”
Bryce looked faintly shocked. Angela supposed that from her mother’s explanation, he had expected Angela to have some little shoestring operation.
“How is the company set up?” he asked, scribbling on the pad.
“It’s a corporation. Tim and I started out as partners, but when it got bigger, we incorporated. Tim and I own nearly all the shares.”
“Kelly’s not a partner?”
“No. She’s bought some shares, and all our employees have gotten some shares as bonuses, but basically Tim and I own it. We began it. Later, we hired Kelly to do our accounting. Her job has grown as we have. Basically, now she oversees all operations except creating the games.”
“You and Tim do that?”
“Yes. I think up the stories and write out the plot line. Tim creates the software for them. We each have a few assistants now, but we still pretty much do all the Concordia games ourselves.” She shrugged. “It’s a lot more fun than overseeing the other stuff. I leave the simulation games alone. That’s Jeremy Coger’s field.”
She went on to explain how the games were packaged, marketed and distributed, and all the while Bryce scribbled across his pad. Angela looked at his. hand as it moved across the page. His skin was tanned, the back of his hand and his fingers lightly dotted with curling dark hairs. His fingers were long and strong, the nails short-clipped. It was a very masculine, no-nonsense sort of hand, but not stubby or rough. It wasn’t hard to imagine it moving with gentleness across a woman’s body.
Suddenly Angela’s thoughts flew to the bed beside them. She had hardly noticed it when she came in, but now it seemed to fill the room. She kept her eyes firmly away from it, sure that Bryce would somehow guess her thoughts if she so much as glanced at it. But, of course, since she was determined not to look at it, looking at it became an almost impossible urge to resist. She jumped restlessly to her feet and began to pace.
There was a long moment of silence, and Angela pivoted to look at Bryce. He was watching her, his brow drawn into a frown. She frowned back.
“Well? Are we through?”
He started and looked disconcerted. “What? Oh. No, I…let’s see.” He turned back to his yellow pad. “What about the IRS? When did that start?”
“About three months ago. They called us in for a routine audit. We showed them our records, and I assumed that was the last of it. Then all of a sudden, they started asking more questions, nosing around. I don’t know what they saw that set them off. This one guy, McGuire, kept saying that we didn’t make enough profit—like it was some kind of crime or something. We didn’t make as much profit as the last few years. But we just had a lot more expenses. Things like that happen. Don’t they?”
“Sure. And the IRS could be off track. Unfortunately they usually manage to run something down.”
Angela sighed. “I’m beginning to feel paranoid.”
“The IRS can do that to you.”
“I tell myself that if we haven’t done anything wrong, we don’t have anything to worry about. But they’re making me jittery. I keep thinking that somewhere we must have made a mistake and I just can’t see it. That’s why I told Mother the other day. I shouldn’t have…I knew it would worry her.”
“I’m sure she was glad you told her. She wants to help you.”
“I know. And she always expects that she’ll have to. That’s what makes it so galling.” Angela grimaced. “I hate to screw up in front of her.”
Bryce looked amazed. “But Marina’s very patient and understanding about mistakes. That’s why she’s such a wonderful teacher.”
“Yeah, well, it’s probably different when you’re a student rather than her daughter. When I didn’t understand things in math, she acted like I was being purposely obstructive. She couldn’t believe that I didn’t get it. Finally she came to realize that I really didn’t understand these things that seemed so obvious to her. Then she’d get this—I don’t know, distressed sort of look in her eyes. And I’d know that I disappointed her. I think she was afraid that I was mentally impaired.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Bryce said gruffly.
Angela glared at him. How could she have forgotten that she was talking to the man who thought Marina Hewitt could do no wrong? “I wouldn’t have expected you to understand.”
“Your prejudice is appalling.” He got up and strode across the room to where she stood.
“I’m not prejudiced!” Angela retorted, stung.
“I’m sure you’re not about all the politically correct things, but you most definitely are about people who are logical or mathematical. You presume that if a person understands numbers, they don’t understand anything else, that they’re emotionless robots. Being logical doesn’t mean that you can’t understand feelings.”
“You, I’m sure, are in touch with your feelings.” It galled her for him to lecture her, as if she were still a child.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re too stiff and uptight to even know that you have feelings. Look at you…here it is…six o’clock, in your hotel room, and you’re still wearing a tie—knotted at the top! I’m surprised you even took off your suit jacket. You were the same when you were nineteen, too. Stiff, dry, logical. You looked at my friends and me playing in the pool like we were creatures from another planet. And when I played a joke on you, you never even got mad. Any normal person would have blown up, but you just got stiffer and quieter. No doubt it wasn’t logical to get mad.”
Bryce stared at her in disbelief. “What should I have done? Tell my hostess’s child what a spoiled brat she was? Of course I held my tongue. To have said anything would have been hurtful to Marina. No doubt you think it’s ridiculous to be courteous.”
“Of course not!” Red flamed in Angela’s cheeks. She felt foolish and embarrassed and oddly hurt by his opinion of her. “But you can be courteous and still be capable of human emotions. You don’t have to be a statue like you.”
Bryce knew that was how she saw him, as a bloodless, passionless person, more a wax figure than a man. The idea infuriated him, all the more so because right now his blood was thrumming through his veins and even as they fought he could not stop thinking how desirable she looked. Angela was thoroughly annoying, but some elemental instinct in him wanted her, and that fact was as irritating as she was.
Suddenly, surprising himself as much as her, Bryce reached out and grabbed her shoulders. Angela froze in astonishment, staring at him with wide, disbelieving eyes as he pulled her to him and took her mouth in a long, searing kiss.
His lips were hot and demanding; his tongue slid along the seal of her lips, seeking entrance. Angela shivered, her knees amazingly weak, and opened her mouth to his seeking tongue. It was not a sweet kiss; it burned with anger and resentment…and passion. There was nothing emotionless or saintly about him now. His body curved around hers, his arms pressing her into his hard chest and thighs, and the heat was enveloping, enervating. His mouth possessed hers as if by right, his tongue exploring, challenging.
Angela sagged against him, and her fingers dug into his shirt in the back as she clung to him. His kiss made her tremble, made her forget who he was and what he was to her. She tasted the driving hunger that aroused her own, and she wanted more. Her tongue wound around his, stroking and seeking. She felt his breath shuddering out, hot upon her cheek, and his kiss gentled, no longer demanding, but coaxing and enticing her. His hand stroked up and down her back, pressing her into him. Angela wrapped her arms around his neck and gave herself up to his kiss.
Three (#ulink_6bc5bfec-968e-50db-b0e3-373f2e66e9e2)
Bryce’s lips moved over Angela’s, deliciously firm and warm. His hand slid down her body and onto her hip, then slowly back up. His thumb brushed against the side of her breast, sending a quiver of desire through her abdomen.
He lifted his mouth, but only to change the slant of his kiss. His kiss deepened; his tongue invaded her mouth. Angela answered eagerly, tasting the dark, silky pleasures of his mouth. She felt weak and strangely helpless, not like herself at all, but somehow the feeling was pleasurable as well as scary, as if she were about to step onto a wild ride at an amusement park or enter a new adventure. She wrapped her arms around Bryce’s neck, clinging to him.
For a long moment they were lost in intense pleasure, their mouths locked together, their bodies straining against each other. Then there was a knock on the door, breaking into the enchantment, and a bored voice drawled, “Room Service.”
Angela jumped, startled, and her lip came into painful contact with Bryce’s teeth. She stepped back, one hand pressed to her smarting lip, and stared at Bryce dazedly. This couldn’t be happening. Bryce Richards had just kissed her—and she had enjoyed it.
“Room service,” the disembodied voice repeated outside the door, and Bryce jerked into movement.
“Yes. Coming.” He started toward the door.
Angela cast a wild look around the room, then sank into a chair, pushing her hands back into her thick, curling hair. She tried to pull her thoughts back into some semblance of order while Bryce dealt with the hotel employee.
She had done some impulsive things in her life, but it occurred to her that this was probably the worst. Bryce Richards disliked her; he hadn’t kissed her because he was attracted to her. He had done it because she had made him mad. He had done it to establish that he was in control, to prove her wrong. She had insulted him, more or less accused him of being without passion, and he, of course, had to show her that he was not.
And she, like an idiot, had responded to his kiss! Angela couldn’t imagine what was wrong with her that she had acted that way. He was handsome, of course—in a cold way, she reminded herself—but he was all the things she disliked in a man: a staid workaholic with no sense of humor, a man who did things only because they made sense. She could not imagine Bryce Richards, skipping a day of work to go out and have a picnic. He was the sort of man who would bring a woman flowers because that was the accepted thing to do, but he would never think of surprising her with some odd little present that had irresistibly reminded him of her. He would make plans for an evening and follow them to the letter. In short, he was the sort of man with whom she would be bored in an hour or two—no matter how much she might feel an utterly inexplicable physical attraction to him.
It also occurred to Angela that right now Bryce was probably regretting what he had just done just as much as she was. She looked up.
Bryce was shutting the door behind the waiter. He turned and gazed across the room at her, every line of his body screaming that he was uncomfortable. He cleared his throat. “Well…”
Angela popped to her feet. “I better be going now.”
“What? Oh, yes, I suppose so. Look, Angela, I’m sorry—”
She shook her head, putting on what she hoped was a cheery, nonchalant face. “Nonsense. Happens to me all the time. Men stop me on the street to kiss me. It’s my irresistible charm.”
She nodded and left the room, closing the door behind her.
Bryce stood still for a moment after she left, gazing blankly at the door. Finally he turned to the room service cart and absently lifted the covers. His earlier hunger had vanished, and he studied the food with uninterest.
Room service had come just in time, he thought. Who knows what might have happened if they had not been interrupted?
Stifling a sigh, he sat down and began to eat.
Angela drove home in a fury. She parked her car in the single garage assigned to her condominium and stomped up the stairs to her condo, still seething over her encounter with Bryce Richards.
The condominium complex where she lived was small and secluded, surrounded by large, spreading oaks. It was an elegant place without being pretentious, and its occupants were by and large young professionals without children. Angela’s condo, toward the rear of the complex, was a small, utilitarian, down-to-earth place with little decoration. She didn’t spend much time here. Her real home was the lake house, and it was there that she had put in most of her effort of furnishing and decorating. This condo was simply a place to sleep during the week, and its primary advantages were that it was quiet and close to work.
The furniture was simple and comfortable; some of it she had had from the tiny first apartment she had shared with Kelly when their business was beginning. It looked old and well lived-in, and the stacks of books all around—in bookcases, on tables and in piles on the floor—added to the casual, cozy ambience. At odds with the furniture, however, were the array of electronic machines and gadgets around the place.
Angela had always been intrigued by gadgets and time-saving or energy-saving devices, and when the company had started making good money, she had allowed herself to indulge in the clever machines that caught her fancy. Though she was not fond of cooking, her kitchen was a treasure trove of bread machines, cappuccino makers, electric steamers, icecream machines and various sorts of food processors. The second bedroom, which served as her office at home, was stocked with a fax machine, copier, two computers and an assortment of hand-held computerized games, translators, calculators and electronic novelties. Her favorite was the home theater setup at one end of her living room, where a large-screen TV and a multitude of speakers, VCRs, laser disc players, tuners, tape players, etc., provided sensational sound and view for any movie.
Tonight, however, she had no interest in popping any cassette into the VCR. Nor did cooking a dinner appeal to her. She was too restless, too agitated; her mind kept jumping from her tax troubles to Bryce Richards to her bizarre behavior in his hotel room. She rattled purposelessly around the condo for a few minutes and finally wound up on the small balcony in back.
The balcony was shielded from the sun and neighbors by large, sheltering oaks, but it had a clear view of the balcony next door. There a slim, curly-haired, middle-aged man fussed over a group of hanging plants, watering them and carefully breaking off dead leaves.
“Hi, Jim.” Angela leaned against the railing and smiled at the man, who turned and beamed at her. Jim had more or less adopted Angela when she first moved into her condo six years earlier, telling her she was the daughter he had never had, and they had weathered many an emotional storm with each other over the intervening years.
“Sweetheart!” He came over, the empty watering pot dangling from his hand. “My, aren’t you home early? What happened?”
Angela grimaced reflexively. “Trouble, probably.”
“Really?” His brows arched in amused curiosity. “Do tell. Is it interesting or some boring business thing?”
“It’s people, not business. Or maybe a combination of both.”
“Well, why don’t you come over and tell Daddy all about it? I have hot water on the stove and I’ll fix you a nice cup of herbal tea if you want.”
“Sure. That sounds great.” Angela turned and walked back through her condominium.
Jim opened the door for her just as she reached it and led her inside, chattering all the way as he walked back into the kitchen to fetch her tea.
His condo was a mirror image of hers structurally, But there would never be any mistaking the two. Jim’s place was done in the same campy, flamboyant style in which he spoke and acted. Having been around him in moments when he was quite serious, direct, and even practical, Angela had never been quite sure whether this flamboyance was real or merely something he assumed as befitting the owner of a trendy art gallery.
“So what happened?” he asked as he bustled back out of the kitchen, carrying a small tray on which sat two cups.
Angela, who had kicked off her shoes and leaned back in an ultramodern turquoise canvas chair, reached up and took the steaming cup gratefully. “Mmm…smells delicious.”
“Thank you. I had water heated because I was expecting Harbaugh, but, of course, he called about two minutes before you came and said he was going to be late again. Lawyers.” He made a face and took a sip of his tea. “But never mind that. Tell me about you.”
Angela sighed and began to relate the events of this afternoon, to Jim’s appreciative noises and comments. When she finished, she shrugged. “So there you have it. I dislike this guy, always have. He represents everything I don’t like about my family and that whole world they inhabit. And then all of a sudden, he kissed me! And I enjoyed it!”
“Sounds like not such a terrible problem to me,” Jim joked.
Angela answered with a derisive snort. “I’m serious. It’s a complication, a stupid, weird complication—as if I didn’t have enough with this IRS thing hanging over my head.”
“Well, you know, opposites attract and all that. I mean, look at Harbaugh and me—a lawyer, for pity’s sake! You know how serious he is. Sometimes I swear the man has no sense of humor. But we’ve been together almost four years now.”
“I know. With some people it probably works out. But you don’t know Bryce Richards. He’s not just serious or humorless, he’s also methodical and critical and analytical. I doubt that the man knows how to have fun. Everything has to have a reason. Besides, we don’t even like each other. He’s precisely the type of. man I don’t want, and I’m sure he still has some kind of grudge against me, considering all the awful twelve-year-old kind of practical jokes I played on him. I mean, just because I’ve grown up and suddenly there’s this physical thing between us, that doesn’t mean that we’re going to start liking each other. We’re still the same people, like night and day. It would be a mess…especially with us working together now. It’s going to be hard enough being in the same office with him as it is. If we were having an affair, too, it would be impossible.”
“Sorry,” Jim said, retreating into the serious persona that he usually strove to keep hidden. “Just teasing—although it does sound like there’s an awful lot of free-floating emotions in this relationship. Well, frankly, Angie, it seems to me like the only solution is to avoid him.”
“How can I do that? He’ll be working right down the hall from me.”
“So? Go to work late and stay late. You already do that lots of times. Stay in your office while you’re there and don’t go wandering all over talking to everybody.”
“Exile myself from my own business?” Angela frowned. “I don’t want to do that.”
“Then get rid of him.”
“No. That wouldn’t be fair to Tim and Kelly. We need his help even if I don’t like him.” Angela sighed. “I guess you’re right. I’ll try to avoid him as much as I possibly can. I’ll hide out in my office till he’s through.” She smiled at him. “Thanks.”
“Ah, it was nothing.” Jim made a dismissive gesture with his hand.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/kristin-james/the-last-groom-on-earth/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Kristin James
HERE COMES THE GROOM? So what if everyone thought Bryce Richards would make the perfect husband? Angela Hewitt had fought enough childhood battles with him to know better. But when her sexy nemesis came to her rescue, she suddenly felt like a damsel in distress - heart palpitations and all! Now she was dreaming of forever with the last man she'd every marry!Bryce wondered what had come over him - kissing Angela of all people! He wasn't even sure why he was trying to help out this reckless, exasperating, irresistible woman. Falling in love with her was out of the question!Bryce wouldn't marry her if… if… Well, okay, maybe he would… .
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u279fe455-bef3-55e8-9d17-e9a1278b87c3)
Excerpt (#u07c2c258-7d9c-52da-aea6-2e299645e646)
Dear Reader (#u82aa395a-a8d0-580f-9e2c-916f8bdeda40)
Title Page (#uf0a78dcc-fe7c-5c29-82ea-9e376edfe125)
About the Author (#u5598bdaf-d66c-5bb0-9fea-be797d46f4ed)
One (#uac061466-7152-5ae6-966b-63241c068443)
Two (#ue807615e-daac-5dee-803d-0f49da8ed713)
Three (#ub389b93d-7707-5900-8590-48ab8ad4b9fb)
Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“You’re Not At All My Type,”
Angela said as her thumb traced the line of his upper lip.
“No,” Bryce agreed. “Nor are you mine.”
His hand sank into her hair at the nape, holding her head immobilized, and he leaned toward her until his face was only inches from hers. “I’d have to be crazy to get involved with you. But I’m tired of being sensible,” he growled. “Tonight I don’t want to be careful. I want to take you to bed. To feel your body under mine.”
Angela shivered. “What if I said yes?”
Award-winning author Kristin James “touches readers’ hearts.”
—Romantic Times
Dear Reader,
Welcome to the wonderful world of Silhouette Desire! This month, look for six scintillating love stories. I know you’re going to enjoy them all. First up is The Beauty, the Beast and the Baby, a fabulous MAN OF THE MONTH from Dixie Browning. It’s also the second book in her TALL, DARK AND HANDSOME miniseries.
The exciting SONS AND LOVERS series also continues with Leanne Banks’s Ridge: The Avenger. This is Leanne’s first Silhouette Desire, but she certainly isn’t new to writing romance. This month, Desire has Husband: Optional, the next installment of Marie Ferrarella’s THE BABY OF THE MONTH CLUB. Don’t worry if you’ve missed earlier titles in this series, because this book “stands alone.” And it’s so charming and breezy you’re sure to just love it!
The WEDDING BELLES series by Carole Buck is completed with Zoe and the Best Man. This series just keeps getting better and better, and Gabriel Flynn is one scrumptious hero. Next is Kristin James’ Desire, The Last Groom on Earth, a delicious opposites-attract story written with Kristin’s trademark sensuality.
Rounding out the month is an amnesia story (one of my favorite story twists), Just a Memory Away, by award-winning author Helen R. Myers.
And next month, we’re beginning CELEBRATION 1000, a very exciting, ultraspecial three-month promotion celebrating the publication of the 1000th Silhouette Desire. During April, May and June, look for books by some of your most beloved writers, including Mary Lynn Baxter, Annette Broadrick, Joan Johnston, Cait London, Ann Major and Diana Palmer, who is actually writing book #1000! These will be months to remember, filled with “keepers.”
As always, I wish you the very best,
Lucia Macro
Senior Editor
Please address questions and book requests to:
Silhouette Reader Service
U.S.:3010 Walden ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269
Canadian:P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3
The Last Groom
on Earth
Kristin James
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
KRISTIN JAMES
is a former attorney married to a family counselor, and they have a young daughter. Her family and her writing keep her busy, but when she does have free time, she loves to read. In addition to her contemporary romances, she has written a number of historicals.
One (#ulink_f32c8e67-1c9e-5f74-83df-c63f11a4b2ea)
Bryce Richards had thought he was ready for anything when it came to Angela Hewitt, but he found that he was wrong. He was not prepared to walk into the offices of H & A Enterprises and find a witch standing on a stool in the middle of the room.
He stopped, struck dumb, and simply gaped at the woman on the stool. Another woman knelt at her feet, mumbling something as she fingered the hem of the witch’s dress. Bryce wondered for one mad moment if he had stumbled into some sort of pagan ceremony. Then the kneeling woman let out a yelp of pain and reached up to remove the pins she held clenched be tween her teeth.
“Would you stop wriggling?” she asked irritably. “I’ll never get this hem fixed at this rate.”
Bryce realized with relief that the woman on the floor was measuring a hem on the “witch’s” dress. He looked more closely at what the “witch” wore. It was long and flowing and black, clinging tightly to her torso, then floating out loosely below her hips in layers of some diaphanous material. The edges of each layer were cut in a zigzag fashion so that it hung in points, and the ends of the loose sleeves were cut in the same way. It was this cut and the color of the dress that had made him think immediately of a witch’s costume. Now, looking at the plunging V-cut neckline of the dress, he realized that it must be some sort of odd evening gown. It was, he told himself, much too sexy for riding broomsticks and casting spells.
His eyes lingered on the neckline. The woman’s breasts were full and creamy white, pushing up and out of the black material in a way that made his fingers itch to curve over the lush flesh. He dropped his gaze lower, moving over the material that clung to her breasts, waist and hips as if it were a second skin. His loins tightened in response. Who was this woman, and what on earth was she doing dressed like this and standing in the middle of a business office?
Then he looked up, and he knew. It was Angela Hewitt herself. He could not see her face; her head was bent as she peered down at the woman working on her hem. But that shock of curling red hair could belong to only one person. He remembered it clearly, even if it had been almost fourteen years—and even if it now hung in burnished, inviting curls instead of braids or a wild tangle. He should have known, Bryce thought. Trust Angela Hewitt to be under investigation by the IRS and yet be unconcernedly trying on evening gowns in the middle of her office.
Angela glanced up at him, then turned and called out, “Hey, somebody’s appointment is here!”
Bryce glanced around the room for the first time. It was large, the wide main hall of the old house near downtown Raleigh in which H & A Enterprises was located. A receptionist’s desk, vacant at the moment, stood to one side of the elegant curved staircase. The rest of the hallway was empty, sweeping back in a dazzling expanse of gleaming gold oak flooring to a swinging door at the opposite end. On either side of the hallway, several doors stood open. A few heads popped out of the doors at Angela’s announcement, and the swinging door in the back opened, and a man peered out.
Everyone looked at Bryce blankly. Then they turned to look at Angela.
“Hey, Angie, looking good,” one of the young men commented, and another let out a wolf whistle.
Angela grimaced at the man who had whistled. “I don’t know. Somehow, I don’t think Maladora is really me. I mean, whoever heard of an evil sorceress with freckles and red hair?”
One of the women watching chuckled and said, “Then why don’t you go as Princess Alicia?”
Bryce’s cool gray gaze swept over the scene. This hardly looked like a well-run business, with the employees hanging in their doorways, the owner creating a distraction in the middle of the office, and all of them sounding like the inhabitants of a madhouse. He suspected that their accounting procedures were just as lax. No wonder the IRS was breathing down their necks.
“Nah, I was her last year,” Angela answered offhandedly. “I was a medieval lady the year before. And I think a Southern belle is way too overdone.”
She turned to Bryce and asked seriously, “What do you think? Do I look like Maladora to you?”
“I don’t know,” Bryce responded crisply, “since I have no idea what or who Maladora is. Miss Hewitt, if I could speak with you…”
Angela looked at him, slightly puzzled, then her eyes narrowed. “You!” She spat out the word in recognition. “You’re Bryce Richards!” From the tone of her voice, she might have been saying, “Jack the Ripper!”
“Yes.” He nodded his head in greeting.
“What are you doing here?” Angela frowned at him darkly.
“Your parents asked me to—”
“Arrgh.” Angela made an exasperated noise deep in her throat and, holding up her skirts, lithely hopped off the stool. “I might have known they’d do something like this,” she announced to no one in particular, then turned, with an eloquent swish of her skirts, and stalked toward the stairs.
Bryce followed her. She whirled at the foot of the stairs and glared at him. “Go away. I don’t need you. Nor do I need my parents sending their flunky down here to pester me.”
“I can see that you still have the same charming personality,” Bryce began, then stopped. He reminded himself that he intended to hold onto his temper. He was determined not to let Angela get to him, as she had done so many times years ago.
“And I can see that you are still the same prig you always were,” she snapped back. She drew a breath to say more, but then she glanced up at the top of the stairs, where several more interested spectators had gathered, and she shut her mouth with a snap.
Angela cast him a withering glance—just as if, Bryce thought with a growing sense of indignation, it had been he who was creating this scene. Then she turned and stomped up the stairs and into the room at the top, closing her door behind her with a loud crack.
Angela was furious. She reached back, unzipped her dress and ripped it off, wadding it into a ball and hurling it at a chair in the corner of the room. She might have known, she thought. Trust her parents to decide that she was too incompetent to handle this problem and then send down their Boy Scout to tell her what to do.
Damn Bryce Richards! She hadn’t even thought about him for years. Now he showed up, and all the old feelings of inadequacy, resentment and rejection came flooding in on her.
Angela set her jaw as she stalked over to her desk and jerked on the jeans and T-shirt that she had been wearing before she tried on the costume. She remembered that first day when she had come into the den of her family home in Charlotte and found Bryce sitting with her mother, discussing some horribly boring math problem that Angela hadn’t even understood, and her mother had been beaming at him like a proud parent with a precocious child. Angela’s heart had immediately dropped down to her socks.
All her life she had never fit in with her family. Her mother was a professor of accounting of some note, and her father was a banker. Both sides of the family were littered with hardheaded businessmen, engineers, actuaries and scientists. All of them were levelheaded, logical, systematic people whose every decision was based on a rational analysis of the options.
Angela’s sister, Jenny, had fit in with them; Angela could remember her actually becoming excited when she figured out the key to a difficult math assignment. Grown now, she worked in the bank and had married a chemical engineer.
Angela, on the other hand, had been flighty, daydreaming and impulsive. Her decisions were made on an instinctive, gut-level feeling, and she found math courses boring. Her favorite subject was literature, and she preferred to spend her days hidden in some nook or other, reading about knights and fair maidens, adventure and romance. She remembered once, when she had been sitting in front of the television, enthralled in an old black-and-white swashbuckler, her science homework open and forgotten on her lap, her mother had come into the room and found her. Marina Hewitt had said nothing, simply stared at her daughter in dismay and astonishment. Angela had felt like crying. It wasn’t simply that her mother disapproved of her neglecting her homework to watch an old movie. What was more upsetting to Angela was that Marina could not comprehend why anyone would even want to do such a thing.
Angela had never felt quite a part of her family. By the age of twelve, when Bryce Richards came on the scene, she was convinced that everything about her was wrong. Though she had wanted and tried all her life to fit in with the other Hewitts, she had never been able to, and the attempt to do so had made her miserable. The years of intensive math courses ahead of her, which her parents had planned on, seemed like sheer punishment. She didn’t want to be methodical; she didn’t want to plan out her high school, her college and then her life. She wanted to be free and easy, to go where the winds of fortune took her. Yet at the same time, she felt guilty for rebelling against her parents, for not wanting to be another model daughter, and she could not squelch the old desire that her parents love her just as she was.
Then Bryce, Mr. Perfect, had come along. He was one of her mother’s students in a night course she taught at the local university, and Marina had taken him on as her protégé. He had come over to visit frequently. Her parents invited him to dinner, sometimes took him with them on family outings, spent long hours talking to him. He shared her parents’ interests. He admired and respected them. Or, as the twelve-year-old Angela had seen it, he spent most of his time buttering them up. In Angela’s opinion, he was a gawky, thin boy of nineteen, a dopey numbers nerd—the epitome of everything she disliked. Worse than that, it was obvious to her that her parents adored him, which only confirmed what kind of feeling they must have for her, his opposite. Her parents were taking him in, a sort of surrogate son, and as a consequence she would be, she knew, squeezed even further out of the family.
In short, in Bryce Richards she had seen her enemy. The battleground was her house, and her parents, the prize. She played childish tricks on him at every opportunity, and the scoldings and groundings she received from her parents for those tricks only made her dislike Bryce more. The harder she tried to defeat him, the more she was separated from her family. Finally, after a year, she had given up. She admitted to herself that he had won, and she had lost. She withdrew into her own interests, spending hours curled up in her room reading science fiction and fantasy or zapping enemies with her joystick in front of the game console and TV set. When Bryce was around, she made it a point to stay out of sight. By the time she was fifteen, Bryce had graduated from college and gone to another city to work. He and her parents had always stayed in touch, but Angela had never inquired about him. She had not seen him again until today.
She groaned and buried her head in her hands, leaning her elbows against the desk. What a time for him to pop up again! It was the last straw to have to put up with him when she was already under the stress of a threatened IRS investigation—and with her latest project only half done and her deadline a few more weeks away. What made it even more awful was the fact that her parents had told Bryce about her problems, had asked him to come rushing down here and save her—indeed, she was sure that they must have begged him, in order to get him to help her.
She had enjoyed a better relationship with her parents the past few years. They hadn’t been able to argue with the obvious success of her business; all the silly impulsive things she had done, which they had moaned over, had turned out to be highly profitable in the long run. And with the miles between Raleigh and Charlotte to separate them, she and her parents had achieved a certain friendliness, almost adult to adult.
That they had turned around and spilled all her troubles to Bryce Richards was a betrayal of that newly achieved closeness. And they had asked him to come save her, too!—as if she were a baby, an incom petent. It was humiliating. Bryce was the last, the last person she wanted helping her. Not only did he probably share her parents’ assessment of her as a scatterbrained nincompoop, but she also felt sure that he thoroughly disliked her, as well. After all, she had been mean to him as only a hurt twelve-year-old can be, and she doubted whether he had forgotten. He had a memory like an elephant’s—worse, like an accountant’s.
There was a loud rap on the door, and a fraction of a second later, it opened, framing Bryce Richards in the doorway. He was frowning, his mouth tightly compressed, and his face looked carved out of stone. He was certainly no longer the gawky young man she remembered, Angela thought to herself. It was no wonder that it had taken her a few moments to recognize him. He was tall, of course, but his body was rock-solid now, and he moved with confidence and surety. She had not remembered him as being so handsome, and she wondered if it was maturity that had changed his face or if she had simply been too blinded by her dislike of him to notice the clean-cut lines of his face. His eyes had always been intense, but fifteen years ago, she had not realized how attractive their odd silvery gray color was.
“What are you doing following me?” Angela snapped, irritated at the foolish way her thoughts were wandering. Even as she said it, she realized how childishly petty she sounded. She blushed, embarrassed and even more irritated that she could so easily fall back into long-ago patterns.
“I drove all the way down here from Charlotte because Marina asked me to. I’m not going to turn around and drive back just because you’re too pigheaded-”
“Well, you could have saved yourself the trouble of the trip,” Angela retorted, “if you had bothered to call me first. I would have told you that I don’t need your help.”
His eyebrows rose in a sardonic expression of disbelief, and he moved forward into the room. He sat down in the chair in front of her desk and folded his hands, looking at her with a galling air of patience, as if she were a child or mentally defective.
“You don’t need help when the IRS has your company under investigation?”
“Mother had no right to tell you about it.”
Bryce shrugged. “She was concerned about you.”
Angela wanted to snap back that Marina was concerned because she thought that Angela couldn’t do anything, but she kept her lips shut tight against the words. Both she and Bryce might know that that was her mother’s opinion, but she wasn’t about to admit it to him.
“We’ll manage just fine without your help.”
“Wait a minute,” a voice said from the doorway.
Angela looked up to see a short, slightly balding man with a round face and a warm smile standing outside the doorway, peering in interestedly. Angela groaned inwardly.
“Who is’ this guy? What’s he talking about?” the man went on.
“Yeah.” A blond woman who had been standing just to the side of the door stuck her head inside, also. “I’m not sure we want to turn down help quite so quickly.”
Angela sighed. “Hello, Kelly. Tim. Can’t a person have a private conversation around here?”
Kelly cocked her head, looking judicious, then said, “It’s hard. Particularly when your door’s open.”
“And you started your argument downstairs in front of everyone,” Tim added.
“All right. Tim, Kelly, this is Bryce Richards. He’s a friend of my parents. Bryce, this is Timothy Allen, my partner, and Kelly Beeckman, our chief financial officer.”
Kelly grinned and amended, “Head bookkeeper, in other words.”
Tim smiled at Bryce and reached out to shake his hand. “Nice to meet you. You’ve known Angela a long time?”
“Since I was twelve,” Angela said shortly. “I was just telling Bryce that we can handle the IRS problem. We have the C.P.A. who did our taxes, and we hired a tax attorney.”
“And with their help, you’ve gone from an ordinary audit into a full-blown investigation.” Bryce pointed this out casually.
Angela shot him a fulminating glance. Tim’s round face grew worried, and Kelly began to chew at her lower lip.
“Look, Angela, if Mr. Richards thinks he can help…” Kelly began.
“My parents are interfering, that’s all.”
Tim ignored her and turned toward Bryce. “What makes Mr. and Mrs. Hewitt think you can help us?”
“Because I’m an auditor. I’ve worked for the IRS and as an auditor for the Feds. Now I have my own company in Charlotte, and our specialty is fiscal investigation.”
“Fiscal investigation?” Tim looked blank. “What’s that mean?”
“Well, basically, it’s that we find errors and fraud. We’re sort of a security company in the financial arena. We study corporate systems of accounting and set up ways to avoid theft and fraud. We find leaks and duplications of work. We outline plans to trim the fat.”
Tim’s eyes widened. “Why, that sounds like you could help us.” He turned to look inquiringly at Angela.
“We don’t need him.” Angela crossed her arms defensively. “Besides, it’ll cost a fortune, and we’re already paying for that expensive tax attorney—and the whole reason the IRS is suspicious is because they think we aren’t making enough money! How can we afford to hire him?”
“I’m not charging you.” Bryce interrupted quietly. “I’m doing this as a favor to your mother.”
“Oh.” Somehow Angela felt even more irritated by this fact. “I’m not a charity case,” she told him coldly. “If we need your services, we’ll pay for them.”
“Of course. It isn’t as if we haven’t made any money the past few years,” Tim said jovially. “We just had higher expenses the last year—more staff, more development costs, that sort of thing. But we’re still strong. We’re making good money. Angela’s just upset.”
Angela made a strangled noise in her throat, and Tim glanced over at her. “Well, it’s true, Angie. Everyone is. How could we not be with the government sniffing around like we’re some kind of criminals? I think we ought to let Mr. Richards try, see what he can come up with.”
“I don’t know…” Kelly said doubtfully, looking at Angela, then back at Tim. “If there’s something wrong, we would have found it already. Maybe the IRS is on a wild-goose chase. They haven’t told us what they expect to find, have they?”
“No. They’ve been frustratingly tight-lipped.” Angela was pleased that Kelly was supporting her. “They’re just poking into our records and making a nuisance of themselves. I don’t think they even know what they’re looking for.”
“Maybe they don’t,” Bryce agreed. “But if you think that the IRS is going to look at a few records, then shrug their shoulders and leave, you’re incredibly naive. Once they’re on your trail, they’ll be after you till they get you.”
“But there’s nothing to get!” Angela burst out. “We’ve paid our taxes every year. We reported all our income. Our deductions are legal.”
“That’s true.” Tim nodded. “I mean, everything we’ve done is aboveboard, so we really shouldn’t have anything to worry about. It’s a nuisance, but in the end they’re bound to find out that there’s no basis for their suspicions, and they’ll drop the investigation.”
Bryce turned his cool gray eyes on him for a moment, then began to shake his head. “I think all three of you are in for a rude awakening. The IRS is like a terrier with a rat. Sticking your head in the sand is not going to make them go away.”
He paused for a moment. All three of the others in the office stared back at him. Finally he shrugged and stood up. “All right. I can’t beat you over the head to make you do it. It’s your business.” He turned and looked directly at Angela. “I‘ll tell your mother you prefer to go it on your own. Goodbye, Angela.” He nodded at them all. “Good luck.”
He didn’t need to add the next line. “You’ll need it.” His expression as he turned away from them made that opinion clear.
He closed the door behind him. Angela leaned back in her chair with a sigh and closed her eyes. “The past few months,” she said softly, “have been the worst of my life.”
The IRS had begun an audit of their company in January. At first it had seemed perfectly ordinary, and Angela had not been worried, as she was sure that their record-keeping would bear them out. But as the thing went on, it had seemed to mushroom, until Angela had begun to be afraid—so much so that she had divulged her worries to her mother last week on the telephone.
“Amen,” Kelly agreed, plopping down in the chair Bryce had just vacated.
Tim began to rub his chin in a familiar nervous habit. “Come on, you guys, cheer up. It’ll turn out okay. It has to.”
“No, it doesn’t.” Angela opened her eyes and looked at him. Tim was a sweet guy and a good friend, not to mention an absolute whiz at computers, but he was not a person who liked to face reality. He was more likely to deny an unwelcome truth and ignore it than to try to change it or adapt to it. “What if Bryce is right? What if we are being ostriches? We could lose our whole business.”
“Don’t say that!” Kelly squeaked.
Angela looked over at the blonde. They had been friends for over ten years. In fact, she had met Kelly before she even knew Tim. Kelly had lived in her dorm at the University of North Carolina, and they had met in the cafeteria. Much to Angela’s amazement—she had never dreamed she could have anything in common with an accounting major—they had become fast friends. Three years later, when the tiny business of computer games that Angela and Tim had started had grown so big that they needed someone to handle the accounts full-time, Angela had pulled Kelly into the business. Her levelheadedness had proved to be the perfect complement to Angela’s and Tim’s dreamer tendencies. Over the years, as their business had grown, so had Kelly’s job; she presided over the entire business end of H & A Enterprises: orders, shipping, and accounting. Angela and Tim both agreed that whatever their creativity had produced, the business would never have boomed as it had without Kelly.
“Kelly…” Angela began thoughtfully, “why did you say you didn’t think we needed Bryce’s help?”
Kelly shrugged. “It seemed pretty clear to me that you didn’t like him. That you didn’t want him to be messing in our business records.”
“You’re right, I didn’t.” Angela got up and began to pace the room.
Her instinctive reaction had been to get rid of Bryce. But now she was beginning to wonder if she had acted in a hasty and childish manner. Her parents had been worried enough about her situation to send him&—and whatever else one might say about the elder Hewitts, they knew the business world. They were not likely to panic or act impulsively; they were logical and coolly analytical to a fault. They also knew exactly how good Bryce Richards was at his business. If, in their opinion, he could help H & A Enterprises out of this trouble, then he probably could.
“Maybe I was wrong to kick him out so quickly,” Angela admitted with a sigh. “Maybe I should have given him a chance to see if he could find anything.”
“Your opinion is good enough for me,” Tim responded, smiling at her reassuringly. “You know him better than Kelly and I do. I’m going to leave the decision up to you.”
“I agree.” Kelly chimed in.
“Thanks.” Angela smiled at her friends. It warmed her heart that they had such confidence in her. People had told her that it would be impossible to be partners with a friend, but time had proven those doom-sayers false. She had worked with Tim and Kelly for almost eight years, and both the business and their friendship had flourished.
Still, today was one time when she would have wished that they were not so quick to rely on her judgment. She was open-minded enough to admit that her dislike of Bryce was not rational, but emotional, and she worried now that she had made a mistake that might hurt their business.
Tim and Kelly returned to their offices, and Angela settled down behind her desk to work. But after several minutes of staring at her blank blue computer screen, she realized that working was impossible at the moment. Her mind was like a hamster on its wheel, circling endlessly.
With a sigh, she planted her elbows on the desk and sank her head onto her hands; she stared down at her desk, thinking. She disliked Bryce Richards, and she did not want him here at the office, poking his nose into everything. But, on the other hand, she would never forgive herself if he could have found the key to their financial troubles, and she had not let him just because of an old childhood antagonism.
Finally she picked up the phone and dialed her mother’s number in Charlotte. A few minutes later, she was in her car heading toward the Radisson Hotel.
Two (#ulink_d321c6ff-028e-5d89-8c39-60e2de7a3353)
Bryce leaned back in his chair and massaged his temples wearily. He had checked into his hotel and started work on his presentation for CompCon tomorrow, just as he had planned, but he found it difficult to concentrate on the numbers strung out across the sheets in front of him. His meeting with Angela had left him irritable and dissatisfied.
He made a noise of disgust and got to his feet. That woman! He got up and began to pace the room. Angela Hewitt was as great a pest as she had been as an adolescent. He could remember with great clarity the silly tricks she had played on him when he came to visit her mother. A slightly chubby girl with wild, curly red hair and a mouthful of braces, she had seemed to delight in making Bryce feel foolish and out of place. And, of course, he thought, remembering his own gawky, uncertain self, he had been the perfect foil for her tricks. He had already felt ill at ease just being in the Hewitts’ house. It was gracious and obviously expensive, but without a breath of ostentation, a jewel of old-money taste. Being inside their house had been a glimpse into an entirely different sort of life for him, a life that he had wanted with every fiber of his being. At the same time, he had been terrified that he might break something in his awkwardness or that he might make some gauche mistake that would reveal his ignorance.
Angela seemed to have understood that with the instinct that children have, and she had played on it. Bryce had never been sure when he might find a whoopee cushion on his seat or a plastic bug in his drink. She was prone to tell him stories about her family, which he was never sure were true or not. He had believed the first one, that Angela’s aunt was a famous pianist, and had mentioned something about her to Marina, who had looked at him blankly, then told him that she didn’t have a sister. He had felt a fool and after that he was sure never to repeat anything Angela told him unless someone else had confirmed her story.
A reluctant smile twitched at Bryce’s lips as he remembered her wilder concoctions. No one could ever accuse Angela of lacking imagination. Looking back on it now, he could see that her tricks were merely adolescent buffoonery. Someone with more confidence than he had at the time would have shrugged them off. But he had been a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, with nothing going for him but his brain, and he had wanted desperately to fit in.
Of course, he was nothing like that boy now. He was powerful and confident, used to moving in circles of great wealth. Coming down here, he had told himself that Angela had changed, too, that she would no longer get under his skin. After all, he simply would not allow it.
It had taken him less than five minutes to realize how wrong he had been. Angela Hewitt was as infuriating as ever. Oh, she had changed, all right-changed in a way that made his heart speed up and his loins begin to throb in a most annoying manner. The pudgy girl with a mouth of metal was gone; in her place was a curvaceous woman whose curling mass of red hair made a man want to sink his hands into it. Bryce had found that his eyes returned again and again to Angela’s soft, high breasts—all too visible in that ridiculous costume she had been wearing—and his palms had itched with a desire to follow the curve of her buttocks. Even now he couldn’t keep his mind off her full, soft mouth; his mind had drifted off his presentation figures several times to contemplate exactly how those lips would feel beneath his.
But that intense, vibrant desirability did not ease Bryce’s irritation with her; if anything, it made it even worse. He hated the fact that he had responded physically to a woman who grated so on his nerves. Bryce had never been one who let his hungers intrude on his professional life. It was his policy never to date anyone with whom he worked—employee, boss, or client—and it was a policy from which he had never strayed. Oh, he would notice when a woman in his office or in one of his client’s was exceptionally pretty or sexy. He was, after all, a man, and he was stirred by the sight of long, well-shaped legs or a deliciously curved figure. But it was never more than a passing thought. He noticed it, then dismissed it from his mind. Nor was he ever interested in a woman whom he disliked or who irritated him, at least not for longer than it took for her to get on his nerves.
But today, standing there with Angela Hewitt, irritated as he was by her obstructive, naive attitude, he couldn’t keep his eyes off her, couldn’t help thinking how delightful it would feel to have those legs twined around his back. It was disturbing to have been so attracted yet so annoyed by her. Bryce Richards did not like anything illogical, and his wayward thoughts about Angela certainly did not make sense.
It was just as well, he told himself, that she had not wanted his expertise. It would have been difficult working with the woman, given his conflicting emotions. He would be better off not being in her office—yet it was thoroughly exasperating to have her deny his offer of aid.
There was a knock on the door, and Bryce turned, relieved, thinking that it was room service. He had called them and ordered dinner a few minutes earlier. No doubt much of his turmoil and lack of ability to concentrate was due to the fact that he was hungry. Once he had eaten, he would feel like his old self again.
He opened the door, smiling in anticipation, only to find that the person outside his door was Angela Hewitt. His face fell in disappointment.
“Oh. It’s you.”
“Why, thank you,” Angela returned sarcastically. “Nice to see you, too.”
Bryce grimaced and stepped aside, motioning for her to enter. “I was expecting room service. Besides,” he went on as she walked into the room, “our last meeting did not leave me with a great deal of eagerness to see you again.”
“For Heaven’s sake…” Angela gave an airy wave of her hand and went to the window to look out at the view. “Can’t anyone disagree with you without your holding a grudge?”
Bryce found himself watching the action of her hips beneath her tight jeans as she walked, and that irritated him as much as her words. He closed the door with a snap. “I’m not holding a grudge, I simply hoped I wouldn’t have to see you again.”
Angela turned. “You’re so stuffy. You were stuffy even when you were nineteen.”
“Yes, and you were a pest. I’m sorry to say that you haven’t changed much, either.”
Angela lifted her chin in a defiant gesture. She hated apologizing—and to have to do it to this man, of all people! Gritting her teeth, she said, “I came to tell you that—that I was wrong. This afternoon when you were at our office, I was…”
“Rude?” Bryce suggested.
Angela flashed him a disgusted look and said, “Abrupt. I should not have dismissed your help so peremptorily.”
“Your partners ganged up on you to accept?”
“No. In fact, Tim told me to do whatever I think is best. He and Kelly trust me, you see. However, when I thought about it, I realized that I wasn’t acting in the company’s best interest. I was simply reacting to—” she made a vague gesture toward him “—the past. And my parents. I hate to accept help from them. It confirms their opinion of me.”
Bryce looked puzzled. “And what is their opinion of you?”
Angela gave him a look that indicated that she doubted his mental powers. “That I’m a flake. Ditzy and incompetent. All they see in any business is numbers, and they know how I am with those. So they figure that I’m bound to fail.”
“I don’t get that impression from them. I think they’re rather proud of you and your success, actually.”
Angela stared. “Are you sure you’re talking about my parents? Everett and Marina Hewitt?”
A faint smile touched Bryce’s lips. “Yes, I believe those are the ones.”
“I think you’re mistaken.”
“No. I imagine I know them a lot better than you. They may not understand you or what you do—”
Angela let out a dry chuckle. “That’s the understatement of all time.”
“—but they love you and are very proud of you. That’s why they’re concerned about this problem with the IRS.”
“Yes. My little problem.” Angela made a disgusted face and turned away to gaze out the window again.
When it appeared that she was going to say nothing else, Bryce prompted, “How did you find me?”
“I called Mother. She told me you always stayed here when you were in Raleigh, and she said you planned to spend the night because you had a presentation to CompCon in the morning. They’re a good company, by the way, but you have to handle Jason Willard with kid gloves.”
He gave her a stiff little bow of his head. “Thank you for the advice.”
“You’re welcome,” Angela replied, ignoring the note of sarcasm in his voice. She crossed her arms and looked at him.
Standing outside Bryce’s door, her stomach had been jittery with nerves. But now, seeing the mulish expression on his face, Angela felt, perversely, more relaxed. Bryce obviously did not like her being here. That fact made it easier for her to admit that she needed his help.
“Anyway,” she said, sitting down and crossing her legs, “I’m sorry. I thought about what you’d said, and Tim and Kelly and I talked it over. I decided I had been wrong to turn down your offer.” She gazed up at him a little defiantly, more as if she were being scolded than admitting that she had made a mistake. Bryce found it strangely appealing.
“I came to ask you if your offer still held,” she said. “Are you willing to find our problem?”
Angela could see from his face that he would have liked to turn her down, but she was counting on his promise to her mother to keep him from doing what he wanted.
Finally, grudgingly, he said, “Yes. I suppose I am—though, God knows, I’ll probably regret it. I can imagine what your records are like. You probably keep all your invoices in a shoe box.”
Angela grinned impishly. “I’d love to tell you that they were, just to see the smoke come out of your ears, but I can’t malign Kelly. She keeps excellent records. She’s not at all like me.”
“Obviously.”
Angela made a face at him. She watched him, more relaxed now that she had choked out her apology. She wondered why she had not remembered how handsome he was. Even if he had filled out, surely the bare bones of his good looks had been there: the firm, well-cut lips, the strong bones of his face, the dark-lashed gray eyes.
Bryce walked over to the table and sat down across from her. Angela could see the wary look on his face, and she wondered what he thought she was going to do. She decided not to help him out. She gazed back at him with wide eyes, swinging her foot and waiting for him to make the first move.
“All right,” he said, taking out a yellow pad and pencil and settling down to take notes. “Let’s get some basics. I need to know about your business.”
“Mother didn’t tell you?”
“She said only that you made computer games.”
“That’s right. Fantasy sort of games, mostly, some flight and road simulation sort of things. We’re beginning to move into the CD-Rom area. Our mainstay and what we started out with are the Concordia games and others like them.”
“Concordia games?” Bryce raised his eyebrows.
“You’ve never heard of them?”
“I don’t play computer games. I use my computer for work.”
“Of course. How silly of me.” Angela’s smile flashed, creating a dimple in her cheek.
There was something definitely sexy, Angela thought, about Bryce’s serious, intense gaze. The silvery gray eyes seemed to go right through her. She wondered if he brought the same single-minded intensity to his lovemaking as he did to his work. The thought sent a shiver through her.
She glanced away from him quickly. She couldn’t believe that she was thinking about Bryce this way. Bryce Richards, of all people! It was crazy; they could hardly manage to string together three or four civil sentences to each other. The thought of ever going to bed with him was sheer insanity. He was not her type, and she felt sure that Bryce would run as fast as he could the other way if he thought that she was interested in him. He had made it very clear what he thought of her.
“The Concordia games are quest games,” she said quickly to get her mind off her strange thoughts. “They are set in a fictional kingdom, Concordia, in some past time, vaguely medieval. There’s a king and queen and their beautiful daughter, Princess Alicia. Their enemy is an evil sorceress, Maladora.”
“Ah!” Bryce’s brows flew up in a look of enlightenment. “That’s who you were dressed as this afternoon.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Oh. For Tim’s party…it’s a week from Friday. A big charity costume party he throws every year for this children’s charity he’s involved with.”
“Oh.” His face cleared. “Okay. So what does this Maladora do?”
“Anyway, Maladora is very powerful, and though, of course, she’s defeated in each game, she always finds some way of coming back. In a weird way, people are probably more attached to her than to the princess or even Sir Leopold. He’s the knight from another country who came to Concordia and released the royal family from the enchantment that Maladora had put them under. That was our first game, Concordia. Our second was Concordia: Maladora Returns and the third was Concordia: Alicia’s Escape, and so on. Right now I’m working on the seventh. I’m going to introduce a new villain and have Maladora on the same side as the royal family for once. The games are humorous, particularly the contemporary series. We always put in little tongue-in-cheek things. They’re not the violent ones where you kick and stab and shoot your way to the end—you win by figuring out clues and collecting things along the way, then using them at the right time.”
“I see.”
From the expression on his face, Angela doubted that he did, but she let it pass. Bryce, she suspected, simply didn’t understand games; they were beyond his scope. That was the way her parents were. Numbers made sense; fantasies and entertainment did not.
“And these games are successful?”
“Very.” Angela bit back a smile at the faint tone of amazement in his voice. “People love them. They’re interesting and complex—you can work on them for days. One gets fun and a sense of accomplishment out of them. That big open room downstairs in our office, the one that has all the little cubicles with people with headsets?”
He nodded, remembering glancing into the room.
“Those are our telephone support lines. People who buy the games call to get help in using them. The support staff help customers if they’re having trouble setting up, and if they’re stuck, they’ll give them hints and ideas. The support lines are busy all day long. We’re grossing millions.”
Bryce looked faintly shocked. Angela supposed that from her mother’s explanation, he had expected Angela to have some little shoestring operation.
“How is the company set up?” he asked, scribbling on the pad.
“It’s a corporation. Tim and I started out as partners, but when it got bigger, we incorporated. Tim and I own nearly all the shares.”
“Kelly’s not a partner?”
“No. She’s bought some shares, and all our employees have gotten some shares as bonuses, but basically Tim and I own it. We began it. Later, we hired Kelly to do our accounting. Her job has grown as we have. Basically, now she oversees all operations except creating the games.”
“You and Tim do that?”
“Yes. I think up the stories and write out the plot line. Tim creates the software for them. We each have a few assistants now, but we still pretty much do all the Concordia games ourselves.” She shrugged. “It’s a lot more fun than overseeing the other stuff. I leave the simulation games alone. That’s Jeremy Coger’s field.”
She went on to explain how the games were packaged, marketed and distributed, and all the while Bryce scribbled across his pad. Angela looked at his. hand as it moved across the page. His skin was tanned, the back of his hand and his fingers lightly dotted with curling dark hairs. His fingers were long and strong, the nails short-clipped. It was a very masculine, no-nonsense sort of hand, but not stubby or rough. It wasn’t hard to imagine it moving with gentleness across a woman’s body.
Suddenly Angela’s thoughts flew to the bed beside them. She had hardly noticed it when she came in, but now it seemed to fill the room. She kept her eyes firmly away from it, sure that Bryce would somehow guess her thoughts if she so much as glanced at it. But, of course, since she was determined not to look at it, looking at it became an almost impossible urge to resist. She jumped restlessly to her feet and began to pace.
There was a long moment of silence, and Angela pivoted to look at Bryce. He was watching her, his brow drawn into a frown. She frowned back.
“Well? Are we through?”
He started and looked disconcerted. “What? Oh. No, I…let’s see.” He turned back to his yellow pad. “What about the IRS? When did that start?”
“About three months ago. They called us in for a routine audit. We showed them our records, and I assumed that was the last of it. Then all of a sudden, they started asking more questions, nosing around. I don’t know what they saw that set them off. This one guy, McGuire, kept saying that we didn’t make enough profit—like it was some kind of crime or something. We didn’t make as much profit as the last few years. But we just had a lot more expenses. Things like that happen. Don’t they?”
“Sure. And the IRS could be off track. Unfortunately they usually manage to run something down.”
Angela sighed. “I’m beginning to feel paranoid.”
“The IRS can do that to you.”
“I tell myself that if we haven’t done anything wrong, we don’t have anything to worry about. But they’re making me jittery. I keep thinking that somewhere we must have made a mistake and I just can’t see it. That’s why I told Mother the other day. I shouldn’t have…I knew it would worry her.”
“I’m sure she was glad you told her. She wants to help you.”
“I know. And she always expects that she’ll have to. That’s what makes it so galling.” Angela grimaced. “I hate to screw up in front of her.”
Bryce looked amazed. “But Marina’s very patient and understanding about mistakes. That’s why she’s such a wonderful teacher.”
“Yeah, well, it’s probably different when you’re a student rather than her daughter. When I didn’t understand things in math, she acted like I was being purposely obstructive. She couldn’t believe that I didn’t get it. Finally she came to realize that I really didn’t understand these things that seemed so obvious to her. Then she’d get this—I don’t know, distressed sort of look in her eyes. And I’d know that I disappointed her. I think she was afraid that I was mentally impaired.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Bryce said gruffly.
Angela glared at him. How could she have forgotten that she was talking to the man who thought Marina Hewitt could do no wrong? “I wouldn’t have expected you to understand.”
“Your prejudice is appalling.” He got up and strode across the room to where she stood.
“I’m not prejudiced!” Angela retorted, stung.
“I’m sure you’re not about all the politically correct things, but you most definitely are about people who are logical or mathematical. You presume that if a person understands numbers, they don’t understand anything else, that they’re emotionless robots. Being logical doesn’t mean that you can’t understand feelings.”
“You, I’m sure, are in touch with your feelings.” It galled her for him to lecture her, as if she were still a child.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re too stiff and uptight to even know that you have feelings. Look at you…here it is…six o’clock, in your hotel room, and you’re still wearing a tie—knotted at the top! I’m surprised you even took off your suit jacket. You were the same when you were nineteen, too. Stiff, dry, logical. You looked at my friends and me playing in the pool like we were creatures from another planet. And when I played a joke on you, you never even got mad. Any normal person would have blown up, but you just got stiffer and quieter. No doubt it wasn’t logical to get mad.”
Bryce stared at her in disbelief. “What should I have done? Tell my hostess’s child what a spoiled brat she was? Of course I held my tongue. To have said anything would have been hurtful to Marina. No doubt you think it’s ridiculous to be courteous.”
“Of course not!” Red flamed in Angela’s cheeks. She felt foolish and embarrassed and oddly hurt by his opinion of her. “But you can be courteous and still be capable of human emotions. You don’t have to be a statue like you.”
Bryce knew that was how she saw him, as a bloodless, passionless person, more a wax figure than a man. The idea infuriated him, all the more so because right now his blood was thrumming through his veins and even as they fought he could not stop thinking how desirable she looked. Angela was thoroughly annoying, but some elemental instinct in him wanted her, and that fact was as irritating as she was.
Suddenly, surprising himself as much as her, Bryce reached out and grabbed her shoulders. Angela froze in astonishment, staring at him with wide, disbelieving eyes as he pulled her to him and took her mouth in a long, searing kiss.
His lips were hot and demanding; his tongue slid along the seal of her lips, seeking entrance. Angela shivered, her knees amazingly weak, and opened her mouth to his seeking tongue. It was not a sweet kiss; it burned with anger and resentment…and passion. There was nothing emotionless or saintly about him now. His body curved around hers, his arms pressing her into his hard chest and thighs, and the heat was enveloping, enervating. His mouth possessed hers as if by right, his tongue exploring, challenging.
Angela sagged against him, and her fingers dug into his shirt in the back as she clung to him. His kiss made her tremble, made her forget who he was and what he was to her. She tasted the driving hunger that aroused her own, and she wanted more. Her tongue wound around his, stroking and seeking. She felt his breath shuddering out, hot upon her cheek, and his kiss gentled, no longer demanding, but coaxing and enticing her. His hand stroked up and down her back, pressing her into him. Angela wrapped her arms around his neck and gave herself up to his kiss.
Three (#ulink_6bc5bfec-968e-50db-b0e3-373f2e66e9e2)
Bryce’s lips moved over Angela’s, deliciously firm and warm. His hand slid down her body and onto her hip, then slowly back up. His thumb brushed against the side of her breast, sending a quiver of desire through her abdomen.
He lifted his mouth, but only to change the slant of his kiss. His kiss deepened; his tongue invaded her mouth. Angela answered eagerly, tasting the dark, silky pleasures of his mouth. She felt weak and strangely helpless, not like herself at all, but somehow the feeling was pleasurable as well as scary, as if she were about to step onto a wild ride at an amusement park or enter a new adventure. She wrapped her arms around Bryce’s neck, clinging to him.
For a long moment they were lost in intense pleasure, their mouths locked together, their bodies straining against each other. Then there was a knock on the door, breaking into the enchantment, and a bored voice drawled, “Room Service.”
Angela jumped, startled, and her lip came into painful contact with Bryce’s teeth. She stepped back, one hand pressed to her smarting lip, and stared at Bryce dazedly. This couldn’t be happening. Bryce Richards had just kissed her—and she had enjoyed it.
“Room service,” the disembodied voice repeated outside the door, and Bryce jerked into movement.
“Yes. Coming.” He started toward the door.
Angela cast a wild look around the room, then sank into a chair, pushing her hands back into her thick, curling hair. She tried to pull her thoughts back into some semblance of order while Bryce dealt with the hotel employee.
She had done some impulsive things in her life, but it occurred to her that this was probably the worst. Bryce Richards disliked her; he hadn’t kissed her because he was attracted to her. He had done it because she had made him mad. He had done it to establish that he was in control, to prove her wrong. She had insulted him, more or less accused him of being without passion, and he, of course, had to show her that he was not.
And she, like an idiot, had responded to his kiss! Angela couldn’t imagine what was wrong with her that she had acted that way. He was handsome, of course—in a cold way, she reminded herself—but he was all the things she disliked in a man: a staid workaholic with no sense of humor, a man who did things only because they made sense. She could not imagine Bryce Richards, skipping a day of work to go out and have a picnic. He was the sort of man who would bring a woman flowers because that was the accepted thing to do, but he would never think of surprising her with some odd little present that had irresistibly reminded him of her. He would make plans for an evening and follow them to the letter. In short, he was the sort of man with whom she would be bored in an hour or two—no matter how much she might feel an utterly inexplicable physical attraction to him.
It also occurred to Angela that right now Bryce was probably regretting what he had just done just as much as she was. She looked up.
Bryce was shutting the door behind the waiter. He turned and gazed across the room at her, every line of his body screaming that he was uncomfortable. He cleared his throat. “Well…”
Angela popped to her feet. “I better be going now.”
“What? Oh, yes, I suppose so. Look, Angela, I’m sorry—”
She shook her head, putting on what she hoped was a cheery, nonchalant face. “Nonsense. Happens to me all the time. Men stop me on the street to kiss me. It’s my irresistible charm.”
She nodded and left the room, closing the door behind her.
Bryce stood still for a moment after she left, gazing blankly at the door. Finally he turned to the room service cart and absently lifted the covers. His earlier hunger had vanished, and he studied the food with uninterest.
Room service had come just in time, he thought. Who knows what might have happened if they had not been interrupted?
Stifling a sigh, he sat down and began to eat.
Angela drove home in a fury. She parked her car in the single garage assigned to her condominium and stomped up the stairs to her condo, still seething over her encounter with Bryce Richards.
The condominium complex where she lived was small and secluded, surrounded by large, spreading oaks. It was an elegant place without being pretentious, and its occupants were by and large young professionals without children. Angela’s condo, toward the rear of the complex, was a small, utilitarian, down-to-earth place with little decoration. She didn’t spend much time here. Her real home was the lake house, and it was there that she had put in most of her effort of furnishing and decorating. This condo was simply a place to sleep during the week, and its primary advantages were that it was quiet and close to work.
The furniture was simple and comfortable; some of it she had had from the tiny first apartment she had shared with Kelly when their business was beginning. It looked old and well lived-in, and the stacks of books all around—in bookcases, on tables and in piles on the floor—added to the casual, cozy ambience. At odds with the furniture, however, were the array of electronic machines and gadgets around the place.
Angela had always been intrigued by gadgets and time-saving or energy-saving devices, and when the company had started making good money, she had allowed herself to indulge in the clever machines that caught her fancy. Though she was not fond of cooking, her kitchen was a treasure trove of bread machines, cappuccino makers, electric steamers, icecream machines and various sorts of food processors. The second bedroom, which served as her office at home, was stocked with a fax machine, copier, two computers and an assortment of hand-held computerized games, translators, calculators and electronic novelties. Her favorite was the home theater setup at one end of her living room, where a large-screen TV and a multitude of speakers, VCRs, laser disc players, tuners, tape players, etc., provided sensational sound and view for any movie.
Tonight, however, she had no interest in popping any cassette into the VCR. Nor did cooking a dinner appeal to her. She was too restless, too agitated; her mind kept jumping from her tax troubles to Bryce Richards to her bizarre behavior in his hotel room. She rattled purposelessly around the condo for a few minutes and finally wound up on the small balcony in back.
The balcony was shielded from the sun and neighbors by large, sheltering oaks, but it had a clear view of the balcony next door. There a slim, curly-haired, middle-aged man fussed over a group of hanging plants, watering them and carefully breaking off dead leaves.
“Hi, Jim.” Angela leaned against the railing and smiled at the man, who turned and beamed at her. Jim had more or less adopted Angela when she first moved into her condo six years earlier, telling her she was the daughter he had never had, and they had weathered many an emotional storm with each other over the intervening years.
“Sweetheart!” He came over, the empty watering pot dangling from his hand. “My, aren’t you home early? What happened?”
Angela grimaced reflexively. “Trouble, probably.”
“Really?” His brows arched in amused curiosity. “Do tell. Is it interesting or some boring business thing?”
“It’s people, not business. Or maybe a combination of both.”
“Well, why don’t you come over and tell Daddy all about it? I have hot water on the stove and I’ll fix you a nice cup of herbal tea if you want.”
“Sure. That sounds great.” Angela turned and walked back through her condominium.
Jim opened the door for her just as she reached it and led her inside, chattering all the way as he walked back into the kitchen to fetch her tea.
His condo was a mirror image of hers structurally, But there would never be any mistaking the two. Jim’s place was done in the same campy, flamboyant style in which he spoke and acted. Having been around him in moments when he was quite serious, direct, and even practical, Angela had never been quite sure whether this flamboyance was real or merely something he assumed as befitting the owner of a trendy art gallery.
“So what happened?” he asked as he bustled back out of the kitchen, carrying a small tray on which sat two cups.
Angela, who had kicked off her shoes and leaned back in an ultramodern turquoise canvas chair, reached up and took the steaming cup gratefully. “Mmm…smells delicious.”
“Thank you. I had water heated because I was expecting Harbaugh, but, of course, he called about two minutes before you came and said he was going to be late again. Lawyers.” He made a face and took a sip of his tea. “But never mind that. Tell me about you.”
Angela sighed and began to relate the events of this afternoon, to Jim’s appreciative noises and comments. When she finished, she shrugged. “So there you have it. I dislike this guy, always have. He represents everything I don’t like about my family and that whole world they inhabit. And then all of a sudden, he kissed me! And I enjoyed it!”
“Sounds like not such a terrible problem to me,” Jim joked.
Angela answered with a derisive snort. “I’m serious. It’s a complication, a stupid, weird complication—as if I didn’t have enough with this IRS thing hanging over my head.”
“Well, you know, opposites attract and all that. I mean, look at Harbaugh and me—a lawyer, for pity’s sake! You know how serious he is. Sometimes I swear the man has no sense of humor. But we’ve been together almost four years now.”
“I know. With some people it probably works out. But you don’t know Bryce Richards. He’s not just serious or humorless, he’s also methodical and critical and analytical. I doubt that the man knows how to have fun. Everything has to have a reason. Besides, we don’t even like each other. He’s precisely the type of. man I don’t want, and I’m sure he still has some kind of grudge against me, considering all the awful twelve-year-old kind of practical jokes I played on him. I mean, just because I’ve grown up and suddenly there’s this physical thing between us, that doesn’t mean that we’re going to start liking each other. We’re still the same people, like night and day. It would be a mess…especially with us working together now. It’s going to be hard enough being in the same office with him as it is. If we were having an affair, too, it would be impossible.”
“Sorry,” Jim said, retreating into the serious persona that he usually strove to keep hidden. “Just teasing—although it does sound like there’s an awful lot of free-floating emotions in this relationship. Well, frankly, Angie, it seems to me like the only solution is to avoid him.”
“How can I do that? He’ll be working right down the hall from me.”
“So? Go to work late and stay late. You already do that lots of times. Stay in your office while you’re there and don’t go wandering all over talking to everybody.”
“Exile myself from my own business?” Angela frowned. “I don’t want to do that.”
“Then get rid of him.”
“No. That wouldn’t be fair to Tim and Kelly. We need his help even if I don’t like him.” Angela sighed. “I guess you’re right. I’ll try to avoid him as much as I possibly can. I’ll hide out in my office till he’s through.” She smiled at him. “Thanks.”
“Ah, it was nothing.” Jim made a dismissive gesture with his hand.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/kristin-james/the-last-groom-on-earth/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Kristin James
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: HERE COMES THE GROOM? So what if everyone thought Bryce Richards would make the perfect husband? Angela Hewitt had fought enough childhood battles with him to know better. But when her sexy nemesis came to her rescue, she suddenly felt like a damsel in distress – heart palpitations and all! Now she was dreaming of forever with the last man she′d every marry!Bryce wondered what had come over him – kissing Angela of all people! He wasn′t even sure why he was trying to help out this reckless, exasperating, irresistible woman. Falling in love with her was out of the question!Bryce wouldn′t marry her if… if… Well, okay, maybe he would… .