“I’m sorry.” The words took a long moment to penetrate the haze of her anger. “I’m sorry. That was completely uncalled for and very unprofessional. I’ve had a long, frustrating morning, but that is no excuse for taking out my bad temper on you. Can we begin again? I’m Spencer Reed. Would you care for a cup of coffee?”
His outstretched hand across the desk was meant as a peace offering, she supposed. And the lopsided grin was meant to be soothing. She managed to keep her mouth shut, but enjoyed thinking about where he could stick his charm.
“Save it for someone you can still make a good impression on,” she snapped. “What do you want?”
He sighed and eyed her briefly over the tops of his glasses, as if debating whether to continue his apologies. She caught herself before she could ask him to take the glasses off so she could see if he looked as good without them as he did with them on. After a moment, he shrugged and lifted a stack of legal documents off the corner of his desk. With a gesture, he indicated the armchair facing the desk.
Addy shook her head. Whatever business he had with her, she preferred to hear it standing. Getting cozy was not an option.
“I hope I’m not the bearer of bad news,” he said slowly. “Last month Mrs. Adeline O’Connell passed away in her sleep.”
A glancing wave of shock made her falter for a moment. Although she’d not seen the woman since she was a baby, Addy was her great-aunt’s namesake. She hadn’t known of her death. Carefully schooling her face to blankness, she replied briskly.
“My condolences to her family.”
“You are her family.” The stern look he shot at her felt like a scolding.
“Mr. Reed, the last time I saw my great-aunt, I was in diapers. I haven’t heard from her since, and I certainly don’t consider her a part of my family.” She clipped the words out as she glanced at the men’s watch on her wrist. There was still time to return to her crew and try to clean up the disaster she’d left behind at the construction site.
“Perhaps you don’t. However, Mrs. O’Connell apparently considered you a part of hers. The reading of her will took place immediately after her funeral, and she has left you a significant bequest.”
With one hand, he plucked a document off the top of his stack and placed it on the desk in front of her.
“Is that what this is all about?” Her astonished laugh echoed in the sparsely furnished room. “I could have saved us both a lot of trouble if you’d bothered to mention that in your messages.” She pushed the papers right back at him. “I’m not interested in anything that woman wanted to give me.”
“Don’t be too hasty, Ms. Tyler. Think of it as your Free Parking jackpot.”
It took her a moment to place the Monopoly reference.
“Oh, shut up.” The words she’d repressed at the mention of Adeline O’Connell burst out of her like an erupting volcano. “That woman treated my mother like dirt her entire life. She took pleasure in hurting people. Took pleasure in trying to make people feel ashamed of themselves.” She grabbed her backpack from the floor, where she’d originally dropped it. “I wouldn’t take anything of hers if you plated it in gold and tied it up with a pink ribbon. Thanks, but no thanks. I’m out of here.”
She swung the heavy pack on her shoulder and whirled to stalk out the office door. His footsteps followed hers more quickly than she would have expected.
“Ms. Tyler.” Her name in his mouth rang with the command of an order to halt and his palm smacked against the door, holding it shut. She stopped with her hand on the knob, but refused to turn and face him. “There is a monetary bequest of nearly fifty thousand dollars, and also a property.”
These words did move her.
He was so close that her shoulder brushed against him as she turned. She was shorter, and resented having to look up at him. She also resented that being this close to him, closer than was comfortable, and knowing that his hand held the door shut behind her, was making her pulse race. She was dancing on a thin line between dislike and desire.
“Don’t insult me.” She let the words drop like individual stones into a still lake. “Your apology was not accepted and neither is hers. Not everyone can be bought.”
His lake-blue eyes narrowed and dropped as he tilted his head a little bit.
“You know, when you’re not behaving with all the polish of a truck driver,” he said after a moment, “you are quite unfairly beautiful.”
She pulled her shoulders back and turned her face away from him, all of a sudden sure that he would kiss her in a moment if she didn’t move. They stood frozen for silent seconds. She felt more than heard him exhale and realized she was holding her own breath as he dropped his hand from the door.
The moment had passed, which allowed her to face him again.
“Don’t fool yourself, Counselor. I’m not for sale.”
With those words, she yanked the door open and slammed it behind her. The resounding crash she left in her wake was the most satisfying moment of her morning.
She would have been even more pleased if she’d managed to shut the door before his parting shot chased after her.
“Everyone is for sale, Ms. Tyler, in my experience. Particularly women.”
In the parking lot outside the nondescript office building, she cranked the key in the ignition and pulled onto the street, tires squealing in sympathetic anger. She took the corners tightly and the straightaways at speed, with two monologues battling in her head. Her conscious mind bowed to her will, focusing on the difficulties she’d faced this morning with the clearly inaccurate geographic survey of her latest engineering project. The shopping center was a tricky design, involving floodplain issues that demanded absolute accuracy. Repeated problems had forced her to the drastic step of going out to the site herself with the surveyors and wading through the January snowdrifts. A heretofore unrecorded runoff stream, hidden under layers of Chicago winter snow, had landed her on her butt in cold, not-quite-frozen mud. She still blamed Mr. Spencer Reed for putting her in the position of embarrassing herself with his insistence on interrupting her workday.
In contrast to her willed focus, her subconscious made clear her total lack of control, as thoughts of that man and his insulting offer continued to pop into her head throughout the day. During a meeting with one of her project managers, Addy caught herself comparing the brassy highlights of the man’s strawberry-blond mop to the rich, gold glints she remembered in Spencer’s hair. When she took a half hour to review a new proposal, the first residential property she’d been offered, she blinked herself out of a fantasy that the property Reed had mentioned might be a house as intriguing as the one she was being asked to work on. Even her lunch break was interrupted by constant thoughts of the witty, sarcastic comebacks she imagined herself using on the attorney in a world where her off-the-cuff remarks would outmatch his.
Stop it. Just stop it. She crumpled up the remains of her Italian sub sandwich in its wrapper and pitched it neatly into the wastebasket in the corner of her office. I’m not interested in anything that man has to say.
It was depressing, however, that Spencer was the first man in aeons to spark anything other than boredom in her. Not her type at all, but still…there was something about the arrogance, not to mention the body, the face and the very mussable hair, that made her want to get down on the floor and wrestle with him.
She shook her head once and commanded her sex drive to sit down and shut up.
And stop calling him Spencer, she berated herself. You don’t call your enemies by their first names.
“Adeline Tyler, don’t you dare tromp through my house in those mucky boots! Get back out on the porch.”
Her mother’s voice came rocketing