Everyone was gone. Everyone had things to do. She was going to go home to her cat. She’d make a meal for one. Watch some television. Go to bed. Have a dream. Wake up, and come back here tomorrow to do the touch-up painting on the murals. “Boy, a really exciting life,” she said as she crossed the room, turned off the last light and stepped out into the corridor.
She locked the doors, then turned to go to the elevators. A man was there in a maintenance uniform, on his knees in front of an open panel to one side, working on something intently. “Don’t tell me—they’re down again?” she asked as she approached him.
He sat back on his heels with a huge screwdriver in his hand and looked up at her, his middle-aged face flushed from his efforts. “No, ma’am, they’re working fine,” he said. “I’m just doing some fine-tuning on them.”
“Good. It seems they never work when you need them to.”
He got to his feet, pushed the screwdriver into a tool belt he was wearing with grease-smudged overalls, then picked up a rag and rubbed his soiled hands with it. “You and everyone else complaining about them.” He lowered his voice. “Even him up there,” he said, rolling his eyes upward.
“Him?”
“Holden. One of the big guys. He was just saying he wanted them kept in good working order, as if we’d been trying to keep them in bad working order.”
“Mr. Holden’s still here?”
“Yeah, that guy and Mr. Terrel—they’re around at all hours. They work all the time.”
So, he was here. And she knew, according to his appointment ledger, that he stopped appointments by five. She wasn’t going to go home and eat with a cat. Not when Zane Holden was still in the building and possibly available. Maybe she wouldn’t have to wait two weeks to see him, after all.
“Thanks,” she said to the man. “Thanks a lot.”
He looked a bit confused, but nodded and smiled. “You’re real welcome, ma’am.”
She pushed the up button on the nearest elevator, and the car was there immediately. “Have a good night,” she said as she got in.
“You, too,” he called after her as the doors shut.
“That’s the plan,” she muttered as she pushed the button for the twentieth floor. “That’s the plan.”
As the elevator started upward, she felt her heart start to hammer in her chest. She wasn’t dressed right. It was Friday—dress down day—which meant she was in jeans, a plain white shirt and chunky boots. And she had no makeup on.
She caught herself. All that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t dressed up. She didn’t matter. This was an opportunity. And she was going to take it. She had to take it.
She steeled herself. There was so much at stake, but she had always been a fighter by necessity and knew that you didn’t wait for an opening to magically appear. You made the opening, then you struck when the iron was hot.
This was her opening. It didn’t mean that she liked it or that she wasn’t afraid to take on the powers that be, but she had no choice.
ZANE HAD BEEN in a hurry. He’d worked longer than he’d intended to, and by the time he looked up it was six-thirty. Karen Blair didn’t do “waiting” well, and he didn’t want to have to test her on that—not before he found out what she had to say about the company’s PR issue.
He’d grabbed his jacket and briefcase, then headed down the hall to Matt’s office to drop off more figures he’d ironed out. He went through his partner’s empty outer office and into Matt’s personal space. The room was supposed to be a duplicate of his, a matching C.E.O. suite, but he never ceased to marvel at the almost Spartan condition Matt could maintain anywhere he went. Despite the thick carpeting, the wood touches and elaborate metal-and-glass desk, there wasn’t a thing out of place. The massive desk held only a silent computer and a phone system. And Matt was gone.
The man didn’t own anything, despite all the money he was making. He didn’t “collect personal paraphernalia,” he’d said once. He lived out of a suitcase, in a hotel room, and drove rental cars and worked. Zane knew Matt grew up poor, got to college on scholarships, passed the bar exam, and had real brains for business. And another thing he knew for sure—Matt was one of very few people that Zane trusted, really trusted.
As he tossed the paperwork on the pristine desk, he heard the sound of a door opening. Matt wasn’t gone, after all. Zane crossed to the door and stepped out of the inner office, but he wasn’t facing Matt.
There was the hint of a flowery scent in the air, a scent he remembered from somewhere. Then he saw a woman in the open doorway, and he remembered. The first time he’d seen her he’d had a flashing impression of a slender wisp of a woman in dark slacks and a white top, just before she’d crashed into him in the stairwell. Then, as he’d grabbed her to keep her from falling, there had been a sensation of fine bones, heat, softness, before she spoke and everything had shifted.
A woman who had no use for Zane Holden and his “cohorts” had been a blip on his day at the time. But now she was here, and in the harsh overhead lights he took in details. Jeans defined slender hips and long legs, a shirt tucked in at the slim waist, hinted at high breasts. Then he looked up into her face. Incredible amber eyes were huge with shock, and sudden color flooded her face, emphasizing the fact that she wore no discernable makeup and that she had freckles, real freckles. A woman who blushed and had freckles. He almost smiled. Then he remembered what she’d said about him. He didn’t smile. Instead, Zane went a bit closer, flicking his gaze over her feathery blond cap of hair, her straight nose, those freckles, pale pink lips softly parted with surprise—then back to her eyes.
“It’s you,” she breathed. “Oh, shoot, I’m so sorry. I never should…” She bit her pale bottom lip. “I really owe you an apology for what I said the other day,” she said, then started fumbling in her purse. “I didn’t know who you were and I was just saying things, and…” She was talking quickly as she rummaged in her purse, then suddenly said, “Aha. Here it is.”
She pulled something out of her purse, then held it up to him. His gold pen. “Where in the hell did you get that?”
“You dropped it on the stairs when we…when I ran into you.” She came closer, and held it out to him. “I found it and didn’t know who you were.”
That color came again. She was blushing, which made her freckles vivid. When was the last time he’d seen someone blush? He didn’t have a clue.
“Anyway, I kept it and was going to give it back, and now…” Her voice sort of faded.
He glanced at the pen in her hand—a hand with slender fingers, no polish, short, oval nails and no rings. Then he shifted his briefcase to the same hand holding his suit coat and took the pen. He was vaguely aware of a sense of heat in the rich metal. Her heat. “I was looking all over for it.”
“I bet you were,” she said as she moved back a bit. “I mean, it had to have cost a fortune, and I know if I had a pen like that I’d about die if I lost it.”
He fingered the pen. “You came here to bring it back to me?”
“Oh, no, of course not. I didn’t even know who you were, obviously. I mean, if I had, I certainly…it would have been…” She shrugged. “Okay, let’s just get this over with. I’m sorry for saying what I said. I had no idea who you were, or I never would have said it. Can we forget it and start all over again?”
He doubted he’d forget that reproach in her voice, but starting over with her had its own appeal. “Okay. If you aren’t up here to bring back the pen, why are you here?”
“I was told you were still here,