“All right, we know the lay of the land now, Meg,” Etienne was saying, causing her to start.
She pulled herself back into the here and now and the business at hand. “The situation at Fieldman’s looks pretty desperate,” she said.
“Getting cold feet?”
She was. The thought of holding people’s lives in her hands filled her with dread. She’d spoken with Edie at lunchtime, and her friend was so scared she was practically in tears.
“I don’t want my friends to suffer,” she said. “Edie’s husband got laid off from his job last year and he hasn’t been able to find another one. This place is all she has. She’s not the only one, either. The people here…they’re good people.”
“They didn’t stand up to Alan when he fired you.”
“They have children, dependents. I don’t. And I don’t blame them. What could they have said that would have made a difference? And anyway, my problems with Alan were of my own making.”
Etienne swore at that. At least she assumed he was swearing. “I don’t know those words,” she told him.
“Good. And you’re not going to, either, ma chère.”
Meg felt a jolt, a warmth, go through her at the French phrase. All right, she’d had high school French, enough to realize that he meant it just as a friendly term, but coming from Etienne’s lips…oh darn, Etienne could say the words peanut butter and a woman would go all gooey inside.
Except me, she thought. I just declared my intent to be strong not two minutes ago. And it’s true. It’s got to be true. I have to make it true. Etienne’s not available. I’m not available and I don’t want to be available. From now on I’m immune to Etienne. Please let me be immune. Don’t let me do or say something stupid.
“This Alan…he was the one in the wrong. You shouldn’t let a man like that dictate your life,” Etienne told her. “Your worth should never be dependent on one person.” He said the words angrily with a slash of his hand.
“I don’t let my worth depend on the opinion of others,” she assured him. “I won’t.” But she had. Once upon a time she had tried to break past her parents’ conviction that her birth had intruded on their plans and ruined their lives, but she hadn’t been able to do that, and now that no longer mattered. She had a goal and a purpose and none of what had happened in her past could stop her.
“Good. I’m glad to hear that,” Etienne said with a smile that lit up those sexy, silvery-blue eyes. “We’ll save your friends together, Meg. This won’t be all on your head. I wouldn’t allow you to carry that burden or to ever feel that you were solely responsible for saving another person. I would never have asked you to go through anything like that alone.” He broke off abruptly and she wondered what his experience with burdens or trying to save people had been, but she’d read the online articles about him losing his wife and baby and she was sure he knew about the depths of despair and the fear of not being able to save someone. He had good reason to travel the world alone and keep his heart intact.
Meg’s eyes felt suddenly misty. She blinked. “Thank you.”
“Still,” he said in that low, deep voice of his, “I have to express my admiration. You were amazingly adept at deciphering those ledgers. They were gibberish to me, and I’ve looked at more than my share of ledgers.”
She shrugged. “Mary had her own system. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t a great idea.”
“So, the ledgers are translated. That’s one bridge crossed,” he said. “Now, on to the next.”
She blinked. They had already been here for ten hours. “What’s next?”
“You,” he said.
“Me?” Her heartbeat went into overdrive.
“I made you a promise yesterday. We had a deal.”
“Oh. Me. You’re going to transform me. And you’re going to make me into a worthy spokesperson.”
“You’re already worthy and you don’t need transforming. You need polish.”
“Lots of polish.”
He frowned, but she ignored that. “What are you going to teach me first?”
She looked up at him and was surprised to see a look of intense heat in his eyes. “First I’m going to dress you.”
Meg swallowed hard. Even though, she reminded herself, there was no reason to be self-conscious. Dressing a woman was a lot different from undressing her. But her appearance was the last thing she had envisioned when she’d asked Etienne to help make her a success. This was unsettling, unnerving. The very thought…She felt ridiculously frivolous, but somehow she was sure that Etienne had encountered any number of successful women in his life. He knew the right ingredients.
“All right,” she said slowly. “I suppose you could do that. I was never very fond of this dress, anyway.”
“That dress should be destroyed so that no one can ever wear it again.”
He sounded so offended that she just had to smile. “That’s going a bit far, isn’t it?”
“Not nearly far enough, Meg. You have…curves. You should show them.”
“Curves?” she said with a laugh and a shake of her head. “Well, thank you for putting it that way instead of simply saying that I weigh too much.”
“You do not weigh too much. You have shape. Here,” he said, motioning toward her breast. He didn’t touch her at all, but she felt as if she had been touched. “And here,” he continued, curving his palm near her hip.
With great effort, Meg continued to breathe.
“Shape is a good thing,” Etienne said. “N’est ce pas? Isn’t it?”
It had never been a good thing for her before, but…
“You know a lot about women and what makes them…noticeable, don’t you? That is, noticeable in a good way, not in a bad way.”
“Has someone been making you feel bad about your looks?”
Okay, that was a subject she was not going to discuss. Doing so would only make her look as if she felt sorry for herself, and she refused to be that kind of whining woman. “No. Not at all,” she said brightly.
He smiled, and she knew that he probably suspected she was lying. “Good, because you should be proud of your looks. You have…”
He was hesitating. In her Meg plow-ahead way, she wanted to help, but discussing her physical attributes was virgin territory for her and also incredibly dangerous to her peace of mind, she thought, remembering that curving-his-hands-near-her-body exploration that had made her ache and want to squirm closer. “Etienne, I’m not some fragile flower.You don’t have to be so careful with me. I’m comfortable with who I am and I want you to know that I can do a pretty decent job of camouflaging this scar with makeup when I take the time to do that if it will help my image,” she offered, gesturing toward her mouth.
“Yes. I noticed that enchanting scar, Meg,” he said. And somehow the way he said it, he made it sound as if every woman on earth should only wish they had such a scar. “How did you get it?”
But that was another topic she didn’t care to discuss in great depth. “It was just a little fall. Not a big deal,” she said, though of course it had felt like a very big deal when she was growing up. Her mother had constantly urged her to cover it up and had bemoaned the fact that Meg would never be half as beautiful as her sister, Ann. Ann being the grown daughter Leslie Leighton and her husband had actually planned