Which called up an image of something he knew he could never pursue.
“What can we do?” he asked, skirting all the issues except the only one he would allow himself. “Many things. When a company begins to fail, it’s not enough to simply go back to the old ways. And yes, better accounting practices will help, but they won’t get Fieldman’s the attention we need to pique customers’ curiosity. What we need are some quick, very visible, highly touted changes. We want a spark to intrigue the customers and fire up the employees. We want something to attract publicity.”
He caught a smile on her face. “What?”
“I assume your changes won’t be like the ones Alan made,” she said.
Etienne laughed. “Well, I was thinking bunny rabbits. With carrots. Very eye-catching.”
“Ah, I see you really do need me, after all,” she said. “No bunny rabbits.”
He tried to look wounded. “What do you suggest, then?”
For half a second, she looked self-conscious. Those pretty caramel eyes flew open wide. “All right, you don’t want to go back to what Fieldman’s was doing when Mary was in charge.”
He slowly shook his head. “The world moves on. We have to move with it.” It was a good reminder and more for himself than for Meg. He was a man constantly on the move, and he needed to be that way. There was no way to change the past. All he could do was move away from it.
“Your job takes you all around the world, doesn’t it?”
“I never stop moving. It helps that I’m not married or likely to be. It wouldn’t be fair to ask a woman to put up with a man like me who is never around.”
Which was far more direct than he felt comfortable being, but he had learned that being direct was the only way.
Meg didn’t even blink. In fact she smiled slightly. “I’m not a family woman, either, or likely to get married.”
Which meant something bad had to have happened to her at some point.
“Someday I’ll want children, but since I don’t have them yet, I’m free to spend as much time on the job as necessary.”
Children. Etienne’s heart started thudding. He had once wanted a child.
He didn’t speak. Memories rushed at him. A conversation with his wife. She hadn’t wanted the baby. He had. But she was the one who lost her life due to the rigors of pregnancy and an undetected heart defect.
And he was obviously not hiding his reaction to her declaration well. Meg was looking at him with what could only be called concern in her expression. Etienne shook off the past. It was done. It was over. And he was making Meg nervous. That wasn’t acceptable.
“But we don’t need to spend time talking about my plans,” she said quickly. “We need to discuss the company and…I understand what you said, but we don’t want to toss out what worked completely, do we?” she asked. “That is, isn’t my knowledge of what was working part of why you hired me?”
She licked her lips nervously. Etienne’s pulse jumped. His body reacted…the way any man’s body would react. And suddenly, standing here staring at those berry lips, he wondered for a second why he had hired Meg. She wasn’t pretty in the common way at all—some might even call her plain—but there was something…some light in her eyes, something very full about those lips that made her very tempting, and temptation was never allowed to be a part of his dying business reclamation projects. Yet, here he was examining Meg as if he intended to do something that was out of the question.
He nearly swore. No doubt he’d simply been depriving himself of female companionship for too long. He was clearly going to have to watch himself around Meg Leighton. And she was still waiting for an answer to her question.
“Yes, you have the keys to what made Fieldman’s work before. Let’s take that and give it a twist.”
“Something classic but fresh,” she said.
“Fresh and enticing,” he agreed.
“Maybe…” Her whole face lit up.
“What?” He watched her, but she suddenly looked self-conscious.
“No. Maybe I’d better let that idea sink in and think it through a bit, let it play out and mature before I share it. I have an awful and longstanding tendency to jump in and do things without waiting for common sense to kick in, to react or speak without thinking. Bad habit.”
“Not always.”
She gave him a look that said he was clearly wrong. “For me it is. That’s part of what I want you to help me with. How to think on my feet without saying or doing something tremendously terrible or embarrassing.”
“What kinds of things have you said and done?”
She shook her head. “No. I am so not sharing my most embarrassing moments. It’s bad enough that they happened in the first place. I’ve taken numerous classes to improve myself. I’ve tried to learn how to ski, how to skate, how to enter a room, and I know the basic concepts. I’ve even been taught how to fall gracefully several times, but when it comes down to the wire, I’m still the person who steps on the banana peel and ends up in an embarrassing heap with absolutely no grace. Or the one who yells something loud and embarrassing just as everyone in the room stops talking. I live in fear that someone will catch me on a camera phone and I’ll end up on the Internet as one of those ‘most watched videos.’” She threw out one hand in a gesture of remorse. “You don’t happen to carry a camera phone around with you, do you?”
Etienne couldn’t stop himself from chuckling. “Yes, I do, but I would never use it against you, Meg. That would be trop…I mean too unfeeling of me.”
She gave him another look. “Ah, so you’re a gentleman. Not the type of man I meet every day.” Which made him wonder what her experiences with men had been. “So…about that idea for the company…How do you feel about leather?”
Etienne nearly choked. Ah, her so-called habit of saying something without thinking about how her audience would hear it…now he understood a little bit. Still, in this case, it was a charming addition to her personality. This woman was a delight, was all he could think of. Despite her original reluctance to work with him, she had clearly jumped in with both feet now that she’d made up her mind to commit. “Leather?” he asked, reminding himself that she was talking about furniture, not something kinky. “I like leather. What man doesn’t?”
“All right. I’ll keep that in mind. Tomorrow I’ll bring you ten ideas.”
“Of ways to use leather creatively.”
They had been moving deeper into the office, but now she stopped and faced him. Though her eyes only met his chin, she tipped her head back and gave him the kind of look a woman gave to an errant schoolboy. “Are you making fun of me, Etienne?”
No. He was enjoying her. Immensely. In a quite improper way that he knew darn well he was going to regret. Later. “I might be,” he conceded. “But I mean it only in the very best way. I think you’re unique. I like the way your thought process works.” And that, he suddenly realized was the key to Fieldman’s future success. There was always a key. Finding it was the challenge. And here she was, standing right beside him. The woman who was going to make the difference in a way that hadn’t occurred to him earlier.
“What?” she said. “Why are you looking at me that way?”