Emmy And The Boss. Penny McCusker

Lindy said.

      “You’re not eating?”

      “There are olives in the martini.”

      Emmy rolled her eyes.

      “All right, I’ll eat.” Lindy smiled dazzlingly up at the waiter. “You choose for me,” she said to him. “I’m sure whatever you give me will be incredible.”

      He froze for a few seconds, his eyes on Lindy, but Emmy had to give him credit for hanging on to his professionalism because he finally nodded and said, “Of course, ma’am.” His words were a bit strangled, he wasn’t breathing quite right, and his upper lip was sweating, but at least he didn’t trip over his own feet the way she’d seen some men do after Lindy unleashed herself on them.

      Emmy shook her head, but she was smiling, and it felt good. Trust Lindy to pull her out of the doldrums. “That man is never going to be the same.”

      “But my meal will be fabulous. Now, where were we? Oh, right, I was enjoying your upheaval.”

      “And I was about to call you a b—”

      “Don’t say it, you’ll only feel terrible later.”

      “Not this time.”

      Lindy laughed off Emmy’s scowl. “You have no reason to complain,” she said. “Roger was considerate enough to go away before getting rid of him involved, well, hiring me. And five minutes later a drop-dead-gorgeous man walked into your life, stumbling all over himself the minute he laid eyes on you. If that wasn’t lo—”

      “Don’t say it.”

      “Fine,” Lindy huffed out, “but I’m using the other L-word because at the very least it was lust at first sight, and that’s a pretty good place to start. If you had any sense you’d drag Nick Porter home, lock yourself in the bedroom with him for the next couple of weeks and see where it goes from there. My money’s on happily ever after.”

      “No such thing,” Emmy said.

      “Then why were you marrying Roger?”

      Emmy thought about that a minute, then did a hands-up. “The reason escapes me now.”

      “It doesn’t escape me.” Lindy took her martini out of the waiter’s hand, barely sparing him a glance this time in favor of taking a big, fortifying swallow. “You don’t want to be alone, but you don’t want to take any emotional risks. You didn’t love Roger, so he wasn’t a threat. If you came home one day and found him gone, you wouldn’t care.”

      “I’d care if he took all my furniture.”

      “And doesn’t it mean anything to you that you’d miss your end tables more than your fiancé?”

      “They’re really nice end tables.”

      “Give me one good reason why you can’t get together with Nick,” Lindy said, the soft, wistful tone of her voice more compelling than all the exasperation that had gone before it.

      Emmy picked up her drink and took her time fishing out the cherry.

      “Well?”

      “I’m thinking,” she said. But everything she came up with was either ridiculous or something she couldn’t say out loud. There was nothing wrong with Nick, unless you counted his low ambition quotient, and that was only a flaw to an overachiever like her. The only real problem she had with him was that he made her want things she hadn’t wanted in a long, long time. If she said that to Lindy, they’d be right back to exasperation because Lindy was a stop-griping-and-deal-with-it kind of person. Emmy didn’t want to deal with this. She’d been lugging around her emotional baggage for years, and it hadn’t gotten in her way. She didn’t see any reason to unpack it now.

      “You can think all you want,” Lindy said, “but you won’t come up with anything.”

      “Roger is gone, and Nick isn’t taking his place.”

      “That sounds really convincing, but what are you going to do about you?”

      Emmy shrugged.

      “No, you don’t,” Lindy said, not letting her duck the subject. “Being a foster kid—”

      “That’s the past.”

      “Not if you keep letting it affect the present.”

      “I’m not going there tonight,” Emmy warned.

      “You never go there and it’s unhealthy. One of these days you’re going to wake up in a rubber room, missing a few months of your life.”

      “Do I get to pick which ones I want to forget?”

      “No, and trust me, I know how it feels. I ignored my garbage until I was forced to deal with it. If you’re smart, you’ll deal with yours before that happens.”

      “I’m handling it fine.”

      “First you agreed to marry Roger for…I don’t know the reasons, but I can tell you they were the wrong ones.” Lindy leaned forward, keeping her voice down, “and now you’re turning your back on a nice guy like Nick. Doesn’t sound like dealing to me. It sounds like sticking your head in the sand.”

      “Whatever. It’s working.”

      “For the time being,” Lindy, the voice of doom, said.

      Emmy looked away. She could tune Lindy out so she didn’t hear the disapproval, and if she didn’t look at her, she didn’t have to see it, either. But she couldn’t escape her own feelings—and suddenly she was feeling a whole lot. “You asked me to give you one reason why I shouldn’t get together with Nick,” she said. “How about he’s scum?”

      “No, he’s not. You’re just saying that because—”

      “He’s standing over there with a redhead,” Emmy said, disgusted with herself more than Nick because she hated that he was standing there with any woman but her. “I told you he didn’t want me anymore.”