The corners of Lukkas’s mouth curved just a hint as he turned toward the officer and said, “She does, actually. This is Hanna’s first day. She’s here a little early,” he commented. “But that’s a good thing.”
The officer removed his hand from his weapon. “Oh.” There was just a sliver of disappointment in the man’s voice. He glanced from the producer to the woman who had almost been arrested. “Sorry about that, but it’s better to be careful than let things ride and then be sorry.”
The apology was halfhearted, but Yohanna considered it better than nothing. She inclined her head, silently indicating that she accepted the officer’s rather paltry excuse.
A huge range of emotions swirled through her like the wind gearing up before a storm. This was a whole different world that she was signing on for.
She focused on the one piece of information she had picked up out of all this. “You had a stalker?” she asked Lukkas incredulously. She’d occasionally read about things like that happening, both to famous celebrities as well as to average, everyday people, but it had never touched her life or happened to anyone she actually knew.
Until now.
“What happened?” she asked him.
Lukkas didn’t answer her and gave no indication that he had even heard her. Instead, what he said was, “Ready to get started?”
She took that to mean that the subject of his past stalker was off-limits. While her curiosity was still rather exceedingly ramped up, she could understand why the producer wouldn’t want to pursue the subject. This was obviously something out of Spader’s private life and she was just an employee—a new employee at that—hired on a probationary basis. That didn’t exactly make her someone he was about to bare his soul to within the first few minutes of her first day on the job.
So she buried the question as well as her growing and somewhat unbridled curiosity and cheerfully replied, “Absolutely,” to his question.
But even with her ready and eager to get started, it turned out that the producer wasn’t quite ready to go back into his house just yet.
Instead, he took out what looked like a weather-beaten wallet from his back pocket. When he opened it, she realized that he wasn’t holding a wallet. What Lukkas had in his hand was a checkbook.
The next moment he had turned toward the officer who was still standing there. “I heard that the department is collecting ticket money for their semi-annual basketball-for-charity game,” Lukkas said as he began to write a more than substantial check to the Bedford Police Department, earmarking it for the basketball game.
Seeing the sum, the officer beamed, instantly forgetting all about the arrest he had been deprived of. “Yes, sir.”
“Here.” Lukkas tore out the check and handed it to the officer. “This might help a little.”
Looking again at the sum the producer had written in, the police officer’s eyes seemed about to fall out of the man’s head. Yohanna thought that perhaps the number hadn’t quite registered when the man had first glanced at the check.
“Yes, sir, it sure would,” the officer said with no small enthusiasm.
“Keep up the good work,” Lukkas said, turning his back on the man and striding back to his house.
Yohanna tried to fall into place beside the producer. She found herself all but racing to keep up with him. In the background, she heard the patrol car driving away.
Glancing over his shoulder, Lukkas asked, “Am I walking too fast for you?”
“No,” Yohanna answered stubbornly, doing her best to move even faster.
He stopped abruptly at his front door. Fueled by momentum, Yohanna almost crashed into him. Had he not caught hold of her shoulders just then, her body might have wound up vying for the exact same space that his was in.
Hiding his amusement, Lukkas held her in place for a moment. “Never be ashamed to admit the truth,” he told her, referring to the answer she’d given him.
Rather than meekly accept the castigation, she lifted her chin ever so slightly and asked, “Does that work both ways?”
He didn’t answer her immediately. He took his time, as if he was weighing something.
“Yes,” he said after a beat.
She decided to see if he actually practiced what he preached. “Then, did you have a stalker?”
Releasing her shoulders, instead of being annoyed, Lukkas laughed. “Touché,” he acknowledged, inclining his head.
Then he pulled open the front door. He’d left it unlocked earlier when he’d come out to see what was going on.
Yohanna just assumed the man was going to leave the question she’d repeated hanging in the air, unanswered. To her surprise, as she started to enter the house, she heard him say, “Yes, I had a stalker. It was a few years ago.”
Closing the door behind them, Lukkas began to lead her through the house to the room he’d converted into his office. The same place where he had conducted her interview yesterday.
This time, since she was just a shade less nervous than she had been the day before, she took in more of her surroundings. Rather than modern or austere, the furnishings struck her as comfortable with warm, friendly lines. She wondered if her new boss had done the decorating himself, or if he had hired someone to do it for him.
Maybe he’d left it up to the woman she was replacing, she mused.
“Did they catch the person? The stalker,” she clarified. Since Lukkas had opened up a little, she did her best to follow up on the subject. The more she knew about her employer, the more efficiently she could serve him.
“Why do you want to know?” As a rule, Lukkas didn’t like being questioned. He turned the tables on his new assistant. Every word she uttered painted that much more of a complete picture of her.
“Just curious if there was still someone out there who felt they had the right to a piece of your life,” she told him.
He thought that was rather a unique way of describing his stalker. Maybe there was more to this woman he’d hired than he’d thought, which was all to the good in his opinion.
“There’s always someone out there, Hanna,” he told her. “But if you’re asking specifically if that misguided young woman is liable to pop up outside my window at a time of her choosing, the answer’s no. To the best of my knowledge, she’s still being treated as an inpatient at a psychiatric facility.” This time he stopped right outside his office door. “Anything else?”
She got the distinct impression that the topic of conversation was to end right here, at his door. She wasn’t quite sure if that meant she had stepped over some invisible boundary, or if the tone of voice he was using was just the way he sounded when he spoke to someone who was working for him.
If he decided to keep her on, she supposed she’d find out.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Go ahead.” There was no indication that he was running out of patience as far as she could see—which was good.
“Shouldn’t I have filled out some sort of paperwork for your human resources department?” Yohanna asked.
Although overjoyed to actually be working, especially for someone like Lukkas Spader, there was still a small part of her that was highly skeptical about the validity of the entire arrangement. That left her wondering if perhaps, at the end of the day, she was not only off the record but completely off any books, as well.
Lukkas made no answer.
Instead, he pushed open the door to his office and silently gestured