“So are bill collectors.”
She laughed, that wonderful laugh again. “Some people see it that way, I know. But I prefer to think of it more like a puppy begging at the table, with big sad eyes that you try to ignore but can’t. Then you end up feeling guilty and give them what they want.”
He chuckled. “So, you admit you use guilt?”
“Absolutely,” she answered blithely. “It’s one of my best tools. Besides, once people give, they feel so much better.”
His chuckle became another laugh. “So it’s for their own good, then?”
“Absolutely. And ours, of course, but you see, that’s the best part. Everyone winds up happier. So, may I add you to the roster?”
It was on the tip of his tongue to say yes. His mouth was open to say yes. Then, at the last second, he remembered what he would be saying yes to. He’d never been to one of those kinds of charity auctions before, but visions of beauty pageant contestants were vivid in his mind.
Uh-uh. No way.
Lord, she’d almost had him, with her cheerful demeanor, her sense of humor…and that voice.
Almost.
“Listen, Ms. Laraway, I have a meeting scheduled in ten minutes. I’ll consider your…request, but I have to go.”
“Certainly. My goal is to convince you to volunteer, certainly not to interfere with your work,” the sexy voice said, and he wondered again why he didn’t just say yes. “But please, do think about it. I’ll get back to you.”
He did think about it. In fact, when his assistant stuck her head in the door and reminded him that his meeting was to begin in approximately forty-five seconds, and that the staff was already in the adjacent meeting room, he realized he’d been thinking about it for the entire ten minutes.
Or rather, thinking about the amusing, sexy-voiced Ms. Laraway. He wasn’t going to participate in her auction—parading himself around like a horse in a sale ring wasn’t his idea of fun—but it was tempting, if only to meet the woman.
He gathered the papers he’d been going over in preparation for the meeting before he’d been interrupted by the call. He started toward the meeting room door, but stopped as his assistant turned to go back out to her desk.
“Karen?”
She turned, looking at him questioningly. He’d inherited both Karen Yamato and this office when Pete Collins had turned over the reins to him and retired. His old mentor had told him that Karen was both the glue that held things together and the oil that kept them running, and it hadn’t taken Ethan long to realize Pete had been understating things a bit. The petite, ageless-seeming Eurasian woman, who looked to him exactly as she had when he’d first come here as a boy, was as close as anybody around West Coast Technologies came to being indispensable. And that included him.
“Did you get a number from the woman who just called? From the Alzheimer’s charity?”
“Layla? Of course.”
Layla? Her name was Layla? A voice like that, and a name like Layla Laraway? The mind fairly boggled, he thought. And his own mind was conjuring up all kinds of heated, sweaty images.
“Did you change your mind and decide to do the auction?”
“I…no. I just wanted to know when it was. I forgot to ask.” I need to know how much time I have to come up with an excuse. Then he frowned. “How did you know I wasn’t going to do it?”
Karen lifted a brow at him, reminding him without a word that even after only five years, she knew him almost as well as she’d known Pete after twenty years of working for him. Perhaps it was in part because he’d learned so much from her former boss that he’d taken on some of his characteristics. He didn’t mind; he could do a hell of a lot worse than emulate Pete Collins. Or, at least, the Pete who had sat in this office.
He fought off the old pang and was glad when Karen offered a distraction.
“I’ll call Layla back for you during your meeting, if you’d like,” she said.
He looked at her, curious about the familiarity in her tone. “You know her?”
“Only by reputation.”
“Which is?”
“Smart. Dynamic. Dedicated.” Three things guaranteed to gain Karen’s approval, Ethan thought. “What I’ve heard, I admire,” she added.
He knew too well that no one won Karen Yamato’s admiration lightly; if Layla Laraway—Lord, what a name—had gotten it without even a face-to-face, she had to be something.
“So you think I should do it?”
“I think,” she said, with a gesture toward the door, “you should go to your meeting.”
He jerked upright; he’d actually forgotten. Again.
He was still shaking his head as he walked into the room. He was rarely so scattered. He didn’t want to think a single phone call from an unknown woman had done it, because that would mean he would have to consider that both his sisters were right about his dearth of a social life, and that he was rapidly losing what they called his minimal social skills.
“We understood that you needed at least a year after you broke up with Gwen,” Margaret had told him just yesterday. “You were together a long time. But now it’s been three years. It’s time.”
“What is it with women?” he’d asked, figuring the best defense was a diversion. “Do you always put time limits on things like that?”
“Only,” his oldest sister had returned dryly, “when our brother is turning into a workaholic monk.”
“You’re too damn sexy to be celibate,” Sarah had put in.
Now that had scattered him. She was his baby sister, for crying out loud, she wasn’t supposed to be thinking things like that, let alone saying them.
Of course, she was twenty-eight now. He supposed she wasn’t quite the innocent he’d held in the dark the night their world had fallen apart. But still, it was hard not to think of her as that frightened ten-year-old sometimes. He—
“Ethan? Are you ready to start?”
He, Ethan thought as he snapped back to the present, was losing it. Definitely.
He glanced at his head of Research and Development, Mark Ayala, whose report on the progress on the Collins project was the reason for this meeting. He knew what he would hear, which was no change in the status quo, but he would take that happily over any setbacks. He’d only begun the project ten months ago, expected it to take years, and considered it worth the time and expense.
“Sorry, Mark,” he said as he took his seat at the head of the long table. “Let’s get to it.”
Mark began, in that report-making drone that always reminded Ethan of Professor Kosell’s economic theory classes. He’d always sat in the back of the theater-style lecture hall, high up and close to the door, so he could escape quickly and make it to work in the scant fifteen minutes he’d had to get across town. Unfortunately, the back part of the room was also the highest part of the room, where the heat of a hundred or so bodies rose, and that, coupled with his usual lack of sleep and the professor’s monotone, had frequently been enough to have him nodding off.
Ethan didn’t care for these types of meetings. He’d found most people too intimidated by the formal setting to really cut loose with any original thinking. He much preferred to keep current on projects by visiting his people in their own environment, where the actual work was being done. And for original thinking, he was much more likely to take a group out for pizza and beer, and let the ideas flow.
He liked the fact that West Coast Technologies