“As far as I’m concerned, the bet is off,” Tom called after her.
“You wish,” Melissa called back.
Andrea, though puffy-eyed, looked as though she’d rallied while Melissa was away. She smiled, pushed back her chair and hurried into the tiny break room, returning moments later with a steaming cup of coffee.
The fragrance was tantalizing.
“I made it myself,” Andrea said, sweeping past her, into the inner office, and setting the cup down on Melissa’s desk.
“I thought making coffee was against your principles,” Melissa said lightly, extracting the stack of messages from her purse before putting the bag away in its usual cubbyhole.
“You’re the one who said it wasn’t in my job description,” Andrea said.
Melissa smiled. “Nevertheless, Andrea,” she replied, with a touch of irony that was probably lost on her assistant, “thank you for making the coffee. Did anyone call or stop by while I was out?”
For a fraction of a second, Andrea looked almost coy. “Mr. Creed was here,” the girl responded. “About fifteen or twenty minutes ago.”
Melissa’s heart raced, though she was all-business on the outside.
Or so she hoped, anyway.
She sat down, reached for the cup, took a sip of coffee before saying anything at all. “Oh? Did he say what he wanted?”
Be casual.
“Lunch,” Andrea said.
Lunch—an ordinary enough concept. When connected with Steven Creed, however, even the suggestion gave her that runaway roller-coaster feeling again.
Melissa merely nodded. She fanned the phone messages out on the surface of her desk, just to give herself something to do.
“I could get Mr. Creed on the phone for you,” Andrea offered, her tone eager, almost breathless.
Melissa didn’t look up from the messages. “I’ll do that myself, Andrea,” she said. “But thank you.”
“He’s pretty hot,” Andrea commented.
Melissa sighed. Agreeing that Steven was hot would have been like agreeing that the sky was blue.
Andrea hurried out of the office and closed the door behind her.
Melissa picked up the telephone handset, squinted at the written message with Steven’s name on it and dialed.
While she waited, a miniature Cirque de Soleil sprang to life in the pit of her stomach, performing death-defying spins and leaps and dives.
This was ridiculous. Maybe Steven Creed was attractive—okay, he was definitely attractive—but he was a mortal man, not a Greek god, for heaven’s sake.
Then again, that was the problem, wasn’t it? He was all man—too much man—maybe even more man than she could handle.
As if.
“Steven Creed,” he said suddenly, startling Melissa. She realized she hadn’t actually expected him to answer the call—she’d planned on leaving a message. Counted, inexplicably, on that little buffer of time.
“H-hello,” she responded, all but croaking the word. Get a grip, she told herself silently. You’re a grown woman, dammit, not a teenager.
“Melissa?”
“Yes.” She cleared her throat. Squeezed her eyes shut tight. “It’s me. I’m sorry—I was planning to answer your call earlier, but then something came up and I had to leave the office and—”
“I just wanted to invite you to lunch,” Steven said, with a smile in his voice, when she bogged down in the middle of her sentence. She’d have sworn he knew how rattled she was, and that only made her more so. “I’ll understand, of course, if you’re busy or something. It’s pretty short notice.”
Say you’re busy, advised Melissa’s inner chicken little. He gave you an out.
“I’m not busy,” she said aloud.
“Great,” Steven responded. “Meet you at the Sunflower Café at noon?”
Melissa checked her watch. It was quarter after eleven, so she had forty-five minutes to pull herself together. “Perfect,” she said, sounding way more perky than she considered necessary.
Her “perky” quota was normally zero. Add Steven Creed to the equation, though, and she was about as sedate as a middle-school cheerleader at the first big game of the season.
“See you then,” Steven said. “Bye.”
“Bye,” Melissa said, a few seconds after he’d hung up.
She took several sips of her rapidly cooling coffee, then squared her shoulders, raised her chin and started answering the messages Andrea had given her earlier.
A big believer in tackling the least appealing task first, she dialed Bea Brady’s number. The older woman answered on the second ring, but not with a hello, or her name, the way most people would have done.
“It’s about time you called me back, Melissa O’Ballivan!” she snapped, instead.
Melissa’s temper surged, nearly breaking the surface of her professional composure, but she managed a pleasant tone when she replied. “I’m at work, Bea,” she said. “Parade Committee business should probably be handled after hours.”
“How do you know I’m calling about the parade?” Bea demanded, every bit as surly as before.
Melissa reread the message, hoping she’d transcribed Andrea’s handwriting correctly. “It says here that you’re concerned about someone purchasing toilet paper?”
“Adelaide Hillingsley bought a truck load of the stuff at one of those box stores in Flagstaff,” Bea blurted. “She lives by herself. There’s only one bathroom in her house. What would one woman be doing with so much tissue if she didn’t plan on flouting the rules and using it to decorate the Chamber of Commerce float for the parade?”
Melissa closed her eyes, sat back in her chair and counted mentally until she was sure she wouldn’t laugh. Adelaide was a force to be reckoned with; although she’d originally been hired as a receptionist, she’d been running the organization for years.
“Maybe you should ask Adelaide about that, Bea,” Melissa said, when she dared to speak at all. “Since it’s committee business and I’m at work—”
“Oh, don’t give me that, Melissa O’Ballivan,” Bea broke in. “Everybody knows you don’t have anything to do most of the time anyway!”
Melissa counted again, but this time it was to keep from yelling.
“I beg your pardon?” she said, when she’d reached the double digits.
Bea backed off a little. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” she conceded. She was a nice person, despite being a bit on the pushy side—as president of the local Garden Club, and an old-line Stone Creeker, she was used to being in charge, getting things done, that was all.
“I’m glad,” Melissa said pleasantly, thinking the other woman’s remark might not have stung so much if it wasn’t so damn true.
“You’ll speak to Adelaide? Remind her that the Parade Committee specifically voted never to use toilet paper in the construction of a float? It would be so tacky—”
“I’ll talk to Adelaide,” Melissa said, because she had other calls to make and she needed to move on to the next one. None of them were any more important or pressing than this one but, still. She was drawing a paycheck, and she was on county time.
“When?