But the evening’s work was actually a nice change. After hours her sometimes-hard-to-take boss grew much less intense. Off came the exquisitely tailored suit coat he’d worn from the moment he’d gotten out of the car that morning, joined over a chair-back by his tie. Then he opened the collar button of his hardly wrinkled shirt and rolled his sleeves up to his elbows, exposing a thick neck and forearms so sinewy any construction worker would have been proud of them.
“Get out those comfortable shoes you said you were bringing,” he advised Lucy as he led the way to the room he less formally referred to as the research room.
Rand was still all business as they passed the evening going through the stacks of papers. He checked each sheet to make sure what it contained and where it belonged, then handed it to Lucy, telling her which file to put it in.
It was a monotonous task that didn’t allow for conversation as Rand concentrated on what he was doing. But Lucy found herself waiting almost breathlessly for each of those silences to be broken by the deep tones of a voice so rich it could have come from a jazz singer in a smoky New Orleans bar.
When all the papers were tucked neatly into the files, Lucy excused herself for a bathroom break and used her cell phone to call Max and bid him good-night. By the time she returned to the office Rand had transferred all the files to the file room where they spent the remainder of the evening sifting through the deep drawers of the cabinets to put the files away.
She was surprised to find Rand joining her in that portion of the job. Making sure the papers got into the correct files had required his participation, but finding the right slot for them was certainly not something he needed to attend to. Yet there he was, doing just that, right alongside her.
It was nice, Lucy admitted reluctantly. Nice to see that no job was too small for his attention. Rand Colton might be a bear to work for but he didn’t demand any less of himself than he did of anyone else, and somehow that seemed to cushion the weight of his heavy expectations.
By ten o’clock Lucy was beat and glad when they finally finished.
Even Rand seemed worn out as he raised long arms above his head, flexed his broad shoulders and stretched toward the ceiling.
“Okay, enough is enough,” he said to the accompaniment of his back cracking. “That was quite a day’s work.”
“No argument here,” Lucy agreed, rubbing at a crick in her neck.
“I didn’t even let you stop for dinner.”
“I didn’t let you stop for dinner either,” she countered with a small laugh.
“I think I owe you that much. What if we hit the diner around the corner before we go back to Georgetown? My treat for a job well done.”
That was all the invitation sounded like, too. It wasn’t as if he were asking her out on a date or even angling for that. Which, for no good reason, felt slightly demoralizing to Lucy.
But it was the way things should be, she told herself. He was just her boss, she was just his secretary. They’d put in over fourteen hours of work and he was trying to reward her for it. That was all there was to it.
Still, though, she knew she should decline the offer. Despite the fact that Sadie was baby-sitting and had long since put Max to bed, Lucy knew she should go home.
But she was hungry.
And Max would be asleep and wouldn’t know the difference if she were gone another hour.
“What do you say?” Rand urged when she hadn’t answered immediately.
“Nothing fancy?” she heard herself ask right in the middle of giving herself reasons why it wasn’t a good idea to fraternize with the boss.
“It’s a diner. Definitely nothing fancy. And if you think I can protect you out on the mean streets of Washington, we can walk there, eat and then call for the car so we don’t interrupt whatever sporting event Frank’s watching while he waits for us to page him.”
Frank was Rand’s driver and was apparently on-call. Lucy thought it was yet another surprise to find Rand considerate of the other man. And as for trusting that Rand could protect her on a late-night walk anywhere, it only took one look at the size of him, at the confidence in his comportment, to judge the notion of not being safe with him a joke.
“A walk would be good,” she agreed. “I could use the fresh air.”
“Let’s do it, then.”
Within minutes they were down the elevator and out in the cold, crisp evening.
“This way,” Rand said with a nod to his right as he pulled on leather gloves the same charcoal color as the knee-length camel hair overcoat he wore.
Lucy had buttoned up her own black wool overcoat and also took gloves from her pockets as they headed off down the street that was still alive with people and traffic.
Neither Lucy nor Rand said much along the way. Lucy could only assume that he was doing the same thing she was doing—winding down.
The diner around the corner was just a hole-in-the-wall on the bottom floor of the office building abutting Rand’s. It had booths around the perimeter and counter-seating behind which was a cut-out in the wall that opened to the kitchen where orders and plates were exchanged.
The restaurant was about half-full and Rand led the way to a vacant booth.
“Workin’ late tonight are ya, counselor?” the waitress called to them from behind the cash register a split second after they sat down.
She was an older woman with her hair cut in a man’s crew cut and a large black mole below her left eye. Lucy noticed as she approached their table that she was dressed in the classic Liberty-green waitress dress, white apron and white nurse’s shoes that might have come right out of a diner from the 1950s.
Rand answered her greeting as if they were well-acquainted and ordered two Blue Plate Specials before so much as consulting Lucy.
When the waitress left he said, “The Blue Plate is pot roast, potatoes, salad and rolls. At this time of night you don’t want anything off the grill. It hasn’t been cleaned since dawn and the food that comes off it is pretty bad. I should have warned you before we got here but since I didn’t I couldn’t do it in front of Gail. She’s part-owner and would have been insulted.”
The offense Lucy had taken at not being asked what she wanted to eat abated with that explanation. She could hardly fault him for looking out for both her palate and the waitress’s feelings. So she decided to just go with the flow rather than make an issue of Rand Colton’s high-handedness.
Gail returned with water and asked if they wanted coffee.
This time Rand raised his eyebrows at Lucy, waiting for her to answer for herself.
“I’ll have herbal tea.”
“I’ll have iced tea,” Rand added.
They’d settled their coats and gloves on the booth seats beside them and so there they were, face-to-face, with nothing to distract them. And although the view was grand since Rand looked every bit as terrific as he had to start the day, it was unnerving to have those penetrating eyes of his studying her as if she were a painting on a museum wall.
“How did you get from California to Washington D.C.?” Lucy asked just to get the conversational ball rolling.
“I was here a couple of times as a kid. To visit my father. He was a Senator when I was pretty young and my mother brought us here to see him. It was so exciting it stuck with me. Then I spent the summer after my first year of law school here, interning at a think tank, which basically means I spent twelve hours a day, six days a week, researching arcane case law for