Mindy was chewing, and she swallowed before answering. “It’s just great of his parents to take us along—we could never have afforded it on our own.”
With a nod, Amanda poked her fork into a cherry tomato.
“What are you doing over the holidays?” Mindy asked.
Amanda forced a smile. “I’m going to be working,” she reminded her friend.
“I know that, but what about a tree and presents and a turkey?”
“I’ll have all those things at my mom and stepdad’s place.”
Mindy, who knew about James and all the dashed hopes he’d left in his wake, looked sympathetic. “You need to meet a new man.”
Amanda bristled a little. “It just so happens that a woman can have a perfectly happy life without a man hanging around.”
Mindy looked doubtful. “Sure,” she said.
“Besides, I met someone just yesterday.”
“Who?”
Amanda concentrated on her salad for several long moments. “His name is Jordan Richards, and—”
“Jordan Richards?” Mindy interrupted excitedly. “Wow! How did you ever manage to meet him?”
A little insulted that Mindy seemed to think Jordan was so far out of her orbit that even meeting him was a feat to get excited about, Amanda frowned. “We were in line together at a bookstore. Do you know him?”
“Not exactly,” Mindy admitted, subsiding a little. “But my father-in-law does. Jordan Richards practically doubled his retirement fund for him, and they’re always writing about him in the financial section of the Sunday paper.”
“I didn’t know you read that section,” Amanda remarked.
“I don’t,” Mindy admitted readily, unwrapping a bread stick. “But we have dinner with my in-laws practically every Sunday, and that’s all Pete and his dad ever talk about. Did he ask you out?”
“Who?”
“Jordan Richards, silly.”
Amanda shook her head. “No, we just had Chinese food together and talked a little.” She deliberately left out the part about how they’d gone to the minitherapy session and the way she’d reacted when Jordan had asked her about James.
Mindy looked disappointed. “Well, he did ask for your number, didn’t he?”
“No. But he knows where I work. If he wants to call, I suppose he will.”
A delighted smile lit Mindy’s face. Positive thinking was an art form with her. “He’ll call. I just know it.”
Amanda grinned. “If he does, I won’t be able to accept the glory—I owe it all to an article I read in Cosmo. I think it was called ‘Big Girls Should Talk to Strangers,’ or something like that.”
Mindy lifted her diet cola in a rousing roast. “Here’s to Jordan Richards and a red-hot romance!”
With a chuckle, Amanda touched her cup to Mindy’s and drank a toast to something that would probably never happen.
Back at the hotel more crises were waiting to be solved, and there was a message on Amanda’s desk, scrawled by the typist who’d filled in for Mindy during lunch. Jordan Richards had called.
A peculiar tightness constricted Amanda’s throat, and a flutter started in the pit of her stomach. Mindy’s toast echoed in her ears: “Here’s to Jordan Richards and a red-hot romance.”
Amanda laid down the message, telling herself she didn’t have time to return the call, then picked it up again. Before she knew it, her finger was punching out the numbers.
“Striner, Striner and Richards,” sang a receptionist’s voice at the other end of the line.
Amanda drew a deep breath, squared her shoulders and exhaled. “This is Amanda Scott,” she said in her most professional voice. “I’m returning a call from Jordan Richards.”
“One moment, please.”
After a series of clicks and buzzes another female voice came on the line. “Jordan Richards’s office. May I help you?”
Again Amanda gave her name. And again she was careful to say she was returning a call that had originated with Jordan.
There was another buzz, then Jordan’s deep, crisp voice saying, “Richards.”
Amanda hadn’t expected a simple thing like the man saying his name to affect her the way it did. It was the strangest sensation to feel dizzy over something like that. She dropped into the swivel chair behind her desk. “Hi. It’s Amanda.”
“Amanda.”
Coming from him, her own name had the same strange impact as his had had.
“How are you?” he asked.
Amanda swallowed. She was a professional with a very responsible job. It was ridiculous to be overwhelmed by something so simple and ordinary as the timbre of a man’s voice. “I’m fine,” she answered. Nothing more imaginative came to her, and she sat there behind her broad desk, blushing like an eighth-grade schoolgirl trying to work up the courage to ask a boy to a sock hop.
His low, masculine chuckle came over the wire to surround her like a mystical caress. “If I promise not to ask any more questions about you know who, will you go out with me? Some friends of mine are having an informal dinner tonight on their houseboat.”
Amanda still felt foolish for talking about James in the therapy session, then practically bolting when Jordan brought him up again over Chinese food. Lately she just seemed to be a mass of contradictions, feeling one way one minute, another the next. What it all came down to was the fact that Dr. Marshall was right—she needed to start taking chances again. “Sounds like fun,” she said after drawing a deep breath.
“Pick you up at seven?”
“Yes.” And she gave him her address. A little thrill went through her as she laid the receiver back on its cradle, but there was no more time to think about Jordan. The telephone immediately rang again.
“Amanda Scott.”
The chef’s assistant was calling. A pipe had broken, and the kitchen was flooding fast.
“Just another manic day,” Amanda muttered as she hurried off to investigate.
2
It was ten minutes after six when Amanda got off the bus in front of her apartment building and dashed inside. After collecting her mail, she hurried up the stairs and jammed her key into the lock. Jordan was picking her up in less than an hour, and she had a hundred things to do to get ready.
Since he’d told her the evening would be a casual one, she selected gray woolen slacks and a cobalt-blue blouse. After a hasty shower, she put on fresh makeup and quickly wove her hair into a French braid.
Gershwin stood on the back of the toilet the whole time she was getting ready, lamenting the treatment of house cats in contemporary America. She had just given him his dinner when a knock sounded at the door.
Amanda’s heart lurched like a dizzy ballet dancer, and she wondered why she was being such a ninny. Jordan Richards was just a man, nothing more. And so what if he was successful? She met a lot of men like him in her line of work.
She opened the door and knew a moment of pure exaltation at the look of approval in Jordan’s eyes.
“Hi,” he