A Wife In Time

“Well, no, not really,” Susannah admitted. Although most of their interns were still single—and in their junior year of college—it wasn’t a requirement for entrance into the internship program.

“Listen, I’m only going to say this once,” he bit out. “Stay away from my brother.”

“A little hard to do since he works for me,” Susannah noted wryly.

“Then fire him.”

“I’ll do no such thing. Besides, he’s an intern. He can’t be fired. He’s not a paid employee. Look, I’m sorry to hear your brother is having marital difficulties, but I fail to see what that has to do with me.”

“Lady, you take the cake! You don’t think your having an affair with him might have something to do with his marital problems?”

“An affair?” Susannah repeated in astonishment. Now she knew Kane Wilder was off his rocker. “No way!” It was too ridiculous to even contemplate. Sure, she’d had lunch with Charles a few times, but that certainly didn’t qualify as an affair! There had never been a hint of any impropriety— Well, there was that one time in the copying room two weeks ago when he’d brushed up against her. At the time, she’d thought she’d been imagining things. Now she was quickly reassessing that conclusion.

It made Susannah very uneasy to think that Charles might have had a crush on her and she hadn’t even noticed. A crush so intense that he was threatening to leave his wife over it. Things like that didn’t happen to her, which was no doubt why she hadn’t recognized the signs earlier.

“Look, Mr. Wilder,” she began. “Your brother clearly has a problem—”

“Oh, sure, put the blame on him,” Kane retorted.

“He is the one who’s married,” she reminded him.

“And you’re the one who went after him—a much younger man.”

Stung, Susannah said, “He’s not that much younger!”

“You’re old enough to know better.”

“So is he. Not that anything happened, because it didn’t,” she quickly clarified before going on to bluntly say, “Your brother is lying if he told you that he’s having an affair with me.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“And I’m supposed to just take your word for it, is that it?”

Susannah nodded emphatically.

“The word of a woman I’ve just met over the word of a brother I’ve helped raise, the brother who has never told a lie in his life.”

“Well, when he decided to start, he sure started with a big one,” she countered. “Because the claim that the two of us are somehow romantically involved is ludicrous.”

“I see. So you’re merely sexually—not romantically— involved with him, is that it?”

“No, that’s not it! My relationship with your younger brother has been strictly professional.”

“Strictly professional?” he questioned. “Meaning you never met with him privately. You treated him as you did all your other co-workers?”

Susannah couldn’t stop the flash of guilt that shadowed her face.

“I knew it,” Kane said, looking at her as if she were something the cat had dragged in.

Susannah’s patience was rapidly running out. “No, you don’t know anything! Okay,” she acknowledged, “so I may have taken him more under my wing than I have with some of the other interns. But that doesn’t mean that I’m having an affair with him. Not by any stretch of the imagination!”

“And why do you suppose my brother would lie about something like this?” Kane asked coldly.

“I have no idea. You’d have to ask him that question. Maybe you misunderstood what he told his wife,” Susannah suggested.

“I didn’t misunderstand what he told me,” Kane retorted.

“I can’t believe he made up such a ridiculous story,” Susannah said with perplexed frown. “Surely he realized he’d be caught in a lie of this proportion?”

“My point exactly,” Kane agreed with a pleasant smile that conveyed mockery rather than humor. “It would be pretty foolish of him to lie about something like this.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s telling the truth, however,” Susannah quickly maintained. “When I get back to New York, I’ll clearly have to talk with him.”

“Another little talk at your place?”

“He’s never been to my place.” She paused, remembering the time she’d stayed home to read manuscripts and he’d brought over a contract she’d needed to authorize. “Okay, so maybe he was at my place. Once. For five minutes. Maybe fifteen. I offered him a cup of coffee.”

“I’m sure you did. Along with a little sympathy about his unsupportive wife.”

“I didn’t even know he had a wife!”

“Well, now that you do, you can break it off.”

“How many times do I have to tell you, there’s nothing to break off,” she said through gritted teeth.

“You can tell me until you’re blue in the face. That doesn’t mean I believe a word you say. But believe me when I tell you that I’m not about to stand by and watch my brother get hurt by a—”

“Mata Hari like me,” Susannah sarcastically completed. “I get the picture, Mr. Wilder. And I’ll be expecting an apology from you in writing when this misunderstanding is cleared up.”

He stared at her in astonishment. “You’ve got some nerve, lady.”

“Oh, so now you think I’m a lady,” she said mockingly. “Funny, you didn’t act like it a moment ago when you accused me of seducing your brother. If it weren’t so absurd, I’d be highly insulted. As it is, I’ll chalk your incredibly rude behavior up to male hysteria.”

“Those two words are mutually exclusive.”

“Not in your case,” Susannah noted sweetly before turning on her heel and marching into the sanctuary of the women’s bathroom.

“I’m not done talking to you!” Kane bellowed from outside the door.

“Do you know if there’s another way out of here?” Susannah asked a woman in the bathroom.

“That door over there leads to the hallway outside the exhibition area.”

“Great. Thanks.” She made a beeline for that exit. Her little run-in with Kane Wilder had just taken up fifteen of the thirty minutes she had for lunch. Standing in the long line at the convention center’s cafeteria ate up another ten. Meanwhile, Susannah still hadn’t eaten a thing.

She grabbed an apple and an anemic-looking green salad, all the while lecturing herself on how she should have handled Kane. She wasn’t happy with the way he’d put her on the defensive. She should have stopped him in his verbal tracks the second he started making his ridiculous accusations.