Wife On Approval

Eileen shrugged. “What else do I have to occupy myself these days? That pest called again this afternoon.”

“Which pest? Do you mean we’re getting prank calls?”

“I suppose you could call it that. I’m talking about Ben Orcutt. The message he left is in there somewhere.”

“I suppose his dishes need washing again.” Paige sighed. “Sometimes I wish he hadn’t taken Sabrina seriously when she suggested that if he called us more often instead of letting the mess pile up to the ceiling, he’d have visitors on a regular basis.”

“Lately,” Eileen sniffed, “he seems to want visitors about three times a week. It would have been more useful, you know, if Sabrina had taught the man to wash his own dishes—but I don’t suppose she’s practical enough to think of that. You could certainly do without him as a client, now that you have plenty of others.”

“Even if she’d given him lessons, Mother, he’d still be a client. He would just have to come up with another excuse to call. He’s lonely, that’s all.”

Eileen sniffed. “Most men are incapable of amusing themselves. To say nothing of actually seeing and taking care of what needs to be done. Your father, for example—”

With the ease of long practice, Paige sidetracked the conversation. “I can’t quite read this sentence. The message from Carol Forbes—what kind of paper does she want me to pick up? Wallpaper?”

“No—an issue of the Denver Post that had an article about her nephew.”

“Oh, that’s right. I see the date now. If you wouldn’t mind, Mother, we could use a hand with the phones again tomorrow. Cassie’s going to try to decorate Christmas trees for four clients tomorrow, and I have to work on arrangements for the staff holiday party at Tanner.” She set the message slips aside.

Eileen shrugged. “I certainly don’t have anything better to do these days, while I’m sitting at home and waiting for you.”

Paige reminded herself that just because her mother handed her a ticket didn’t mean she had to take the guilt trip. “I thought perhaps you and I could go out this weekend to choose our tree.”

Eileen shrugged. “Not a lot point in having one. I don’t care much about Christmas, anyway, and you’re so tired of the holiday by the time it arrives that the whole thing is more effort than it’s worth.”

Paige took a long breath. “It’s still Christmas,” she said firmly. “We have to do something to celebrate.”

“Go through the motions, you mean.” Eileen stirred the soup again. “Or are you feeling a little sentimental?”

“Christmas used to be my favorite holiday.”

“I know,” Eileen said dryly. “Back in the old days. You surely aren’t thinking about trying to patch things together with Austin, are you, now that he’s in town?”

Paige spun around, and her sleeve caught the stack of message slips and sent them whirling into a blizzard of pink snow. “How did you know—” She caught herself, but it was too late.

Eileen looked pleased at the reaction. “I saw a story on the business channel about his new job. You weren’t even going to tell me he’d come back to Denver, were you?”

Paige said stiffly, “I didn’t think you’d be particularly interested.”

“How could I not be interested in the man who used my daughter and then tossed her aside? You’re not having any foolish ideas, are you?”

“About wanting him back? Of course not.”

“That’s good,” Eileen said with satisfaction. “Because, of course, it can’t be done. And if, instead of rose-colored romantic notions, you’re really cherishing any feeble ideas of taking revenge for the way he treated you—well, I don’t think you could possibly pull that off, either.”

Her mother’s blithe assumption that she would fail—that she wasn’t attractive enough, feminine enough, or smart enough to succeed—acted on Paige almost like a challenge. So she couldn’t possibly win Austin back, could she? And she couldn’t possibly figure out a way to get even with him for dumping her? Or, best of all, to accomplish both things at the same time?

Paige was half tempted to take on the dare, not to put Austin in his place but simply to prove that her mother was wrong about her.

Except, of course, she reminded herself, that it would be such a childish thing to do.

Austin had only been inside the offices of Tanner Electronics once before, and that had been just a walk-through to get the lay of the land in order to help him decide whether he wanted to take the job. On that visit Caleb Tanner had been beside him all the while. It was time, he thought, to get a real sense of the people and the business and the surroundings, with no one interpreting or interfering.

So when Austin came into the big glassed-in atrium lobby at the front of the building shortly after lunchtime, he deliberately didn’t head directly for the executive wing. He strolled up and down the halls instead, peeking into office cubicles and conference rooms, studying computer screens and listening to discussions.

Tanner was a young firm, small and intimate and suffering from growing pains. That much Austin had known before he’d ever considered associating himself with the business, and it was part of what he’d found so attractive about Caleb Tanner’s offer. The challenge of grooming a new company beyond financial success into a position of status intrigued him.

By the time he eventually arrived at Caleb Tanner’s corner office, however, Austin found himself frowning. There was no secretary in the outer room—there hadn’t been on the day he visited, either, Austin recalled—so he strolled over to the open door of the inner office and knocked softly.

Caleb’s back was to the door; he was leaning over the once-gleaming surface of his teak desk, where a no-longer-identifiable electronic device lay in a million pieces, and he was whistling softly as he studied the bits. He turned at Austin’s tap, looking startled. “I didn’t expect you till Monday,” he said, stretching out a hand in warm welcome.

“I got Jennifer enrolled in school this morning, and since she wanted to stay and get started, I thought I might as well come in for a few hours and begin to get acclimated.”

“Sabrina said you’d stopped by last night, but I thought you’d take the rest of the week to settle in.”

“I intended to,” Austin said. “But there’s not much settling left to be done. Your Rent-A-Wife team did wonders.”

“Not mine,” Caleb said. “Or, at least, not all mine. I suppose I have to take responsibility for Sabrina, terrifying as the idea is, since I’m marrying her in a couple of weeks. But the other two—”

“An interesting business,” Austin said. “Rent-A-Wife, I mean. I wonder what inspired it.”

“It was Paige’s idea, I guess. You’ve met Paige?”

Austin nodded. He wondered what Caleb would say if he told him exactly how long—and how well—he’d known Paige. But he’d closed that door behind him last night. She had made a misleading statement—not a lie, exactly, but a good long way from the whole truth—and by not correcting it then and there, he had in a sense promised that he would continue to be silent.

Besides, he told himself, perhaps that approach was the best one, anyway. Their marriage had been so brief as to be almost nonexistent, and it was so far in the past that dragging it up now would create nothing more than shock value.

“She wanted a more flexible job,” Caleb said, “to allow her to take care of her sick mother, so she started up the firm and then the other two partners signed on a few months later. So what do you think of Tanner now that you’re on board? The first thing, I guess, is to get an office set up for you. I intended to move out over the weekend so this fancy desk would be waiting for you Monday morning, but you beat me to it.”

Austin couldn’t see the whole surface because of the electronic gadgetry scattered over it, but the part he could see was covered with deep scratches. The desk, he thought, was teak, and it had once been a showpiece. Now it looked more like a workbench. “Thanks, but I wouldn’t want to put the chairman of the board out of the space you’ve grown accustomed to. There are a couple of rooms down the hall that will do fine for me. I’d rather be just a little off the beaten path, anyway—I get more work done that way.”

Caleb grinned. “My point exactly. This corner of the building is like dead center of the target, and I’ve been looking forward to getting out of it. I’ll just move out my personal stuff and leave everything else, and you can settle right in to the executive suite and get to work.”

On the contrary, Austin thought; moving Caleb out looked like a fairly big job. There were boxes, books and papers—to say nothing of electronic bits and pieces—scattered everywhere in the big room. And the physical clutter might not be the worst of the debris that Caleb had collected, Austin suspected. If the employee who was supposed to occupy the outer office was as inefficient as it appeared, he or she wasn’t likely to be a success at working for Austin. “I’d rather hire my own secretary, Caleb,” he said firmly. “Fresh start, new loyalties, all that stuff.”

Caleb frowned. “What are you talking about? Oh, you thought I was leaving mine for you? I’ve never had one.”

At least, Austin thought, that explained why the outer office was always empty. “I see. Well, even hiring a secretary isn’t the first thing on my list. Security is.”

Caleb’s eyebrows rose. “You mean things like new locks and guards around the building?”

“And some other measures, as well. If you aren’t suffering a leakage of information, it’s only a matter of time.”

“My people are loyal.”

“That’s beside the point, when a stranger can loiter in the hallway till an office is left empty and then go look at the specs still blinking on the computer screen.”

“Industrial spies, you mean? What makes you think they could get by with that kind of behavior?”