The Measure of a Man

“All right, Janie, you win.” So saying, Gilbert put his hand first into one pocket, then another, until he located his wallet. He pulled it out and looked through the bills.

“No,” Jane protested, pushing his wallet back, “it’s on me.”

He gave her a steely look that was meant to penetrate down to her soul. “Young lady, I know for a fact that you can barely afford your own lunch, much less pay for mine.” Taking out a twenty, he pressed it into her palm. “Here, this should cover us both.” He saw the protest rising to her lips and headed it off. “Please, Jane, allow me a few pleasures.”

Reluctantly she closed her hand over the bill, then brushed a quick kiss against his cheek. How could they possibly be thinking of getting rid of him? It was Broadstreet who should be getting his walking papers, not the professor. And as quickly as possible.

“You really are a dear, dear man,” she told him affectionately.

Sinking into the leather chair that welcomed him like an old friend, Gilbert waved her away, his attention already directed toward the open file on his desk. The university had long since removed him from the English department and he no longer coached a baseball team the way he had in the old days. But they had allowed him to continue in the capacity of adviser and counselor and he took his work and the students that went with it very, very seriously.

It meant he could still help the deserving. The way he’d been doing, one way or another, for the last thirty years.

For a second longer, Jane stood watching him.

Damn them all to hell, she thought angrily. How dare they threaten to put that wonderful man out to pasture? Without his wife, all Professor Harrison had was his work here at the university. She knew in her heart that if he was forced into retirement, the man who had been like a father to her would, in a very short period of time, certainly whither away and die.

She wasn’t about to let that happen—even if it wouldn’t impact her own financial situation the way it would. Not while there was a single breath left in her body.

Angry, wishing she could get her hands around Broadstreet’s throat and squeeze it until the man promised to leave the professor alone, Jane turned on her heel and swung open the outer office door. She did it with the same amount of force she would have delivered to Broadstreet’s solar plexus if she were given to street brawling.

She heard the creaking noise at the same time she shut the door behind her.

The ladder hadn’t been there when she’d walked into the professor’s office.

If it had, it would have blocked her access. As it was now, the door had come in jolting contact with the side of the wide, ten-foot ladder. Jolting as well the man who was perched two rungs from the top.

Momentarily stunned, Jane reacted automatically. Being the mother of one very hyper five-year-old had trained her to be prepared for anything and to react to situations even when she was half asleep or caught completely off guard, the way she was now. That was why the saleswoman at the department store last month hadn’t been smacked over the head by a mannequin that would have fallen right on her head if Jane hadn’t caught it in time. And why the maintenance man changing the light bulb didn’t go flying off the tottering ladder now.

Her legs braced, Jane grabbed both sides of the ladder that were facing her, pulling back with all her might and steadying it so that the ladder didn’t go over on its side.

The next minute its rather well-built, muscled occupant was all but sliding down the steps, eager to do so on his own power rather than because of gravity. Inches apart, his hand on the rungs to ground the ladder, his temper flashed as he glared at the cause of his sudden earthquake.

“Damn it, why don’t you watch where you’re going?” he demanded.

She’d once been timid and shy. But life and the professor had taught her that she needed to stand up for herself or face being stepped on. She was in no mood to be stepped on.

Jane met the man’s glare with one of her own. “Why don’t you watch where you’re sticking your ladder? Don’t you know any better than to put it so close to a door?”

Chapter Two

Nothing irritated Smith Parker more than being in the wrong. The way he was now. He frowned deeply. Not at the woman in front of him, but at the situation. This was not where he expected to be at this point in his life.

At twenty-nine, Smith had expected to be doing something important. At the very least, something more significant than changing light bulbs in the hallway of one of the older buildings at the very same university he’d once attended, nurturing such wonderful dreams of his future.

A future that definitely did not include a maintenance uniform. But this was the same university that had abruptly turned his life upside down, stripped him of his scholarship, money awarded through a work-study program, and thus his ability to pay for the education that would have seen him rise above a life involving only menial jobs.

An education that would have allowed him to become something more than he was now destined to be.

In a way, Smith supposed that he should be grateful he was working, grateful that he was anywhere at all. There had been a stretch of time, right after he’d spiraled down emotionally and sleepwalked through his exams, causing his grades to drop and him to leave the university, that he had seriously considered giving up everything and meeting oblivion.

Ultimately it was his love for his parents who had loved him and stood by him with unwavering faith throughout it all, that had kept him from doing anything drastic. Anything permanent. He knew that ending his own life would in effect end theirs.

So he had pulled back from the very brink of self-destruction, reassessed his situation and tried to figure out what he could do with himself.

The answer was just to pass from one day to the next, drifting without a plan, he who had once entertained so many ideas.

To support himself and not wind up as a blot on society’s conscience, he’d taken on a variety of dead-end, lackluster jobs, doing his best but leaving his heart out of it. Some of the others he worked with felt that a job well done was its own reward, but he didn’t. He did them because that was what he was getting paid for, nothing else. He did them well because that was his nature, but one position was pretty much like another. When his father’s health had begun to fail, any tiny speck of hope he’d still entertained about eventually returning to college died. He’d needed to help out financially.

When this unsolicited offer had arrived out of the blue, asking him to come down to the university to apply for the position that began at something higher than minimum wage, he’d taken it only because of the money. There had been no joy in it, no secret setting down of goals for himself to achieve anything beyond what he was offered.

He was seriously convinced that, for him, there was no joy left in anything. Being accused of something he had not done and verbally convicted without being allowed to defend himself had killed his spirit.

So he did his work, making sure that he was never remiss, never in a position to be found lacking by anyone ever again.

But today, his mind had wandered. Just before beginning his round of small, tedious chores, he’d seen a landscaping truck go by. The truck’s logo proclaimed it to belong to a local family company that had been in business for the past fifteen years. Seeing it had momentarily catapulted him into the past.

That had been his goal once. To have a business of his own. Something where he was his own master, making his own hours, responsible for his own success. Evaluated and held to high standards by his own measure, not whimsically made to live up to someone else’s, someone who might, for whatever reason, find him lacking through no fault of his own but because of something they themselves were dealing with.

The truck had driven around the corner and disappeared. Just as his dreams had.

He’d returned to his chores in a dark frame of mind. Even so, he went through the paces, giving a hundred percent, no more, no less.

He’d spent most of the morning dealing with a clogged drain incapacitating the university’s indoor pool. The smell of stagnant water was still in his head if not physically with him and admittedly he wasn’t exactly in the best frame of mind, even though he was tackling a far lesser problem.

So he hadn’t been paying attention when he set up the ladder and worked the defunct bulb out of the socket in the ceiling. He’d only used the ladder instead of the extension pole he normally employed because someone had apparently made off with the pole.

Even the hallowed halls of Saunders saw theft, he’d thought.

It seemed ironic, given that was the offense he’d been accused of all those many years ago. Theft. When he discovered that the pole, an inexpensive thirty-dollar item, was missing, he couldn’t help wondering if this would somehow come back to haunt him. Would the head of the maintenance department think he’d taken it for some obscure reason?

Once a thief…

Except that he hadn’t been. Not even that one time he’d been accused by that pompous, self-centered jerk, Jacob Weber.

Smith looked down now at Jane Jackson’s face, biting back a stinging retort that was born of defensiveness and the less-than-stellar mood he was in. She was right, he’d been careless, which made his mood even darker.

Still, he couldn’t just bite her head off, not if she didn’t deserve it. That wouldn’t be right and he’d made a point of always abiding by what was right, by walking the straight and narrow path even when others veered away from it.

He always had.

Which made that accusation that had ruined his life that much more bitterly ironic.

So he blew out a breath, and with it the words that had sprung to his tongue, if not his lips. Instead, after a beat, Smith grudgingly nodded his head. “You’re right. My fault.”

Since he’d just admitted it was his mistake and not hers, the anger Jane had felt heat up so quickly within her died back. Leaving her feeling awkward.

She looked up at Smith—he had to be almost a foot taller than she was—a little ruefully, the way she did each time their paths crossed. She remembered him. With his dirty-blond hair, magnetic brown eyes and chiseled good looks, he would have been a hard man to forget.