Regarding The Tycoon's Toddler...

She stood, pushed the pen in her purse and tried to think positive thoughts. He didn’t know anything, except that she was complaining—and any number of employees were complaining these days. Every employee was complaining. She was part of a very large crowd.

So, if she ever met up with the man again, she’d give him back his pen. He probably wouldn’t even remember her. She had a feeling about him—he was the sort of person who had so much going on in his life that a clumsy woman in a stairwell who crashed into him wasn’t memorable. Not for a man like that.

Friday

MATT STUCK HIS HEAD in Zane’s office just before six and said, “Dinner anyone? I’m heading out at seven.”

Zane sat back and tossed the cheap pen he’d had to use today onto the papers. “No, I’ve got too many loose ends here. One of them is finding that pen you gave me for Christmas. It’s gone.”

“I’ll get you another one when we finish up here,” he said.

Zane hated losing something like that. “If it works out, I’ll get you one, too.”

“So, no dinner?”

“Dinner, but not with you. I’m meeting someone at eight.”

“Business?”

“Half and half. Karen Blair. She’s a publicist for Schle-singer and Todd. She’s good at what she does. I’ve seen her work, and I’ve been thinking that LynTech could use some good publicity for a change.”

“You can say that again. Wait until those cuts hit the light of day.”

“Everyone shares in the cuts equally,” Zane said. “We’ll face the angry hordes when we have to.”

“Okay. Oh, Rita had to cancel out two nanny interviews yesterday morning, so she rescheduled for today. She’s going to take those, and I’m going to make some calls. I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, and left, closing the door behind him.

The room felt empty and seemed too quiet. Why should it be a major production to find this nanny? His mother had found them easily, one after another, until he was sent off to boarding school. It wasn’t an impossible request to fulfill, he thought as he reached for the side lamp and snapped it on a higher beam. The light made him squint a bit. Running a hand roughly over his clean shaven face, he picked up the cheap plastic excuse for a pen, and frowned. God, he hated losing things.

LINDSEY SPENT THE DAY doing schedules and trying to figure out how to make the stove in the kitchen work for a bit longer. But she kept thinking that waiting two weeks to speak to Zane Holden was two weeks too long. When she looked up at almost six-thirty, she knew she couldn’t go home for the weekend and put this out of her mind.

Two weeks? She couldn’t wait. There was too much at stake. So on impulse she called up to Zane Holden’s office on the off chance that he was still at work. All she got was a voice-mail response. She hung up on the synthesized voice, then stood, turned off the lights in her office, got her purse and went out into the deserted play area.

Everyone was gone. Everyone had things to do. She was going to go home to her cat. She’d make a meal for one. Watch some television. Go to bed. Have a dream. Wake up, and come back here tomorrow to do the touch-up painting on the murals. “Boy, a really exciting life,” she said as she crossed the room, turned off the last light and stepped out into the corridor.

She locked the doors, then turned to go to the elevators. A man was there in a maintenance uniform, on his knees in front of an open panel to one side, working on something intently. “Don’t tell me—they’re down again?” she asked as she approached him.

He sat back on his heels with a huge screwdriver in his hand and looked up at her, his middle-aged face flushed from his efforts. “No, ma’am, they’re working fine,” he said. “I’m just doing some fine-tuning on them.”

“Good. It seems they never work when you need them to.”

He got to his feet, pushed the screwdriver into a tool belt he was wearing with grease-smudged overalls, then picked up a rag and rubbed his soiled hands with it. “You and everyone else complaining about them.” He lowered his voice. “Even him up there,” he said, rolling his eyes upward.

“Him?”

“Holden. One of the big guys. He was just saying he wanted them kept in good working order, as if we’d been trying to keep them in bad working order.”

“Mr. Holden’s still here?”

“Yeah, that guy and Mr. Terrel—they’re around at all hours. They work all the time.”

So, he was here. And she knew, according to his appointment ledger, that he stopped appointments by five. She wasn’t going to go home and eat with a cat. Not when Zane Holden was still in the building and possibly available. Maybe she wouldn’t have to wait two weeks to see him, after all.

“Thanks,” she said to the man. “Thanks a lot.”

He looked a bit confused, but nodded and smiled. “You’re real welcome, ma’am.”

She pushed the up button on the nearest elevator, and the car was there immediately. “Have a good night,” she said as she got in.

“You, too,” he called after her as the doors shut.

“That’s the plan,” she muttered as she pushed the button for the twentieth floor. “That’s the plan.”

As the elevator started upward, she felt her heart start to hammer in her chest. She wasn’t dressed right. It was Friday—dress down day—which meant she was in jeans, a plain white shirt and chunky boots. And she had no makeup on.

She caught herself. All that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t dressed up. She didn’t matter. This was an opportunity. And she was going to take it. She had to take it.

She steeled herself. There was so much at stake, but she had always been a fighter by necessity and knew that you didn’t wait for an opening to magically appear. You made the opening, then you struck when the iron was hot.

This was her opening. It didn’t mean that she liked it or that she wasn’t afraid to take on the powers that be, but she had no choice.

ZANE HAD BEEN in a hurry. He’d worked longer than he’d intended to, and by the time he looked up it was six-thirty. Karen Blair didn’t do “waiting” well, and he didn’t want to have to test her on that—not before he found out what she had to say about the company’s PR issue.

He’d grabbed his jacket and briefcase, then headed down the hall to Matt’s office to drop off more figures he’d ironed out. He went through his partner’s empty outer office and into Matt’s personal space. The room was supposed to be a duplicate of his, a matching C.E.O. suite, but he never ceased to marvel at the almost Spartan condition Matt could maintain anywhere he went. Despite the thick carpeting, the wood touches and elaborate metal-and-glass desk, there wasn’t a thing out of place. The massive desk held only a silent computer and a phone system. And Matt was gone.

The man didn’t own anything, despite all the money he was making. He didn’t “collect personal paraphernalia,” he’d said once. He lived out of a suitcase, in a hotel room, and drove rental cars and worked. Zane knew Matt grew up poor, got to college on scholarships, passed the bar exam, and had real brains for business. And another thing he knew for sure—Matt was one of very few people that Zane trusted, really trusted.

As he tossed the paperwork on the pristine desk, he heard the sound of a door opening. Matt wasn’t gone, after all. Zane crossed to the door and stepped out of the inner office, but he wasn’t facing Matt.

There was the hint of a flowery scent in the air, a scent he remembered from somewhere. Then he saw a woman in the open doorway, and he remembered. The first time he’d seen her he’d had a flashing impression of a slender wisp of a woman in dark slacks and a white top, just before she’d crashed into him in the stairwell. Then, as he’d grabbed her to keep her from falling, there had been a sensation of fine bones, heat, softness, before she spoke and everything had shifted.

A woman who had no use for Zane Holden and his “cohorts” had been a blip on his day at the time. But now she was here, and in the harsh overhead lights he took in details. Jeans defined slender hips and long legs, a shirt tucked in at the slim waist, hinted at high breasts. Then he looked up into her face. Incredible amber eyes were huge with shock, and sudden color flooded her face, emphasizing the fact that she wore no discernable makeup and that she had freckles, real freckles. A woman who blushed and had freckles. He almost smiled. Then he remembered what she’d said about him. He didn’t smile. Instead, Zane went a bit closer, flicking his gaze over her feathery blond cap of hair, her straight nose, those freckles, pale pink lips softly parted with surprise—then back to her eyes.

“It’s you,” she breathed. “Oh, shoot, I’m so sorry. I never should…” She bit her pale bottom lip. “I really owe you an apology for what I said the other day,” she said, then started fumbling in her purse. “I didn’t know who you were and I was just saying things, and…” She was talking quickly as she rummaged in her purse, then suddenly said, “Aha. Here it is.”

She pulled something out of her purse, then held it up to him. His gold pen. “Where in the hell did you get that?”

“You dropped it on the stairs when we…when I ran into you.” She came closer, and held it out to him. “I found it and didn’t know who you were.”

That color came again. She was blushing, which made her freckles vivid. When was the last time he’d seen someone blush? He didn’t have a clue.

“Anyway, I kept it and was going to give it back, and now…” Her voice sort of faded.

He glanced at the pen in her hand—a hand with slender fingers, no polish, short, oval nails and no rings. Then he shifted his briefcase to the same hand holding his suit coat and took the pen. He was vaguely aware of a sense of heat in the rich metal. Her heat. “I was looking all over for it.”

“I bet you were,” she said as she moved back a bit. “I mean, it had to have cost a fortune, and I know if I had a pen like that I’d about die if I lost it.”

He fingered the pen. “You came here to bring it back to me?”