From Boss to Bridegroom

“It’ll work out for the best. You’ll see. Now go change into a suit. You have to look professional. Rand is a stickler for that.”

“Oh good, a stickler, too,” Lucy said facetiously, adding stickler and playboy to the already long list of things that didn’t recommend Rand Colton to her.

“Just keep thinking of all the other attorneys you’ll encounter to hand out your card to,” Sadie advised airily. “Now scoot! You don’t want to be late. He can’t abide anyone being late either.”

“I think I should have two scoops on-account-a when you go someplace dressed like that we don’t eat dinner till way late in the nighttime and by then I’ll be hungry again.”

Lucy craned around to look at her son, strapped into the back seat of Sadie’s car by seat belts.

Max was small for his age but precocious. He seemed more like four going on forty most of the time, making it difficult to argue with his reasoning.

“It’s true that I dress like this to go to work. But today I’m just going to talk to a man, so it won’t take that long. We’ll have dinner at the same time we do every night now.”

Max wrinkled his pert little nose.

Lucy thought that even if she weren’t his mother she’d think he was adorable. He had chipmunk cheeks, big blue eyes that stared out at her from behind owlish eyeglasses, and whisk-broom brown hair cut close to his head.

“Two scoops, okay?” he said as if she should grant permission despite their previous exchange.

“Sorry. One scoop, buddy.”

“But what if they have the butter brickle kind and the bubble-gum kind? Then I should have a scoop of each and eat supper better tomorrow.”

“If they have both kinds you can have one scoop of one kind now and we’ll get the other kind to take home for tomorrow.”

Max grinned victoriously, as if that had been what he was angling for all along.

Seeing it made Lucy’s heart balloon. He had a silly habit of biting the tip of his tongue between his front teeth when he grinned like that and it was so cute she couldn’t believe it. He also had heartbreaker dimples in each chubby cheek that made him look irresistibly impish.

“What if there are three kinds?” he suggested as if he knew her defenses were down.

“Quit while you’re ahead,” she advised as both she and Sadie laughed.

Sadie pulled to a stop at a red light and nodded to the huge chrome and glass high-rise building on the next block. “Rand’s office is in there. I’ll just drop you off out front. The ice-cream parlor is two blocks farther down in the lobby of the redbrick building. They have underground parking there so I’ll be able to get a spot. Why don’t you walk over and meet us when you’re finished?”

“You don’t want to come up and say hello?”

“Rand and I had a nice chat on the phone. I know how busy he is. I don’t want to bother him with a drop-in.”

When the light turned green, Sadie pulled through the intersection and eased the car to the curb in front of Rand Colton’s building. “He’s on the twenty-third floor, Suite 2300. Good luck.”

“I probably need it,” Lucy said wryly. Then, with a quick glance back at Max again, she added, “Be good for Aunt Sadie.”

“He’ll be fine,” Sadie answered as the car behind them honked.

Lucy took that as her cue and hurried out of the vehicle so her aunt could get going again.

As she entered the imposing building, she checked her watch. She had twenty minutes to spare and while she had no intention of being late, she also didn’t want to appear overeager.

So with time to spare, she found a rest room in the lobby and went in to check her appearance.

She’d worn what she considered her power suit—a navy blue formfitting jacket with a high split-collar that helped disguise the length of her neck, and straight-leg slacks to match. She knew that some schools of thought held that a woman should wear a skirt but she didn’t subscribe to it. Partly because she felt more comfortable—and more confident—in pants, and partly because on her eighteenth birthday she’d taken a dare from a friend and been tattooed on the inside of her right ankle. It was a tasteful rose tattoo, barely an inch from bud to stem and not readily noticeable, but depending on how conservative the interviewer was, it could be detrimental.

She freshened her lipstick. It was a pale shade of burnished red and, along with mascara and blush, was the only makeup she wore.

She was glad to see that her blue eyes—the same shade as Max’s—were clear of the slight redness an allergy had caused the day before. But she closed them for a moment to fight the burning that was a continuing result of having cleaned out the dusty attic.

Her shoulder-length mahogany hair was ordinarily a hard-to-tame mass of spiral curls, but for interviews she always wrestled it into a topknot. If she left it loose, she had a tendency toward a come-hither sort of appearance that some men read as a sexual invitation. It wasn’t an impression she wanted to give.

She checked her watch again—2:50—and decided it was time to take the elevator to the twenty-third floor.

On the way up she felt the same anticipatory tension she always experienced when facing a job interview, but she fought it by reminding herself that this was only a temporary position and even if it could be an important step in making contacts in the legal profession, she already had a foot in the door in the form of her aunt.

But still, knowing in advance that Rand Colton was a difficult man put her on edge. She took several deep breaths, hoping that would help and stepped off the elevator when the doors opened.

Suite 2300 was to her right, at the end of the hallway. Two oversize oak doors unlike any others on the floor marked the entry and a simple, elegant gold nameplate announced Rand Colton, Attorney At Law.

Lucy took a last deep breath, reached for the ornate gold knob and entered the office to the distant sound of female sobbing and male shouting. “It was a simple enough task—cancel an appointment. Instead you let the CEO of a major company come all the way down here when I was in court. You may just be a temp but surely someone somewhere told you that when your employer tells you to call a client and cancel an appointment you should actually pick up the phone and do it.”

More sobbing surrounded a pitiful, “I forgot.”

“You forgot?”

The booming male voice was loud enough to hurt Lucy’s ears and she wasn’t even in the same room.

“You rattled off so many things in such a hurry I couldn’t write them all down fast enough and then you left and I tried—”

“Trying isn’t good enough! Do you know what that man’s time is worth?”

Apparently the temp had no answer to that because rather than feebly defending herself any longer, she came rushing out of the inner office, snatched her purse from a desk drawer and ran past Lucy out of the suite.

Definitely a bear of a boss. Assuming, of course, that the man delivering the tirade was Rand Colton.

“Incompetence and idiocy. Where do they find these people?”

This last part wasn’t a shout, it was more a remark to himself that Lucy could still hear as she stood in the reception area.

If it hadn’t been so close to three o’clock by then, she would have slipped out of the office and given the man she hadn’t yet set eyes on a moment to calm down before their meeting.

Just then the man came storming out of the inner office. Without so much as a glance in Lucy’s direction he charged the large oak reception desk to pound punishingly on the computer keyboard. He didn’t show any indication that he’d even realized she was there, but with his eyes still on the computer monitor, he said in as derogatory a tone as she’d ever heard, “And who are you?”

Patience, she counseled herself.

“I’m Lucy Lowry, Sadie Meeks’s niece. We have a three o’clock interview.”

“Is it that late already?” he barked, while still assaulting the keyboard.

“I’m afraid it is.”