“Yeah, I know, I hear you—No, you're right about that. Not good. What? Ah…” Jake glanced over his shoulder at Robin and quickly strolled farther away, into the entry. “Robin,” he muttered. At least Robin thought that was what he said, and felt a sharp stab of panic. She stood up, followed him into the entry.
“Uh… sure. Yes, I think we can fix that, sure. Not to worry. What? Hey, whatever works for you—okay, great! That's great, Carol. I really appreciate it,” he said and turned to smile again at Robin. “T hank s again and we look forward to hearing back.”
With that, he hung up and grinned at Robin. “Ms. Wirt will call you in the morning.”
Was she imagining things, or did his chest puff up an inch or two? “You're kidding.”
“I'm not.”
She gaped at him.
Jake laughed, strolled into the dining room and replaced the phone. “You have to pay your respects. That's something you're definitely going to have to learn.”
Now he was just showing off. “I beg your pardon? Pay my respects to whom? I can't even get Ms. Wirt on the phone, and neither could you!”
“To Carol. Carol is the one running the outfit, just like Lucy runs your office—”
“Lucy does not run my office—”
“Hey, you can't deny Lucy keeps things humming,” he said. 'Those girls are the front line. You have to get past them to get to the decision-makers. They are busy, they don't have time for a lot of crap, and they are going to be the one to decide if a cold call goes on up the chain. If Carol can't tell Eldagirt Wirt what you want, then Eldagirt Wirt isn't going to waste her time with you. And if Carol doesn't like you, then it's a pretty sure thing Eldagirt isn't going to be overly fond of you, either. See what I mean?"
“Sort of,” she begrudgingly admitted.
“Everyone has a role. You just have to understand what it is.”
That actually made a lot of sense. It was true that Lucy never passed someone along to her without telling her what the person wanted so Robin could decide what to do with the call. It was also true that if Lucy got a bad feeling about someone, Robin tended to trust her instincts. And it was painfully true that she had treated Carol abominably, attempting to pass over her like a doormat.
“Now the bad news is,” Jake said, wincing slightly, “Carol's not real fond of you. You might need to… well, you know… eat a little crow.”
Ugh, hate the crow. Man, she had a lot to learn. Maybe Dad was right. Maybe she was arrogant.
Robin groaned, shoved her hands through her hair. “How do you know so much?”
Jake shrugged. “Just been around, I guess.”
Robin nodded, considered the easy set of his mouth and imagined that he was probably a good friend to those lucky enough to know him. “T hank s,” she murmured. “I think I needed that.” She extended her hand to him. “Really.”
Jake looked at her hand, looked as if he didn't quite know what to do with it. Thinking she might have somehow of-
fended him, Robin started to withdraw it. But Jake suddenly took her hand in his, holding it gently, like a feather, turning it over slowly to look at the back of her hand. His hand dwarfed hers, made hers look like a delicate thing.
His rough, callused palm skimmed the surface of her skin, creating a burning friction. The effect was absolutely electrifying; Robin drew a breath and held it as he very carefully turned her hand over, so that her palm was facing up, and with one blunt finger, wordlessly traced the path of her lifeline to her wrist, scoring her with his touch, sparking a river of fire that ran down her arm and straight into her heart.
Jake looked up, his liquid brown gaze meeting hers, and she felt it seep into her, past the carefully constructed wall, down into the very pit of her. His hand closed tightly around her fingers, and Robin took a step forward, drawn like a magnet to the circle of his arms, attached by a powerful, physical current running between them.
“Well now, what's going on here?”
Hello, Grandpa.
Yep, Jake liked old man Stanton—he cackled upon catching them doing the hand thing, pointed out Robin's furious blush, thereby flustering his granddaughter so bad that she stomped into the dining room and plopped down to stare at her computer.
She tried her best to pretend it didn't happen, but couldn't do it, not with a blush like that, hot and fierce, just like the one he felt under his own skin. Gawd. Whatever had just happened between them, he couldn't really say. Maybe it was her genuine, innocent surprise at hearing someone might not like her, a glimpse of a secreted purity in her that went racing through him like fire. Something he had said had softened her in a way that was totally incongruent with the fast-moving, hardened rest of her. Robin was tough, she was arrogant, she was fiercely protective of her place in this world. She was also the proverbial material girl, collecting more things in her quest for the better deal. But at the same time, there was a childlike innocence about her, an untouched part of her that so very much appealed to the man in him.
Hell, everything about her appealed to the man in him.
And when she had offered her hand, that delicate, nail-bitten hand sparkling with a sapphire that matched the color of her eyes, desire had surged through him on some monstrous tsunami wave, crashing through him and pushing him down to the bottom of it. The lure of forbidden territory had compelled him to take her hand in his; he had been only a moment away from taking her in his arms.
What alarmed him was not the handholding, or even the discovery by Mr. Stanton. It was the prospect of a next time, because he seriously doubted he could restrain himself next time. Which was why he was going to work very hard to obliterate all thoughts of Robin Lear, grit his teeth and force these absurd images he was building in his head, images of her in various locations, like the back of his bike, or in his truck. In his bed.
Goddammit, he was not some blue-collar Casanova, and pretending to be one was as ludicrous as it was dangerous, both personally and professionally. Man, he needed to put some buffers between him and the house on North Boulevard before it was too late.
In the dining room, Robin was having similar misgivings about what she considered a near disaster, and while she could hardly tolerate Grandpa's ribbing, he had saved her from a horrible, terrible mistake. She did not need any entanglements right now; she had enough trauma in her life as it was. Nonetheless, she couldn't seem to let the hand incident go, and spent a fair amount of time studying the wall where Jake had been working, imagining his capable hands skillfully and carefully removing years from the brick.
And she wondered why this… this thing between them was so impossible, what exactly it was she was afraid of. It baffled her—she generally preferred to avoid such introspection because she rarely liked what she saw, and on top of that, it was too exhausting. And men, well… they either wilted around her or tried to corral her. Usually, after the first few dates with a guy, she would always feel like she was searching for something. She just never understood what.
Ugh. The question was too hard, so she tried not to think, tried to explore the wacky world of packing materials. But when she drifted off to sleep that night, in that conscious point of no return, the curious question of why she couldn't do this thing with Jake clouded her thoughts.
When she slept, she dreamed of pink flamingos and pickup trucks.
The next morning, she hauled herself out of bed at the ungodly hour of 6 a.m. , put on her running gear, and headed outside before it got too muggy, determined to put this strange infatuation firmly behind her.
She did not succeed.
Coming back from her lame attempt to (a) run, and (b) think about anything else but Jake, she entered the house through the back door, and damn near walked over a man she had never seen before, down on one knee, scraping up what looked to be the remnants of a breakfast taco on the floor. At least she hoped that was what it was.
The man looked up, jerked backward with surprise when he saw her, then said cheerfully, “Oh hey, how you doing?”
Only then did she notice his arm was in a sling. “Who are you?”
“Me? Oh! I'm Chuck Zaney. But you can call me Za-ney.”
Zaney, Zaney .. . did she know him? Robin racked her brain, tried to remember where she had left the phone. Help, police! A man is eating tacos in my kitchen!
Before she could remember, the man offered, “Oh, see, I'm the dude behind Manning. Get it? Well… not behind him like that,” he quickly clarified, “but you know… like with him.”
“Zaney,” she repeated, the name registering in some deep recess.
“Yep. Spelled just like it sounds.” He suddenly laughed. “You know what they used to call me in school? Zany Zaney.” He waited a beat or two, then laughed in loud Foghorn Leghorn fashion. When Robin did not join in his jocularity, his laughter trailed off. “Yep, those were some crazy guys,” he said and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
“Where's Jake?” Robin asked quickly before he detoured down memory lane again.
“Oh man, he had to go talk to his nephew's teacher. The kid keeps running off, so Jakie, he's gonna go knock some sense into him.” Zany Zaney finished cleaning up whatever it was and struggled to his feet. “I'm still trying to figure this out,” he said, waving his sling about. “Hard to manage the tacos.”
“I can see that,” Robin said impatiently and walked past him to the dining room. The clump of Zaney's work boots followed directly behind her. “So when is Jake going to be here?” she asked.
“Dunno,” Zaney said, shaking his ponytailed head. He held up his good hand. “He's gotta go see about the kid,” he said, folding one finger over, “and then he has to make up his class,” he added, bending the second finger, “and then…” He paused at the third finger.
Robin waited for him to finish his thought. Until she realized that he had. “His class?” she prompted, trying not to sound too interested.
“Oh, yeah! Jakie, he's gonna be an architect! He'll be done next summer if Cole don't mess it up for him.”
This news surprised her. “He's studying to be an architect?” she asked just to be sure she had not misunderstood.
Zaney nodded again. “He's real good.”
The unexpected information pricked her conscience—for some reason, Robin had assumed Jake was streetwise but uneducated. That snap assumption on her part, however vague, struck her as unfair… and maybe even a little arrogant. “So how is it this Cole is going to mess it up?” she pressed further, her curiosity running rampant now.
“Well, see, Cole, he's Ross's kid. But Ross died in a car wreck. Cole was just a punk kid then, still is if you ask me, but Ross's old lady, she wasn't really planning on raising the kid, so she took off, and Cole's been living with his grandma ever since, but now, he's a little older, and he keeps getting hisself into trouble. So Jakie, he says he's gonna teach him how to be a man.” Zaney paused, adjusted the tool belt around his slim hips with his good hand, then
struggled to withdraw a measuring tape. “ 'Bout how big is this room?”
“How old is Cole?”
“Fourteen. See, my idea is we start upstairs and gut those rooms first.”
“Does anyone else live there? I mean with Cole?”
“His grandma's all. Jake's dad ran off a long time ago. Then Ross died, and Todd the Toad—that's what we used to call him, the little fart—oops, beg your pardon,” Zaney said, his face turning crimson. “Well anyway, Todd, he's gone for a while, so no, there ain't no one there but Cole and his grandma.” He looked down at his measuring tape. “Okay, I'm gonna go upstairs and check it out,” Zaney said.
“Sure,” Robin muttered. Zaney clumped up the stairs as she headed for the shower.
She mulled over the information Zaney had so happily given up. It fascinated her that the three Manning sons had turned out so differently. Jake must have faced a lot of adversity. But… wow. What fragments she knew about Jake's life were a little on the mind-boggling side. It was hard to understand how he could be so… so sane. Yet he had somehow managed to overcome it all, was building a solid clientele among Houston 's elite families, and while he was doing that, he was attending school.
Pretty damn remarkable. And highly admirable. She had really underestimated him.
Robin finished dressing, donning gray slacks, white shirt, and black sandals. As she came out of her bedroom, she heard a familiar voice, and groaned softly to herself at the sight of Grandpa, in his coveralls, in the entry. Oh, and great, he was with Jake.
“Hey, El, you want to hand me that crowbar?”
El? El?
Grandpa shuffled over to the toolbox, found a crowbar, and hurried to hand it to Jake. Then he stood there, hands on knees, watching closely as Jake pulled the baseboard from the wall.
“Grandpa, what are you doing?” Robin demanded as she came into the dining room.
“Hey, Robbie-girl.”
“He's assisting me,” Jake said, giving her the once-over with a lopsided smile. “Me and El, we're a team.”
Oh right, that was all the world needed. Robin was about to protest, but the phone started ringing, and when she went to answer it, she couldn't find the damn thing. On the fourth ring, she found it, said breathlessly, “Hello?”
“Ms. Lear?”
Instantly, she knew the gravelly voice on the other end belonged to none other than Eldagirt Wirt. “Yes! Robin Lear, here!” she said excitedly.
“Eldagirt Wirt. I hear you been trying to get hold of me.” She sounded like she had smoked a pack of cigarettes just moments ago.
“T hank you for calling!” Robin said, and almost added something entirely too smart, like this year, but then remembered: flies with honey. “I know you are very busy. Ah… Carol, ah, she's been a great help,” she said, surprising herself with her cleverness. “I'll try not to take up too much of your time, but I'm with LTI in Houston , and we've been looking at different packing supply companies, hoping to form a partnership.”
Eldagirt responded with a phlegm-laden cough.
“Ah… your company has an excellent reputation—”
“The best,” Eldagirt interjected.
“Yes. Yes, that's right, one of the best! That's why I wanted to talk to you. I thought perhaps we could explore a future collaboration between LTI and Wirt—”