Prelude to a Wedding (13 page)

"No?"

"No, I won't try to tell you any more.
Because if I tell you, you'll think I'm crazy, too. Because it's
not what he did, it's how he did it."

There seemed to be no answer to that.

"I'm sorry, Bette. I'm truly sorry." Janine
stood and slung the strap of her oversize handbag over her
shoulder. "And if you want to fire me or put me on suspension, I'll
understand. But I won't go back there."

The door hadn't even clicked closed behind
her before it opened again to admit Darla.

"Paul Monroe's on line one," she announced,
then gave a sympathetic frown when Bette cursed emphatically.

"You want to take it or shall I?"

"I'll take the call."

"Okay, but you know, I don't think that man's
nearly as harmless as he might seem on the surface. I saw his face
Thursday when you made me tell him that you'd already left for an
appointment with another client, and that's a stick of dynamite I
wouldn't go playing around with too much."

Bette grimaced her understanding. She knew.
She knew all too well. Defusing the dynamite was exactly the
point.

She had her hand on the phone when she
stopped, with something tingling along the nerves of her arm,
something ringing cheerfully in her head.
Uh-oh
. She wanted
to take this call. She looked forward to hearing his voice. And
that was dangerous. Very, very dangerous. Lighting a dynamite fuse
required only a spark.

"Wait a minute."

Darla turned from the door, and waited for
Bette to continue.

"On second thought, you take the call. Tell
him we'll have a replacement secretary in his office first thing
tomorrow morning. And tell him, well, you know what to tell him.
Then come back in and we'll have to adjust the schedule to free up
Norma Schaff to go there for the rest of the week."

* * * *

Norma Schaff, in her mid-fifties and
razor-sharp of mind and wit, was made of sterner stuff than Janine
Taylor. At least Bette would have sworn to that before Norma Schaff
had to face Paul Monroe. She lasted two-and-a-half days.

To finish out the week, Bette tried a new
approach., sending Jonathan Roiter. He finished out the day, which
Darla termed a moral victory, and then said he'd rather swab
toilets than go back Monday morning.

"Paul Monroe's on line three," Darla
announced as she held open the door for Jonathan's departure. "And
before you tell me to take this call, too, I think you should know
that he said he wants to talk to you this time."

Bette stared at the phone a moment, then
looked up at her assistant and friend. "I don't understand it,
Darla."

"Me either, but I think the only way we're
ever going to have a shot at understanding it is if you get an
explanation from him. You know the odd thing is, he sounds
perfectly charming on the telephone. I wonder what he's doing to
these people."

Bette waited until the door closed, took a
deep breath that should have steadied her more than it did, then
picked up the phone.

"Hello?"

"Hi, Bette. How are you? It's good to hear
your voice. Have you had a nice week?"

Darla was right. He sounded perfectly
charming. Pure irritation swept aside uncertainty.

"I've had an absolutely miserable week, as
you well know since you are directly and solely responsible for it.
What have you been doing to those people we send to your
office?"

"Me? Nothing. I haven't laid a hand on a
single one of them. Why?"

Nobody could sound that innocent and really
be innocent. "Why! Because we've had three of our best people come
back this week—three people in one week! —saying they would never
work for you again."

"Oh, that."

"Yes, that!"

"It's just that I've been feeling sort of
crazy this week—"

"The feeling's mutual."

She knew he heard her, but he ignored it.

"But my feeling crazy's easy enough to
fix."

"Oh, really. How do you suggest we fix
it?"

No, no, no, Bette
! Her brain listened,
aghast, at the opening her mouth had given him, and she braced to
be run over by the Mack truck he would surely drive through it. She
could have sworn the phone line hummed with his glee.

"Go out with me."

As Mack trucks went, that wasn't so bad. A
mere four-ton—or four-word—model. But he didn't fool her. This
truck was just the lead vehicle in a caravan. Because after going
out, there would be talking and laughing, then holding hands,
kissing in the moonlight, embracing in the dark and who knew what
else . . . Only she did know what else. Just the thought of it
changed the pattern of her breathing and heartbeat. And that was
the problem. If she went out with Paul Monroe. the man most likely
to be named least likely to be her type of man, she could fall for
him hard. More than she already had. She had to be firm. "No!"

"You don't have to shout."

She might have overdone the firmness, but she
hadn't actually shouted. "I didn't shout."

"Could have fooled me," he grumbled, and to
her dismay she felt her lips quirk up in a smile.

"No," she repeated, definitely not a shout
this time, perhaps because the word was mostly aimed at
herself.

"I heard you the first time." Something in
his voice made Bette put a hand to her throat, made her want to
take all the words back and erase that—was it pain?—from his voice.
"All right, so you don't want to go out with me."
Yes, I do want
to go out with you
, she thought,
but I won't. I can't.
"Then I guess you'll just have to send an-other temporary secretary
Monday morning."

Whatever she'd heard in his voice had
disappeared. His last words were almost cheerful. She swallowed,
hard. "Yes, we'll send you another new secretary Monday
morning."

"Fine."

"Fine."

"Have a nice weekend, Bette."

"You, too, Paul. Goodbye."

She hung up, but left her hand on the
receiver. She knew she'd have an absolutely miserable weekend—for
the same reason she'd had a miserable week.

* * * *

She wasn't even surprised when Karen Van
Ryland came in Tuesday at 11:30 and announced she wouldn't work for
Paul Monroe.

"That's it. I'm mad as hell and I'm not going
to take any more of this, Darla." Bette pressed her hands on the
desktop and rose slowly from her chair.

"What are you going to do?"

Do? Yes, she had to do something. The weekend
had turned out worse than miserable—it had been unproductive. She
hadn't caught up with the paperwork from Top-Line the way she'd
wanted to. She hadn't investigated the two prospective
neighborhoods she'd had on her agenda and she hadn't attended the
real estate open houses she'd targeted.

In fact, all she had accomplished was carving
jack-o'-lantern faces into the three pumpkins that had taken up
residence on her front steps. Oddly, they all bore a striking
resemblance to the mask of Tragedy. Her neighbor had remarked that
she had the most depressing doorstep in town. She had added that
only seemed fitting since Bette's expression matched that of the
jack-o'-lanterns.

Yes, she had to do something. She had to at
least try to stop this.

"I'm going to face that maniac on his own
turf and tell him he can't get away with this!"

"Do you think that's wise?"

She hadn't told Darla what Paul's condition
for behaving normally was, but she had an uncomfortable feeling the
older woman had her suspicions.

"No, I don't think it's wise, but I think
it's inevitable."

As inevitable as it had been that those three
pumpkins would get faces.

The phone rang and they looked at the
instrument, then at each other. Bette swung her coat on as it rang
a second time, grabbed her purse and was to the door by ring
three.

"Tell him I will be in his office in fifteen
minutes, and then we'll just see about this nonsense."

* * * *

"This is ridiculous, Paul."

Paul's gaze followed Bette as she prowled
across his inner office for the third time. Her dark green dress
was made of some heavy material with just enough swing to caress
her curves with each move. Loose sleeves were gathered into tight
cuffs that made her wrists look impossibly small. He could hold
both her wrists in one hand with no problem. He would hold them
behind her, encouraging her to arch, while he explored the white
slender throat that rose from the circle of a scarf tied at the
neckline of that green dress.

The warmth gathering in his groin made him
grateful he'd assumed his habitual pose when Bette first came in—
feet propped against the edge of his desk, knees bent, slouched a
bit so the back of his neck rested on the high back of the
old-fashioned wooden swivel chair. He'd done it deliberately,
emphasizing his calm casualness as a contrast to her high-wired
agitation. Sitting like this was also comfortable, and luckily in
this case, it masked certain realities of male human anatomy.

For a week and half, he'd found such
fantasies involving a certain dark-haired, blue-eyed woman had
become increasingly frequent. They'd also become disturbingly
realistic. And the trouble was, the fantasies also seemed to be
producing increasingly realistic reactions.

It was as bad as being a teenager again. No,
worse. As a teenager he'd had no thought of fulfilling the
fantasies. Now he had a fairly good idea how incredible it would be
if he did.

Just one stumbling block—Bette Wharton.

He watched her slim fingers pick up a framed
photograph from the bookshelves to the right of his desk. He'd
wager she wasn't aware it was the second time she'd picked up that
particular photograph, a shot taken his senior year in college,
with Grady, Michael and Tris on the front steps of the university
library. And he'd up the bet to any amount anyone cared to name
that she'd deny ever letting the tip of her finger stroke the image
of his youthful face the way she'd just done.

If it wouldn't have raised her hackles, he
would have grinned at her. She was weakening.

He wondered if a tiger on the hunt felt this
way as it watched a particularly graceful gazelle graze closer and
closer to being within the predator's grasp—a little sorry for the
creature about to become lunch, but at the same time hungry, so
very hungry. Maybe he'd missed something by never pursuing a woman
before. Or did it only work this way with Bette?

She put down the photo with a bit of a thunk
and swung back to face him, and he thought maybe the gazelle wasn't
as defenseless as it looked. It certainly had the speed to escape,
no matter how delicate its limbs.

"Did you hear me?" Her exasperated tone
informed him he'd missed something.

"No."

She let out a short, irritated spurt of
breath that made it harder for him to restrain a grin. It also had
the effect of drawing his attention to her mouth, and rekindling
memories of the way it had felt against his lips, his teeth, his
tongue.

"This has got to stop, Paul."

"My not listening?"
Or my
fantasizing
?

"Your scaring off my secretaries!"

"I told you that was easy enough to remedy.
Go out with me."

"Paul—"

The warning sounded clearly, but he didn't
heed it. He'd dismissed the possibility that she was involved with
someone ten days ago as he'd sat in his car contemplating her dark
house, but the thought came again now. Maybe that was why . . .

His feet hit the floor with a thud and the
old chair creaked upright. "Is there a special reason you won't go
out with me?"

"What do you mean, a special reason?" He
could almost see her caution.

"Another man," he rapped out. "Are you
involved with somebody else?"

"No." The word came too fast, and she was too
flustered, for the answer to be anything but automatically honest.
But then she faced him, hands on hips, and glared full force.
"There's no 'somebody else' about it. I'm not involved with you,
either."

"Yet." He let himself smile a little as he
said the word, more because the tension had eased than anything
else.

"Not at all."

"Why not, Bette?"

"Why not?" she repeated. She sounded more
uncertain than outraged. He took that as a good sign.

"Yeah. Why not? It's not like you could be
suspecting I have some horrible secret in my past. You know pretty
much all there is to know about my past. You've even met my
parents. You seemed to like them."

He let the last sentence linger, forcing her
to say something or be rude.

"Yes, I liked them."

Who would have thought that getting her to
agree with him would be such a kick? He had a feeling his fantasies
might start including the word
yes
. "You must have been able
to tell that most of the time they think I'm a pretty good guy. I
could give you affidavits from a couple friends, maybe even Judi.
Surely you'd take a younger sister's word for it that I'm not a
monster."

"I don't think you're a monster." She sounded
almost sullen. The signs were better and better.

Abruptly, he didn't want to play the game of
reading signs anymore. He wanted to know. He wanted her to tell
him. "Then why won't you go out with me?"

For a long, tenuous moment he thought she
wouldn't respond. Willing her to answer, he kept his eyes on
her.

"It's too . . . You're too—" she darted a
look at him, then off to the side "—dangerous."

"What do you mean, dangerous?" An
extraordinary relief surged through him, and he couldn't stop the
grin this time—dangerous was a whole lot better than her just not
wanting to spend time with him. But when she stiffened, he knew
he'd done exactly the wrong thing.

She took a deep, backbone-steadying breath,
walked over to the black leather couch under the windows and sat
down with dignified composure. If he'd rattled her, she'd recouped.
The gazelle had not only escaped, it was prepared to face down its
pursuer. He felt absurdly deflated, shut out.