* * * *
Six days. One hundred forty-four hours. Eight thousand six-hundred and forty minutes.
Bette punched numbers into the calculator on her desk as if jabbing the keys would cure what ailed her, then wiped out the total before it could come up on the screen. She didn’t want to know how many seconds. That would only make it seem longer—if that were possible. It was bad enough expressed as six days. And six nights.
The days she could fill with all the busyness of running Top-Line Temporaries. Even the weekend had been crammed with duties and responsibilities, plans and projections. After the havoc Paul Monroe had wreaked on her life, she’d needed time to catch up.
They had sent Heather Carlini off to Paul’s office Wednesday morning, and held their breath—though Bette was honest enough with herself to admit her feelings and Darla’s were not identical in this situation.
Heather Carlini was a knockout. Dark hair, huge brown eyes, petite but blessed with an abundance of the right curves, and an apparently innate sense of how best to use them to her advantage. Bette had assigned her the job with deliberate intentions, and almost immediate regrets. What if Paul fell for her? Well, wasn’t that the best solution? Yes. No!
Bette felt as if the rumbling in her head might let loose any second with an explosion to rival Mount St. Helens.
But there had been no eruptions of any kind. Not from inside her, not from Paul Monroe. Not Wednesday, not Thursday, not Friday. Nothing.
“All quiet on the Monroe front,” Darla had said as they closed up Friday night, leaving the words to echo in Bette’s head all weekend. And now it was nearing five o’clock Monday and all was still peace and quiet.
At least until nighttime came.
Even with all the effort she’d put into work over the past six days, Bette discovered she still had energy for tossing and turning each and every one of six nights.
She’d rerun the scene in Paul’s office so many times that the mental tape should have worn out. Instead, in some ways, it seemed to have become clearer and clearer.
Crystal clear that she’d assessed him correctly that first night. Intelligent, warm, charming, wry, sexy, endearingly funny and open. And truly a kid at heart.
He’d practically flinched at the word future. In his vocabulary any synonym for forethought was a bad word. The man ran from plans and schedules as if they came from the same litter as Godzilla. He looked no farther ahead than the moment. She’d always wanted—needed—to know that this moment, added to the next moment and the one following that, was building toward something.
He’d made no bones about what he looked for from her. He’d said it right out: I want you. Not that he cared for her, not that he was interested in the potential of a long-term relationship with her.
Not that she expected a relationship immediately. They’d known each other such a short time, and relationships—lasting relationships—took time to build, to mature. It took a lot of small steps to reach a goal. But, just as she had known there was the potential for success before she started Top-Line Temporaries, she wanted to know that the possibility of a long-term relationship existed with a man. That after getting to know each other gradually, step by step, they might think about a more permanent future.
But that wasn’t how Paul Monroe operated. He wanted her. Right now, for this moment, and let tomorrow be hanged.
That wasn’t her approach to life, so it couldn’t be her approach to—to—The word love leaped to mind, but she shied away from that and substituted one less volatile. To relationships.
Limiting their contact to a strictly business association was the only sane thing. So why was sanity driving her crazy?
Six days, six nights. One hundred forty-four hours. Eight thousand six-hundred and forty minutes. And for every one of them, she’d thought of him.
Worse even than the memories was the way her body reacted to them. Her heartbeat skittered, her breathing turned jagged, her skin pulsed, her insides heated. Six days without seeing, smelling, touching or tasting Paul Monroe, and he still filled her with sensation every one of those six nights.
And, yes, she admitted, sitting in the rational atmosphere of her office at 4:47 of an ordinary Monday afternoon, she had wondered if he would ever again try to make those sensations real. Would he ever call her? Show up at her office? Arrive at her front door?
Would she ever stop wishing he’d do one of those things, any of those things, as long as it meant she saw his dancing eyes, heard his amused voice? She wouldn’t tempt the Fates and her heart with anything more than seeing and hearing him. She’d only risk enough exposure to him to break this pervasive ache of isolation.
She shook her head once, emphatically, more than a little disgusted. Who was she kidding? Did she really think just seeing and hearing Paul Monroe a little would satisfy her?
Something had to give. She had to either learn to control these longings and get on with her life or—Darla pushed open the door, slipped inside and leaned against the closed panel.
“What is it, Darla?” The grimace drawing her assistant’s face seemed to be the result of trying to stifle some extreme emotion. Laughter or tears?
“I have some news for you, Bette.” Darla spoke as if trying to prepare her for a shock, to soften a blow.
“Yes?”
“Heather Carlini is here.”
“Oh?” It took a moment for that to sink in. Six days and six nights can dull the wits. “Oh, no! Not again!”
But even as she said the words, something inside her exulted. He hadn’t fallen for Heather Carlini, long wavy hair, huge dark eyes, petite curves and all. And he hadn’t given up. Paul Monroe was back in her life. She wanted to shout. She wanted to sing.
“Yes, again.”
She wanted to cry. The urge to grin died of its own accord. Paul Monroe was back in her life, and she had some questions to consider. What was Top-Line Temporaries going to do? What was she going to do?
“But...but it seemed to be going so well. We hadn’t heard a peep out of Heather for six days. Six days! That was twice as long as Norma.”
Darla shook her head, and the laughter she’d fought so hard it contorted her face escaped at last. “There’s a reason for that.”
“Well?” The demand was none too patient.
“I asked her if she’d had any trouble last week, and she said no. So I asked how it could be so terrible to work for Paul Monroe if she’d breezed through the last three days of last week with no problems. And Heather said—Heather said . . .” Darla gulped twice and finally seemed to get her voice back in order, although tears leaked from the corners of her eyes and left a shiny trail on her dark cheeks. “She said there was a simple explanation for that. He wasn’t—he wasn’t there last week.”
“What?”
Darla nodded hard, and expelled a sigh that shimmered with laughter. “That’s right. Out of town. In Washington, D.C. All those days we sat here congratulating ourselves that we’d finally licked the Paul Monroe Problem, he wasn’t even there!”
Bette watched Darla feel for a chair to lower her laughter-weakened body into, and she tried to assess what it all meant and what she should do next.
Standing, she carefully closed the folder on her desk, returned her pencil to its holder and the calculator to its drawer. Moving automatically, dreamily, she felt as if her muscles functioned with no direction from her mind. But underneath she felt a glow of energy such as she had never before felt.
She couldn’t consider this feeling too closely or, like looking directly into the sun, it might blind her. Instead, she concentrated on accomplishing the mundane. She pulled her coat on and took up her purse, some portion of her recognizing the actions as slow-motion reruns from last Tuesday.
The phone rang, as it had last Tuesday.
She looked at Darla, and saw her dark eyes widening with recognition of the repetitions. The phone rang again.
“Tell him I’ll be there in a few minutes, and we’ll settle t
his,” Bette said, knowing that that, too, was a near repeat of Tuesday.
Only it wasn’t like Tuesday at all, because Tuesday she hadn’t felt this gush of joy, this flooding of relief and fear and anticipation.
Tuesday, she thought as she elected to walk the nine wind-whipped blocks that separated her office from his, she had concentrated only on what his presence was doing to Top-Line Temporaries. Now she knew what Paul Monroe’s absence could do to Bette Wharton.
He’d been out of town. He’d stepped out of her life, stopped harassing her for six days because he was out of town. Not because he no longer wanted to be with her. Not because he’d given up on her.
The relief of it stung her eyes as much as the wind. She might extract some small compensation, some payment for the toll he’d taken on her emotions the past six days. And she had to remember that this situation could have some bearing on her business, though anything to do with business seemed a remote and misty concept right now. She had more immediate concerns.
Like knowing that at the end of this confrontation she would not walk out of his old-fashioned office the way she had Tuesday. She could not turn her back on the fact that he wanted her. On the fact that she wanted him.
Even though it meant, this once, accepting the moment, and letting the future be hanged.
She knew now that Paul Monroe hadn’t given up. And now she knew that neither could she. Whatever happened next.
Chapter Seven