He accepted that with a nod of the head. “You work for old Floyd Thorpe, huh?”
“Yes, I’m sorry to say I do.”
“He’s a hell-raiser that one—a real shyster.”
Startled, she looked into his dark eyes. “You know him?”
“He’s been around Kansas City a long time. Everybody there knows old Floyd. It’s his kind that give construction companies a bad reputation. He’s as crooked as a dog’s hind leg.”
“But he knows how to make money so he’s excused, right?” she questioned sarcastically.
Refusing to rise to the bait, Sam asked, “If you dislike him so much, why work for him?”
“With the construction industry tied directly to new-home starts, need you ask?”
He wiped his mouth on a napkin. “No, I guess there aren’t a lot of job openings right now, are there?”
She poked at the fleshy wedge of tomato in her bowl as if it were Thorpe’s fat belly. “The only opening I’ve seen lately is the one between Floyd Thorpe’s front teeth when he spits his slimy tobacco juice at my feet.”
Brown laughed appreciatively, prompting Lee to look up with a devilish expression on her face. “Can I share a very private joke with you? One that’s exceedingly irreverent?”
“I love irreverent jokes.”
Lee sucked on her bottom lip, then confessed, “Privately, when I’m disgusted with my boss, which I usually am, I call him by his initials.”
“Which are?”
“F.A.T.” Brown rocked back in his chair and laughed while she continued, “He doesn’t like it generally known what his middle initial is. Maybe that’s why I take such pleasure in including it.”
The fine white lines about Brown’s eyes disappeared as he crinkled a smile and watched as she jabbed repeatedly at the tomato. His eyes passed over high, wide cheekbones, the proud, straight nose, the black straight hair caught behind her ear, in a plump, smooth bun, the copper skin and near-black eyes.
“You’re Indian, right?”
Her eyes flashed up defiantly, and the feathers swung against her jaws. “One quarter Cherokee. He never lets me forget it.”
Brown glanced at the feathers but withheld comment. “What you’re saying is old Fat knows which side his bread is buttered on, huh?”
“Exactly. He’s asked me no less than five times to accept the honorary title of vice-president.”
“Let me guess.” Brown leaned forward. “That would qualify him as a minority contractor, right?”
She grinned ruefully. “And make him eligible to bid any and all Minority Business Enterprise jobs the federal government lets, either as prime contractor or subcontractor. As you know, they seem to be the best bet going right now.”
He studied her from beneath black brows shaped like boomerangs. “I take it you’ve declined the vice-presidency.”
“With great relish.”
Again Sam Brown leaned back in his chair and laughed richly. “There are a few contractors in the Kansas City area who’d grin from ear to ear to hear somebody put one over on F.A. after all the times he’s pulled underhanded deals.”
“I’d grin wider myself if it weren’t for the increase in pay I’m turning down just to make Fat Thorpe eat crow.”
“Or—more aptly—Cherokee?” Sam quipped, watching her closely.
She chuckled and her dark eyes sparkled momentarily before a pensive look overcame them. She nudged a few remaining pieces of lettuce around her salad bowl and folded her knuckles beneath her chin. She braced one elbow on the table, rested her other forearm against the edge of the table, and stroked the damp sides of her cold glass. “You know,” she mused to the ice cubes in the empty tumbler, “there are some things my pride just won’t let me do. Not even for money.”
“But I thought you said money was why you took the job.”
“It was. But I earn enough to support myself now. That’s all I need.”
She saw his eyes drop to the hand toying with the glass. It bore only a large oval turquoise in a sterling silver setting.
“You’re not married?” he asked.
His eyes moved higher, met hers, and her fingers stopped stroking the damp glass.
“No,” she answered tersely, realizing she should qualify the answer, then disregarded her conscience, thinking she owed this man nothing. They were simply sharing a table—two strangers in a lonely city away from home.
Their main course arrived, and Sam Brown changed the subject. “I take it the Fat is going to hit the fan when he hears you lost the bid, huh?”
Lee looked up, chuckled appreciatively, and noted, “You do have an irreverent sense of humor, don’t you? He’s always hitting the fan over one thing or another. It’s a way of life with him. If it’s not over losing the bid, it’ll be over me staying overnight on his precious company credit card, which he warned me not to do.”
“But you’re doing it anyway?” A frown tilted his brows.
“It was either that or get into Kansas City in the middle of the night after missing the six P.M. flight out of here. After the day I’ve put in, I wasn’t about to spend half the night in a plane.”
“All because I had your suitcase, right?”
She met his eyes, but only shrugged and returned to her dinner.
The waitress brought coffee, interrupting them momentarily. When they were alone again, Lee studied Sam thoughtfully and asked, “If you’ve been around the K.C. area long enough to know about the questionable business practices of my illustrious boss, why haven’t we met before?”
“Probably because we’ve been primarily involved with plumbing contracting and only recently decided to expand into sewer and water work.”
“We?” she asked curiously. “Who’s the other Brown in Brown and Brown?”
“It was my dad. He was the one who knew every contractor’s secrets around town. He was in the contracting business for years.”
“Was?”
“He died four years ago,” Sam stated unemotionally, cutting into his prime rib.
“I . . . I’m sorry.”
He looked up brightly. “Oh, don’t be. My father had a hell of a good life, did everything he ever wanted to do, died a happy man . . . on a golf course, no less, on the sixth tee.” His brown eyes twinkled. “That sixth tee always did give him trouble.”
Even though Sam Brown pronounced all this with no apparent sadness, Lee felt awkward sharing his private history this way when she scarcely knew him. But he went on. “He was a hard-drinking, hardworking Norwegian—”
“A Norwegian named Brown?”
“Comes from Brunvedt, somewhere back along the line.”
“I’m sorry . . . I interrupted.”
“Well as I said, he was a hard-headed Norwegian, and when I say he did everything he wanted, that included disobeying doctor’s orders. He’d had a small stroke and was given orders to take it easy for a few months, but when a stubborn Norwegian takes it into his head he’s going to go golfing, there’s no stopping him.”
Lee found she was enjoying Sam Brown’s company immensely by now and surprised even herself by replying, “And when a stubborn Norwegian takes it into his head that he’s going to go to dinner with a woman, there’s no stopping him either, is there?”
Sam angled a smile at the knot of hair behind her ear, then at her eyes, and finally her lips. It occurred to Lee that he looked nothing whatever like any Norwegian she’d ever met. His hair was a rich chestnut color, his eyes and skin so dark they seemed to reflect her very face as he reached blindly for his coffee cup and—without taking his eyes from her—teased, “Well, it wasn’t so painful after all, was it?”
She wished she could answer otherwise, but she found it impossible. “Admittedly, no it wasn’t.”
“Maybe we can do it again sometime in Kansas City.”
For a moment she was tempted, but recalling the less estimable aspects of his personality, she warned, “Don’t plan on it. Not unless I’ve won the bid.”
br /> “Mmm . . .” He lifted his coffee. Devilish eyes sparkled above the cup. “Might be worth fixing the bid in your favor next time.”
“I have no doubt you’d do it.” She studied him for some time, then admitted, “I have a habit of coining titles for people I meet. You know what I’ve dubbed you?”
“What?”
Their eyes tangled in a delightful duel of wits.
“The Honorable Sam Brown.”
“Hey, I like that . . . that’s clever.”
“And pure, unvarnished sarcasm. Brown, you’re a completely dishonorable scoundrel, and I don’t know why I’m sitting at this table with you right now.”
He tipped his chair back until it balanced on two legs. “Because you wanted to find out if I’m as perverted as my reading material led you to suspect. They say every woman is attracted to the wrong kind of man at least once in her life. Who knows? Maybe I’m it for you.”
“Then again maybe you’re not.” She tipped her head and studied him closely. He was a highly delicious looking male specimen—she’d grant him that. And his nasty sense of humor didn’t hurt a bit. But Lee reminded herself again that he wasn’t the sort with whom she should be bantering about sexually provocative things. Conversations such as this provoked vibrations that said much more than the mere words, and she was by no means ready for such vibrations again. Her wounds hadn’t healed from the last disastrous relationship. But even while she chided herself for indulging in such give-and-take, Sam’s eyes were steady on her as his chair came down on all fours. He leaned crossed arms on the table edge, and pitched slightly toward her.
“Tell me,” he said, his voice gone low and intimate. “What’d you think of the one stretched out on the rock beside the river?”
Damned if she was going to look like some nillywitted teenager caught peeping at African breasts in National Geographic! Lee looked Brown smack in the eye and replied levelly, “The photographer must have missed oiling the inner side of her right calf. The water didn’t bead up there.”
Sam Brown rewarded her with a full-throated, appreciative peal of laughter while Lee scolded herself for her own precociousness. A moment later he had flung his soiled napkin on the table, picked up the check and was standing behind her chair, waiting to pull it back. But before he did, he leaned close and, just beside an aqua feather, said, “Chief Sitting Bull would have excommunicated you from the tribe if he’d ha . . . ha . . .” He turned away just in time. “Aaa-chooo!”
She glanced over her shoulder with a cheeky grin. “My goodness, Brown, it looks like you’re allergic to me. Don’t get so close next time.”
He was rubbing his nose with a handkerchief. “It’s that perfume you’re wearing.”
“My apologies.” She grinned, not feeling the least bit of contrition.
It’s just as well, she thought. She had no business being with him in the first place. But still she had to smile, for on the way back to their rooms he sneezed three more times, and by the time they reached her door he was giving her a good six-foot clearance.
Chapter THREE
FLOYD A. Thorpe kept his office like he kept his teeth—brown around the edges. Rolls of plans, soil samples, drill bits, cast-iron pipe fittings, test plugs, incoming mail, hydrant wrenches, and used coffee cups created a random scattering of litter that was rarely cleared or dusted, for F.A. raised particular hell if anyone monkeyed with his “filing system.” The room had an unpleasant smell, a mixture of rancid chewing tobacco, dust, stale alcohol, tar, and dried clay, topped off with the peculiar smell of cast iron. When Lee had taken the job at Thorpe Construction, F.A. had been in the middle of one of his sporadic drying-out periods, during which he became less abusive and more reasonable. The office had been cleaner, and so had he.
But he’d been off the wagon for months now. His nose shone like a beacon, and his cheeks wore the mottled red puffiness of the serious drinker. It was all Lee could do to face him the following morning across the junk on his desk.
“He what!” bellowed F.A.
Lee took a step backward. Thorpe’s breakfast Manhattan was offensive the second time around.
“He got my suitcase by mistake, found the bid inside, and turned it in along with his own.”
“And took the goddam job away from you like candy from a baby!” F.A. fumed and paced, then picked up a coffee can and spit into it. Lee studied a piece of P.V.C. pipe on a littered file cabinet behind him rather than observe the distasteful sight of his brown spume. “By a measly four thousand dollars!” F.A. whammed his fist into the center of the desk, lifting dust and making the telephone dance. He dropped into his desk chair and glowered at Lee, then turned suddenly pensive. “That’s old Wayne Brown’s kid, isn’t it? Mmm . . . appears the kid’s got more brains than his old man.” Thorpe’s eyes narrowed shrewdly, and he chuckled deep in his throat. Then he turned his beady eyes on Lee again. “I hope you learned your lesson from this. Everybody’s out to screw everybody else in this world, and Sam Brown proved it!” With a quick shift of weight, he leaned back in his chair. “You thought any more about that vice-presidency I offered you?”
“Sorry, I prefer estimating.”
Again he banged his fist on the desk. “Damn it, Walker, I put up with a lot from you, carrying your bids in a suitcase like some green recruit, then picking up the wrong damn one at the other end of the line and losing me a job worth over four million bucks! How long do you think I’m going to put up with screw-ups like this! I want your name on them corporation papers. It’s the least you can do after the mess you made out of this Denver bid.”
“I’m sorry about losing the suitcase, but the rest of it wasn’t my fault. If Sam Brown checked my bid against his, he wouldn’t admit it.”
“Why, hell no, who would?” F.A.’s pot belly was so hard it scarcely depressed when he crossed his hands on it. “Tell you what, girlie. I’ll give you till Friday to think it over. Either you help me out with this here minority business thing and agree to become vice-president, or you can find yourself someplace else to work. You’re costin’ me money, and unless you help me make a little of it back, I got no use for you.”
Back in her own neat office, Lee strode angrily to her chair, deposited herself in it with great vexation, cursed under her breath, and considered marching back in there and telling F.A.T. where to put his vice-presidency and his tobacco cud! There’d be nothing so sweet as to walk out there and show that fat, smelly boar she didn’t need his precious job or his calculating little mind one moment longer.
But the bitter truth was, she did.
She had no husband across town bringing in a paycheck from another job to support her. She was self-reliant now and needed a weekly salary to survive. Sam Brown had been right when he’d summed up the estimator’s job market right now—there was none! Two years ago, before the recession had gripped the country, Kansas City and its surrounding suburbs had had perhaps twenty more general contractors than it did now. Now the industry grapevine buzzed constantly with news of this one or that one on the verge of folding, and they all held their breaths, hoping the next one to go under wouldn’t be themselves.
The phone interrupted Lee’s reverie. She punched line one and answered, “Lee Walker.”
“You made it back.”
The voice surprised Lee.
“Brown, is that you?”
“That’s right, the Honorable Sam Brown. I looked for you on my flight. Thought we might sit together and share my magazine.”
She didn’t feel in the least like smiling but couldn’t help it. Damn the man, making her laugh when he’d been the initial cause of the altercation she’d just had with Thorpe!
“Oh, you did, huh? I took an earlier flight. I’ve been back since ten o’clock.”
A brief pause, then, “How did Thorpe take the news?”
She laughed, a single mirthless huff. “Need you ask?”
“Well, you win a few and you lose a few. He should know that by now.”
&nb
sp; “That isn’t even remotely funny, Brown. Not after what you did to me! He came down on me like a tent when the circus is over, and what really irritates me is that Fat Thorpe actually seems to admire you for your duplicity. His exact words were, ‘The kid’s got more brains than his old man.’ It appears you’re two peas in a pod, you and my boss.”
His unconcerned laughter came over the wire. “We’re both a couple of degenerates, is that it?”
“That’s it,” she agreed.
“Well, how would you like a chance to try your hand at reforming me . . . say over dinner Friday night?”
Lee came close to sputtering, the dressing down she’d just taken from F.A. still burning beneath her collar. “Dinner! What, again? And ruin my reputation around this town by being seen with a known pervert? I told you, Brown, I don’t know why I ate with you the first time!”
“I’ll take you to the American Restaurant,” he bribed.
The American! Lee was suddenly crestfallen and undeniably tempted. The American Restaurant at the Crown Center was the crème de la crème of eateries in the Kansas City area.
“Brown, that’s a dirty, rotten low blow, and you know it.”
“I know,” he agreed mirthfully, a smile in his voice.
“I told you, not until I’m the low bidder, and right now I’m not, as you well know.” The American Restaurant, she thought woefully, kissing the chance good-bye.
“Okay, Cherokee, but I’ll hold you to it . . . when you’re low bidder.”
“Ch . . .” Now Lee did sputter! “Ch . . . Cherokee! Brown, don’t you ever call me that ag . . . Brown?” She clicked the disconnect button. “Brown!”
But he’d hung up. Then she did too, slamming the receiver down so hard it jumped back off the cradle. “Cherokee!” she spit out crossing her arms and glaring at the instrument guilty of carrying his damn sexy, teasing voice to her when she was in no mood to be manipulated by a smooth talker like him.
How dare he call her Cherokee when . . . when . . .
But a moment later her lips betrayed her and she found herself grinning at the phone. It was the last time she grinned that day.