Dwight snorted, suddenly sounding very much like his son. “He’s been spinning stories to turn you against me. He was always much closer to his mother. Too close, it seems.”
Stephanie couldn’t help smiling. She couldn’t think of anyone less of a mommy’s boy than Garrett.
“Don’t take his side against me,” Dwight roared.
Her smile vanished. “You need to leave. That yelling isn’t good for the baby.”
As if to bear her out, the baby kicked hard. The sensation still felt entirely miraculous to Stephanie. She broke off, to caress her stomach.
“Is it kicking?” Dwight’s hand twitched at his side; one thing he was good at was sharing the joy of a kicking baby. In that scrupulously fair way of his, he never assigned the baby a gender. Stephanie alternated between being certain it was another adorable boy, and thinking of an angelic little girl.
“Just go, Dwight,” she said. She didn’t want to soften toward him, and if she let him feel the baby move…
“I won’t ask you again,” he said, and she shivered at the echo of the day he’d proposed to her.
I should have turned him down.
“Come home with me now,” he said.
Like all those years ago, she wasn’t able to say no. But she did manage to shake her head in refusal.
Dwight’s still-flushed face paled. His hand lifted in a jerky movement, as if he might salute her. He let it drop.
Then he left.
CHAPTER NINE
S
TEPHANIE
HAD
BEEN
occupying his spare room for three nights and Garrett was ready for her to go. He could tolerate her forced cheerfulness and the clutter of herbal tea bags and vitamin pills on his kitchen counter. But she used the bathroom every ten minutes during the night, and while he’d never considered himself a particularly light sleeper, he was used to living alone. He hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since she arrived.
When he got up at six on Thursday, she was already in the kitchen, making herself a pastrami sandwich. A strange choice for breakfast. Must be a pregnancy thing.
Garrett poured milk over some granola and ate standing at the counter, wishing he’d had more sleep. Last night had been even worse than the ones before. Not only had he had Stephanie’s disturbances to contend with, he’d been oddly alert, thinking about holding hands with Rachel. More than alert…turned on.
Too much going on. My brain is melting.
“You have that college visit today, right?” Stephanie asked.
He grunted. He didn’t like talking early in the morning.
“It’s a beautiful day. It’ll be nice to get out of the city,” she said wistfully.
“You could always go home,” he suggested.
She didn’t say a word, but the knife she was using to slice a tomato clattered against the board.
“Forget it,” he muttered. It wasn’t like he needed to sleep or anything. On the other hand… “How are you going on finding somewhere else to stay?”
“I’m working on it,” she said evasively.
That didn’t sound good.
“I’ll bet Dad’s missing you,” Garrett tried. But he couldn’t make it sound convincing and her eye roll said it wasn’t worth trying.
“He told me you’re hoping to make partner in your firm,” she said.
“Did he tell you he doesn’t think I’m up to the job?”
“
I
think you are,” she said.
Garrett neither needed nor wanted the consolation prize of Stephanie’s approval. And he certainly didn’t want her thinking it was any kind of motivation for him.
“Is there anything I can do to help with the pitch you’re working on?” she asked. “Maybe typing documents or searching the internet?”
“Nope.”
Stephanie stopped slicing, knife poised in midair, in one of those frozen moments he was getting used to. “Baby’s kicking,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” he said.
“Would you like to feel?” she asked.
He started. “You mean, touch your stomach?”
She beamed, and he remembered her smiling like that when he’d first met her. “You won’t get germs,” she promised.
“I’m good.” He dumped his bowl in the sink and rinsed it with a blast of cold water. “Time I left.”
After brushing his teeth, he grabbed his laptop bag. He called a goodbye to Stephanie in the split second before the door closed behind him.
* * *
B
Y
THE
TIME
THEY
NEARED
the end of their tour of Brightwater’s Porchester College campus in Connecticut, Garrett was aggravated beyond measure.
He blamed Rachel. Something about holding her hand yesterday had made it impossible for him to ignore her, even when she was jabbering on at Clive about subjects of zero interest to Garrett. Yeah, she had quite a nice voice, but it was possible to have too much of a good thing.
She’d taken his agreement to
pretend
to be pleasant to his staff—a concession made purely because it disturbed him to witness her blind loyalty to the firm, loyalty that would bite her on her cute butt very soon—as an invitation to involve him in all kinds of conversations in which he had no interest.
So far, she’d asked his opinion of the new corporate values KBC had defined, whether he agreed it would be wonderful for working moms if the firm established a day-care center in that empty space on the fifty-fifth floor, and what would be the best retirement gift for Joseph King, one of the founding partners and the outgoing chief creative officer.
She was wanting him to
care.
She was out of luck.
His lack of response had discouraged her—eventually—and she’d turned her attention to Clive. The two of them had vocally admired the campus facilities, and now, as they headed to the cafeteria for lunch, Clive was sharing some laid-back anecdote from his days as a student at Columbia.
“Did you go to college, Rachel?” Clive asked, when he’d finished his story. “I seem to recall you were pretty young when I joined KBC.”
She shook her head. “My folks were perpetually broke and I didn’t want to go into debt to get an education.”
Maybe that explained why she’d been looking so longingly around this place, Garrett thought. “Everyone has student loans,” he said, in case she was feeling sorry for herself. He’d had loans himself, despite his family’s comfortable finances. Dwight had believed Garrett should make his own way in the world, and since he hadn’t been “sensible enough” to have the military pay for his studies…
“I didn’t want to risk not being able to pay them back,” Rachel said.
“You cut off the whole possibility of an education and went to work in a mail room because you were scared?” Everything about her was irritating him today, most of all the fact that his gaze was constantly drawn to her against his will. Drawn to specific parts of her that he was suddenly weirdly aware of: legs, butt, hands, lips. Eyes. “That’s dumb.”
“It worked out perfectly,” she said. “I joined a wonderful firm that gave me the opportunity to move into account exec training within a year, and met some lovely people.”
“Oh, yeah, your surrogate family.” She sounded almost like an orphan, but she’d said her family couldn’t afford college. “What’s wrong with your real family?” he asked. “Are your parents in jail? No, let me guess…a psychiatric institution?” he said with relish. That would make sense of Rachel’s bizarre hand-holding proclivities.
“Of course not,” she said coldly.
That’s better, Rach. Back off.
Clive chuckled. “What would you have studied if you’d gone to college, Rachel?” he asked.
She didn’t hesitate. “Optometry.”
Garrett would have pegged her for English lit or psychology, but he wasn’t about to ask. Clive, however, did.
“For some reason optometry just really appealed,” she said. “I loved biology.”
“Can’t have loved it that much, if you weren’t prepared to take out a loan to study it.” Garrett followed Rachel through the door to the cafeteria, which Clive held open.
“What did you study, Garrett?” she asked.
“Marketing, at Stanford.”
“So that’s when you fell in love with advertising,” she said as they lined up for their food.
There she went again, wanting him to care. “It’s a job,” he said.
Clive stacked so many cartons of French fries on his tray, you’d think they’d announced an imminent global shortage.
“That’s so unfair.” Rachel ladled minestrone into a bowl. “I love French fries, but if I eat them more than twice a week I blow up like a puffer fish.”
“I can imagine,” Garrett said, giving up the battle not to eye those long, slim legs again. He set his laptop bag on his tray while he fished inside for his wallet. His hand encountered a Saran-wrapped bundle. He pulled it out.
“What the hell?” he muttered. A pastrami sandwich. He turned it over, just to be sure.
Stephanie had made him a packed lunch. What was she trying to achieve?
“Garrett’s got a girlfriend,” Rachel chanted under her breath. Was it his imagination, or did she sound annoyed? He imagined she’d be pretty uptight to think he’d held her hand while he had a girlfriend.
“She isn’t my girlfriend,” he said. Not to reassure Rachel, he just didn’t want to assign Stephanie any role in his life. Whatever his father’s wife was playing at, she could quit right now. He wasn’t looking for a mommy to pack him a lunch. Even if she’d made a lucky guess that pastrami was his favorite.
His handling had opened a gap in the Saran, and the tantalizing smell of pastrami and tomato and onion wafted out. Dammit, Stephanie was doing exactly the same thing as Rachel. More subtly, perhaps, but she was latching on to him and trying to make him care.
Never going to happen.
He sealed the sandwich firmly up again, cutting off that aroma, then dropped it into the nearest trash can.
“Wow,” Rachel said, “she’s really not your girlfriend.”
“I would have eaten that,” Clive protested.
“You’re welcome to it,” Garrett said.
Clive glanced back at the trash can with a disturbing degree of interest. Then he shrugged. “It’s okay. They have burgers up ahead.”
Garrett quashed the thought that he’d rather have eaten the pastrami sandwich.
They found a table near the exit. As they ate, Garrett was unreasonably aware of Rachel, sipping at her soup, occasionally dabbing those lips with a napkin.
Clive went to refill his bottomless soda, and since those two had been doing all the talking, silence fell.
“Have you got what you need out of this visit, Garrett?” Rachel asked.
“Yep,” he lied. Because it was none of her business if the initial ideas he’d had for Brightwater’s creative no longer excited him, and nothing else had popped up in their place. Something would come to him. It always did.
“I’ve found it quite inspiring,” she said. “This is going to be my best pitch ever.”
He knew bravado when he heard it. She was worried. Some of his own anxiety, which he hadn’t quite acknowledged, lifted.
“Do you think your Brightwater campaign will be better than the Lexus one?” she asked.
“The best is yet to come,” he assured her.
She looked a little sick. “So, you’re taking it seriously?”
“Of course.” They both knew there was no
of course
about it.
She broke a piece off the roll that had come with her soup and spread butter on it. “Why did you leave all those other agencies, Garrett?”
He ran a hand around the back of his neck. “Different reasons at different times.”
“So, what are you generally looking for when you join a new firm?” A few crumbs had flaked off her roll and she pressed her finger into them to pick them up.
He wondered if she was considering applying for new jobs now. Smart idea. Or maybe she was just trying to work out his plans. “As far as possible, to be my own boss,” he said.
“Wouldn’t you be better off starting your own agency?” she asked. “You wouldn’t have to answer to anyone at all.”
“Tempting as that sounds, big firms have more resources,” he said. “I’m not interested in running on a shoestring.”
“So your ideal agency is big, but gives you plenty of autonomy,” she mused.
“I guess,” he said impatiently. He realized she was frowning. “What’s wrong now?”
“Do you realize KBC is your ideal firm?” she asked.
“No, it’s not.”
“Lots of autonomous units, the partnership structure, no head office driving us mad. No wonder you haven’t quit in disgust,” she said. “You love that place.”
“I don’t.”
But her words struck a chord. He did like it at KBC. More than anywhere else he’d been.
He didn’t want to leave yet.
Which meant the partnership was no longer just about proving something to his father, or beating Rachel or telling KBC where it could put its promotion.
All these years he’d stayed detached from anything he couldn’t control, always able to walk away, and now Rachel Frye had come along with her constant questions and her insistence on making things matter… And dammit, suddenly he
cared.
Hell. What a mess.
* * *
O
N
F
RIDAY
, R
ACHEL
retreated to a place that offered guaranteed peace of mind: the New York Public Library. For a century, the Beaux Arts building had dominated 42nd Street at 5th Avenue. Its marble halls were as solid and permanent as you could wish a building to be.
She needed solid. The past few days she’d felt horribly unsettled. Worried by Garrett’s insistence that whoever had the best creative would win, that team skills would count for nothing. Alarmed at the realization that KBC wasn’t just another advertising agency to him. Wasn’t as replaceable as he claimed everything was.
Walking down the marble hallway with its carved wooden ceiling didn’t produce the usual sense of calm. Maybe the Periodicals Room would do it, she thought, as she stepped through the deep doorway.
More than any other, this room inspired her, with its dark paneled walls, historic murals and brass lamps. Some of her best ideas had come while she was immersed in the sense of something so much more timeless than an advertising campaign.
And right now, she needed to go back to what she knew worked, rather than letting Garrett spook her. She’d exaggerated slightly when she’d told him her creative was her best ever. It was a good start, but it needed more…something.