she frowned. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
He stared at her. “What am I doing here? It’s my family’s company.”
She shrugged. She wasn’t going to give up any ground if she could help it. “I thought you were off in West Texas somewhere for the week.”
“I’m back.”
So it seemed. Just more of her bad luck. “It’s after hours. This building is supposed to be empty.”
He looked at her as though he’d decided she had a screw loose after all. “Oh, I see. So I’m the one not following rules.”
Ridiculous. She knew that. But what the heck—the best defense was a good offense. She’d heard that many times. And she certainly had no intention of begging for mercy. So what else could she do?
“Exactly,” she said, holding his gaze. “You’re certainly the one who caused all the trouble.”
He stared at her and suddenly, he grinned. And then he laughed.
She stepped back, startled again. Who knew he even had a sense of humor? She felt hesitant, thrown off guard. She was perfectly comfortable defending herself against a strong man, but she wasn’t sure what to do with a man who laughed.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he drawled at last, eyes sparkling. “I say we blame it on the orchid. That makes about as much sense.”
She looked down at what she’d gathered in her hands. Watching her, he held back a chuckle. She seemed to be taking him so seriously. And that reminded him of what he’d always liked about her. She wasn’t a flirt.
He’d had his fill of flirts. Women sometimes seemed to respond to him like flowers opened to the sun. There’d been a time when he’d reveled in it. But that time had long since passed. Now it just got in the way.
Not that he was dead to physical appeal. With her thick blond hair and her large dark eyes, Callie Stevens was a looker and he had the same involuntary attraction to her any normal man would have. Still, he was experienced enough to know it didn’t mean a thing. It would never touch him where he lived. Nothing much did anymore. Life was more tolerable that way.
“Orchids are plants,” Callie was saying, looking at him with a crease between her brows that told him she knew he’d been teasing her, but wanted to challenge him anyway.
“Agreed. So what?”
She looked triumphant. “No free will. You can’t assign blame to them. They have no choice in how they’re flung about.”
He had the grace to pretend chagrin. “I’ll have to admit, you’ve got a point there,” he said.
She hesitated only briefly. If he was admitting things, it was definitely time for her to make a grand departure.
“Of course I do,” she said regally. “Now if you’ll excuse me…”
She turned to go, but his hand on her arm brought her to a halt before she’d made a convincing attempt at a getaway. She looked up at him, wishing she could read the intentions in those clear blue eyes.
“Hold it,” he was saying. “We’re not finished here.”
For the first time, she really did feel uneasy. She was alone in a darkened building with a man she really didn’t know all that well. She’d been one with six others in the research group under Grant Carver, but they were only one of four groups he supervised. She had worked closely with him on a couple of projects, but there’d been a natural reserve between them and it hadn’t only come from her end of the relationship.
She’d had a strange encounter with him once, months ago, where he’d made a proposal that was so off-the-wall, she sometimes wondered if she’d dreamed it. She’d turned him down and he hadn’t seemed to hold it against her. But it had made her wonder about him. She knew there was tragedy in his life. If she hadn’t known it from the office buzz, she would have recognized it in the depths of his eyes.
But that was all he’d ever revealed. In fact, she’d probably seen more honest emotion from him tonight than she’d seen in over a year of working for him.
For some reason, her attention dropped to his open shirt and stuck there for a beat too long. It wasn’t as though she could actually see anything. The lighting cast dark shadows on his chest. But the fact that the crisp white fabric that was usually closed behind a tie now lay open, exposing something mysterious, was somehow intimate and exciting in a way she hadn’t expected. Her pulse stuttered in surprise and began to race.
But she couldn’t let him know.
“I’m finished,” she responded, looking back up quickly. “I came for my orchid and I’ve got it.”
“There must have been an easier way,” he noted dryly.
“Probably,” she said. “But I never seem to do things the easy way.”
He nodded. “You do things in a pretty good way, from what I’ve seen. As I remember it, you worked on the Ames Ranch project last year, didn’t you?”
Work. Yes, if he kept this on a professional level, she could handle it. If only he weren’t touching her. His fingers had curled around her arm in a casual grip, but when she tried to pull away, he didn’t budge. For all intents and purposes, he had her trapped.
“Yes, sir, I did,” she said stoutly.
“And quite handily, too.” His handsome head tilted as he studied her from narrowed eyes. “You were the only one on the staff who seemed to understand what the hell was going on most of the time.”
You actually noticed? She didn’t really say it, but it was on the tip of her tongue. But she would have followed that up with, Why didn’t you give me any credit for that at the time?
He was gazing at her speculatively. “I think we could do some good work together. I’ve got a new project coming up…”
Her eyes widened. Tossing her thick blond hair back, she stared right into his deep eyes.
“Too late. Your uncle fired me today. Didn’t you know?”
She’d expected him to react with surprise. Maybe even shock. After all, he’d just admitted she was one of the best employees he had. When he realized what had happened surely he would do something to straighten things out. Surely he would tell her he’d reprimand whomever it was that put her on the list for layoffs. Maybe he would invite her to come back and even give her a nice fat raise to make up for…
Her head jerked as she came out of her dream and heard how he actually responded to her announcement of her firing.
“Yes, I know.”
“You know?” she echoed stupidly.
He knew. He’d probably put her on the list on purpose. Hey, fire the blond chick—she’s good but she gets on my nerves. Smart is one thing, smart aleck is another. Get rid of her.
Suddenly she was furious—as angry as she’d been when she’d first heard she was a goner. Pulling away from his grip on her arm, she turned on him fiercely.
“But you think you know everything, don’t you? Did you also know I just lost my second job, the one I use to help get out of a mountain of debt that’s about to eat me alive? Did you also know that I’m about to be evicted from my apartment because I can’t pay the rent? Do you ever think about things like that when you casually toss people overboard? Or are we just like chess pieces in a big, careless game that doesn’t mean a thing to you?”
His handsome face could have been cut from stone. “Are you finished?”
“No! There are others just like me. Everyone in the research department, in fact. We were all living by the skin of our teeth, paycheck to paycheck…because you don’t exactly pay a lot to your lower-level employees, do you? And now every one of us is out on her ear, wondering where the