of contract.” Shoot. She shouldn’t have said that. She should have stopped while she was ahead.
From the look he gave her it was clear that Cal Panagos was not a man who liked being threatened, even in a veiled, passive-aggressive way.
He took a moment to straighten the lapel of his Italian-tailored dark gray suit. It fit him perfectly, both physically and metaphorically. It was perfect and cold.
“Everyone needs to be contacted and all assignments need to be canceled,” he said coolly. “My secretary can do that.”
“Can your secretary find her way around the filing maze Lucy created? Some of our legal papers are filed under L for legal, but others are under S for serious legal.”
Cal frowned as if he was trying to figure out whether Kit was on the level.
“Can your secretary figure out kill fees, which are different for each assignment and which are based on past history with each writer? The files are in a spreadsheet on my computer, but there are a lot of them to figure out. More to the point, do you want to pay her—or him—for the hours she’ll have to spend trying to find her way through that maze? Or do you want to keep on the one person who can expedite it?”
He frowned again, drawing a dark shadow across the expression in his light blue eyes. “It may be hard for you to imagine, Ms. Macy, but, yes, I think I can do all of that—and more—without you.” He tilted his head slightly. “After all, we’ve only just met. I’ve managed a much bigger publication than this without any guidance at all.”
She’d taken the wrong tack. She needed to back off quick and try something different.
Maybe plain old honesty would do the trick.
It wasn’t as if she had a lot of other options.
“Look,” she said, “I’m not saying you and your staff aren’t capable of these things. I’m just saying I’m already up to speed, so it makes a lot more sense, economically and timewise, to keep me on.” She looked into his eyes, feeling as though she was swimming against the current in the turbulent ocean of his eyes. “It would benefit both of us.”
His expression softened almost imperceptibly. Perhaps a slight turning of the tide. “Things are changing around here. A lot.”
“I can change.”
He raised an eyebrow slightly. This was a man who knew how he looked at all times and used it to communicate everything he wanted to say. “Are you willing to commit to doing it my way, even before you know what that means?”
She didn’t have any choice. “Yes. Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it. I’m a professional.”
He nodded thoughtfully.
“Please.” She bit the bullet so hard she wouldn’t have been surprised if her teeth shattered. “I really need my job.”
He was still holding the manila envelope with her name on it. He looked at it, then back at her. A long moment passed before he dropped the envelope on the desk.
“This goes against my better judgment,” he said.
Hope lurched in her chest. “Some of the best things in life begin with that very statement.”
He raked his gaze across her. “You’re a persuasive woman, Ms. Macy.”
She smiled. “That will work to your advantage.”
The smallest hint of a smile played at the curve of his mouth. “That particular feminine quality has occasionally worked against me in the past.”
“Presumably you’re referring to pleasure, not business.”
He hesitated, looking at her. “Sometimes it’s hard to separate the two.”
A frisson of electricity zapped through her chest, and gooseflesh raised on her arms and against the cotton of her shirt. There was nothing to say he was talking about sex—he could have meant that he enjoyed his work so much that it was always a pleasure—but something about the way he looked at her gave Kit chills she didn’t want to attribute to his sex appeal.
So she assigned it instead to a cool blast from the air conditioner.
Even though it was so muggy in the office that she couldn’t be sure the air conditioner was even on.
“Well, I intend to make sure that working with me is a pleasure.” Kit fumbled, hearing—probably at the same time he did—the clumsiness of her sentiment. “I mean, I think we’ll work well together.”
“There you go with that persuasion again,” he said, with a smile that lit his pale blue eyes.
The air conditioner had to be on and she must be standing directly in front of a previously undetected vent, because she was positively getting chills. “Does that mean you’re willing to give me a try?” she asked.
He gave a short laugh. “It’s certainly tempting.”
“I’m talking about the job.”
He nodded for a long moment, then smiled and said, “Okay, you’ve got two months to prove yourself. If I can live without you by then, you’re outta here. Period.”
“Fine.” She turned on her heel to leave when she remembered the call from the bank.
Oh, this wasn’t going to be easy.
She turned back to Cal. “There’s just one more thing,” she said.
He looked at her wearily and let out a breath. “Don’t tell me you want a raise.”
She shook her head. “Just a letter to the bank assuring them that I’m gainfully employed.” She gave a small shrug. “And if you could leave out the part about it being for two months, that would be great.”
Cal watched the feisty redhead leave the room and shook his head. The girl was trouble, every nerve in his body told him so. The way she raised that chin and leveled those Kelly-green eyes at him—she was like a kitten, irrationally brave in the face of the wolf who could eat her alive.
Then she’d flounced out of the place, after having the nerve to ask him to put in writing that he employed her, with her long tangle of hair swinging behind her like spun copper. He had to admire her nerve, as crazy at it was. Hell, he was tempted to tell the bank he was paying her four times what she earned just because she’d taken the chance on asking him.
She was a nervy little thing.
And he could eat her alive all right.
For the time being, though, he’d resist that. She could flit around the office and pull files and make calls. He could use that. Maybe she’d even live up to her own advertising, though in Cal’s experience it was rare that a woman that pretty had the smarts to back it up.
His only real concern about keeping her was that she might prove to be too much of a distraction to him. He had a lot to do and almost no time to do it. In the past he’d had the leisure to flirt and enjoy the chase. He’d also had the security of a large number of personnel, so when the flirting was done and the chase was over, he could disappear back into the excuse of business and that would be that.
But at the moment Kit Macy was his only employee, and given the modest—no, meager—budget Breck Monahan had allowed, he wasn’t going to be able to hire more than fifteen or twenty more.
Hardly the sort of numbers that would allow him to back off gracefully at the end of a fling.
So there would be no fling.
He could live with that.
He got up and went to the back room where Ebbit Markham had pointed out a hundred-odd years’ worth of back issues of the magazine. It was musty and dark, and it occurred to Cal that he might be better off just lighting the whole lot on fire or locking the door and throwing away the key.
The unpleasantness