The Antonides Marriage Deal. Anne McAllister

just exhaled sharply and rocked back on his heels before muttering something under his breath, then turning and stalking off down the hall.

      “Welcome to your first wonderful day at Antonides Marine,” Tallie murmured to herself as she watched him stalk away.

      No question about it—Tallie Savas was going to be a pain.

      Who the hell needed a president who baked cookies? Who came to meetings and sat there, scribbling furiously on a notepad and never said a word? Who buried herself in her office with the piles and piles of reports he’d given her and actually read them? And took them home with her?

      Elias stood glaring after her from his office as she tottered toward the door, the box full of files balanced on top of her briefcase, and three empty cookie tins teetering precariously on top of that.

      A gentleman would help her with it.

      Elias didn’t feel much like a gentleman. He would have liked to have seen her collapse in a heap.

      But the way his life was going at the moment, his father would probably want to pay all her medical bills with money Elias hadn’t made yet!

      Grimly he strode after her. “Allow me,” he said with frigid politeness and opened the door for her.

      “Thanks.” She gave him a sweet smile that was completely at odds with her stubborn refusal to go home and let him get on with the job. “Have a good evening.”

      “Oh, yeah,” he said drily.

      She turned her head to grin at him. The top cookie tin teetered, and she nearly dropped them all, rescuing it.

      Against his better judgment, Elias said grudgingly, “Do you want some help?”

      Tallie shook her head—and the cookie tins and the briefcase and the box. “No, thanks.” And she wobbled off down the hall.

      Oddly annoyed at having his offer refused, Elias shut the door behind her. But he didn’t move away. He continued to watch her through the glass. If she dropped the damn things, she’d have to let him help her.

      But at that moment one of the doors down the hall opened and a man came out. Elias recognized Martin de Boer instantly from his tweedy elbow-patched jacket and his floppy earnest-and-intense-journalist-too-busy-to-get-a-haircut hair.

      Martin wrote for the snooty monthly opinion mag, Issues and Answers, that rented a group of offices down the hall. When Elias had leased to them, he’d figured they’d be congenial tenants, and the people who worked on the physical magazine were. He even played recreational league basketball with the layout director.

      But the journalists who wrote for Issues and Answers were a different story. They thought everyone else had issues but only they had answers. And from the few conversations Elias had had with him, Martin de Boer had more answers than most. As far as Elias could see, de Boer was a pompous, arrogant know-it-all who stuck his oar in where it wasn’t needed.

      And his opinion didn’t improve as he watched Martin smile and speak to Tallie, obviously offering to help carry her box. In this case he got a brilliant smile in return and a reply that permitted him to whisk the box out of her arms gallantly and cradle it in his own.

      Hell! Elias glared. She’d practically kicked his shins when he’d offered! He was half tempted to stalk down the hall and jerk the damn box out of de Boer’s skinny arms.

      Good thing his cell phone rang.

      Bad thing to hear his father’s voice, jovial and upbeat, booming down the line. “Well how’d it go today with our new president?”

      Elias, watching Tallie disappear into the elevator with Martin the Bore, bit out two words: “Don’t ask.”