A Bride For The Boss

Two

Andi went to the baseball game. Jolene had been right: eight-year-old Jacob was thrilled that his aunt was there, cheering for him alongside his parents. Of course, six-year-old Jilly and three-year-old Jenna were delighted to share their bag of gummy bears with Andi, and made plans for a tea party later in the week.

It had felt odd to be there, in the bleachers with family and friends, when normally she would have been at work. But it was good, too, she kept telling herself.

After the game, she had dinner with her family and every time her mind drifted to thoughts of Mac, Andi forced it away again. Instead, she focused on the kids, her sister and the booming laugh of her brother-in-law as he flipped steaks on a smoking grill.

By the following morning, she told herself that if she’d stayed with Mac and kept the job that had consumed her life, she wouldn’t have had that lazy, easy afternoon and evening. But still she had doubts. Even though she’d enjoyed herself, the whole thing had been so far out of her comfort zone, Andi knew she’d have to do some fine-tuning of her relaxation skills. But at least now she had the time to try.

Sitting on her front porch swing, cradling a cup of coffee in her hands, Andi looked up at the early-morning sky and saw her own nebulous future staring back at her. Normally by this time she was already at the office, brewing the first of many pots of coffee, going over her and Mac’s calendars and setting up conference calls and meetings. There would already be the kind of tension she used to live for as she worked to keep one step ahead of everything.

Now? She took another sip of coffee and sighed. The quiet crowded in on her until it felt as though she could hear her own heartbeat in the silence. Relaxation turned to tension in a finger snap. She was unemployed and, for the first time since she was a kid, had nowhere in particular to be.

It was both liberating and a little terrifying. She was a woman who thrived on schedules, preferred order and generally needed a plan for anything she was going to do. Even as a kid, she’d had her closet tidy, her homework done early and her bookcases in her room alphabetized for easy reference.

While Jolene’s bedroom had been chaotic, Andi’s was an island of peace and calm. A place for everything, everything in its place. Some might call that compulsive. She called it organized. And maybe that was just what she needed to do now. Organize her new world. Channel energies she would normally be using for Mac and his business into her own life. She was smart, capable and tenacious. There was nothing she couldn’t do.

“So.” After that inner pep talk, she drew her feet up under her on the thick, deep blue cushion. “I’ll make a plan. Starting,” she said, needing the sound of her own voice in the otherwise still air, “with finally getting my house in shape.”

She’d bought the run-down farmhouse a year ago and hadn’t even had the time to unpack most of the boxes stacked in the second bedroom. The walls hadn’t been painted, there were no pictures hung, no rugs scattered across the worn, scarred floor. It pretty much looked as lonely and abandoned as it had when she first bought it. And wasn’t that all kinds of sad and depressing?

Until a year ago, Andi had lived in a tiny condo that was, in its own way, as impersonal and unfinished as this house. She’d rented it furnished and had never had the time—or the inclination—to put her own stamp on the place. Working for Mac had meant that she was on duty practically twenty-four hours a day. So when was she supposed to be able to carve out time for herself? But in spite of everything, Andi had wanted a home of her own. And in the back of her mind, maybe she’d been planning even then on leaving McCallum Enterprises.

Leaving Mac.

It was the only explanation for her buying a house that she had known going in would need a lot of renovation. Sure, she could have hired a crew to come in and fix it all up. And she had had a new roof put on, the plumbing upgraded and the electrical brought up to code. But there were still the yards to take care of, the floors to be sanded, the walls to be painted and furniture to be bought.

“And that starts today,” she said, pushing off the swing. With one more look around the wide front yard, she turned and opened the screen door, smiling as it screeched in protest. Inside, she took another long glance at her home before heading into the kitchen to do what she did best. Make a list.

She knew where she’d start. The walls should be painted before she brought in sanders for the floors, and they’d probably need a couple of coats of paint to cover the shadow images of long-missing paintings.

In the kitchen she sat at a tiny table and started making notes. She’d go at her home exactly as she would have a new project at McCallum. Priorities. It was all about priorities.

An hour later, she had several lists and the beginnings of a plan.

“There’s a lot to do,” she said, her voice echoing in the old, empty house. “Might as well get started.”

She worked for hours, sweeping, dusting, mopping, before heading into Royal to buy several gallons of paint. Of course, shopping in town was never as easy as entering a store, getting what you wanted and then leaving again. There were people to chat with, gossip to listen to and, as long as she was there, she stopped in at the diner for some tea and a salad she didn’t have to make herself.

The air conditioning felt wonderful against her skin, and Andi knew if it was this hot in early June, summer was going to be a misery. She made a mental note to put in a call to Joe Bennet at Bennet Heating and Cooling. If she was going to survive a Texas summer, she was going to need her own air conditioning. Fast.

“So,” Amanda Battle said as she gave Andi a refill on her iced tea. “I hear you quit your job and you’re running off to Jamaica with your secret lover.”

Andi choked on a cherry tomato and, when she got her breath back, reached for her tea and took a long drink. Looking up at Amanda, wife of Sheriff Nathan Battle and owner of the diner, she saw humor shining in her friend’s eyes.

“Jamaica?”

Amanda grinned. “Sally Hartsfield told me, swears that Margie Fontenot got the story direct from Laura, who used to work with you at Mac’s. Well, Laura’s cousin’s husband’s sister got the story started and that is good enough to keep the grapevine humming for a while.”

Direct was probably not the right word to describe that line of communication, but Andi knew all too well how the gossip chain worked in town. It was only mildly irritating to find out that she was now the most interesting link in that chain. For the moment.

But Jamaica? How did people come up with this stuff? she wondered, and only briefly considered taking her first vacation in years, if only to make that rumor true. Still, if she went to Jamaica, it would be a lot more fun if she could make the secret-lover part of the gossip true, too.

“Secret lover?” If only, she thought wistfully as an image of Mac rose up in her mind.

“Oooh. I like how your eyes got all shiny there for a second. Tells me there might be something to this particular rumor. Something you’d like to share with a pal? Wait.” Amanda held up one finger. “Gotta fill some coffee cups. Don’t go anywhere until I get back.”

While she was gone, Andi concentrated on the sounds and scents of the Royal Diner. Everything was so familiar; sitting there was like being wrapped up in a cozy blanket. Even when you knew that everyone in town was now talking about you. Royal had had plenty of things to chew over the past couple years. From the tornado to an actual sheikh working a revenge plot against Mac, local tongues had been kept wagging.

And the diner was gossip central—well, here and the Texas Cattleman’s Club. But since the club was limited to members only, Andi figured the diner was the big winner in the grapevine contest.

She looked around and pretended not to notice when other customers quickly shifted their gazes. The black-and-white-tile floor was spotless, the red vinyl booths and counter stools were shiny and clean, and the place, as always, was packed.

God, she hated knowing that mostly everyone in there was now talking and speculating about her. But short of burying her head in the sand or locking herself in her own house, there was no way to avoid any of it.

Amanda worked the counter while her sister, Pamela, and Ruby Fowler worked the tables. Conversations rose and fell like the tides, and the accompanying sounds of silverware against plates and the clink of glasses added a sort of background music to the pulse of life.

When Amanda finally came back, Andi mused, “Where did Laura come up with Jamaica, I wonder?”

“Nothing on the secret lover then?” Amanda asked.

Andi snorted. “Who has time for a lover?”

Amanda gave her a sympathetic look, reached out and patted her hand. “Honey, that’s so sad. You’ve got to make time.”

She would if she had the option of the lover she wanted. But since she didn’t, why bother with anyone else? “How can I when I’m going to Jamaica? But again, why Jamaica?”

“Maybe wishful thinking,” Amanda said with a shrug, leaning down to brace folded arms on the counter. “Heaven knows, lying on a beach having somebody bring me lovely alcoholic drinks while I cuddle with my honey sounds pretty good to me most days.”

“Okay, sounds pretty good to me, too,” Andi said. If she had a honey. “Instead, I’m headed home to start painting.”

Amanda straightened up. “You’re planning on painting your place on your own? It’ll take you weeks.”

“As the gossip chain informed you already,” she said wryly, “I’m unemployed, so I’ve got some time.”

“Well,” Amanda said, walking to the register to ring up Andi’s bill, “using that time to paint rather than find yourself that secret lover seems a waste to me. And, if you change your mind, there’s any number of kids around town who would paint for you. Summer jobs are hard to come by in a small town.”

“I’ll keep it in mind. Thanks.” Andi paid, slung her purse over her shoulder and said, “Say hi to Nathan for me.”

“I’ll do that. And say hi to Jamaica for me.” Amanda gave her a wink, then went off to check on her customers again.

* * *

Several hours later, Andi knew she should have been tired. Instead, she was energized, and by the end of her first day as a free woman, the living room was painted a cool, rich green the color of the Texas hills in springtime. It would need another coat, but even now she saw the potential and loved it. She had a sense of accomplishment, of simple satisfaction, which she hadn’t felt in far too long. Yes, she’d been successful in her career, but that was Mac’s business. His empire. This little farmhouse, abandoned for years, was all hers. And she was going to bring it back to life. Make it shine as it had to some long-gone family.

“And maybe by the time it’s whole and happy again, I will be, too,” she said.

“Talking to yourself?” a female voice said from the front porch. “Not a good sign.”

Andi spun around and grinned. “Violet! Come on in.”

Mac’s sister opened the screen door and let it slap closed behind her. Being nearly seven months pregnant hadn’t stopped Vi from dressing like the rancher she was. She wore a pale yellow T-shirt that clung to her rounded belly, a pair of faded blue jeans and the dusty brown boots she preferred to anything else.

Her auburn hair was pulled into a high ponytail at the back of her head and her clear green eyes swept the freshly painted walls in approval. When she looked back at Andi, she nodded. “Nice job. Really. Love the darker green as trim, too. Makes the whole thing pop.”

“Thanks.” Andi took another long look and sighed. “I’ll go over it again tomorrow. But I love it. This color makes the room feel cool, you know? And with summer coming...”

“It’s already hot,” Vi said. “You are getting air conditioning put in, right?”

“Oh, yeah. Called them at about eight this morning, as soon as the sun came up and started sizzling. They’re backed up, though, so it’ll be a week or two before they can come out here.”

“Well,” Vi said, walking into the kitchen as comfortably as she would at her own house. “If you start melting before then, you can come and stay with Rafe and me at the ranch.”

“Ah, yes,” Andi said, following her friend into her kitchen—which was comfortably stuck in the 1950s. “What a good time. I can be the third wheel with the newlyweds.”

“We don’t have sex in front of people, you know,” Vi told her with a laugh. “We tried, but the housekeeper Rafe hired disapproved.”

She stuck her head in the refrigerator, pulled out a pitcher of tea and sighed with pleasure. “Knew I could count on you to have tea all ready to go. You get glasses. Do you have any cookies?”

“Some Oreos.” They’d been friends for so long, they worked in tandem. “In the pantry.”

“Thank God.”

Laughing, Andi filled two glasses with ice, then poured each of them some tea as Vi hurried into the walk-in pantry and came back out already eating a cookie. She sighed, rolled her eyes and moaned, “God, these are so good.”

Still chuckling, Andi took a seat at the tiny table and watched her friend dig into the cookie bag for another. “Rafe still watching what you eat?”

Vi dropped into the chair opposite her, picked up her tea and took a long drink. “Like a hawk. He found my stash of Hershey’s bars, so they’re gone.” She ate the next cookie with as much relish as she had the first. “I love the man like crazy but he’s making me a little nuts. Although, one thing I’ll say for him, he does keep ice cream stocked for me.”

“Well, that’s something,” Andi agreed, taking a seat opposite her.

“But, wow, I miss cookies. And cake. And brownies. The only bad part about moving to the Wild Aces when I married Rafe? Leaving the Double M and our housekeeper Teresa’s brownies. I swear they’re magic.” Vi sighed and reached for another cookie. “You want to make a batch of brownies?”

Andi really hated to quash the hopeful look on her friend’s face, but said, “Oven doesn’t work.” Andi turned to look at the pastel pink gas stove. The burners worked fine, but the oven had been dead for years, she was willing to bet. “And it’s too hot in here to bake anything.”

“True.” Vi turned her tea glass on the narrow kitchen table, studying the water ring it left behind. “And I didn’t really come here to raid your pantry, either, in spite of the fact that I’m eating all of your Oreos.”

“Okay, then why are you here?”

“I’m a spy,” Violet said, laughing. “And I’m here to report that Mac is really twisted up about you quitting.”

“Is he?” Well, that felt good, didn’t it? She had long known that she was indispensable in the office. Now he knew it, too, and that thought brought her an immense wave of satisfaction. Instantly, a ping of guilt began to echo inside her, but Andi shut it down quickly. After all, it wasn’t as if she wanted Mac to have a hard time. She was only taking the opportunity to enjoy the fact that he was. “How do you know?”

“Well, spy work isn’t easy,” Violet admitted. “We pregnant operatives must rely on information from reliable sources.”

Andi laughed shortly. “You mean gossip.”

“I resent that term,” Violet said with an indignant sniff. Then she shrugged and took another cookie. “Although, it’s accurate. Mac hasn’t actually said anything to me directly. Yet. But Laura called a couple hours ago practically in tears.”

“What happened?” Andi asked. “Mac’s not the kind of man to bring a woman to tears.”

“I don’t know,” Violet said, smiling. “He’s made me cry a few times.”

“Angry tears don’t count.”

“Then Laura’s tears don’t count, either,” Vi told her. “She was really mad—at you for leaving her alone in the office.”

“Probably why she made up the Jamaica story,” Andi muttered.

“Jamaica?”

“Never mind.” She waved one hand to brush that away. “What did Mac do?”

“Nothing new. Just the same old crabby attitude you’ve been dealing with for years. Laura just doesn’t know how to deal with it yet.”

Okay, now she felt a little guilty. Mac could be...difficult. And maybe she should have used her two weeks’ notice to prepare Laura for handling him. But damn it, she’d learned on her own, hadn’t she? Laura was just going to have to suck it up and deal.

“Anyway,” Vi continued, “I told her the best thing to do was stay out of his way when he starts grumbling under his breath. She said that’s exactly what he was doing already and that the office was too small for her to effectively disappear.”

Andi chuckled because she could imagine the woman trying to hunch into invisibility behind her desk. “Poor Laura. I really shouldn’t laugh, though, should I? I sort of left her holding the bag, so to speak, and now she’s having to put up with not only Mac’s demands but the fact that I’m not there to take the heat off.”

“Laura’s tough. She can take it.” Vi picked up a fourth cookie and sighed a little as she bit in. “Or she won’t. Either way, her choice. And if she walks out, too? An even better lesson for Mac.”

“You think?”

“Absolutely,” his sister said, waving her cookie for emphasis before popping it into her mouth and talking around it while she chewed. “The man thinks he’s the center of the universe and all the rest of us are just moons orbiting him.

“Maybe it really started when our parents died and he had to step up. You know, he’s only six years older than me, but he went from big brother to overbearing father figure in a finger snap.” She frowned a little, remembering. “We butted heads a lot, but in the end, Mac always found a way to win.”

Andi knew most of this family history. Over the years, Mac had talked to her about the private plane crash that had claimed his parents and how he’d worked to make sure that Violet felt safe and secure despite the tragedy that had rocked their family. He’d done it, too. Violet was not only a successful, happy adult, she was married and about to become a mother.

Maybe he had been overbearing—and knowing Mac, she really had no doubt of that—but he’d protected his sister, kept the family ranch and even managed to build on the business his parents had left behind until McCallum Enterprises was one of the biggest, most diversified companies in the country.

In all fairness to him, Andi had to say, “Looks to me like he did a good job.”

Violet shrugged and nodded. “Yeah, he did. But the thing is, he’s so used to people snapping to attention whenever he walks into a room, I think it’s good for him that you quit. That he’s finding out he can’t always win. It’ll be a growth moment for him.”

But Andi knew that growth wasn’t always easy. She also knew she should feel bad about being glad that Mac would have a hard time without her.

Apparently, though, she wasn’t that good a person.

* * *

She still wasn’t there.

From the moment Mac walked into the office that morning, a part of him had fully expected to find Andi right where she belonged, at her desk. But she hadn’t been.

Except for a few times when he’d had no other choice, Mac had spent most of the day ignoring Laura as she hunched behind her computer, pretending to be invisible. No doubt she’d been worried how the day would go without Andi there to take care of things.

Well, hell, he had been, too.

As it turned out, with reason.

“This day just couldn’t get worse.”

Mac left his office and fired a hard look at Laura. “I need the Franklin contracts. I tried to pull up the pdf and it’s not where it’s supposed to be. Bob Franklin just called, he’s got some questions and—” He noticed the wide-eyed expression on Laura’s face and told himself it was pointless to hammer at her.

This was Andi’s territory. Turning, he stomped into the back of the building where Andi had stored hard copies of each of their in-progress deals in old-fashioned file cabinets. Of course, their records were mostly digitized and stored in the cloud, with several redundant backup sites so nothing could be lost. But there was something to say for holding a hard copy of a contract in your hands. It was immediate and more convenient, in his mind, than scrolling up and down a computer screen looking for a particular clause. Especially when you couldn’t find the damn digital copy.

“And now I have to hunt down the stupid contract the hard way.” He yanked open the top file drawer and started flipping through the manila separators. He made it through the Fs and didn’t find the Franklin takeover.

Shaking his head, he told himself that he was the damn boss. It wasn’t up to him to find a damn contract on a damn deal they’d done only three weeks ago. The problem was it was Andi’s job and she wasn’t here to do it.

Laura was good at what she did and he had no doubt that in time she might grow to be even a third as good as Andi at the job. But for now, the woman was an office manager suddenly tossed into the deep end. There were a couple of part-time interns, too, but neither of them could find their way out of a paper bag without a flashlight and a map.

“So bottom line?” he muttered, slamming the drawer and then opening another one. “I’m screwed.”

Normally, this late in the afternoon, he and Andi were huddled around his desk, talking about the day’s work and what was coming up on the schedule. He really didn’t want to admit how much he missed just talking to her. Having her there to bounce ideas off of. To help him strategize upcoming jobs.

“Plus, she would know exactly where the stupid contract is,” he muttered.

Mac hated this. Hated having his life disrupted, his business interfered with—hell, his world set off balance. Worse, Andi had to have known this would happen when she walked out and, no doubt, she was sitting on a beach in Bimini right now, smiling at the thought of him trying to set things right again on his own.

“Take a vacation. Who the hell has time for a vacation?” he asked the empty file room. “If you love what you do, work is vacation enough, isn’t it?” He slammed the second drawer shut and yanked the third open. What the hell kind of filing system was she using, anyway?

“She loved her work, too,” he muttered. “Can’t tell me otherwise. In charge of every damn thing here, wasn’t she? Even setting up the damn filing system in some weird way that I can’t figure out now. If she thinks I’m going to let this damn office crumble to the ground then she’s got another damn think or two coming to her because damned if I will, damn it!”

Temper spiking, he slammed the third drawer shut and then just stood there, hands on his hips, and did a slow turn, taking in the eight filing cabinets and the dust-free work table and chairs in the center of the room.

“Why the hell is she on a beach when I need her help?”

His brain dredged up a dreamlike image of Andi, lying back on some lounge, beneath a wide umbrella. She sipped at a frothy drink and behind huge sunglasses, her eyes smiled. Some cabana boy hovered nearby enjoying the view of Andi in a tiny yellow bikini that Mac’s mind assured him was filled out perfectly.

Mac scowled and shut down that mental image because he sure as hell didn’t need it. “Why is she off enjoying herself when I’m here trying to figure out what she did?”

But even as he complained, he knew it wasn’t the filing that bothered him. Given enough time, he’d find whatever he needed to find. It was being here. In the office. Without Andi.

All day he’d felt slightly off balance. One step out of rhythm. It had started when he got there early as usual and didn’t smell coffee. Andi had always beat him to work and had the coffee going for both of them. Then she’d carry two cups into his office and they’d go over the day’s schedule and the plans that were constantly in motion.