Who's on Top?
When Jackie, the marketing coordinator, had finished, he thanked her graciously. “And how’s Tommy doing?” he asked.
She rolled her eyes. “Kid’s gonna drive me crazy, whining about that cast on his arm.”
Dom shook his head in sympathy. “Well, tell him he’s lucky he didn’t break it in the summertime. A cast gets even hotter and itchier then, believe me.”
She nodded.
“Your Buccaneers are looking good, Tim.” Dom said to one of the analysts.
The guy flashed a big white grin at him. “Yeah. Gonna kick the he—uh, hoo-ha outta the Falcons.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure about that. Whatcha got for me?”
Tim made his report while Dom nodded thoughtfully.
Jane taped the meeting and took notes with growing incredulity. But they couldn’t possibly have all gotten together and rehearsed beforehand. No, these people actually liked Sayers. And that didn’t add up.
Hmm. She tapped her pen on her nose. And so, clearly, had the company receptionist. But while she’d written that off to a sweet young thing’s infatuation with his looks, she couldn’t write off the interactions in this meeting. It was all very peculiar. For an instant she wondered if just maybe he’d been telling the truth in her office. That he was being set up by a power-hungry boss.
But no—that was ridiculous. She knew Arianna DuBose, was a member of the Kiwanis Club with her and the local women executives’ networking group, too. She’d never seen Arianna be anything other than charming, articulate and beautifully dressed. And the woman was in a position of power already—so there was no need for her to backstab or get Machiavellian.
Sayers was an educated white male of a certain age, with certain expectations. And he’d felt anger when a woman was promoted over him—plain and simple. It didn’t take her behavioral psych degree to figure that out.
Why, then, did he seem to get along so well with the women in this room? Oh, lightbulb, Jane. They work for him. Not vice versa. It’s easy to be gracious when you’ve got the power. Satisfied, she stopped hitting her nose with her pen and capped it, ignoring the quirk of Sayers’s lips. Go ahead and smirk at me, you yutz. You’re not stumping me by this charming behavior. I’ve got you figured out.
While he took in another report, she allowed herself to assess his looks again from the corner of her eye.
Nice tapered waist. Long thighs. Solid, athletic-looking knees—no skinny knobs visible through the pants. So he probably had good legs, not chicken sticks. She peeked at the chest hair again, which was a bad idea, since it got her wondering about the broad chest underneath.
Jane, get a hold of yourself! You cannot have a fantasy about the man right in front of him.
Aw, but I’ve got such a good one, her libido whined. Listen: it involves a furry rug before a roaring fire on a cold, winter night…and he licks melted chocolate and marshmallows off your—
Stop it! She noticed that she was again tapping on her nose with her pen. She recapped it for the second time. Usually she tapped on the earpiece of her glasses, but she’d been curiously reluctant to put them on in front of Dominic.
He looked over at her and now both corners of his delectable mouth turned up.
Trying to sucker me? Not a chance. She returned his gaze coolly and waited for the meeting to be over, which it soon was. Her stomach growled audibly as he turned to her.
“Care for some lunch?”
Should she go to lunch with him? She hesitated. Well, she could observe him further with other people. Why not? “Okay,” she said. “I just need to run to the ladies’ room first.”
“Good thing,” Dominic responded.
Good thing? Why would he possibly care that she took a tinkle? Bizarre man. Jane hitched the strap of her briefcase over her shoulder and marched down the hall to the relevant door. She availed herself of the amenities, still puzzling.
It was when she went to wash her hands that she figured it out. Blue pen marks adorned her nose, making her look like a refugee from the Bic warrior tribe.
She stared at them with growing mortification. How long had they been there? Why hadn’t one of the other six people in the room said something? And how was she going to get them off?
Jane dropped her briefcase on the floor and went to town with the pink liquid soap and a brown paper towel, only succeeding in removing all the makeup from the lower half of her face. The pen marks, however, still remained.
She might as well draw a mustache on her lip or add kitty whiskers. No wonder Dominic Sayers had smirked at her!
The score between them was temporarily even, but she’d fix that—and him. There was no doubt in her mind, no doubt at all, about who was going to end up on top….
4
DOMINIC OBSERVED JANE quizzically as they moved their trays through the salad buffet at a local restaurant. The skin on and around her nose seemed extremely…thick. And very…nonshiny. Powdered. But somehow red underneath. His deductive powers told him that she had scrubbed her skin vigorously and then applied almost an entire jar of makeup to the offending area, and he pressed his lips together to keep from laughing. Because underneath it all, he could still detect faint bluish lines.
In spite of them, she was still beautiful, even with that schoolmarm’s pout on her pretty lips. He ran an appreciative gaze over her curves, lingering again on her breasts. Damn that jacket. The things ought to be outlawed for women….
Miss Bic squinted, peered and then selected carefully from the salad offerings. No iceberg lettuce. Only red leaf. And only the freshest-looking pieces. Anything with even a suspicion of brown went right back into the large steel lettuce bin. Miss Bic seemed highly irritated by the clear plastic barrier over the salad bar. She peered through it, eyes again squinted, and steamed it up with her breath.
“Forget your glasses?” Dom asked.
“No. How do you know I wear glasses?”
“Oh, just a guess.” Because you’ve just about flattened your nose against the Plexiglas, there, sweetheart. And if only I’d met you in a different context, I’d love for you to get that close to me.
She straightened but squinted even more as she wielded the salad tongs over a container of cherry tomatoes and snatched one.
“That one’s squishy,” Dom told her. A characteristic to be avoided in tomatoes but sought after in breasts.
She dropped it and glared at him. “Thank you.” She scrunched her eyes and hunched over the clear plastic again, nearsightedly fishing for perfection.
“Would you like me to help you?” Dom asked.
“No, I’m fine.”
“That one on the far right, in the corner, is Without Flaw. No green edges, no wrinkles, no dark spots, no puckering.”
She deliberately took a different one, and Dom shook his head. Exactly four others joined their buddy on her plate.
Miss Bic bypassed the next container completely—no fatty pepperoni for her—but picked precisely five quarters of marinated artichoke from the next bin. And then five slices of cucumber, followed by five slices of red pepper, which, he supposed, color-coordinated with the five cherry tomatoes. For protein she chose small slices of grilled chicken: five.
What was with the magic number? Dom was almost disappointed when Jane used only one ladleful of fat-free Italian dressing.
He took his own tray and followed her back to their table, unloading his heaping bowl of chili and massive iceberg lettuce salad under her gaze.
Her eyes widened as he added a few shakes of hot sauce to the chili, and he grinned. “Don’t worry—I used exactly five shakes.”
Spots of pink appeared in Jane’s cheeks and spread to her ears, which he could see now since she’d stuffed her hair behind them. They were very cute ears. He’d really like to lick one—just taste it.
“So what’s with the number five?” Dom asked.
Jane shrugged. “I don’t know. I just like it.”
“It’s a nice, clean number,” Dom mused. “Half of ten.”
Jane started to look annoyed.
“No extra digits to mess it up. No ambiguity about it. It’s reasonable. Not too high, not too low. Right in the middle.”
“I thought I was supposed to be analyzing your behavior,” Jane said.
“Turnabout’s fair play.” He spooned chili into his mouth and tried not to stare at the blue lines still visible to the right of her nose.
She touched the area self-consciously. “I don’t know what it says about me, but the number five has always been my favorite. We have five fingers on each hand. Five toes on each foot. We have two arms, two legs and a head. If you connect those five points in a continuum, you make a circle.”
“Da Vinci,” he said.
“Exactly.”
He waited.
She fidgeted. “And…oh, I don’t know. Five times five is twenty-five, which is point two five of a hundred, one clean quarter…” She gave a self-conscious laugh. “You probably think I’m a crazy woman.”
“No.” Dom held his spoon wrong side up, the curve of it against his bottom lip. “I think you’re a very precise, analytical woman. You draw logical conclusions. You’re no fuss, no muss and you make decisions based on orderly sets of facts.”
Jane stared at him. “And how else are you supposed to make decisions? Isn’t that the right way?”
“Aha,” Dom said. “So according to you, there’s a right way and a wrong way to make a decision, then.”
Jane stabbed a piece of red pepper and stuck it in her mouth. Simultaneously she took a deep, deliberately calm breath. Both multitasking and playing for time, Dom thought. Efficient. Intelligent. Rigid.
And dangerous to him. He’d already given her too much ammunition to draw conclusions about him—especially if she was a rigid personality. He hoped this morning’s meeting had shown her that he wasn’t as much of a jerk as he’d appeared to be in her office.
But maybe she’d decided that it was all a dog and pony show for her benefit. Or worse, that he was some kind of split personality. Oh, great…he could just see himself explaining to her. “Oh, that guy you met at first? That was Dirk, my mean side. But he only pops out every once in a while. Dominic, the nice guy? He’s around the majority of the time. He’s the one you want to evaluate, not Dirk.” And then there’s Drew, the horny goat-man who’d like to back you up against a wall and…
Uh-huh. Was it better to have Miss Bic think he was a pig or just a garden-variety psycho? Dom spooned some more chili into his mouth and wondered how he’d arrived at this point in his life. He also wondered how he was going to convince Miss Bic that Arianna was the split-personality psycho, not him.
JANE CRUNCHED DOWN ON HER vegetables and pondered the corner into which Dominic Sayers was trying to back her.
If she admitted that yes, she did feel that there was a right way versus a wrong way to make a decision, then his next step would be to show her that she had drawn erroneous conclusions about him, based upon skewed logic. And really, any logic could be turned upon its ear if you messed around with it long enough…because logic was based on assumptions. Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!
Jane decided right then that she strongly disliked Dominic Sayers. Because of him, she had drawn blue marks around her nose. Because of him, she had not put on her glasses, and still refused to put them on, even though she needed them to see and they were in the side pocket of her purse. And because of him, she hadn’t slept much last night and was now questioning her ways of thinking.
Because of Dominic Sayers, she was being silly, vain and illogical. And she was none of these things on a normal day under normal circumstances. The abnormality was him, Dominic Sayers. There was nothing wrong with her. He was the one who needed help.
Jane, now firmly back on the comfortable cushion of her superiority, refrained from slapping herself in the forehead. Of course Sayers was trying to force her to question herself. He wanted to challenge all of her assumptions about him. He wanted to con her into thinking he was the very model of a modern management man.
Which he isn’t. He obviously had issues about answering to women, and she was, after all, a woman. To whom he had to answer. So he wants to get my panties in a wad. And he’s made a good start, darn it.
Jane took another bite of her salad and aimed a pleasant smile at Dom. “How’s your chili?”
“Full of beans.” He looked at her with a bland expression.
Jane narrowed her eyes, but he gazed back without a blink. Full of beans, huh? He’s referring to my profession, and not his food. But she let it pass.
“Dominic,” she asked, “why did you invite me to lunch?”
“It was the polite thing to do,” he said with a quirk of his lips. “And I’m a polite guy.”
“You weren’t polite the last time we met.”
“True. But I hadn’t planned on being stuck with you then.”
Her mouth opened in surprise at his candor, and without planning to, she laughed. “But since you’re stuck with me now…?”
“I might as well charm you. After all—” he smiled winningly “—charming you is in my best interests, you will agree.”
Again her mouth opened. This time she covered it with her hand to smother the laugh. He’s incorrigible.
“Oh, don’t do that.” Dominic grasped her fingers in his large paw—zing!—and pulled them down to the table. “You have a beautiful smile. Don’t hide it.”
Where had the zing come from? Being touched inappropriately by a grizzly bear should not produce a zing, darn it. Jane reclaimed her hand from under his paw and wrapped her fingers around her fork, wielding the utensil like a weapon.
She stabbed a piece of grilled chicken and waved it at him. “Do you really think I’m that easy to manipulate?”
“Oh, no—don’t assume that I’ve underestimated you. I think you’ll be a real chore to manipulate.” His eyes danced.
She gaped at him again. How did he think he could get away with saying such things? Part of her was offended. Yet part of her admired his honesty—even though it bordered on the obnoxious.
“Listen, Sayers.” Though she couldn’t help but respond to the twinkle in his eyes, she kept her tone firm. “You cannot charm me into a positive evaluation. I’m a professional, not an eighteen-year-old coed. And I’m not looking at how you interact with me. I’m observing your behavior in the workplace.”
He nodded. “Understood. So I’m only exercising my charm around you to stay in practice.” Sayers dug back into his chili while she stared at him, fighting the desire to bang her forehead on the table.
He leaned the underside of his spoon against his lower lip again, gently tapping, and she saw her face reflected in it upside down, contorting like taffy and looking utterly ridiculous.
The fingers grasping the spoon dwarfed it, but Sayers’s hand wasn’t really like a paw at all. It possessed an unexpected elegance, a teasing masculinity that crept somehow under her skin and set her nerves aflame.
Damn it, damn it, damn it, thought Jane. I refuse to envy a spoon. I refuse!
But those fingers of Dom’s, the zing fingers, wrapped all the way around the stainless steel, caressing it. Leaving faint whorls printed on the metal.
She wondered what his fingertips would feel like on her skin, and an unbidden image of them stroking down her spine produced a delicious shiver.
Which of course he noticed. Dom quirked an eyebrow at her. “Cold?” he asked, lips still against the bowl of the spoon.
She shook her head, instructing herself to look away from his mouth. How curious that she’d never really examined the human mouth…the web of tiny lines and miraculous tissues and curious curves that created a lip. Two lips. What had inspired God to create the human lip?
Eat. Your. Salad. Logic and professionalism said it to her. You. Brainless. Bimbo. Lips, for God’s sake! If she didn’t snap out of this, she might as well pull her own upper lip all the way over her head and go home.
Jane forked up a slice of cucumber and waved it through the air at Dom. Say something, idiot! But she landed it back in her bowl like a little UFO on a practice run.
“Let me guess,” prompted Dom. “That piece of cucumber has more than five seeds, which renders it unacceptable.”
“Huh?”
He was openly laughing at her now. “Or is it a little too green? At least eat your chicken, Jane. You need protein to sustain this level of neurosis.”
She tossed her napkin on the table and glared at him. “Sayers, you’re presuming a familiarity between us which does not exist and will not exist. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you’re attempting to tease me and not outright insult me, but we need to get that clear. I am not neurotic. I just happen to like fresh vegetables, okay?”
“I stand corrected and chastened, Jane.” He looked anything but. “And I would never dare to get familiar with you. Unless of course you wanted me to.” He grinned.
His words sent a flash of heat through her and she shifted in her seat uncomfortably. She didn’t dare acknowledge it, but the heat grew as she pictured Dominic getting familiar with her…right under the restaurant table…with a bare foot, his fingers or, even more shocking, his tongue?
She almost gasped out loud at the image and she knew she needed to recover now, immediately, or he would read her thoughts; sense her state of arousal.
“Is this how you behave around Arianna DuBose?”
Dominic’s eyes flashed. His nostrils flared. His lips flattened into a thin line. His jaw tightened. “No.”
He picked up the check and fished his wallet out of a back pocket, then slapped the bill down with a credit card.
“You’re not paying for my lunch,” Jane said evenly.
“I am.”
She pulled her purse onto her lap and dug out her wallet, catching the corner of her glasses with the flap. They clattered onto the tabletop and she felt herself flush dark red.
Ignoring them and avoiding his sardonic gaze, she pulled a twenty out of her wallet and placed it on top of his credit card.
“We’ll go Dutch. I don’t want any questions raised about the objectivity of my evaluation.”
He stood up. “Did I understand correctly? That must mean you haven’t already made up your mind.” His voice dripped sarcasm.
Pig. Jane stood up, too. Then she jammed her glasses onto her nose and marched out of the restaurant ahead of him.
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