“Didn’t I tell you she was terrific? Seb is so lucky to have you.”
“He doesn’t have me,” Neely said.
But Vangie and all the rest of them drowned her out, telling her how happy they were that she and Sebastian were together.
Arguing didn’t do any good. Sebastian would sort it out, Neely decided. He would doubtless make it clear to them that they were merely roommates.
But as she drove home after sharing a dinner of pizza and salad with so many of Sebastian’s relations, she envied him the joy of them and understood why, even though they exasperated him, he would move heaven and earth for them.
He loved them.
And Neely was stunned to find herself wishing that he loved her, too, the way that she, heaven help her, had fallen in love with him.
“No,” Seb said into the phone. “I can’t.”
Which was an understatement and then some. He paced around the confines of his office and wanted to bang his head against the wall instead of sounding calm and rational on the phone. There was no way he could just pick up and fly off to Reno for a zoning commission meeting on Friday. “Sorry. But you’ll have to reschedule.”
“We have rescheduled,” Lymond, the chairman of the medical group whose project he’d developed, reminded him. “This is the reschedule, Seb. And they aren’t going to do it again.”
“Then…” you’ll have to do it without me, Seb wanted to say. But he couldn’t. He’d asked them to put it off the day after Max’s accident. They said they would, and now they had, and he’d promised to accommodate…
“I’ll get back to you,” he promised the chairman.
“The meeting’s at twelve-thirty.”
Seb cursed under his breath after hanging up the phone because he knew he couldn’t ask them to change it again. It would be unprofessional. But he didn’t see how he could be in two places at once. That wasn’t unprofessional. It was flat-out impossible.
And he couldn’t ask Roger Carmody and Stephen Blake to reschedule, either. Blake might be willing, but Carmody was already apprehensive about Max’s having to leave the project. He’d raised a dozen questions about the public space and atrium when Sebastian had spoken with him on the phone.
It was insane. The plans were good ones. They were his, yes, not Max’s. But Max had approved them. Max would argue for them if Max were able to be there.
Maybe Max would have to go after all. That would settle Carmody’s nerves, they’d all be on the same page, and everything would go on according to the plans Seb had drawn up in the first place.
That’s what would have to happen, he decided. There was no other way to handle it.
“Of course there is,” Max said when he stopped by the hospital that night.
“Oh?” Seb raised an eyebrow. “Have you figured out how to clone me, then?”
“Don’t need to. Send Neely.”
Seb blanched. “You’re joking.”
Both of Max’s brows went up. “Why should I joke? She knows the project better than anyone. She’s worked with me on it since day one.”
“I worked with you on it, too,” Seb reminded him. “Until you phased me out.”
“Yeah, and that was my mistake, “Max admitted. “But you had Reno to do, and I wanted to work with Neely. And now I’ve phased you back in, as you put it. Basically it’s your plan we’ve used, and while you know it better than anyone, Neely’s worked on the project the whole time. She knows it too.”
“Not as well as I do.”
“Which goes without saying. But she knows Blake and Carmody.”
Exactly. She could undermine the whole damn thing. “She doesn’t like what I do.” That was the long and short of it right there.
“She’s playing for our team,” Max said flatly.
Seb remembered their encounter over her pink offices and his “pointy buildings”—in her term—and shook his head. Yeah, he knew Neely much better now. Certainly he liked her personally a lot better now. And that he would happily have taken her to bed went without saying.
But that had nothing to do with working with her, being on the same page with her in terms of the project. Bed was play, this was work. This was his career, his life.
“Have you talked to her about it?” Max asked.
Seb lifted his shoulders. “Haven’t had time.”
“You should take time.”
Seb grunted. “Yeah.”
Instead, after he left Max, he called back Lymond in Reno to see how things stood.
“Expecting you Friday morning. You need a ride from the airport?”
“No,” Seb said grimly. “I’ll be there.”
He rang Roger Carmody to discuss the atrium. If he could answer the questions now on the phone, maybe the meeting would be a mere formality.
But Roger’s secretary said he was out of town until Thursday evening.
“Ask him to call me no matter what time he gets in,” Seb said.
But he had been tied up in another meeting when Roger had called. So all he got was Roger’s voice message afterward saying, “I don’t like it. We need to rethink. I’ll discuss it with you tomorrow.”
But tomorrow Seb wouldn’t be there.
Neely Robson would.
He got back to the houseboat before ten for the first time since Max’s accident. Neely was sitting in the rocker, holding one of the kittens. She looked up and smiled at him when he came in.
It was one of those Neely smiles that undermined his resolve and made him want to throw good sense to the winds and simply carry her off to bed. Not that she would let him.
All the more reason to be short and to the point now.
“I have to be in Reno tomorrow,” he said without preamble. “It’s unavoidable. They’ve rescheduled already. I can’t ask them to do it again. And the Carmody-Blake meeting will have to go on, too.”
“That’s all right,” she said quickly. “I can handle—”
“You don’t need to handle anything. Just take care of your part and I’ll take care of the rest next week.”
Her smile faded. “I’ve already taken care of my part,” she said a little stiffly. “The homespace is all approved.”
A reminder he didn’t need. “So it is,” he said, aware that his tone was now
