him to the chair he sat in. Then she—
Jane O’Toole, get a grip on yourself! You’ve obviously been working too hard and are in desperate need of a date.
She tried to remember how long it had been and then decided she didn’t want to think about that.
Wiping her mind clean, she opened a new file on her laptop and stared at the blinking cursor for a moment before typing in his name. Under it she wrote:
Attitude problem. Bullheaded. Seems to thrive on confrontation. Blames others (boss) for current predicament. Arrogant. Aware of physical attractiveness. Competitive streak several miles wide.
Treatment plan:
1. Exploit and then control subject’s hostility; get him to relax and open up.
2. Establish more about subject’s background. Does he have an underlying anger at women?
3. Observe subject in office environment. Gather examples to show him how his behavior negatively impacts his relations with coworkers. Pay special attention to interaction with females.
4. Bring up these examples in a nonthreatening way and explore alternate scenarios for subject to employ next time.
5. Using the above examples, get subject to admit he has a problem and that he can solve it.
6. Do not allow subject’s looks or your own libido to sway you from your objectives!
Jane stared at the computer screen. Now where had number six come from? She needed to remember that Sayers was not a nice guy. He had likened himself to a pig.
That scent of his wasn’t at all porcine, though—woodsy, male, a hint of clove—and it still hung in her office. Jane spun in her chair to face the credenza, from which she pulled a can of Lysol. She depressed the nozzle and walked it around the room on full blast.
Take that, Sayers. I’ll figure you out. And then I’ll fix you like a bad habit.
SUNDAY DINNER WAS ITS USUAL barrel of laughs. How could you love two people so much and be so frustrated by them? Jane reminded herself that even a graduate degree in psychology couldn’t answer a question like that.
“The potatoes are dry,” her dad muttered. Gilbey said nothing as he helped himself to a slab of meat loaf, placing it in the center of a lake of ketchup on his plate.
Jane contemplated what this said about her brother as she methodically scraped her father’s portion of mashed potatoes back into the serving bowl and added butter and cream. As she reached into a cabinet for the electric beaters, her dad said, “Now don’t make ’em too fattening, Janey.”
She plugged the beaters in. “Adding water won’t make them taste very good.” The noise drowned out any possible response from her dour dad. When she was done, Jane scooped a healthy portion of mashed potatoes back onto his plate and watched with satisfaction as he began to eat them with obvious enjoyment—not that he could allow himself to acknowledge it.
“Probably’ll gain five pounds,” he groused between bites.
She just smiled. He was on the skinny side and had abnormally low cholesterol. She wasn’t worried.
Her gaze returned to Gilbey, who was now turning his plate to make sure the meat loaf was truly centered in the ketchup. “Perfect,” he announced to nobody in particular.
Did he want a compliment for his skill? “You know, Gil, most people put the meat loaf on the plate first and then the ketchup on top.”
“I’m not most people.”
Truer words had never been spoken.
“Why do you do it that way?”
“Because it works better.”
Jane shook her head, but as she watched him eat, she was struck by the fact that it did work better—at least for him. Gil had a hard time with accepted structure. He was always questioning traditional ways of doing things. She’d called him stubborn and exasperating many times. But maybe he was just creative.
Gilbey, in his own way, was as unique as Shannon. But if Shannon marched to an alternate orchestra, Gil shambled along to an alternate grunge band.
Jane stuck a piece of meat loaf into her own mouth and tried to catch her brother’s gaze, but he wouldn’t look at her. He was ashamed at the loss of another job. Well, he should be, darn it!
“Your critical side is not your most attractive side,” she heard her mother say in her head. Jane all but rolled her eyes. Yeah, but you can’t be blind to people’s faults, either.
She fought against her judgmental side, she really did. She used it to help people, to fix their problems. She was good at that. She’d founded a company to do it. Her critical side would end up being her most lucrative side. Most companies steadily lost money for the first three years they were in business. Thanks to her, Finesse was close to breaking even in nine months.
Jane’s thoughts turned to her mother again, now dead of breast cancer twelve years. Mom would never have bought meat loaf and mashed potatoes. She’d have made them—and not the powdered kind either, as Jane suspected these were.
Dad hadn’t been surly and depressed when she was alive, and Gilbey hadn’t been quite such a mess—she’d had him doing all kinds of landscaping for her, even building a rock waterfall by hand. Jane still remembered him then, totally absorbed in his task, working twelve hours a day with only a twenty-minute lunch break. Gilbey loved to work with his hands. She understood that.
That’s why the last three jobs she’d gotten him had involved manual labor. But he’d walked off the construction job, put all the parts together backward on the assembly-line job and butted heads with the foreman on this latest one, a position in an electronics company.
What am I going to do with you, Gil? It simply never occurred to her that he wasn’t her problem.
On the other side of the table, her dad put down his fork and rubbed his belly. “Feel like I swallowed a bowling ball.”
“Did you enjoy the meal, Dad?”
“Unnh.” But he nodded.
She picked up his plate and wished that men of his generation would acknowledge the arrival of feminism and do their own dishes. Yeah, right. Dad would clean up the kitchen the same day he mowed the lawn en pointe, in a pink ballerina tutu.
In that one regard, it was a good thing that Gilbey still lived with him. Jane took the plates to the sink and rinsed them. To the mental list in her head she added: antidepressants for Dad, another job for Gilbey. The men in her life always needed help.
That night, to her shame, Jane dreamed of a hot, naked Dominic Sayers who needed help finding his clothes. Funny, but she refused to give them to him.
In fact, she had hidden them herself and she taunted him with a single sock…for which Dominic had to chase her down. Laughing, he pinned her against the wall and demanded his things, threatening to take hers if she didn’t return them.
When she refused, he opened her blouse with his teeth, scattering buttons
