Men like Jared Taylor, tall, dark and gorgeous men with ambition, sophistication and drive paid no real attention to her. Certainly, not the sort her beautiful, equally sophisticated stepsister received. She’d seen the way he’d straightened when Candace had walked in, caught the way his eyebrows arched ever so slightly as his glance moved along the length of her body. She’d seen the quick, reciprocating interest, too, as Candace had checked out his left hand. He hadn’t been wearing a ring. Amy had noticed that herself when he’d helped her pick up the files that had scattered at their feet. If the guy was single, odds were that Candace would have him asking her out by the end of their next meeting.
Silence had intruded again, heavy, uncomfortable. Later, she could wonder if she’d ever find a man who would look at her with that unmistakable, purely male interest. Right now, she just needed for him to talk to her. Or to talk herself. That silence did nothing but let her too active imagination head in directions she really didn’t want it to go.
“So, Mr. Taylor,” she began again.
“It’s Jared,” he corrected. “And you’re…Amy…?”
An introduction seemed totally reasonable under the circumstances.
“Amy Kelton,” she replied, and would have offered her hand had she any idea where to find his.
“Kelton? Are you any relation to the Kelton in Kelton & Associates?”
“Mike Kelton was my father. He owned the agency before he passed away.”
“He did?” He seemed to hesitate on a number of levels. “I mean, I’m sorry. About your father.”
“Thanks. Me, too.” It had been nearly five years, but the shock of her dad’s sudden death and its unsettling aftermath still caught her off guard at times. Mike Kelton had been a man in his prime. Or so everyone had thought when he’d gone out one morning for his usual run, and promptly suffered a massive coronary.
“The firm went to his wife,” she explained, her tone matter-of-fact. This man was a client, after all. As long as the firm bore her father’s name and she was part of the team, she would protect its members—no matter how ambivalent she personally felt about some of them, or how invisible she usually was herself. “She was his business partner. Jill Chapman Kelton. She’s Candace’s mom. You would have met her, but she’s touring a client’s plant today.”
J.T. frowned into the sea of black that prevented him from seeing features he remembered mostly as being delicate. Her eyes were dark, long-lashed and shot with flecks of gold, though why he remembered that from the few seconds she’d actually made eye contact with him, he had no idea.
From the nearness of her voice, the young woman who apparently held more interest in the firm than he would have ever suspected, remained by the wall a couple of feet away.
He knew the agency was a mother-daughter enterprise from his own quick research into the firm and Candace’s recitation of the firm’s hierarchy a while ago. She’d even pointed out the classy, silver-haired version of herself in the photos on her trophy wall. What Candace hadn’t mentioned was that her assistant was her stepsister, and that her mother had inherited the firm from Amy’s dad. Not that she’d had any reason to mention it, he admitted to himself. He hadn’t asked anything about the company that would have given her reason to bring it up.
“So you’re interning,” he concluded, thinking it the only way to explain the younger stepsister’s subordinate position. “You’re in college and learning all the jobs on the way to becoming a partner yourself.”
“Actually…no. I’m Jill and Candace’s assistant, the bookkeeper and gofer for just about everyone else.”
“You’re not going to be part of the agency?”
“Not in any way other than I already am. The company belongs to Jill.” Candace would become a partner in a few months, though. Her mother had promised her a quarter interest when she turned thirty. If Candace wanted to tell him that, she could. It wasn’t her place. “My only financial interest in it is in what she pays me.”
“Are you okay with that?”
A shrug entered her voice. “I have to be.”
He hadn’t expected the acceptance in her response. Or maybe it was the resignation. Baffled by whatever it was, his basic sense of fair play insisted that she should have shared the ownership of what appeared to be a very successful operation, not merely been there to support the women now running it.
“Why do you have to be?”
“Because I need the job to help support my grandmother,” she admitted, too concerned about being trapped to care that he was so blunt. They were talking. That was all she cared about just then. “Jill pays me too much to go anywhere else.”
“Do you live with your grandmother?”
“No, I… No,” Amy repeated, and promptly told herself she really should shut up. At the very least, she should change the subject. She couldn’t begin to deny the unease she felt knowing she was ten stories up, trapped in a box with nothing but whatever mechanical wizardry he understood but she didn’t to keep it from dropping to the basement. She just wasn’t in the habit of sharing her problems with people she knew, much less with a stranger she’d be faced with again when he returned for his next appointment.
“Then, she lives with you,” he concluded.
“She’s in an assistant living facility.”
“What about your stepmom?” he asked, before she could move on. “Why isn’t she supporting her?”
“Because Grandma Edna is my responsibility. She’s my mom’s mom and the only real relative I have left,” she allowed, though she might not have added the latter had she not been where she was. If the elevator fell, there wouldn’t be anyone to see that the increasingly eccentric older woman was properly cared for. Edna could be a handful. Jill couldn’t stand her.
“Can we talk about something else, please? Tell me about your company,” she suggested, desperately wanting not to think about falling down the shaft. “You must be excited about pulling it all together. Is having your own firm something you’ve always wanted?”
J.T. didn’t know which caught him more off guard just then; her obvious resignation to her position in the company, the abrupt change of subject, or her assumption that he felt any excitement at all about his possible venture.
She’d also just confronted him with the sudden need for an acceptable explanation for his own circumstances.
He could hardly tell her that the idea of starting his own company had nothing to do with realizing a dream. It had simply been the logical thing to do, given what his father had thrown at him. He couldn’t tell her, either, that once he’d decided what he had to do, that he’d approached the task with the same methodical, get-it-done attitude he intended to tackle in his pursuit of Candace-the-potential bride. There had been nothing resembling excitement involved.
The thought gave him pause. Standing there with the dark masking his disquiet, he couldn’t honestly say he felt energized, eager or enthusiastic about much of anything he did anymore. Even his last climbing trip in the Swiss Alps had left him oddly dissatisfied and restless. It almost had been as if pushing himself to conquer yet another mountain was no longer enough.
He
