the elementary sense, as in high school. We went to the same school, that’s all,” he emphasized. He peeled off his jacket. It was suddenly very warm in the office. “Get your mind out of the gutter, Nat.”
“Don’t be so judgmental, Jason. Under the right set of circumstances, the gutter can be a very nice place to visit once in a while.” The wink she sent his way was a broad one. Nathalie cleared her throat. “All right, so now that we’ve established that this is a prior mysterious acquaintance—”
Damn it, why did she insist on digging this way? “Not mysterious, Nathalie, I just told you—”
She was quick to cut him off. “Oh, but it’s what you didn’t tell me that I’m more interested in, Jason. One doesn’t look like that if one runs into the kid who sat beside you in homeroom and once borrowed your pen so they could finish their English homework.” The look she gave him was a knowing one and all the more infuriating for it. Nathalie had never cared for Debra, although he’d found that out only after the fact. And she had been trying her damnedest to get him to go out again no matter how often he told her to butt out of that part of his life. “I’d wager there was more to it than that.”
“Then you’d lose, Nathalie.”
“I never lose.” Nathalie tossed her head, sending her vibrant auburn hair cascading over her shoulder. “I just suffer temporary setbacks that will eventually be overcome if I just hang in there.” It was a great motto for a firm that specialized in stock market finances. It was also the motto that Nathalie lived by.
“Excuse me, is anything wrong?”
In unison, they turned around to the source of the question. To the young woman standing now in the open doorway.
Self-conscious, Mindy dropped her hand to her side. “I knocked—twice—but I guess you didn’t hear me,” she explained.
Mindy had sat at her desk, pretending she didn’t hear the raised voices or that her future might not very well be hanging in the balance with what was being said. But it was. Since she’d arrived back in New York, she’d gone to a score of companies in response to almost any ad she found in the paper that didn’t list working out in the open fields in its job description. In desperation, she would have even gone for that, but her present stamina wouldn’t allow it. The tone of the interviews that had been conducted all wound up being the same. Hopefully positive, until her own code of honor forced her to be truthful with her perspective employer and admit that, although she didn’t look it, she was three months pregnant with twins.
And really, really needed this job, she would add silently.
Granted her parents were more than willing to take her in, but that wasn’t the way she wanted to start her new life here—indebted to her parents. It was enough that they gave her emotional support and had floated her a loan so that she could put down the first and last month’s security on her tiny apartment. The latter was the size of a moderate walk-in restaurant refrigerator, but it was hers and that meant a lot. So did earning her own way.
Up until this job, no one had room for a woman who was going to expand before their eyes in the coming months and whom they felt might or might not be back once she gave birth, despite all her assurances that she would be. But Nathalie Dixon had been sympathetic and understanding and willing to take a chance on her, which meant the world to Mindy. She’d instantly taken a liking to the other woman.
But it was obvious that she was going to have to convince the man from her past that she was up to this. Funny how things turned out.
She wondered how much Nathalie had told him. But Jason’s eyes weren’t traveling to her belly, so maybe he didn’t know.
Which was just the way she wanted it for now. One battle at a time.
“No,” Jason said curtly, sparing a look at Nathalie before he turned to face Mindy, “nothing’s wrong. Let’s see about getting you to work, Mindy.”
She smiled, relieved. Maybe this was going to be all right after all. “That sounds good to me.”
We’ll see, Jason added silently. We’ll see.
Chapter Two
Jason glanced at his watch. It was nearly five o’clock. Finally. All day it had felt as if the minutes were dragging on the back of an arthritic turtle.
He hadn’t been able to concentrate for more than ten, fifteen of those slow-moving minutes at a time. No matter how hard he tried to block out everything, his mind kept wandering back to the woman sitting some thirty feet outside of his office.
His lack of self-discipline surprised and annoyed him. It had been years since he hadn’t been able to throw a rope around his thoughts and rein them in.
He had even managed to contain the pain and guilt he felt over Debra’s death, placing the emotions in a sealed area so that he could get on with his work. That had been the important thing then. Work had been his main goal, his main purpose for existing and his salvation, all wrapped up in one—much to the relief of the great many investors that his company handled who had come to depend very heavily on his knowledge and his savvy.
Without him a lot of people would have found themselves adrift in financial waters that seemed to keep insisting on changing course without giving the slightest warning to them.
He wasn’t much good to any of them now, least of all himself, Jason thought darkly, thoroughly disgusted with himself.
With a sigh he closed the folder containing the reports he’d been staring at without success for the past half hour. Pushing away from the desk, he dragged a hand through his hair.
The July sun was shining brightly into his window, and he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the glass. He doubted that anyone looking at him would have had a clue what was going on inside of him, just as they wouldn’t have been able to tell back in the days when he was in high school. He’d learned early on how to mask his feelings from the outside world.
But that didn’t make them any less real to him.
This had to stop, he told himself. But at the moment, he didn’t see how. It couldn’t end by dismissing Mindy. He hadn’t expected it, but she was good. She’d taken to the work like a proverbial duck to water, absorbing everything he said. Unlike with the temps who had paraded through the office, he hadn’t had to explain anything to her twice. What was more, she didn’t act as if he was speaking in some unfathomable foreign language. The world of finance left a great many people anesthetized, but Mindy just looked at him with those bright-blue eyes of hers, and he could see she understood. In his book, that made her a very rare person.
But then, he already knew that.
Jason massaged his forehead. The shadow of a headache was playing hide-and-seek with his temples, threatening to take over. What he needed, he thought, was a stiff drink. He didn’t indulge often, but this definitely felt like one of those times men announced that they needed a drink.
Nerve endings tightened as he heard the knock on his door. Nathalie rarely knocked, she just strolled in. The fact that it could be one of the interns whom he kept to pore over every bit of news data that affected the market, never even occurred to him.
He knew it was her. “Come in.”
And he was right. The next
