“You’re getting along okay?” Charles inquired, sincere worry written all over his face. “If you need anything, anything at all, I’d be happy to help.”
“I’m getting along,” she reassured him.
When they’d been left alone, Jason regarded her with amusement. “You knew perfectly well you’d never be thrown out of here on your tush, didn’t you?”
“It was always a possibility,” she corrected, an impish grin in her eyes. “Charles can be temperamental.”
Jason had seen the genuine warmth in the older man’s gaze. Whatever temperamental outbursts he might be prone to, Jason doubted one would ever be directed toward the woman seated opposite him.
After they’d ordered—the sensible fish for him, an enviably thick, juicy burger for her—he leaned back and studied her.
The dark circles under her eyes and the weary slump to her shoulders hadn’t vanished, but there was a bit more life in her expression.
“So, tell me how you and Charles came to be such pals,” he suggested. “He usually radiates polite indifference to the customers.”
“He mentioned to me once that he had a little nest egg put aside that wasn’t growing fast enough to suit him. I offered a few suggestions. He tripled it. He’s grateful,” she said succinctly.
“You have a nose for investments?”
“I’m a broker,” she said, then amended, “Or at least I was until a few months ago. Our firm downsized. I was one of the last ones hired, so I was one of the first fired. It didn’t seem to matter that I was making a fortune for the company and for my clients.”
Jason had to struggle to hide his astonishment. He tried to reconcile this bedraggled, ill-clad waif with the kind of barracudas who thrived on Wall Street in their expensive, stylish power suits. He couldn’t.
Still, this latest discovery told him he’d seriously miscalculated the kind of negotiations that would lure her into the TGN fold. Cold hard cash and a simple appeal to her vanity were exactly the wrong things to offer. He had to make her see the long-term future she could have, the example she could become with her combination of brains and beauty, the good she could do for charity, perhaps.
First, though, he had to see if she had exhausted all of the possibilities for another job on Wall Street. He didn’t want her dallying with acting only until something in her field came along. This part on Within Our Reach was intended to be more than a quick fix. He needed a long-term commitment from her, a year at the very least. If things panned out as he expected, the soap could go on forever with Callie as its leading lady.
“Surely there are other jobs for someone with your qualifications,” he suggested.
“Of course,” she agreed. “If I’d been willing to move to some other city and start over. Even my own firm offered me that. So did half the other brokerages I contacted within hours after being canned. The rest were firing staff of their own.”
“You didn’t want to move because New York is where it’s happening in the financial world,” he concluded.
She lifted her gaze to his. “It was more than that. Going anyplace else would have been admitting defeat.”
The response told him quite a bit about her determination and her priorities. He could understand that sort of drive, that sort of stubborn will. He’d needed it in spades for his own career climb.
“And, therefore,” he surmised, “anything less than another position in the thick of the action was not to be tolerated.”
“Exactly.”
He leaned toward her. “Shall I tell you what I see for you in the future?”
She regarded him with a wry expression. “Is looking into crystal balls one of your hobbies?”
“No, making things happen is one of my skills,” he declared flatly.
She shivered a little. Jason grinned. He enjoyed the effect such unbridled confidence had on people. “Gives you goose bumps just hearing such self-assurance, doesn’t it?”
She leaned forward then. “Oh, I definitely think you’re full of it, Mr. Kane.”
“Jason,” he corrected, deliberately ignoring the jibe, “since you and I are going to be very close.”
“I doubt that, Mr. Kane.”
He sat back and took a long, slow swallow of coffee, assessing his next step. “Are you a gambling woman, Callie?”
“I never gamble,” she insisted.
“And yet you played the stock market with millions of dollars of other people’s money.”
“I took informed risks.”
He grinned at the distinction. “Whatever. You spent your entire career researching companies, then placing bets on which ones would beat the odds, correct?”
“Something like that.”
“Do you know anything about TGN?”
“The basics, of course.”
“Know anything about the turnaround it’s made in the past three years?”
For an instant she looked uneasy. “That you’re credited with making it happen,” she conceded. “The story made headlines as well as reassuring nervous stockholders. The price of shares has climbed as a result.”
“What did that tell you about me?”
“That you’re smart and relentless,” she said at once.
“Exactly. Are you willing to gamble against a man like me getting my way?” he inquired lightly.
She sat up a little straighter at that, squaring her shoulders, lifting her chin. “You’re forgetting who you’re dealing with, Mr. Kane. I’m not an out-of-work actress. I’m no airhead. I’m not a pushover. And I’m not desperate.”
He lifted her hand, as soft and light as a bird, and touched his lips to the delicate knuckles. A surprising shudder swept through both of them at the contact. “A challenge only makes things more interesting, wouldn’t you say?”
She swallowed hard and practically yanked her hand from his. “You’ve guessed wrong this time, Mr. Kane. I am not an actress,” she repeated stubbornly. “I don’t want to be a star.”
“So you’ve mentioned,” he said without the slightest hint that he found the adamant rejection nearly as insulting as she’d clearly meant it to be. He’d trained himself to respond to subtleties, and her physical reaction to him told him far more than her deliberately dismissive attitude. She was susceptible to him and she didn’t like it. He, to the contrary, found her responsiveness illuminating.
He directed a look straight into those baby-blue eyes of hers and dropped his voice to a seductive pitch. “I think changing your mind is going to be downright
