started ringing again, and he moved to pick it up, then stopped.
He grinned at her, that grin that made her heart do traitorous and treacherous things. She was glad she was engaged to a man who did not make her feel so topsyturvy. It would be exhausting to feel this way all the time!
“Hey,” he said, his deep voice edged with just a trace of sarcasm, “that would be your job now.”
The door shut behind him, and thankfully he took all his bristling energy with him, though without him in it, the room seemed even more depressing than before, if that was possible.
She went around to the other side of the desk, closed her eyes, tried to concentrate. Surely she must have hit her head harder than she thought. She felt shell-shocked, but she took a deep breath, picked up the phone and said, “K & B Auto.”
She had barely gotten it out when she was assaulted by a description of a malfunctioning carburetor in an accent so deep it was nearly indecipherable.
She loved cars. She always had. She loved how they looked and how they smelled and how they sounded when they were running perfectly. She realized what she loved was the cosmetics of cars, because she was not even entirely sure what a carburetor was. Maybe she had been a little overly confident in telling that annoying man she was going to bring calm to chaos. She wasn’t sure how her master’s degree was going to help her with this challenge.
“Call back. Later. Tomorrow would be good.” She hung up the phone and sank into a padded leather chair in front of a scarred metal desk overflowing with paper.
The connecting door to the work bay swung open.
“That coffee? I like it strong.”
He was zipping himself—very unselfconsciously—into a pair of faded blue coveralls, the jeans and white T-shirt underneath.
The politically correct reply would have been to tell him to make his own damn coffee, but her eyes were mutinously glued to that zipper.
The door shut again before she came to her senses enough to become politically correct.
Coffee. Strong. Now would really be the time to march into the dark cavern of the auto repair bays to tell him he had obviously mistaken her for someone she was not. She might be able to manage an office. But girl Friday? Really that was beneath her dignity! She hadn’t spent the last six years of her life at school so that she could make coffee and fetch doughnuts!
What on earth had her father been thinking? It was totally evident she was going to be a fish out of water in this environment. It was totally evident this had been a mistake.
“My specialty is disasters,” she said, mimicking herself. “I can fix a mistake like this one—in a week.”
She pushed back several leaning stacks of paper to make enough room for her elbows. Then she rested her head in her hands and ordered herself to think. Thinking was generally her specialty, not that she had let even a hint of that show in the encounter she had just survived. Nor was any of her natural intelligence surfacing now. Because instead of formulating a plan of attack for the terrible mess in this office, and the huge coffee machine that gloated at her from its perch on the crowded counter, she was lamenting her choice of outfit.
A terrible choice. A suit, classic Chanel, jacket and straight skirt, in a small plaid pattern that had made her feel exceedingly professional when she had chosen it, along with dark stockings and plain black pumps, this morning. It was the type of outfit her fiancé, Mitch, approved of. Respectable. Mature. Appropriate for someone planning an academic career.
It makes you look fat, a voice inside her head wailed. Plus, it was going to be too hot. Her office space already seemed sauna-like, though in fairness, part of that might be her reaction to Garner Blake.
And her hair! Why had she ever allowed her sister Chelsea to talk her into cutting it? Oh, because Chelsea had talked about bone structure and her eyes and had made her believe, somehow, that having only two inches of hair could make her other features seem extraordinary!
Of course, under Chelsea’s hand—that wheat-blond hair coaxed into a riot of cheerful curls—that had happened. For Brandy’s wedding, Chelsea had also used makeup like an artist used a brush. In moments, Jessie had found herself in possession of startling cheekbones, stunning eyes, a sinfully puffy bottom lip.
But left to her own devices? Jessie felt her new “do” managed to look like she had slept with a demon-possessed rolling pin. Desperate for some semblance of order from her unruly hair she had taken to wetting it down, plastering it against her head and letting it dry like that. Without looking in a mirror, she knew the result was less than stellar, a drowned rat mixed with a helmet-head kind of look.
And makeup? A tiny line of gloss around her lips, a hint of mascara, a touch of blush. The result? Dull. Dull. Dull.
Stop it, Jessie commanded herself. The order of business was not to sit here wishing for another opportunity to make that all-important first impression. If she had it to do again, she should not waste her wishes on beauty. Why should she care if Garner Blake thought she was attractive? She was already taken, engaged, not available for the man-woman game anymore. She was relieved about that. The rules and procedures had always seemed just a little nebulous. She was a disaster at interchanges with the opposite sex, and she was darned lucky to have found Mitch, who appreciated her for her mind.
No, if she was throwing wishes around, she should opt for a chance to look brilliant.
Just a year from her doctoral degree, if she chose to continue her prairie dog study, and she had managed to present herself as a complete imbecile from the moment she had stepped out of her smoking car.
She had confidently proclaimed her master’s degree qualified her to look after his office, and she could clearly see it would take something much more than that.
“A combination of the Queen of Clean and Trump,” she muttered out loud.
Sitting at this horribly messy desk in a building that smelled of grease and other mysterious and extremely masculine substances, and that was heating up more by the second, it occurred to her she should have asked more questions of her father.
Still, he hadn’t really given her much opportunity. He had passed her off to James to get details like location, date and time. She remembered her father had sounded frail in a way that had made her uneasy—and eager to please.
She might not like this job, but she was not letting her father down!
And she was not letting that arrogant ass—who happened to be her boss—win!
“And I am certainly not being defeated by a coffeepot,” she decided, and leapt to her feet. She focused furiously on her task, ignoring the almost constant jangling of the phone. The pot was a huge silver monstrosity that did not bear any resemblance to the one she had at home on her kitchen counter. She found grounds, dumped in approximately enough to sink the Titanic, found the on switch and got it working.
“‘I like it strong.’” She mimicked his deep voice.
Still, when the office began to fill with the smell of coffee, Jessica King felt inordinately pleased with herself.
“There’s no problem so great a good mind can’t solve it,” she said to herself, quoting Mitch. With new confidence she picked up the ringing telephone.
