right moment, and smiled cordially at Blake when he came through the door. The smile hid more than it revealed.
For instance, you would think, after you had seen a man a certain number of times, the novelty of him would wear off.
That you would no longer notice the color of his eyes, the little Dennis-the-Menace rooster tail in his hair, the powerful shape of his shoulders, the easy and effortless ripple of his arm muscles.
You would think, after a while, that the loose, graceful swing of his walk wouldn’t make butterflies take off in your stomach, and that you would be able to look at his lips without wondering what they tasted like and what they would feel like, and if you were ever, ever going to know.
She realized she had been having these thoughts for a long, long time. The crush on the boss wasn’t new, just her admission of it.
He was so handsome. She loved his eyes. She felt like she could look at him forever. She had the awful thought her newly discovered feelings were going to be in her face, that she would stumble over her tongue now, turn red whenever he spoke to her.
Diligently, she looked back at her work, began to type furious nonsense, which she hoped at least wouldn’t say she was in love with her boss.
When he neither greeted her nor went by her into his own office, she glanced up, to see him perched on the corner of her desk, one leg swinging, the other anchored to the floor. He looked at her thoughtfully, his brow furrowed. His normal smile, the one that put the sun to shame, was nowhere in sight.
He looked distinctly…crabby.
“Anything you want to tell me about?” he asked.
She swallowed. No. Even he wasn’t that intuitive, though he was dangerously alert to undercurrents and unspoken things going on all around him.
He shocked the kids with this uncanny ability to look into their hearts.
Ralph, you got something in that pocket I should know about?
Shirley, anything happen last night you care to share with me?
Polly, do you need to talk to me?
And as it turned out Ralph had a joint in his pocket, and Shirley tearfully admitted to escaping from her second-floor dorm window and running across the roof to peek in the boys’ dorm, and Polly had been keeping a kitten under her bed that had turned seriously ill.
But Holly didn’t have any secrets of that nature. Secrets that had witnesses or hard evidence.
How much could he read into a blush, a stammer, a quick lowering of eyes, after all?
“Something to tell you?” she said, pleased with how smooth her voice sounded, just as if she was the same person as she had been when she arrived at work this morning, when in fact she was changed in some way that was so fundamental she knew she could never change back.
“You know. Some interesting detail about your day.” His you-can-confide-in-me voice invited trust, showed genuine interest.
She stared at him, flabbergasted, and resisted the urge to pinch herself. Was he actually showing interest in her personally? It seemed too much to hope for, following so closely on her discovery of the feelings she was harboring in the far and secret reaches of her heart.
Her golden opportunity. To make him smile. To make him see her. All she had to do was think of something clever, or funny, or interesting to share with him about her day.
Not one single thing came to her mind.
She had always performed terribly under pressure. She knew if she was ever chosen to play Wheel of Fortune, she would be one of those people who asked for a letter that had already been used.
“Well?” he said silkily, leaning toward her, something glinting gravely in his eyes.
“Willie died,” she blurted out.
“Willie?”
“The guppie.”
“A fish?” He looked stunned, like he didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, and why should he?
A golden opportunity, blown. She said miserably, “The one named after the whale. As in Free Willie.”
He said nothing.
“I’ll go get another one tomorrow,” she babbled. “Little Flo Henderson was very attached to him.”
“Anything else you want to tell me about? Aside from the unfortunate demise of Willie?”
It occurred to her there was something pointed about his question. That he wasn’t expressing a nice generic kind of interest in her. He was probing for something specific.
Annoyed at herself for hoping too much, and at him for not even being in the same ball park as her, she said crisply, “If there’s something specific you want to know, you’ll have to tell me. I don’t do well at twenty questions.”
“How’s this for specific—”
It occurred to her the glint in his eye that she had mistaken for interest was actually anger. Blake was angry at her.
“—what does it feel like to have the blade of a knife pressed against your pretty little throat?”
“Oh,” she said, deflated, “that.” She wondered if it counted at all that Blake Fallon thought her throat was pretty.
“Oh, that. Hardly worth mentioning.”
“To be quite frank, I’d forgotten about it already.”
“It seems to me I asked you if something was wrong as soon as I stepped into this office and saw you with Tomas. It doesn’t seem to me as if I got a straight answer.”
“The whole thing was already long over by the time you got here.”
“Oh? The way I heard it, the knife was being shoved under the desk by your big toe just as I came in the door. Is it still there, or did Miss Efficient file it already?”
Miss Efficient? “Actually, I did file it already. It’s in the trash. Outside.”
“Not inside, where I might see it.”
She was beginning to feel really angry. This was what his interest in her was about? The first strong emotion he had ever shown to her was annoyance? Anger? She realized she had not totally forgiven him yet for that teasing but still slightly stinging remark he had made earlier.
I didn’t know you were a girl.
And now the brief interest that had lit in his eyes was about this? Even his remark about her neck had been accompanied by that cynical tone of voice.
“I had no interest in hiding the knife from you,” she said stiffly. “I put it in the outside garbage so I didn’t have to see it every time I disposed of a piece of paper.”
“Meaning the episode did leave some impression on you.”
“Some,”
