pounds today, Ms. Darcy,” a man called as he sat down at a table with several women.
Darcy spread her arms. “With a healthier menu our sick days have decreased, a number of our staff have quit smoking and—” she pointed at a large graph covering one wall “—my employees have lost a grand total of 3122 pounds.”
Admirable, he thought, but at the same time the expense of organic food seemed too high for employees. “Why do you care?”
“Healthier employees work better, and we decreased the amount they pay for health insurance without sacrificing benefit coverage.”
“That’s a lot of work to get a discount,” he said, thinking the employees should pay more not less. He provided insurance only to the managerial staff.
She studied him. “Why do I get the feeling that you are impressed by the fact I’ve saved the store money, but not by the fact that I’m attempting to make my employees’ lives better?”
“Department stores are notorious for having a high turnover rate. It hardly seems worth the bother.”
She gave him a look that had a Queen Victoria regalness that made him catch his breath.
“You already know Bennett’s is very stable. And my caring for them is one of the reasons why.”
She looked fierce, like a tigress protecting her cubs. For a second he was taken aback by this woman who showed absolutely no fear of him. Mentally, he rubbed his hands together. He was so ready for this fight. After all, he’d come here with the idea of offering her a princely—no, a queenly sum for the property the store sat on. He was determined to own it all, lock, stock and barrel and no society girl who looked as luscious as she did was going to stop him—despite his attraction to her.
He chastised himself and tried to push the unwanted feelings into the background. He’d had enough of marriage. Not that it had been unhappy, but he’d stayed more out of loyalty, than love, especially after his wife’s cancer diagnosis. And now he was left to raise his daughter on his own—
inadequately, he believed. His wife had been a good mother, giving up corporate America to stay home once their daughter was born. He hadn’t been able to give his daughter the kind of attention her mother did.
He took a tray and placed a plate on it. He glanced at Darcy. His employees ate off paper. How could she justify real plates? And stainless-steel utensils? Plastic should be good enough. He needed to change this.
He walked down the buffet line. He stopped at a tray of whole-grain waffles. “Don’t you have any regular waffles?” he asked, realizing all the food would be classified as healthy.
“Multigrain is good for you,” Darcy said as she reached for a plate of fruit.
The attendant studied him, one hand on her hip and a formidable look on her face. Like the other attendant behind the counter, she wore a white apron over a white uniform. She’d bound her gray hair into a tight ponytail.
“How long have you worked here?” he asked.
“Thirty-five years. You must be the new boss,” she said in a tone that grated on his nerves.
Taken aback, he almost dropped his whole-grain waffle. “Excuse me.”
“Mabel,” Darcy intervened, “be polite.”
“Humph!” She slapped the waffle on his plate and added a couple strips of bacon.
“Bacon?”
“It’s turkey bacon,” Mabel snapped. “Please move on, there are people who are working and need to eat. And I intend to feed them.”
“Be careful,” Darcy warned. “I’ve ended up on the wrong end of her wooden spoon way too many times.”
“She hit you?” He was appalled.
“She never hit me, but she did spank me pretty good when I was four.”
“Don’t these people know who you are?” He’d always thought spanking was a barbaric practice.
“I don’t think they cared. These people are my village.”
Confused, he could only stare at her.
“You know,” Darcy said almost impatiently, “it takes a village to raise a child. And when I get around to having children, I want this—” she spread her hands to encompass the cafeteria “—and the rest of the store to be their village. And feeling the business end of Mabel’s palm didn’t do me any harm, in fact, it probably did a lot of good. And I hope she gets the opportunity to do the same for my children.”
He finished the line and looked around for a place to sit down. “Where’s the private dining room?”
“A private dining room!” she said in amazement. “We don’t have one, we’ll have to mingle with the ordinary folks.”
He gazed down at her, his lips puckered in disapproval.
“You really think you are lord and master of all you survey, don’t you?” she said in an exasperated tone. “Have fun trying to get Mabel to bow to you, she’ll take her spoon to your back end and she doesn’t care how old you are.”
“I’ve done my time in the trenches,” he replied, thinking of the one summer he’d interned in the mail room. That had been enough manual labor for him for the rest of his life. “And I’ll let the police handle any attempt to smack me with a spoon.”
Darcy’s mouth twitched. “Good luck with that. I’m sure her son, who is head of the detective division, will probably have something to say about that. If he lets that fly, then her daughter who is a district attorney will. Mabel spanked them, too.”
She gestured him to sit at a table in a corner. He sat stunned. He hadn’t bought a department store, he was in the loony bin. What had he gotten himself into? Every step he’d taken to take charge had been derailed by this woman.
“If you’re thinking you can fire anybody because they aren’t subservient enough for you, think again. If I can beat the unions and keep them out, trust me, I’m not afraid of you.”
“I should think you’d be pro union.”
“I let the union come in and allowed them to do their song and dance, but when we started comparing figures, my employees found out they would have to take a two-dollar decrease in pay to support their union dues and our insurance package was better than the minimum standards set by the union. Trust me, when it came to a vote, there were only two yes votes, and one of those was mine. I think the other yes vote was my stepfather.”
“But,” he said, looking around at the cloth-covered tables, “there are so many things you could do to trim the fat and increase the profit margin.”
“Number one, you’re talking about your profit margin. And number two, what you call fat, I call flavor.”
She drizzled maple syrup over her waffles, cut them and dug in. He watched her eat. “But with the economy in the shape it’s in, you…”
“Listen,”
