to formality, she noticed.
“You may not believe me,” he continued, “but I truly can understand your disappointment. However, this agency has entered into a contract with the people who entrusted you to us for placement in the first place. It’s a binding legal document that I am not willing or able to violate.”
Emma began to steam. Why had he told her the information was only a few feet away—to taunt her? How sadistic was that?
How could this petty bureaucrat in his fancy suit, sitting in his corner office like some potentate in his ivory tower, claim to know what she was feeling?
She had to try one last time, just in case he was beginning to weaken. “Are you sure there’s nothing you can do?”
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his slacks and rocked back on the heels of what were no doubt very expensive shoes. “If you want to send me your résumé, I could ask around,” he suggested with obvious reluctance. “Have you checked with the employment agencies here in Portland?”
“No!” Emma exclaimed, her frustration finally breaking through as she threw up her hands. “That’s not the help I meant, and you know it!”
He shook his head. “Eventually you’ll adjust to the idea that you were adopted by two people who wanted a baby very much,” he insisted. “They should have told you a lot sooner, but they didn’t. There it is and you can’t change it.”
If he said it was time to move on, she was going to slug him. Instead he shrugged.
“I’ve been doing this for a long while,” he continued, apparently encouraged by her silence. “The adoption process isn’t something that people go through unless they’re desperate for a child. It’s expensive and time-consuming. Their privacy is shredded, their lives picked apart.”
He paused for breath while she gave him her iciest glare. “It sounds as though you’ve had a heck of a bumpy ride lately,” he said, “but you look like a capable woman. Give yourself time to accept once again the identity that you’ve grown up with and the parents who raised you.”
Emma’s fuse, which had often been regrettably short, finally blew at the platitudes he was trying to heap on her poor head.
She picked up her purse. “You may think, just because you run this agency, that you’re so wise and all-knowing about how it feels to be adopted, Mr. Davis.” She grabbed the knob and yanked open the door, too angry to thank him for his time.
“As for your advice, your platitudes and your pseudo sympathy,” she continued loudly, pointing at the big vase, “you can stick them right into that cheap, tacky glass monstrosity you seem to be so proud of.”
Head held high, she sailed out the door and slammed it shut behind her.
Morgan stood in the suddenly silent office with his hands braced on his hips. He understood the reasons behind the agency’s confidentiality regulations; he agreed with them one hundred percent.
In this case, Emma would never know that he was protecting her as well as her biological parents. She had been through enough without having to deal with a father who would never acknowledge her because the personal cost to him and his career might be more than he was willing to pay.
Between the shouting and door slamming, Emma Wright’s exit had been a noisy one. At any moment he expected his assistant to burst into his office in order to reassure herself that he was still in one piece.
Absently he looked around, his glance landing on the large blown-glass vase that Emma had disparaged on her way out the door.
“It’s not tacky,” he muttered defensively as he studied the blue and purple sculpture. Created in the manner of Dale Chihuly, a prominent Northwest artist, the twisting, fluid shape resembled either a man-eating flower or a floppy hat, depending on the angle from which it was viewed.
“And it sure as hell wasn’t cheap.” Morgan winced as he recalled his winning bid at the recent charity auction. Even so, he would have willingly given up the vase in exchange for a magical elixir to remove that wounded, lost look from Emma Wright’s sad gray eyes before she got angry and they turned to fire.
He had plenty of experience reading people, and the most satisfying part of his job was being able to help them. Emma’s case was an unusual one, but she didn’t know that and he couldn’t tell her. It was part of the reason she stayed in his mind.
It had nothing to do with the fact that she was hot.
Portland was full of hot women wearing vividly colored cropped tops, tight miniskirts and miles of bare skin that replaced winter’s long, dark raincoats and high boots. Quite a few of them worked right here in the hospital complex, but he’d gotten good at ignoring them.
His mother was always nagging him about giving her grandchildren, but he had rules about mixing business and pleasure. His rules hadn’t protected him from Emma. Her red knit top hadn’t been especially snug, nor did her short khaki skirt expose an unusual amount of her long, attractive legs. It was those big gray eyes that grabbed him first, eyes a man could dive into and get lost. Wavy brown hair he wanted to plunge his fingers into and muss all up.
Full lips…
His appreciation of Emma Wright as a woman wasn’t what she needed, so he forced himself to ignore the rush of heat as several rapid knocks sounded on his closed door.
“Enter,” he called out as he turned away from the window.
Just as he had expected, it was Cora who poked her head inside. “Everything okay?” she asked.
As much as he was tempted to ask her opinion, he didn’t have that luxury.
“Everything’s fine,” Morgan replied with a reassuring smile.
She studied him for another moment with a concerned expression, like a soccer mom checking for injuries, before she finally returned his smile with one of her own.
“Okay, good,” she said. “Since you don’t have any wounds in need of binding up, I’m going to lunch.”
Around the corner from the assistant’s station, Everett Baker had pressed himself against the wall so that he wouldn’t be discovered. He’d been on his way back to the accounting department where he worked when he heard the woman shouting at the director. Yelling and anger always made Everett’s stomach knot up. Absently he had rubbed slow circles on his midsection as he watched the pretty woman in the red shirt rush past Cora’s desk.
Why did women always start shouting when they got upset? If they would only ask nicely, they might get whatever it was that they wanted.
No one ever seemed to notice Everett, so he was able to watch the other employees whenever he had a break from his work. Sometimes he was able to listen to their conversations, if they talked loud enough. It helped him to figure out why some people had so many friends and others, like him, didn’t.
On a really good day, he would see Leslie Logan. She came often to Children’s Connection, looking like a modern-day queen. Everett had a special reason for watching her, but it wasn’t what anyone else might think. Leslie was old enough to be his mother.
Everett glanced at his watch and saw that it was
