LITMIR.BIZ

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him, but kept herself in check. She didn’t want the man getting the wrong impression about her.

      “Then, I have the job?” she asked, afraid of allowing herself to be elated yet having little choice in the matter.

      “You can’t start if you don’t,” he pointed out. “I’ll take you on a three-month probationary basis,” he informed her. “Which means that I can let you go for any reason if I’m not satisfied.”

      “Understood.”

      He peered at her face. “Is that acceptable to you?”

      “Very much so, s-si—” She was about to address him as “sir” but stopped herself, uttering, instead, a hissing sound. “Lukkas,” she injected at the last moment.

      “I’m currently producing a Western. We’re going to be going on location—Arizona. Tombstone area,” he specified. “Do you have any problem with that?”

      She wanted to ask him why he thought she would, but this wasn’t the time for those kinds of questions. They could wait until after she had entrenched herself into his life. The fact that she would do just that was a given as far as she was concerned now that he had hired her.

      “None whatsoever,” she told him.

      “All right. Then go home and get a good night’s sleep. I need you back here tomorrow morning at seven.”

      “Seven it is. I’ll be bright eyed and bushy tailed,” she responded, thinking of a phrase her grandfather used to use.

      “I’ll settle for your eyes being open,” he told her. “See you tomorrow, Hanna.”

      Yohanna opened her mouth to correct him and then decided she rather liked the fact that her new boss was calling her by a nickname, even if she didn’t care all that much for it. She took it as a sign they were on their way to forming a good working relationship.

      After all, if someone didn’t care for someone else, they weren’t going to give them a nickname, right? At least, not one that could be viewed as cute. If anything, they’d use one that could be construed as insulting.

      “See you tomorrow,” she echoed. “I’ll see myself out,” she told him.

      Lukkas didn’t hear her, his mind already moving on to another topic.

      Yohanna had to hold herself in check to keep from dancing all the way to the front door.

Chapter Two

      The landline Yohanna had gotten installed mainly to placate her mother—“What if there’s a storm that takes out the cell towers? How can anyone reach you then? How can I reach you then?”—was ringing when she let herself into her condo several hours later that day.

      Yohanna’s automatic reaction was to hurry over to the phone to answer it, but she stopped just short of lifting the receiver. The caller-ID program was malfunctioning, the screen only registering the words incoming call.

      Frowning, she stood next to the coffee table in the living room and debated ignoring the call. Granted, everyone she knew did have this number as well as her cell number, but for the most part, if they called her, it was almost always on her cell phone, not her landline. That was for sales people, robo calls and her mother.

      Which meant, by process of elimination, that the caller was probably her mother.

      Yohanna was really tempted to let her answering machine pick up. Talking to her mother was usually exhausting.

      But if she ignored this call, there would be others, most likely coming in at regular intervals until she finally picked up and answered. Her mother had absolutely unbelievable tenacity. She would continue calling, possibly well into the evening, at which time her mother would make the fifteen-mile trip and physically come over. Her hand would be splayed across her chest, as she would dramatically say something about her heart not being up to taking this sort of stress and worry.

      Yohanna resigned herself to the fact that she might as well answer her phone and get the inevitable over with.

      Taking a deep, bracing breath, she yanked the receiver from its cradle and placed it against her ear—praying for a wrong number.

      “Hello?”

      “It’s about time you answered. Where were you? Never mind,” Elizabeth Andrzejewski said dismissively. “I’m calling you to tell you that I’ve got your room all ready.”

      Yohanna closed her eyes, gathering together the strength she sensed she was going to need to get through this phone call.

      Until just a minute ago she’d been walking on air, still extremely excited about being hired. She would have been relieved landing any job so quickly, on practically the heels of her recent layoff, but landing a job with Lukkas Spader, well, that was just the whip cream and the cherry on her sundae.

      However, dealing with her mother always seemed to somehow diminish her triumphs and magnify everything that currently wasn’t going well in her life. Her mother had a way of talking to her that made her feel as if she was a child again. A child incapable of doing anything right without her mother’s help.

      Yohanna knew that, deep down, her mother really meant well; she just wished the woman could mean well less often.

      “Why would you do that, Mother?” she finally asked. She hadn’t used her room since she’d left for college and moved out on her own.

      “So you’ll have somewhere to sleep, of course,” her mother said impatiently.

      “I have somewhere to sleep. I sleep in my bedroom, which is in my condo, Mother, remember?” Yohanna asked tactfully.

      She heard her mother sigh deeply before the woman launched into her explanation.

      “Well, now that you’ve lost your job, you’re not going to be able to hang on to that overpriced apartment of yours. You should sell it now before the bank forecloses on it.”

      Yohanna was stunned. Where was all this coming from? She’d had this so-called “discussion” with her mother several years ago when she’d first bought her condo. Her mother couldn’t understand why “a daughter of mine” would “waste” her money buying a “glorified apartment” when she had a perfectly good room right in her house. She’d thought that argument had finally been laid to rest.

      Obviously she had thought wrong.

      “The bank isn’t going to foreclose on me, Mother,” Yohanna informed her. “My mortgage payments are all up-to-date.”

      “Well, they won’t be now that you’ve been fired,” her mother predicted with a jarring certainty.

      “Laid off, Mother,” Yohanna corrected, trying not to grit her teeth. But there was no one who could make her crazier faster than her mother. “I wasn’t fired, I was laid off.”

      “Whatever.” The woman cavalierly dismissed the correction.

      “There is a difference, Mother,” Yohanna insisted. “One has to do with job performance. The other is a sad fact of modern life. In my case, it was the latter.”

      “Potato, potato,” her mother said in a singsong voice. “The bottom line at the end of the day is that you don’t have a job.”

      The words suddenly hit her for the first time. “How did you find out?” Yohanna asked.

      She hadn’t told anyone about her layoff except for Mrs. Parnell, bless her. Granted, the people that she’d worked with knew, but a lot of them had been laid off, as well. She didn’t see any of them sending her mother a news bulletin. They didn’t even know her mother.

      So how had her mother found out?

      “I’m your mother,” Elizabeth Andrzejewski replied

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