LITMIR.BIZ

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very levelheaded business partner, not to mention close friend—at least up to this point—materialized in the doorway of her office which was next to his. There was an amused expression he didn’t appreciate creasing Nathalie’s lips.

      “I see you’ve met our new administrative assistant.” Nathalie’s eyes shifted from Jason’s handsome, tanned face and almost permanent sober expression to the rather shocked look on their new employee’s face. Nathalie sighed. “Oh, God, Jason, you’re not frightening the help already, are you?” She offered Mindy a broad smile. “Because I picked this one to last.”

      In response, Jason took hold of Nathalie’s arm, mumbled a barely audible “excuse us” to Mindy and shepherded his partner into her office. He managed to shut the door before demanding, “What the hell are you doing?”

      Jason and she went back a ways, back to the first elementary business course at Columbia. She’d begun her education later than most and because of their age difference, treated Jason like a younger brother who needed occasional emotional support. She’d seen him through his wedding and the unsteady years that followed, and she knew him as well as, if not better than, anyone.

      “Trying to run an efficient office while you make predictions from the top of Mt. Sinai, my friend, why?” She seemed to scrutinize his face, as if trying to discern what was really up. “We decided to split the tasks, remember? I was going to handle the mundane things, like getting the office to run in a timely fashion and schmooze with the clients while you were going to handle the research that has made our company a household name among the famous and rich who want desperately to remain that way.” She glanced past his shoulder toward where the outer office was. “Now, Mindy Richards seems like a very bright, capable young woman who just needs a chance to show us her stuff without being raked over the coals in the first ten seconds of your entrance.”

      Richards? Was she married? It occurred to him that he hadn’t looked at her hand. He’d been too stunned to look at anything but her face.

      Of course she was married. Probably in the first ten minutes after graduation. Someone like Mindy had her pick of men.

      He couldn’t bank down the feeling of sadness that suddenly rose up and filled him.

      Nathalie was looking at him as if he was some kind of science experiment that had gone awry. He forced his mind forward. “How could you hire her without asking me?”

      “Simple. I never asked you before. And,” she reminded him diplomatically, in case he missed this salient point, “I never said very much when you sent them all fleeing into the hills. But I swear, Jason, you send this one packing and we are going to have a very, very serious talk about adjusting this attitude of yours.” Her voice softened a little. “I know where this is coming from, but it’s been over a year since—”

      The look in his eyes was the darkest she’d ever seen. It cut her off midbreath.

      “That has nothing to do with it.” Nathalie was closer to him than anyone else ever had been, but even she was not allowed to cross a certain line.

      “It has everything to do with it. With you and the way you’ve become.”

      Jason could feel himself shutting down. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t bring himself to discuss Debra’s death or the effect it had on him. Just as he couldn’t talk about how the empty sham of a marriage had unmanned him. “Drop it, Nat.”

      She sighed. Stubborn though she was, even she knew when to stop hitting her head against a brick wall.

      “All right—for now. And only because we both have work to do,” she added in case he thought he’d won. “But I want you to behave around that girl, hear me? She needs this job.”

      Why, he wondered. Why would Mindy need a job that was so completely out of the realm of what she’d gone to school for? And if she was married, wouldn’t her husband be able to provide for her so that she could find work in her field?

      It didn’t make any sense to him.

      Jason looked at his partner. “Why?”

      Nathalie stared at him. “Since when do you care about the personal life of anyone?”

      “That’s not fair.” Damn it, she made him sound like some kind of self-absorbed despot. Feeling unaccountably restless, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his Italian custom-made slacks.

      “All right, it’s not. You’ve been good to me.” Reaching up, Nathalie placed her arm around his shoulder in big-sister fashion. “But I worry about you, Jason,” she confessed. “About what all this enforced solitude is doing to you.”

      He knew she meant well, but he wasn’t in the mood for this. He shrugged off her arm. “I just got back from a convention of three thousand people—”

      “It’s very easy to be alone in a crowded room. All you need is a mind that isolates you.” Tilting her head, she studied him for a moment. Then her eyes widened as a realization seemed to come with the suddenness of a fireworks display on the Fourth of July. “You know her, don’t you?” When he made no immediate denial, she advanced to the next plateau. “What is she, an old girlfriend? Someone you had a wild, secret fling with?” The grin nearly split her face. “Oh, Jason, I didn’t think you had it in you.”

      “I don’t. I didn’t.” Damn it, where did she get off, making these wild assumptions? Well-meaning or not, sometimes Nathalie really got on his nerves. “She’s just someone I used to know.”

      She cocked her head. “Know how, in the biblical sense?”

      “In the elementary sense, as in high school. We went to the same school, that’s all,” he emphasized. He peeled off his jacket. It was suddenly very warm in the office. “Get your mind out of the gutter, Nat.”

      “Don’t be so judgmental, Jason. Under the right set of circumstances, the gutter can be a very nice place to visit once in a while.” The wink she sent his way was a broad one. Nathalie cleared her throat. “All right, so now that we’ve established that this is a prior mysterious acquaintance—”

      Damn it, why did she insist on digging this way? “Not mysterious, Nathalie, I just told you—”

      She was quick to cut him off. “Oh, but it’s what you didn’t tell me that I’m more interested in, Jason. One doesn’t look like that if one runs into the kid who sat beside you in homeroom and once borrowed your pen so they could finish their English homework.” The look she gave him was a knowing one and all the more infuriating for it. Nathalie had never cared for Debra, although he’d found that out only after the fact. And she had been trying her damnedest to get him to go out again no matter how often he told her to butt out of that part of his life. “I’d wager there was more to it than that.”

      “Then you’d lose, Nathalie.”

      “I never lose.” Nathalie tossed her head, sending her vibrant auburn hair cascading over her shoulder. “I just suffer temporary setbacks that will eventually be overcome if I just hang in there.” It was a great motto for a firm that specialized in stock market finances. It was also the motto that Nathalie lived by.

      “Excuse me, is anything wrong?”

      In unison, they turned around to the source of the question. To the young woman standing now in the open doorway.

      Self-conscious, Mindy dropped her hand to her side. “I knocked—twice—but I guess you didn’t hear me,” she explained.

      Mindy had sat at her desk, pretending she didn’t hear the raised voices or that her future might not very well be hanging in the balance with what was being said. But it was. Since she’d arrived back in New York, she’d gone to a score of companies in response to almost any ad she found in the paper that didn’t list working out in the open fields in its job description. In desperation, she would have even gone for that, but her present stamina wouldn’t allow it. The tone of the interviews that had been conducted all wound up being the same. Hopefully positive,

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