Kitabı oku: «Regarding The Tycoon's Toddler...», sayfa 4

Chapter Four

“Okay.” But she couldn’t think of what she’d been saying. She took a stab at it. “I…I really think I need to make the point that being there for a child is only part of the equation in good child care. This isn’t glorified baby-sitting, no matter what you might think.”

“It’s not?” he asked, one dark eyebrow lifting slightly. “Sounds like it is to me.”

“Well, I guess it could be called baby-sitting on one level, but it’s much more than that. There are so many layers to child care, so many nuances that people don’t see. But the kids know.”

“You sound as if you’ve had a lot of experience with children. Any of your own?”

“No, but I’ve been involved—” He was on the move again, and she went with him, trying to regroup as he crossed to the door and snapped off the lights. Only the low light of a moon rising in the sky over Houston lit the room. “I love children and I want what’s best for them,” she said, stopping by him in the dimness. “That’s why I wanted—”

“What are your qualifications for all of this?” He cut her off as he walked away from the outer door, heading across to the side of the room and a set of closed, double doors.

She hurried after him. “I have a degree in Early Childhood Development. I’m working on my masters.”

As she talked, she watched him push a single brass button on the wall by the doors. The doors opened, and light spilled into the darkened room from a single elevator car. He stepped inside, stirring the air around Lindsey, then turned with the light at his back. For a moment he was a dark shadow with brightness behind him, and her dream was there. An open escape to something, or someone. And the light. She bit her lip hard to bring herself back to reality. This wasn’t a dream. It was reality—sharp, hard reality. All she had to do was step into the car with him, turn, face the doors, go down twenty floors and keep talking. She could do that.

He was talking, saying something about being impressed that she was going for her master’s degree. He shrugged, his image becoming clearer as her eyes adjusted to the light.

“I barely got a law degree.”

She stood very still, trying to get air in her lungs, but having no luck at all.

He motioned her into the car. “Come on. It’s working. Don’t worry about it. They were supposed to have the whole system in top shape by today. I’ve used the stairs too much lately. We can talk about your education on the way down and figure out how overqualified you are for what you do.”

She went forward into the small space. She liked small spaces—always had. They meant safety. But she wasn’t sure it would be that way with this man.

Lindsey hugged her purse to her middle and turned to face the doors as they slid shut. They were mirrored doors that bounced back a slightly distorted version of Lindsey Atherton next to Matthew Terrel. But they gave an illusion of more space.

“How long have you been interested in child care?” he asked, and it startled her slightly to hear his deep voice confined by the small space.

She’d been interested in how kids were treated ever since she’d found out it wasn’t normal for a six-year-old to have to hide in a closet to feel safe when they were left in a house alone. But he didn’t want to hear that any more than she wanted to share it with a stranger, so she gave him facts.

“Four years…professionally.”

“Where do you stand on discipline?” he asked as the elevator started smoothly downward.

She could feel him watching her in the reflective doors, but didn’t look at him. “Discipline?” she asked, easing her hold on her upper arms and staring at the place where the two doors met. “I…I think a child needs limits.” She exhaled. “They need rules and they need to be responsible for their own actions.”

“Agreed,” he murmured.

She looked up at the floor indicator, the floors slipping by so quickly that this would be over almost before it had begun. She girded herself and turned to look at him and not at a secondhand image in the mirrored doors.

“Listen, we need to talk about the money,” she said, getting right to the point before she ran out of time. “Unless there’s enough money, this is nothing more than glorified baby-sitting, and you can get that for a couple of dollars an hour from some thirteen-year-old who wants to buy makeup at the mall after school. This is much more than that.”

“So, if you throw money at it, you end up with babysitters who are getting their master’s degrees?” he asked.

Anger was there, mixed with frustration, and she felt fire in her face. But she didn’t have the luxury of indulging her emotions. She couldn’t afford to snap back at him, so she made herself take a breath and keep control. “No, if you invest in it, you get quality child care. And you can get people who love what they do.”

He glanced at his watch as she spoke, then his gaze met hers again. “I don’t expect love—just value for money paid.”

If Lindsey had a wish coming to her, she would wish for this man to have a heart, and for her to have more time to find that heart. But wishing never worked. She learned that early on in life. So, short of throwing herself physically at him and hog-tying him in the elevator, the meeting was over. She knew it. She’d lost.

“Then you’re settling for less than you should,” she said, knowing that she had nothing to lose now.

“I don’t settle for anything,” he said tightly.

At the same time the world jerked violently. Lindsey felt the floor lurch under her, and she was flying forward. In that split second she felt as if she were reliving that moment on the stairs when she collided with the man. But this time it was nothing she did. Her purse flew out of her hands, and she was thrown towards the stranger. She was clutching his jacket with both hands, and their bodies connected.

It took Zane a full second to realize that it was the elevator stopping violently, and in that second Lindsey came right at him. He felt a stinging in his upper right arm, then they collided and she was against him, pushing him back against the wall.

From no contact to total contact, he felt her pressing against every inch of his body. Her hair was tickling his chin, a provocative scent that clung to her filled his senses, and he could almost feel her heart hammering against his. Her hands were tugging on his jacket, and he did what he had done the first time. He held her up, put his arms around her to steady her. But this time the shock was giving way rapidly to an intense awareness of her.

A stranger, but very definitely a woman and different from any nanny he’d ever seen in his life. He didn’t dare move, afraid that the response that was deep inside him would build. Then she shifted, her face tipped up to his, and the amber eyes were veiled by improbably long lashes. Freckles stood out against skin pale from shock.

“Oh, God,” she gasped. “What happened?”

He thought for a moment she was shocked at what he was feeling—the basic emotion of a man with a woman in his arms—but he rejected that. “An unexpected stop,” he managed to say, then took a breath. “And we aren’t moving.”

Her eyes darted to the floor indicator, and at the same time she let go of him. She moved back, and felt coolness there instead of the heat. A disturbing sense of loss came with it. “Stuck?” she breathed.

“As in, stuck between floors,” he said, waiting for panic or fear or both to show up in her expression.

He didn’t expect her to turn and start to smooth his suit coat where she’d crunched the material, a contact he’d barely felt.

“I am so sorry for doing that,” she said. “This suit must have cost you a—” She bit her lip and drew her hands back. “It’s okay, I think,” she murmured. “We’re stuck?”

He turned and pressed each floor button one after the other, but nothing happened. “Stuck,” he said, and turned back to her. She was watching him, her expression unreadable. “And don’t even say it. The elevators were not shut down to save money.”

Her cheeks flamed at his jab. “I didn’t say that.”

“You were thinking it, weren’t you?”

“Okay, it crossed my mind. I admit it, but I didn’t say it.” She crouched in front of him to retrieve her purse, which had landed on top of his dropped briefcase. “What now?”

He turned to the panel and reached for the emergency phone. “We’ll get help,” he said, lifting the receiver to his ear.

Zane pushed the button under the phone, and in two rings someone was on the line.

“Yes?”

“The executive elevator stopped, hard, and it’s stuck between floors.”

“Oh, man, I’m sorry.” The guy sounded like some teenager. “That’s a bummer.”

“Just get it going.”

“Yeah, sure, as soon as we can.”

Zane hung up, then turned to Lindsey, who was standing facing him now with her purse in hand. “They’re starting to work on it, and it won’t be long.” He couldn’t stand her just standing there looking at him as if everything was just fine. It was annoying the hell out of him to be stuck like this. “This doesn’t bother you at all?”

She blinked at the question, then shrugged. “Well, of course it does. I don’t want to plunge down seven or eight floors, that’s for sure.”

“I don’t think we’re going to plunge anywhere,” he said.

“Then, we wait. And if we’re waiting, we can talk some more. No wasted time.”

It sounded like something he would have said, if this had happened during rushed business negotiations. And when he thought about it, he had to admit that this was exactly that. He could have this nanny thing sewn up before they got to the parking garage.

“You’ve missed your calling.”

“Oh, what’s that?”

“You should have hired on to help with the cuts around here.”

“I think they’re doing just fine in the cutting department without me,” she said a bit tightly.

“You do say what you mean, don’t you.”

Her lashes lowered slightly, shadowing her expression just a bit. “A bad habit.”

“I was giving you a compliment, believe it or not.”

“I’m sure you meant it as a compliment.”

He wasn’t gaining any ground here at all, and worse than that, he had the feeling he wasn’t even controlling this interview. He backed against the closed doors and crossed his arms. “Okay, forget the compliments. We can talk business. We aren’t going anywhere just yet, as you pointed out.”

“Not unless we crawl out the escape hatch.”

He looked up at the panel in the ceiling. “I think we’ll save that for a last option.” He glanced back at her, sensing a heat in the car. Probably the air-conditioning not working right. “So, you’ve got a degree, and you’re working toward your master’s?”

“Slowly but surely. But you know, where kids are concerned, degrees are just so much confetti.”

“If academic qualifications don’t matter, what does?”

“Being there, just being there and caring.”

“And you care.” It wasn’t a question but a statement of fact. Her caring was very evident even in the short time he’d been around her. He wasn’t used to passion where it concerned work. Anger, intensity, drive. But not real passion. “Do you put that on your resume?”

She looked around, then unexpectedly moved back and sat on the floor, her back against the far wall, her legs crossed Indian-style. She laid her purse by her and looked up at him. “No, I don’t put that on my resume. It’s a given in this business. Why would anyone work with kids if they didn’t care about them?”

“I don’t know,” he said, watching that passion he’d glimpsed building in her again. And it was fascinating.

“Well, I do know, and I wouldn’t have anyone working for me that didn’t care. Amy Blake doesn’t have any degrees, but she’s all heart when it comes to kids. Her own child is so lucky, even without a father. She’s totally rearranged her life to be with her little girl.” She spoke in a rush. “She loves her own child, and she loves the other kids that she helps care for.”

“She works for you?” That didn’t make sense. Unless the agency had gotten so fed up with their failure to find a nanny for him that the boss had come for the final interview.

“She’s the coordinator and the heart behind the center.”

“The center?”

He heard her take a breath, then she pressed her hands palm down on her knees. “Okay, Mr. Terrel, since we’re stuck here and you’ve asked me to talk, I’m going out on a limb with you. I know that you and Mr. Holden are partners or associates or whatever you want to call it, and you must trust each other completely. You have equal input. You’re both in charge, from what I hear, and even though he’s the one who’s been doing the work on this, I think you can help me. Either by agreeing to what I need, or by talking to him about it and getting his agreement.”

She thought he was Matthew? “I don’t know what you think, but—”

“Oh, I’m sorry if I misunderstood the arrangement. I thought you were co-C.E.O.’s or something like that. I thought you could probably take care of this. Or if you can’t, maybe you could convince Mr. Holden that Just For Kids needs the funding badly. We need more programs, more people to help, so the child-worker ratio comes down. It’s imperative that we have more supplies for the younger children.”

He couldn’t have cut in if he’d wanted to: she was talking quickly, and her hands were moving to emphasize her points. So he just watched, listened and took in the fact that he’d found L. Atherton in a stalled elevator.

“And a van,” she went on. “A better van, for the after-school pickups. That would be great—nothing fancy, but one that keeps running and won’t break down. And the oven in the kitchen, well, it just either burns or doesn’t cook.”

She assumed that he was Matthew, and he’d assumed that she was there as a nanny candidate. They’d both been wrong, dead wrong. “Just For Kids?”

“Mr. Lewis understood that it was the backbone of the company, that an employee who knew his or her child was safe and cared for and within arm’s reach was an employee who could give more to the company than a worried parent.” She spread her hands palms up. “He knew that having the center right here was a win-win situation. And sending back my requests for funding marked “Denied” just isn’t right.”

L. Atherton. The name scrawled on the bottom of every request that had crossed his desk. Lindsey. No wonder she’d said the things she’d said the first time they’d run into each other. He was the one cutting her job bit by bit. “You sent the requests, didn’t you.”

“Of course,” she said with a slight frown. “I know they had to be annoying, but it’s important.” Then the frown was gone and she was talking quickly again. “If you could just talk to Mr. Holden and try to explain to him how very important the center is. He’s got to have some semblance of a heart somewhere inside him, and if you could…” Her voice trailed off and high color touched her cheeks, as she lifted one hand to touch her lips with the tips of her fingers. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I did it again. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“You think Zane Holden is heartless?”

She bit her lip hard and tried to regroup, to do some damage control. “I think he’s not looking at the whole picture on this. Mr. Lewis saw it, and he—”

“Ran this company like it was a hobby, letting his heart get in the way of the business. That’s why he’s not at the helm of LynTech any longer, and why the company was on a downhill slide when it was acquired.”

“Then, why would anyone pay all that money for it if it wasn’t worth it?”

“Some things are more valuable in pieces than they are as a whole.”

“I don’t understand. Mr. Holden and you bought the company to break it up, and you both thought you could make money out of the rubble?”

He closed the space between them and crouched in front of her. “It’s called restructuring, and it works, especially in a high-tech company like this, where the original owner acquired and acquired and never cut his losses.”

“And the day care center is one of the casualties in this restructuring?”

For some reason the things he’d said to Matt about eventually closing the center seemed heartless when he thought about saying them to her. “The idea of a business is to make money,” he said bluntly. “Not to give it away.”

“That’s just it. It’s not giving it away. It’s making your employees happy, more secure—and that has to be a big plus.”

“More money in their paychecks would make them happy. But that’s not going to happen, either, at the moment. Can’t you understand that there isn’t any money and there won’t be any money for the center?”

She leaned toward him, and it brought waves of a subtle scent that he’d sensed the first time he’d been close to her. A light flowery scent that was barely there, yet seemed to permeate the air in the still elevator.

“I’m beginning to understand,” she said with a frown that drew her finely arched eyebrows together.

“So the requests for funding increases are going to stop?”

Her frown deepened. “Not in this lifetime.”

He’d been in wars before for business, but this woman was an unsettling adversary. She knew she didn’t stand a chance, yet she wasn’t backing down one bit. “It’s a waste of time,” he said tightly.

Her eyes narrowed. “Talking to you is a waste of time. That’s obvious. I need to talk to Mr. Holden. Maybe he’ll realize that what I’m saying is true. Maybe he’ll start to think like Mr. Lewis, instead of thinking like…like an Ebenezer Scrooge.”

“And I suppose that you’re Tiny Tim who’s going to show old Ebenezer the real meaning of humanity?”

His usual sarcasm, which worked so well in the business world, hit her and hit her hard. He could see it in the way her expression tightened and that color flooded back into her cheeks. Damn it, he hated the twinge of regret that came to him as he watched her. But what was there to regret in doing what he had to do? That was ridiculous.

“No, I’m not Tiny Tim, and I’m not about to try to make Mr. Holden human, I’m just trying to make sure that the kids get what they need. That’s all.”

“At the expense of the company?”

She gave a deep, exasperated sigh. “What about the kids?”

“They’re their parents’ problem.” It seemed so logical to him. “They can take care of them. They can make whatever arrangements are necessary.”

“Day care in some other place, where they can drop them at six in the morning and pick them up at six at night? Where they don’t see them for twelve hours? Or no day care, so the kids come home to an empty house and are terrified until their parents can get home from work?”

She was talking quickly, and he could see how passionate she was about the center. “Maybe you want the kids to lock themselves in a closet so they’ll feel safe and so they don’t feel vulnerable to the boogeymen out there.”

She stopped abruptly, her breathing rapid and echoing in the small space. She was shaking slightly and clutching her hands together tightly in her lap. It made him uncomfortable. He stood, moving back from her before he did something stupid, like trying to make her stop looking so pained.

“No, of course not,” he said as he straightened and put distance between them. “That’s not going to happen.”

Her tongue darted out to touch her pale lips, and she seemed to sink back against the wall. “But it is going to happen, and you don’t have a clue what I’m talking about. You were probably born with a silver spoon in your mouth, and you probably had someone there all the time.” She breathed unsteadily, but her words were slower now. “You had parents who never had to leave you alone so they could go out to earn money to keep a roof over your head and food on the table.”

He’d had the roof and the food and the nannies, but as far as being alone…that was a matter of definition. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, either,” he muttered.

“I know kids, and I know what they feel,” she said tightly as she stared up at him with no retreat in her. “And kids are forever.”

He had a flashing thought that passion had been the wrong word to use to describe this woman. Her determination crackled around him. “If you care so much, why aren’t you out in the projects and slums and low-income areas, fighting for day care?”

He’d thought that would stop her in her tracks, but he was as wrong about that as he’d been in thinking she was a nanny candidate.

“Maybe I should be,” she conceded as she got to her feet and swiped at her jeans with both hands, brushing off imaginary dust or dirt. “But I don’t have unlimited funds. I wasn’t born to privilege. I was orphaned when I was six, then in foster care, then on my own. And I need to make a living.”

She looked at him, only a foot of space separating them now, and there was an extra brightness to her eyes. Not tears, or self-pity, but something that added to his discomfort.

“Kids gets scared even in middle-class homes, and Mr. Lewis gave me a chance at LynTech to help those kids.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I thought I could make a difference.”

She could go from intense to vulnerable in a moment. “So, your bottom line is money, too, isn’t it,” he said with more bite than he’d intended.

“The bottom line is helping the kids.”

That was enough for Zane. He didn’t want to be in this closed space with a woman who could make him uneasy, who was starting to make him wonder if she’d been right—that he didn’t have a heart. He turned from her and grabbed at the red emergency phone again. A kid was back on the line immediately. “Yes?”

“How long is this going to take?”

“I’m not sure, sir, but we’re working on it.”

“What’s the problem?”

“That’s just it, we aren’t sure.”

“What in the hell does that mean?”

“Sir, we thought the system was all in place. But the computer readout is all wrong. The thing is, we need someone to read it and figure out what to do. Where it went off track.”

“Then, get someone to do it.”

“Well, that’s the problem. The only guy I know of who could do it isn’t available.”

“Offer overtime—whatever it takes,” he said.

“That might not work.”

He was tired of this runaround, and his frustration level was rising quickly. “Can you give me a straight answer on this? I don’t have the time to play twenty questions.”

“The guy who used to do it, well, he was let go last week. He was laid off, and his position was eliminated.”

Zane had a vague memory of Matt agreeing to cut back on the maintenance staff, but this was ridiculous. “Do you know him?”

“Yes, sir, I do. John Olson.”

“Then, call him and pay whatever he wants to have him come in and take care of this as quickly as possible.”

“Sir, I don’t think—”

“Just do it, and do it right now.” He bit out the words.

“Yes, sir,” the man said, and hung up.

Zane slowly put the receiver back on the hook, then braced himself to face Lindsey.