Читать книгу Wedding Vows: With This Ring - Barbara Hannay - Страница 9

THE bride flounced out of the room, and unbidden, words crowded into Houston’s brain.

And then they lived happily ever after.

He scoffed at himself, and the words. Yes, it was true that a dress like that, filled out by a girl like Molly Michaels, represented a fairy tale.

But the fact she was stuck in it, the zipper stubborn, her hair wound painfully around the pearls, represented more the reality: relationships of the romantic variety were sticky, complicated, entrapping.

Besides, a man didn’t come from the place Houston Whitford had come from and believe in fairy tales. He believed in his own strength, his own ability to survive. He saw the cynicism with which he had regarded that dress as a gift.

In fact, the unexpected appearance of one of the Second Chances employees in full wedding regalia only confirmed what several weeks of research had already told him.

Second Chances reminded Houston, painfully, of an old-style family operated bookstore. Everyone was drawn to the warmth of it, it was always crowded and full of laughter and discussion, but when it came time to actually buy a book it could not compete with the online giants, streamlined, efficient, economical. Just how Houston liked his businesses, running like well-oiled machines. No brides, no ancient, adorable little old ladies at the helm.

He fought an urge to press the scar over the old break on the bridge of his nose. It ached unbearably lately. Had it ached ever since, in a rare moment of weakness, he had agreed to help out here? This wasn’t his kind of job. He dealt in reality, in cold, hard fact. Where did a poorly run charity, with brides in the hallways and octogenarians behind the desks, fit into his world?

“And that was our Molly,” Miss Viv said brightly. “Isn’t she lovely?”

“Lovely,” Houston managed. He recalled part two of his mission here.

Miss Viv had confessed to him she was thinking of retiring. She loved Molly and considered her her natural successor. But she was a little worried. She wanted his opinion on whether Molly was too soft-hearted for the job.

“Is she getting ready for her wedding?” On the basis of their very brief encounter, Molly Michaels seemed the kind of woman that a man who was not cynical and jaded like him—a man who believed in fairy tales, love ever after, family—would snatch up.

He didn’t even like the direction of those thoughts. The wedding dress should only be viewed in the context of the job he had to do here. What was Miss Michaels doing getting ready for her wedding at work? How did that reflect on a future for her in management?

The job he hadn’t wanted was getting less attractive by the second. A demand of complete professionalism was high on his list of fixes for the ailing companies he put back on the track to success.

“She’s not getting ready for her wedding,” Miss Viv said with a sympathetic sigh. “The exact opposite, I’m afraid. Her engagement broke off before they even set a date. A blessing, though the poor child did not see it that way at the time. She’s not been herself since it happened.”

At this point, with anyone else, he would make it clear, right now, he didn’t want to know a single thing about Molly Michaels’s personal life. But this job was different than any he’d ever taken on before. And this was Miss Viv.

Everybody was a poor child to her. His need to analyze, to have answers to puzzles, surprised him by not filing this poor child information under strictly personal, none of his business, nothing to do with the job at hand. Instead, he allowed the question to form in his mind. If a man believed in the fairy tale enough to ask someone like Molly Michaels to be his wife, why would he then be fool enough to let her get away?

Because the truth was lovely was an unfortunate understatement, and would have been even before he had made the mistake of making the bridal vision somehow real by touching the heated silk of Molly’s skin, the coiled copper of her hair.

Molly’s eyes, the set of her sensuous mouth and the corkscrewing hair, not to mention the curves of a slender figure, had not really said lovely to him. Despite the fairy tale of the dress the word that had come to mind first was sexy.

Was that what had made him get up from his chair? Not really to rescue her from her obvious discomfort, but to see what was true about her? Sexy? Or innocent?

He was no Boy Scout, after all, not given to good deeds, which was another reason he should not be here at Second Chances.

Still, was his need to know that about Molly Michaels personal or professional? He had a feeling at Second Chances those lines had always been allowed to blur. Note to self, he thought wryly, no more rescuing of damsels in distress.

Though, really that was why he was here, even if Miss Viv was obviously way too old to qualify as a damsel.

Houston Whitford was CEO of Precision Solutions, a company that specialized in rescuing ailing businesses, generally large corporations, from the brink of disaster. His position used all of his strengths, amongst which he counted a formidable ability to not be swayed be emotion.

He was driven, ambitious and on occasion, unapologetically ruthless, and he could see that was a terrible fit with Second Chances. He didn’t really even like charities, cynically feeling that for one person to receive the charity of another was usually as humiliating for the person in need as it was satisfying for the one who could give.

But the woman who sat in front of him was a reminder that no man had himself alone to thank for his circumstances.

Houston Whitford was here, at Second Chances, because he owed a debt.

And he was here for the same reason he suspected most men blamed when they found themselves in untenable situations.

His mother, Beebee, had suggested he help out. So, it had already been personal, some line blurred, even before the bride had showed up.

Beebee was Houston’s foster mother, but it was a distinction he rarely made. She had been there when his real mother—as always—had not. Beebee had been the first person he had ever felt genuinely cared about him and what happened to him. He owed his life as it was to her charity, and he knew it.

Miss Viv was Beebee’s oldest friend, part of that remarkable group of women who had circled around a tough boy from a terrible neighborhood and seen something in him—believed in something in him—that no one had ever seen or believed in before.

You didn’t say sorry, too busy in the face of that kind of a debt.

It had started a month ago, when he’d hosted a surprise birthday celebration for Beebee. The catered high tea had been held at his newly acquired “Gold Coast” condominium with its coveted Fifth Avenue address, facing Central Park.

Beebee and “the girls” had been all sparkle then, oohing over the white-gloved doorman, the luxury of the lobby, the elevators, the hallways. Inside the sleek interior of his eleven-million-dollar apartment, no detail had gone unremarked, from tiger wood hardwood to walnut moldings to the spectacular views.

But as the party had progressed, Miss Viv had brought up Second Chances, the charity she headed, and that all “the girls” supported. She confessed it was having troubles, financial and otherwise, that baffled her.

“Oh, Houston will help, won’t you, dear?” his foster mom had said.

And all eyes had been on him, and in a blink he wasn’t a successful entrepreneur who had proven himself over and over again, but that young ruffian, poor child, rescued from mean streets and a meaner life, desperately trying to live up to their expectation that he was really a good person under that tough exterior.

But after that initial weakness that had made him say yes, he’d laid down the law. If they wanted his help, they would have to accept the fact he was doing it his way: no interfering from them, no bringing him home-baked goodies to try to sway him into keeping things the very same way that had gotten the charity into trouble in the first place and especially no references to his past.

Of course, they hadn’t understood that.

“But why ever not? We’re all so proud of you, Houston!”

But Beebee and her friends weren’t just proud of him because of who he was now. No, they were the ones who held in their memories that measuring stick of who he had once been…a troubled fourteen-year-old kid from the tenements of Clinton, a neighborhood that had once been called Hell’s Kitchen.

They saw it as something to be admired that he had overcome his circumstances—his father being sent to prison, his mother abandoning him—but he just saw it as something left behind him.

Beebee and Miss Viv dispensed charity as easily as they breathed, but as well-meaning as they were, they had no idea how shaming that part of his life, when he had been so needy and so vulnerable, was to him. He did not excuse himself because he had only been fourteen.

He still felt, sometimes, that he was their poor child, an object of pity that they had rescued and nursed back to wellness like a near-drowned kitten.

Was he insecure about his past? No, he didn’t think so. But it was over and it was done. He’d always had an ability to place his life in neat compartments; his need for order did not allow for overlapping.

But suddenly, he thought of that letter that had arrived at his home last week, a cheap envelope and a prison postmark lying on a solid mahogany desk surely a sign that a man could not always keep his worlds from overlapping.

Houston had told no one about the arrival of that letter, not even the only other person who knew his complete history, Beebee.

Was that part of why he was sending her away with Miss Viv? Not just because he knew they could probably not resist sharing the titillating details of his past with anyone who would listen, including all the employees here at Second Chances, but because he didn’t want to talk to Beebee about that letter? The thought of that letter, plus being here at Second Chances, made him feel what Houston Whitford hated feeling the most: vulnerable, as if that most precious of commodities, control, was slipping away from him.

And there was something about this place—the nature of charity, Miss Viv and his history, Molly, sweetly sensual in virginal white—that made him feel, not as if his guard was being let down, but that his bastions were being stormed.

He was a proud man. That pride had carried him through times when all else had failed. He didn’t want Miss Viv’s personal information about him undermining his authority to rescue her charity, changing the way people he had to deal with looked at him.

And when people found out his story, it did change the way they looked at him.

He could tell, for instance, Molly Michaels would fall solidly in the soft-hearted category. She’d love an opportunity to treat him like a kitten who had nearly drowned! And he wasn’t having it.

“Let’s discuss Molly Michaels for a minute,” he said carefully. “I’d like to have a little talk with her about—”

“Don’t be hard on her!” Miss Viv cried. “Try not to judge Molly for the outfit. She was just being playful. It was actually good to see that side of her again,” Miss Viv said.

Playful. He liked playful. In the bedroom.

In the office? Not so much.

“Please don’t hurt her feelings,” Miss Viv warned him.

Hurt her feelings? What did feelings have to do with running an organization, with expecting the best from it, with demanding excellence?

He did give in to the little impulse, then, to press the ridge of the scar along his nose.

Miss Viv’s voice lowered into her juicy-secret tone. “The broken engagement? She’s had a heartbreak recently.”

It confirmed his wisdom in sending Miss Viv away for the duration of the Second Chances business makeover. He didn’t want to know this, at all. He pressed harder. The ache along the scar line did not diffuse.

“A cad, I’m afraid,” Miss Viv said, missing his every signal that he did not want to be any part of the office stories, the gossip, the personalities.

Despite his desire to remove himself from it, Houston felt a sudden and completely unexpected pulsing of fury.

Not for the circumstances he found himself in, certainly not at Miss Viv, who could not help herself. No, Houston felt an undisciplined desire to hurt a man he did not know for breaking the heart of a woman he also did not know—save for the exquisite tenderness of her neck beneath his fingertips.

That flash of unreasonable fury, an undisciplined reaction, was gone nearly as soon as it happened, but it still served to remind him that things did not always stay in their neat compartments. He had not overcome what he had come from as completely as everyone believed.

He came from a world where violence was the default reaction.

Houston knew if he was to let down his guard, lose his legendary sense of control for a second—one second—he could become that man his father had been, his carefully constructed world blown apart by forces—fury, passion—that could rise up in a storm that he had no hope of taming.

It was the reason Houston did not even allow himself to contemplate his life in the context of fairy tales represented by a young woman in a bridal gown. There was no room for a compartment like that in the neat, tidy box that made up his life.

There was a large compartment for work, an almost equally large one for his one and only passion, the combat sport of boxing.

There were smaller compartments for his social obligations, for Beebee, for occasional and casual relationships with the rare member of the opposite sex who shared his aversion for commitment. There were some compartments that were nailed shut.

But now the past was not staying in the neat compartment system. The compartment that held Houston’s father and his mother was being pried up, despite the nails trying to hold it firmly shut.

Houston’s father had written his only son a letter that asked nothing and expected nothing. And yet at the same time Houston was bitterly aware that how he reacted to it would prove who he really was.

After nineteen years, his father was getting out of prison.

And it felt as if all those years of Houston outdistancing his past had been a total waste of energy. Because there it was, waiting for him, right around the next bend in time.

The scar across his nose flared with sudden pain, and Houston pressed a finger into the line of the old break, aware he was entering a danger zone that the mean streets of Clinton had nothing on.

“Have a seat,” Houston invited Molly several hours later, after he had personally waved goodbye to Beebee and Miss Viv at the airport.

“Thank you.” She took a seat, folded her hands primly in her lap and looked at him expectantly.

It was his second encounter with her, and he was determined it was going to go differently than the first. It was helpful that Miss Viv was not there smiling at him as if he was her favorite of all charity cases.

And it was helpful that Molly Michaels was all business now, no remnant of the blushing bride she had been anywhere in sight. No, she was dressed in a conservative slack suit, her amazing hair pinned sternly up on her head.

Still, it was way too easy to remember how it had felt underneath his hands. He was not going to allow himself to contemplate the fact that even after untangling her from that dress several hours ago he was no closer to knowing her truth: was she sexy? Or innocent?

Not thoughts that were strictly professional. In fact, those were exactly the kind of thoughts that made a man crazy.

“I’m sorry about the dress. You must think I’m crazy.”

Damn her for using that word!

The nails holding a compartment of Houston’s past shut gave an outrageous squeak. Houston remembered the senior Whitford had been made crazy by a beautiful woman, Houston’s mother.

Who hadn’t she made crazy? Beautiful, but untouchable. Both of them had loved her desperately, a fact that had only seemed to amuse her, allowed her to toy with her power over them. The truth? Houston would have robbed a bank for her, too, if he’d thought it would allow him to finally win something from her.

The memory, unwanted, of his craving for something his mother had been unable to give made him feel annoyed with himself.

“Crazy?” he said. You can’t begin to know the meaning of the word. “Let’s settle for eccentric.”

She blushed, and his reaction was undisciplined, unprofessional, a ridiculous desire, like a juvenile boy, to find out what made her blush and then to make it happen often.

“So, you’ve been here how long?” Houston asked, even though he knew, just to get himself solidly back on the professional track.

“As an employee for several years. But I actually started here as a volunteer during high school.”

Again, unprofessional thoughts tickled at him: what had she been like during high school? The popular girl? The sweet geek? Would she have liked him?

Houston remembered an incident from his own high school years. She probably would not have liked him, at all. He shook off the memory like a pesky fly. High school? That was fifteen years ago! That was the problem with things coming out of their compartments. They could become unruly, pop up unannounced, uninvited, in moments when his concentration was challenged, when his attention drifted.

Which was rarely, thank God.

Since the memories had come, though, he exercised cool discipline over them. He reminded himself that good things could come from bad. His mother’s abandonment had ultimately opened the door to a different world for him; the high school “incident” had led to Beebee putting him in boxing classes “to channel his aggression.”

Houston was more careful than most men with the word love, but he thought he could honestly say he loved the combat sport of boxing, the absolute physical challenge of it, from the grueling cardiovascular warm-up to punching the heavy bags and the speed bags, practicing the stances, the combinations, the jabs and the hooks. He occasionally sparred, but awareness of the unexpected power of fury prevented him from taking matches.

Now he wondered if a defect in character like fury could lie dormant, spring back to life when it was least expected.

No, he snapped at himself.

Yes, another voice answered when a piece of Molly’s hair sprang free of the restraints she had pinned it down with, curled down the soft line of her temple.

She’d been engaged to a cad.

Tonight, he told himself sternly, he would punch straight left and right combinations into the heavy bag until his hands, despite punch mitts, ached from it. Until his whole body hurt and begged for release. For now he would focus, not on her hair or her past heartbreaks, but on the job he was here to do.

Houston realized Molly’s expression had turned quizzical, wondered how much of the turmoil of that memory he had just had he had let slip over his usually well-schooled features.

Did she look faintly sympathetic? Had she seen something he didn’t want her to see? Good grief, had Miss Viv managed to let something slip about him?

Whatever, he knew just how to get rid of that look on her face, the look of a woman who lived to make the world softer and better.

A cad could probably spot that gentle, compassion-filled face from a mile away! It would be good for her to toughen up.

“Let me be very blunt,” he said, looking at the papers in front of him instead of her hair, the delicate creamy skin at her throat. “Second Chances is in a lot of trouble. I need to turn things around and I need to do it fast.”

“Second Chances is in trouble?” Molly was genuinely astounded. “But how? The secondhand stores that provide the majority of our funding seem to do well.”

“They do perform exceedingly well. The problem seems to be in an overextension of available funds. Your department?”

Here it was: could she make the kind of hard decisions that would be required of her if she took over the top spot in the newly revamped Second Chances?

The softness left her face, replaced with wariness. Better than softness in terms of her managerial abilities. If that was good, why did he feel so bad?

“You can’t run an organization that brings in close to a million dollars a year like a mom and pop store. You can’t give everyone who comes in here with their hand out and a hard luck story everything they ask for.”

“I don’t!” she said. “I’m very careful what I fund.”

He saw her flinch from his bluntness, but at this crucial first stage there was no other way to prepare people for the changes that had to happen. Another little curl broke free of her attempt to tame her hair, and he watched it, sentenced himself to another fifteen minutes on the bag and forged on.

“Two thousand dollars to the Flatbush Boys Choir travel fund? There is no Flatbush Boys Choir.”

“I know that now,” she said, defensively. “I had just started here. Six of them came in. The most adorable little boys in matching sweaters. They even sang a song for me.”

“Here’s a check written annually to the Bristol Hall Ladies’ Lunch Group. No paperwork. No report. Is there a Bristol Hall Ladies’ Lunch Group? What do they do? When do they meet? Why do they get money for lunch?”

“That was grandfathered in from before I started. Miss Viv looks after it.”

“So, you’re project manager, except when Miss Viv takes over?”

“She is the boss,” Molly said uneasily, her defensive tone a little more strident.

“Ah.” He studied her for a moment, then said softly, “Look, I’m not questioning your competence.”

She looked disbelieving. Understandably.

“It’s just that some belt-tightening is going to have to happen. What I need from you as I do research, review files and talk to people is for you to go over your programming in detail. I need exact breakdowns on how you choose programs. I need to review your budgets, I need to analyze your monitoring systems.”

She looked like she had been hit by a tank. Now would be the wrong time to remember the sweet softness of her skin under his fingertips, how damned protective he had felt when he heard about the cad. Now he was the cad!

“How soon can you have that to me?” he pressed.

“A week?”

A chief executive officer needed to work faster, make decisions more quickly. “You have until tomorrow morning.”

She glared at him. That was good. Much easier to defend against than sweet, shocked vulnerability. The angry spark in her eyes could almost make him forget her hair, that tender place at her nape. Almost.

He plunged forward, eager to get the barriers—compromised by hands in hair—back up where they belonged. Eager to find out what he needed to know about her—professionally—so he could make a recommendation when the job here was done and move on.

“I’ve been sorting through paperwork for a number of weeks,” he told her. “I have to tell you, after a brief look, it’s quite evident to me that you’re going to have to ax some of your projects. Sooner rather than later. I’ve short-listed a few that are on the block.”

“Ax projects?” she said with disbelief. “Some of my projects are on the block?”

He nodded. He felt not the least like a knight riding in to rescue the business in distress. Or the damsel. He was causing distress, in fact. The feeling of being the cad intensified even though he knew in the long run this would pay off for Second Chances, guarantee their good health and success in the coming years and possibly decades if this was done right, if they had the right leader to move ahead with.

“Which ones?” She went so pale a faint dusting of freckles appeared over the bridge of her nose.

He was annoyed that his feeling of being the cad only deepened, and that she was acting as if he had asked her to choose one of her children to float down the river in a basket. He was aware of feeling the faintest twinge of a foreign emotion, which after a second or two he identified, with further annoyance, as guilt.

Houston Whitford did not feel guilty about doing his job! Satisfied, driven, take charge, in control. Of course, generally, it would be fairly safe to say he didn’t feel, period.

He used a reasonable tone of voice, designed to convince either her or himself that of course he was not a cad! “We have to make some practical decisions for the future of this organization.”

She looked unconvinced about his cad status, and the careful use of the we did not even begin to make her think they were a team.

She looked mutinous, then stunned, then mutinous again. Her face was an open book of emotion.

“Is it that bad?” she finally sputtered. “How can it be? Miss Viv never said a word. She didn’t even seem worried when she left!”

He had actually sheltered Miss Viv from how bad things were as he had begun to slug his way through the old gal’s abysmal record and bookkeeping systems. Miss Viv—and his mother, Second Chances’s largest patron—trusted him to fix this. He would. Neither of them needed to know the extent he had to go to. But Molly Michaels did, since the mantle of it all could quite possibly fall on her slender shoulders.

“Yes, it’s bad.” He closed the fuchsia cover on one of the project reports, the mauve one on another and put those files on the desk between them. “The Easter Egg hunt is gone. The poetry competition is out. And I’m looking at the prom dress thing, and—”

“Prom Dreams?” she gasped. “You can’t! You don’t know what it means to those girls.”

“Have you ever known real hardship?” he asked her, his voice deliberately cold. This job was not going to be easy no matter how he did it. Hard choices had to be made. And he had to see if she was willing to make them. There was no way she was going to be suited to taking over the top job at Second Chances if she was always going to be blinded by the stars in her eyes.

But cad that he was, his gaze went to the lip that she was nibbling with distraction. He was shocked that out of the blue he wondered if one of his hard choices was not going to be whether or not to taste those luscious lips before he made his escape!

She met his eyes. Stopped nibbling. Things that should be simple, cut-and-dried, suddenly seemed complicated. He wished she wasn’t looking at him as if she was remembering, too, that unguarded moment when two strangers had touched and the potential for something wild and unpredictable had arced in the air between them.

“My parents divorced when I was young,” she offered, softly. “I considered that a terrible hardship. The only one I’ve known, but life altering.”

Thank God she didn’t mention the cad! He could see the pain in her eyes. Houston reminded himself, sternly, that he likely had a genetic predisposition toward allowing women to make him crazy. Because he had no business thinking of trying to change the light in her eyes. But he was thinking of it, of how soft her lips would be beneath his own.

Why would that genetic predisposition toward crazy be surfacing now, for God’s sake? He’d been around many, many beautiful women. He’d always taken his ability to keep his emotional distance for granted, one of the few gifts from his chaotic childhood.

Don’t form attachments. Don’t care too deeply.

Except for his business and boxing. Both had rigid guidelines and rules that if followed, produced a predictable result. That made them safe things to care about. An occasional bruised knuckle or fat lip, a skirmish in the business world, those hazards were nothing compared to the minefields of becoming attached to people, where the results were rarely predictable.

No, he knew exactly where he was going to channel his substantial passion and energy.

He was being drawn backward, feeling shadows from his past falling over him, entirely against his will. He blamed the letter from his father and the unfortunate fact it coincided with the past weeks of going over files of people who were as desperate and as needy as his family had once been.

It was his annoyance at himself for allowing those thoughts into his business world that made his tone even sharper than it had to be, even if he was testing her ability to run a million dollar corporation.

“Have you ever been hungry?” But even as he asked it, he knew that question, too, stemmed not so much from professional interest as from a dark past he thought he had left behind.

“No,” she said, “but I think I can imagine the desperation of it.”

“Can you?” he said cynically.

Without warning a memory popped over the barrier of the thick, high wall he had constructed around the compartment of his childhood.

So hungry. Not a crumb of food in the house. Going into Sam’s, the bakery at the corner of his street, Houston’s heart beating a horrible tattoo in his chest, his mouth watering from the smells and the sights of the freshly baked bread. Looking around, it was crowded, no one paying any attention to him. Sam’s back turned. Houston’s hands closing around one of the still-warm loafs in a basket outside the counter, stuffing it under his thin jacket. Lifting his eyes to see Sam looking straight at him. And then Sam turning away, saying nothing, and Houston feeling the shame of the baker’s pity so strongly he could not eat the bread. He brought it home to his mother, who had been indifferent to the offering, uncaring of what it had cost him.

Molly was looking at him, understandably perplexed by the question.

Stop it, he ordered himself. But another question came out anyway, clipped with unexpected anger. “Out of work?”

“I don’t suppose the summer I chose to volunteer here instead of taking a paying job counts, does it?”

“The fact you could make a choice to volunteer instead of work indicates to me you have probably not known real hardship.”

“That doesn’t make me a bad person!” she said sharply. “Or unqualified for my job!”

“No,” he said, taking a deep breath, telling himself to smarten up. “Of course it doesn’t. I’m just saying your frame of reference when choosing projects may not take into account the harsh realities the people you are helping live with.”

Another memory popped over that wall. His father drunk, belligerent, out of work again. Not his fault. Never his fault. His mother screaming at his father. You loser. The look on his father’s face. Rage. The flying fists, the breaking glass.

Houston could feel his heart beating as rapidly as though it had just happened. Molly was watching him, silently, the dismay and anger that had been in her face fading, becoming more thoughtful.

He ordered himself, again, to stop this. It was way too personal. But, master of control that he was, he did not stop.

“Have you ever had no place to live?”

“Of course not!”

Homelessness was so far from her reality that she could not even fathom it happening to her. Not that he had any right to treat that as a character defect, just because it had once been part of his childhood reality.

The eviction notice pounded onto the door. The hopeless feeling of nowhere to go and no place to feel safe. That sense that even that place he had called home was only an illusion. A sense that would be confirmed as the lives of the Whitfords spiraled steadily downward toward disaster.

Again Molly was silent, but her eyes were huge and had darkened to a shade of green that reminded him of a cool pond on a hot day, a place that promised refuge and rest, escape from a sizzling hot pressure-cooker of a world.

Her expression went from defensive to quiet. She studied his face, her own distress gone, as if she saw something in him, focused on something in him. He didn’t want her to see his secrets, and yet something in her steady gaze made him feel seen, vulnerable.

“You’re dealing with desperation, and you’re doling out prom dresses? Are you kidding me?”

Houston was being way too harsh. He drew a deep breath, ordered himself to apologize, to back track, but suddenly the look on her face transformed. Her expression went from that quiet thoughtfulness to something much worse. Knowing.

He felt as transparent as a sheet of glass.

“You’ve known those things, haven’t you?” she guessed softly.

The truth was he would rather run through Central Park in the buff than reveal himself emotionally.

He was stunned that she had seen right through his exquisite suit, all the trappings of wealth and success, seen right through the harshness of his delivery to what lay beneath.

He was astounded that a part of him—a weak part—wanted to be seen. Completely.

He didn’t answer her immediately. The part of him that felt as if it was clamoring to be acknowledged quieted, and he came back to his senses.

He had to apply his own rules right now, to set an example for her. Don’t form attachments. Don’t care too deeply. Not about people. Not about programs.

And he needed to take away that feeling he’d been seen. Being despised for his severity felt a whole lot safer than that look she’d just given him.

He was laying down the law. If she didn’t like it, too bad. It was his job to see if she was capable of doing what needed to be done. Miss Viv wanted to hand this place over to her. There was absolutely no point doing any of this if six months later soft hearts had just run it back into the ground.

“Prom Dreams is gone,” he said coolly. “It’s up to you to get rid of it.”

She bit her lip. She looked at her shoes. She glanced back at him, and tears were stinging her eyes.

There was no room for crying at work!

And absolutely no room for the way it made him feel: as if he wanted to fix it. For Pete’s sake, he was the one who’d created it!

“I can see we are going to have a problem,” he said. “You are a romantic. And I am a realist.”

For a moment she studied him. For a moment he thought she would not be deflected by Prom Dreams, by his harshness, that despite it she would pursue what he had accidentally shown her.

But she didn’t.

“I am not a romantic!” she protested.

“Anyone who shows up for work in a wedding gown is a romantic,” he said, pleased with how well his deflection had worked. It was about her now, not about him, not about what experiences he did or didn’t know.

“I didn’t arrive in it,” she said, embarrassed and faintly defensive, again. “It was a donation. It had been put on my desk.”

“So naturally you had no alternative but to try it on.”

“Exactly. I was just checking it for damage.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, not even trying to hide his skepticism. “Anyone who wants to buy dresses instead of feeding people is a romantic.”

“It’s not that black and white!”

“Everything is black and white to a realist. Rose-colored to a romantic.”

“I might have been a romantic once,” she said, her chin tilted proudly, “but I’m not anymore.”

Ah, the cad. He shoved his hands under his desk when they insisted on forming fists.

“Good,” he said, as if he were the most reasonable of men. “Then you should have no problem getting on board for the kind of pragmatic changes that need to be made around here.”

He knew she was kidding herself about not being a romantic. Despite the recent heartbreak Miss Viv had told him about, it seemed that Molly had hopes and dreams written all over her. Could she tame that enough to do the job Second Chances needed her to do?

“Couldn’t we look at ways to increase funding, rather than cutting programs?”

Ah, that’s what he wanted to hear. Realistic ideas for dealing with problems, creative approaches to solutions, coming at challenges from different directions, experimenting with angles.

For the first time, he thought maybe. Maybe Molly Michaels had the potential to run the show. But he let nothing of that optimism into his voice. It was just too early to tell. Because it couldn’t work if she was so attached to things that she could not let go of the ones that were dragging the organization down.

“Believe me, I’m looking at everything. That’s my job. But I still want every single thing Second Chances funds to have merit, to be able to undergo the scrutiny of the people I will be approaching for funding, and to pass with flying colors.”

“I think,” she said, slowly, “our different styles might work together, not against each other, if we gave them a chance.”

He frowned at that. He wasn’t looking for a partnership. He wasn’t looking to see if they could work together. He wanted to evaluate whether she could work alone. He wasn’t looking for anything to complicate what needed to be done here. It already was way too complicated.

Memories. Unexpected emotion.

Annoyed with himself, he put Houston Whitford, CEO of Precision Solutions, solidly back in the driver’s seat.

“What needs to be done is pretty cut-and-dried,” Houston said. “I’ve figured it out on paper, run numbers, done my homework. A team of experts is coming in here tomorrow to implement changes. Second Chances needs computer experts, business analysts, accounting wizards. It needs an image face-lift. It needs to be run like a corporation, stream-lined, professional.”

“A corporation?” she said, horrified. “This is a family!”

“And like most families, it’s dysfunctional.” That was the Houston Whitford he knew and loved.

“What a terribly cynical thing to say!”

Precisely. And every bit of that cynicism had been earned in the school of hard knocks. “If you want Walt Disney, you go to the theater or rent Old Yeller from the video store. I deal in reality.”

“You don’t think the love and support of a family is possible in the business environment?”

The brief hope he’d felt about Molly’s suitability to have Miss Viv turn over the reins to her was waning.

“That would assume that the love and support of family is a reality, not a myth. Miss Michaels, there is no place for sentiment in the corporate world.”

“You’re missing all that is important about Second Chances!”

“Maybe, for the first time, someone is seeing exactly what is important about Second Chances. Survival. That would speak to the bottom line. Which at the moment is a most unbecoming shade of red.”

She eyed him, and for a moment anger and that other thing—that soft knowing—warred in her beautiful face. He pleaded with the anger to win. Naturally, the way his day was going, it didn’t.

“Let me show you my Second Chances before you make any decisions about the programs,” she implored. “You’ve seen them in black and white, on paper, but there’s more to it than that. I want to show you the soul of this organization.”

He sighed. “The soul of it? And you’re not romantic? Organizations don’t have souls.”

“The best ones do. Second Chances does,” she said with determination. “And you need to see that.”

Don’t do it, he ordered himself.

But suddenly it seemed like a life where a man was offered a glimpse at soul and refused it was a bereft place, indeed. Not that he was convinced she could produce such a glimpse. Romantics had a tendency to see things that weren’t there. But realists didn’t. Why not give her a chance to defend her vision? Really, could there be a better way to see if she had what it took to run Second Chances?

Still, he would have to spend time with her. More time than he had expected. And he didn’t want to. And yet he did.

But if he did go along with her, once he had seen she was wrong, he could move forward, guilt-free. Make his recommendations about her future leadership, begin the job of cutting what needed to be cut. Possibly he wouldn’t even feel like a cad when he axed Prom Dreams.

Besides, if there was one lesson he had carried forward when he’d left his old life behind him, it was to never show fear. Or uncertainty. The mean streets fed on fear.

No, you set your shoulders and walked straight toward what you feared, unflinching, ready to battle it.

He feared the knowing that had flashed in her eyes, the place that had called to him like a cool, green pond to a man who had unknowingly been living on the searing hot sands of the desert. If he went there could he ever go back to where—to what—he had been before?

That was his fear and he walked toward it.

He shrugged, not an ounce of his struggle in his controlled voice. He said, “Okay. I’ll give you a day to convince me.”

“Two.”

He leaned back in his chair, studied her, thought it was probably very unwise to push this thing by spending two days in close proximity to her. And he realized, with sudden unease, the kind of neighborhoods her projects would be in. He’d rather hoped never to return to them.

On the other hand the past he had been so certain he had left behind was reemerging, and he regarded his unease with some distaste. Houston Whitford was not a man who shirked. Not from knowing eyes, not from the demons in his past.

He would face the pull of her and the desire to push away his past in the very same way—head-on. He was not running away from anything. There was nothing he could not handle for two short days.

“Okay,” he said again. “Two days.”

Maybe it was because it felt as if he’d made a concession and was giving her false hope—maybe it was to fight the light in her face—that he added, “But Prom Dreams is already gone. And in two days all my other decisions are final.”