Читать книгу A Whole Lot of Love - Justine Davis - Страница 8

“You wouldn’t be averse to selling your body for a good cause, would you?”

Ethan Winslow’s first thought was that this woman had the sexiest voice he’d ever heard. His second was that if he didn’t pay attention, he would end up following that low, husky, seductive, downright erotic voice into who knew what kind of mess.

“Look, Ms….”

“Laraway.”

“Ms. Laraway, I appreciate your effort, but I’d just as soon write a check.”

She laughed. Damn, the laugh was even sexier, deep and sensual. “We’ll gladly take that, too. But we’d really like something more…corporeal, as well.”

“My backside on the block?” he asked wryly.

“I’ve heard it’s a fine backside.”

She said it so cheerfully that he found himself grinning in spite of himself. He was sitting here casually discussing his backside, and the auctioning off of same, with a woman he’d never met but who had the kind of voice that gave men X-rated dreams.

“And who told you that?”

“Oh, you have many fans in town, Mr. Winslow.”

Are you one of them? he wondered almost hopefully. If she looked anything like her voice, he might reconsider doing something about his dismal social life.

“Surely you wouldn’t want to disappoint them?” the voice said. “You could bring in the largest donation of the night, from what I’ve been told.”

“You’ve been told,” he said, “way too much.”

“It’s a character flaw,” she said with a dramatic sigh. “People talk to me.”

Ethan laughed. It felt odd, and he wondered if his baby sister was right and he really had become too darn serious. He leaned back in his chair, turning his head slightly to avoid being toasted by the southern California sun pouring through his office window.

“I can see why,” he said.

“They also find it very hard to say no to me.”

He didn’t doubt it; he wondered if there was a man on earth who could listen to this voice for long and still say no. To whatever she asked. He wondered idly if she’d found her way into this work because she knew the effect it had, that voice. Maybe she’d learned somewhere along the way that she could use it to loosen the wallet of any male.

At least she’d chosen to use it in a good way, if that were the case, he thought.

“You see,” she went on, “I’m very…persistent.”

“So are bill collectors.”

She laughed, that wonderful laugh again. “Some people see it that way, I know. But I prefer to think of it more like a puppy begging at the table, with big sad eyes that you try to ignore but can’t. Then you end up feeling guilty and give them what they want.”

He chuckled. “So, you admit you use guilt?”

“Absolutely,” she answered blithely. “It’s one of my best tools. Besides, once people give, they feel so much better.”

His chuckle became another laugh. “So it’s for their own good, then?”

“Absolutely. And ours, of course, but you see, that’s the best part. Everyone winds up happier. So, may I add you to the roster?”

It was on the tip of his tongue to say yes. His mouth was open to say yes. Then, at the last second, he remembered what he would be saying yes to. He’d never been to one of those kinds of charity auctions before, but visions of beauty pageant contestants were vivid in his mind.

Uh-uh. No way.

Lord, she’d almost had him, with her cheerful demeanor, her sense of humor…and that voice.

Almost.

“Listen, Ms. Laraway, I have a meeting scheduled in ten minutes. I’ll consider your…request, but I have to go.”

“Certainly. My goal is to convince you to volunteer, certainly not to interfere with your work,” the sexy voice said, and he wondered again why he didn’t just say yes. “But please, do think about it. I’ll get back to you.”

He did think about it. In fact, when his assistant stuck her head in the door and reminded him that his meeting was to begin in approximately forty-five seconds, and that the staff was already in the adjacent meeting room, he realized he’d been thinking about it for the entire ten minutes.

Or rather, thinking about the amusing, sexy-voiced Ms. Laraway. He wasn’t going to participate in her auction—parading himself around like a horse in a sale ring wasn’t his idea of fun—but it was tempting, if only to meet the woman.

He gathered the papers he’d been going over in preparation for the meeting before he’d been interrupted by the call. He started toward the meeting room door, but stopped as his assistant turned to go back out to her desk.

“Karen?”

She turned, looking at him questioningly. He’d inherited both Karen Yamato and this office when Pete Collins had turned over the reins to him and retired. His old mentor had told him that Karen was both the glue that held things together and the oil that kept them running, and it hadn’t taken Ethan long to realize Pete had been understating things a bit. The petite, ageless-seeming Eurasian woman, who looked to him exactly as she had when he’d first come here as a boy, was as close as anybody around West Coast Technologies came to being indispensable. And that included him.

“Did you get a number from the woman who just called? From the Alzheimer’s charity?”

“Layla? Of course.”

Layla? Her name was Layla? A voice like that, and a name like Layla Laraway? The mind fairly boggled, he thought. And his own mind was conjuring up all kinds of heated, sweaty images.

“Did you change your mind and decide to do the auction?”

“I…no. I just wanted to know when it was. I forgot to ask.” I need to know how much time I have to come up with an excuse. Then he frowned. “How did you know I wasn’t going to do it?”

Karen lifted a brow at him, reminding him without a word that even after only five years, she knew him almost as well as she’d known Pete after twenty years of working for him. Perhaps it was in part because he’d learned so much from her former boss that he’d taken on some of his characteristics. He didn’t mind; he could do a hell of a lot worse than emulate Pete Collins. Or, at least, the Pete who had sat in this office.

He fought off the old pang and was glad when Karen offered a distraction.

“I’ll call Layla back for you during your meeting, if you’d like,” she said.

He looked at her, curious about the familiarity in her tone. “You know her?”

“Only by reputation.”

“Which is?”

“Smart. Dynamic. Dedicated.” Three things guaranteed to gain Karen’s approval, Ethan thought. “What I’ve heard, I admire,” she added.

He knew too well that no one won Karen Yamato’s admiration lightly; if Layla Laraway—Lord, what a name—had gotten it without even a face-to-face, she had to be something.

“So you think I should do it?”

“I think,” she said, with a gesture toward the door, “you should go to your meeting.”

He jerked upright; he’d actually forgotten. Again.

He was still shaking his head as he walked into the room. He was rarely so scattered. He didn’t want to think a single phone call from an unknown woman had done it, because that would mean he would have to consider that both his sisters were right about his dearth of a social life, and that he was rapidly losing what they called his minimal social skills.

“We understood that you needed at least a year after you broke up with Gwen,” Margaret had told him just yesterday. “You were together a long time. But now it’s been three years. It’s time.”

“What is it with women?” he’d asked, figuring the best defense was a diversion. “Do you always put time limits on things like that?”

“Only,” his oldest sister had returned dryly, “when our brother is turning into a workaholic monk.”

“You’re too damn sexy to be celibate,” Sarah had put in.

Now that had scattered him. She was his baby sister, for crying out loud, she wasn’t supposed to be thinking things like that, let alone saying them.

Of course, she was twenty-eight now. He supposed she wasn’t quite the innocent he’d held in the dark the night their world had fallen apart. But still, it was hard not to think of her as that frightened ten-year-old sometimes. He—

“Ethan? Are you ready to start?”

He, Ethan thought as he snapped back to the present, was losing it. Definitely.

He glanced at his head of Research and Development, Mark Ayala, whose report on the progress on the Collins project was the reason for this meeting. He knew what he would hear, which was no change in the status quo, but he would take that happily over any setbacks. He’d only begun the project ten months ago, expected it to take years, and considered it worth the time and expense.

“Sorry, Mark,” he said as he took his seat at the head of the long table. “Let’s get to it.”

Mark began, in that report-making drone that always reminded Ethan of Professor Kosell’s economic theory classes. He’d always sat in the back of the theater-style lecture hall, high up and close to the door, so he could escape quickly and make it to work in the scant fifteen minutes he’d had to get across town. Unfortunately, the back part of the room was also the highest part of the room, where the heat of a hundred or so bodies rose, and that, coupled with his usual lack of sleep and the professor’s monotone, had frequently been enough to have him nodding off.

Ethan didn’t care for these types of meetings. He’d found most people too intimidated by the formal setting to really cut loose with any original thinking. He much preferred to keep current on projects by visiting his people in their own environment, where the actual work was being done. And for original thinking, he was much more likely to take a group out for pizza and beer, and let the ideas flow.

He liked the fact that West Coast Technologies was still small enough to do that, and he planned on keeping it that way. Pete had been a firm believer in “If it ain’t broke…” and Ethan was content to hold that line for now. He knew they couldn’t compete with all the large companies around, so he focused on specializing, working on things that had the potential to be multifunctional, or highly useful to a smaller group of people.

And then there were his pet projects, such as this one. Ethan made himself tune back in, as he sensed from Mark’s tone that he was finally winding down.

“—can see, overall, things look very promising. The difference between the control group and the ones with the implant are marked.”

“How much longer are your tests scheduled to run?” Ethan asked.

Mark leaned back in his chair, scratched a bit at his beard, then said, “Another two months before we move on to the next phase.” He looked down at his notes, then back at Ethan. “Speaking of that, it would be so much more helpful if we could—”

Ethan held up his hand, knowing what was coming. “Sorry. There’s got to be a better way to test this than to perform a dozen mouse lobotomies. That should be our last resort. I don’t like the idea of intentionally and permanently destroying their memory just to see if we can fix it.”

“They’re mice,” Mark said. “And pampered ones at that. The best food, comfy cages with fresh shavings every day…my dog doesn’t live as well as these guys do.”

“Maybe you should take better care of your dog,” Ethan said, but jokingly. “Think of another way, Mark. I know you can. Maybe…something temporary?”

The R and D head looked at him, then sighed. “I’ll try. I’m checking on a chemical that supposedly temporarily affects that part of the brain, but I’m not sure how it might affect results for our purposes.” He shrugged. “Maybe I should just get ’em drunk.”

Ethan grinned. “Ouch. Crabby, hungover mice. But better than psychotic ones.” He glanced down the table at Moira O’Donnell, the production manager. “You’re current, Moira?”

The redhead nodded. She tapped at her notepad with a long, flame-red nail. “I’ve tracked the necessary changes as we go. We can go into production within seven days and have enough on the market to give us a nice head start on any deconstruction copy-catters.”

Ethan understood her concern. With any such product, no matter how complex, you had to expect that as soon as a competitor could get his or her hands on it—legitimately or otherwise—they would be taking it apart to study its construction, then building their own. Every amount of inventory you could get on the market before that happened solidified your hold on the market. Even if it was years away, they needed to be ready.

But in Ethan’s mind, that didn’t apply here. “Thanks, Moira. But on this one, put your focus on speed, not foiling industrial espionage. If we succeed, I’m not looking to make a fortune, I just want it available to as many people as possible as soon as possible.”

Moira nodded, although she didn’t look happy. It was her competitive nature, Ethan guessed. But that nature was part of what made her so good at her job, and on most other projects it paid off.

He shifted his gaze to the representative from the W.C.T. legal department. “So, how goes the war on your end, David?”

“The FDA,” David Grayfox said with a grimace, “is the biggest pain in the—”

Again Ethan held up a hand. “Yeah, I know. So we can expect approval for voluntary human testing in about two zillion twenty-five?”

“About,” David mumbled.

“Keep pushing. We have to determine if what works on our pampered, well-fed and wonderfully housed lab mice will work as well on the human brain.”

He knew he was stating the obvious; this was, after all, the entire point of the Collins project.

“Yeah,” Mark added offhandedly as he gathered his papers, “we may all need it someday.”

Ethan knew Mark hadn’t meant it that way, but nevertheless, the joking rejoinder dug deep into a sore spot that had never healed.

“Pray that you don’t,” he said, unable to stop the edge that came into his voice.

Mark looked at him, startled, then sheepish, as if he only now realized what he’d said. “Right, boss,” he muttered, and Ethan knew that, from the generally anarchistic Mark, the title “boss” was tantamount to an apology.

Ethan nodded and stood, indicating the meeting was over. The others exited the room, and he started back toward his office. Karen caught his eye; she already had the receiver to her ear, but gestured at the phone on her desk, and he saw that two lines were lit. She mouthed a name at him.

Layla.

To his amazement, since he had a perfectly reasonable question to ask her, he hesitated. He stood there, staring down at the lit phone line as if it had the power to shock him if he touched it.

Only when he realized Karen was looking at him rather oddly did he nod and stride past her into his office. He stood behind his desk, looking down at his own phone, where the second line blinked tauntingly. He set down his notepad. Then his pen. Then himself, noticing that the creak of his leather desk chair seemed louder than usual.

Odd, how he had no trouble saying no in a business framework, but when it came to things like this, especially for charity, it was much more difficult. He had so little time, he’d made it a habit to say no to everything that required more than a monetary donation, and even those he picked rather carefully.

So he would say no again. Simple.

He stared at the phone.

He shouldn’t keep her waiting. He’d in essence called her, after all.

He would just tell her no. He couldn’t—wouldn’t—do it.

He cleared his throat and picked up the phone.

“How was your meeting?” were her first words after he said hello. “Constructive?”

Somewhat relieved at the subject, he answered, “More a case of not regressing. Not much progress, but no bad news.”

“Sometimes that’s good news.”

He found himself smiling. “Yes, sometimes it is.”

“There’s a lot to be said for no forward progress, if it also means not sliding back to the bottom of the mountain.”

It was so close to his own thoughts that he couldn’t help chuckling. “Exactly.”

“It wasn’t by chance about the memory chip, was it?”

His amusement vanished in a rush. The Collins project wasn’t hush-hush, but it wasn’t general knowledge, either. Certainly not outside the industry.

She seemed to understand his sudden silence. “It’s why you were added to my list since last year, Mr. Winslow. We’re loosely affiliated with the national Alzheimer’s Association, and they track people who are doing research in the arena, even privately.”

“Oh.” He relaxed; they had had contact with several of the leading research facilities, any of which could have mentioned the project. And it wasn’t as if she shouldn’t know, given her connection. “Sorry. Reflex.”

“One you’ve had to develop, I imagine. It must be frustrating to put a lot of time and money into something, only to have someone else beat you to it.”

“It is. But in this case, I’d celebrate, if theirs worked. As long as it gets done.”

“That’s…an admirable attitude.”

Ethan felt suddenly uncomfortable. He’d had his share—more than his share, he thought—of nominations for sainthood, and he didn’t like it. Or maybe he just didn’t like it that the world had become a place where what he did, which was only what he thought had to be done, made him so different in the eyes of many.

“As is what you’re doing,” she added. “If your chip should work, it could become instrumental in the treatment of Alzheimer’s.”

“‘If,”’ he said dryly, “is a very big word. Especially in this case.”

“Trying to jog the human memory bank is tricky, computer chip or not.” He could almost hear her smiling as she added, “And some mornings are harder than others.”

Since he seemed to be having one of those mornings, he couldn’t help but laugh. Damn, but she was going to be hard to say no to. But he was still going to do it.

“Look, about your auction—”

“When I asked you to think about it,” she put in, sounding amused, “I did mean for more than an hour.”

It did, now that she mentioned it, seem a bit churlish to turn her down after that short a time. His “No” died unspoken. “I…just needed to know when it is.”

“Ah. To see how much time you have to wiggle out of volunteering.”

Embarrassed that she’d called it so accurately, he said, “No.”

“Oh?”

“To see how much time I have to wiggle out of it gracefully.”

She laughed. He’d been right, it was a wonderful sound, full and rich in that low, sexy voice. “It’s much easier to simply give in gracefully, Mr. Winslow.”

This was odd, he thought. He’d been in high-pressure business negotiations where he hadn’t felt the least bit persuaded by any power tactics, yet he was feeling it here.

“And you don’t have to come up with your ‘Evening to Remember’ plans right now. I only need them a week ahead, so you have a few days.”

Ah, he thought, at last, the answer to his question. “So, it’s the weekend after next?”

“Yes, on Saturday evening. There are no real rules for the evening you plan, it can be fun or elegant or creative, so you can keep it safely impersonal. If you need any help, feel free to call. I always have suggestions.”

After her promise to call him back and her cheerful goodbye, he hung up and sat looking at his phone. The sound of her voice echoed in his mind, along with the sound of his own laughter. He didn’t know how much time had passed before he remembered.

He never had told her no.

He had the oddest feeling he’d just been flattened by a velvet steamroller.