Читать книгу The Last Groom On Earth - Kristin James - Страница 7

Bryce Richards had thought he was ready for anything when it came to Angela Hewitt, but he found that he was wrong. He was not prepared to walk into the offices of H & A Enterprises and find a witch standing on a stool in the middle of the room.

He stopped, struck dumb, and simply gaped at the woman on the stool. Another woman knelt at her feet, mumbling something as she fingered the hem of the witch’s dress. Bryce wondered for one mad moment if he had stumbled into some sort of pagan ceremony. Then the kneeling woman let out a yelp of pain and reached up to remove the pins she held clenched be tween her teeth.

“Would you stop wriggling?” she asked irritably. “I’ll never get this hem fixed at this rate.”

Bryce realized with relief that the woman on the floor was measuring a hem on the “witch’s” dress. He looked more closely at what the “witch” wore. It was long and flowing and black, clinging tightly to her torso, then floating out loosely below her hips in layers of some diaphanous material. The edges of each layer were cut in a zigzag fashion so that it hung in points, and the ends of the loose sleeves were cut in the same way. It was this cut and the color of the dress that had made him think immediately of a witch’s costume. Now, looking at the plunging V-cut neckline of the dress, he realized that it must be some sort of odd evening gown. It was, he told himself, much too sexy for riding broomsticks and casting spells.

His eyes lingered on the neckline. The woman’s breasts were full and creamy white, pushing up and out of the black material in a way that made his fingers itch to curve over the lush flesh. He dropped his gaze lower, moving over the material that clung to her breasts, waist and hips as if it were a second skin. His loins tightened in response. Who was this woman, and what on earth was she doing dressed like this and standing in the middle of a business office?

Then he looked up, and he knew. It was Angela Hewitt herself. He could not see her face; her head was bent as she peered down at the woman working on her hem. But that shock of curling red hair could belong to only one person. He remembered it clearly, even if it had been almost fourteen years—and even if it now hung in burnished, inviting curls instead of braids or a wild tangle. He should have known, Bryce thought. Trust Angela Hewitt to be under investigation by the IRS and yet be unconcernedly trying on evening gowns in the middle of her office.

Angela glanced up at him, then turned and called out, “Hey, somebody’s appointment is here!”

Bryce glanced around the room for the first time. It was large, the wide main hall of the old house near downtown Raleigh in which H & A Enterprises was located. A receptionist’s desk, vacant at the moment, stood to one side of the elegant curved staircase. The rest of the hallway was empty, sweeping back in a dazzling expanse of gleaming gold oak flooring to a swinging door at the opposite end. On either side of the hallway, several doors stood open. A few heads popped out of the doors at Angela’s announcement, and the swinging door in the back opened, and a man peered out.

Everyone looked at Bryce blankly. Then they turned to look at Angela.

“Hey, Angie, looking good,” one of the young men commented, and another let out a wolf whistle.

Angela grimaced at the man who had whistled. “I don’t know. Somehow, I don’t think Maladora is really me. I mean, whoever heard of an evil sorceress with freckles and red hair?”

One of the women watching chuckled and said, “Then why don’t you go as Princess Alicia?”

Bryce’s cool gray gaze swept over the scene. This hardly looked like a well-run business, with the employees hanging in their doorways, the owner creating a distraction in the middle of the office, and all of them sounding like the inhabitants of a madhouse. He suspected that their accounting procedures were just as lax. No wonder the IRS was breathing down their necks.

“Nah, I was her last year,” Angela answered offhandedly. “I was a medieval lady the year before. And I think a Southern belle is way too overdone.”

She turned to Bryce and asked seriously, “What do you think? Do I look like Maladora to you?”

“I don’t know,” Bryce responded crisply, “since I have no idea what or who Maladora is. Miss Hewitt, if I could speak with you…”

Angela looked at him, slightly puzzled, then her eyes narrowed. “You!” She spat out the word in recognition. “You’re Bryce Richards!” From the tone of her voice, she might have been saying, “Jack the Ripper!”

“Yes.” He nodded his head in greeting.

“What are you doing here?” Angela frowned at him darkly.

“Your parents asked me to—”

“Arrgh.” Angela made an exasperated noise deep in her throat and, holding up her skirts, lithely hopped off the stool. “I might have known they’d do something like this,” she announced to no one in particular, then turned, with an eloquent swish of her skirts, and stalked toward the stairs.

Bryce followed her. She whirled at the foot of the stairs and glared at him. “Go away. I don’t need you. Nor do I need my parents sending their flunky down here to pester me.”

“I can see that you still have the same charming personality,” Bryce began, then stopped. He reminded himself that he intended to hold onto his temper. He was determined not to let Angela get to him, as she had done so many times years ago.

“And I can see that you are still the same prig you always were,” she snapped back. She drew a breath to say more, but then she glanced up at the top of the stairs, where several more interested spectators had gathered, and she shut her mouth with a snap.

Angela cast him a withering glance—just as if, Bryce thought with a growing sense of indignation, it had been he who was creating this scene. Then she turned and stomped up the stairs and into the room at the top, closing her door behind her with a loud crack.

Angela was furious. She reached back, unzipped her dress and ripped it off, wadding it into a ball and hurling it at a chair in the corner of the room. She might have known, she thought. Trust her parents to decide that she was too incompetent to handle this problem and then send down their Boy Scout to tell her what to do.

Damn Bryce Richards! She hadn’t even thought about him for years. Now he showed up, and all the old feelings of inadequacy, resentment and rejection came flooding in on her.

Angela set her jaw as she stalked over to her desk and jerked on the jeans and T-shirt that she had been wearing before she tried on the costume. She remembered that first day when she had come into the den of her family home in Charlotte and found Bryce sitting with her mother, discussing some horribly boring math problem that Angela hadn’t even understood, and her mother had been beaming at him like a proud parent with a precocious child. Angela’s heart had immediately dropped down to her socks.

All her life she had never fit in with her family. Her mother was a professor of accounting of some note, and her father was a banker. Both sides of the family were littered with hardheaded businessmen, engineers, actuaries and scientists. All of them were levelheaded, logical, systematic people whose every decision was based on a rational analysis of the options.

Angela’s sister, Jenny, had fit in with them; Angela could remember her actually becoming excited when she figured out the key to a difficult math assignment. Grown now, she worked in the bank and had married a chemical engineer.

Angela, on the other hand, had been flighty, daydreaming and impulsive. Her decisions were made on an instinctive, gut-level feeling, and she found math courses boring. Her favorite subject was literature, and she preferred to spend her days hidden in some nook or other, reading about knights and fair maidens, adventure and romance. She remembered once, when she had been sitting in front of the television, enthralled in an old black-and-white swashbuckler, her science homework open and forgotten on her lap, her mother had come into the room and found her. Marina Hewitt had said nothing, simply stared at her daughter in dismay and astonishment. Angela had felt like crying. It wasn’t simply that her mother disapproved of her neglecting her homework to watch an old movie. What was more upsetting to Angela was that Marina could not comprehend why anyone would even want to do such a thing.

Angela had never felt quite a part of her family. By the age of twelve, when Bryce Richards came on the scene, she was convinced that everything about her was wrong. Though she had wanted and tried all her life to fit in with the other Hewitts, she had never been able to, and the attempt to do so had made her miserable. The years of intensive math courses ahead of her, which her parents had planned on, seemed like sheer punishment. She didn’t want to be methodical; she didn’t want to plan out her high school, her college and then her life. She wanted to be free and easy, to go where the winds of fortune took her. Yet at the same time, she felt guilty for rebelling against her parents, for not wanting to be another model daughter, and she could not squelch the old desire that her parents love her just as she was.

Then Bryce, Mr. Perfect, had come along. He was one of her mother’s students in a night course she taught at the local university, and Marina had taken him on as her protégé. He had come over to visit frequently. Her parents invited him to dinner, sometimes took him with them on family outings, spent long hours talking to him. He shared her parents’ interests. He admired and respected them. Or, as the twelve-year-old Angela had seen it, he spent most of his time buttering them up. In Angela’s opinion, he was a gawky, thin boy of nineteen, a dopey numbers nerd—the epitome of everything she disliked. Worse than that, it was obvious to her that her parents adored him, which only confirmed what kind of feeling they must have for her, his opposite. Her parents were taking him in, a sort of surrogate son, and as a consequence she would be, she knew, squeezed even further out of the family.

In short, in Bryce Richards she had seen her enemy. The battleground was her house, and her parents, the prize. She played childish tricks on him at every opportunity, and the scoldings and groundings she received from her parents for those tricks only made her dislike Bryce more. The harder she tried to defeat him, the more she was separated from her family. Finally, after a year, she had given up. She admitted to herself that he had won, and she had lost. She withdrew into her own interests, spending hours curled up in her room reading science fiction and fantasy or zapping enemies with her joystick in front of the game console and TV set. When Bryce was around, she made it a point to stay out of sight. By the time she was fifteen, Bryce had graduated from college and gone to another city to work. He and her parents had always stayed in touch, but Angela had never inquired about him. She had not seen him again until today.

She groaned and buried her head in her hands, leaning her elbows against the desk. What a time for him to pop up again! It was the last straw to have to put up with him when she was already under the stress of a threatened IRS investigation—and with her latest project only half done and her deadline a few more weeks away. What made it even more awful was the fact that her parents had told Bryce about her problems, had asked him to come rushing down here and save her—indeed, she was sure that they must have begged him, in order to get him to help her.

She had enjoyed a better relationship with her parents the past few years. They hadn’t been able to argue with the obvious success of her business; all the silly impulsive things she had done, which they had moaned over, had turned out to be highly profitable in the long run. And with the miles between Raleigh and Charlotte to separate them, she and her parents had achieved a certain friendliness, almost adult to adult.

That they had turned around and spilled all her troubles to Bryce Richards was a betrayal of that newly achieved closeness. And they had asked him to come save her, too!—as if she were a baby, an incom petent. It was humiliating. Bryce was the last, the last person she wanted helping her. Not only did he probably share her parents’ assessment of her as a scatterbrained nincompoop, but she also felt sure that he thoroughly disliked her, as well. After all, she had been mean to him as only a hurt twelve-year-old can be, and she doubted whether he had forgotten. He had a memory like an elephant’s—worse, like an accountant’s.

There was a loud rap on the door, and a fraction of a second later, it opened, framing Bryce Richards in the doorway. He was frowning, his mouth tightly compressed, and his face looked carved out of stone. He was certainly no longer the gawky young man she remembered, Angela thought to herself. It was no wonder that it had taken her a few moments to recognize him. He was tall, of course, but his body was rock-solid now, and he moved with confidence and surety. She had not remembered him as being so handsome, and she wondered if it was maturity that had changed his face or if she had simply been too blinded by her dislike of him to notice the clean-cut lines of his face. His eyes had always been intense, but fifteen years ago, she had not realized how attractive their odd silvery gray color was.

“What are you doing following me?” Angela snapped, irritated at the foolish way her thoughts were wandering. Even as she said it, she realized how childishly petty she sounded. She blushed, embarrassed and even more irritated that she could so easily fall back into long-ago patterns.

“I drove all the way down here from Charlotte because Marina asked me to. I’m not going to turn around and drive back just because you’re too pigheaded-”

“Well, you could have saved yourself the trouble of the trip,” Angela retorted, “if you had bothered to call me first. I would have told you that I don’t need your help.”

His eyebrows rose in a sardonic expression of disbelief, and he moved forward into the room. He sat down in the chair in front of her desk and folded his hands, looking at her with a galling air of patience, as if she were a child or mentally defective.

“You don’t need help when the IRS has your company under investigation?”

“Mother had no right to tell you about it.”

Bryce shrugged. “She was concerned about you.”

Angela wanted to snap back that Marina was concerned because she thought that Angela couldn’t do anything, but she kept her lips shut tight against the words. Both she and Bryce might know that that was her mother’s opinion, but she wasn’t about to admit it to him.

“We’ll manage just fine without your help.”

“Wait a minute,” a voice said from the doorway.

Angela looked up to see a short, slightly balding man with a round face and a warm smile standing outside the doorway, peering in interestedly. Angela groaned inwardly.

“Who is’ this guy? What’s he talking about?” the man went on.

“Yeah.” A blond woman who had been standing just to the side of the door stuck her head inside, also. “I’m not sure we want to turn down help quite so quickly.”

Angela sighed. “Hello, Kelly. Tim. Can’t a person have a private conversation around here?”

Kelly cocked her head, looking judicious, then said, “It’s hard. Particularly when your door’s open.”

“And you started your argument downstairs in front of everyone,” Tim added.

“All right. Tim, Kelly, this is Bryce Richards. He’s a friend of my parents. Bryce, this is Timothy Allen, my partner, and Kelly Beeckman, our chief financial officer.”

Kelly grinned and amended, “Head bookkeeper, in other words.”

Tim smiled at Bryce and reached out to shake his hand. “Nice to meet you. You’ve known Angela a long time?”

“Since I was twelve,” Angela said shortly. “I was just telling Bryce that we can handle the IRS problem. We have the C.P.A. who did our taxes, and we hired a tax attorney.”

“And with their help, you’ve gone from an ordinary audit into a full-blown investigation.” Bryce pointed this out casually.

Angela shot him a fulminating glance. Tim’s round face grew worried, and Kelly began to chew at her lower lip.

“Look, Angela, if Mr. Richards thinks he can help…” Kelly began.

“My parents are interfering, that’s all.”

Tim ignored her and turned toward Bryce. “What makes Mr. and Mrs. Hewitt think you can help us?”

“Because I’m an auditor. I’ve worked for the IRS and as an auditor for the Feds. Now I have my own company in Charlotte, and our specialty is fiscal investigation.”

“Fiscal investigation?” Tim looked blank. “What’s that mean?”

“Well, basically, it’s that we find errors and fraud. We’re sort of a security company in the financial arena. We study corporate systems of accounting and set up ways to avoid theft and fraud. We find leaks and duplications of work. We outline plans to trim the fat.”

Tim’s eyes widened. “Why, that sounds like you could help us.” He turned to look inquiringly at Angela.

“We don’t need him.” Angela crossed her arms defensively. “Besides, it’ll cost a fortune, and we’re already paying for that expensive tax attorney—and the whole reason the IRS is suspicious is because they think we aren’t making enough money! How can we afford to hire him?”

“I’m not charging you.” Bryce interrupted quietly. “I’m doing this as a favor to your mother.”

“Oh.” Somehow Angela felt even more irritated by this fact. “I’m not a charity case,” she told him coldly. “If we need your services, we’ll pay for them.”

“Of course. It isn’t as if we haven’t made any money the past few years,” Tim said jovially. “We just had higher expenses the last year—more staff, more development costs, that sort of thing. But we’re still strong. We’re making good money. Angela’s just upset.”

Angela made a strangled noise in her throat, and Tim glanced over at her. “Well, it’s true, Angie. Everyone is. How could we not be with the government sniffing around like we’re some kind of criminals? I think we ought to let Mr. Richards try, see what he can come up with.”

“I don’t know…” Kelly said doubtfully, looking at Angela, then back at Tim. “If there’s something wrong, we would have found it already. Maybe the IRS is on a wild-goose chase. They haven’t told us what they expect to find, have they?”

“No. They’ve been frustratingly tight-lipped.” Angela was pleased that Kelly was supporting her. “They’re just poking into our records and making a nuisance of themselves. I don’t think they even know what they’re looking for.”

“Maybe they don’t,” Bryce agreed. “But if you think that the IRS is going to look at a few records, then shrug their shoulders and leave, you’re incredibly naive. Once they’re on your trail, they’ll be after you till they get you.”

“But there’s nothing to get!” Angela burst out. “We’ve paid our taxes every year. We reported all our income. Our deductions are legal.”

“That’s true.” Tim nodded. “I mean, everything we’ve done is aboveboard, so we really shouldn’t have anything to worry about. It’s a nuisance, but in the end they’re bound to find out that there’s no basis for their suspicions, and they’ll drop the investigation.”

Bryce turned his cool gray eyes on him for a moment, then began to shake his head. “I think all three of you are in for a rude awakening. The IRS is like a terrier with a rat. Sticking your head in the sand is not going to make them go away.”

He paused for a moment. All three of the others in the office stared back at him. Finally he shrugged and stood up. “All right. I can’t beat you over the head to make you do it. It’s your business.” He turned and looked directly at Angela. “I‘ll tell your mother you prefer to go it on your own. Goodbye, Angela.” He nodded at them all. “Good luck.”

He didn’t need to add the next line. “You’ll need it.” His expression as he turned away from them made that opinion clear.

He closed the door behind him. Angela leaned back in her chair with a sigh and closed her eyes. “The past few months,” she said softly, “have been the worst of my life.”

The IRS had begun an audit of their company in January. At first it had seemed perfectly ordinary, and Angela had not been worried, as she was sure that their record-keeping would bear them out. But as the thing went on, it had seemed to mushroom, until Angela had begun to be afraid—so much so that she had divulged her worries to her mother last week on the telephone.

“Amen,” Kelly agreed, plopping down in the chair Bryce had just vacated.

Tim began to rub his chin in a familiar nervous habit. “Come on, you guys, cheer up. It’ll turn out okay. It has to.”

“No, it doesn’t.” Angela opened her eyes and looked at him. Tim was a sweet guy and a good friend, not to mention an absolute whiz at computers, but he was not a person who liked to face reality. He was more likely to deny an unwelcome truth and ignore it than to try to change it or adapt to it. “What if Bryce is right? What if we are being ostriches? We could lose our whole business.”

“Don’t say that!” Kelly squeaked.

Angela looked over at the blonde. They had been friends for over ten years. In fact, she had met Kelly before she even knew Tim. Kelly had lived in her dorm at the University of North Carolina, and they had met in the cafeteria. Much to Angela’s amazement—she had never dreamed she could have anything in common with an accounting major—they had become fast friends. Three years later, when the tiny business of computer games that Angela and Tim had started had grown so big that they needed someone to handle the accounts full-time, Angela had pulled Kelly into the business. Her levelheadedness had proved to be the perfect complement to Angela’s and Tim’s dreamer tendencies. Over the years, as their business had grown, so had Kelly’s job; she presided over the entire business end of H & A Enterprises: orders, shipping, and accounting. Angela and Tim both agreed that whatever their creativity had produced, the business would never have boomed as it had without Kelly.

“Kelly…” Angela began thoughtfully, “why did you say you didn’t think we needed Bryce’s help?”

Kelly shrugged. “It seemed pretty clear to me that you didn’t like him. That you didn’t want him to be messing in our business records.”

“You’re right, I didn’t.” Angela got up and began to pace the room.

Her instinctive reaction had been to get rid of Bryce. But now she was beginning to wonder if she had acted in a hasty and childish manner. Her parents had been worried enough about her situation to send him&—and whatever else one might say about the elder Hewitts, they knew the business world. They were not likely to panic or act impulsively; they were logical and coolly analytical to a fault. They also knew exactly how good Bryce Richards was at his business. If, in their opinion, he could help H & A Enterprises out of this trouble, then he probably could.

“Maybe I was wrong to kick him out so quickly,” Angela admitted with a sigh. “Maybe I should have given him a chance to see if he could find anything.”

“Your opinion is good enough for me,” Tim responded, smiling at her reassuringly. “You know him better than Kelly and I do. I’m going to leave the decision up to you.”

“I agree.” Kelly chimed in.

“Thanks.” Angela smiled at her friends. It warmed her heart that they had such confidence in her. People had told her that it would be impossible to be partners with a friend, but time had proven those doom-sayers false. She had worked with Tim and Kelly for almost eight years, and both the business and their friendship had flourished.

Still, today was one time when she would have wished that they were not so quick to rely on her judgment. She was open-minded enough to admit that her dislike of Bryce was not rational, but emotional, and she worried now that she had made a mistake that might hurt their business.

Tim and Kelly returned to their offices, and Angela settled down behind her desk to work. But after several minutes of staring at her blank blue computer screen, she realized that working was impossible at the moment. Her mind was like a hamster on its wheel, circling endlessly.

With a sigh, she planted her elbows on the desk and sank her head onto her hands; she stared down at her desk, thinking. She disliked Bryce Richards, and she did not want him here at the office, poking his nose into everything. But, on the other hand, she would never forgive herself if he could have found the key to their financial troubles, and she had not let him just because of an old childhood antagonism.

Finally she picked up the phone and dialed her mother’s number in Charlotte. A few minutes later, she was in her car heading toward the Radisson Hotel.