Читать книгу The Last Groom On Earth - Kristin James - Страница 8

Bryce leaned back in his chair and massaged his temples wearily. He had checked into his hotel and started work on his presentation for CompCon tomorrow, just as he had planned, but he found it difficult to concentrate on the numbers strung out across the sheets in front of him. His meeting with Angela had left him irritable and dissatisfied.

He made a noise of disgust and got to his feet. That woman! He got up and began to pace the room. Angela Hewitt was as great a pest as she had been as an adolescent. He could remember with great clarity the silly tricks she had played on him when he came to visit her mother. A slightly chubby girl with wild, curly red hair and a mouthful of braces, she had seemed to delight in making Bryce feel foolish and out of place. And, of course, he thought, remembering his own gawky, uncertain self, he had been the perfect foil for her tricks. He had already felt ill at ease just being in the Hewitts’ house. It was gracious and obviously expensive, but without a breath of ostentation, a jewel of old-money taste. Being inside their house had been a glimpse into an entirely different sort of life for him, a life that he had wanted with every fiber of his being. At the same time, he had been terrified that he might break something in his awkwardness or that he might make some gauche mistake that would reveal his ignorance.

Angela seemed to have understood that with the instinct that children have, and she had played on it. Bryce had never been sure when he might find a whoopee cushion on his seat or a plastic bug in his drink. She was prone to tell him stories about her family, which he was never sure were true or not. He had believed the first one, that Angela’s aunt was a famous pianist, and had mentioned something about her to Marina, who had looked at him blankly, then told him that she didn’t have a sister. He had felt a fool and after that he was sure never to repeat anything Angela told him unless someone else had confirmed her story.

A reluctant smile twitched at Bryce’s lips as he remembered her wilder concoctions. No one could ever accuse Angela of lacking imagination. Looking back on it now, he could see that her tricks were merely adolescent buffoonery. Someone with more confidence than he had at the time would have shrugged them off. But he had been a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, with nothing going for him but his brain, and he had wanted desperately to fit in.

Of course, he was nothing like that boy now. He was powerful and confident, used to moving in circles of great wealth. Coming down here, he had told himself that Angela had changed, too, that she would no longer get under his skin. After all, he simply would not allow it.

It had taken him less than five minutes to realize how wrong he had been. Angela Hewitt was as infuriating as ever. Oh, she had changed, all right-changed in a way that made his heart speed up and his loins begin to throb in a most annoying manner. The pudgy girl with a mouth of metal was gone; in her place was a curvaceous woman whose curling mass of red hair made a man want to sink his hands into it. Bryce had found that his eyes returned again and again to Angela’s soft, high breasts—all too visible in that ridiculous costume she had been wearing—and his palms had itched with a desire to follow the curve of her buttocks. Even now he couldn’t keep his mind off her full, soft mouth; his mind had drifted off his presentation figures several times to contemplate exactly how those lips would feel beneath his.

But that intense, vibrant desirability did not ease Bryce’s irritation with her; if anything, it made it even worse. He hated the fact that he had responded physically to a woman who grated so on his nerves. Bryce had never been one who let his hungers intrude on his professional life. It was his policy never to date anyone with whom he worked—employee, boss, or client—and it was a policy from which he had never strayed. Oh, he would notice when a woman in his office or in one of his client’s was exceptionally pretty or sexy. He was, after all, a man, and he was stirred by the sight of long, well-shaped legs or a deliciously curved figure. But it was never more than a passing thought. He noticed it, then dismissed it from his mind. Nor was he ever interested in a woman whom he disliked or who irritated him, at least not for longer than it took for her to get on his nerves.

But today, standing there with Angela Hewitt, irritated as he was by her obstructive, naive attitude, he couldn’t keep his eyes off her, couldn’t help thinking how delightful it would feel to have those legs twined around his back. It was disturbing to have been so attracted yet so annoyed by her. Bryce Richards did not like anything illogical, and his wayward thoughts about Angela certainly did not make sense.

It was just as well, he told himself, that she had not wanted his expertise. It would have been difficult working with the woman, given his conflicting emotions. He would be better off not being in her office—yet it was thoroughly exasperating to have her deny his offer of aid.

There was a knock on the door, and Bryce turned, relieved, thinking that it was room service. He had called them and ordered dinner a few minutes earlier. No doubt much of his turmoil and lack of ability to concentrate was due to the fact that he was hungry. Once he had eaten, he would feel like his old self again.

He opened the door, smiling in anticipation, only to find that the person outside his door was Angela Hewitt. His face fell in disappointment.

“Oh. It’s you.”

“Why, thank you,” Angela returned sarcastically. “Nice to see you, too.”

Bryce grimaced and stepped aside, motioning for her to enter. “I was expecting room service. Besides,” he went on as she walked into the room, “our last meeting did not leave me with a great deal of eagerness to see you again.”

“For Heaven’s sake…” Angela gave an airy wave of her hand and went to the window to look out at the view. “Can’t anyone disagree with you without your holding a grudge?”

Bryce found himself watching the action of her hips beneath her tight jeans as she walked, and that irritated him as much as her words. He closed the door with a snap. “I’m not holding a grudge, I simply hoped I wouldn’t have to see you again.”

Angela turned. “You’re so stuffy. You were stuffy even when you were nineteen.”

“Yes, and you were a pest. I’m sorry to say that you haven’t changed much, either.”

Angela lifted her chin in a defiant gesture. She hated apologizing—and to have to do it to this man, of all people! Gritting her teeth, she said, “I came to tell you that—that I was wrong. This afternoon when you were at our office, I was…”

“Rude?” Bryce suggested.

Angela flashed him a disgusted look and said, “Abrupt. I should not have dismissed your help so peremptorily.”

“Your partners ganged up on you to accept?”

“No. In fact, Tim told me to do whatever I think is best. He and Kelly trust me, you see. However, when I thought about it, I realized that I wasn’t acting in the company’s best interest. I was simply reacting to—” she made a vague gesture toward him “—the past. And my parents. I hate to accept help from them. It confirms their opinion of me.”

Bryce looked puzzled. “And what is their opinion of you?”

Angela gave him a look that indicated that she doubted his mental powers. “That I’m a flake. Ditzy and incompetent. All they see in any business is numbers, and they know how I am with those. So they figure that I’m bound to fail.”

“I don’t get that impression from them. I think they’re rather proud of you and your success, actually.”

Angela stared. “Are you sure you’re talking about my parents? Everett and Marina Hewitt?”

A faint smile touched Bryce’s lips. “Yes, I believe those are the ones.”

“I think you’re mistaken.”

“No. I imagine I know them a lot better than you. They may not understand you or what you do—”

Angela let out a dry chuckle. “That’s the understatement of all time.”

“—but they love you and are very proud of you. That’s why they’re concerned about this problem with the IRS.”

“Yes. My little problem.” Angela made a disgusted face and turned away to gaze out the window again.

When it appeared that she was going to say nothing else, Bryce prompted, “How did you find me?”

“I called Mother. She told me you always stayed here when you were in Raleigh, and she said you planned to spend the night because you had a presentation to CompCon in the morning. They’re a good company, by the way, but you have to handle Jason Willard with kid gloves.”

He gave her a stiff little bow of his head. “Thank you for the advice.”

“You’re welcome,” Angela replied, ignoring the note of sarcasm in his voice. She crossed her arms and looked at him.

Standing outside Bryce’s door, her stomach had been jittery with nerves. But now, seeing the mulish expression on his face, Angela felt, perversely, more relaxed. Bryce obviously did not like her being here. That fact made it easier for her to admit that she needed his help.

“Anyway,” she said, sitting down and crossing her legs, “I’m sorry. I thought about what you’d said, and Tim and Kelly and I talked it over. I decided I had been wrong to turn down your offer.” She gazed up at him a little defiantly, more as if she were being scolded than admitting that she had made a mistake. Bryce found it strangely appealing.

“I came to ask you if your offer still held,” she said. “Are you willing to find our problem?”

Angela could see from his face that he would have liked to turn her down, but she was counting on his promise to her mother to keep him from doing what he wanted.

Finally, grudgingly, he said, “Yes. I suppose I am—though, God knows, I’ll probably regret it. I can imagine what your records are like. You probably keep all your invoices in a shoe box.”

Angela grinned impishly. “I’d love to tell you that they were, just to see the smoke come out of your ears, but I can’t malign Kelly. She keeps excellent records. She’s not at all like me.”

“Obviously.”

Angela made a face at him. She watched him, more relaxed now that she had choked out her apology. She wondered why she had not remembered how handsome he was. Even if he had filled out, surely the bare bones of his good looks had been there: the firm, well-cut lips, the strong bones of his face, the dark-lashed gray eyes.

Bryce walked over to the table and sat down across from her. Angela could see the wary look on his face, and she wondered what he thought she was going to do. She decided not to help him out. She gazed back at him with wide eyes, swinging her foot and waiting for him to make the first move.

“All right,” he said, taking out a yellow pad and pencil and settling down to take notes. “Let’s get some basics. I need to know about your business.”

“Mother didn’t tell you?”

“She said only that you made computer games.”

“That’s right. Fantasy sort of games, mostly, some flight and road simulation sort of things. We’re beginning to move into the CD-Rom area. Our mainstay and what we started out with are the Concordia games and others like them.”

“Concordia games?” Bryce raised his eyebrows.

“You’ve never heard of them?”

“I don’t play computer games. I use my computer for work.”

“Of course. How silly of me.” Angela’s smile flashed, creating a dimple in her cheek.

There was something definitely sexy, Angela thought, about Bryce’s serious, intense gaze. The silvery gray eyes seemed to go right through her. She wondered if he brought the same single-minded intensity to his lovemaking as he did to his work. The thought sent a shiver through her.

She glanced away from him quickly. She couldn’t believe that she was thinking about Bryce this way. Bryce Richards, of all people! It was crazy; they could hardly manage to string together three or four civil sentences to each other. The thought of ever going to bed with him was sheer insanity. He was not her type, and she felt sure that Bryce would run as fast as he could the other way if he thought that she was interested in him. He had made it very clear what he thought of her.

“The Concordia games are quest games,” she said quickly to get her mind off her strange thoughts. “They are set in a fictional kingdom, Concordia, in some past time, vaguely medieval. There’s a king and queen and their beautiful daughter, Princess Alicia. Their enemy is an evil sorceress, Maladora.”

“Ah!” Bryce’s brows flew up in a look of enlightenment. “That’s who you were dressed as this afternoon.”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Oh. For Tim’s party…it’s a week from Friday. A big charity costume party he throws every year for this children’s charity he’s involved with.”

“Oh.” His face cleared. “Okay. So what does this Maladora do?”

“Anyway, Maladora is very powerful, and though, of course, she’s defeated in each game, she always finds some way of coming back. In a weird way, people are probably more attached to her than to the princess or even Sir Leopold. He’s the knight from another country who came to Concordia and released the royal family from the enchantment that Maladora had put them under. That was our first game, Concordia. Our second was Concordia: Maladora Returns and the third was Concordia: Alicia’s Escape, and so on. Right now I’m working on the seventh. I’m going to introduce a new villain and have Maladora on the same side as the royal family for once. The games are humorous, particularly the contemporary series. We always put in little tongue-in-cheek things. They’re not the violent ones where you kick and stab and shoot your way to the end—you win by figuring out clues and collecting things along the way, then using them at the right time.”

“I see.”

From the expression on his face, Angela doubted that he did, but she let it pass. Bryce, she suspected, simply didn’t understand games; they were beyond his scope. That was the way her parents were. Numbers made sense; fantasies and entertainment did not.

“And these games are successful?”

“Very.” Angela bit back a smile at the faint tone of amazement in his voice. “People love them. They’re interesting and complex—you can work on them for days. One gets fun and a sense of accomplishment out of them. That big open room downstairs in our office, the one that has all the little cubicles with people with headsets?”

He nodded, remembering glancing into the room.

“Those are our telephone support lines. People who buy the games call to get help in using them. The support staff help customers if they’re having trouble setting up, and if they’re stuck, they’ll give them hints and ideas. The support lines are busy all day long. We’re grossing millions.”

Bryce looked faintly shocked. Angela supposed that from her mother’s explanation, he had expected Angela to have some little shoestring operation.

“How is the company set up?” he asked, scribbling on the pad.

“It’s a corporation. Tim and I started out as partners, but when it got bigger, we incorporated. Tim and I own nearly all the shares.”

“Kelly’s not a partner?”

“No. She’s bought some shares, and all our employees have gotten some shares as bonuses, but basically Tim and I own it. We began it. Later, we hired Kelly to do our accounting. Her job has grown as we have. Basically, now she oversees all operations except creating the games.”

“You and Tim do that?”

“Yes. I think up the stories and write out the plot line. Tim creates the software for them. We each have a few assistants now, but we still pretty much do all the Concordia games ourselves.” She shrugged. “It’s a lot more fun than overseeing the other stuff. I leave the simulation games alone. That’s Jeremy Coger’s field.”

She went on to explain how the games were packaged, marketed and distributed, and all the while Bryce scribbled across his pad. Angela looked at his. hand as it moved across the page. His skin was tanned, the back of his hand and his fingers lightly dotted with curling dark hairs. His fingers were long and strong, the nails short-clipped. It was a very masculine, no-nonsense sort of hand, but not stubby or rough. It wasn’t hard to imagine it moving with gentleness across a woman’s body.

Suddenly Angela’s thoughts flew to the bed beside them. She had hardly noticed it when she came in, but now it seemed to fill the room. She kept her eyes firmly away from it, sure that Bryce would somehow guess her thoughts if she so much as glanced at it. But, of course, since she was determined not to look at it, looking at it became an almost impossible urge to resist. She jumped restlessly to her feet and began to pace.

There was a long moment of silence, and Angela pivoted to look at Bryce. He was watching her, his brow drawn into a frown. She frowned back.

“Well? Are we through?”

He started and looked disconcerted. “What? Oh. No, I…let’s see.” He turned back to his yellow pad. “What about the IRS? When did that start?”

“About three months ago. They called us in for a routine audit. We showed them our records, and I assumed that was the last of it. Then all of a sudden, they started asking more questions, nosing around. I don’t know what they saw that set them off. This one guy, McGuire, kept saying that we didn’t make enough profit—like it was some kind of crime or something. We didn’t make as much profit as the last few years. But we just had a lot more expenses. Things like that happen. Don’t they?”

“Sure. And the IRS could be off track. Unfortunately they usually manage to run something down.”

Angela sighed. “I’m beginning to feel paranoid.”

“The IRS can do that to you.”

“I tell myself that if we haven’t done anything wrong, we don’t have anything to worry about. But they’re making me jittery. I keep thinking that somewhere we must have made a mistake and I just can’t see it. That’s why I told Mother the other day. I shouldn’t have…I knew it would worry her.”

“I’m sure she was glad you told her. She wants to help you.”

“I know. And she always expects that she’ll have to. That’s what makes it so galling.” Angela grimaced. “I hate to screw up in front of her.”

Bryce looked amazed. “But Marina’s very patient and understanding about mistakes. That’s why she’s such a wonderful teacher.”

“Yeah, well, it’s probably different when you’re a student rather than her daughter. When I didn’t understand things in math, she acted like I was being purposely obstructive. She couldn’t believe that I didn’t get it. Finally she came to realize that I really didn’t understand these things that seemed so obvious to her. Then she’d get this—I don’t know, distressed sort of look in her eyes. And I’d know that I disappointed her. I think she was afraid that I was mentally impaired.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Bryce said gruffly.

Angela glared at him. How could she have forgotten that she was talking to the man who thought Marina Hewitt could do no wrong? “I wouldn’t have expected you to understand.”

“Your prejudice is appalling.” He got up and strode across the room to where she stood.

“I’m not prejudiced!” Angela retorted, stung.

“I’m sure you’re not about all the politically correct things, but you most definitely are about people who are logical or mathematical. You presume that if a person understands numbers, they don’t understand anything else, that they’re emotionless robots. Being logical doesn’t mean that you can’t understand feelings.”

“You, I’m sure, are in touch with your feelings.” It galled her for him to lecture her, as if she were still a child.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re too stiff and uptight to even know that you have feelings. Look at you…here it is…six o’clock, in your hotel room, and you’re still wearing a tie—knotted at the top! I’m surprised you even took off your suit jacket. You were the same when you were nineteen, too. Stiff, dry, logical. You looked at my friends and me playing in the pool like we were creatures from another planet. And when I played a joke on you, you never even got mad. Any normal person would have blown up, but you just got stiffer and quieter. No doubt it wasn’t logical to get mad.”

Bryce stared at her in disbelief. “What should I have done? Tell my hostess’s child what a spoiled brat she was? Of course I held my tongue. To have said anything would have been hurtful to Marina. No doubt you think it’s ridiculous to be courteous.”

“Of course not!” Red flamed in Angela’s cheeks. She felt foolish and embarrassed and oddly hurt by his opinion of her. “But you can be courteous and still be capable of human emotions. You don’t have to be a statue like you.”

Bryce knew that was how she saw him, as a bloodless, passionless person, more a wax figure than a man. The idea infuriated him, all the more so because right now his blood was thrumming through his veins and even as they fought he could not stop thinking how desirable she looked. Angela was thoroughly annoying, but some elemental instinct in him wanted her, and that fact was as irritating as she was.

Suddenly, surprising himself as much as her, Bryce reached out and grabbed her shoulders. Angela froze in astonishment, staring at him with wide, disbelieving eyes as he pulled her to him and took her mouth in a long, searing kiss.

His lips were hot and demanding; his tongue slid along the seal of her lips, seeking entrance. Angela shivered, her knees amazingly weak, and opened her mouth to his seeking tongue. It was not a sweet kiss; it burned with anger and resentment…and passion. There was nothing emotionless or saintly about him now. His body curved around hers, his arms pressing her into his hard chest and thighs, and the heat was enveloping, enervating. His mouth possessed hers as if by right, his tongue exploring, challenging.

Angela sagged against him, and her fingers dug into his shirt in the back as she clung to him. His kiss made her tremble, made her forget who he was and what he was to her. She tasted the driving hunger that aroused her own, and she wanted more. Her tongue wound around his, stroking and seeking. She felt his breath shuddering out, hot upon her cheek, and his kiss gentled, no longer demanding, but coaxing and enticing her. His hand stroked up and down her back, pressing her into him. Angela wrapped her arms around his neck and gave herself up to his kiss.