Читать книгу A Ring for Rosie - Maggie Wells - Страница 11

Chapter 3

If it weren’t for a client presentation he had to prep for, James would have ditched going into the office altogether. As director of sales, he often spent days out “in the trade,” schmoozing existing customers, developing leads into customers, and prospecting for new leads as if they were made out of gold. Which they were, in a way. When one is a partner in a small business, one does everything possible to keep the cash flow fluid. But he couldn’t duck the office every day.

Not today of all days.

He hadn’t wanted to say yes to Megan staying with him. He sure as shit hadn’t expected her to respond to his snark about the hot water by dropping her damn towel. Talk about your proverbial rocks and hard places. Then again, he’d been wedged in a crevice from the moment she’d knocked on his door.

A brisk rap on the office door brought his head up. Before he could say, “Come in,” Rosie breezed into his office, dropped a stack of neatly labeled files in his tray, then sashayed back out again without a word.

He groaned long and loud the second the door snicked shut behind her. Spinning his chair away from the computer on his desk, he closed his eyes and tried to do some of the deep breathing people liked to claim made them calm. Frankly, gulping air like a guppy only made him feel full and stupid and ache to explode.

Rosie.

It was a kiss. One little kiss. An accidental kiss. Surely they could get past the awkwardness. Eventually.

But he hadn’t gotten past the kiss yet. How the hell could he expect Rosie to? The woman wore her heart on her sleeve. Always had, always would. Her openness was one of the things he admired most about her. When Rosie loved, she loved with everything she was. His partners had warned him off on his first day, and he’d been more than willing to agree. His personal life had been jammed with complications. The last thing he wanted was to mess things up at the day job.

Another sharp knock jolted him from his thoughts. When the door didn’t swing open right away, he knew Mike had to be standing on the other side. Swallowing the lump of dread tangled in his throat, he croaked, “Come in.”

The door swung inward, and sure enough, his best friend and ersatz brother-in-law stood framed in the doorway.

“Did you check the numbers on the Telcore account?” he asked without preamble.

James nodded. “Yeah, I’ll re-run them with a 24–7 monitoring service added in.”

“Good.”

Mike reached for the door handle, but James couldn’t let him go without trying to explain. Again. “Hey, listen—”

He got the palm. “No. I don’t want to talk about Megan.”

“Come on, man,” James argued, rising from his chair. “What the hell was I supposed to do? You wouldn’t let her stay, she told me she couldn’t stay with your folks anymore. The boys were…” He sighed and rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. “They want her there.”

Mike snorted. “They don’t know any better.”

“Of course they don’t,” James snapped. “They’re four.”

Mike held up both hands in surrender. “I get you. But I can’t talk about this right now.”

Sinking back in his seat, James blew out a frustrated whoosh of air. He understood. Mike was torn. And angry. Lord knows, James was well acquainted with both feelings. But Mike was also Megan’s brother. Mike and Megan had once been close, however, Megan’s inability to commit to her children had driven a wedge between the siblings. James felt keenly responsible for the rift.

Most days James wished he’d never gone there. But he had. He’d blurred the line between friendship and family, and he had no one to blame but himself. If he hadn’t, he never would have had Jamie and Jeff. And if he’d never had his kids, who would he be? Certainly not the man he was today.

“Be careful, man.”

James ran his hand over his face, then across his mouth as he met Mike’s gaze and nodded mutely.

Mike grasped the doorknob. “Did you know Rosie stormed into Getta Piece and chowed down on a bunch of dicks?”

“Shit,” James said.

“She told Georgie you kissed her.”

“Fuck.” James had been reduced to words with no more than four letters.

Mike didn’t turn around. “She didn’t say anything about fucking, but I will remind you if you do anything to make Rosie even think about leaving us, Colm and I will be stuffing your dick into your mouth. Got me?”

“Got you.”

James pushed off with one foot and let his chair swivel away from the door as Mike left his office. Closing his eyes, he did his best not to allow the words “Rosie,” “kiss,” “fuck,” or “dick” to form a common thread in his brain. He failed. Thinking about anything other than Rosie had become increasingly difficult in the past few weeks.

But, as his friend Colm would say, it was what it was. Deal.

And deal, he would. Grabbing the files Rosie had dumped on his desk and his laptop, he tucked them under his arm and stood. He thought about leaving the messenger bag filled with half-eaten snacks and broken toys where it lay, but he’d picked up enough single-parent knowledge to be sure he’d need to excavate something from its depths if he dared to leave the bag behind. Looping the strap over his shoulder, he tucked the files against his ribcage and made a beeline for the door.

Rosie didn’t look up as he stepped out. A sure sign she was pissed. He ducked his head and hurried past. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember the last time Rosie failed to greet him with her usual over-friendly enthusiasm. He didn’t like her newfound coolness.

“I’m out in the field the rest of the day.” He pressed his shoulder to the exterior.

She didn’t call out one of her usual phrases of encouragement. No, “Go get ’em” or “Reel in a big one. Mama wants new shoes.”

She responded with only the steady clickety-clack of her fingernails on the keyboard and a brusque, “Noted.”

He rushed from the office, the soles of his shoes slipping on the crumbling asphalt of the parking lot. With one single word, Rosie had made one thing excruciatingly clear: He was screwed. And not in the way a guy liked to be screwed.

* * * *

Rosie exhaled the moment the door closed behind him. She’d prayed he’d stay away from the office today. Thank goodness her mother didn’t know she was wasting prayers on self-preservation. Maria Herrera was prone to what she and her sisters liked to call catechismic fits. The last thing Rosie needed were extra lectures on the sanctity of prayer. Most everything her mother had ever taught her had sunk in—to a certain extent. Sure, she’d given her virginity up to Marco Rodriguez on prom night, but lots of the girls she knew ditched theirs not long after their quinceañera. She’d held out almost three more years.

And in the decade since, there’d only been two other lovers. Sadly, she’d only dated one man in the years since she first laid eyes on James. Paul Ferro was handsome, successful, and clearly smitten with her. She’d tried hard to love him; wanted to with every fiber of her being. Endured endless reminders from her mother and sisters about how she wasn’t getting any younger. And they were right. Paul was practically perfect. But Practically Perfect Paul wasn’t James. When jokes about rings and mortgages became attempts at serious discussion, she’d had to end the relationship.

Her family had been livid. For his part, Paul was more resigned. He’d even gone as far as making a crack about her being married to her work, but they both knew she didn’t stay on at Trident because she was dedicated to the databases she’d painstakingly built.

And though she would be suitably appalled by the heresy, Maria Herrera would also have been heartbroken if she had been privy to her daughter’s most fervent prayers. She didn’t want to love James Harper anymore. Deep down, she wanted to convince herself he was undeserving, though she knew he was intrinsically a good, if somewhat insensitive, man. She was tired of being overlooked. Her battered ego yearned to be impervious to his casual remarks about his love life. Every night she closed her eyes and prayed she’d awaken and magically be cured. Her prayers were never answered. She’d even entertained the idea of taking her mother on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. There she had a chance of falling head over heels for a handsome Frenchman.

An impossible love of the long distance variety had to beat the crap out of having to see the one you love, day in and day out, and not be able to have him.

The phone on her desk rang, breaking into her reverie. Out of habit, she clicked the save icon before reaching for the receiver, even though she hadn’t made a single change to the spreadsheet on her screen since Mike walked into James’s office and shut the door.

“Trident Security, how may we help you?”

“I have a bag of dicks. You wanna come over and eat ’em?”

Rosie blinked. If the voice hadn’t been female and familiar, she might have hung up in a panic. But she knew this obscene phone caller and was grateful for the distraction. Smiling, she cradled the phone against her shoulder. “No, thanks. I’ve already eaten so many dicks I can barely keep my pants zipped.”

“Whoa. Whoa,” a masculine voice boomed behind her. “Wow. Okay. Going back in my office.”

Her caller dissolved into fits of unrestrained laughter and Rosie couldn’t help but join in. “No! Wait,” she called to Colm Cleary, the third partner in the firm. “It’s Monica.”

At the mention of his girlfriend’s name, Colm visibly sagged with relief. “I might have known.”

“I heard you,” Monica snapped.

“She heard you,” Rosie relayed.

Colm pointed to his office. “I’ll take it in here.”

“Tell him I’m not calling for him. Mr. Smarty-pants.” When Rosie hesitated, Monica pressed on. “Tell him I called him Mr. Smarty-pants, though.”

Covering the receiver, she turned to find Colm standing at his desk, his hand on the phone. “She says she isn’t calling for you…Mr. Smarty-pants.”

A puzzled frown bisected his dark brows, but the beginnings of a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “She made you say the last part, didn’t she?”

“I am my own woman.” Rosie tossed her hair back. “No one makes me do anything.”

“Tell him, Rosie,” Monica cheered. “Call him some more names. Dirty ones, if you want. He likes when women abuse him.”

Rosie smothered a laugh, then adopted her most sober tone. “This conversation is not appropriate for the workplace.”

“Which is why I’m calling to invite you over to eat a bag of dicks with me and Georgie,” Monica answered without missing a beat. “There will be wine. Possibly pizza.”

Glancing over at Colm’s office again, she asked, “You’re inviting me over to your house?”

“Girls’ night in. Georgie has a pin the peenie on the weenie game we can play, I have Cards Against Humanity. Come over and we’ll laugh until the adult diapers run out.”

Longing and pride warred inside her. She wanted to have a girls’ night more than anything. Now her sisters were all busy with their own families, she ached for female companionship. Sure, they tried, but it’s hard to get really into a girls’ night when one or two were unable to drink due to pregnancy or breastfeeding, or they spent the whole evening fielding texts from increasingly panicked spouses. Having watched Mike, Colm, and even James master the complexities of single parenthood, Rosie found she had no patience for the manipulative incompetence her brothers-in-law employed on a regular basis.

“Okay, fine, you can get up and use the powder room if you’re going to be all persnickety.” Monica made the pronouncement with exaggerated magnanimity.

Though she’d spent time with Monica at parties and get-togethers involving the children, she hadn’t sought the other woman out socially. Still, she found herself whispering a weak, “I’d like that,” into the phone. When Monica laughed, she quickly joined in. “The girls’ night, I mean. If everyone else is up for peeing their pants, I don’t want to be the party pooper.”

“Oh, dear God,” Colm muttered loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear, then swiped at his office door.

The walls shook with the slam, but Rosie didn’t pay any mind. Five years in the same office had taught her teenaged girls had nothing on grown men when it came to dramatic door slamming.

Rosie took a minute to jot down Monica’s address and phone number, smiling as she listened to the other woman prattle on about snack foods and movie selections. Colm must have been watching the lights on his phone, because the second she disconnected, he opened his office door again. “You’re going to Monica’s?”

Not one to be left out of the conversation, Mike opened his door as well. “Georgie texted, said she wouldn’t be coming over tonight because she got a better offer. Something about pinot, pizza, and penis. Should I be worried?”

Rosie fixed him with her mother’s patented you-foolish-child look and said, “Most likely.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I thought so, too.”

“They’re going to Monica’s to talk over ways to fricassee Jimbo’s manhood,” Colm informed him.

“A good use of time,” Mike concurred. “Though, between us, I suspect he doesn’t use his as much as he wants us to think he does.”

“Believe it or not, some women are capable of holding entire conversations without once mentioning the men in their lives,” Rosie said with prim authority. “I doubt your names even come up. And there’s no reason for anyone’s manhood to feel threatened. No one has done anything wrong.”

“Right, but sometimes we do things that are plain stupid.” Mike shot Colm a knowing look.

“True.” Colm shrugged. “Or thoughtless.”

Mike nodded a shade too enthusiastically. “Oh yeah. Thoughtless is a big one. I’d say thoughtless accounts for ninety percent of most male stupidity.”

Well-meaning as they were, Rosie couldn’t take one more minute of male bashing for her benefit. “Stop,” she ordered, holding up one hand. “Stop, okay?” Both men snapped their jaws shut like marionettes. But she could read the worry in their eyes. Her cheeks burned as she remembered what Georgie said about everyone knowing about her feelings for James. “I’m fine. James will be fine. We will all be fine.”

Rosie could almost see them repeating her words in their heads. Like she was the damn Dalai Lama of Delano Street and she’d given them some kind of mantra to hang onto. Sighing, she let her shoulders slump as she turned her attention back to her computer. “Go back to work.”

She could feel them standing there. Hovering. Uncertain. At last, Colm muttered a good natured, “Yes, boss,” and retreated to his lair.

Mike wasn’t as easily put-off. Rather than returning to his desk, he circled hers until he stood directly in her line of vision. “Rosie.”

He spoke her name with almost killing gentleness. Tears seared her throat and scalded her eyes. “Mike, please.”

“I only…” He looked away, as if he needed to gather strength to go on. When their eyes met again, she saw the naked torment in his. “He’s stuck. The kids want Megan there.” He paused for a moment but didn’t break her gaze as he swallowed hard. “They don’t know any better…”

He trailed off, and she nodded her sympathy. And she did feel bad. For him and for James. She was scared, too. Not just for James and her feelings for him, but for the twins. She loved those boys. Like their father, she’d loved them from the first time she saw them. Cared for them every chance she got. And not because she wanted their father, but because they were sweet boys. Good boys, despite their rambunctious natures. And if Megan hurt them…

But she couldn’t say all this to Mike because he was standing on the other side of this whole unholy mess. Megan was his sister. His only sibling. No matter what they did to one another, siblings almost always found their way back to each other. Rosie had watched her sisters and cousins play a lifelong round robin of “I’m not speaking to her” and “He’s dead to me,” only to end up laughing and cutting up at the next family function. But Mike was caught between the sister he’d protected his whole life and one of his best friends.

“I know.” She let him off the hook. And by proxy, James, too. But she wasn’t saying so aloud. “I know.”

“Rosie, you know we love you. We need you. But if you need time…well...”

When she looked up, she met his gaze directly. “Do you want me to leave?”

“God, no,” he answered with gratifying speed. “I was thinking a vacation.”

“Then shut up and go back to work.”

Mike drummed out a riff on the counter in front of her computer. “Yes, boss.”

He turned and walked back to his office, his shoulders still hunched up around his ears, and Rosie felt a spurt of hate so vile, so vicious she was surprised the acid alone didn’t incinerate her internal organs. Megan did this. Hurt Mike. And James. She’d hurt those boys. Those delightfully mischievous boys who picked dandelions for her to put in a cup on her desk, then gleefully emptied the confetti from the three-hole-punch all over the carpet.

“Rosie?” She turned to find him framed in his doorway. “Thanks.” He closed the door behind him silently.

Pursing her lips, she turned back to her computer, placed her left hand on the keyboard and her right on her mouse, and stared hard at the blinking cursor, her jaw set with determination. “You are welcome.” She began to type. Without pausing, she shot a glance at James’s office door. “Others, not as much.”