The Husband Project. Leigh Michaels

Alison stopped just inside the door to get her breath and bask in the quiet atmosphere she loved so well. Sunlight spilled through the stained-glass panel above the front door and lavishly spread a rainbow of colors across the beige carpet on the stairs and the golden oak floor of the hall. Upstairs, from the front office, she heard Kit’s laugh. The aroma of fresh coffee wafted up from the ground-floor kitchen and mixed with the scent of photocopies still warm from the machine near the receptionist’s desk.

      As Alison came into the front office which had once been the brownstone’s living room, the secretary jumped up, almost knocking over a vase of flowers. “You’re back!”

      Alison fielded the vase and sniffed a half-open red rose. “Very nice, Rita,” she said. “I hope the flowers are a romantic gesture, though, because if someone’s sending bribes and trying to hire you away from us we’ll have to do something drastic.”

      Rita colored gently; her pink cheeks made her hair look even more silvery than usual. “My son sent them for my birthday,” she said. “I thought you were going to be gone another week.”

      Alison shrugged. “I was very bored, and every time I tried to follow doctor’s orders and rest, one or the other of the cats decided to jump up on my lap. Given the choice of sitting at a desk or having a Persian napping atop my incision, I decided I might as well come back to work.”

      “Well, you look as if you’re about to drop,” Rita said critically.

      “Will it make you happier if I sit down to read my messages?” Alison took a thin sheaf of pink notes from the basket marked with her name. “There aren’t many, for a whole week. And here I thought I was indispensable to the firm. ,.

      “Those are just the personal ones, people who called here when they couldn’t get you at home.”

      Alison wasn’t really listening. Most of the messages were short, just friends and clients offering a few words of encouragement and the wish that she’d be back in top form soon. But her friend Jake had called with a doctor-patient joke which Rita had patiently transcribed, right down to a punch line which made Alison groan.

      And Rob Morrow had phoned to ask her to the opera. When he’d heard why she was out of the office, he’d left a tongue-in-cheek message that he’d heard some fancy excuses in his day but having surgery to avoid sitting through Rigoletto was the best one yet.

      She smiled and put the sheaf of messages down. Just reading them had left her feeling warm and comforted. Her friends were special, indeed.

      And there’s not a single one of them you’d sacrifice for the cause? Logan had asked.

      He’d sounded just short of sarcastic, but Alison was even more convinced that she’d been right not to turn to her male friends. She was genuinely fond of each of them, or they would no longer be in her life—and she wasn’t willing to take any risks with those relationships.

      Few mates, she had found, were able to comprehend the simple concept that men and women could be friends without sexual feelings getting in the way. She didn’t for a minute suppose that Logan Kavanaugh understood that, or he wouldn’t have asked such an idiotic question.

      But even among men who accepted the general principle, it was difficult to find one who could wholeheartedly translate that philosophy into his personal life. That was why she hadn’t seriously considered talking to any of her men friends about her desire for a child. She suspected that, despite their good intentions, most of them would conclude that her request implied a whole lot more than a simple favor. And a good many of the rest would feel just a bit threatened since they hadn’t been asked...

      Alison realized belatedly that Rita was talking, her soft voice rhythmic and soothing. “Kit and Susannah have been splitting your business calls. Kit’s taken everything to do with the video, Susannah’s handling the singles group and...”

      A low, warm voice from the hallway said, “Did I hear my name?” A moment later Kit was standing over Alison’s chair, arms folded and one foot tapping ominously on the hardwood floor.

      “What are you doing here? You aren’t supposed to be driving yet.”

      “Who said I drove?”

      “Then please tell me you took a cab. Because if you walked all the way over here—”

      “Dr. Williams told me to get gentle exercise.”

      “I think she meant to start with a little less than half-mile hikes. Why didn’t you call and ask for a ride?”

      “Because you’d have told me to stay home.” Alison smiled at the look of defeat in Kit’s eyes. “Anyway, I’m here now, so I might as well do some work.”

      She was extra careful on the stairs which led down to her office on the ground floor, since going down steps was still one of the more difficult things physically, and the last thing she wanted to do was take a pratfall with Kit standing by to say I told you so.

      Susannah and Kit had offices on the upper floor, in what had once been bedrooms. But when they’d first toured the building, in the days when it was still a home, Alison had taken one look at the ground-floor study, with its thick walls and high windows and built-in bookshelves, and fallen in love.

      She had never regretted her choice. Since it was half underground, the room was always warm and quiet, and being as far as possible from the confusion of the top floor production room was worth the effort of climbing all the way up now and then.

      The surface of her black lacquer desk was exactly as she’d left it, bare except for her red leather blotter and a whimsical Chinese vase that doubled as a pen holder. Her projects were laid away neatly in the file drawer below, and she pulled out the most pressing of them. The promotional video she’d been working on for months, intended to draw industry to Chicago, was in the hands of the tape editors, but there was plenty to be done in the next couple of weeks while they finished the final cut.

      And then there was the singles club. The outgrowth of a casual brainstorm of Susannah’s months ago, the project had landed on Alison’s desk only because Susannah hadn’t found a sponsor until the week before her wedding. And how would it look to her new husband, she’d asked Alison earnestly, if she started spending a couple of evenings a month in a singles group?

      So Alison had inherited the club—a project she still thought was Susannah’s craziest idea yet. But one of Chicago’s finest restaurants had agreed to host and sponsor the club, and now there was no backing out; Tryad’s reputation was on the line, and Chicago Singles would succeed, or else.

      She opened the folder, and within minutes she was buried in her work. Even if her heart wasn’t entirely in the project, Alison had to admit that the more deeply she became involved in the singles club, the more possibilities there were.

      She didn’t realize how long she’d been working till she stood up to get a notepad from the storage closet out in the hallway and had to grab the corner of her desk to keep from falling. She was light-headed, and there was a nagging ache in her lower back and a sharper one near the half healed incision.

      “So much for the idea that you don’t need rest breaks any more,” she told herself dryly as she evicted Tryad’s calico cat from her comfortable nest at one end of the white wicker love seat. The cat glared and stalked off, tail high, and Alison lay down, wriggling around until she found a comfortable position.

      The love seat was hardly conducive to naps—but then she didn’t intend to sleep, only to rest for a few minutes. Kit had installed a chaise longue in her office, and Susannah had selected an overstuffed couch, but Alison had deliberately chosen the wicker love seat and matching chair because—white they were cozy and inviting with their feminine, frilly cushions—they were not so comfortable that visitors sat around just to chat.

      Her brain kept on ticking, rattling off promotional possibilities for the Chicago Singles. She loved her work, so much that it didn’t feel like a job at all most of the time. And she was comfortable with her life. Of course she wanted a child, and she’d continue to explore