From Boss to Bridegroom. Victoria Pade

I told you last night—Aunt Sadie will bring you to day care later this morning when she goes to read to the kids. Until then you’ll stay at her place. She’s making you a special breakfast and I put your dinosaur videotape in your backpack so you can watch that if you want or you can watch cartoons. Then you’ll come home with Aunt Sadie this afternoon and stay with her again. I probably won’t be home before you go to bed but it’s only this once and I’ll call you today and again tonight. Got all that?”

      Max nodded solemnly, more asleep than awake and seemingly unfazed by his mother’s imminent departure.

      “I’ll miss you,” Lucy told him.

      “Miss you, too.”

      “Be a good boy.”

      Again the nod.

      Lucy knew he’d be fine. She didn’t have a doubt that Sadie would take good care of him or that he’d enjoy playing with kids his own age at the day care. She knew he did well with other children, that he made friends easily. But she still felt awful leaving him for such an extended amount of time.

      It’s only for today, she reminded herself.

      And fast on that thought came one that had been popping into her head all through the last evening and again this morning like some kind of consolation prize—that she was spending the time away from her son with Rand Colton.

      She didn’t want that to be something that could brighten her spirits. But for some reason it was. Some reason she didn’t even want to think about, let alone analyze.

      “Kiss,” she demanded of her son.

      An instant, impish grin tugged at the corner of Max’s mouth just before he planted a wet one on her cheek. Then he turned his face for her to do the same to him.

      “I’m taking the Triceratops to day care with me,” he informed her in the meantime.

      “Okay, but you know the deal. You have to share.”

      “Then maybe I better take the Tyrannosaurus, too.”

      Max said that as if it were serious business, which, to him, dinosaurs were.

      “Have a nice day.” She ruffled his hair as she said goodbye to her aunt, then forced herself to walk out the door.

      “You have a good day, too,” Sadie called after her.

      The big black Lincoln Town Car outside had windows too darkly tinted to see through, yet knowing Rand was in that back seat made Lucy’s pulse pick up more speed with each step that drew her nearer.

      She wanted to believe it was nothing but first-day jitters. But she knew better. This had more to do with the man himself. And as much as she wished she could deny that fact, she couldn’t.

      There had been something about their brief meeting the day before that had caused him to stick in her mind vividly. Images of his tall, lean-but-muscular body, of his handsome face, even of his big hands, had kept her company all through the night.

      Something about their brief meeting had caused her to wake up earlier than necessary this morning with a desire to dress just so for their coming day and evening together, inspiring her to wear her best suit, a pale blue cashmere that buttoned in a diagonal from her right shoulder to her left hip. It had been an extremely expensive birthday gift from her aunt that she saved for only the most important workdays.

      And worst of all, there had been something about her brief meeting with Rand Colton that had caused her to look forward to today as if it were some kind of special occasion she’d been waiting for her whole life.

      He’s your boss, she reminded herself firmly. Not to mention that he was arrogant and irascible. And that she wasn’t interested.

      But still, as his driver got out and hurried around the car, a twitter of excitement danced across the surface of her skin at the imminence of seeing Rand Colton again. And no amount of telling herself that sense of excitement was completely uncalled-for made any difference.

      When the driver opened the door for her, she got her first view of Rand. Or at least of his profile.

      His dark, dark hair was impeccably combed, his face clean-shaven, and the scent of his aftershave wafted enticingly out to her.

      He wasn’t wearing a suit coat to cover his pristine white dress shirt, complete with French cuffs and cuff links of brushed gold. Against the stark whiteness of the shirt he wore a mauve silk tie Windsor-knotted at his throat. His suit pants were a rich wool that were not quite black and not quite gray but somewhere between the two. He looked better than any man had a right to that early in the morning.

      But Lucy tried not to notice.

      “Thank you,” she muttered to the driver as she slipped into the back seat.

      Rand was writing something on a sheet of paper braced by a leather-bound notebook. The notebook was propped against a massive thigh that was raised with the aid of his ankle perched atop the opposite knee.

      He didn’t look up as Lucy got in and the driver closed the door behind her. He didn’t even say good morning.

      Neither did she. Instead she said, “You’re from California and you don’t know how to drive?”

      “Of course I know how to drive,” he answered, still not looking up from what he was doing. “But I like living in Georgetown and I don’t like taking the Metro into the city.”

      Oh no, no public transportation for His Nibs…

      “Besides,” he went on, “we can get a surprising lot of work done on the way into the office if someone else is behind the wheel and fighting traffic. So yes, I own a car, but I also invest in a service that provides this car and driver.”

      He continued to write at a breakneck pace and apparently didn’t intend to waste any more time on small talk because he said, “You’ll find paper and pen in the pocket behind the seat. Take this down.”

      And so Lucy’s day began.

      From that moment on she barely had time to even notice Rand the man. He was like working with an excessively efficient machine. It took everything she had to keep up with him whether he was rattling off the perfect letter or having her jot down notes on his train of thought in preparation for writing a brief, or ordering her to fix his coffee, or to get a client on the phone or bring him a file.

      He had the most rapid-fire mind—and mouth to go with it—that she’d ever encountered. No wonder he’d run through a succession of secretaries, Lucy thought more than once during the day. He was almost superhuman and what he really needed was two or three secretaries to meet all his needs.

      Not that Lucy missed a step, because she didn’t. In fact, matching him movement for movement became a challenge to her, and once she’d met that challenge, she one-upped him by anticipating several requests before he actually made them. Even though the job and the pace were not what she would have opted to do every day for the rest of her life, she found it all exhilarating. She found him exhilarating, if she were honest with herself or had had the time to ponder it.

      She did manage to sneak in a phone call to Max while Rand was in court, but beyond that the day flew by. Before she knew it, it was nearly 6:00 p.m. and they switched gears to tackle what Rand called the mess in the library—stacks of papers and files that previous secretaries had obviously set aside to deal with after the maelstrom of Rand’s workday and then never gotten back to.

      But the evening’s work was actually a nice change. After hours her sometimes-hard-to-take boss grew much less intense. Off came the exquisitely tailored suit coat he’d worn from the moment he’d gotten out of the car that morning, joined over a chair-back by his tie. Then he opened the collar button of his hardly wrinkled shirt and rolled his sleeves up to his elbows, exposing a thick neck and forearms so sinewy any construction worker would have been proud of them.

      “Get out those comfortable shoes you said you were bringing,” he advised Lucy as he led the way to the room