Too Hot To Handle. Barbara Daly

from the corner of his mouth.

      That was the other thing Alex hated—the loss of his dignity.

      But Alex would consume a slice of cold pizza in the same graceful way he did everything else, without drooling, and if he absolutely had to sleep, he’d do it sitting up. Without snoring. Besides, with her luck, he’d probably arrive in Dubuque without incident, only to find out she was a liar.

      “I’ve cancelled the trip to Dubuque,” she admitted. A brainstorm struck. “I convinced the customer there was really no need for a face-to-face meeting. We can handle everything fine by phone and e-mail.” She warmed to her theme. “Just as I can handle your account, if you’re serious about needing to have some work done.”

      In the brief silence that ensued she imagined she could hear Alex thinking. Instead, she heard, “Forget Dubuque, Carol,” and then, “Oh, I’m very serious. But the design firm our ad agency has been using has the same attitude you just described, and I’m more of a hands-on person.”

      How well she knew that. His hands-on policy had awakened her to sensations she could never have dreamed of, to pure, hot, insistent…

      “I was hoping your firm might take a more personal approach to your clients.”

      “We do, of course,” Sarah said. “We want to be sensitive to our clients’ perceived needs and self-images.” She trailed off, distracted by an odd echo on the line.

      “I have very strong feelings about my investors, the companies I invest in and everything that goes out under my name. I require periodic face-to-face discussions, whether I’m buying or selling. It means a lot of travel, but it’s worth it,” he said.

      “I see.”

      “I’d insist on an initial meeting at the very least.”

      “What’s your print budget?” It was a rude question, but he was gaming her, dangling a carrot in front of her nose, and she needed to know how sweet that carrot was before she bit into it.

      “A million and a quarter, give or take.”

      With great difficulty Sarah kept herself from saying, “Dollars?”

      Now she faced a new distraction. Jeremy crept into her doorway and mouthed, “Take it!” Ray moved up behind Jeremy, nodding vigorously. Annie thrust herself between them, giving Sarah a pleading expression complete with a Virgin-Mary-clasped-hands pose. There wasn’t room in the doorway for anyone else. Rachel had clearly left the line open and the speakerphone on, and the whole staff was begging her not to turn down a plum contract simply because she was too chicken to see Alex Emerson again.

      They did work for peanuts. Their deal with her contained no definition of overtime and therefore no compensation for it. And still, cutting every corner, the firm was barely keeping its head out of the minestrone.

      She owed them this contract. And to get it, she’d have to get it on Alex’s terms. The customer, damn him, was always right.

      “I suppose one meeting would…”

      Victory signals came at her from the doorway. She frowned.

      “…get the basics worked out.”

      A hand, either Macon’s or Rachel’s, shot through the doorway to wave a small American flag with a white hanky of peace tied to it.

      “Saturday, then. At seven.”

      She hung up slowly. The breeze from the collective sigh of relief that emerged from the doorway lifted the tendrils of hair off her suddenly hot forehead.

      SARAH EYED HERSELF in the full-length mirror in her bedroom, turned to the left, then to the right. After, she picked up a hand mirror to get a rear view.

      This wasn’t the right dress, either. It would be the fourth dress she’d brought home and taken back.

      She knew she wasn’t behaving rationally, but self-awareness was a long way off from behavior modification and she didn’t have time to travel that road.

      Curse Alex and his British correctness. Of course, he would insist on picking her up and bringing her home. She could protest until she turned blue that the modern woman was perfectly capable of getting herself to and from a restaurant, but her reasoning wouldn’t work on Alex.

      So she’d volunteered to make dessert.

      Now why the hell had she done that?

      Because Alex would insist on paying for dinner, and the only way she could strike back was to offer dessert, coffee and brandy.

      Because Alex had a legendary sweet tooth.

      Because by the sheerest coincidence, desserts were the only cooking she did, and she’d gotten pretty good at doing them.

      Sarah buried her face in her hands. Dusk was falling on this Thursday night in early June. The wedge of sky she could glimpse through her bedroom window was such a thrilling mix of terracotta pink and orange, it seemed irreverent to think of it as merely pollution from a million cars crossing bridges, threading through tunnels on their way to the New Jersey and Connecticut suburbs.

      That’s what she’d like to do—leave town. Instead, she had to get back to Loehmann’s before it closed, return the dress, then scour the grocery and specialty stores for dessert ingredients.

      The cold lump in her stomach grew larger. Which dessert? Crème brûlée for sure.

      A memory drifted through her mind, sharp, clear and bittersweet—Aunt Becki making crème brûlée for her lover, just in case he might be able to come to dinner that night.

      “What do you think, sweetheart?” she could hear Aunt Becki saying in her sweet, laughing voice. “Have I got it? A little browner, do you think, or is it just right?”

      Todd had not been able to break free from his family and come to dinner that night. “It was good practice,” Aunt Becki declared, as cheerful as ever, although her glow had dimmed a little. “Let’s try it out on Alex when he picks you up tonight. See what he thinks. He probably knows exactly what a crème brûlée should be.”

      Alex had licked his lips over the crunchy broiled brown-sugar top and the creamy interior of the dessert and pronounced it to be the model against which all other crème brûlée should be measured. At Aunt Becki’s insistence, he’d taken one home to Burleigh, the butler who’d been like a father to fatherless Alex, a man who’d seen, heard, experienced and eaten everything in his position with the formidable Eleanor Asquith, Lady Forsythe at the time Sarah met her.

      She wished she’d asked Alex how Burleigh was.

      Slowly her attention returned to the immediate problem. Maybe she didn’t want to remind Alex of the past. Personally, she was hungry for an almond zuger kirsch-torte, layers of fluffy white cake baked with meringue on top and put together with tons of buttercream frosting.

      Some people didn’t like cake.

      Or a clafoutis. Alex could watch her stir up the batter and pour it over the fruit, and while it baked they could…

      Scratch the clafoutis.

      Some people didn’t think it was dessert unless it was chocolate. The warm chocolate cake would present the same timing problem as the clafoutis, the timing problem being time alone with Alex. Her fudge pecan pie would cover the chocolate front.

      On the other hand, Alex might have developed an allergy to chocolate.

      She groaned. First, Loehmann’s.

      THE SOUND OF THE BUZZER set Sarah’s heart to pounding painfully. Her hand shook as she picked up the house phone. “It’s Alex,” he said, as if she might not recognize his voice.

      What she could do was simply not push the button that unlocked the front door. Then she could go out the back window and down the fire escape, grab a taxi on Sixth Avenue, go to a car rental agency and leave for someplace cool, quiet and Alex-free. Like the Yukon.