One Final Step. Stephanie Doyle

he eventually retired and came back to his hometown of Detroit to start up his specialty car design company. A company that would eventually spawn the idea for the vehicle he was currently showing her.

      Madeleine tried to reconcile the images of the spiky-white-haired racer with the wraparound shades and the sedate businessman standing in front of her in his expensive suit and tie.

      But there were still edges to the businessman. His sleeves were rolled up. She could see his forearms were sprinkled with light brown hair. For a moment she was captivated by those naked arms.

      “So what do you think?”

      She thought his arms appeared very strong. Probably not the answer he was looking for and definitely not something she should be thinking about at all. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had such thoughts about a man. Probably not in seven years.

      Another kind of counting she didn’t like to think about. She didn’t know what the fact that it had been so long said about her, a woman who hadn’t admired a man’s forearms in more than seven years.

      Cold? Most likely. Overly cautious? Definitely.

      “Have I finally convinced you?” he asked.

      “I think you believe in what you’re doing.”

      “Understatement. Did I sell you?”

      “I don’t know much about auto mechanics.”

      “Forget that, did I sell you as an average citizen? Would you buy this car? Would you believe you can save money by buying it?”

      Madeleine considered that. She drove a BMW. A nine-year-old gift from her father, which was beginning to show its age. He’d given it to her after she’d been hired by the Marlin presidential campaign. Tangible evidence of her success at such a young age. Her older brother, Robert, who hadn’t yet made junior partner at his law firm, had been seething with jealousy when her father handed her the keys.

      She should have done away with it years ago, if only because it brought back memories of a time when her father was proud of her. Not that she was hanging on to it for sentimental reasons, trying to hold on to a piece of him now that he was gone.

      Her father would disdain such impracticality.

      The future was where her head should be. Eco-friendly instead of maudlin and sappy. What Michael was describing would be better than all hybrids on the road today. Definitely a practical choice for her.

      “I don’t know,” she said, trying to regain her focus on the present instead of the past. “It almost seems improbable.”

      “Exactly! That’s my point. We get it into our heads that technology is so far down the road we think it will always be out of reach. I want to convince people the time is here and now. We can have this.” He pointed to the screen, now an image of a silver car anybody would want to own. “We can have this now.”

      “Then let’s talk about the other side of the equation. Tell me about you.”

      “Why do I feel like I’m the one being interviewed?”

      “Because you are. Remember, I need to believe in you as well as your project. You’ve sold me on the project, now sell me on you.”

      “I’m the problem, remember? It’s why I need you. I’m a hard-drinking, fast-car driving, womanizing playboy.”

      No, she thought, he wasn’t. There was so much more to him. She could sense it. There was a sincerity about him that playboys she’d met, and she’d met plenty during her days on political campaigns, never had. “You also run a successful luxury-car company. One wonders where you find the time for all your activities.”

      “A man finds time for what he wants. And I no longer actually race fast cars, at least not competitively, so there’s that.”

      “Why do I feel like you want me to see the worst in you?” She could see the question startled him, but she sensed it was getting closer to the truth.

      “I don’t. I’m trying to be honest here.”

      “Hmm,” she murmured. Again, she didn’t think so. Instinctively she felt like he was hiding something. It should have signaled her warning bells. After all, she hadn’t verbally committed to the job so it wasn’t too late to decline his offer. Instead she found herself desperately curious about him.

      “If you won’t tell me about the man you are today, tell me about who you were. Many have retold your success story. Kid from the wrong side of 8 Mile Road makes it big. How did that happen? How did you turn it around? You were a kid from a poor neighborhood…”

      “I was a poor kid,” he interrupted.

      “Isn’t that what I said?”

      “No. There is a big difference. There were kids who grew up in the same neighborhood I did who didn’t think they were poor. They had a mom, sometimes a dad, too. They had siblings and family meals. They ate three times a day and they went to school and did their homework. Yeah, maybe they wore shoes long after they outgrew them or pants that were too tight. They never got an extra helping at dinner, but they weren’t poor.”

      “You were different from them.”

      “In every way. It was just me and my mom. Don’t ask me about my father, I have no idea who he is.”

      “I’m sorry.”

      “I’m not. He could have made things worse. As for my mother, it feels weird calling her that, mostly I called her Jackie. She was an addict. Big deal, right? So are lots of mothers on that side of town. Jackie was strung out most days doing whatever it took to get her next fix, while I survived on what the state gave us. I lived on Kraft Dinner and the dollar menu at the local fast-food place. We never talked from as far back as I could remember. It was like we didn’t even know each other. We were two people sharing the same apartment.”

      “Did you go to school?”

      “I tried for a while. I had this thought that I could use school to get out, but it was too much time spent sitting around talking and not enough doing. So I was done with that by seventeen. The only thing I cared about were cars and driving them fast. It’s how I got hooked up with Nick. He lived on the block and would see me screeching around town in my mother’s POS. He showed me how to fix cars, and my mother’s POS always needed fixing. Eventually he brought me into the game.”

      “Auto theft?”

      “Yeah, yeah. At first I just broke down the cars for parts. Then one day Nick takes me out and shows me how to jack them. I’m not going to lie—it was a pretty big high. My adrenaline would pump, but you had to make your fingers move and you had to remember how each car was different and how to shut down an alarm in seconds. In hindsight it was a blessing and a curse.”

      “A blessing?”

      “Kept me off the drugs. Nick didn’t tolerate that. Bad for business. No drinking, no drugs. When you jacked you needed full control of your senses.”

      “The hard drinking came later, then?”

      “Huh? Oh…yeah, yeah. Later.”

      Exactly. He was no more a hard-drinking man than she was a hard-drinking woman. Yes, he was definitely hiding something and it was only one of the reasons she was cautious about taking him on as a project.

      For one, he was a man in the media spotlight, which meant working with him was going to present some risk. Plus, while she didn’t exactly believe he was the scoundrel he presented himself to be, there were all those pictures of him at various parties with so many different women. Men, she found, didn’t easily give up the things they wanted—especially when they were told by someone else not to indulge.

      But what she had to concern herself with most of all was that she liked the way he looked in his suit. She liked it even better when he rolled up his sleeves. As an employee she should have no physical attraction to her