Too Hot To Handle. Barbara Daly

responsible, sensitive building management firm, quite unlike the skinflints who managed her office building. She paused for a moment to admire the broad, muscled back and spectacular buns of the man who was directing his workers to the back of the building where a scaffolding was already in place. Wouldn’t it be great if she could lure him into her home for a brief interlude before her own workday started?

      It was one thing to entertain such a delightful thought, and quite another to emerge from the shower a short time later and see a man’s face looking through her bathroom window.

      Sarah opened her mouth to scream. The neighborhood had been plagued by a Peeping Tom in the last few years. Maude, who claimed to have sighted him twice, had warned her to keep her windows closed and locked and her shades down as the scaffolding provided such easy access to all floors of the building, but had Sarah listened? No, and here she was, facing the Village Voyeur himself!

      “Whoa!” the man said through the open window, just before her scream emerged.

      She clutched her bath sheet tighter and glared at him. “What do you think you’re doing, looking in my…”

      All of a sudden she realized she was seeing the front of the very man whose back she’d been admiring earlier. He gave her a broad, brilliant smile and tipped the bill of his cap. “I’m the roofing contractor, ma’am. Don’t mind me. I’m just on my way up.”

      His words trailed off as his gaze focused directly on her. The scene took on the misty quality of a romantic movie as she gazed back. Tall, dark, handsome, deeply tanned—and he was a roofing contractor. Perfect, simply perfect.

      Before the fantasy ended, they’d made a date to go out for Thai food that very night. By nine o’clock that evening she wished she had remembered to pull the shades down. The roofing contractor might be breathtakingly handsome, but he was not going to become her man-for-the-moment. Not even for a split second. He told terrible jokes terribly, quizzed the waiter relentlessly until he was sure he hadn’t ordered any Thai food that had any Thai seasonings in it, and she had a deep-seated suspicion he’d neglected to mention he was married. His line, delivered in a low, sexy voice while his eyelids drooped in a manner he must have thought was suggestive, was: “How about we head up to your apartment for a quick one before I hit the road to Brooklyn.”

      As the word Brooklyn came across the table, Sarah conceded that the misty quality of their accidental morning meeting was entirely due to steam from the shower. “I don’t drink after dinner,” she said, then added, “Tonight’s my treat.” She whipped out her billfold.

      “I wasn’t talking drinks, foxy lady, I was talking…”

      Foxy lady? Bleah-h-h-h. She knew perfectly well a drink was not the “quick one” he had in mind. She handled the transaction so swiftly, estimating the tip, rounding it off on the high side and paying in cash, that she was off in one direction and he in another before he had time to absorb the situation.

      Not that she was giving up on the idea of finding a man. She would demand to have her office windows washed at once or the management company could look for a new tenant.

      She said as much to Annie on Monday morning after a frustrating, unproductive weekend. A worried look came over Annie’s face.

      “Uh, I’ll tell them that, but it’ll be an empty threat.”

      “How so?” She strongly felt the management company owed her a crew of muscled hunks, just for letting the windows go for such a long time.

      “You can’t afford to move.”

      She knew it, of course, but Annie’s expression told her there were other things she needed to know. In addition to supplementing Jeremy’s design work, Annie kept the Great Graphics! books.

      “What’s our financial situation?”

      “I don’t know how you’re going to meet the payroll next month.”

      “That bad?” Sarah’s other frustrations fled as a sick feeling settled into the pit of her stomach. “Well, for starters, I won’t pay myself. I can manage for a while.”

      Macon stuck his head through the doorway. “I can manage for…well, forever, I guess.”

      “Oh, Macon,” Sarah said, “I pay you little enough as it is.”

      “But you let me keep my consulting business. I’ve been making money working with computers since I was thirteen,” he told her, “and apparently not spending it.” He frowned, as if he were wondering what on earth other people did with their money. “Except on more computer equipment.”

      “We can take it a month at a time,” Annie said, giving the printout of her spreadsheet a steel-eyed gaze. “If you two can forgo salaries next month, I’ll lean on the Zweig Company for the money they still owe us, and if that doesn’t do it, we can hit Ray and Jeremy up for the next month.” She gave Sarah an apologetic look. “Rachel and I are both living right on the edge as it is.”

      “We will not ‘hit up’ anybody else,” Sarah said. “I’ve got to get out there and drum up more business.” She didn’t miss the sidelong glance that passed between Macon and Annie. They already had all the work they could do, but the jobs were small ones with a low-profit margin. She was in deep trouble, and at the moment, lacked the necessary backbone to get herself out of it.

      IT SEEMED NOTHING SHORT of a miracle to learn that the window-washers had arrived at the office building. Sarah found it particularly annoying to pick up the telephone just as she was looking over the crew and find Alex on the other end of the line.

      Rachel was a wonderful office manager and general factotum, but the announcement, “Guy on the phone wants to talk to you about some work,” was not the sort of briefing one needed before speaking with the enemy.

      “Sarah. Hello.”

      Sarah took a deep breath. He must have lied to Rachel, and she wasn’t going to let him get away with it.

      “Alex.” Well done. She was as cool as a mint Lifesaver. “Did I pick up on the wrong line? Rachel said a potential client was calling.”

      “That’s me. Alex Emerson, potential client.”

      She blinked. “Oh. Well. What can I do for you?” Or to you, you scum on a picture postcard English pond.

      “Actually, the reason I’ve been so persistent about dinner,” Alex said, “is that I have a project I want to talk to you about.”

      He’d said the magic word. “A project?”

      “Yes. My promotional materials. I don’t like the product I’m getting now. I’ve told the ad agency to contract the work to somebody different, but I’ve been asking around myself, too, and somebody mentioned your name. Said he’d been happy with your work.”

      “Who?”

      “Si Harper. The guy at Super Shuttle. That’s the new airline that runs shuttles from New York to…”

      “I know Si. I know what Super Shuttle does.” She hoped he hadn’t heard her gasp. How had he found out she did Super Shuttle’s work?

      “Carol, my person here, tells me I can take the company jet as far as the Midway Airport…”

      She hadn’t been thinking. Of course he would have his own plane. No place on earth was too inconvenient for Alex to reach.

      “…but I can’t land it in Cedar Rapids. The private strip is closed for construction. So I’ll take a taxi to O’Hare, get on a United shuttle to Cedar Rapids, then rent a car and drive up to Dubuque.”

      When he mentioned O’Hare, Sarah felt tempted. As a hub of air travel for the continental United States, Chicago’s O’Hare was a wonderfully chancy airport. An electrical storm on either coast and O’Hare came to a standstill. If she had a thousand dollars for each person she knew personally who’d had to spend a night in that airport, she’d have the down payment for a two-bedroom