A Very Exclusive Engagement. Andrea Laurence

“I’ll take care of it, sir. I have the website bookmarked.” Glancing down at the yellow paper she shook her head. “I see Ms. Orr has given you a special welcome to the company. This is one I haven’t seen before.”

      “Should I feel honored?”

      “I don’t know yet, sir. I’ll tell you once I look it up.”

      Liam chuckled, turning to leave, then stopping. “Out of curiosity,” he asked, “what did she call Graham?”

      “Her favorite was stronzo.”

      “What’s that mean?”

      “It has several translations, none of which I’m really comfortable saying out loud.” Instead, she wrote them on the back of the note he’d handed her.

      “Wow,” he said, reading as she wrote. “Certainly not a pet name, then. I’m going to have to deal with Ms. Orr before this gets out of control.”

      A blur of red blew past him and he looked up to see Francesca heading for the elevators in a rush. “Here’s my chance.”

      “Good luck, sir,” he heard Jessica call to him as he trotted to the bank of elevators.

      One of the doors had just opened and he watched Francesca step inside and turn to face him. She could see him coming. Their eyes met for a moment and then she reached to the panel to hit the button. To close the doors faster.

      Nice.

      He thrust his arm between the silver sliding panels and they reopened to allow him to join her. Francesca seemed less than pleased with the invasion. She eyeballed him for a moment under her dark lashes and then wrinkled her delicate nose as though he smelled of rotten fish. As the doors began to close again, she scooted into the far corner of the elevator even though they were alone in the car.

      “We need to talk,” Liam said as the car started moving down.

      Francesca’s eyes widened and her red lips tightened into a straight, hard line. “About what?” she asked innocently.

      “About your attitude. I understand you’re passionate about your work. But whether you like it or not, I’m in control of this company and I’m going to do whatever I have to do to save it from the mess that’s been made of it. I’ll not have you making a fool out of me in front of—”

      Liam’s words were cut off as the elevator lurched to a stop and the lights went out, blanketing them in total darkness.

      This couldn’t really be happening. She was not trapped in a broken elevator with Liam Crowe. Stubborn and ridiculously handsome Liam Crowe. But she should’ve known something bad was going to happen. There had been thirteen people sitting at the table during the board meeting. That was an omen of bad luck.

      Nervously, she clutched at the gold Italian horn pendant around her neck and muttered a silent plea for good fortune. “What just happened?” she asked, her voice sounding smaller than she’d like, considering the blackout had interrupted a tongue lashing from her new boss.

      “I don’t know.” They stood in the dark for a moment before the emergency lighting system kicked on and bathed them in red light. Liam walked over to the control panel and pulled out the phone that connected to the engineering room. Without saying anything, he hung it back up. Next, he hit the emergency button, but nothing happened; the entire panel was dark and unresponsive.

      “Well?” Francesca asked.

      “I think the power has gone out. The emergency phone is dead.” He pulled his cell phone out and eyed the screen. “Do you have service on your phone? I don’t.”

      She fished in her purse and retrieved her phone, shaking her head as she looked at the screen. There were no bars or internet connectivity. She never got good service in elevators, anyway. “Nothing.”

      “Damn it,” Liam swore, putting his phone away. “I can’t believe this.”

      “So what do we do now?”

      Liam flopped back against the wall with a dull thud. “We wait. If the power outage is widespread, there’s nothing anyone can do.”

      “So we just sit here?”

      “Do you have a better suggestion? You were full of them this morning.”

      Francesca ignored his pointed words, crossed her arms defensively and turned away from him. She eyed the escape hatch in the ceiling. They could try to crawl out through there, but how high were they? They had started on the fifty-second floor and hadn’t gone very far when the elevator stopped. They might be in between floors. Or the power could come back on while they were in the elevator shaft and they might get hurt. It probably was a better idea to sit it out.

      The power would come back on at any moment. Hopefully.

      “It’s better to wait,” she agreed reluctantly.

      “I didn’t think it was possible for us to agree on anything after the board meeting and that fit you threw.”

      Francesca turned on her heel to face him. “I did not throw a fit. I just wasn’t docile enough to sit back like the others and let you make bad choices for the company. They’re too scared to rock the boat.”

      “They’re scared that the company can’t bounce back from the scandal. And they didn’t say anything because they know I’m right. We have to be fiscally responsible if we’re going to—”

      “Fiscally responsible? What about socially responsible? ANS has sponsored the Youth in Crisis charity gala for the past seven years. We can’t just decide not to do it this year. It’s only two weeks away. They count on that money to provide programs for at-risk teens. Those activities keep kids off the streets and involved in sports and create educational opportunities they wouldn’t get without our money.”

      Liam frowned at her. She could see the firm set of his jaw even bathed in the dim red light. “You think I don’t care about disadvantaged children?”

      Francesca shrugged. “I don’t know you well enough to say.”

      “Well, I do care,” he snapped. “I personally attended the ball for the past two years and wrote a big fat check at both of them. But that’s not the point. The point is we need to cut back on expenses to keep the company afloat until we can rebuild our image.”

      “No. You’ve got it backward,” she insisted. “You need the charity events to rebuild your image so the company can stay afloat. What looks better in the midst of scandal than a company doing good deeds? It says to the public that some bad people did some bad things here, but the rest of us are committed to making things right. The advertisers will come flocking back.”

      Liam watched her for a moment, and she imagined the wheels turning in his head as he thought through her logic. “Your argument would’ve been a lot more effective if you hadn’t shrieked and called me names in Italian.”

      Francesca frowned. She hadn’t meant to lose her cool, but she couldn’t help it. She had her mother’s quick Italian tongue and her father’s short fuse. It made for an explosive combination. “I have a bit of a temper,” she said. “I get it from my father.”

      Anyone who had worked on the set of a Victor Orr film knew what could happen when things weren’t going right. The large Irishman had a head of thick, black hair and a temper just as dark. He’d blow at a moment’s notice and nothing short of her mother’s soothing hand could calm him down. Francesca was just the same.

      “Does he curse in Italian, too?”

      “No, he doesn’t speak a word of it and my mother likes it that way. My mother grew up in Sicily and met my father there when he was shooting a film. My mother’s Italian heritage was always very important to her, so when I got older I spent summers there with my nonna.”

       “Nonna?”

      “My maternal grandmother.