Too Hot To Handle. Barbara Daly

had built up so high inside her she felt as if she were about to come out of her skin. She could have asked Alex to come in. He would have come. One touch and she’d have led him to her bed. “He saw me, actually, and followed me home.”

      “Ha!” Macon said. “He’s a—”

      She spun. “No, he’s not a stalker. He’s…”

      She had to gather up her courage to go on. “We were teenagers. He was my first lover. It was an experience so exquisite—” she halted, frightened by the threat of tears, by the impact of the memories that controlled her life even now “—I knew I wanted only that, with that person, for the rest of my life.”

      “And he didn’t?”

      Dear Macon. He couldn’t believe a man she wanted would not want her. “I guess I wasn’t good enough for him. At least, I wasn’t good enough for his mother, the ever-so-famous movie star, and he didn’t have the courage to defy her.”

      “You weren’t good enough? Or your Aunt Becki wasn’t the kind of…”

      “Whatever,” Sarah snapped. Of course she’d told Macon about Aunt Becki. She told everyone about Aunt Becki. Tall and blond like Sarah, but more beautiful than Sarah could ever dream of being, she’d been the mistress of a film producer, Todd Haynes. Although he had loved her deeply, he couldn’t take the publicity of a divorce from his wife or the potential pain it would have caused his children.

      Aunt Becki had loved him, too, so much that she’d been willing to accept what she could have of him. He’d provided her with a lovely little house in Beverly Hills, where he spent as much time as he could. And then, when Sarah’s parents died, this cutthroat industry type had welcomed Sarah into that house as generously as Aunt Becki had, accepting without protest his mistress’s need to shelter and comfort her sister’s child.

      Becki’s and Todd’s was a beautiful love story. Why anyone couldn’t see how innately good Aunt Becki had been remained a mystery to Sarah, who’d been cared for with a kind of love Eleanor Asquith couldn’t begin to understand.

      “Hello in there,” Macon said. “Where’d you go, Sarah?”

      Sarah snapped to the present. “Alex and I were an item at Hollywood High. We made our plans. Pretty sensible plans, come to think of it, for a pair of kids drunk on love. He had to go to Cambridge—the Emerson men had been going to King’s College for generations. I had a scholarship to Stanford. But we’d stay together, even if we were apart.”

      “This is so romantic it’s making my scalp prickle.”

      “My scalp prickles, too, just thinking about it.” The hollow sound of her voice came straight from the hollow feeling in her heart. “One night he just didn’t show up, and I didn’t see him again until last Saturday.” She whirled on Macon again. “If you say, ‘And how did that make you feel?’ I’m going to shove you out the window.”

      Macon arranged his arms in a diving position. “See Macon,” he said, “preparing to go gracefully.”

      ALEX SAT in glum silence in his stately suite of offices. Located in a historic old building in downtown San Francisco, Emerson Associates was the venture capital firm he owned and had naively assumed he totally controlled. Apparently that assumption was incorrect. As far as he could tell, the offices were empty, which was odd, since it was Thursday. With a staff of five he managed hundreds of millions of dollars, which he then channeled into businesses that made the dollars thrive and multiply. He made sure those five people shared the success in salary increases, bonuses and stock shares. But in order for everyone to grow richer, those five people needed to show up at the office on a regular basis. Until today, they always had.

      There was a fine, warm team spirit in the office. Especially when the team was in the damned office.

      “Carol,” he yelled.

      Silence, followed by footsteps whose slow pace reeked of reluctance. A moment later a middle-aged, red-haired woman in a navy suit became visible by increments—the tip of her nose followed by the rest of her head, then a substantial bosom and, at last, a pair of surprisingly elegant legs. The whole package came to a halt just inside the doorway to his enormous office. He could barely see her at this distance.

      “You called?”

      Or hear her. “Of course I called. Where is everybody? Where’s Mike with the Harbisher analysis? Where’s…”

      “Hiding,” said Carol.

      “What do you mean, hiding? Do we have a maniac loose in the office?”

      “Yes.”

      “Carol,” Alex said, forcing a tight smile, “come closer.”

      “Why?”

      “Because I asked you! Nicely!”

      She grabbed the door and closed it silently, his shout echoing against it.

      “So much for nicely,” he muttered. His single objection to his staff was that they didn’t always treat him with the respect he, as owner of the firm, properly deserved. They treated him more like family. A younger member of the family, to add to the insult. So what if he was thirty years old, younger than anybody, except the office manager? Didn’t matter. This was his castle and he should be king.

      Of course, they were Americans. They took a dim view of kings. That might explain it.

      For a few minutes he remained at his desk, fuming. Then, being a man of action, he got up and went in search of his people.

      He found them huddled together in Mike’s office. Mike Semple was his financial analyst. Carol, his executive assistant, was just sitting down at Mike’s conference table with Suzi, the office manager, Les, his management analyst and Tricia, negotiator and director of communications.

      “Good of you to join us, Alex,” Mike said. “We were just starting a staff meeting.”

      “Without me?” Alex felt startled and oddly unbalanced.

      “About you.”

      “Oh.” Alex nudged Suzi to the left and Les to the right in order to plunk himself down in a side chair, avoiding his usual spot at the head of the table. “Good thing I showed up. What is it about me we’re discussing?”

      “We’re wondering what’s up,” Les said. “Are we going broke?”

      “No.”

      “Did we underbid for Palmer Pipe Company?”

      “No. Look, I know I haven’t been in the best mood the last couple of days.” To his annoyance, his team answered him not with reassurance, but with, to be precise, two nervous giggles and three derisive snorts. “It’s a personal matter,” he said, hoping that those sacred words would end this ridiculous cross-examination as it would in any civilized sort of setting. Americans, however, were not yet completely civilized, as he had learned from numerous painful experiences. They talked too openly about matters they should keep to themselves, and in return, wanted the most outrageously intimate details from others. You’d think, with more than two hundred years of practice, they’d learn to stop asking how much you made in a year. And whom you were sleeping with. At least one of the two.

      “I didn’t know you had any personal matters,” Suzi said.

      Of course, Suzi was still very young.

      “I didn’t know you had any personal anything,” Les seconded her. “Except your toothbrush.”

      Now Les should have known better than to mention something as personal as a toothbrush.

      “Put the problem on the table,” Mike suggested. “We’ll discuss it just like we discuss business problems.”

      As his senior person, Mike should be hanged for what he’d just said. This was not fine, warm team spirit. This was insubordination of the most outrageous, most insupportable nature. He wouldn’t put up