Love Handles (Oakland Hills #1)(21)
Bev studied her cold, bored profile. She sat back down. “No,” she said softly. “Not like this.”
Alarm flickered across Ellen’s forehead, then vanished. Without meeting Bev’s eyes she bent at the knees, plucked the paper out of Bev’s grasp, and strode out of the room holding her box.
Bev sat in the empty office, the chaos of unfinished designs—bolts of fabric leaning in corners, sketches and photos on presentation boards, samples piled up on racks and conference tables—scattered around the room like abandoned children. The phone rang, and off behind her she heard the PA echo through the hall asking for somebody whose name she didn’t recognize.
“Whoops,” Bev whispered.
It was time. To everything there was a season, et cetera et cetera. Liam lifted the overflowing box under his desk and hauled it to the door.
You're a sentimental dork. He was done with this business, thanks to Ed, yet he was carrying home mementos like an eighth-grade girl.
He looked down into the box at the sketches and tear sheets—a Macy's ad for the first pair of Fite the Man shorts he'd designed on top of the pile—and reassured himself he could hardly leave behind the evidence of his Achilles heel. Ellen would probably move into his office before lunchtime and comb over every inch, mocking and taking and destroying like a ravenous, sarcastic locust.
Better off taking it all home and recycling it at the condo. Nobody knew him there, nobody knew Fite or Ed Roche or his damn descendants, and nobody cared.
Nobody.
With the edge of the box digging into his ribs, Liam paused near the door and turned around to look around the office, where he’d spent most of his adult life. Right after the Olympics, with Dad finally in his grave and nothing more for Liam to do but maintain a pulse for his mother and brother and sister, Ed had offered him the job at Fite and saved him from God knows what. Law school, probably. He wished he had the brains for engineering, but he didn’t. Other jocks went into broadcasting, but he knew he didn’t have the charm or patience for that bullshit, though his old friends did very nicely every four years when another Olympics rolled around.
He might have to consider that after all. His salary at Fite had been good, but hardly enough to retire on. To stay in the Bay Area, which was a given, he’d be taking a pay cut—if he could find a company to take him in. He wasn’t a fashion guy, he was a jock—an asset at Fite Fitness, but not at Levi’s or BeBe or any of the other apparel companies in town. And though it was common knowledge he didn’t have an MBA, only Ed had known the worst of it—that he’d never finished his BA, either.
“Damn.” He dumped the box on the floor where he stood and thought of Rachel, Jennifer, even Darrin. Wayne, George at the back door, Alfred in the grading room. Sure, he was short on options, but any one of the lower staff people would hurt more than him with the sudden loss of a paycheck.
He bent over and rested his forehead against the door, cursing Ed for leaving him without the tools he needed to get the job done. He remembered the gleam in Ed’s eye, telling him about his granddaughter. Well, the tools he was willing to use, anyway.
“Damn.” He couldn’t bring himself to walk away. Maybe he wasn’t the warmest boss in the world, and most of the people at Fite probably thought he was a bastard, but he wasn’t going to screw them over the way Ed had screwed him. He had to stick around as long as he could, if just to write stealth recommendations for Ellen’s casualties.
He banged his head against the door and gazed down at his new Nikes, absently calculating their make and reverse-engineering the midfoot overlay. Just as he was about to bend over and take one off to bring to the shoe merchandiser, he heard a knock.
If he hadn't been inches from the door, he wouldn't have heard it at all. Just a tap, then a pause, then another tap. A chill tickled down his spine, and he stood up straight, the midfoot overlay forgotten. “Yes?” he barked out, not as irritated as he sounded. Nobody at Fite would knock on his door. Nobody would dare.
Silence. He thought he heard the sudden exhalation of breath and, impossibly, he imagined the scent of lemon blossoms. Vowing his next job would be for a publicly held corporation with thousands of employees and absolutely no family ties amid staff whatsoever, he flung open the door. “You.”
Her face, with its impossibly clear complexion, so similar to Ellen’s but without the severity of expensive makeup, peered up at him. “You, yourself.”
He turned away, shoving aside his curiosity about the woman, wondering how he—even with his acute senses—could have possibly smelled her through the door. She must have doused herself in Lemon Pledge that morning. Yet he couldn’t resist inhaling the scent deep into his lungs before striding over to his desk, surprised she'd come by to see him in person. Ellen had walked over too, of course, but she liked to gloat, and his impression of Bev Lewis had been that she'd avoid conflict.
Which is why he knew she wouldn't withstand Ellen's final offer.
“Stop in to say goodbye?” He lounged back in his chair and propped his feet up on the desk.
She lingered in the doorway, tilted her head, and said nothing. His attention dropped to the cheap suit she wore, the same ugly one from her previous visit with faded black jacket that didn't match the darker black pants. His professional eye took in the poor, baggy fit at the waist that hid whatever body she had underneath—tall but soft and obviously nonathletic. A before picture. The woman off the street.