Love Handles (Oakland Hills #1)(22)

Not their customer.

“You should drop by some of the SOMA showrooms while you're here,” he said. “Pick up some new pieces for your apartment. Your new apartment. Or house, perhaps?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Furniture. Home furnishings. That kind of thing. San Francisco has some cutting-edge designers.”

She was still frowning. “You think I'm here to go shopping?”

“Let's not waste each other's time.” He turned to his computer, where he’d been copying over his personal files to a thumb drive. When they'd accidentally loaded Illustrator on his PC, nobody thought he'd actually use it. Nobody but Ed knew he had, or that he'd loaded the custom sketching software too, and flown to Denver for a private tutorial to learn it as well as anyone. Better. “Ellen's new offer was probably a fair one. You obviously needed the money.” He realized now that was what Ed must have intended all along; Ellen learns her lesson, and his lazy but wholesome granddaughter gets the windfall.

“What the f*ck are you talking about?” the wholesome granddaughter asked. Her blue eyes flashed down at him over the desk, and he lost his train of thought. Up close, under the fluorescents, they were turquoise. A best-selling color for the summer line, the last delivery before the big fall assortments when the colors went dark and muted and natural again. A bright, happy, energetic color that stood out starkly against her pale cheeks and thick, black lashes.

Perhaps she wore colored contacts. Nobody really had eyes like that.

She blinked, growing visibly uneasy with his gaze, but still angry. “You seem to think you know something. But I don’t think you know what you think you know.”

He broke the spell by looking down at her ugly suit. A less flattering garment could not have been designed for her, but he realized why she’d chosen something so baggy around her waist when he looked at her chest, now at eye-level. She had to be a D cup, at least. Nothing off the rack would fit her well, with breasts like that—

“Hello.” She waved and sat down. “You can stop making snide comments about me going shopping. I didn’t sell the company.”

He leaned back and the chair creaked. “Not yet.”

“I’m not going to.”

“You just haven’t seen Ellen yet,” he said. “She’s waiting for you.”

“Yes, I did, and no she’s not, and I wish you would believe me. I’ve refused Ellen’s final offer, and she’s decided to—” She stopped and glanced away. “To wait for me to change my mind.” Then she took a deep breath, nodded, and looked back at him. “We’ll call it a leave of absence.”

Hope began flopping around in his heart like a Golden Retriever puppy. With years of practice he threw a thick, suffocating blanket over it. “Leave of absence?”

“She said she quit, but I can’t believe she would do that. I’ll call her tonight. The last thing I wanted was more bad blood.”

He looked at her. “What exactly did she say?”

“I’m sure she’ll cool down. She packed up a box and left when I refused to sign, saying she was just going to wait for me to drive Fite into the ground so she can pick up the pieces.”

The puppy stuck his nose out from under the blanket. Without glancing at his own pile of belongings behind her, he asked, “She packed up a box?”

“I’m sure she’s waiting for me to call her any second. She expects me to break under the pressure.”

So did he. He tried not to smile. Reminded himself he’d have to be very, very careful negotiating between the two disasters Ed had dumped on him. Just enough of the granddaughter would keep the aunt away, but not so much that he went insane or the company went under with her clumsy oversight. He reached for his coffee, sipped, met her eyes. Now he understood the hysterical edge lingering there. “Ellen had an exaggerated view of her own importance. Fite is better off without her.”

“She says the same about you.”

“Sadly for you, that is not true. This place revolves around me.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You have a high opinion of yourself.”

“I’m the executive vice president. I have a high opinion of the job.”

“My aunt was a vice president—”

“Of shopping.” He forced a tight smile. The expense reports for that woman had dwarfed her salary.

Bev shook her head, but her eyes grew wary. “You said ‘sadly.’ Why ‘sadly?’”

Biting his lip as though he was trying to hide something, he let his eyes drift away from her and over to the box near the door. Then he inhaled deeply and didn’t meet her gaze.

She took the bait. Twisting around to look behind her, she asked, “What?”

He shrugged, pushed himself slowly to his feet. In a panic now, Bev took it all in at once—the stripped shelves, the bare wall racks, the empty desk. She gaped at him with her mouth in an O.

“I know when I’m not wanted.” He was proud of himself for sounding sincere.

“You’re leaving?” She shot to her feet. “You, too? Oh, Christ. No. You can’t. You just can’t.”

He opened his eyes wider and said nothing.

Gripping her head with two soft-looking hands, she made a pitiful moaning sound in the back of her throat that was disturbingly erotic. “Oh, God,” she said, and he tried not to think of what she would sound like in bed. Because he was pretty sure he’d just heard it.