Reece knelt on his front porch and rubbed the gray cat’s lopped ear as his pet ate. “You stay away from over there, you hear?” He hitched a thumb toward Lanie’s house. “She’s trouble.”
He didn’t know what it was about the woman, but she rubbed him the wrong way. Bursting into his house and ransacking his kitchen … and all he could do was stare in amazement while she whirlwinded her way through his house.
Reece hated being caught off balance like that! He vowed to make sure their paths crossed as little as possible in the future.
The phone rang, and he stepped inside to answer it. “And that dumb horse…” he growled as he lifted the receiver.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing, Ma. I was just mumbling again.” Reece opened the refrigerator and began assembling the ingredients for a super-colossal chef’s salad.
“Oh. Well, here’s something else to mumble about. Friday was my last day at the feed store.”
“Wha…?”
“Don’t worry. There’s this friend of mine who’s a whiz with the books—”
“Ma, it’s not that easy to get someone to replace you. How am I going to find somebody who can do the paperwork and who doesn’t mind lifting fifty-pound sacks of grain when needed?” He pictured a tottering old white-haired woman trying to hoist a sack while maneuvering her walker.
“Hmm. I forgot to mention that.”
Reece sighed into the phone.
“I’m sure that’ll be no problem, dear. She looks like she has plenty of heart.”
On the other hand, if she was anything like his mother, she’d outwork them all. “Ma…”
“She’s starting tomorrow at eight, and you’d better be nice to her, young man! I’ll be in shortly afterward to start training her.” She chuckled softly. “It’ll be nice to sleep late tomorrow.”
There was no arguing with his mother when she started the “young man” stuff. “I wish you’d given me more time, so I could have found someone on my own.”
“Maurice Albert Masardi, I gave you a year’s notice.” Now she was hauling out the big guns, calling him by his birth name. She might as well have pulled his ear like she’d done when he was a kid. “It took us a year to straighten out the mess your daddy left of the store when he died, but this past year has been spent building the business.” Her voice softened. “We’re in the black, honey. You don’t need me anymore.”
Reece stopped demolishing the lettuce. “I’ll always need you, Mom.”
A muffled sound came over the phone. When Dot spoke again, her sergeant’s voice came through loud and clear. “My friend starts work tomorrow. Be nice to her!”
“Yes, ma’am.” Reece hung up the phone and looked at the mound of salad he’d prepared. His appetite gone, he wondered what to do with it all.
The next morning Lanie checked her reflection in the bathroom mirror.
Superb!
She didn’t consider herself much of a looker; her fair skin burned easily, and her brunette hair framed her small face in a simple style that bordered somewhere between girlish and chic. Lanie adjusted her chunky wood necklace, satisfied that she would make a smashing impression.
She glanced again at her watch. Plenty of time. Too bad there hadn’t been time to drive by Masardi’s yesterday and get acquainted with the route she would take. She’d have to make do by allowing extra time to drive there this morning.
Winnie’s bleated protests tore at Lanie’s heart as she backed out of the gravel driveway. The lead line from her pet’s halter allowed plenty of room for grazing, basking in the sun, or cooling off in the shade. But Winnie was a social animal, and she craved human company.
“Hush, sweetie,” Lanie crooned from the car window. “Mommy will be home soon.”
Fifteen minutes later, she pulled up in front of Masardi’s … Farm and Home Supply? No matter. It should be a welcome change from the electric company where she’d worked until last week, and the psychiatric clinic before that.
She walked in the door and was greeted by the sight of row upon row of grass and vegetable seed, fertilizer, grain, potting soil, and a variety of farm and home gardening tools. In the left front corner of the store, beyond the tractors and riding lawn mowers, an area was sectioned off with freestanding partitions.
It looked like an office, so she headed for it, hoping to find Maurice Masardi.
Lanie was rounding the corner to enter the office when a tall form appeared in the doorway.
Oof!
She crashed into a hard chest and bounced backward in surprise. Strong arms shot out to grip her shoulders. In the moment of recognition that followed, his fingers dug harder into her shoulders.
“You! What are you doing here?” he demanded.
Lanie stared up at Reece, her jaw slack in fascination. When he scowled like that, his dark eyes appeared even more deep-set, like those of an eagle. His piercing gaze ripped through her, and she suddenly felt stupid, gaping back at him.
Remembering the first impression she had wanted to set with the owner, she snapped her mouth shut.
“I—I’m here to work. Do you know where I can find Mr. Masardi?”
“Please don’t tell me … you’re the woman who was hired to take care of the books?”
Lanie slowly nodded.
He released her and made a pathetic whimpering sound in his throat. He shook his head as if to clear it. “It’s that chain letter email I got last week. I knew I shouldn’t have broken the chain.”
“You didn’t delete it without forwarding it, did you?”
He blinked at her in response.
“You should never delete a chain letter. I always just filter them into a folder so I don’t have to look at them. That way, it’s as if I never received it.”
“My mother must be a sadist.”
Lanie’s eyes widened as she made the connection. “You’re Mau-Reece?” she asked, dragging out the name. Somehow, this Adonis—in corduroy shorts and a shirt that sprouted delicious dark-gold hairs where the buttons stopped at the top—didn’t match her idea of a Maurice. She giggled.
A scowl drew his thick brows together. “I was named after my favorite uncle.”
Lanie clamped her teeth on her lower lip to erase the grin from her lips. “I’m sorry. I—I mean … I’m not sorry that you were named… Oh, never mind.”
Reece took a deep breath, and Lanie watched his shirt expand. She pulled her eyes away from his magnificent chest to his still-brooding face.
Too bad such a great body was wasted on a grouch. He stepped aside and motioned her toward one of the two desks crowded into the tiny area.
“Have a seat,” he said through tight lips. “We might as well get to know each other.”
Lanie sat at the desk, drawing herself as erect as possible while Reece pulled over the other chair and straddled it backward.
She refused to be intimidated by his unwelcoming attitude. Nevertheless, seeing him at such close range, with his arms folded rigidly across the back of the chair, unnerved her.
“Look,” she said, sitting primly upright, “if you don’t want me to work here, just say so. I can find another job easily enough,” she bluffed. “Maybe even a better one.”
He hesitated a moment, as if considering the option, then appeared to think better of it. “Aw, don’t get huffy. We can use your help.”
He looked her over from head to toe and gnawed the inside of one cheek. His gaze stopped at her polka-dotted legs.
Beneath his intense gaze, Lanie felt strangely underdressed.
“You have a resume?”
Lanie reached into her purse and pulled out the somewhat wrinkled sheet of paper. Expressionless, he scanned the page.
“It says here you stayed at your last job less than six months. Didn’t you like the work?”
“Oh, yes, and I’m sure my supervisor there will give you a glowing assessment of my work. It’s just that”—Lanie’s voice cracked, and she fought to control her emotions—“I lost a lot of time due to my father’s illness and subsequent death.”
Reece’s hard features softened for a moment, and she detected a look of empathy. Then she recalled that Mrs. Masardi had lost her husband—Reece’s father—only two years ago. Of course he would understand.
“You have my sympathy,” he said softly.
Uncomfortable with the quiet, Lanie babbled on. “You’ll notice I worked at the City Psychiatric Clinic for over five years. My work there was also exemplary, and I have an associate’s degree in business administration. As I told your mother, I made straight A’s.”
“You don’t have a reference person listed for the psychiatric clinic.”
Lanie gulped. She had hoped to bluff him past that omission. “I, uh, wish you wouldn’t call them for a reference.”
Reece raised one eyebrow in a gesture that duplicated his mother’s expression yesterday. He peered at her, blatantly suspicious. “You weren’t a … patient there? Were you?”
“No, of course not! I was the administrative secretary.” She leaned back in her chair to distance herself from those knowing brown eyes. “In fact, I was even cited once for my role in calming a disturbed woman who had barricaded herself in my office and threatened us with a letter opener.”
Reece waited for her to finish.
She smiled in what she hoped was a charming manner. “In case you haven’t already noticed,” she continued, “I tend to be a bit impulsive.”
Reece smiled and rolled his eyes heavenward.
“Anyway, shortly before I left that job, I had dressed up as Glenda, the Good Witch of the North. You know, from The Wizard of Oz.”
“This I gotta hear.”
“It was Halloween!”
The gray cat slunk into the office, jumped onto Reece’s lap, and settled down to sleep.
“You let your cat come inside? I thought that was against your religion or something.”
Reece rubbed the feline’s lopsided ears. “He catches mice.”
“Yech.” Lanie shuddered at the thought of sharing her office with sharp-toothed rodents.
“So, they fired you for dressing like an idiot?”
He was teasing her now, and she wasn’t sure how to proceed. So she just opted for the truth.
“No. I forgot how I was dressed and went into the locked ward to deliver some charts. I even had on a halo.” Lanie fingered the clasp on her purse. “It set a patient back three months in his treatment.” She sighed. “That was when I decided that working in a psychiatric clinic wasn’t for me.”
Maybe he should fire her before she had a chance to undo two years of hard work. Surely his mother didn’t know what she was getting them into.
Perhaps if he explained that the girl was a catastrophe waiting to happen… Nah, that would only make his mother more determined to “help the poor thing.” And he had promised to be nice to her.
“Please don’t misunderstand,” Lanie pleaded. “I can handle any crisis that comes along.” The clasp on her purse snapped repeatedly as she opened and shut it. “It’s the little things that cause me trouble.”
A regular Lucille Ball. Only with straight brown hair instead of fire-red and curly. He straightened and rubbed the aching muscles at the back of his neck.
With a grimace of resignation, he opened the desk drawer and dropped her resume in with the rest of the employee records. “Welcome to the staff, Lucy.”
“My name is Lanie.”
“I know.”