In Bed with the Boss Page 6

  The second time, in New York three years ago, he’d tracked Thatcher down and confronted him. Drake denied everything.

  Tom had seriously considered murder then. Or, at least, finding a way to cause Thatcher’s destruction, however he could manage that.

  He still didn’t really know why he’d walked away from the tempting prospect of revenge.

  But he had. He’d walked away and made another new life for himself with TAKA-Hanson.

  At least this time, since Tom had been truthful with Helen from the start, Drake wouldn’t be able to cost him his job just by filling Helen in on Tom’s shady past.

  Thatcher in the hospitality business…

  It couldn’t be good. Drake always kept a close eye on the competition. Too close. Did he already have spies infiltrating TAKA-Hanson?

  Suddenly, Tom saw the issues with the interiors in San Francisco, and the problems in Kyoto in a whole new light. Could Drake be behind it all?

  Tom grunted. No need to get paranoid. Drake Thatcher meant trouble, yeah. But cost overruns and designers running behind schedule…Things like that were bound to happen.

  Then again, the situation with Riki seemed especially extreme. Could that much be going wrong with flooring and furnishings, all at once, without a little help?

  They could and he knew it. It was the nature of the beast. It was business. Things went wrong and you dealt with them. There was little to be gained by manufacturing conspiracy theories.

  He considered calling Helen right then. But it was barely 5:00 a.m. in Tokyo—and this unpleasant news was nothing that couldn’t wait until he saw her Friday, when she met him in Kyoto. He would prefer to discuss it face-to-face, anyway.

  Yeah.

  It could wait. This was hardly a crisis.

  It was more like a warning sign.

  Tom knew Drake Thatcher. Whatever project Drake took on, he had to be the best at it. The man would stoop pretty damn low to deal a blow to any competitor.

  And wait…

  Tom was getting ahead of himself. It was always possible that Chip had bad intel on this. The reporter had said he’d talked to one of Thatcher’s partners, but he hadn’t mentioned whether he’d checked around to confirm the reliability of the source.

  Tom picked up the phone and made some calls. He had sources of his own, after all.

  An hour later, he was certain.

  Drake Thatcher had moved over into the hotel business. TAKA-Hanson would need to be ready to deal with Drake’s dirty tricks.

  Chapter Four

  Early Thursday morning, Tom and Shelly took one of the TAKA-Hanson jets to Kyoto. With the hour-long layover for refueling in San Francisco, the trip took fourteen hours.

  Shelly worked through some of the flight and napped the rest. Tom had suggested the nap. He planned that they’d go right to work as soon as they landed. A little sleep on the plane would keep jet lag from slowing them down too much.

  When they touched down at the private airstrip in Kyoto, it was a little after nine Thursday night, Chicago time. In Japan, it was lunchtime on Friday.

  It was also raining—torrential rain. Walls of water poured out of the sky. The pretty Asian woman who’d taken care of them through the flight provided rain slickers.

  “Welcome to Kyoto,” she said. “As it happens, you visit our beautiful city in the season of monsoons.”

  Shelly took the yellow slicker—and used the opportunity to practice her rudimentary Japanese. “Dmo arigat.” Thank you very much.

  The pretty woman bowed. “Ditashi mashite.” You’re welcome.

  “Let’s go.” Tom already had his slicker on. Shelly donned hers and they raced for the limo that waited for them on the tarmac.

  Once they were safe in the comfort of the big car, with their bags safely stowed in the trunk, Tom told the driver to take them to the construction site.

  Shelly would have admired the scenery—if it had been more than a blur through all that water. On the other side of the car, Tom sat, silent. He seemed preoccupied, as he had through most of the flight.

  She wanted to reach across, touch his hand. Ask him if he was all right. But since she was trying to keep things professional, she hesitated to give him any contradictory signals.

  He must have felt her worried gaze on him. “What?” His nose was shiny with rain and water glistened in his dark brows, stuck his eyelashes together.

  She flipped back the hood of her slicker and brushed at her cheeks with both hands. “I’m soaked. Slicker or not.”

  “And you will be wetter, believe me.”

  She couldn’t wait to get to the hotel where they were staying, to take a long bath and indulge in a good night’s sleep. But work came first. Now, they were headed for The Taka Kyoto. Tom got out his BlackBerry and called the site, told them to except his arrival within the hour.

  After that, they were quiet. There was the rain drumming on the roof and the low drone of the driver’s radio.

  When they arrived at the site, Shelly saw mud—a lot of it—and rain-soaked concrete. She spotted two enormous building cranes, one at either end of the site. The Taka Kyoto rose from the rubble of ongoing construction. Through the veil of the rain, the building itself appeared more or less complete.

  “It looks as far along as the San Francisco hotel,” she said to Tom.

  He sent her a grim glance. “Trust me. It’s not. We got the whole thing closed up before the rains started. But inside, we’ve got a long way to go and less than six months to do it in.”

  The driver steered the limo to a row of trailers. They flipped their yellow hoods back over their heads, grabbed their briefcases and made a run for it. Tom raced for the nearest, biggest trailer, Shelly right behind him.

  A middle-aged Asian woman pushed the door open for them. They ran in. “You made it.” She smiled. Her accent was as American as a big slice of homemade apple pie.

  “Thanks, Akiko.” Tom was already shrugging out of the dripping slicker. Shelly followed suit. Tom said, “Akiko is Robby’s assistant.”

  “Hey,” said Akiko, turning her bright smile on Shelly.

  A man in shirtsleeves came through a door a few feet away. Brown hair, white shirt, tan slacks. Maybe five-ten. He was ordinary to the point of blandness, the kind of guy you would pass on the street and never give a second glance.

  Tom said, “Shelly, this is Robby Axelrod.”

  Robby nodded. “Great to meet you, Shelly.” He rubbed his hands together. “Well, Tom. How ’bout lunch?”

  “Can you have something brought in?”

  “Of course.” Robby glanced at Akiko, who gave him a nod. “Right away,” she said.

  “And coffee,” added Robby.

  “Will do,” said Akiko.

  The construction manager led the way through the open door to the main area of the long trailer, which was an on-site conference room. Ned Jones, the new accountant on the site, stood from the table and Robby introduced him. Ned had been hired just recently, when the original accountant was forced to return to the States.

  “Family issues,” Robby explained, shaking his head.

  The afternoon progressed pretty much like the day with the designer in San Francisco. Robby had valid reasons for all the ways construction was running behind schedule. The rains, he said, caused no end of delays. Trucks carrying equipment and material didn’t arrive on time—if they arrived at all. That meant the subcontractors lined up to do the job had to move on to something else. And then, when the material did arrive, Robby had to get another sub or wait for the first one to become available again.

  Yes, there’d been some accounting issues—subs being paid before the work was done, material paid for that hadn’t been delivered yet. There were requisitions stuck in processing, so that material and equipment were never ordered in the first place. But all that, Robby and Ned explained, had occurred because the previous accountant had been distracted by the long illness of his wife back home.

  Ned, Robby insisted,
was on top of the problem. He was switching them over to a whole new payables/ receivables system. Robby was pleased with the way he was cleaning up the accounting end.

  Tom shook his head. “I’ve seen the reports. Sorry, Ned. But most of the problems have occurred since you took over.”

  Ned, who was tall, blond and square-jawed, explained, “To start, I tried working within my predecessor’s system. I never like to come on a job and make changes right off the bat. I like to see what works and what doesn’t, and then proceed from there. We’re just moving on to using my system now.”

  “And we need to give the new system a chance to work,” Robby argued.

  Tom looked from one man to the other. “Of course, we’ll give it a chance. How long till it’s up to speed?”

  “We’re getting there,” said Robby, with a nervous glance at Ned.

  Tom pressed for a commitment. “You’re telling me the accounting issues are a thing of the past as of this moment?”

  Robby hedged. “Any system takes tweaking. You’ll need to give us a few weeks to work out the kinks.”

  “We don’t have a few weeks.”

  “I know. And I didn’t mean to put up a red flag here. You’ll be seeing improvement immediately. Right, Ned?”

  “That’s right.” Ned was all square-jawed firmness and determination. “Now we just need to finish cleaning up the mess.”

  Tom nodded. “Good. I’ll be watching the numbers. Closely.”

  “And you’ll like what you see,” Ned promised.

  The rain had slowed to a drizzle by the time the limo dropped Shelly and Tom off at their hotel.

  “Take the evening for yourself,” he said, when they reached her room.

  “You don’t need me for dinner with Robby and Ned?”

  “Order room service,” he said. “Rest up. Be fresh for tomorrow, when the meetings will be endless and we’ll also have the thrills and chills of touring the site.”

  “Ugh. Even if the rain stops, it’s going to be muddy.”

  “True. But at least Akiko has a cabinet full of rubber boots. In a range of sizes.”

  “Good news. I guess I won’t have to sacrifice a pair of shoes, after all.”

  She should say good-night. But she didn’t. She felt reluctant to leave him. After the long flight, when he’d been wrapped up in his own concerns, and the endless tension-filled meeting over the problems at the site, it was nice to share a quiet minute, just the two of them.

  And he didn’t seem any more eager to leave her than she was to see him go. So why not? A little small talk. What could it hurt?

  “I feel guilty,” she confessed. “Leaving you on your own.”

  “Hey. I’ll have Robby and Ned.”

  “True….” He had a tiny scar over his left eye, a thin, pale line, long-healed. How had that happened?

  He laughed. “What?”

  “Nothing. Really—So. Room service. A good night’s sleep. What’s not to like? And you get the guys’ night out.” Three harried-looking businessman-types came striding toward them. Shelly tugged on the retractable handle of her suitcase and backed to the wall beside the door to her room, out of their way.

  Tom moved in closer as the strangers rushed by. “Tomorrow night’s another story.” He smelled of the rain and that subtle aftershave he wore. And his face was shadowed with a day’s growth of dark beard. She wanted to reach up and touch his rough cheek, to let her hand trail down until she clasped his big shoulder. She could just feel the hardness of his muscles beneath the fine fabric of his jacket….

  She kept her hands to herself and remembered it was her turn to talk. “What’s happening tomorrow night?”

  “You’ll be working.” His voice was low, almost intimate. The sound of it warmed her. “Helen and Mori will be here. We’ll have dinner with them, just the four of us.”

  “That’s great. I can’t wait to meet the fabulous Helen and her Samurai tycoon husband.”

  Tom braced a hand on the wall near her head. “Who told you Mori Taka was a Samurai tycoon?”

  “That’s what Verna always called him. The Samurai Tycoon—usually followed by a sigh. She said he has dark, piercing eyes and a commanding presence. I think she kind of had a crush on him.”

  Tom grunted. “Come on. Verna?”

  Shelly laughed. “Just a fantasy crush.”

  “Verna’s married.”

  “Fantasy, Tom. As in, not in the real world.”

  “She’s a grandmother.”

  “So? Grandmothers have fantasy lives too, you know.”

  “I never said they didn’t.”

  “Tom. Come on. You said ‘Verna’s a grandmother,’ implying that you believe grandmothers don’t have fantasy lives.”

  “I implied no such thing. Helen’s a grandmother. I don’t know about her fantasy life, but I have no trouble believing she has one.”

  “But Helen’s hot, right?”

  “And by that you mean…?”

  “Helen may be a grandmother, but she’s not grandmotherly. You seem to think that grandmotherly women don’t have fantasy lives. I’m here to tell you, they do. Or at least, Verna does.”

  He shook his head. Slowly. “You should have been a lawyer.” A smile flirted with the corners of his sexy mouth. “You’d have killed ’em in every cross.” He moved in an inch closer, bringing with him that clean scent of rain and the warmth of his big body.

  “I never wanted to be a lawyer,” she said and wished her voice hadn’t suddenly gone husky.

  “No? Then what?”

  “I planned to study finance. You’re lucky Max came along. I’d be competing for your job.”

  “I think you’d be damn good at whatever you decided to do.”

  “Why, thank you….”

  “You could still go back to school, you know.” He touched her face. And she let him. So lightly, he traced the fall of her hair where it lay along her cheek, curling slightly from the rain. She reveled in that touch—at the same time as she reminded herself that it didn’t mean anything.

  That it was innocent.

  Innocent. Right. She knew it was anything but.

  And what were they talking about? Oh. Her going back to college. “It’s possible,” she said, the huskiness more pronounced than before. “In the future. Right now, though, I’ve got this demanding job. Takes up most of my time. Lucky I happen to love it, huh?”

  “Lucky. Oh, yeah…”

  She tried valiantly to remember all the reasons she could never do something so foolish and unprofessional as kiss him. But the whole world was there in those summer-sky eyes of his. And along her cheek, she could still feel the memory of his touch—an echo of sensation, so sweet. So…right.

  And his lips…What red-blooded woman wouldn’t want a kiss from those lips of his?

  She whispered, “Tom, we shouldn’t be doing this.”

  “What?”

  “As if you didn’t know.”

  “I don’t. I’m innocent. I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, please. You know. Standing here in this hallway, together, behaving in a manner that’s a long way from professional.”

  “It’s just small talk. Nothing wrong with that.”

  “It’s more than small talk. You know it is.”

  “You think?”

  “I know.” And she made it worse. She gave in to her desire to reach up, to lay her hand along the side of his beard-scratchy cheek.

  He whispered her name as his mouth met hers.

  So lightly, he kissed her. A hello kind of a kiss, a let-me-taste-you kiss, a butterfly brushing of his lips on hers.

  No, she thought. Shouldn’t be doing this. Bad, bad move…

  And simultaneously, a joyous voice in her head shouted, Yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes…

  When he pulled back to look at her, she still had her palm pressed against his cheek. She gulped and broke the contact.

  His mouth remained two inches from hers and his eyes
…oh, his eyes…“I shouldn’t have done that, huh?”

  She let out a slow sigh. “Oh, probably not.”

  “We’ll just pretend it never happened.”

  This was very serious and she knew she shouldn’t laugh. Still, a low giggle escaped. “Pretend it didn’t happen. Wish me luck with that.”

  “I’m lying,” he said. “I won’t pretend anything of the kind.”

  “Yeah. Well. I would. If I could.”

  “But you can’t.” The blue eyes gleamed, the summer-sky sweetness fled. Now the blue was dangerous, wild and full of mystery as the deep blue sea. He wanted her.

  As she wanted him.

  She whispered, “A week ago, that bench at Washington Square Park, in front of the Newberry…”

  He remembered. “You told me this wasn’t going to happen.”

  “And look at us now.”

  “Shelly. It was just a kiss.”

  “Yeah. Right. How many times did you kiss Verna?”

  “Don’t get on me again about Verna. I was wrong and I’m willing to admit it. A grandmother has a right to her fantasies, just like the rest of us.”

  “I wasn’t referring to Verna’s fantasies. You’re deliberately misunderstanding me.”

  “What? Me?”

  “I repeat, how many times did you kiss Verna?”

  “I kissed her last Friday night, as a matter of fact.”

  “Cheater. On the cheek, you kissed her.”

  “A kiss is a kiss.”

  She groaned. “Liar, liar, pants on fire…”

  He leaned closer still, so his rough cheek brushed her soft one. A sweet shiver ran through her as he whispered in her ear. “You feel it, like I do. It’s…special. Between you and me.”

  She put her hands on his hard, warm chest and pushed gently—until he backed away enough that she could look him in the eye. “Office romances are a bad idea. They never—”

  “Stop.” He put his index finger against her lips.

  “But I—”

  “Shh. Listen. Are you listening?”