A Lyon's Share (6 page)

The determined set of his rugged features had been molded by the storm. They didn't vary, but his blue eyes smiled at her brightly in triumph as he sat the small heater on the floor.

"You found it," Joan murmured, finding she couldn't voice her relief at his safe return.

His broad shoulders blocked her view of the heater as he knelt beside it. Within a few minutes, Joan felt the first emanations of heat. The snow on his clothes began to melt, puddles forming on the carpet.

"You're going to catch pneumonia in those wet things," she said anxiously.

"That's an old wives' tale," Brandt declared, shrugging out of his jacket like a giant grizzly bear coming out of hibernation. "Pneumonia is caused by a germ, not wet clothes. It'll be uncomfortable for a while, but they'll soon dry." He walked to the sofa, picked up her shoes sitting on the floor beside it, and carried them back to the heater. "We'll get them warm before you have to put them on," he explained.

His thoughtfulness sent a warm glow of pleasure through her veins. That combination of indomitable strength and tender consideration was rare. Perhaps, Joan decided, when someone was as self-assured as Brandt Lyon, they could afford to show such kindness without fearing damage to their male ego.

Her eyes followed his movements as he used her scarf to rub most of the snow from his hair and carelessly brushed the flakes that hadn't melted from his slacks. Before she could conceal her silent study of him, his gaze glittered over her.

"This heater isn't going to be able to keep both rooms warm. We'll have to decide which office we're going to use," he stated.

"I won't be able to type those letters you dictated since there isn't any electricity, but I had thought I would take out the inactive folders from the filing cabinet," Joan offered hesitantly. The prospect of sitting idle the entire day with Brandt Lyon's dominating presence was too daunting to contemplate.

"It's settled. We'll move the heater into your office." He reached down for her shoes and handed them to her. "I'll go open a window."

"A window?" she blinked in confusion.

His gaze trailed over while she slipped on her warmed shoes. "The heater burns the oxygen in the air. We'll need some ventilation if we don't want to suffocate."

An hour later the temperature in Joan's office had increased to the point where she no longer needed to wear her heavy coat to be comfortable. Brandt had disappeared again on an undisclosed errand after setting up the portable typing table in her office. Pausing for a moment beside the heater to warm her fingers, Joan wondered how she would have fared if she had been stranded alone, dependent on her own resourcefulness.

The door to the hall opened and closed quickly, a cold draught accompanying Brandt. She glanced curiously at the tray in his hands.

"Without electricity, we can't have coffee, but when this thaws, we'll have sweet rolls and juice, courtesy of the canteen," he announced.

"I wish you hadn't mentioned coffee," Joan grimaced, walking around her desk to rummage through the center drawer for her comb. "I never feel myself in the mornings until I've had my first cup.

"Yourself being the cool efficient paragon who rules the office?" Brandt questioned, a brow arching with complacent amusement.

The comb in her hand faltered in mid-stroke through the slightly tangled locks of her long hair.

"I don't rule the office," Joan asserted feeling more like a schoolgirl than an efficient secretary as her cheekbones gleamed with a rosy hue of embarrassment.

"You blush very easily, don't you?"

The color intensified. "It has something to do with being fair-skinned, I think." She kept her head averted from his discerning eyes as she began winding her hair into its prim coil at the nape of her neck.

"Leave your hair down." he commanded huskily, covering the distance, between them when she wasn't looking. "It'll keep your ears warm. Besides—-" His fingers pulled part of her hair free from her unresisting hold, and Joan was too startled by his sudden nearness to protest. "The color of your hair is much too attractive to be concealed in that severe style. It's like spun gold when it's loose."

"It's naturally that color," she stated as if he had accused her of achieving the color from a bottle.

He laughed softly. "I guessed that."

Joan fought back the clamoring of her senses. "It's too unpractical to wear it down. It keeps getting in the way."

"Does it?" Disbelief was in his question as he tucked her hair behind her ears and turned away. "You never wear it down so how can you be sure?"

"You'll see," she declared, shaking the rest of her hair free in frustration and dumping the pins, on top of the desk.

The instant she surrendered to his stronger will, she knew she had made an irretrievable mistake. The cloud of hair about her shoulders made her feel instinctively feminine and vulnerable, the very sensations she needed to avoid or she would fall completely under the power of his magnetism. The invisible barrier between employer and employee had been breached last night when she had lain in his arms. She desperately needed to repair her defenses.

With cold deliberateness, she ignored him the rest of the morning, completing the filing from the wire basket on her desk. On the surface, Joan was successful, but an inner radar kept her apprised of every movement Brandt made as he pored over the blueprint spread out on the drafting table.

"I'm hungry." His low voice shattered the silence, causing Joan to spin abruptly around. "What are we having for lunch?"

The blue depths of his eyes seemed to pull her into a whirlpool of emotional chaos. This strange intimacy that had crept between them made it nearly impossible for her to react naturally. Bells rang, warning her that she was becoming much too susceptible to his attraction but she couldn't think of what she might do to prevent it.

"I don't know," she answered quickly, turning back to the file drawers before she succumbed to despair at her own vulnerability.

"I'll see what the canteen has to offer."

As she nibbled the cold sandwich later, Joan realized it was this constant sharing that was destroying her peace of mind. A business aloofness couldn't be maintained in these circumstances. She was conscious of his stirring interest in her or maybe it was curiosity as Brandt regarded her in a new light discovering the humanness behind her facade of efficiency.

But wasn't she making too much of his new interest? What harm would there be in a friendship being developed between them? What was there to fear? If Brandt Lyon did begin to regard her as a woman, that didn't mean he was suddenly going to be overwhelmed by her average looks—not when someone like Angela lurked in his memory.

"A penny for your thoughts," Brandt's voice snapped the thread of her musings.

"They aren't worth it." Joan protested self-consciously.

"Anything that can keep a woman quiet for fifteen minutes must be worth at least a penny," he mocked.

"If you must know." She glanced up from her sandwich into the vivid blue of his eyes, now lazily veiled by thick lashes. "I was wondering how much longer the storm would last."

"Getting tired of my company already?"

"Not as tired as you must be of mine," Joan retorted, not able to match the lightness in his voice.

"On the contrary." There was an eloquent shrug of his broad shoulders. "As a matter of fact I was just wondering how an attractive girl like you has avoided the altar."

"It's more a case of the altar avoiding me."

"Then you aren't a career girl." The smoothly firm line of his mouth was pulled into a wry smile. "That means some day I'll have to find myself another secretary, and just when I was becoming used to you, too."

"I haven't handed in my notice yet, Mr. Lyon." Joan said stiffly.

"It was Brandt last night," he reminded her with a wicked light in his eyes. Their dancing gleam was disturbing and Joan looked away. "Surely there's someone special in your life, isn't there? Or would you have me believe that you dress sexily for a maiden aunt?"

She blinked back the sudden sting of tears, pride surfacing with a rush. She couldn't tell him of her empty weekends, of the countless nights she had spent in her own company. Those half-forgotten words she had spoken last week when she had intimated that her weekends were always occupied had come back to haunt her. White lies or any kind of lies always seemed to compound into more.

"I don't know if—" Joan hesitated, then plunged forward, hoping she wasn't burying herself in a series of lies and silently apologizing to Ed Thomas for seeking refuge in his name, "—Ed is exactly special, but I am fond of him." That statement was at least the truth.

"Have you known him long?" The tilt of the leonine head indicated a casual interest.

"No, he's a brother of my room-mate's fiancé." Her fingers were tearing nervously at the uneaten portion of her sandwich.

"Your room-mate is the Moreland girl in the computer department, isn't she?"

"Yes, that's right, Kay Moreland," Joan answered in a startled voice that betrayed her surprise. She had never suspected that he was even aware she had a room-mate.

"Are you bringing Ed to the Christmas party?"

"Well, actually," his question had caught her off guard, "he lives in Cleveland."

"It must be pretty serious if he flies back and forth just to see you," Brandt commented.

"And his brother," Joan added, rising to her feet in an effort to end the conversation.

The swivel chair behind her desk squeaked loudly in protest to her sudden movement, screeching like chalk on a blackboard.

"That chair needs to be oiled," he said, walking over to rock it back and forth.

"I may look like an Amazon, but that chair is too heavy for me to turn upside down to get to the area where the squeak is," she said sharply.

There was a piercing quality to the look he gave her, the harshness of controlled anger. Her chin tilted defiantly as she swallowed the tight lump in her throat. Joan had always been conscious of her size ever since her teenage days when she had towered over the boys in her class.

His eyes narrowed as he studied her. "Have you always been sensitive about your height?"

"It isn't something that can be ignored," Joan responded stiffly.

"Why is it," Brandt's head was cocked inquiringly to the side, "that short girls always dream of being statuesque and tall girls want to be daintily petite?"

"It's human nature, I suppose," she shrugged. "to want what you can't have. But I have accepted the way I am."

"Then stop apologizing for being a tall, beautiful blonde." The crisply spoken compliment seemed to accuse her of false modesty and Joan reacted sharply.

"Really. Mr. Lyon, you can't expect me to believe you!" Her head was thrown back in an indignant pose. "In the three years I've worked for you, you've never once paid any attention to me as more than your secretary."

Brandt's knee was hooked over the corner of her desk as he half sat and half stood against it, his hands folded complacently on his thigh.

"You have only yourself to blame for that. The "No Trespassing" signs were so boldly displayed and your manner was so briskly efficient and businesslike that I couldn't guess that you wanted to be treated as a woman. Besides," a latent harshness crept into his strong features, "I've always lived by the rule that business should never become mixed with pleasure. I don't want my personal life to be intertwined with my work."

The precise clearly spoken statement sent prickles up her spine. Joan no longer doubted that he was sincere. Brandt Lyon did consider her attractive. At the same time, he made it clear that her looks made no difference. He would never want her as more than his secretary. And she had to accede to the advisability of his stand. If a man-woman relationship had developed between them and later burned itself out her position in his office would have become untenable for both of them.

She averted her gaze from the determined line of his jaw. "I agree with you completely." Her mouth moved stiffly in resistance to the words she uttered.

A heavy sigh of exasperation sounded behind her and she faintly caught a whispering, "Do you?" that was mockingly derisive. Pushing aside her long hair, Joan glanced over her shoulder, a bewildered frown knitting creases in her forehead. His back was turned to her as he tilted the chair back, then completely turned it upside down.

"Do you have any all-purpose oil here?" he asked.

The detached voice forced Joan to conclude she had only imagined the previous question, a trick of her imagination that was so susceptible to Brandt's masculinity.

"In the middle desk drawer," she answered.

While Brandt worked at oiling the squeaky springs of the swivel chair, Joan began sorting through the file cabinet, removing the inactive folders and placing them on a nearby straight chair. Only one part of her mind was devoted to the task. The rest was trying to draw comfort from the discovery that Brandt thought she was attractive.

Her preoccupation made her less thorough in her actions. She barely noticed that the top drawer didn't close tightly when she pushed it forward to go through the second drawer. Her mouth twitched in amusement as she found a folder misfiled. It was one she had given Brandt the other day and he had replaced it in the wrong drawer. Removing it from its incorrect place, she reached down for the third drawer of the four-drawer cabinet.