The Bargain (2 page)

“No? Because it seems like he went out of his way to keep a low profile on this one, sweetheart.”

What was this loon talking about?

Forget it. She heard the front door open then and Clarissa greet Drew. He didn’t need to start his day out on a sour note like this. “I’m sorry, sir. Mr. Kingston naturally wants to listen to the concerns of constituents, and he values their feedback, but he’s very busy at this time. Why don’t you call back later and schedule an appointment? Have a very nice day.”

“Don’t you dare hang — ”

She let the phone fall back on the receiver, feeling just a little bit wicked and not the least bit sorry.

“Good morning, Shannon.”

As it always did when she saw Drew, her heart tightened a little inside her chest. “Good morning.”

Trim and polished, he was what every politician wished they looked like. The suit was expensive but worth every penny since it fit him so well. His shoulders were just as broad as they had been in high school and his body just as lean. Nowadays he had an air of maturity about him that he hadn’t quite earned back then, but his smile was still boyish in its charm. “Everything all set for the budget meeting?”

She nodded and held out a file for him.

“Wonderful,” he said, looking through it. “Eleven o’clock?”

“Ten.”

“Oh, that’s right. Thanks. What would I do without you?” Drew smiled again, but it was with less energy than usual.

For the first time, Shannon noticed dark circles under his eyes. “You look tired. Can I get you anything? Some coffee?”

“No, thanks. I’ve had four cups already. Any more caffeine and I’ll be too jittery to hold my pen steady.”

She hesitated, wanting to ask if everything was all right but not sure if her asking would make him think she was being too presumptuous somehow. Then he disappeared into his office and closed the door behind him, and the moment was gone.

Coward, she thought to herself.

A short while later she knocked cautiously on his door to deliver a piece of mail to him.

“Come in.”

She opened the door to see him seated behind his desk and staring out the window. “Sorry,” she said. “This was just messengered over, though, so … ”

He nodded toward his desk, and she let the letter fall onto it. Then he went back to staring out the window.

Just say it, she told herself.
Ask
him already. “Is everything all right?” she blurted out finally.

There. She had said it, and miracle of miracles, he didn’t look shocked or offended. Was basic conversation this hard for everyone, she wondered, or just for her?

“Oh, sure,” he said with a slight sigh and a shrug of his shoulders. “It’s just … Do you have any family, Shannon?”

“Me?” she asked, surprised. “I … well, parents. A couple of cousins maybe that I haven’t seen in years.”

“Parents still living?”

She knew his were not. “Yes.”

“That’s nice,” he said faintly. “No brothers or sisters, though.”

“No.”

“Mmm,” was all he said, and he went back to staring out the window.

Now what? she wondered. Ask him again? Turn around and leave? She froze like a wild animal caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. How could any woman be this inept around a man?

Drew saved her by speaking again. “This youth center … ”

“Yes?” she said hopefully.

He turned to look at her and frowned. “Do you think … ” He trailed off, his fingers rifling idly through the papers she had spotted earlier on his desk.

“Yes?” she repeated.

But he seemed to think better of whatever he was going to say. “Never mind. I shouldn’t be keeping you from your work like this. Don’t mind me.”

Feeling a little disappointed, Shannon turned to go.

“Oh, Shannon?”

She turned back, hope sparking anew. Would he confide in her after all? Thank her for her concern? Be touched that she cared enough to ask after him?

“Could you do me a favor?”

“Of course. What is it?”
Comfort you? Hold your hand? Have your baby, maybe?

Drew looked a little sheepish. “I have a dinner date tonight, but I forgot to make reservations. Could you call Le Joli and ask for a table for two? Seven o’clock. Something with a view, preferably.”

A pang shot through her, but Shannon kept her expression carefully neutral. “Sure. Anything else?”

“No, that’s it, thanks. Good old Shannon. You’re a lifesaver.” And he treated her to one more charming smile as she closed the door behind her on her way out.

Good old Shannon.

Pulling up the restaurant’s number on her computer as she sat down, Shannon wrote herself a note to call them when they opened for lunch. There was nothing surprising about Drew’s request. She had done the same thing for him many times before. It just hurt a little more each time she did it.

Good old Shannon wouldn’t fit in at a fine French restaurant, she thought with a glance down at her clothes and a slight hitch in her throat. She cleared it quickly. Good old Shannon was not the type of girl a man thought of when he thought of a romantic dinner for two. Good old Shannon wasn’t really the type of girl a man thought about at all.

Maybe with the right clothes, a little makeup …

Her mother’s voice popped into her head, her words an echo from some childhood memory.
You can put a pig in satin and pearls, baby, but it won’t change the fact that a pig is still a pig.

Now where had that come from? she wondered, frowning as she struggled to remember. Her mother had never been insensitive enough to actually imply Shannon bore any kind of resemblance to a pig. Her memory cleared. No, it was back in high school when Shannon had started talking about maybe going to college after all. Her bewildered parents hadn’t seen much point to it. They certainly hadn’t understood why she bothered to put herself through night school. Come to think of it, there were a lot of things they didn’t understand.

Which could be one reason why she didn’t call Florida very often.

But for just a moment, sitting there, aching over Drew’s obliviousness to her, Shannon found herself wishing her mother were a little closer than Florida. Well, she would wish that if her mother were a little more like June Cleaver and a little less like Peg Bundy — or at least a little more like Clarissa.

“Clarissa?” she called out through her open door.

“Yes?” the other woman’s voice floated back to her.

“Want to adopt me?”

“Sure thing, honey.”

Shannon smiled faintly and forced her attention away from Drew and onto her work. This was hardly a productive line of thinking. Time to get back to zoning issues.

She made very little headway amid phone calls and emails that kept interrupting her, but she did her best to shut out both the distraction in her heart and the chatter between Clarissa and the occasional visitor. Her eyes were glued to her computer screen, so she couldn’t help but let out a startled gasp when a pair of large masculine hands came down on her desktop, one on either side of her computer.

She looked up to see just who had invaded her personal space so abruptly.

“Hello,” said a dark-haired, dark-eyed personification of sin. “Remember me? I believe you hung up on me earlier.”

The first thought that went through Shannon’s head was, dear Lord, I hope he doesn’t have a gun.

The next was to wonder how anyone could possibly look that good outside of the pages of a magazine.

And the third one was to wonder why he looked vaguely familiar to her. With features Michelangelo might have chiseled and a mouth to die for, he could have easily been a movie star or a model. Maybe she really had seen him in a magazine somewhere. The only trace of a flaw in his face would be the dark shadows beneath his eyes, lending him a vaguely troubled look that worked quite well for him.

Those eyes darkened further. “Interesting choice in phone etiquette for a secretary — ”

“Personal assistant,” Shannon corrected him coolly, struggling both to regain her composure and to place just where exactly she had seen this man before.

He leaned closer to get eye to eye with her, a move she was sure was calculated. “Sweetheart, you can slap whatever label on it you like. I really don’t care. What I do care about is getting in to see your boss, right now.”

Magnificent or not, he did not get to come in here and try to bully his way past her. “And as I explained to you on the phone earlier,” Shannon said, slowly and purposefully standing up so that he couldn’t tower quite so much over her, “Mr. Kingston is a very busy man with a very busy schedule. You can’t just walk in without an appointment.”

“Hard to make an appointment when you’re left talking to a dial tone, isn’t it?”

Her face grew a little warmer, and she knew her cheeks were turning unbecomingly pink again. Wonderful. “If you’re going to behave like a childish brat,” she said primly, “don’t be surprised if people treat you like one.”

“Oh, you are a charmer, aren’t you?”

She ignored that. “I’m sorry, but I believe you’ve wasted your time
and
mine in coming down here. Mr. Kingston has a meeting starting shortly and can’t take the time to see anyone else just now.”

The man straightened. “He can make time for his brother.”

“His brother?” The fog surrounding her memory finally cleared as things clicked into place. Yes, she vaguely remembered Drew having a brother in school. Marcus? Micah? No, wait … “You’re … Michael.”

Michael. A few years older than Drew — and therefore Shannon. He was a senior when they were freshmen, and he only existed on the peripheral of Shannon’s life since Drew was the center of her universe then, and he and his brother ran in very different circles.

“Heard of me, have you? I’m surprised Drew would think me worth mentioning.” There was a slight edge to his voice. She couldn’t tell if it was bitterness or sarcasm.

Drew
hadn’t
mentioned his brother to Shannon, not even once. But she felt reluctant to explain how she knew of him, almost as if by doing so it would relegate her back to the same wallflower status that belonged to her in high school. Because while she might vaguely remember him, he clearly had no idea who she was.

Michael Kingston. Even if you never spoke to him in school, you knew who he was. To say he had a reputation would be putting it mildly. No respect for authority, unruly and unpredictable. She thought he might have even been kicked out of school at some point. But he was wildly popular. Every girl wanted him, and many got to have him — for a little while. A player was what Shannon would have called him. Sex-on-a-stick was what many others said instead. And giggled.

In fact, the odds were very good that Shannon was the only girl at McKinley High who hadn’t carried some kind of torch for him. If rumors could be believed, that might have included one or two of the teachers, too. But her awareness of him hadn’t extended much farther than his relationship to Drew.

“What?” he asked her irritably all of a sudden, and Shannon realized she had been staring blankly at him. Or maybe through him.

She hesitated uncertainly. “I don’t think Drew — er, Mr. Kingston is expecting you. He would have said something.”

“No, I’m sure this will be the surprise of the decade. But never mind that. Let’s get this family reunion started.” Michael stepped around Shannon’s desk and would have no doubt reached for the doorknob to Drew’s office, but Shannon scrambled up and intercepted him. He did a double take, clearly startled to find her between him and the door.

“I don’t care if you’re his long-lost fairy godmother. You can’t just barge in because you feel like it.” Pompous jerk, she added mentally.

She had a feeling he was thinking a few unflattering things about her as well. His eyes narrowed. “Move.”

“No.”

He frowned at her, his frustration showing on his face. “Don’t think I won’t pick you up and move you myself.”

“Don’t think I won’t kick you where it will really hurt.”

Her words made him blink. “You little — ”

Before he could finish whatever he was about to say, the door to Drew’s office opened and the younger of the two brothers stepped out. “That’s enough, Michael.”

Shannon’s heart did a flip-flop inside her chest as Drew put his hand on her arm to gently move her aside, and she had a feeling she was blushing again. If she was, Drew didn’t seem to notice. Story of her life.

“If you’ve got something to say, you can say it to me, not to Shannon,” Drew told his brother tersely.

“I’ve been trying to,” Michael returned, the edge back in his voice as he spared a brief and aggravated glance toward Shannon. She frowned back. “Easier said than done.”

“What do you want, Michael?”

“What do I want? I want you to quit screening your damn calls, for starters, and pick up the phone when I call you. I want you to remember that our parents had two sons, not just one.” He pulled a crumpled newspaper clipping from his pocket and held it up in front of Drew’s face. “And I want to know where you get off pulling a stunt like this!”

Unable to help herself, Shannon strained to see the headline. She couldn’t make it out, but she did recognize the building in the black-and-white photograph that accompanied it. Kingston Manor, the old family home and the future housing of the Kingston Youth Center.

“Kept it out of the bigger newspapers so far, haven’t you? I’ll bet you didn’t think I would find out,” Michael continued, his anger growing. “At least not until it was too late to do anything about it. Am I right?”

For the first time, Drew looked a little uncomfortable, maybe even slightly embarrassed. “This doesn’t concern you, Michael.”

“The hell it doesn’t! It was my home once, too.”

“That was a
long
time ago.” Drew’s voice grew cooler.

A shadow crossed Michael’s face. “Oh, I get it. I walked out, so — ”

“
Ran
out is more like it.”

In the midst of the heated exchange, Shannon glanced toward the outer hall to see Clarissa watching, her mouth open in surprise. The blonde mouthed the words
what’s going on?
Shannon gave her head one furtive and bewildered shake.