Daddy on Demand / Déjà You: Daddy on Demand / Déjà You. Lynda Sandoval

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СКАЧАТЬ will murder me in my bed, but that comes with the situation, doesn’t it?” Then beaming at Collin, she added, “You’re such a dear man. Exactly who are you?”

      “A friend.”

      “No, he’s not!” Sabrina glared at Collin before realizing her protest fell on deaf ears. Redirecting her attention to her landlady, she appealed to her compassionate side as a grandmother and mother. “Mrs. Finch, we’re talking about my birth certificate, my school records and tax receipts. You’re certain that was all taken?”

      Accepting the check, the woman nodded. “Looks like a first-class case of identity theft to me, sweetie. You sure are a lousy judge of character.”

      With a killing look toward Collin, Sabrina muttered, “Tell me about it.”

      Pocketing the checkbook and pen, Collin extended his hand to her. “Let me get you somewhere so you can think clearly.”

      Wanting badly to slap away his hand, she felt the cold draft called reality still her. Mrs. Finch had accepted his money. Now she was indebted to a man she despised.

      “This can’t be happening,” she whispered.

      “I’m sorry.” Placing a hand at the small of her back, he gestured to the front door. “My car is outside. I can follow you to wherever you would like to go or drive you and bring you back to your car after we eat and talk.”

      Her numbness made her slow to react, but she shook her head. “I can’t.”

      “Well, you certainly can’t stay here.”

      “No…but I don’t have a car anymore.”

      “Excuse me?”

      It should have bothered her that Mrs. Finch was standing by soaking all of this in, too, but what value did pride have under these circumstances? “The lease ran out and I turned it in.” She looked at him with a last feeble surge of resentment. “Thanks to you, I couldn’t afford it any longer.”

      “Now just a moment…I didn’t make you quit your job. If you remember correctly, I didn’t even lower your salary. You left all on your own.”

      “Stanley Norbit has foul breath and was stalking me daily through that dungeon. He’s creepy.”

      While Collin couldn’t see himself inviting old Norbit to his apartment for a dinner party, the eccentric man’s work ethic and performance was second to no one. “He may be a bit socially stunted, but he’s never let me down when I had an eleventh-hour request.”

      “Try wearing a bra and shave your legs and then talk to me.”

      “I respect my tailor too much to do that to him.”

      Not at all amused by his attempts to make light of her latest catastrophe, Sabrina began to storm out of the building, but stopped at the front door to make herself clearly understood. “I would apply as a mortician’s apprentice before I would work for someone like him again. But first and foremost, you made me the laughingstock of the firm, and you never realized that. You don’t go from working on the top floor for the executive vice-president and wind up in the basement for a joke of a department head, who until then, ran a one-man operation. Not without everyone speculating as to why and drawing their own obnoxious and humiliating conclusions.”

      Sabrina kept her chin raised, though fully aware that in dusty and tattered jeans, an oversize T-shirt recently used while painting her apartment and scruffy sneakers, she resembled a bag lady, not an executive’s assistant. Seconds away from long-repressed tears, she summoned the last of her dignity and declared, “I promise you, Mr. Masters, I will pay you back every cent of what you gave Mrs. Finch, but now, please leave me alone.”

      Collin followed her out of the building. “At the risk of you slinging that cowhide version of a bowling ball at me, may I ask what you’re going to do without a place to stay, clothes to change into and money? I’ll wager you don’t even have enough cash in that purse to buy yourself a hot dog.”

      Not even change to feed a parking meter—if she had a car.

      Standing in the shadow of the ancient building, surrounded by the towering glass-and-steel high-rises that was today’s Dallas, and its future, Sabrina didn’t need a stronger sign that her future lay in his hands. It was an amber day full of glittering leaves and enough wind to finish pulling her hair out of her loose ponytail. She quickly rewound the elastic band around the honey-gold mass and tried to come up with a game plan. There was little she could do for the rest of the dust and grime after a day’s work of supervising restocking shelves—and doing plenty of that labor herself—at Bargain Bonanza’s main warehouse. Every morning as she dressed, ignoring aches and exhaustion, she had to remind herself that she was a “manager,” and that would look good on her résumé. But with the economy what it was, she wondered when she would be able to risk hunting for a job that actually used her brains more than her questionable brawn.

      Collin ventured closer and studied her face. “You’ve grown very quiet. Do I need to worry about catching you in a dead faint? When did you last eat?”

      “I guess sometime around…” She remembered buying some vending-machine sandwich that she’d heated in the break room’s microwave. Then she’d been called to some delivery paperwork problem in the warehouse. When she returned, a cashier trainee, who regularly snatched up any and all snacks or leftovers, was devouring her sandwich. One look at his grease-covered lips around her ham-and-cheese melt had killed Sabrina’s appetite.

      “There’s a great bistro near where I live,” Collin said, carefully directing her to his black Mercedes parked directly in front of the building. “It’s open until people quit ordering, but should be relatively quiet at this hour.” He added almost gently, “I’ll bet they can make anything you could want.”

      Humiliated by the reflection that she saw in his car’s window, Sabrina tried her best to make him leave by being her least gracious. Casting him a sidelong look, she countered, “And what do you want?”

      Holding up an index finger to beg her patience, Collin got her seated inside, then trotted around the front of the glistening mechanical indulgence, and climbed in behind the camel brown steering wheel. “Right now a triple Scotch would be sheer bliss.”

      “No one asked you to write that check. What happened, did that Wynne, Wooster, what’s his name that you hired after dumping me make a pass at you?”

      “Geoffrey Wygant is an excellent assistant and you’ll be happy to know is in a twenty-year relationship with his partner, Duke.”

      The last Duke she’d known was a rottweiler on a farm neighboring her parents’ place in Wisconsin. Homesickness mixed with her shame and she shook her head with abject misery. “Excuse me. I shouldn’t have said that. I was just—”

      “Dealing with shock and low blood sugar.” Collin spun the Mercedes into traffic and turned a sharp right at the next corner. “Geoff happened to be the first applicant since you who could spell as well as the kids on Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? Most impressive is that he possesses an unbeatable knack for matching clients to restaurants.”

      So much for her favorite bathtub fantasy where Collin Masters admitted his mistake and came with flowers and the keys to a white Porsche to beg her to come back. No matter how many magazines she read or how much СКАЧАТЬ