Working Overtime. Raye Morgan

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СКАЧАТЬ to working there. She had an elderly uncle who still lived in the area. She’d visited his rickety beach house often as a child, walking down to the ocean on hot summer days. It was going to be fun being back there. But she was going to have to be wary.

      A friend of hers had a saying she was always repeating, “If you don’t want to get burned, stay away from the fire.” Words of wisdom. She was going to keep them in mind.

      Michael checked his watch and stifled a groan. They’d only been sitting here for a little over a quarter of an hour. It felt like much longer. The obnoxious minutes were dragging their scruffy little feet. This was like some type of unbearable medieval torture.

      He glanced over at Chareen. She was staring down into her drink and he took the opportunity to take a good look at her.

      He took in her silky curtain of hair, the soft curve of her cheek, her elegant chin line, and then his gaze trailed down into the opening of her blouse, where the upper swell of her breasts was barely visible. Reaction surged through him and he had to look away quickly, grabbing his coffee cup and draining it in one long swallow. It was as though someone had picked up one of his teenage dreams, looked inside and pulled out everything he liked in a woman, then mixed it all together and presented him with Chareen Wolf. There wasn’t a flaw on her. She was the sort of female who made grown men think about chucking it all and heading to the South Seas in a sailboat with only her on board.

      His mind slipped back to a picture of Grace, his ex-wife. She’d been just as pretty, but every time he thought of her now, all he saw was the haunting look of disappointment in her eyes. It had been four years since he’d seen her, but the memory of that look still had the power to make him bleed.

      So he’d spent the last few years looking for love in all the wrong places—on purpose. No commitments, no promises, no more disappointed looks. Casual relationships were all he could handle. He’d thought he was beyond being easily aroused any longer. That is, until he’d heard Chareen Wolf’s voice in the library.

      But that wasn’t what he’d come to California for and he couldn’t let himself get sidetracked. The TriTerraCorp CEO had taken him to lunch before he’d left Florida and made it very clear that there was a vice presidency riding on this job in California. That would be great. After all, wasn’t that what he had been working toward for the last few years?

      Business, Not Pleasure. That was going to be his motto on this project. He’d promised himself as much, and he knew he had the self-discipline to keep that promise. But working side by side with Chareen Wolf was not going to make it any easier.

      But wait a minute. Here was a thought. Why did they have to work together side by side? After all, he was the executive officer here. He set strategy, others implemented his orders. He could set it up in any way he chose, and a good way was beginning to form in his mind right now.

      He glanced at Chareen. “You know,” he told her casually, “I understand that you are used to working without too much direct supervision. Your department head told me you are the best TriTerraCorp has got at this sort of thing.”

      She gazed at him brightly. “Well, I think I’m pretty good at my job,” she admitted.

      He smiled at her. “So I hear. And I’m sure you’d prefer to work without me breathing down your neck all the time. So how about this?” He leaned forward, giving her a direct look that seemed to startle her. “Why don’t you set up your own schedule and make your reports to me through Leonard Trask, your supervisor. That way, you’ll have complete autonomy, unless I find any problem with your work. Though I hardly expect to do that.”

      She sat up a bit straighter and seemed excited. “That’s a great idea,” she told him. “So, in other words, I’ll reserve time at city hall to delve into the archives and go over the deeds, then set up my own interviews with sources, write up a report and hand it to Leonard, who will pass it on to you.”

      “Exactly.” He was pleased to see she was as quick as he’d heard she was. But just a little surprised that she seemed as eager for this hands-off approach as he was. When you came right down to it, he wasn’t used to women finding excuses to avoid his company. But that was neither here nor there. “You’ll still be available for any follow-ups we might need, of course.”

      “I love it,” she said, smiling from ear to ear, her eyes shining. “Mr. Greco, you’re going to spoil me.”

      “Believe me, Ms. Wolf, you’re doing me a favor.”

      Great. She was going for it. He stretched back in his chair and risked a smile. He was a genius.

      “That,” he told himself silently, “is why they pay you the big bucks, Greco. You are the man with the plan.”

      Chapter Two

      Chareen shed her clothes with a sigh of relief and stepped into the shower as though it were a waterfall on a tropical mountainside. The water felt so good running through her hair and down over her skin, and it had been such a long day.

      She’d picked up her two little ones, Ricky and Ronnie, at the day-care center and had driven them directly to their favorite fast-food restaurant for hamburgers. She’d then spent an hour trying to ward off constantly impending disaster as they charged through the room with the plastic balls and sailed down the long tube slide and climbed anything with a handhold. There was a lot of noise involved—and an apology to the man who was hit in the head with one of the plastic balls when her two wild ones had a ball war. And then there was the little girl who started crying because Ronnie made a face at her. But finally she’d been able to convince the boys to get back in the car and she’d dragged them back here to Casa del Mar, the old Victorian house where they were staying.

      A sort of corporate bed-and-breakfast, the three-floor structure had been renovated to provide rooms for contract workers and other temporary visitors to TriTerraCorp. When she’d told Leonard, her supervisor, about having to find a place to stay while her house was being repaired, he’d suggested she stay there for the duration. Currently half empty, the house had plenty of room for her and her two boys.

      “Just keep those kids quiet,” Leonard had warned her. “Some of the old-timers who stay at Casa del Mar are real cranky when it comes to the sound of kids.”

      Keeping Ricky and Ronnie quiet would require depriving them of the power of speech, and even then they would surely pound on drums to get their message out. But she did her best, hurrying them in through the lobby area and up the stairs to the room on the second floor where they were staying. She bathed them, read them a story and put them to bed. At last, she had a few minutes to unwind.

      And to think about what had happened at work. She’d been putting off thinking about it, because there were just too many ramifications to deal with all at once. Michael Greco had rocked her world, whether he knew it or not. She only hoped he didn’t know it.

      And it wasn’t just that he looked so much like Danny. At least, she thought he did. She wished she’d brought a picture along when they’d moved in here so that she could get it out and take a look and see if this was all in her imagination. Funny how blurry his image was to her now. There had been a time when she’d been so in love with that face, she thought she’d die if she couldn’t be with him.

      Well, she hadn’t been with him for a very long time now, and she was still very much alive—though it had been touch-and-go for a while there. Everyone had always warned her that Danny would disappear from her life. No one had expected it to happen quite the way it had, though, in a fiery car accident that СКАЧАТЬ