Boss Meets Her Match
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Janet Lee Nye
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Chapter One
THAT IS THE ugliest thing I have ever seen. Lena leaned forward and squinted at the tiny white sticker in the corner of the painting. Five thousand dollars? Tie a paintbrush to my cat’s tail and she’d do a better job. She shifted on the bench. The sounds of the party echoed loudly from the floor below. Sipping her wine, she wrinkled her nose. Cheap chardonnay.
She didn’t want to be here, which was why she was hiding out on the second floor of the City Gallery. She wanted to go home. Take her shoes off and put pajamas on. Drink some wine that didn’t taste like battery acid. She straightened with a sigh. Might as well get it over with. Dr. Eliot Rutledge, famed neurosurgeon, very old money Charleston—and her first of many clients—was waiting for her.
Footsteps on the hardwood floor caught her attention. A man ambled slowly around the corner, looking at the art exhibited on the walls. Lena cut a glance in his direction. He didn’t fit with the suit-and-cocktail-dress crowd downstairs. His beige linen pants were slightly wrinkled—and that shabby white dress shirt. No. Just no. His dark blond hair was long and tied in a ponytail with a length of leather. A neat beard covered his face. He leaned down, looked at a price tag and whistled. Lena smiled.
“Pretty pricey, huh?” he asked, sliding down on the bench beside her.
She looked directly at him. Damn. That is a fine-looking man. The hair and beard couldn’t hide his high cheekbones and eyes so blue they almost didn’t look real. White teeth appeared as he grinned at her. Her stomach went quivery under that bad boy grin. She looked away and sipped more wine. She didn’t do bad boys anymore.
He gestured at the painting in front of them. It was an abstract, not quite as dense as a Pollock but not as minimalist as Munch. Slashes of red and blue, smears of purple and yellow. “What do you think of this one?”
She shrugged. “Not my style, to be honest.”
“Ah, man. I saw you sitting up here instead of being downstairs with all the mingling and small talk and I thought to myself, now, there’s a woman who doesn’t go for polite society bullshit. Thought you were up here seriously contemplating the meaning of art.”
She tried her perfect one-eyebrow-arch-and-glare trick. “Did you, now?”
All that got her was another of those inappropriate thought-provoking grins. “Indeed I did.”
“I think it’s ugly,” she said, taking another drink. “I think my friend’s nine-year-old could do better.”
His laugh echoed off the narrow corridor. “But one of those people downstairs will buy it.”
“Probably.” She stood. “Excuse me, but I have to find someone.”
“Ah,” Eliot Rutledge said, as he walked around the corner. “You’ve met. Wonderful.”
Lena looked from Dr. Rutledge to the man smiling up at her from the bench. “No,” she said, ice cubes practically dropping from the word. “We have not met.”
“Lena, this is our artist.”
A hot spark of anger flared in her chest and spread to her cheeks. The man stood, still smiling, and held out a hand. “Matt. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Lena.”
“Did you know who I was when you approached me?”
“Nope. Just a happy accident.”
She stared at him until the smile melted from his face. A long string of profanities pushed against her pressed lips. Breathe. Just breathe.
“Matt asked for a recommendation. Told him I wouldn’t have anyone else in the city watch after my portfolio.”
“Thank you,” she said automatically. She turned back to Matt. Gave him her iciest smile. “I’d be happy to discuss this with you. In my office. During business hours. Call my secretary and make an appointment.” She turned to Dr. Rutledge. “Eliot, it was good to see you.”
As she rounded the corner to the stairs, she heard Dr. Rutledge’s voice. “Did you make her angry? I’d recommend not doing that anymore.”
Smiling as she pushed through the doors out into the perfection that was Charleston in October, she nodded. That’s right. Don’t piss me off. Her condominium was a short walk away along Waterfront Park. She ambled past tourists and college kids. There was still light in the sky and it was a perfect sixty-five degrees. Maybe she’d go for a run. Or maybe she’d collapse on the couch, order some Vietnamese and binge-watch something. Her phone vibrated in her purse. She fished it out. Sadie. Her best friend. The woman she called sister. Her finger hovered over the screen. Completely tired of talking to people for the day, she was sorely tempted to dismiss the call.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“Your mother is what’s up.”
Lena smiled. At least she wasn’t the only one being tortured by her mother. “What’s she done now?”
“We went to look at dresses. I swear to God, Lena. I’m going to get married in jeans and a T-shirt just to spite her. You should have seen the dresses she begged me to try on ‘just to see.’ I looked like Scarlett O’Hara’s cousin from the trailer park. A full veil. To the knees!”
“Sounds perfectly lovely. At least she’s off your case about getting married in a church.”
“For now,” Sadie replied grumpily. “What are you doing this weekend? I need a rational human being for dress shopping.”
Lena reached her condo door and leaned against it. She could hear her cat meowing indignantly from the other side. Supper was an hour late. “We can do that. But don’t invite my mother. I’m trying to stay off her radar right now.”
“Yeah, by throwing me at her.”
“You’re the blushing bride. Much more fun than the dried-up old maid.”
“Is she still on that?”
“She’s backed down a bit. I think my aunts are planning something. Every time I see one of them, I feel like I’m being interrogated. Look, I gotta go. I just got home and la gata has complaints.”
“Okay, grumpy. Bye.”
* * *
“KEEP YOUR FUR ON,” she said as she entered her condo and kicked her shoes off. Sass, the cat, did not keep her fur on. Winding her way around and between Lena’s ankles, she complained bitterly of the near-death experience of having supper one hour late.
An hour later, she’d been forgiven by Sass, her business suit had been replaced with pajamas and Bon Banh Mi had delivered dinner. Wallowing happily on the couch, she scooped salad into her face and resumed binge-watching Supernatural. Her phone buzzed and Sass smacked at it. “Sthop,” she said around a chunk of lettuce. Estrella Acosta. Shit. What now?
“Hola, Tia. Qué pasa?”
“Are you coming to church on Sunday?”
Okay. Getting straight to the point. That’s new. “I hadn’t planned on it.”
“Contestame, will you come to church on Sunday?”
Lena made a face at the phone. “I haven’t been to confession.”
“You don’t have to go to confession to go to church, Miss Smarty Pants.”
“Which mass?”
That was important because no way she was getting up at four in the morning on a Sunday to drive an hour for a sunrise mass.
“Ten.” Lena grinned at the clipped tone in her aunt’s voice. “You haven’t been to church since Luis died. It would mean a lot to your mother.”
That melted the smile off her face. She slumped into the couch. “Okay. Yes. I will come to the 10:00 a.m. mass this Sunday.”
“And to the house for lunch too?”
“Yes.”
Sass swatted at her hair hanging over the arm of the couch. “This is why I should have got a dog instead of you, Sass. I’d have to walk a dog. Take it out to pee and stuff. Perfect excuse to stay home. But no. I got a cat.”
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see her family. It was that ever since Sadie got engaged, everyone was starting to look at Lena like she was supposed to just pick out a man and start popping out babies. Her mother was calling Sadie’s soon-to-be stepdaughter nieta and dropping grandbaby hints like it was her job. Problem was Lena had spectacularly rotten luck with men.
