“And there are some local accounts that need your review. They’re out in the car—I’ll be back in a jiff.”
She watched him stroll out of the dining room, dressed to the nines as usual, his Italian leather loafers almost soundless on the tile floor. As he walked past Jake, Robin was momentarily distracted by the tattoo peeking out beneath the arm of Jake’s T-shirt as he reached high above his head. She was dying to see it, imagining it was something like a heart, with a name scribed in flowing letters across it. I heart Lindy. Better yet, maybe it was a skull and crossbones. Whatever, it sent a peculiar little shiver down her spine, just like the rest of him.
Oh God—was she really doing this? Was she really lusting after Jake? Robin abruptly turned away, walked out of the dining room and down the long corridor to the master suite. Since when had she become so . . . so aroused by the sight of a man? Irritable now, she shut the door behind her and stood, hands on hips. What she was doing was avoiding work. It was so obvious. She was avoiding work because she felt like a fish out of water. Not only did she not have the foggiest clue how to go about acquiring a company, she was so inept she couldn’t even get the likes of Eldagirt Wirt on the phone. And the only person who could teach her was her ex-lover Evan (Definitely ex! One gigantic slip in judgment did not constitute a re-relationship! Ex, Ex, Ex!).
She supposed she could at least be happy that she hadn’t burned down her office.
Robin fell backward onto her bed and stared morosely at the ceiling. Dad was right; she was arrogant and useless and nothing but window dressing. But she was going to change that. All Robin had ever wanted was to follow in Dad’s footsteps, to become a viable, integral part of the company, his legacy. One she hoped would be her legacy one day. The thing to do was to pour herself into this job and do it right. She had to stop avoiding it with this fruitless, impractical, stupid flirting with Jake. She could not let her fear of failure derail her.
Robin suddenly sat up. She had work to do. She was going to out there and start researching bubble wrap. And when she proved she could do it, Dad would see how wrong he was about her and everything would go back to normal. Assuming she could figure out what normal was. Okay, well, one thing that was definitely abnormal was lying on her bed and fretting in the middle of the day, and she didn’t want to face the fact that maybe she was just a little bit, teeny-tiny bit afraid.
That did it.
Robin sat up, shook her fingers through her hair, and walked out of her room to do what she did best. Work.
Jake noticed the change in Robin’s demeanor the moment she came back into the dining room and plopped down at her computer with a determined look on her pretty face. She ignored him, was even a little stiff with Romeo (which didn’t bother Jake in the least), and punched the computer keys like pop-up weasels. That was all just as well, because he had decided that intriguing or not, this flirting thing was dangerous business. The last thing he needed was to have some sort of fling with a client, because nothing would come back to bite him in the ass faster than that. And there was no question in his mind that this flirtation could ever be more than a fling, period. He harbored no illusions otherwise.
A fling would be an enormous irritant right now. He had enough going on with school and Cole, and there was the constant distraction of work, and Zaney, and his mom’s health, and Lindy’s infatuation. He hated telling women he didn’t want to see them, and generally tried to avoid those situations altogether. Which meant he hadn’t dated seriously in a long time, mainly because of a lack of money and time. But things were a little different now. After all, he wasn’t getting any younger. He had bought the house in the Heights with the vague notion that he might want to settle down someday, and someday was staring him in the face. Lindy was a great gal—what more could a guy want?
Something. This guy definitely wanted something more. He just didn’t know what it was, and thinking about it only made his head hurt.
So Jake forced himself to ignore his little problem, and ignore the conversation going on behind him between Robin and Romeo. Actually, he had no idea what they were talking about, but whatever it was, he really did not care for the way Romeo spoke to Robin, his tone condescending, like she was stupid. Robin was anything but stupid. Crazy, maybe—but not stupid. The man sounded like a patronizing buffoon.
Jake moved upstairs to work so he couldn’t hear them any longer, and was actually beginning to make some headway when his cell phone rang—Mom.
“Jacob, where are you?” she asked when he answered.
“At a job. What’s up?”
“It’s Cole. The principal called and said he wasn’t in school again today—”