“Surely there are other jobs for someone with your qualifications,” he suggested.
“Of course,” she agreed. “If I’d been willing to move to some other city and start over. Even my own firm offered me that. So did half the other brokerages I contacted within hours after being canned. The rest were firing staff of their own.”
“You didn’t want to move because New York is where it’s happening in the financial world,” he concluded.
She lifted her gaze to his. “It was more than that. Going anyplace else would have been admitting defeat.”
The response told him quite a bit about her determination and her priorities. He could understand that sort of drive, that sort of stubborn will. He’d needed it in spades for his own career climb.
“And, therefore,” he surmised, “anything less than another position in the thick of the action was not to be tolerated.”
“Exactly.”
He leaned toward her. “Shall I tell you what I see for you in the future?”
She regarded him with a wry expression. “Is looking into crystal balls one of your hobbies?”
“No, making things happen is one of my skills,” he declared flatly.
She shivered a little. Jason grinned. He enjoyed the effect such unbridled confidence had on people. “Gives you goose bumps just hearing such self-assurance, doesn’t it?”
She leaned forward then. “Oh, I definitely think you’re full of it, Mr. Kane.”
“Jason,” he corrected, deliberately ignoring the jibe, “since you and I are going to be very close.”
“I doubt that, Mr. Kane.”
He sat back and took a long, slow swallow of coffee, assessing his next step. “Are you a gambling woman, Callie?”
“I never gamble,” she insisted.
“And yet you played the stock market with millions of dollars of other people’s money.”
“I took informed risks.”
He grinned at the distinction. “Whatever. You spent your entire career researching companies, then placing bets on which ones would beat the odds, correct?”
“Something like that.”
“Do you know anything about TGN?”
“The basics, of course.”
“Know anything about the turnaround it’s made in the past three years?”
For an instant she looked uneasy. “That you’re credited with making it happen,” she conceded. “The story made headlines as well as reassuring nervous stockholders. The price of shares has climbed as a result.”
“What did that tell you about me?”
“That you’re smart and relentless,” she said at once.
“Exactly. Are you willing to gamble against a man like me getting my way?” he inquired lightly.
She sat up a little straighter at that, squaring her shoulders, lifting her chin. “You’re forgetting who you’re dealing with, Mr. Kane. I’m not an out-of-work actress. I’m no airhead. I’m not a pushover. And I’m not desperate.”
He lifted her hand, as soft and light as a bird, and touched his lips to the delicate knuckles. A surprising shudder swept through both of them at the contact. “A challenge only makes things more interesting, wouldn’t you say?”
She swallowed hard and practically yanked her hand from his. “You’ve guessed wrong this time, Mr. Kane. I am not an actress,” she repeated stubbornly. “I don’t want to be a star.”
“So you’ve mentioned,” he said without the slightest hint that he found the adamant rejection nearly as insulting as she’d clearly meant it to be. He’d trained himself to respond to subtleties, and her physical reaction to him told him far more than her deliberately dismissive attitude. She was susceptible to him and she didn’t like it. He, to the contrary, found her responsiveness illuminating.
He directed a look straight into those baby-blue eyes of hers and dropped his voice to a seductive pitch. “I think changing your mind is going to be downright fascinating for both of us.”
4
Callie was still regarding the huge, newly arrived arrangement of flowers from Jason Kane with dismay when the phone rang. She could barely find it—for all the flowers had been crammed on every available surface over the week since she’d had lunch with the arrogant, pushy network president. She couldn’t imagine what good he thought this display of excess would accomplish. Maybe he hoped she had allergies that would eventually drive her out of her apartment and into his stupid show.
“Yes, hello,” she said, then sneezed. Maybe she was allergic, dammit.
“Callie?”
Eunice, she thought with a sigh at the sound of her sister’s whining voice. “Yes.”
“You sound funny, like your nose is all stopped up or something. You haven’t been crying again, have you?”
Ironically, Callie realized she hadn’t shed a tear since her lunch with Jason Kane. It might be smart not to analyze that phenomenon too closely.
“No,” she said, “but you sound as if you have been.”
That was enough to encourage Eunice to launch into a familiar litany of her problems.
“It’s Mother. She’s driving me to distraction, Callie. She tried to run the tractor this morning, even though I told her over and over that Tom would come by as soon as he’d finished our fields and plow hers.”
“Has it occurred to you that perhaps she’d prefer to be independent, rather than relying on you and your husband?” It was the one area in which Callie could totally sympathize with her mother. She could imagine the kind of price tag that came with Eunice and Tom’s so-called help. Endless reminders of their generosity, no doubt.
“Of course she’d rather be independent,” Eunice snapped. “That’s not the point. She can’t do the work. She’ll wind up having a heart attack or something. And the other day in town she practically ran over Mr. Casey because she won’t wear the glasses the doctor prescribed. She’s fallen twice. Sooner or later, she’s bound to break her hip. I’m scared to death she’s
