Mollie Molay - An Engagement Of Convenience

“You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?” Eldridge muttered grimly.

“But of course I have,” she retorted. “It is just that we do not seem to agree.”

“There’s nothing personal in this, Lili.” He gave a slight shrug. “I’ve been trying to tell you that while I understand the problem, I don’t own the building. Any decision the management may come to will be based strictly on financial considerations.”

Lili saw red. “Ensuring the proper care of an employee’s children should be just as much a part of running a business as making a profit,” she argued. “As long as the children are taken care of, absentee rates will stay down!”

Tom shook his head. “It’s not only me, you know. Even if I sympathize with you, in the long run I don’t matter. Some of the building’s tenants are not too happy with those petitions and fliers you’ve been circulating. They’ve complained that employees are being distracted from their work. Riverview’s management has no choice. The word is out to find and stop the culprit.” He gestured to the drafting table. “The flier you’re working on is only going to stir things up again.” He turned to leave. “I’d advise you to tear it up and go back to work.”

Lili impulsively reached out to stop him. His tense arm muscles told her he was still angry.

“Not if you help us to buy time. You can ask for a postponement of the meeting. That would give me time to find a way to keep the center open.”

“I only have one vote, Lili,” Eldridge said, glancing down at her hand. “What I think isn’t worth much. Not in tight financial times like these. As I just said, from the management’s viewpoint, business comes first.”

“And from yours?”

Eldridge hesitated, then took a step closer to her drawing board. “I might sympathize with your problem, but I don’t have a great deal of influence.”

To Lili’s dismay, he reached over, picked up the charcoal drawing she’d been working on and held it up to the light. “What’s this supposed to be? A wall target for you to pitch darts at?”

That’s not what Lili had intended when she’d started the sketch of his face. Rather, she’d been wistfully wondering what it would be like to kiss him.

That was ridiculous, she knew. After all, she was a mature woman, a single mother, not an infatuated teenager.

“No,” she said softly. “I heard the sound of your voice and somehow started drawing your face….” It was not a very convincing explanation, but it would have to do.

Tom put the sketch back on the drawing board, reached for the piece of charcoal and filled in the eyebrows. “As long as you’ve gone this far, it might as well look more like me.” He handed the drawing back to Lili and, in a voice that set the hair at the back of her neck tingling, warned, “Let’s just say that if I were you, I’d stop causing any more trouble around the building. I’m willing to forget I found the flier this time, but I might not be able to the next.”

Lili silently stared after Eldridge as he left the studio. Whatever fantasies she’d had about getting to know him on a personal level had just been destroyed. She turned back to her work. No matter what he said about not circulating petitions or handing out fliers, she was determined to find some way to keep the center open.

TOM MADE HIS WAY back to his office, wondering how he could have been so off the mark when it came to Lili Soulé. Could this be the same ethereal woman who had floated in and out of the art studio for the past two years? There obviously lurked a will of steel under that shy smile. Lili was the last person he would have expected to be the mastermind behind the fliers and petitions circulating through the buildings.

A red-blooded man, he couldn’t help noticing Lili’s sapphire-blue eyes and blond tousled hair whenever he wandered into the art studio or attended staff meetings. But that was where his interest ended. He had a Business Only policy when it came to his employees and he didn’t intend to change now.

As far as delaying Riverview’s monthly meeting or voting to keep the center open, hell, he was as sympathetic as the next guy, but it was his job to keep Today’s World out of the red and his lease out of trouble.

Since it had been a dire complaint from the building’s management that had brought him to the art studio this morning in the first place, he didn’t know why he hadn’t fired Lili on the spot when he’d discovered that flier. There was a clause in his lease that stated Today’s World’s rental agreement could be canceled if an employee undertook any activity that could be construed as defaming management. Maybe it had been the scent of her perfume, or perhaps her quaint French accent that had distracted him. Either way, he was beginning to feel as if he’d been seeing Lili for the first time. And he had to admit he liked what he saw—a mixture of an old-fashioned woman and a tantalizing modern one.

Too bad she was off-limits.

The way Riverview’s manager had put it, one-half of the business owners were in favor of closing the center. Another third were for keeping it open, and the rest appeared to be undecided. Lili obviously was out to get that minority on her side, and the process was turning Riverview’s tenants into warring camps.

All things considered, he was actually proud of the way he’d kept his cool with Lili instead of firing her.

LILI HEADED STRAIGHT for a heart-to-heart with her close friends April Morgan Sullivan, one of the magazine’s editors, and Rita Rosales Callahan, the magazine’s research librarian, who had just returned from her honeymoon. Confessing her undercover activities and her disastrous meeting with Tom Eldridge might not be wise, Lili realized, but if she couldn’t ask her two closest friends for advice, whom else could she appeal to?

Lili found the two women at the watercooler.

“No way!” Rita said when Lili finished telling the story of how Tom had caught her planning another flier and sketching his likeness!

Rita’s dark eyes lit up with interest. “I know I advised you to try to get Tom’s attention, but that sure was one heck of a way to go about it! What happened after he caught you?”

Lili shivered as she mentally revisited the scene in the art studio. “For a minute I thought he was angry enough about the flier to fire me. Instead, when he noticed the sketch of him I was making, something about him seemed to change.”

Rita grinned. “What did he say?”

“Not much,” Lili confessed, “although I knew he was still upset. For that matter, so was I.” She frowned. “Until today, whenever he visited the studio, I was sure he was trying to satisfy his artistic side.”

“Tom, an artist? No way,” Rita scoffed. “All the man seems interested in is the way the magazine’s circulation is going through the roof after he published those rules of Lucas’s.”

Rita was right, Lili thought. Not that she blamed Tom. Lucas Sullivan was a sociologist and Tom’s long-time friend. After his six recommendations to guarantee a happy marriage—Sullivan’s Rules—were published in Today’s World, the magazine sold more copies than in its entire history. But there had been an even more delightful result as well—Lucas had fallen in love and married Lili’s friend April, his editor.

“I would love to have seen the expression on his face when he caught you working on another one of those fliers,” April said.

“He didn’t look happy. He warned me to stop, but not before he practically took the piece of charcoal out of my hand and filled in the eyebrows on my sketch.”

“Get outta here!” Rita exclaimed. “I didn’t think the man had a sense of humor. But if you really are interested in him, I hope you took the time to talk about something besides work.”