Cara Colter - Wedding Vows - With This Ring - Rescued in a Wedding Dress / Bridesmaid Says, 'I Do!' / The Doctor's Surprise Bride

Which was rarely, thank God.

Since the memories had come, though, he exercised cool discipline over them. He reminded himself that good things could come from bad. His mother’s abandonment had ultimately opened the door to a different world for him; the high school “incident” had led to Beebee putting him in boxing classes “to channel his aggression.”

Houston was more careful than most men with the word love, but he thought he could honestly say he loved the combat sport of boxing, the absolute physical challenge of it, from the grueling cardiovascular warm-up to punching the heavy bags and the speed bags, practicing the stances, the combinations, the jabs and the hooks. He occasionally sparred, but awareness of the unexpected power of fury prevented him from taking matches.

Now he wondered if a defect in character like fury could lie dormant, spring back to life when it was least expected.

No, he snapped at himself.

Yes, another voice answered when a piece of Molly’s hair sprang free of the restraints she had pinned it down with, curled down the soft line of her temple.

She’d been engaged to a cad.

Tonight, he told himself sternly, he would punch straight left and right combinations into the heavy bag until his hands, despite punch mitts, ached from it. Until his whole body hurt and begged for release. For now he would focus, not on her hair or her past heartbreaks, but on the job he was here to do.

Houston realized Molly’s expression had turned quizzical, wondered how much of the turmoil of that memory he had just had he had let slip over his usually well-schooled features.

Did she look faintly sympathetic? Had she seen something he didn’t want her to see? Good grief, had Miss Viv managed to let something slip about him?

Whatever, he knew just how to get rid of that look on her face, the look of a woman who lived to make the world softer and better.

A cad could probably spot that gentle, compassion-filled face from a mile away! It would be good for her to toughen up.

“Let me be very blunt,” he said, looking at the papers in front of him instead of her hair, the delicate creamy skin at her throat. “Second Chances is in a lot of trouble. I need to turn things around and I need to do it fast.”

“Second Chances is in trouble?” Molly was genuinely astounded. “But how? The secondhand stores that provide the majority of our funding seem to do well.”

“They do perform exceedingly well. The problem seems to be in an overextension of available funds. Your department?”

Here it was: could she make the kind of hard decisions that would be required of her if she took over the top spot in the newly revamped Second Chances?

The softness left her face, replaced with wariness. Better than softness in terms of her managerial abilities. If that was good, why did he feel so bad?

“You can’t run an organization that brings in close to a million dollars a year like a mom and pop store. You can’t give everyone who comes in here with their hand out and a hard luck story everything they ask for.”

“I don’t!” she said. “I’m very careful what I fund.”

He saw her flinch from his bluntness, but at this crucial first stage there was no other way to prepare people for the changes that had to happen. Another little curl broke free of her attempt to tame her hair, and he watched it, sentenced himself to another fifteen minutes on the bag and forged on.

“Two thousand dollars to the Flatbush Boys Choir travel fund? There is no Flatbush Boys Choir.”

“I know that now,” she said, defensively. “I had just started here. Six of them came in. The most adorable little boys in matching sweaters. They even sang a song for me.”

“Here’s a check written annually to the Bristol Hall Ladies’ Lunch Group. No paperwork. No report. Is there a Bristol Hall Ladies’ Lunch Group? What do they do? When do they meet? Why do they get money for lunch?”

“That was grandfathered in from before I started. Miss Viv looks after it.”

“So, you’re project manager, except when Miss Viv takes over?”

“She is the boss,” Molly said uneasily, her defensive tone a little more strident.

“Ah.” He studied her for a moment, then said softly, “Look, I’m not questioning your competence.”

She looked disbelieving. Understandably.

“It’s just that some belt-tightening is going to have to happen. What I need from you as I do research, review files and talk to people is for you to go over your programming in detail. I need exact breakdowns on how you choose programs. I need to review your budgets, I need to analyze your monitoring systems.”

She looked like she had been hit by a tank. Now would be the wrong time to remember the sweet softness of her skin under his fingertips, how damned protective he had felt when he heard about the cad. Now he was the cad!

“How soon can you have that to me?” he pressed.

“A week?”

A chief executive officer needed to work faster, make decisions more quickly. “You have until tomorrow morning.”

She glared at him. That was good. Much easier to defend against than sweet, shocked vulnerability. The angry spark in her eyes could almost make him forget her hair, that tender place at her nape. Almost.

He plunged forward, eager to get the barriers—compromised by hands in hair—back up where they belonged. Eager to find out what he needed to know about her—professionally—so he could make a recommendation when the job here was done and move on.

“I’ve been sorting through paperwork for a number of weeks,” he told her. “I have to tell you, after a brief look, it’s quite evident to me that you’re going to have to ax some of your projects. Sooner rather than later. I’ve short-listed a few that are on the block.”

“Ax projects?” she said with disbelief. “Some of my projects are on the block?”

He nodded. He felt not the least like a knight riding in to rescue the business in distress. Or the damsel. He was causing distress, in fact. The feeling of being the cad intensified even though he knew in the long run this would pay off for Second Chances, guarantee their good health and success in the coming years and possibly decades if this was done right, if they had the right leader to move ahead with.

“Which ones?” She went so pale a faint dusting of freckles appeared over the bridge of her nose.

He was annoyed that his feeling of being the cad only deepened, and that she was acting as if he had asked her to choose one of her children to float down the river in a basket. He was aware of feeling the faintest twinge of a foreign emotion, which after a second or two he identified, with further annoyance, as guilt.

Houston Whitford did not feel guilty about doing his job! Satisfied, driven, take charge, in control. Of course, generally, it would be fairly safe to say he didn’t feel, period.

He used a reasonable tone of voice, designed to convince either her or himself that of course he was not a cad! “We have to make some practical decisions for the future of this organization.”

She looked unconvinced about his cad status, and the careful use of the we did not even begin to make her think they were a team.

She looked mutinous, then stunned, then mutinous again. Her face was an open book of emotion.

“Is it that bad?” she finally sputtered. “How can it be? Miss Viv never said a word. She didn’t even seem worried when she left!”

He had actually sheltered Miss Viv from how bad things were as he had begun to slug his way through the old gal’s abysmal record and bookkeeping systems. Miss Viv—and his mother, Second Chances’s largest patron—trusted him to fix this. He would. Neither of them needed to know the extent he had to go to. But Molly Michaels did, since the mantle of it all could quite possibly fall on her slender shoulders.