The Antonides Marriage Deal Read online

  They were another part of the problem. She hadn’t just brought them the first day. She brought them every day. Orif she didn’t bring cookies, she brought strudels or cakes or tortes.

  “Other offices have a candy dish,” Elias grumbled. “We have a damned Viennese bakery.”

  “No one’s complaining but you,” Tallie pointed out unrepentantly.

  Which was true, of course. But that didn’t make it right. Or healthy! “They will when they get their cholesterol checked.”

  But instead of quitting, she offered to bring in fresh vegetables, too. And after that, she showed up every day with some baked delicacy and a tray of carrot and celery sticks, broccoli and cauliflower pieces and green and red pepper strips.

  Elias didn’t like it. “We don’t have the budget for this sort of thing.”

  “The office isn’t paying. It’s my treat.”

  He muttered things about precedents, but she just smiled and kept on hauling the stuff in. And how was he supposed to forbid her to bring it in? She was the bloody president!

  Of course, once the largesse began arriving regularly, everyone in the office seemed to materialize and stuff their faces.

  And talk.

  He’d never heard so much talking going on. He thought he’d always run a pretty easygoing office where people could speak their minds. But he’d never achieved the level of communication Tallie did with her damn cookies!

  Ideas were exchanged. Thoughts were expressed. The staff didn’t just talk about last night’s Yankees game or how the Mets were doing or how Paul’s wedding plans were going or what Lucy’s grandchildren were doing. They talked about business, too. Sometimes reasonably good ideas actually emerged because of Tallie’s cookies.

  “Your old man is smarter than we thought.” Dyson didn’t know the whole story of how Tallie got to be president of Antonides Marine, but he did know that it was Aeolus’s doing. He probably thought Aeolus picked her because she could bake. Little did he know.

  Elias grunted. “Dumb luck.”

  “Could be,” Dyson allowed with a grin. “But I’m not complaining.” He leaned one hip on the edge of Elias’s desk as he watched Tallie across the hall talking to Rosie. “She’s good for this place. And she’s one fine-looking woman.”

  Elias scowled. “You can’t say that in the office.”

  “Tallie wouldn’t care. She’d just tell me I was a fine-lookin’ man.” Dyson laughed in smug self-satisfaction.

  Elias banged a drawer shut. “Which just shows how bad her taste is.”

  Dyson’s grin broadened. He cocked his head. “You been a little grumpy ever since she got here. You jealous?”

  Elias would have liked to have banged another drawer. “Not a chance. And we don’t pay you to stand around spouting nonsense. Get to work.”

  “Just saying.” Still chuckling, Dyson saluted and left.

  “Shut the door,” Elias called after him, and was glad when it banged shut, though he’d have preferred to do the slamming himself.

  It was true what Dyson said. Tallie would probably say he was a fine-looking man. She joked with Dyson all the time. He even let her call him by his first name, Rufus, which absolutely no one else got away with. She laughed at his silly puns and corny jokes.

  She spent hours with everyone on the staff discussing not just business matters, but their lives.

  Elias would be sitting at his desk, trying to concentrate on work, and he’d hear Rosie nattering on about her boyfriend problems, and Tallie would be right there listening and clucking sympathetically. He’d be getting a cup of coffee so he could focus on the quarterly reports, and he’d overhear Dyson talking to her about old Jimmy Cliff movies and some girl named Sybella who was giving him a hard time. Or he’d go looking for Paul to discuss the information he was gathering about going back to using teak in their boats, and Paul would be in Tallie’s office discussing wedding plans.

  Hell, he hadn’t even known Paul was getting married!

  Tallie knew. She knew Paul’s fiancée’s name. She knew Lucy’s grandchildren’s names. She knew what Giulia had named the baby she’d finally had last Saturday.

  “Giacomo,” Tallie had told him, “after Vincent’s father.”

  Elias didn’t even know who Vincent was.

  Tallie even knew the name of Cara’s hair colourist.

  “Why? Planning to color your hair pink?” Elias had asked her sarcastically when Cara had gone back to work.

  Tallie had grinned. “Actually, I was making sure it wasn’t anyone I let anywhere near my hair.”

  But that was the only time she’d grinned at him. Every other time she’d been business—all business.

  And he had to admit that when she worked, she worked hard. She came to work early and she left late. Because she spent damn near the whole workday listening to peoples’ problems, Elias thought irritably.

  But if he couldn’t fault her diligence, he certainly didn’t think much of her taste in men.

  She was hanging around with Martin the Bore.

  After pompous, irritating Martin had been the macho hotshot who’d carried her box of papers downstairs, he’d stopped by the office later that week to see if she was free for lunch.

  “No, she’s not,” Elias said flatly before she could answer.

  Tallie had looked at him, surprised.

  “We have a lunch meeting.”

  “Really? I didn’t know that.” She looked at Martin and shrugged, smiling ruefully. “Sorry. I guess I can’t.”

  “Dinner then?” Martin had lifted shaggy eyebrows hopefully.

  Elias’s jaw clenched. It was still clenched when Tallie turned to him, her look questioning.

  “What?” he demanded.

  She smiled guilelessly. “I just wondered if we might have a dinner meeting I don’t know about, too?”

  “No,” he said curtly. “We don’t.”

  “Fine.” She turned away. “Then I’d love to go out with you,” she said to Martin.

  Elias, grinding his teeth, had turned and stalked away. But he knew she’d gone out with the Bore that night. He learned later she’d gone with him to the opera on the weekend.

  “Opera?” Elias had choked on the word when she’d mentioned it on the following Monday morning

  “Well, I prefer jazz,” Tallie had said with a shrug. “But it was an educational experience. Martin knows a lot about opera.”

  “I’ll bet,” Elias had muttered, shaking his head. She really did have lousy taste in men.

  Not that it mattered to him.

  He was not—repeat, not!—interested in Tallie Savas. She was trouble, with a capital T. He was working with her because he had to. Just working! Nothing else.

  But she was getting under his skin. He thought about her all the time. He hadn’t thought about a woman this much since he’d been crazy in love with Millicent. And look what a disaster that had been, he reminded himself.

  He put Tallie Savas firmly off-limits.

  All the same, it was good he had the building renovations to work on. Tearing out walls became an excellent way to spend his evenings. It used up a lot of excess energy that his hormones would have preferred to spend another way. He hadn’t ripped Martin the Bore’s head off yet, either. And every night that Elias worked like a maniac, banging and slamming and ripping and hammering with Elvis Costello at full volume, he didn’t hear the phone and didn’t have to talk to his sisters or his father or his mother, either.

  Hell, life was just about perfect.

  Knowledge was power, wasn’t it?

  So if Tallie knew her father was setting her up and if she knew he hoped she would fall for Elias Antonides, all she had to do was resist.

  Right?

  Piece of cake.

  In fact, that turned out to be the operative word. Or one of them, at least.

  Cake. Cookies. Bread. Muffins. Scones. Linzertorte. Gugelhupf. Striezel. Buchtel. Powidlkolatschen. Semmel. Vanillekipferln, courtesy of her Viennese bak
er friend, Klaus. And baklava, ravani, koulourakia and megthalpeta, courtesy of her mother.

  You name it, Tallie baked it.

  Every night when she got home from the office, she fed Harvey, fixed her own dinner, did her Pilates to relieve stress. And then she went into the kitchen and got out the flour and sugar and butter and spices and undid all the work Pilates had done—because baking was how she really relieved stress.

  And Tallie was stressed.

  Or maybe, she thought grimly, she was frustrated.

  Who wouldn’t be if they had to spend days looking at—and not touching—as fine a specimen of the male of the species as Elias Antonides?

  Well, she supposed Dyson and Paul weren’t.

  And Rosie had a boyfriend, and Lucy had a husband, and Trina and Cara drooled over boy bands and one of the new young Latin ballplayers on the New York Mets. None of them even seemed to notice that Elias Antonides simply oozed sex appeal.

  Lucky them.

  Unfortunately Tallie noticed. She noticed the way Elias had of furrowing his brow when he was deep in thought. She noticed the dimple in his cheek that flashed when he grinned. She sat in the meetings, and while she was supposed to be listening, she was noticing what large capable hands Elias had and that he had calluses on his fingers which no man who pushed a pen all day should have.

  More than she wanted to, Tallie noticed muscles flexing beneath his shirt that he hadn’t got from pushing any pen, either. There was not much about Elias Antonides that she didn’t notice, more’s the pity.

  Worse, he challenged her. He was constantly staring at her as if he wished she would just disappear. And then he’d ask some pointed question or wait until Paul had outlined some particularly boring facts, and then Elias would look at her and say, “And what do you think, Ms Savas?”

  After being caught out the first time and blushing bright red, then having to make up something on the spot that, fortunately, wasn’t too far off base because she’d done a lot of reading the night before, she had vowed never to be caught again.

  It was almost a game to her now—watching him surreptitiously, waiting for him to pounce with his question, then answering him with all the wisdom and forethought she could muster.

  She began to look forward to it, determined to pick up on things he might not have noticed, to show him she was good at what she did, too.

  Some days after a meeting she felt like she’d been in a sparring match with the two of them, challenging and feeding off each other. Elias Antonides got her adrenaline flowing.

  And that was even scarier.

  Brian used to get her adrenaline flowing. Lieutenant Brian O’Malley had been the last man Tallie would have imagined she’d fall for. But he’d always had a way of challenging her, of making her think about things differently, of making her mad and then of making her laugh.

  He had loved her for herself, not the companies her father owned. He had helped her find the best part of herself. When his plane had crashed on a training exercise seven months before their wedding, a part of Tallie had died with him. No one had ever made her feel as alive as Brian had.

  Until now.

  Not that Elias was anything like Brian!

  He wasn’t. Was…not. Period.

  He was handsome—far handsomer than her tough, redheaded, freckle-faced Brian. He was smooth and arrogant, which Brian had never been. Besides, Elias was her father’s choice, not hers. And if he sparred with her, it was because he was stuck with her for the next two years.

  It was not an ideal situation.

  She came home tired but edgy, running whatever Elias had said that day over in her mind, thinking about how she might have answered him better, sharper, quicker. Almost always she could think of something.

  At the time, though, she was often distracted by the physical Elias Antonides as much as the sharp-as-a-whip managing director. Hormones that had been dormant since Brian’s death.

  It was disconcerting, to say the least.

  It was particularly disconcerting to have it happen at work. Nothing—not even Brian—had distracted her from her work before. Of course Brian had never been where she’d worked. But Elias was. And Elias did.

  She’d even found herself fantasizing about what he looked like without his oxford cloth shirts and his well-pressed khakis. She wondered what he looked like naked!

  So she baked. Furiously. And she went out with Martin.

  She never fantasized about Martin.

  He wasn’t bad looking. He was actually reasonably nice looking in a pigeon-chested, pinch-lipped sort of way. He had an engaging grin when it could be teased out of him. And he had very nice hazel eyes. She liked his eyes. But had she thought about him naked?

  No. Never.

  He looked as if he could use a square meal, but he never ate one. He ate a lot of macrobiotic things like brown rice and bulgar with bean sprouts. It was healthy, he told her. He didn’t think her baking was healthy at all, but he went out with her anyway.

  “To convince me of the error of my ways,” she told Harvey.

  Martin, she discovered early on, could pontificate on any topic—and did. At length. He was interesting in a long-winded sort of way. His favorite topic was his view of the world and how it was failing to live up to his standards.

  Tallie herself was in danger of not living up to them, too, because the night he took her to the opera she very nearly fell asleep.

  She should have stayed home and gone over the material Elias had given her—her “homework” for the weekend. But she’d spent most of the day on Saturday doing just that—and found herself distracted with thoughts of the way Elias had looked holding Giulia’s baby when she’d brought him into the office to show him off the day before.

  It hadn’t been Elias’s idea. The women had been passing Giacomo around, cooing and gooing over him. Trina had been holding him when Elias stuck his head out of his office and wondered sarcastically when they had started providing child care and when Trina was going to finish typing up the material he’d given her that morning.

  Tallie would have said something pithy and sarcastic right back. But Trina, in her haste to do the right thing, actually did something better.

  “Oh, gosh, right now,” she’d said—and thrust the baby into Elias’s arms as she’d darted back to the steno office to get to work.

  Tallie didn’t know who looked more shocked, Elias or the baby. She’d thought he would hand Giacomo straight back to his mother.

  But he didn’t. After a moment’s stunned silence, he’d shifted the baby awkwardly until he had it settled more comfortably in his arms, and then they regarded each other solemnly.

  And then he’d smiled.

  Elias had smiled—not the baby!

  It was the most amazing thing. She could close her eyes and still see the tender look on his face. There was no impatience, no irritation. None of the things he most commonly aimed at her.

  And that was when she’d realized it hadn’t been a good thing Trina had done at all, because it had the unfortunate effect of making him even more appealing than he usually was—and in a different way.

  It had been reasonably easy to resist a man who was simply physically attractive. It was a lot harder to ignore her attraction when she saw him with a baby.

  He also listened patiently to phone calls from his sisters or requests from his mother. For all of Elias’s hard-nosed attitude in business, he was, Tallie had realized after being there just a few days, a soft touch when it came to his family.

  Of course, he had to be, or he’d never have stayed on as managing director of Antonides Marine. But it wasn’t just his faimly. That same afternoon, after Giulia left, Tallie caught him on the phone agreeing to buy cookie dough from some school fundraiser for one of his mother’s friends’ granddaughters.

  Then he’d noticed her listening and had scowled fiercely at her.

  Tallie had grinned. It was like verifying the Big Bad Wolf liked sentimental old movies.

&n
bsp; But it was also worrisome. And it had made her say yes when Martin wanted her to go with him to some totally boring lecture at Cooper Union on global warming.

  His mother had stopped trying to set him up with women.

  Used to her perennial efforts to get herself a new daughter-in-law, Elias was at first relieved by the sudden lack of women being shoved down his throat.

  And then he realized why.

  His mother didn’t have to find him a suitable wife because she thought his father already had. And Elias couldn’t keep saying, as he’d said to all her earlier efforts, “No, Mom. No, I’m not interested. No. No. No.”

  Because if he did, they’d know she was getting to him.

  He knew what he needed to do. He needed to find his own woman.

  Not to marry, God forbid. He was adamant about that. But to go out with, to flirt with, to charm and tease and have sex with.

  Man did not live by work alone, as his father was often inclined to tell him.

  Elias knew that. He’d had Gretl, hadn’t he?

  But it had been months since he’d had Gretl or any other woman. Obviously he needed to find one—a recreational partner—not a life mate.

  And definitely not the president of Antonides Marine!

  So on Monday he went out after work instead of heading down to the second floor where he was knocking out the walls of one of the offices. There was a bar called Casey’s down the block, and he dropped in and had a beer and studied the unattached women at the bar.

  The noise was appalling. The women, when he talked to them, were brainless. And none of them had hair that made him want to run his fingers through it. So he finished his beer and went back and knocked down another wall.

  Tuesday he tried a different place—a club that had a jazz quartet. He liked jazz and he thought he might meet a more kindred spirit. He did not think about the woman in his office who liked jazz but went to see an opera with Martin the Bore.

  There was a girl called Abigail at the jazz place. She hit on him and he didn’t resist. He spent the evening listening to her talk about her crazy roommates and her annoying mother and he wondered if Tallie played jazz CDs while she was baking. Abigail gave him her phone number. He discovered later he’d left it on the bar and he didn’t even care.