Mine 'Til Monday Read Online Free PDF Page B

muster the enthusiasm about being with him for this weekend. For Miranda. For her future.
    “Yes, it will be a lovely weekend,” Miranda sighed happily. “And if all goes well, soon we’ll be welcoming you two into the Finesse family.”
    Dorothy slowly exhaled, a smile frozen on her face.
    Miranda frowned slightly, and reached for Dorothy’s hand.
    “I hope this, er, interview isn’t all too awkward, dear,” she said. “It must seem like a strange way for me to do my recruiting, but I simply must see for myself that you and your young man are the right ones to begin taking over. As you know, I made that promise to Walter before he died. He wanted the company to go to a couple just like us, two people who would think of Finesse as more than just a place to work.”
    “I remember,” Dorothy said, smiling despite her nerves at the romantic notion coming from the otherwise tough-as-nails businesswoman. Whenever she spoke of Walter, Miranda’s eyes misted over a little and her voice smoothed out, as though it were an echo of the young woman she’d once been.
    “Started from nothing, you know. For fifty years we used to talk about that company over toast in the morning and in bed at night. It was everything to us. And I’m determined that it shall stay that way.”
    Shame flicked Dorothy’s conscience, and she lowered her eyes. Well, Finesse would be her life. She’d just have to work twice as hard, to prove to Miranda that she could do it with or without a mate.
    Miranda gave Dorothy’s hand a squeeze. “Oh, I have a good feeling about this!”

 
     
     
     
    CHAPTER THREE
     
    “Here’s to...” Mud paused, glass of cabernet aloft, and frowned. Idly he toed the ground with his sneaker, and the glider rocked gently.
    Dorothy lifted her own glass, leaning back against the soft pillows as the glider’s motion seemed to stir the evening breeze into releasing the scent of the lilac that grew in her hedge. She loved her little patio, even though she didn’t use it nearly enough, squeezing gardening in between her business travel and work-at-home weekends. The glider had been an impulse purchase, irresistible with its seductively slow, easy swing. But it was so obviously made for two, and somehow Dorothy could never bring herself to use it.
    Until now. Now she was nestled in it, inches away from Mud, having a celebratory toast of sorts the night before their grand deception was to begin.
    “I was going to say your success,” Mud continued. The glow of the hurricane lamps burning on Dorothy’s small patio table illuminated his face in a most appealing way, but left the depths of his eyes dark, unreadable. “But seeing as this is our last night together before our debut, I suppose a better toast would be...”
    He brushed his glass against her own, the contact so slight as not to produce even an audible clink.
    “To us.”
    Us. Dorothy merely nodded, no appropriate response coming to mind. They both drank, regarding each other across the gulf of a few moon-shined inches.
    “To us,” she finally murmured. But she wasn’t at all sure who “us” was. Because the lines, despite her best efforts, were becoming blurry, and she was feeling an awful lot like the twelve-year old whose heart raced at the mere thought of being close to Mud.
    “You worked hard,” Mud said softly.
    “I did.” It was true. It had been grueling, like studying for graduate school entrance exams, or staying up all night in the lab when they were on the verge of something big. In two days Mud had drawn her through hell, a hell populated with little white balls and fiendish metal implements that never did what she intended. A hell where each infraction was met with demands to try again, again, again until every muscle in her body ached and her mind was numbed beyond rational thought.
    He’d taken her through that, and in the end made her into something new, a woman who could drive and putt and chip and bogey.
    But there was more.