Marie kept her hands clenched in her lap so that she wouldn’t punch Erik Lehnsherr in his pompous face. They glided up Main Street in his navy Cadillac, and she stared out the passenger-side window, tuning out the purplish drone of his voice.
West Point College was nestled in a valley at the west end of town and populated by female students only. It was one of the last of the dying tradition of women’s colleges, and could afford to remain single sex only by virtue of its massive endowment.
The college had a somewhat odd relationship with the rest of town. On the one hand, it kept the town alive economically: three thousand students and a staff of around four hundred supplied a great deal of business.
On the other hand, the townspeople resented what they saw as the elitism of the school, whether intellectual, social, or financial.
Erik Lehnsherr was a staff member who didn’t help this image. “…ergo,” he puffed at her, “I perceive a conflict of interest.”
Ergo? For God’s sake, she might not be exactly hip, but at least she didn’t use the word ‘ergo’.
“Mr. Lehnsherr,” she said, “Mrs. Xavier asked me, as a special favor, to persuade her grandson to visit her. How could I refuse? Especially in light of all the help she’s given me on the book?”
“I simply don’t understand how you failed to mention the grandson to me.”
“I… didn’t see the point. They hadn’t even spoken for twelve years, until yesterday.”
“He’s very inconvenient.”
Oh, well, don’t let a human life get in your way. She said nothing aloud.
“If we were living a dramatic novel,” Erik said, “this would be the precise chapter in which he’d be killed off.”
Her mouth fell open.
“Only joking, of course.”
Of course. Mwahh ha ha ha. She shivered, even more appalled than usual at Erik.
“What I need to know, my dear, is where your loyalty lies.”
“My loyalty?”
He nodded and stroked his chin. “Mrs. Xavier was very helpful with your book. Naturally you wish to repay the favor. But West Point College is your employer, and would greatly benefit from acquiring the Xavier Collection.”
Unbelievable. He might as well drag her into a dark alley with a sharp scrap of metal and scrape the message across her throat. If she didn’t know so many Ph.D’s who were waiting tables, she’d quit then and there.
Aloud she said, “Mr. Lehnsherr, the decision rests entirely with Mrs. Xavier, and though we’ve become friends, I have no influence over her. What I can tell you is that her grandson has no interest in even seeing the paintings. He’s made that clear.”
She dug her nails into her palms and kept her thumbs firmly locked over her fingers, which were itching to rip off his navy blue glasses and smack his well-fed face. Yeesh. She was going to have to attend an anger management class.
“Excellent. Looks like an unreliable runabout, doesn’t he? With all that unkempt hair.”
Depends on what you want to rely on him for. “Umm,” she said. Thank God they were approaching the Fine Arts Building, where she could escape into the slide library.
The chair pulled the fat Caddy into his designated parking spot and cut the engine. “We’ll need to meet again over the next few days to discuss tactics,” he told her.
Tactics. Oh, nice. “I’m going to be awfully busy with course preparation and all…”
“Classes don’t start for two weeks. I’m sure you can spare an hour here and there.”
Sigh. “Of course.” She hitched her tan nylon bag over her shoulder and walked crisply away from the baddy and his Caddy. The sinus headache from hell was settling in behind her eyeballs, squeezing them with a vengeance. She’d dump her bag in her office, grab a couple of ibuprofen, and retreat to the blessed darkness of one of the viewing rooms in the slide library.
She arrived at the smoked glass door of the Fine Arts Building, tugged it open, and stepped onto the mint green tiles of the hallway. She bent her head and opened the flat of her nylon bag, fishing for her keys. Retrieving them, she pulled her head out just in time to miss colliding with a solid chest in an ash-blue shirt. The chest belonged to Logan, and he was blocking her office door.
She backed up a step, but not before inhaling his scent. A potent mix of warm skin, laundry detergent, and eau de muscle, it knocked her off-balance. Oh, God. What is he doing here?
“Hello Miss D’Ancanto.”
Frozen courtesy didn’t sit well on him. She preferred his blatant rudeness of the day before. “If I have to call you Logan, you can call me Marie.”
“Marie, I’d like to know exactly what kind of game you’re playin’ at.”
“Ibuprofen,” she said, as she unlocked the door.
“Excuse me?”
She beckoned him in, dumped her bag on a chair, and went straight to the desk drawer she kept medications in. She grabbed the white plastic bottle, tapped three tablets into her hand, and swallowed them with a few gulps of the bottled water she always kept in her office.
She set the bottle down, leaned against her desk, and folded her arms. “I’m not playing any game.”
Logan loomed over her, his mouth set in a straight line. He towered over her bookcases, and could probably tell that the plants sitting in the dust on top were fakes. Great. He’d never trust a woman with fake plants, but she couldn’t keep real ones alive, just as she couldn’t make a dessert that didn’t end in disaster.
What did these things say about her? Probably that she’d done the right thing by becoming a scholar.
“Then explain to me,” demanded Logan, “why one day you’re up at my cabin urging me to take responsibility for my heritage, and the next you’re trying to brainwash my grandmother into leaving the collection to your college.”
Maybe it was his tone of voice, or the headache, or the fact that she’d just been badgered by Erik, but for some reason, she got angry.
“I resent the implications of that statement! And if you think your grandmother can be brainwashed into anything, you sorely underestimate her.”
“My grandmother is vulnerable at this point in her life, and I don’t want her taken advantage of.”
“Well, then,” said Marie before she could stop herself. “Maybe you should visit her a little more often to ensure that doesn’t happen.”
Logan looked as if she’d struck him. His brown eyes blazed with resentment, a muscle jumped in his jaw, and though he didn’t move at all, he seemed to harden into marble. “I plan to.”
They glared at each other for a long moment, and heat bloomed on her skin. She told herself it was because she hated confrontations. The truth was that he made her itchy.
“I want to know what you think you’re up to.”
It infuriated her that he thought she was playing some kind of double game. That he thought she would have any part of manipulating a little old lady. She dodged the niggling fear that by not telling Erik to go to hell, she was doing just that. “I don’t have to explain myself or my actions to you.”
“It would be quite a feather in your cap, wouldn’t it, to acquire the Charles Xavier Collection for West Point College. The perfect follow-up to your book. You might even get a nice promotion out of it. Are you tenured yet, Marie?”
She looked daggers at him.
“I didn’t think so. Yeah, I’m beginning to understand.” His lip curled.
“You understand nothing,” she told him. “If all this were true, why would I have gone to find you? Why would I have tried to get you interested?”
“Well, now, I’ve been asking myself that same question. And finally it came to me why you had such bad sales skills. You took one look at me and knew I’d run like hell from words like ‘duty’ and ‘responsibility’ and ‘legacy’. So you used them, every single one, sure of how I’d respond. Am I right, Marie?”
She stared at him, horrified. “No!”
“Uh-huh.”
This was worse than anything she’d expected. How could she reveal that her pitch had been so rotten because he’d unnerved her? That she’d been focusing on his pecs, his chest, his ass-- instead of her own words?
How could she admit that she’d been picturing him in a horned cap and boots and nothing in between?
“Look,” she said. “I really had nothing to do with Erik Lehnsherr’s position this morning.”
If anything, his sneer became more pronounced. “You brought him. You can’t deny that you’d benefit from the acquisition.”
“I brought him because he pretty much commanded me to. He’s my boss.”
“Oh, so now you’re the victim here.”
Her temper flared again. “I’m not claiming to be a victim! I’m trying to be straight with you. But since you’re not going to believe a single word I say, why don’t we just end this conversation?”
“Then you’ll agree to stay away from my grandmother.”
“What? She’s my friend.”
The look on the man’s face said it all.
“She’s my friend, and she’s in the hospital, and she needs all the cheering up she can get. No, I’m not going to stay away from her. You’re outrageous!”
“Mighty convenient friendship.”
Marie felt as if the breath had been knocked out of her. “How dare you!”
“How dare you?”
Their faces were inches from each other, and she could see each angry pore of his skin. Pugilistic bristles emerged in rough patches like platoons, and the nostrils at the end of his nose were flared. The pupils of his eyes moved over her face like searchlights.
She refused to back up, even when his eyes dilated even more, and he looked as if he were going to kiss her.
Kiss her? Who was she kidding? The guy would sooner bite her. She’d been studying art in the dark for way too long, and her imagination was running away with her.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
This one is a short chapter, but I wanted to make sure I had something posted for the weekend. Some of ya'll other people out there should follow my example and post additional chapters to their stories as well.... I'm just saying... It'd be nice. ;)