At Your Service (Silhouette Desire) (7 page)

“They what?”

She ignored the heads of passing pedestrians that turned at her shriek and shoved more quarters in the phone as the recorded voice broke in for the second time.

“They say you are sick with grief over your
grandmère, chérie.
That because she dies, you cannot…what did they say? Think straight,” Paul explained again patiently. “They say that you have gone off to one of those fancy hospitals for rich women with too many problems. You know, like that president’s poor wife.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she sputtered. “They’re telling people I’m at some kind of rehab clinic? Who’s going to believe that?”

“
Ma chère,
if you are not here to show them otherwise, many people will believe it.”

“What a mess.” Grace slumped against the edge of the phone booth and stared blankly at the street in front of her. She’d thought to buy herself some time and perhaps hoped to make her family worry. Take her seriously for once.

“Indeed it is,” Paul said sternly in her ear. She could hear his disapproval ringing down the phone line. “But everything can be fixed,
chèrie,
if you would just come home!” His voice was booming by the final words.

“I can’t, Paul.”

“Why not?”

Grace took a deep breath. She needed to share her burden with someone, and there was no one she trusted more than Paul. “They want to sell the restaurants.”

“Who does? Which restaurants?”

“My family does, Paul. And Charles, too.” And then the worst part of all. “They want to sell all of the restaurants. They’ve already lined up a buyer for each one.”

The silence over the phone line was deafening. Paul had worked for the Haley Group restaurants since Grace’s grandmother had gone into business, and she knew the news that her family wanted to break up the company would devastate him. Paul had worked in every restaurant in the corporation, as varied as the cuisines and decor and attitude might be, and looked on each one as being one of his children. For the past ten years, he had reigned as head chef at Nîce, the capstone of the Haley Group.

“Even my restaurant?” In Paul’s mind, it was his kitchen, therefore his restaurant.

“Yes.”

“You are certain that they meant my restaurant, too.”

Grace’s laugh was shaky. At least Paul would always remain the same. “I’m certain.” He muttered something in French. “I don’t think you ever taught me the translation for that one.”

“You don’t want to know,
chérie.
But I still do not understand. Your grandmother, she put you in control of the Haley group, yes?”

“Not exactly.” Grace wondered how to explain it to this crazy, lovable Frenchman who had to have a sous chef balance his checkbook for him. “She made me the CFO and Managing Director, which means I’m in charge of all the day-to-day decision-making, but Charles is still the president. Even if he is mostly a figurehead.”

The thought of how Charles had schemed his way into her family, playing on their trust in family ties that went back generations, until he’d convinced everyone that his visibility and social connections made him the prefect image-maker for the restaurant conglomeration, still made her want to stick pins in a voodoo doll.

“That boy. He does not know a pâté from a piece of…never mind. I have been thinking that you owned the Haley Group, Grace.”

“A large part of it, but not all.” Grace forced herself to continue speaking as if her next words didn’t break her heart. “Grandmother meant to change her will, but she fell ill first. She left me fifty percent of the Haley Group. Enough that they can’t sell without me, but I can’t get rid of them, either.”

“These troublemakers?”

Her laugh was born weakly from the sharp pain beneath her breastbone. “Yes. These troublemakers.” Her custom-tailored boyfriend. Her mother. Her family. People who were supposed to be her support, her bedrock. Not her betrayers.

Family wasn’t supposed to try to sell off, piece by piece, all that you had worked to put together over the years.

“Paul, I’m out of quarters here. Just keep an eye out, will you? And don’t worry, before any deals are made, I think I have one last option to play.” After all she’d done to hide, the next step ran against every instinct, but she needed the connection. “If there’s an emergency, you can leave a message for me at a tavern uptown. It’s called Tyler’s.”

Grace used the hours before her shift to set in motion what she feared might be a last-ditch attempt to save her restaurants from being scavenged like a corpse on the Serengeti Plain. It’s funny, she thought as she waited on hold at yet another pay phone, I don’t even remember when I started to think of them as mine. To feel as if each restaurant, from the flowers on the host desk to the lock on the Dumpster, belongs to me, if only because I know it so well.

But they
are
mine.

She felt pride of ownership at the thought, stronger than when she’d thought of the restaurants as belonging to her family as a whole.

But my mother and Charles don’t value them as anything other than investments. They can’t understand why we shouldn’t just sell them off and pocket the cash. Go play in the Mediterranean for a good long while. They’ve never understood what it meant to Grandmother, what it means to me, to see the business she built up from a deli on State Street blossom into
this.

I’m damned if I’ll sell off her vision.

My vision.

Grace reined in her irritation at the thought of the various investment groups and individuals who wanted to purchase each Haley Group property. She imagined them as drooling, panting greyhounds at the starting line of a racetrack, moments from springing ahead and chasing down the prize. But that wasn’t fair. In all likelihood, each potential buyer was completely unaware that those offering to sell off a piece of the Haley Group were not, in fact, authorized to do so.

Which sparked an idea.

Another hour and she’d drafted a list of instructions to her attorney. She would wait to send them off, hoping to find a way to settle matters with her family amicably. But if necessary, she would use whatever weapons she had to preserve her Grandmother’s vision. Grace’s own dream.

Charles and her mother would find they weren’t the only ones who could betray blood.

Tyler’s immediate grin and the casual, “Hey there, Gracie, darlin’,” he tossed out upon seeing her, did nothing to blind her to the fact she was walking into the lion’s den.

“How’d lunch go?” she asked. Today, Saturday, had been his first day open for lunch, although Tyler had expected it to be slow.

“Better than I expected.” He finished wiping down the bar and then flicked the bar rag at a man sitting by the taps, his back to the room. “Probably helped that I had such a charming devil behind the bar.” The man shook his head and waved Tyler off. Grace saw that he seemed to be reading some kind of legal document. “Grace Desmond, meet Spencer Reed, Addy’s husband. The finest attorney north of the Loop.”

“You’re just impressed that I talked the alderman out of a liquor license in time for your grand opening,” Spencer said, turning on his stool.

Tall and wiry, with curling blond hair, a wicked grin and wire-rimmed glasses that he obviously used only for reading as he peered over them at her. Grace got the impression of fair-haired Clark Kent, and understood why Addy went home with such a smile in her eyes.

“You bet I am. Doesn’t do much good, opening a bar and grill, if you can’t have the bar half open, along with the grill.”

Introductions continued, Grace shook hands with all the sincerity she could muster, less than thrilled to find herself chatting casually with a well-known Chicago attorney. Particularly one whose eyes locked on her with calculated observation. Not suspicion, exactly. But as if he were taking a mental photograph, listing bullet points under the heading “For Further Investigation.” She was afraid it wouldn’t take him long to figure out where he’d seen her before.

The contrast with Tyler couldn’t have been clearer. Spencer was the kind of man Grace was used to dealing with in her regular life. Polished. Urbane. Comfortable traveling in the upper echelon of society. And she could appreciate with a woman’s eyes that he was physically attractive. But she observed him as she would an Ansel Adams photograph, with appreciation but no desire to acquire it.

Tyler made her need to own, to possess, stand up and shout out loud.

He was rough-edged, as likely to assault a woman with a knee-weakening kiss in the middle of a crowded bar as to carefully walk her home without attempting to hold her hand. He dedicated himself to pursuing his goals without rest, and worked from a strength in family that let him rely on his mother and sisters to lend a hand when disaster struck. And he cared enough about an unknown diner waitress he’d hired on the fly to make sure that she slept in a safe place.

And the fact that Tyler makes you drool doesn’t factor in at all, Grace?

She was glad that Tyler chose that moment to walk to the far end of the bar. It was hard to look a man in the face when you couldn’t stop yourself from picturing him naked. Then she saw the papers he held in his hand, and all pretense of serenity fled.

“Come on, let’s get this over with.” He waved her over to a seat at the end of the bar.

Grace felt light-headed and figured it was a toss-up as to whether she passed out or threw up. She knew in an instant that she could never pull off the mugging story.

The truth?

Not a chance. She might find Tyler as sexy as all get-out, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t be on the phone to the newspapers as soon as he found out who she was. Any money he might be paid aside, the free publicity alone—Haley Works For Tips At Tyler’s Pub—would be priceless.

Even in a best-case scenario, Grace could picture him contacting her family, because he felt sorry for her, and for them, and thought he could fix things. The man had shown distinct tendencies to take care of the women in his life, and she supposed she was one of those women now, if only as an employee.

The entire question was pointless, really. Spencer Reed sat at the other end of the bar and she wouldn’t be saying a damn word in front of witnesses, particularly not that one.

So. No answer at all.

“I can’t fill those papers out.”

“Really. Why?” He didn’t strike her as being surprised or concerned. Rather, he seemed watchful, as if she had just provided him with one of several expected responses.

“Does it matter?”

He shook his head impatiently, as if in disbelief at her stupidity. “Of course it does. Are you a criminal on the run from the law?”

She knew the question was meant to be ridiculous. “Of course not.”

“There you go.” His grin was encouraging. “That would be bad.” He stopped for a moment and looked at her. Then he turned, poured her a cup of coffee and set it in front of her with sugar and half-and-half. “Drink this.” She wrapped her hands around the solid ceramic mug. “Damn it, Grace. You always look so vulnerable. I’d probably try to help you if you’d just broken out of jail where you’d been locked up for robbing banks.”

“I might have tried that, if you hadn’t given me a job.” She looked down into her cloudy coffee. She hadn’t meant to bring up her earlier precarious position.

Silence radiated from Tyler like heat from a fire. Apparently he wanted more. She just didn’t have it to give to him. “I can’t fill out those papers. I can’t give you a social security number, or a driver’s license. I just can’t.” She hunched defensively over her coffee, leaning on the bar. Her hazy reflection stared back at her from the high gloss of the wood. She avoided her own eyes.

“And I can’t pay you under the table.” Tyler’s pronouncement dropped on her with the heavy weight of finality. Grace leaned back in her chair, boneless, dropping her head back and closing her eyes. The game was up. She wondered if Sarah would want her to pack up her things today, or if she could stay one more night.

She took some comfort from the fact that at least Tyler didn’t sound terribly mad at her. More regretful than anything else. Perhaps she could come back here sometime and visit.

“Grace, look at me.” She owed him that much, for trying to help her. And she saw that he was truly not mad at her, saw instead a well of deep compassion tinged with sadness. “You know how important this restaurant is to me.” His gaze was steady and warm and she knew he was thinking of the night before and what he’d shared about why this meant so much to him. “Important enough that I won’t do anything that might hurt it, like breaking the law.”

“I know.” She felt suddenly ashamed of herself. “I shouldn’t have even thought that you might, or put you in that position. You’ve made this a wonderful space, and I know you’ll be successful here.”

“Thank you. Coming from you, I consider that an enormous compliment.” The fact that he was sincere, that he would say such a lovely thing to a woman he knew only as a recently hired waitress, made her regret even more her unfair judgments of him earlier.

Perhaps if I had more courage, I could simply tell him, right now, who I am and what I’m hiding from. But I can’t do that. I couldn’t bear the possibility that he might look at me and think that I was pathetic, some whiny little rich girl who didn’t know what problems really were.

Tyler refilled her coffee, unnecessarily, since she’d been too nervous to do more than warm her suddenly cold hands on the mug. The uncharacteristic absent-mindedness had her looking sharply at him. His brows were drawn in and down, deepening the lines between them, and his unfocused eyes stared at nothing. He returned the coffeepot to the hot plate and leaned back against a cooler. After a minute he looked hard at her, searching for something in her face, and then glanced at Spencer, still working at the far end. His glance bounced back and forth between the two of them for a minute more before he stood, having clearly come to a decision about something.

First, to Grace, “I won’t pay you under the table.”