“Do you have another desk?” she asked, eyebrows lifted, her hand wrapped around a gargantuan orange leather tote.
“I already told you to go.” He didn’t like to repeat himself.
“Very well. I’ll work at the dining room table,” she said. Before he could repeat himself a third time, her ass was wiggling away from him, one hand rising to flip her hair. Over her shoulder, she slid him a thick-lashed glare.
As he’d played up his limp, Isabella was playing up that lithe wiggle.
Eli couldn’t help but think that he’d just met his match.
* * *
Isa didn’t feel the confidence she portrayed as she swished away from Eli en route to his dining room table, but fake it till you make it had become her motto when she’d started her business three years ago in her apartment’s living room.
Old habits died hard.
The endgame was Sable Concierge earning a gold seal from the Cranes, but she’d be damned if she would allow another man to slot her into the category of brainless bimbo. She had a bark and a bite and wasn’t afraid to use either.
Her company was born of the deep-seated desire not to climb the financial corporate ladder her family had so wanted her to scale. She’d named the company after herself, after writing Isabella Sawyer on a napkin in a coffee shop and trying to come up with a combination of letters that sounded both approachable and professional.
Sable won.
She’d started out with one employee: herself. After working nearly ten years for her parents’ financial firm from the tender age of eighteen, Isa had learned plenty about what it took to be a good PA. She was organized, had a good memory, and knew the fastest way to execute any task. Her favorite part of buzzing around Sawyer Financial Group had been taking the stress from the executives’ shoulders and granting them a moment of relief. She was good at what she did. She loved what she did.
And it had never been enough for her parents.
No, her father, Hugh, and mother, Helena, insisted Isa follow in their footsteps. For too many years, Isa kept quiet as they promoted her from assistant to manager. She’d stopped short of being brought into the upper echelon when her soul couldn’t take any more pressure. The financial business was dry as toast. Numbers on spreadsheets and thirty-page forms filled with lawyer-speak so boring Isa’s eyes had glazed over.
She’d hated it.
By her twenty-eighth birthday, she dreamt of a business where she could go back to doing what she loved: organizing everyone else’s busy day onto a tidy planner page and executing tasks by checking off lists. She knew she was overqualified for a starting assistant position, and so her company was born. After a short while she’d grown from one to ten employees, then fifteen, now thirty-two.
She was doing what she loved, owned a business she loved, and there was absolutely no way she’d allow beastly, sexist Elijah Crane to inhibit her success.
An hour later, her planner in hand, she straightened her shoulders and walked back to Eli’s office. Since there wasn’t a door, she rapped on the wall instead. The rainy day cast muted light over the room, which, save the desk lamp and dying fire, was the only light in the room.
“Elijah, I have a few questions for you.”
“It’s Eli, and I’m busy,” he said, not looking in her direction. His face was lit by his laptop’s screen, turned at an angle so she couldn’t see what he was doing. In the reflection of a pair of black-framed glasses, she saw what looked like an e-mail.
He finally frowned up at her when she walked in, grabbed a chair from the other side of the room, and dragged it—damn, it was heavy—to the front of his desk. She sat, crossing one leg over the other and readied her pen over her planner page.
“First item,” she read. “Reese requests your attendance at the board meeting tomorrow afternoon at the Crane.”
“Are you hard of hearing, Bettie?”
“It’s Isabella, or Isa as you prefer, and, no, I’m not.”
His scowl deepened.
“Will you be attending?” she asked.
“No. I will not be attending. Get out of my office.” He tore his glasses off and dropped them on the keyboard.
“Very well.” She struck through the item with a line. “I said I’d phone in with your responses. I assume you ignored my e-mail.”
“I hate e-mail.”
“You’re replying to one now.”
He blinked. Isa swallowed a smile. This man had no idea who he was dealing with and she sort of loved it.
“I kept the e-mail short and sweet, Eli. You can finish it in ten minutes even with that blunt-fingered, caveman-style, hunt-and-peck typing method you seem to favor.” She made a show of checking off the task box on her planner page. “Next: lunch. Will you be ordering out, or do you have special dietary restrictions?”
“I can feed myself, Bettie. I’ve been doing it for years.”
“It’s Isa,” she corrected calmly. “And feeding you is now part of my job. Not literally, of course. I trust you can maneuver a fork to your mouth if you can move around on a prosthesis.”
He blinked again. She’d been testing him. She’d bet none of her employees had spoken of his injuries or prosthetic leg so garishly. But if he insisted on being blunt with her, she figured turnabout was fair play. Especially since he was content to insult her.
“I don’t like Isa,” he snarled.
“Well, then call me Isabella.”
“What if I don’t like Isabella?”
“Then you are welcome to call me Ms. Sawyer, but it’s rather formal, don’t you think? I’d feel enticed to call you Mr. Crane.”
“Mr. Crane is my father.” Eli crossed his arms over his chest, leaning back in his chair. The stance could have appeared relaxed if every muscle in his upper half wasn’t flexed.
“Then I suggest you find a suitable name to call me so I don’t accidentally age you thirty-five years.”
His mouth compressed into a line, but a spark lit his eyes as if he were enjoying the banter. The dark blue flashed with a heat that consumed the room and stole her cheeks. She swallowed thickly, licking her bottom lip as she recrossed her legs. Rather than watch him, she pretended to write in her planner. She was enjoying the banter, too. Her knees weren’t as strong as she’d like.
“Sable,” she said, clearing her throat of the awareness that’d pooled there.
“Say again?” His handsome face contorted.
She lifted her head. “Like my company. That…I work for,” she tacked on. “You can call me Sable if you don’t prefer Isa or Isabella.” It was her nickname after all.
“Sable,” he muttered, and the heated air between them intensified. Eli’s low voice raked along her spine, sending a zap of electricity to her brain stem. In spite of not wanting to feel anything for him, she felt all sorts of confusing things.
Intrigue.
Curiosity.
Want.
“There you go.” She flashed him a quick smile, then went back to her list, ticking off three more boxes before she stood and moved for the exit. “I’ll order for you, then. No preferences on what you eat?”
“No meat unless it’s seafood,” he said.
“You’re a vegetarian?” It was out of her mouth before she’d thought about saying it. She never would have guessed Eli, clearly a man’s man, didn’t eat meat. Now who’s being sexist?