A Fare To Remember_ Just Whistle_Driven - Vicki Lewis Thompson [7]
Iris clucked her tongue.
“Yeah, it sucks. I know it happens all the time, but I hate to see Zach buying into it. If he doesn’t watch out, he’ll get as ruthless as the boss.”
“This woman, you think she’ll be good for him, then?”
Mario pictured Hannah Robertson in her yellow sundress and flowered suitcase held together with duct tape. “Oh, yeah. She’s exactly what the doctor ordered.”
ALL THROUGH THE DAY Zach kept telling himself that just because he was taking Hannah Robertson to dinner didn’t mean he’d end up taped to Mario’s dash. If and when the time came for him to find someone and settle down, he would do the picking, not some guy who’d seen Fiddler on the Roof once too often. Although matchmaking was cute when it happened to other people, Zach wasn’t about to fall for that program.
But a guy would have to be made of stone not to be kind to a woman who brought cans of tuna to New York so she could pass them out to the city’s homeless population. It also didn’t hurt that she’d looked like a ray of sunshine standing in that dingy hotel lobby. Her red hair was glorious, a deep copper color. She also had brown eyes, which might explain why her sundress had revealed a golden tan rather than pale skin dotted with freckles.
Taking Hannah Robertson to dinner would be no hardship. Getting her the right publishing contacts might be. Zach had asked around, and the consensus seemed to be that Ed had a client who was a publishing bigwig. This was the day that Drake Medford would inform Ed that he would probably be losing his corner office come the first of the month. Under the circumstances, Zach thought asking Ed for a personal favor today was just wrong.
So he’d called his cookbook guy and milked that contact for a couple of tenuous leads. It wasn’t much, but it was better than going to dinner empty-handed.
Partly because he didn’t have much to tell her and partly because he kept thinking of how good she’d looked in yellow, he bought a bouquet of daisies and yellow roses before hopping on the bus that would take him to the stop closest to the Pearson. Going to dinner with Hannah was turning out to be the best part of his day. Every time he’d passed Ed’s office he’d cringed at the idea that he was driving the guy out. Although he’d told himself not to worry, he was worrying, anyway.
So dinner was a terrific distraction. He’d made reservations at a Thai place on Restaurant Row, and they could walk there and back from her hotel. He wasn’t opposed to taking a cab, but Mario wasn’t on duty yet and Zach had become picky about his cabs after riding with Mario.
Fire trucks drove screaming past the bus as it stopped where Zach wanted off. When the sirens abruptly quit, Zach paused at the front of the bus, bouquet in hand, to lean down and peer through the bus’s windshield to see where the trucks had ended up. Damn it, the fire trucks, lights flashing, sat smack-dab in front of the Pearson!
Galloping down the steps to the pavement, Zach headed off at a run. The Pearson wasn’t as tall as some hotels, but tall enough, more than thirty stories. The fire escapes were probably old and rusty. A horrible image of Hannah dangling from a rope made of knotted sheets made his stomach churn.
Hotel guests came streaming out of the tiny lobby as the firefighters went charging in. Zach couldn’t see any smoke, but that didn’t mean anything. The fire could be in a hallway or an elevator shaft. Now he could hear the hotel’s fire alarm, a grating beep, beep, beep that sent sweat running down his spine.
Then Hannah—barefoot and wearing a thin flowered bathrobe—came out of the hotel. Relief emptied his lungs, making him dizzy as he stood a few feet away catching his breath. Now that he could see she was fine, he felt a little silly. He’d pretty much overreacted, considering he barely knew her.
What was that