Trust Me on This - Jennifer Crusie [49]
“Banks?”
Dennie frowned, trying to open her eyes. “What?”
“Banks?”
“Taylor?” She fumbled with the covers, trying to sit up and pull her thoughts together. “Taylor, is that you?”
“It certainly is me.” The satisfaction in Taylor’s voice was clear, even through her stupor.
“Taylor, what do you want?” Dennie looked longingly at the soft place she’d been in bed. “I’m busy here.”
“Not anymore you’re not,” Taylor said. “You’re fired.”
Chapter 7
Back in Harry’s room, Alec closed his eyes in pain. “He owns the land?”
“Yeah,” Harry said. “It’s crap, nobody will ever be able to develop it, but he can sell it. He owns it.”
“Oh, hell.” Alec sat down and put his head in his hands so he could think unimpeded by the relentless gloom in front of him. “Did he misrepresent anything?”
“No.” Victoria seemed near tears. “He was everything he said he was. He never pretended to be anything else.”
Harry reddened a little. “That EPA stuff wasn’t a promise. We can’t get him.”
Alec looked from Harry to Victoria and back again. “Do you guys know something I don’t? Because you look way too depressed for this. We’ll figure this out.”
“How?” Victoria slumped back in her chair. “Harry and I already talked about it. We agreed to the land deal as it stood. If we start asking him to make promises now, he’ll smell a rat. We all sat there and agreed with him.”
“Dennie didn’t,” Alec said. He’d meant it as a rueful joke, but as soon as he said it, he realized what it meant. “Dennie didn’t go for the deal at all,” he said, as he straightened. “If the deal hinged on Dennie, he’d have to pony up more.”
Harry stopped looking at Victoria as if he were a basset hound and brightened. “This could be good.”
“Of course, I just said good-bye to her forever,” Alec said.
“Well, that was dumb,” Victoria said tartly. “Of course, this is my day for dumb people. First Janice Meredith, the smartest woman I know, turns out to be a paranoid rabbit, and then there’s you two. You meet the perfect woman and you sacrifice her for your job.” She stood up and slammed her chair under the desk. “Men have absolutely no sense of priorities.”
She stomped out of the room, and Harry said, “Oh, hell,” and pulled her chair out and sat down.
“I’m missing a lot here,” Alec said.
“Solve your own problems,” Harry said. “What the hell did you dump Dennie for, anyway? You didn’t know she wasn’t a con. You should have played her.” Harry’s scowl deepened. “That’s what you get for being unprofessional. The job always comes first.”
“You can’t dump somebody you never had,” Alec said. “And if it turned out she wasn’t a con—which I would like to point out, it did—we didn’t need a reporter on this, we have enough trouble. And she was unpredictable.”
“Unpredictable is bad,” Harry growled in agreement.
Also she was screwing up my thinking to the point where I might have said something stupid, Alec went on silently. Like, “I love you.” That would have been bad. You do not tell a woman you have known for forty-eight hours that you love her. Well, more like fifty hours because it had been noon on Thursday when she’d come smacking through the doors—
He stopped. Counting the hours since he’d met somebody was a bad sign.
“But we still need her,” Harry said, finishing his sentence. “Go get her.”
Alec grinned. He hadn’t meant to, going back to Dennie was such a bad idea, but as soon as Harry said it, he felt better.
“Only because it’s the professional thing to do,” he told Harry, and went back to his room to figure out what to say when he called her.
Back in her room, Dennie clenched her jaw and told herself not to panic. “Taylor, I’m tired. Call back later with the jokes.”
“Banks, you’re fired.” She heard no sympathy whatsoever in his voice. “I warned