Her Unexpected Admirer (2 page)

“You missed this!” Kate’s father yelled.  “How could you miss something so obvious?” he demanded.  He was the owner of the accounting firm and told her repeatedly how lucky she was that he allowed her to work there.  Accounting jobs were difficult to get right now.  Ironically, he’d used the opposite argument when she’d been in college trying to choose her major.  Repeatedly he’d told her that accounting jobs were the most common by far. According to him, she’d be set for life if she’d just work hard, finish her accounting degree, and ignore all of her ridiculous dreams to become an artist. 

Kate stood in front of his desk, her knees shaking and her head bowed with shame.  She had missed that error, but what was worse, she’d missed the entire report.  How could she have been so oblivious? 

Mentally, she went through the reports that had been sent to her inbox.  Her mind counted, picturing her computer screen and the messages.  There had been nine messages.  Nine reports. 

This report hadn’t been with the batch; she was sure of it.  “Dad, I don’t think I received this report,” she said. 

His eyes snapped up, fury shooting through the now-black depths.  “Are you saying I didn’t give you all the information?” he asked, his voice low and ominous. 

Kate immediately knew that her father would never admit such an omission.  She lowered her head again, trying to figure out how to back track.  “I must have just missed it,” she said softly, knowing what he wanted to hear, but still sure that she hadn’t received the report.  It seemed that no matter how hard she tried, nothing she did was good enough for her father. 

Thankfully, he looked down at his computer screen, his furious gaze no longer stabbing her.  “I’ll fix this.  Just be grateful that I caught it before it went to the client.”  His eyes slashed back to her once more.  “This is why you don’t send anything directly to the client, Kate.  If this had gone out, it would have been my reputation on the line.  It would be me standing in front of the client trying to explain why my own daughter, the daughter who had graduated from all of her accounting classes with barely mediocre grades, was still on staff with me.”

Kate’s eyes flashed with fury.  She hadn’t earned just “mediocre” grades!  She’d been a stellar student and had graduated with honors.  Why did that detail fall from his memory so conveniently?  She opened her mouth to point that out, but quickly decided against making that assertion.  It would just infuriate him more and what was the point?  She just needed to get out of this job and find a position somewhere else.  She didn’t care where, but she wasn’t going to take this kind of abuse from her father any longer. 

This probably wasn’t the best time to tell him about all of the art classes she’d taken in college.  He’d pressured her to take only accounting classes and she’d done her best.  But her real passion was art.  Her heart cried out for a paintbrush and canvas.  It didn’t matter what emotion she was feeling, art soothed her, let her express herself in ways that lifted her up, cleared her mind and made her feel…worthy. 

She hated accounting.  She was here only because her father had demanded that she major in accounting.  After graduation, when she’d wanted to take a couple of weeks off and explore Europe with her friends, he’d scoffed at the idea, demanding that she start working in his firm immediately. 

So here she was, two years later, a misfit accountant who spent her days dredging through numbers and her nights working out her frustration on a canvas.  She would never be a good accountant, she knew.  Nor did she ever want to.  It would be nice to impress her father once in a while, but at the rate she was going, that wasn’t going to happen. 

She thought about the check she’d just received from that art studio in New York.  It was huge!  Much larger than she’d expected.  While her father continued to harangue her about her incompetence, she focused her mind on that check, on the canvas she had waiting for her in her tiny apartment. 

“Are you even listening to me?” her father yelled, his eyes reading her like a book.  “Or are you off in dreamland once more?  You never could focus, could you?  You’re always off, dreaming about some ridiculous fantasy in your mind.”  He grunted his disapproval.  “If you’re ever going to become a professional, you’d better get your head out of the clouds!  You can’t be successful by dreaming!  And you can’t be successful by missing things like this!”  He took a deep breath, obviously trying to calm himself down.  “You’ll do all of this again, including this report.  Be here early tomorrow morning.  I’ll go through the information tonight and will have the correct answers.  If yours don’t match mine by tomorrow, then you’ll do it again.  You’ll do it over and over again until you get the correct answers.  Got it?” he demanded.

Kate nodded her head, feeling the lead weight of her father’s disapproval come down hard on her slender shoulders.  She tried hard to fight it, knowing that he was wrong.  But there was just something inside of her that craved her father’s approval.  All her life, she’d been trying to do what he wanted but she felt like a salmon fighting her way upstream.  It wasn’t working and she was now floundering on the rocks. 

He looked up at her.  “Well?  What are you waiting for?  Get out of my office.  I have a lot of work to do.”

Kate spun around, almost tripping over herself in an effort to get away from him.  Shame washed over her in waves and she wanted badly to just curl up in a ball, hide herself away.  The whole office had probably heard him yelling at her, knew that she’d missed something.  Again.  She was humiliated in front of her peers, but knew that they really weren't her peers.  They were all ‘real’ accountants.  They all loved numbers, loved trying to figure out the intricacies of spreadsheets and taxes.  Number crunching was their life!  It was their passion. 

She had no passion for numbers.  It seemed that she had no passion for anything that didn’t come from a paintbrush.  Was she so odd that she couldn’t even add and subtract correctly?  Was she truly so stupid as to have missed an entire spreadsheet of data?

Staring at her computer screen, she realized that there was no way she could work tonight.  Glancing at her clock, she saw that it was already after seven o’clock.  She’d come in late this morning, only arriving around eight o’clock because she’d stayed up until around three in the morning, working on her latest canvas. 

Her mind cringed at the idea of going through numbers any longer today. She just couldn’t do it.  Peeking out the doorway of her tiny office, she saw only a few lights still on, indicating a couple of other accountants with the firm were still working hard.

Kate bit her lip, trying to decide what to do.  She couldn’t stay here.  She had to get out of this office, had to escape the claustrophobic confines of these four walls.  She also knew that her father probably expected her to stay here and work on whatever else he’d assigned to her. 

But she couldn’t do it!  She had to leave!  She felt like the walls were closing in on her.  Getting out of this closet-sized room was imperative. 

Grabbing her purse and her coat, she rushed out of her office.  Keeping her head low, she raced down the hallway, determined to get out of the office as quickly as possible.  She wasn’t going to stop for anything. 

Thankfully, her father’s office was to the left in the corner.  She had the office at the end of the hallway, the smallest office on the floor without any windows.  She was at the bottom of the totem pole, her father had told her when he’d assigned her to this office.  No perks just for being related to the owner of the accounting firm. 

Well, she didn’t care what perks or responsibilities she had right now. She needed to get out, to feel alive!  She needed to breathe in air that wasn’t surrounded by the chronically bored!  Escape was imperative.

Rushing through the glass entrance doors, she almost burst into the outside hallway.  She was just about to press the call button for the elevator but thought better of that action.  Someone might come out, find her trying to leave before all of her work was done and report it to her father.  Then she’d be here for the rest of the night because in an accounting firm, the work was never really done.  It could go on forever! 

Perhaps she was exaggerating a little, but she didn’t care.  Diving for the staircase, she slammed through the door way and ran down the stairs.  When she’d reached the tenth floor, she took off her heels, wanting to get out of the building faster. 

She finally reached the street level and rushed through the door, taking in deep gulps of air as she leaned against the side of the building.  She didn’t even care that the air was filled with exhaust from the cars racing past as they hurried home to their families.  The air particles weren’t filled with numbers; that was all that mattered.

She walked down the street, intending to walk the ten blocks to her tiny apartment.  But more importantly, she was just going to revel in her escape and feel the air around her that wasn’t closed in by walls or re-circulated air. 

It was cold outside, with winter just around the corner.  She’d forgotten her coat but it didn’t matter.  She was outside and not staring at a computer screen.  Kate took several more deep breaths, letting the other pedestrians move around her as they hurried to their homes or next destination. 

As she passed by one of the hotels, she heard soft jazz playing from a piano.  The sound didn’t actually strike her so much as wrap around her, slow her down and soothe the frayed nerves that had become frazzled by her father’s rant. 

Stopping in front of the hotel, she looked inside, trying to find the source of the music. But all she saw was the elegant lobby and people milling about efficiently.  It was one of the best hotels in Boston and she stared up at the sophisticated logo, wondering what it was like inside.  While her mind sifted through images, her body almost swayed to the jazzy music, humming along and letting the stress of the day flow out of her.  Softly, ever so slowly, the moody music released the tension from her father’s harsh words and her most recent failure in his eyes. 

“Would you like to go inside, ma’am?” the doorman asked kindly, looking at her with a fatherly smile. 

Her first reaction was to shake her head.  Most months, she had to scrimp to pay the rent on her tiny, cramped studio apartment.  But then she remembered the big check from her paintings.  A smile slowly formed on her face.  She wasn’t aware of the doorman’s gasp as her smile transformed her features.  Despite her ignorance of the fact, she was a strikingly beautiful woman.  Her dark brown hair was tied up in a professional looking knot on the back of her head which only emphasized the high cheekbones and the elegant line of her jaw.  Her eyes were a startling color of light blue that sometimes seemed almost magical, especially against her thick, black lashes.  They were the eyes that one would see on a witch, her father had mentioned on several occasions, and not in a complimentary tone.  So she had no idea that men stopped to watch her on the street and women raced to the makeup counters, demanding to find makeup tricks to help them achieve her look. 

But when she smiled, there was something almost ethereal about her.  She was so slender and her bone structure so delicate, but a smile showed the world that there was much more to her.  There was a grace and shyness that was obliterated by her exotic smile that told the world that she had secrets.  Secrets everyone wanted to discover. 

Kate looked up again, closing her eyes and absorbing the music.  “Yes,” she said with a sigh.  “I think a glass of something special would be a perfect end to a perfectly horrible day.” 

The doorman, normally very efficient and gracious with the hotel guests, stumbled as she approached.  He found his footing quickly enough, but blushed when she smiled her thanks a moment before she slipped through the doorway. 

Inside, Kate stood very still, her mind and shoulders releasing more of the tension from the day as the sound of the music increased, surrounding her.  She didn’t realize it, but she was now swaying to the music, leaning in to the sound and letting it flow around her and through her.  She closed her eyes, letting her mind picture the sounds on a canvas.  How could she capture the rhythm?   How could she demonstrate the soothing feeling of the music with paint and color?  Or what items could she attach to her canvas and paint around that would “speak” the sounds to the viewer?  It was a new challenge, one her fingers were itching to try and capture. 

She almost danced over to the bar, and perched on a stool, not looking at the piano player, not wanting the music to be personified just yet.  She’d give credit to the artist, but she wanted to just live in the sound for a few more minutes.

She was also unaware of the dark blue eyes watching her from the corner of the room.  Nor was she aware of the smoldering intent in those eyes. 

“Can I get you something to drink?” the bartender asked as he polished the already shining wood bar in front of her. 

Kate opened her eyes, startled to see the bartender leaning over the counter, but she admonished herself for that surprise.  She was in a bar, of course a bartender would approach her.  “Oh, goodness,” she responded, laughing at how ridiculous she looked.  But then the prospect of a decadent treat hit her and she bit her lower lip in excitement, her eyes sparkling and she didn’t see the startled expression on the bartender’s face as he took in the change in her beautiful features.  “My yes, I’d like the most exotic and crazy drink you could give me,” she said, barely able to sit still on the bar chair.