Page 32 of An Engagement for Erica

“I didn’t know it was a game to win at.” She didn’t like the sound of that.

“No games,” he said. “I felt as if I had enough of them with my father.”

“The same with my mother,” she admitted.

“Another thing in common.”

“You’re running out of ink writing that list up, aren’t you?”

“I’m not sure if you’re joking or not, but I’m going to take it seriously. I am. There is a reason for it.”

“What reason is that?” she asked.

“So you’ll continue to move left.”

Erica laughed and didn’t even put her hand up to her face to see if there was a smile remaining.

She felt it along with the fluttering in her belly.

“I’m under contract with you,” she said.

“You won’t always be,” he said. “Though I’m sure I’ll be extending it.”

She lifted her eyebrow. “Why is that?”

“Because I’ll need your expertise on other things besides gathering this information. Our HR policies need an outsider to look them over and rewrite them. None of that has been done in decades. As you’ve said, one big problem we’ve got is the lack of policies or those we have being enforced. My whole HR department needs to be overhauled.”

“I don’t know that is necessary,” she said. “It sounds as if you’ve got good hard-working staff there, but leadership in that department might be in over their head.”

“That is good to know and part of why I want to extend things. But we are getting off track. You still have more to interview on the floor and that is going to take you two more weeks easily.”

She was meeting with managers, foremen, and randomly selected plant workers in all divisions. Her suggestion and it was a show of good faith that everyone was being listened to.

She’d been surprised when Tucker agreed with that.

“We can reassess everything in two weeks,” she said.

“What about us?” he asked. “We’ve gotten sidetracked a bit. Work, attraction, personal information, commonalities, back to work.”

“And you want to return to the personal information?” she asked.

His dark eyes were smiling at her along with his grin. He had a close cut beard that he’d had before, but she’d seen him without it also.

She’d always gone for the clean-cut man, but this look was better in her eyes.

He wasn’t in a suit, but he wasn't in jeans either.

He’d perfected business casual in her eyes. Black pants, a light purple shirt with faint silver pinstripes, unbuttoned at the collar, no belt that she could see. He didn’t need it with how well his clothing was tailored to him.

“I’d like that,” he said. “What I’d like is for us to maybe pick up where we left off months ago. The elephant in the room is shrinking, but I’m going to lay it all out on the table. We’d talked about getting that drink when we were done before.”

“And now you want to do it again?” she asked.

“I’d like to get it before we were done,” he said. “As I’ve mentioned, we are both professional enough to not let it get in the way, but if you need to wait until all these interviews are done and we move onto things that don’t put you in the office as much, I suppose I’ve waited this long, I can wait a bit longer.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said, smirking.

He squinted one eye at her. “I want to call you out on playing games.”

---