Page 66 of Hotter than Wildfire

“We have to think of something that will cool us down,” she gasped. Something as big and as cold as Antarctica, the way she was feeling.

Harry lifted his hand from hers and she released him.

They drove down into the gloom of the building’s underground garage, the bright sunlight abruptly gone as if a switch had been thrown.

“Not hard,” Harry said, parking neatly beside Sam and Nicole’s vehicle. “Just think of Gerald Montez. That’s enough.”

Turned out that Nicole’s office was just across the corridor from her husband’s. Pretty convenient.

She had elaborate security, involving a palm print and a keypad code. The only thing missing was the retina scan. When her door clicked open like that of a bank vault, Nicole put her hand to Ellen’s back and urged her inside. Nicole turned back to the three men.

“Ellen’s spending the day with me.” Harry opened his mouth and she shook her finger at him. “With me. And I don’t want to hear any discussion about it.”

Harry looked at Sam, who made a strangled noise in his throat. It was clear who called the shots in that family. Mike just looked amused.

Nicole leaned forward a little. “Harry, you know perfectly well that Sam made sure my office is as secure as yours and Sam watches who comes in and out of my office on his monitor anyway, don’t you Sam?”

Sam looked at the floor and had the grace to look a little bit abashed. It was hard to tell, though, on that rough face. He was even worse than Harry at showing emotion.

“Ellen is going to be much more comfortable spending the day with me, aren’t you, dear?” Nicole turned to her.

Walking around in an office of men she barely knew, except for one who turned her on so powerfully she’d have to avoid him as much as possible, or staying with Nicole, cool, calm, friendly Nicole. There was only one possible answer. “Ah. Yes.”

“This is your way to ensure that she looks at your books before she looks at ours,” Harry said sourly.

“Absolutely. So embrace the suck, as you military types say.” Nicole smiled as she closed the door in their faces. She leaned her back against it and blew out a little breath. “Now. We’ve got rid of them, so we can relax.”

She waved a graceful hand at the small office. “Welcome to my little lair. You work on that laptop over there and I’ll work at the desktop. Around eleven one of Sam’s men will go downstairs and get a skinny latte decaf for me and you’d like—what?”

“Cinnamon chai,” Ellen smiled.

“Great.” Nicole pressed a button on a fancy intercom system, murmured Cinnamon chai and hung her jacket up on a brass clothes tree.

Nicole went to a beautiful antique console under the window, brought out two big boxes and placed them on the table next to the laptop. She opened the flaps, looked inside and winced.

“Oh, man. This is what denial looks like. I’ve been putting this off for way too long. I started Wordsmith while my father was very ill and it took all my energy to do the work and take care of dad. So bookkeeping came a very distant third.” She tilted the boxes so Ellen could see inside. There was a wild tangle of bills and check stubs and invoices. It looked like weasels had nested in there. Nicole peered again into the box and back at Ellen. “This is really bad. Sorry.”

Ellen looked around at the tiny little office. Small as it was, it was gorgeous, decorated with a few antiques and lovely watercolors and pretty knickknacks. It was like being inside a little jewel box and smelled of potpourri. Just being here made her feel good.

“I can’t imagine anything I’ll like more than repaying your kindness by doing something I enjoy doing. So no thanks necessary.”

Nicole’s beautiful cobalt-blue eyes widened. “You like keeping accounts?” she asked, in the same tone as you’d say You like genital herpes?

“I do, yes. Strange as that sounds. So, Nicole, you’ve made me a very happy woman. Tell me how your system works.”

“System.” Nicole thought while tapping on the lid of one of the boxes with a manicured pink-tipped nail. “Ahm, I don’t really have much of a system besides Throw the Piece of Paper into the Box. On that laptop you’ll find chronological files of work as it came in and the quotes I put out. Then you’ll have to match those to the bills. I do translations myself and bill those directly, but a much bigger part of my business is matching clients with translators and I take a fifteen percent commission for that. So there are two different sets of accounts.” She looked worried. “It’s really complicated. Maybe I should⁠—“

Ellen put her arm around Nicole’s shoulders and squeezed gently. “I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it. This is what I do, so let me do it.”

“I thought you sang.”

“Yeah, and keep books.” Nicole just looked at her, shrugged, and sat down at her desk. She slid in a portable hard drive into the processor and fired up her desktop. Inside of a minute, she was lost to the world, tapping away at the keyboard, totally absorbed in whatever it was she was translating.

Ellen understood completely. Numbers did for her what languages did for Nicole. She loved them, trusted them. They loved her back and had never, ever let her down. Numbers just—they just always made sense. When the people around her had never made sense, numbers had.

When she had math homework she could forget about her mom’s latest loser boyfriend, about the rent her mom hadn’t paid that month, the cigarette cough that wouldn’t quit. Her mom getting thinner and thinner…

It all went away, thanks to the beauty of math.