“Miss Grady.” The tone was curt and authoritative with more of a snap in it than Michael had used with her predecessor.
Evan could just make out Vanny’s low tones before his brother enjoined, “Don’t tell me to calm down, Vanny. This is just the kind of thing I’m talking about. Yes, I asked her to go get Evan, but she doesn’t have to leave her post unattended while she’s doing so. The phone has been ringing off the hook, as you well know.”
Good manners should have caused him to slow-walk it into Michael’s office to pretend he hadn’t heard that exchange, but frankly he just didn’t give a shit at this point and the secretary herself looked beyond embarrassment, just wearily tightening her mouth. Let Miss Grady deal with her boss as best she could. Apparently he wasn’t the only one mourning the absence of Andrea Prentiss all this time. It looked as if Michael, Vanny and Miss Grady had been doing so as well with equal measure.
Vanny slid one hip off the desk where she had been perched and turned to them, saying to her fiancé over her shoulder, “God forbid you pick up your own phone once in a while.” She beamed at Evan and held out her hands. “Hi there, stranger.”
He took her hands and kissed her lightly on her cheek. “Hi, Vanny.” It still surprised him how warm the woman his brother had fallen for was. She tugged him into a full-fledged hug as Michael got up from behind the desk.
“Evan.” Michael shook hands with him before turning in a frosty tone to his secretary and saying, “Miss Grady, who do you suppose answers the phones if you get up from your desk and don’t either arrange for another girl to watch them or switch them over to the switchboard? How many times have I told you about that?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Reynolds. I thought I had switched them over.”
Vanny let go of Evan to link arms with Miss Grady in a conspicuous show of support. “Oh don’t listen to him, Colleen. He’s been a bear all morning.”
Michael transferred his glare from his secretary to his true love while Vanny walked the girl out and closed the door behind her.
“Vanny, really, you undermine my authority when you intervene with Miss Grady.”
But Vanny had made her way back to him and slipped an arm around his waist, pecking him on the cheek while simultaneously winking at Evan. “You know I’m just trying to keep the poor girl from committing hari-kari on company premises and costing you a fortune.”
Michael’s stern look dissolved, right then and there, into a very un-Reynolds-like grin and he kissed the top of her golden curly head. “I wouldn’t be a bear if you’d just make an honest man of me like you said you would ages ago.”
“It’s only been a few months and these things take time, Michael. You know that.”
“Translation, Miss Grady is not carrying her weight in this whole endeavor,” he told Evan. “She’s the one who is supposed to be taking care of this long-overdue wedding. Damn that Miss Prentiss,” he said to Vanny with a big smile, and though it was a frequent joke between them from what Evan could see in the time since Andrea had left, he did not manage to tune it out as he usually did and instead cut to the chase.
“That’s why I’m here.”
Vanny glanced at him in surprise. “You want to help us with our wedding?”
“No.”
Evan wasn’t sure how much of the truth he had planned to tell Michael, but suddenly it felt all wrong to tell him the whole truth. Witnessing his brother’s easy domesticity with his soon-to-be-wife, Evan felt he would be betraying whatever hope he had of achieving that same intimacy with Andrea if he disclosed to Michael she was on his island. Sure, the woman he had set his sights on wouldn’t even tell him her real name and might disappear at a moment’s notice or show up with completely unexplained life-threatening injuries, but hell—details, details. He could still be making wedding plans with her someday too, if he didn’t fuck up everything.
Andrea had been wrong, dead wrong not to involve her very powerful boss in whatever trouble she was in, to not enlist him as an ally, and instead to run away. Even if Evan hadn’t been in the equation, she was wrong not to secure Michael’s protection and Evan would be wrong, he was wrong, not to try to secure it now on her behalf.
But Jesus, he just couldn’t.
So he said instead, “I want you to get me a meeting with Fredrico Stavros. As soon as possible.”
Vanny and Michael traded a shared look of apprehension mixed with pity. Once Andrea had disappeared, he had never come right out and confessed to them the full extent of his relationship with the vanished girl, but he was sure Miss Prentiss Jr., if not his father, had filled in the blanks.