Free Embraced by Love by Suzanne Brockmann Page B

door.
    “He’s in,” she said.
    “Tell him I need him,” Josie said, “as soon as he can get his bod in here.”
    “And all this time I thought you didn’t care,” David teased, coming into the office.
    Surprised, Josie looked up from the computer to see him smiling at her. “Heck,
you’re
in a good mood today,” she said. “What’s the occasion?”
    “The rain stopped, I guess.” He shrugged, sitting down next to her and looking at the computer screen. “Annie, can you get me some coffee, too?” he asked, already absorbed by the information on the screen.
    Josie and David worked without stopping for three solid hours, with Annie and Frank flitting in and out of the executive office like silent ghosts.
    Suddenly, midmorning, despite her orders not to be disturbed, Josie’s telephone rang. At a nod from her boss, Annie turned on the speaker phone.
    “Yes?” Josie said curtly, raising her voice to be heard.
    “I’m sorry to interrupt.” It was the front receptionist, and the woman sounded flustered. “But Mr. Saunders and Mr. Blake are here—from Fenderson?”
    The Fenderson people. Josie glanced at her watch. Almost five hours early.
    “Oh, damn,” Josie said. “All right. Send them up.”
    Frank was on the other side of the room, sorting the mail. He stood suddenly, nearly knocking his chair over, and ran out of the office. Josie stared after him in surprise, and Annie quickly picked up the opened letters and envelopes that fluttered to the floor in his wake.
    David got to his feet, adjusting his already adjusted tie, and checking his perfect hair in the reflective glass of a framed poster on the wall.
    Josie stood up, too, and moved toward the door, opening it wide just as the Fenderson people were ushered up the stairs. She greeted Saunders and Blake politely by name and showed them into her office.
    “Can I offer you gentlemen some coffee?” Josie said. “And perhaps a donut?”
    Saunders, the older of the two men, smiled benignly. “That would be nice. After all, it
is
just about time for a coffee break.”
    Josie heard David inhale sharply at Saunders’s words, and saw him move his head to look up at the clock on the wall. She followed his gaze.
    Ten-fourteen.
    David’s eyes were panicked as he looked toward Josie’s desk, toward the intercom system sitting there. For one brief instant, she could picture him throwing himself on the intercom, as if it were a grenade.
    The sound of the clock’s big hand moving down one minute echoed in the stillness of the room.
    Ten-fifteen.
    Silence.
    One second, two seconds, three seconds, four . . .
    David was frozen in place, still staring at the intercom.
    “Well,” Josie said, with a nervous laugh, “Annie, if you wouldn’t mind getting us some coffee—”
    The intercom speaker clicked on.
    “Good morning, staff,” Cooper’s voice said calmly, pleasantly. “It’s ten-fifteen, and time for our coffee break.”
    Cooper sounded like, well, Cooper. Josie could see the muscles in David’s jaw working as he clenched his teeth, waiting for the bomb to drop. But Cooper continued in exactly the same vein.
    “We’d like to welcome Misters Saunders and Blake from Fenderson Company, Incorporated, to Taylor-Made Software this morning and ask them to join us as we stand up, stretch our legs, and have another cup of decaf while we listen to the allegro movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto number four in G major.”
    The music started. There were no conga drums, no salsa beat, no horn section . . . It was Bach, light and baroque.
    As she watched, Saunders and Blake exchanged a delighted, smiling look. But David was still tense. He looked with trepidation toward the door to her living quarters, the door Cooper always came leaping out of after he finished his ten-fifteen office-wide announcement.
    The door swung open.
    David cringed.
    But the Cooper who came into Josie’s office looked quite different from the man who had danced barefoot in the