Passion and Scandal by Candace Schuler Read Free Book Online

taxes?"
    "Before," she admitted. "But I don't think that's relevant. Your seventy-five dollars an hour is a before-tax figure, too."
    The lady was one sharp cookie; a sharp, sexy cookie, whether she was trying to be or not. He'd never realized a business discussion could be so damned stimulating.
    "Do we have a deal?" she asked.
    "I'm thinking." He stalled, just to make her work for it.
    "I'd be willing to throw in two of those days of training for free as a gesture of goodwill."
    "Deal," he said, and downshifted into another turn.
    They both smiled, each satisfied that they had made the better bargain.
    * * *
    The Wilshire Arms apartment building was located on Wilshire Boulevard between a small Italian grocery store and a brick-fronted bar named Flynn's. It was an aging grande dame of a building, a great lady from a bygone era with sun-washed pink stucco walls, wrought-iron balconies, graceful arched windows, and a fanciful turret rising up from one corner of the slanting red-tiled roof. Originally constructed in the twenties by a successful real-estate speculator, it had undergone several incarnations over the years, suffering the ignominious fate of having its spacious, high-ceilinged rooms chopped into ever smaller apartments. But somehow, through all the changes it had endured, it never lost its original elegance and glamour.
    Willow stared at it, her gaze darting back and forth between the building and the photographs she held in her hands. The banana tree in front was taller now than it was in the pictures and there were some lush flower beds that hadn't been there back in 1970, but it was plain to see how Steve had so easily recognized it. It had hardly changed at all in the last twenty-five years.
    "Are you going to sit in the car all day and stare at it?" Steve asked, looking down at her from where he stood on the sidewalk. "Or are you going to get out and come in with me?"
    Willow looked up, startled to realize he was standing on the other side of the door, holding it open for her. "Oh. Sorry." She slipped the photographs into the pocket of her suit jacket and swung her legs out of the car.
    Steve permitted himself a quick glance before looking away; he couldn't really be blamed for picturing her ankles with satin ribbons wrapped around them. That was just the kind of fantasy that stuck in a man's mind.
    "Why don't we put that in the trunk?" he said, when she leaned over and reached into the back seat of the open convertible for her briefcase. "You're not going to need it here and there's no sense lugging it around."
    Willow handed it to him without comment, waiting on the sidewalk as he walked around behind the car. He stowed the briefcase and then, to her secret amusement, leaned over and carefully buffed off the fingerprints he'd left on the gleaming paint job with the sleeve of his navy sport jacket.
    "She's a classic," he said when he looked up and caught her smiling. "And classics deserve to be pampered."
    "I'm surprised you park her in the street if you feel that way."
    "This is a pretty good neighborhood," he said, taking her elbow to escort her up the brick path to the front steps of the building. His dimple flashed briefly. "And she's got an alarm that'll wake the dead if anyone so much as breathes on her too hard."
    The front door of the Wilshire Arms had a keyed security lock, meant to keep everyone but tenants out of the building. There was a small brass panel set into the pink stucco wall on one side of the door. It held a column of push-button doorbells, each neatly labeled with a name and apartment number. Above it was a gleaming brass plaque, about two feet square, with the name of the building deeply engraved in bold Gothic script. Below it someone had scratched the words Believe the Legend.
    "What do you suppose that means?" Willow asked as Steve reached out to press the buzzer marked Manager. "What legend?"
    "I have no idea. Probably just some juvenile delinquent's idea of a joke."
    "It is