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  “Yes, sir,” Yohanna responded.

  The smile on her lips was almost shy. He was amused but also somewhat skeptical about whether this petite, attractive young woman was equal to the job he needed doing.

  “I noticed on your résumé that your last job was with a law firm.” He raised an eyebrow as he took a closer look at the dark blonde sitting before him. “Are you a lawyer?” He was aware that most law school graduates had to begin at the bottom of the heap if they were even lucky enough to land a position with any firm.

  “No, sir.”

  “Don’t do that,” he told her.

  She hadn’t a clue what he might be referring to. “Do what, sir?”

  “Call me sir,” he specified. “You make me feel like my father—not exactly a feeling I cherish,” he added more or less to himself.

  Even so, she’d heard him. “Sorry, si—Mr. Spader.” She’d managed to catch herself.

  “Even worse,” he told her. “My name is Lukkas. Think you can manage that?” Yohanna nodded vigorously. “Good,” he pronounced.

  Letting her résumé fall to his desk, he moved his chair in closer and leaned over, creating a feeling of intimacy. “So tell me, Yohanna with-the-unpronounceable-last-name, just what makes you think that you can work for me?”

  As a rule Yohanna had a tendency toward modesty, but she had the distinct impression that the man interviewing her didn’t value modesty. He valued confidence. She’d always had people skills, skills that allowed her to read others rather accurately. Lukkas Spader didn’t strike her as a man who had the patience to work with meek people.

  However she had a feeling that he respected—and expected—honesty. “Mrs. Parnell—”

  He held up his hand, stopping her right there. “Who’s Mrs. Parnell?”

  “She’s friends with Theresa Manetti, the woman who—”

  He stopped her again. “I know who Theresa Manetti is,” he told her. “Go on.”

  Yohanna picked up the thread exactly where she had dropped it. “She said you needed someone to organize your schedules, your notes and keep up to the minute on all the details of your projects.”

  He studied her for a long moment. She couldn’t glean anything from his solemn, thoughtful expression. “And that would be you?” he finally asked.

  Yohanna detected neither amusement nor skepticism in his voice. He was harder to gauge than most. Not to mention that the man was definitely making her nervous. Not because he was so good-looking but because she really wanted to get this job. She wasn’t good at doing nothing.

  Yohanna pulled herself together. She was determined not to let the producer see how nervous he made her. His world was undoubtedly filled with people who fawned over him. She wanted him to view her as an asset, not just another fawning groupie or “yes” person.

  “That would be me,” she replied, silently congratulating herself for not letting her voice quiver as she said the words.

  The next moment she was relieved to see a smile playing on the producer’s lips. The fact that the smile also managed to make him almost impossibly handsome was something she tried not to notice.

  It was like trying not to notice the sun.

  “You’re pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you?” he asked, amusement curving the corners of his mouth.

  Yohanna raised her chin ever so slightly, an automatic reaction when she felt she was being challenged. “I know my strengths,” she replied.

  “Apparently so does Mrs. Manetti,” he told her. “When we spoke, she spoke very highly of your qualifications, and I respect her judgment.”

  He continued looking at her, as if trying to discern if she was as good as the older woman had led him to believe. The silence dragged on for a good several minutes.

  Yohanna had met the woman he was referring to only briefly. They had exchanged a few words and the interview had been arranged. There had been no time for Mrs. Manetti to form an opinion about her abilities one way or another.

  She could feel herself fidgeting inside, and her pulse rate began to accelerate. All she could think of was that she really needed this job. She’d only been out of work for a couple of days, but the thought of prolonged inactivity had her already climbing the proverbial walls. Not to mention that she had enough money in the bank to see her through approximately one month—one and a half if she gave up eating.

  As a last resort she could always move in with her mother, but as far as she was concerned, living under a freeway overpass was preferable to that. Her mother had been decent enough when Yohanna was growing up, but in the past eight years, only two topics of conversation interested her: marriage and children, neither of which was anywhere in Yohanna’s immediate future.

  She was fairly confident that living with her mother even for a day would swiftly become catastrophic.

  Lukkas continued doling out information. “If you became my assistant, you’d be keeping irregular hours at best. I’m talking really irregular,” he intoned, his eyes on hers. “And you’d be on call 24/7. Are you up for that?” he asked, looking at her intently.

  “Absolutely,” she assured him with as much confidence as she could muster.

  But Lukkas still had his doubts. “You’re not going to come to me in tears a week or two from now, saying that your husband is unhappy with the hours you’re keeping and could I give you a more normal schedule, are you?”

  “I don’t have a husband, so that’s not going to happen.”

  But Lukkas wasn’t satisfied yet. “A fiancé? A boyfriend?”

  “No and no,” Yohanna responded, quietly shooting down each choice.

  Lukkas still appeared skeptical. “Really? Not even a boyfriend?” His eyes never left hers, as if he considered himself to be an infallible human lie detector—and being as attractive as she was, the young woman couldn’t possibly be telling the truth.

  “Not even a boyfriend,” she echoed, her face innocence personified.

  “You’re kidding, right?” he said in disbelief. How could someone who looked like this woman not have men lining up at her door, waiting for a chance just to spend some time with her? He knew this was none of his business or even ethical for him to ask, but curiosity urged him on.

  “No,” she replied. “I just never experienced that ‘walking on air’ feeling, si—Lukkas,” she quickly corrected herself.

  “Walking on air,” he repeated. “Is that some sort of code?”

  “More like a feeling,” she explained then added quickly, “I’ve never met a man I felt I had chemistry with. In other words, I didn’t experience any sparks flying between us. Without that, what’s the point?” she asked with a vague shrug.

  “What, indeed?” he murmured, thinking back, for a second, to his own solitary life. It hadn’t always been that way.

  Talking about herself always made her feel uncomfortable. Yohanna was quick to return to the salient point of all this. “The bottom line is that there isn’t anyone to complain about my hours even if they do turn out to be extensive.”

  “No ‘if’ about it,” he assured her. “They will be extensive. I’m afraid that it’s the nature of the beast. I put in long hours and that means so will you.” Again he peered closely at her face, as if he could read the answer—and if she was lying, he’d catch her in that, too. “You’re all right with that?” he asked again.

  “Completely.”

  “You haven’t asked about a salary,” he pointed out. The fact that she hadn’t asked made him suspicious. Everyone always talked about money in his world. Why hadn’t she?

  “I’m sure you’ll be fair,” Yohanna replied.

  Again he studied her for a long moment. He didn’t find his answer. So he asked. “And what makes you so sure that I’ll be ‘fair’?”

  “Your movies.”

  Lukka
s’s brow furrowed. He couldn’t make heads or tails out of her answer. “You’re going to have to explain that,” he told her.

  “Every movie you ever made was labeled a ‘feel good’ movie.” As a child, the movies she found on the television set were her best friends. Both her parents led busy lives, so she would while away the hours by watching everything and anything that was playing on the TV. “If you had a dark side, or were underhanded, you couldn’t make the kinds of movies that you do,” she told him very simply.

  “Maybe I just do it for the money.” He threw that out, curious to see what she would make of his answer.

  Yohanna shook her head. “You might have done that once or twice, possibly even three times, but not over and over again. Your sense of integrity wouldn’t have allowed you to sell out. Especially since everyone holds you in such high regard.”

  Lukkas laughed shortly. “You did your research.” He was impressed.

  “It’s all part of being an organizer,” she told him. “That way, there are no surprises.”

  There were layers to this woman, he thought. “Is that what you consider yourself to be? An organizer?”

  “In a word, yes,” Yohanna replied.

  He nodded, as if turning her answers over in his mind. “When can you start?”

  There went her pulse again, Yohanna thought as it launched into double time. Was she actually getting the job?

  “When would you want me to start working?” she asked, tossing the ball back into his court. It was his call to make.

  He laughed shortly. “Yesterday.” That way, he wouldn’t have lost a productive day.

  “That I can’t do,” she told him as calmly as if they were talking about the weather. “But I can start now if you’d like,” she offered.

  Was she that desperate? he wondered. Or was there another reason for her eagerness to come to work for him? Since his meteoric rise to fame, he’d had friends disappoint him, trying to milk their relationship for perks and benefits. As for strangers, they often had their own agendas, and he had become very leery of people until they proved themselves in his estimation. That put him almost perpetually on his guard. It was a tiring situation.

  “You can start tomorrow,” Lukkas told her.

  She wanted to hug him, but kept herself in check. She didn’t want the man getting the wrong impression about her.

  “Then, I have the job?” she asked, afraid of allowing herself to be elated yet having little choice in the matter.

  “You can’t start if you don’t,” he pointed out. “I’ll take you on a three-month probationary basis,” he informed her. “Which means that I can let you go for any reason if I’m not satisfied.”

  “Understood.”

  He peered at her face. “Is that acceptable to you?”

  “Very much so, s-si—” She was about to address him as “sir” but stopped herself, uttering, instead, a hissing sound. “Lukkas,” she injected at the last moment.

  “I’m currently producing a Western. We’re going to be going on location—Arizona. Tombstone area,” he specified. “Do you have any problem with that?”

  She wanted to ask him why he thought she would, but this wasn’t the time for those kinds of questions. They could wait until after she had entrenched herself into his life. The fact that she would do just that was a given as far as she was concerned now that he had hired her.

  “None whatsoever,” she told him.

  “All right. Then go home and get a good night’s sleep. I need you back here tomorrow morning at seven.”

  “Seven it is. I’ll be bright eyed and bushy tailed,” she responded, thinking of a phrase her grandfather used to use.

  “I’ll settle for your eyes being open,” he told her. “See you tomorrow, Hanna.”

  Yohanna opened her mouth to correct him and then decided she rather liked the fact that her new boss was calling her by a nickname, even if she didn’t care all that much for it. She took it as a sign they were on their way to forming a good working relationship.

  After all, if someone didn’t care for someone else, they weren’t going to give them a nickname, right? At least, not one that could be viewed as cute. If anything, they’d use one that could be construed as insulting.

  “See you tomorrow,” she echoed. “I’ll see myself out,” she told him.

  Lukkas didn’t hear her, his mind already moving on to another topic.

  Yohanna had to hold herself in check to keep from dancing all the way to the front door.

  Chapter Two

  The landline Yohanna had gotten installed mainly to placate her mother—“What if there’s a storm that takes out the cell towers? How can anyone reach you then? How can I reach you then?”—was ringing when she let herself into her condo several hours later that day.

  Yohanna’s automatic reaction was to hurry over to the phone to answer it, but she stopped just short of lifting the receiver. The caller-ID program was malfunctioning, the screen only registering the words incoming call.

  Frowning, she stood next to the coffee table in the living room and debated ignoring the call. Granted, everyone she knew did have this number as well as her cell number, but for the most part, if they called her, it was almost always on her cell phone, not her landline. That was for sales people, robo calls and her mother.

  Which meant, by process of elimination, that the caller was probably her mother.

  Yohanna was really tempted to let her answering machine pick up. Talking to her mother was usually exhausting.

  But if she ignored this call, there would be others, most likely coming in at regular intervals until she finally picked up and answered. Her mother had absolutely unbelievable tenacity. She would continue calling, possibly well into the evening, at which time her mother would make the fifteen-mile trip and physically come over. Her hand would be splayed across her chest, as she would dramatically say something about her heart not being up to taking this sort of stress and worry.

  Yohanna resigned herself to the fact that she might as well answer her phone and get the inevitable over with.

  Taking a deep, bracing breath, she yanked the receiver from its cradle and placed it against her ear—praying for a wrong number.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s about time you answered. Where were you? Never mind,” Elizabeth Andrzejewski said dismissively. “I’m calling you to tell you that I’ve got your room all ready.”

  Yohanna closed her eyes, gathering together the strength she sensed she was going to need to get through this phone call.

  Until just a minute ago she’d been walking on air, still extremely excited about being hired. She would have been relieved landing any job so quickly, on practically the heels of her recent layoff, but landing a job with Lukkas Spader, well, that was just the whip cream and the cherry on her sundae.

  However, dealing with her mother always seemed to somehow diminish her triumphs and magnify everything that currently wasn’t going well in her life. Her mother had a way of talking to her that made her feel as if she was a child again. A child incapable of doing anything right without her mother’s help.

  Yohanna knew that, deep down, her mother really meant well; she just wished the woman could mean well less often.

  “Why would you do that, Mother?” she finally asked. She hadn’t used her room since she’d left for college and moved out on her own.

  “So you’ll have somewhere to sleep, of course,” her mother said impatiently.

  “I have somewhere to sleep. I sleep in my bedroom, which is in my condo, Mother, remember?” Yohanna asked tactfully.

  She heard her mother sigh deeply before the woman launched into her explanation.

  “Well, now that you’ve lost your job, you’re not going to be able to hang on to that overpriced apartment of your
s. You should sell it now before the bank forecloses on it.”

  Yohanna was stunned. Where was all this coming from? She’d had this so-called “discussion” with her mother several years ago when she’d first bought her condo. Her mother couldn’t understand why “a daughter of mine” would “waste” her money buying a “glorified apartment” when she had a perfectly good room right in her house. She’d thought that argument had finally been laid to rest.

  Obviously she had thought wrong.

  “The bank isn’t going to foreclose on me, Mother,” Yohanna informed her. “My mortgage payments are all up-to-date.”

  “Well, they won’t be now that you’ve been fired,” her mother predicted with a jarring certainty.

  “Laid off, Mother,” Yohanna corrected, trying not to grit her teeth. But there was no one who could make her crazier faster than her mother. “I wasn’t fired, I was laid off.”

  “Whatever.” The woman cavalierly dismissed the correction.

  “There is a difference, Mother,” Yohanna insisted. “One has to do with job performance. The other is a sad fact of modern life. In my case, it was the latter.”

  “Potato, potato,” her mother said in a singsong voice. “The bottom line at the end of the day is that you don’t have a job.”

  The words suddenly hit her for the first time. “How did you find out?” Yohanna asked.

  She hadn’t told anyone about her layoff except for Mrs. Parnell, bless her. Granted, the people that she’d worked with knew, but a lot of them had been laid off, as well. She didn’t see any of them sending her mother a news bulletin. They didn’t even know her mother.

  So how had her mother found out?

  “I’m your mother,” Elizabeth Andrzejewski replied proudly, as if that alone should have been enough of an explanation. “I know everything.”