One Night Read Free

surprised to learn this. “It seems to me we can respect each other professionally.”
    “It’s just that…”
    “Yes?” he coaxed when she didn’t immediately continue.
    “I might be putting my foot in my mouth by saying this, but it seems to me it’d help if you could learn to relax.”
    “Relax?” He repeated the word as if he needed Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary to decipher the meaning.
    “You know,” she murmured, sorry now that she’d brought up the subject. “Let your hair down once in a while and stop being so damn serious.”
    A whole lot more than the tips of his ears went red this time, and Carrie realized she’d made a major mistake. The color circled both ears and spread like a flash flood down his neck.
    “Perhaps you should look at yourself before throwing stones,” he suggested.
    “I shouldn’t have said anything,” she admitted and then, because she was curious, added, “What about me? Feel free to speak your mind.”
    “Then I will.” Kyle appeared downright eager. “You don’t think before you speak. You say whatever comes to your mind, without censoring the thought. And while we’re on the subject—” He stopped abruptly.
    “Go on,” she urged, with a saccharine smile.
    What he’d said about her talking before thinking was true, but she’d hang before she admitted it.
    The waitress delivered their order, and Carrie dove into her salad as if she needed to kill it before she ate the first bite. She stabbed the lettuce with her fork with so much force that a black olive leaped off the plate and rolled across the tabletop.
    “Don’t eat that,” she snapped, as if there were some threat that he would, without sterilizing it first.
    “You’re as immature and stubborn as a two-year-old,” he continued, “and you haven’t got a sensible thought in your head.” He attacked his sandwich as if he expected to bite into shoe leather.
    “You’re so caught up in your own importance you don’t even realize how arrogant you look to everyone else.” She took another vicious bite of her salad.
    “You wouldn’t want to know how others see you,” he returned between gritted teeth.
    “This will never work,” Carrie announced. Calmly she set her fork aside and reached for her purse. She pulled out several bills, set them on the table, and stood. “I prefer to buy my own lunch, thank you,” she said, and without a backward glance walked away.
     
    It took a full ten minutes for the churning anger to leave Kyle. He wished to hell he knew what it was about Carrie Jamison that annoyed him so much. He’d seen her with other people and admired and envied their easy camaraderie.
    No matter what she said, it was a lot more than hischoice in suits that had set her off that first day. Some of what she’d suggested about him contained a grain of truth. A tiny grain of truth. Mustard-seed-sized truth. All her talk about his being a stuffed shirt rankled. It simply wasn’t true.
    As for him, Kyle had decided weeks earlier what he found so objectionable about her. Carrie reminded him of his own dear sweet mother. Lillian Harris had never left the sixties. He’d read once that anyone who remembered the sixties wasn’t there. His mother was one of the original flower children, protesting the war in Vietnam, preaching the gospel of love and peace. She’d made her living selling love beads and daisies on the sidewalks of Haight-Ashbury until she’d gotten pregnant with him.
    In Carrie he saw the “don’t worry, be happy” philosophy his mother always followed. Kyle loved his mother, although he didn’t exactly view her as a parent. He had mostly raised himself, although Lillian would be shocked to hear him say it. Even now that he was thirty, she called him at least twice a week and faithfully read him his astrology chart while Kyle listened politely and gritted his teeth.
    Lillian meant well, but he’d lived the majority of his life escaping her clutches. He certainly