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  “Matt,” she said, sounding harassed, “I know this is your night, but I have a meeting at five o’clock, and I’m swamped with work.”

  “At the risk of sounding inflexible,” he said in a cool, implacable voice, “a deal’s a deal.”

  “I know,” she replied with an exasperated sigh, “but besides having to be here late, I also have to bring some work home with me, and come in again tomorrow morning. I’m really not up to a big night out or a big confrontation with you either,” she added with a trace of wry humor.

  In a tone that conveyed his unwillingness to cooperate, he said, “What are you suggesting?”

  “I was hoping you’d be willing to meet me here, and we could have an early dinner, somewhere casual and close by.”

  Matt’s annoyance evaporated, but on the off chance she was trying to taper him off by setting a precedent for quick public dates, he added in a polite but firm voice, “That’s fine. I have a briefcase full of my own work. I’ll bring it along and after dinner we can spend a quiet, productive evening at—your place or mine?”

  She hesitated. “Will you promise we’ll work? I mean, I don’t want to have to . . . to have to . . .”

  His lips twitched with a smile as her voice trailed off. Obviously she did have pressing work, and equally obviously she was worried that he would try to maneuver her into bed. “We’ll work,” he promised.

  Her relief came out in a laughing sigh. “Okay. Why don’t you meet me here about six o’clock? There’s a good restaurant just across the street. We can go to my apartment afterward.”

  “Good enough,” he said, completely willing to adapt his schedule to hers as long as she didn’t try to avoid him. “Are the reporters leaving you alone?”

  “I’ve had a few calls, but we gave them such a show yesterday, I think it’s all going to die a natural death now. I talked to Parker last night and again this morning, and he’s being left alone too.”

  Matt didn’t give a damn if reporters devoured Parker alive, and he wasn’t thrilled by the discovery that she’d talked to him twice since the press conference when she’d not bothered to call Matt until then. Conversely, he was vastly relieved that she apparently hadn’t been with him last night, so he said that was good news, and that he’d come up to her office around six o’clock.

  After shouldering his way through the crowds of Christmas shoppers on the main floor at six o’clock, the relative silence on Meredith’s floor when Matt stepped off the elevator was a welcome relief. Off to his right, two secretaries were working late, but the receptionist and all the others had already left. At the opposite end of the carpeted corridor, Meredith’s office door was open and he could see a group of men and one woman seated in there. Her secretary’s desk was cleared, her computer covered for the night, so rather than sitting down in the reception area, Matt took off his coat and perched his hip on the secretary’s desk, pleased with this unexpected opportunity to see how Meredith worked and what sorts of things occupied her days. Everything about her intrigued him. It always had.

  Unaware of Matt’s presence outside her office, Meredith looked at the invoice Gordon Mitchell, the general merchandise manager in charge of women’s dresses and accessories, had just handed her. “You bought three hundred dollars’ worth of gold metal buttons?” she said with a puzzled smile. “Why are you showing me this? It’s certainly within your budget.”

  “Because,” he replied blandly, “those gold buttons are the reason for that sales increase in women’s dresses and ready to wear that you’ve been watching happen all week. I thought you’d like to know.”

  “You bought them and had them sewn on locally, is that it?”

  “That’s it,” he said, stretching out his legs and looking pleased. “If a dress or a suit has gold metal buttons on it, they walk out of here. It’s a craze.”

  Meredith gazed at him levelly, avoiding looking at Theresa Bishop, the vice president of creative merchandising, whose job it was to predict fashion trends far in advance. “I can’t completely share your satisfaction,” she told him quietly. “Theresa advised us long ago, after she returned from a trip to New York, that one of the continuing fashion trends was going to be clothing decorated with gold metal buttons. You ignored her. The fact that you belatedly bought the buttons and had them sewn on now can’t possibly compensate for the sales we lost before and while you were doing it. What else do you have to report?”

  “Very little,” he snapped.

  Ignoring his attitude, Meredith reached out and pressed a button on the computer screen that showed sales in the past four hours in all the departments under his supervision there and in the branch stores across the country. “Your accessory sales are fifty-four percent higher than over this same day last year. You’re doing something right there.”

  “Thank you, Madam President,” he said snidely.

  “I seem to recall that you hired a new manager for accessories, and he brought in a new buyer. Is that right?”

  “Perfectly correct, as always!”

  “What’s happening with Donna Karan’s DKNY line you bought so much of?” she continued, impervious to his tone.

  “It’s doing fantastic, exactly as I thought it would.”

  “Good. What do you intend to do with all those moderate skirts and blouses you bought?”

  “I’m going to keystone them and get them out of here.”

  “All right,” she said reluctantly, “but mark them all Special Purchase and keep our labels out of them. I mean that. I was on the third floor today and I saw some blouses with Bancroft labels in them and a price tag of eighty-five dollars. They weren’t worth forty-five dollars.”

  “They are when they have a Bancroft label in them!” he shot back. “That label is worth something to customers. I shouldn’t have to remind you of that.”

  “It won’t be if we start sticking it on junk. Get those blouses off that floor and onto clearance racks tomorrow. I mean that, and cut the labels out of them. You know which ones I mean. What about the bucket goods you were so high on?”

  “I bought them. I’ve seen the merchandise—mostly costume jewelry, some of it very nice.”

  Ignoring his sulky, clipped reply, Meredith said levely, “Just keep the bucket goods on the right counters. I don’t want to see that stuff mixed in with expensive costume jewelry.”

  “I said,” he bit out, “it’s nice stuff.”

  Meredith leaned back in her chair, studying him in lengthening silence, while the other vice presidents looked on. “Gordon, why are you and I suddenly at odds over the kind of merchandise that Bancroft’s will and will not sell? You used to be adamant about maintaining only high-quality merchandise. All of a sudden you’re making buying decisions that are better suited to a low-end department store chain than to us.”

  When he didn’t deign to reply, Meredith abruptly leaned forward in her chair, dropped the subject, dismissed him as if he weren’t still there, and turned her attention to Paul Norman, the general merchandising manager in charge of home products, and the only one she hadn’t yet addressed. “As usual, your departments are all looking good, Paul,” she said, smiling at him. “Appliances and furniture sales are up twenty-six percent over this week last year.”

  “Twenty-seven,” he corrected her with a grin. “The computers adjusted from twenty-six to twenty-seven just before I walked in.”

  “Nice work,” she said sincerely, then she chuckled, recalling the sales flyers they’d been able to put in the newspapers, offering stereo components for extraordinarily low prices. “Electronic items are running out of our stores like they had legs. Are you trying to put Highland Superstores out of business?”

  “I would love to.”

  “So would I,” she admitted, then she sobered and looked at the entire group assembled around the desk. “We’re looking good nationwide—everywhere but the New Orleans store. We lost sales the day of the bomb scare, and they stayed down for the next four days for the same reason.” She