That New York Minute Read online

  Failure isn’t an option. Not even close.

  Rachel Frye plays to win. And this time the prize is a partnership at her Manhattan ad agency. She’s up against some stiff competition—including Garrett Calder aka The Shark. Only one of them can win. Everyone else is out of a job.

  Despite the stakes, suddenly Rachel’s fantasizing about being on Garrett’s team. Dying to find out what’s under the brilliant executive’s I-don’t-need-anyone facade. The attraction is entirely mutual—a fact neither of them can ignore. And what started as corporate rivalry is about to get a whole lot more personal!

  “You said you don’t do chicken soup. You didn’t say you don’t do kissing.”

  Rachel’s mouth was no longer quivering...her lips were full and nicely shaped and more tempting than he could believe.

  “I don’t do kissing, either,” she said firmly. “Not with you.”

  Too bad Garrett couldn’t get the idea out of his head.

  “I don’t think you should write off the possibility. I already like your legs.” It wasn’t her legs he was eyeing right now...he found the V of her yellow blouse. “Maybe I’d like the whole—”

  “Don’t you dare say hog,” Rachel warned.

  “Shebang,” he said, grinning.

  Dear Reader,

  Last year, I visited New York City. I’d forgotten how incredible it is, how its streets make you feel so alive. Yet despite being frenetic, it’s easy to get around, and friendly.

  New York is the setting for some great movies—An Affair to Remember, Sleepless in Seattle, Two Weeks’ Notice. The city has also inspired many books…including That New York Minute.

  In That New York Minute, Rachel Frye and Garrett Calder, rivals in a Manhattan advertising agency, are complete opposites—such fun for the writer, helping them find their way to each other! But they have one thing in common: each needs someone who’ll stick with them no matter what.

  My visit to NYC will stay in my heart forever…but not for the obvious reasons. You see, I’d planned to travel there with two of my best friends and fellow authors, Sandra Hyatt and Karina Bliss. We were particularly excited because Sandra was up for an award at the conference we would attend. But a volcanic ash cloud forced the cancellation of my friends’ flight; to our mutual devastation, they never made it to NYC.

  A few weeks later, Sandra died suddenly of a brain bleed. It was a terrible shock to her family and friends, and a reminder to us all to make time for those we cherish (as, indeed, Sandra always did). I will never get to visit the Big Apple with Sandra, but she will always be in my heart.

  You can read more about Sandra, and the Trust established to honor her memory, at www.SandraHyatt.com.

  I hope you enjoy That New York Minute. To share your thoughts, please email [email protected]. To read an After-the-End scene, visit the For Readers page at www.abbygaines.com.

  Sincerely,

  Abby Gaines

  That New York Minute

  Abby Gaines

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Abby Gaines writes contemporary romances for the Harlequin Superromance line, and Regency romances for the Love Inspired Books Love Inspired Historical line. Those might sound like two completely different genres, but Abby likes to say she writes “stories that leave you smiling”—wherever and whenever they are set. Her Harlequin Superromance novel The Groom Came Back won the 2010 Readers Crown Award, and her novella One in a Million won the 2011 Readers Crown. That New York Minute is Abby Gaines’s eighteenth book for Harlequin Books.

  Abby loves cooking, reading, skiing and traveling...though not all at once! She lives with her husband and children—and a labradoodle and a cat—in a house with enough stairs to keep her semi-fit and a sun-filled office whose sea view provides inspiration for her writing. Visit her at www.abbygaines.com.

  Books by Abby Gaines

  HARLEQUIN SUPERROMANCE

  1397—WHOSE LIE IS IT ANYWAY?

  1414—MARRIED BY MISTAKE

  1480—THE DIAPER DIARIES

  1539—THE GROOM CAME BACK

  1585—HER SO-CALLED FIANCE*

  1597—HER SECRET RIVAL*

  1609—HER SURPRISE HERO*

  1712—HER BEST FRIEND’S WEDDING

  *Those Merritt Girls

  HARLEQUIN NASCAR

  BACK ON TRACK

  FULLY ENGAGED

  TEAMING UP

  THE COMEBACK

  Love Inspired Historicals

  THE EARL’S MISTAKEN BRIDE

  Other titles by this author available in ebook format.

  To the memory of

  Sandra Diane Hyde

  1965–2011

  As Sandra Hyatt, a wonderful writer of romance

  As a wife and mother, the heart of her family

  As a friend…irreplaceable

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER ONE

  HE’S BREAKING UP WITH ME.

  Rachel Frye took a swig of champagne. No longer the appropriate drink for the occasion, but she needed something to do with her hands. Something other than clasping them together on the table while she begged Piers not to end it.

  Given they were sitting in one of Manhattan’s coolest bars, a little dignity was called for.

  “Don’t get me wrong, you’re really attractive and smart. I enjoy spending time with you.” Piers leaned forward with the earnestness that Rachel found ninety-nine percent charming and one percent temptation to tell an off-color joke. “But, you know… Oyster?” He pushed the silver plate they were sharing across the highly varnished table for two.

  “Thanks,” Rachel muttered, as her mind scrambled for compelling arguments as to why they shouldn’t break up just yet. She picked up one of the mollusks remaining from the dozen they’d ordered. She’d suggested Crush, a new champagne and oyster bar, for this date because she’d been considering sleeping with Piers tonight.

  Also because it was around the corner from her Madison Avenue office, but still. When a woman suggests to her boyfriend of three months that they start their evening at a place serving well-known aphrodisiacs, the last thing she expects is to get dumped.

  She’d unbuttoned two buttons of her blouse, for goodness’ sake!

  “It’s just, I get the feeling we’re not on the same page,” Piers said.

  Rachel realized too late that slurping an oyster from its shell wasn’t dignified. She swallowed hastily, the salty mass gliding past the lump in her throat.

  Was this about sex? Piers had wanted to sleep with her on the first date, something Rachel would never contemplate. Nor the second. Nor the third. Was it unreasonable to want to believe they might have a future together before she jumped into bed?

  “Actually, I think we have a lot in common,” she said, as she set the empty shell back on its bed of crushed ice. They were both hardworking, capable people. And Piers had the kind of family she�
��d like to have come from: his father was the second-generation owner of an upstate accounting firm, and his mother ruled the local bridge club with an iron, yet friendly, grip.

  “You glanced at your watch when I walked in tonight,” he said. It sounded like an accusation.

  “I…was checking the time,” she said uncertainly. She dabbed at a drop of oyster juice on her chin with her napkin.

  “Rachel, I was two minutes late. It’s not a crime.”

  “I never said it was. I never even thought it. That’s why you’re dumping me? Because I looked at my watch?” Ugh, she needed to rein in that shrillness.

  She turned away from Piers’s concerned gaze to take a deep breath.

  And encountered another gaze, this one altogether unsympathetic.

  Garrett Calder, her fellow creative director at Key Bowen Crane, New York’s largest independent advertising agency, was watching her from his black leather bar stool.

  Rachel had noticed him at the bar when she walked in, noticed the bottle of Dom Pérignon champagne—which would set him back at least two hundred bucks in a place like this—in front of him. She’d assumed he was waiting for someone, but he was still alone and she realized there was only one glass on the bar.

  She knew the guy was a loner—small wonder, with that scowl on his face—but drinking a bottle of champagne by himself?

  “—and it feels like you’re clinging,” Piers said, finishing a sentence she’d failed to hear.

  She jerked back to face him. “I don’t cling!” She was loyal and committed, sure. But those were good things. “I admit, punctuality is important to me, but I never meant to make you feel, uh, pressured.”

  What was wrong with him, that a glance at her watch could terrify him into thinking she wanted a pledge of undying love?

  Which she didn’t. Not yet. She just wanted to be certain the relationship would last more than five minutes.

  “We shouldn’t rush to break up at the first obstacle,” she said, “when there’s every chance we can get past it.”

  Piers was an actuary, a man who calculated risk to the nth degree, and she liked the way his analytical approach spilled over into his personality. There was a lot she liked about him, frankly. His low-key sense of humor, his easy conversation. She was attracted to him physically, and they’d done some serious making out to prove it.

  Though now, when she eyed his receding hairline, she saw it for what it was. Imminent baldness, not a sign of dependability.

  Nothing wrong with bald. Hair was unarguably a nice-to-have, but it was nowhere near the top of the list.

  “When I’m late,” Piers said, “I get the feeling that you worry I’m not going to show up. When we’re together, I feel like you’re always watching me, to make sure I’m still interested. That’s a lot of pressure, Rachel.”

  She forced a laugh. “Piers, I’m a businesswoman with a high-level job and an excellent salary.” She felt as if she was interviewing for the role of Steady, Nonclinging Girlfriend. “I hardly think I’m that insecure.”

  She didn’t assume a guy was a no-show after five minutes. It was more that she started to wonder just how reliable he was. She knew it was illogical, so she tried not to let Piers’s occasional tardiness color her opinion of him.

  She reached across the table for his hand. A nice hand. Neatly squared fingernails. Pale, but that was okay. “I don’t think we should be too quick to end a good thing. How about,” she continued, lowering her voice to what she hoped was husky, “we go back to my place and…work this out.”

  Wariness flickered in his eyes. Then his gaze dropped to those two buttons she’d undone—about time—and the hint of black bra she knew he’d see there.

  Rachel wriggled her shoulders just a little.

  He let out a sigh. “You are a very special woman, Rachel,” he admitted.

  That was more like it! He’d simply had cold feet. Rachel pushed her chair back. It scraped loudly on the wooden floorboards. “Let’s go,” she said.

  Piers stood. “Just so you know, I have an early start tomorrow. I won’t be able to stay the night.”

  She paused as she reached for the jacket she’d slung over the back of her chair. “That’s okay, I have a meeting first thing, too.” The most important meeting of her life, in fact. But was now the time to be discussing work? “We can do dinner tomorrow, instead of breakfast.”

  If her meeting went the way she anticipated, they’d be celebrating her inevitable promotion come dinnertime. She grinned at the thought, and her worries about her love life eased.

  Piers helped her into her jacket, then pulled some bills from his wallet. When he frowned, Rachel knew he was calculating the seventeen-and-a-half percent tip he liked to leave.

  Shouldn’t he be tossing money onto the table willy-nilly, in his haste to get out of here and into her bed?

  Rachel turned away. And once again met Garrett Calder’s gaze. His scowl had gone. He raised his glass to her in a toast that was intended to be ironic, if the tiny, mocking curve to his lips was anything to go by.

  What was that about? She didn’t know Garrett well—no one did—but he always managed to unsettle her, even when she was at her most together. Not because of the stupid nickname they gave him in the office: The Shark. That little piece of hyperbole didn’t bother her at all. What disturbed her was the blend of intelligence and aloofness in his eyes, the suggestion that he knew everything and he didn’t give a damn.

  Now he looked as if he knew exactly what had just transpired between her and Piers. Knew they were headed to her bed.

  She willed the sudden heat in her cheeks to subside. There was no way Garrett could have overheard their conversation. None.

  At last, Piers wedged some neatly folded bills beneath the pepper grinder, and they could leave. The bar’s layout and teeming Thursday night crowd meant they had to walk past Garrett. As she drew level with him, she gave him a polite nod.

  “Let it go, Rachel,” he said.

  She stopped, unsure if she’d heard him correctly over the hubbub of reveling office workers. “Excuse me?”

  Piers bumped into her, jolting her toward Garrett. Who leaned back against the bar, as if he didn’t want her in his space.

  “Begging never works,” he said, his enunciation careful and unfortunately crystal clear to both her and, she was certain, Piers.

  Her heart lurched in her chest. Mortification…and fear.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “You’re drunk.”

  An exaggeration, maybe, but he sure wasn’t sober. The bottle next to him was empty.

  “Who is this guy?” Piers asked.

  “No one. A colleague.” She tugged the lapels of her jacket together, because Garrett’s eyes were definitely straying in that direction. Maybe, when she got her promotion, she could fire him.

  The delightful fantasy didn’t last more than a moment. Garrett was too good at his job. Which was how he got away with acting like a jerk.

  The bartender removed Garrett’s empty Dom Pérignon bottle and began peeling the foil from around the cork of a second bottle.

  “Oh, look, Garrett, your date’s arrived,” Rachel said. “Let’s go, honey.”

  Piers looked startled at the endearment, but he took her elbow.

  “Just so you know,” Garrett said, “offering a guy sex so he won’t break up with you smacks of desperation.”

  The bartender paused in his loosening of the wire cage around the champagne cork and looked Rachel up and down. Was it her imagination, or did he register the black bra and give her a knowing look? Piers let go of her.

  “Whatever’s driving you to drink alone, Garrett—” her voice shook “—keep it to yourself.” That was the way he usually operated. Could he have picked a worse time to attempt something resembling a conversation?

  “Sleep with him, by all means,” Garrett said, with a generous, alcohol-fueled sweep of his arm toward Piers. “Though, personally, I think you cou
ld get a guy with more hair.”

  Piers’s hand went protectively to his head.

  “But whatever you do, do it on your terms,” Garrett said. “Not his.”

  “Uh, Rachel, I’m going to take a rain check,” Piers said. “My early meeting…” He kissed her cheek—were his lips always that dry?—and was gone.

  “Wait!” she called.

  Too late.

  The champagne cork popped; the barman poured the first gush of frothing liquid into Garrett’s glass.

  Garrett picked up the glass and raised it, once again, to Rachel. “You’ll thank me in the morning.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  GRATITUDE WAS NOT RACHEL’S primary sentiment as she waited for the elevator in the Key Bowen Crane building lobby at seven o’clock the next morning.

  Exhaustion and frustration, on the other hand, were flourishing.

  She’d lost a perfectly good boyfriend—okay, maybe not perfect, but who was?—thanks to Garrett. After the way Piers had almost sprinted out of the bar, she didn’t believe for a moment that he was only “taking a rain check.” When she’d phoned him later, he hadn’t picked up.

  She and Piers could have made it work, dammit, if not for Garrett’s stupid accusation that she was using sex to stop Piers from dumping her.

  Kind of hard to get past that. Unfortunately, it had taken Rachel a few hours of tossing and turning to conclude the relationship was beyond salvage.

  As she yawned, a ding signaled the arrival of an elevator. It would take at least another twenty seconds before the doors opened. This building was one of the earliest Manhattan skyscrapers and it still had the original elevator cars. Gorgeous…so long as you weren’t in a hurry.

  The elevator doors wheezed open, and Rachel stepped into the wood-paneled interior. She pressed for the fifty-sixth floor, hit the door-close button and stepped back to enjoy the rare experience of having the space to herself.

  Only to have a laptop bag wedged unceremoniously between the almost-closed doors, forcing them to rumble open again.

  To her horror, Garrett Calder followed the bag into the elevator.

  “You!” she blurted.

  A grunt and a jerk of Garrett’s chin acknowledged her as he set his laptop on the floor. He jabbed the button to close the doors.