Page 26 of Family Affair

“Let me know if you need anything. We can’t have anything happen to Chap!”

“Heaven forbid,” Coco said dryly.

They disconnected and Coco got back into the office building from the small patio where she and other Heated Designs employees sometimes took private calls. The dry conditioned air felt bitingly cold on her bare arms, a stark contrast to the sweltering moist heat outside.

Joining a small group of people waiting for the elevator, she gave everyone a small perfunctory smile. It didn’t help. Her co-workers’ expressions conveyed either indifference or disapproval. No one smiled back. This particular office culture sucked, and even after a year of working at Heated Designs, Coco was treated like an outsider.

Making an effort not reflect too deeply on Heated Designs and its small-town mentality, Coco walked down a short corridor to the manager’s suite. Taking a seat behind her desk in front of Aaron’s office, she stared at the dark computer screen, lost in thought.

She’d gotten a shot at one of the most prestigious galleries of Atlanta. Artists spent their entire professional lives without setting foot in a place like this except as a gawking visitor. Only great artists gained entrance to the sacred show halls of La Vedova. Only the most talented ones. The ones with impeccable technique and that elusive quality described as magnetism.

Was Frank Sheffield that good?

How peculiar that she thought of him now. But truth be told, she wouldn’t have minded asking him for advice.

Lost to a fantasy, Coco tore off a sheet from her notepad and grabbed a pencil. Working quickly, she outlined a face. Dark eyes. Dense, slightly winged eyebrows. High forehead. Wide mouth.

A man’s face, no question. She sketched hair falling across his brow in bold strokes.

Pausing, she surveyed her unfinished work. He looked like Dan. But he wasn’t Dan.

She applied the pencil to paper again. More shading around the eyes. Brackets on both sides of the cynical mouth. She went for a three-quarter view, placing focus on the strong jawline and the unyielding shape of his chin.

The result startled her when Cade Sheffield looked at her from the paper in raw, intimate detail. Every sinew of his strong neck stood out, every individual shadow on his cheek with its fine grain of emerging stubble. Had she really paid that much attention to Cade’s face in the mere minutes they spent together at the rose garden?

Her thoughts circled back to their encounter. Cade had left her strangely disconcerted. Physically, he strongly favored his father Rick, a tall dark-haired male, dressed in the button-down shirt with rolled up sleeves that fit well his trim form.

He seemed nice and capable in a quiet, unobtrusive way, so uncharacteristic for someone with a Sheffield gene. If he had some zest to him, Coco hadn’t been able to notice just then.

And the man in her drawing wasn’t Cade, even though it appeared that she based him on Cade. The feel of this man’s personality, the burn of it, scalded her. She recreated it perfectly, even though his actual looks were a product of her imagination.

Oddly content, she smiled, feeling his intense aura surrounding her. Again, curiosity gripped her and she wanted to know if she got it right, if this was what Frank would have looked like now. She knew he had died a month shy of his twenty-fourth birthday, and she wondered how recent that newspaper obituary picture was. Had it been taken within the last year of his life? Within the last few weeks? He had such a masculine face. But then again, all the Sheffield brothers looked pretty manly.

“Anything happened while I was tied up?” Aaron strode through the door, and it took all the power of will Coco possessed not to jump up in her chair from the surprise he’d given her. Inconspicuously, she slid her drawing under the keyboard.

“No, sir, nothing terribly important.” She followed him with her eyes. “Our office supplies are here. And Cory from Purchasing called. He wants to know if it’s okay if he negotiated the bulk printout bid at a slightly higher price. Would you like me to call him back with a yes?”

“How much are we talking about?”

“He said five percent.” Coco rose and trailed him to his office. “It makes sense. Even ten percent would be on the low end of the competitive procurement. There simply aren’t many print shops that can do the job consistently well. We shouldn’t lose this contract.”

Aaron stopped when he reached his desk and gave her a condescending look. “And how do you know the average pricing of print shop contracts?” he asked snidely.

Taken aback, Coco fell back a step. “I googled it. A lot of service contracts are made public.”

He harrumphed before turning his back to her. “Prepare me a summary report on what you’ve found,” he threw at her over his shoulder. “I’ll look at the numbers and make my decision.”

“Of course,” glad for an excuse to put a wall between them, Coco returned to her chair.

Though it was true that she didn’t mind her new simpler work, Coco minded her new boss. A lot. And to think that she had been glad to come work for him because he had seemed so friendly at her interview. She quickly learned that his youthful appearance, augmented by the cowlick and Harry Potter glasses, housed the personality of Ebenezer Scroogebeforehe had gotten visited by the spirits of Christmas.

She logged into her computer and went to compile the data into a basic spreadsheet - too much info overwhelmed Aaron - but her concentration wavered.

Rosa’s voicemail message kept replaying itself in her head, and with it, her own decision to proceed down the path of cooperation. Was it a good decision, one that would launch her career? Or was she making a mistake?

She pushed the keyboard aside, inadvertently revealing her drawing.

Frank’s face stared back at her in its perfect pencil detail. The image overlaid the lines on the paper, and the semi-transparent aspect added a wistful ghostly quality to his angular bold features.