And Then He Kissed Her by Laura Lee Guhrke Page A

with compliments is useless. You dole out flattery asif you are handing out candy to children. It’s all meant to charm, or to soothe, or to get what you want, or to help you wriggle out of unpleasant situations. Why others fall prey to such tactics, particularly women, is beyond my comprehension, but I am not such a fool as that.”
    Red hair, and a temper, too , he thought, amazed. He hadn’t known she possessed either. “I have never thought you a fool.”
    “‘You’re a treasure, Miss Dove,’” she quoted him with scorn. “‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Miss Dove.’ Do you really think such innocuous flattery ever made me feel valued or important? It didn’t,” she said, answering her own question before he could do so. “But now you want me to come back, so you’re using flattery as a tactic, as if a compliment about my hair ought to impress me enough for that!”
    Impressing her hadn’t even occurred to him. It was true that in his private life he happened to have a certain susceptibility to women with black tresses, but that didn’t make his comment about Miss Dove’s hair insincere. It nettled him that she thought so.
    Harry opened his mouth to set her straight, but she didn’t give him the chance. She sucked in a deep breath and went on. “Besides, you’ve lied to me before, so why should I believe anything you have to say?”
    He stiffened at those words. He was not a liar, and no one had ever dared accuse him of being one. “I do not lie, Miss Dove. Despite your assessment of me and my motives, I do not give falsecompliments, only ones I genuinely believe. I concede to being manipulative—I doubt I could succeed in business if I were not so—but I do not lie.”
    “Equivocate, then. Is that a better way of putting it? You didn’t even know Mrs. Bartleby was my pen name, and it’s right on the title page of every manuscript I’ve ever given you!”
    “Is that what this is all about?” Now he knew the identity of Mrs. Bartleby, but at the moment, having his curiosity satisfied on that point was hardly gratifying. “Good God, I don’t read your title pages. Why should I? When you hand me a manuscript, I know perfectly well who wrote it.”
    “Title pages aside, if you had actually read my work, you would still have known who Mrs. Bartleby is. You led me to believe you have read my manuscripts, but you have not!”
    This was becoming ridiculous. “I told you, I have read enough of your work to form an opinion. That’s all any publisher does. Unless it sparks his interest, he doesn’t read it all. If we read everything we receive all the way through, we should never get any work done. And having been employed by a publisher five years now, opening all the unsolicited writing I and my editors receive, you ought to know that.”
    “What I know is that you will never publish any of my writing because you cannot look at it objectively. You are too closed-minded.”
    “I am not closed-minded!”
    “I have finally come to accept that flaw of your character,” she continued with blithe disregardfor his denial, “and I have taken my writing elsewhere, to someone who respects my work. Someone who respects me.”
    “Respect?” The implication that he did not have respect for her was an insult to his character that made Harry truly angry. “If you think Barringer has a shred of respect for you or your writing, you are deceiving yourself. To be blunt, you’re not of his class, and Barringer is one of those pompous asses that abound in this world who care about distinctions of that sort. He’s a snob and a hypocrite.”
    “He had some equally flattering things to say about you.”
    “I’ll wager he did.”
    “Things which my own observations of you over the years only served to confirm.”
    “What observations? You claim a full understanding of my nature, but if that were true, there would be nothing that blatherskite Barringer could say about me with which you would