It Happened One Week by Joann Ross Page A

complained when Amanda handed her one of the red shirts. “I had my colors done and I’m a summer.”
    “This week you’re an autumn.” Amanda tossed a blue shirt to Julian Palmer.
    “You certainly chose a graphically unsatisfying design,” he complained.
    “We should have come to you for help,” she said, soothing the art director’s easily ruffled feathers. Personally, she thought the white Team Challenge script just dandy. “But I knew how overworked you’ve been with the Uncle Paul’s potato chip account, and didn’t want to add any more pressure.”
    “The man’s an idiot,” Julian grumbled. “Insisting on those claymation dancing barbecue chips.”
    “It worked for the raisin growers,” Kelli reminded everyone cheerfully. Despite all the rumors that had circulated since the woman’s arrival two weeks ago, no one could accuse her of not being unrelentingly upbeat.
    Amanda had been surprised to discover that beneath that bubbly-cheerleader personality and bimbo clothing, Kelli possessed a steel-trap mind when it came to her work. Which made it even more surprising that she’d stoop to having an affair with a man like Greg.
    Not that there was actually any proof, other than gossip, that they were sleeping together, she reminded herself. However, given Greg’s Lothario tendencies, along with all the time the pair spent together in his office with the door closed, Amanda certainly wouldn’t have bet against the possibility.
    Julian stiffened and shot Kelli a look that suggested her IQ was on a level with Uncle Paul’s. “Potato chips,” he said, “are not raisins.”
    No one in the room dared challenge that proclamation.
    “Wait a damn minute,” Marvin Kenyon complained when Amanda handed him a blue shirt. “I categorically refuse to be on his team.” He jerked a thumb in Julian’s direction.
    Amanda opened her mouth to answer, but Greg beat her to the punch. “You’ll be on whatever team I tell you you’reon,” he barked from the front of the room. “In case I haven’t made myself clear, people, challenge week isn’t about choice. It’s about competition. Teamwork.
    “And effective immediately, you are all going to work together as teams. Or at the end of the week, I’ll start handing out pink slips. Do I make myself clear?”
    He was answered by a low, obviously unhappy mumble.
    Smooth move, Greg, Amanda thought.
    The worst problem with mergers was their effect on the employees. Even more so in advertising, where people were the agency’s only real assets.
    The rash of changeovers had caused dislocation, disaffection, underperformance and just plain fear. Which explained why more and more accounts were leaving the agency with each passing day. It was, after all, difficult to be creative when you thought you were going to be fired.
    There were times, and this was definitely one of them, when Amanda wished she’d stuck to her youthful dreams of creating a family rather than an ad for a new, improved detergent or a toothpaste that supposedly would make the high school football quarterback ask the class wallflower to the prom.
    When the idea of home and children once again brought Dane to the forefront of her mind, she shook off the thought and led the group out of the room, down to the beach where the first challenge activity was scheduled to take place.

5
    “O h, my God,” Laura said as the group reached the beach and found Dane waiting. “I think I’m in love.”
    While Greg had been harassing the troops and Amanda had been handing out T-shirts, Dane had changed into a black neoprene body glove. The suit somehow seemed to reveal more of him than if he were stark-naked.
    His arms, his powerful legs, his chest, looked as if they had been chiseled from marble. No, Amanda decided, marble was too cold. Dane could have been hewn from one of the centuries-old redwoods found in an old-growth forest.
    “That man is, without a doubt, the most drop-deadgorgeous male I’ve ever seen in