Windswept by Ann Macela

watch Barrett and felt his mouth twist with mild irritation.
    “What is this woman doing to my staff?” he groused out loud. First Gonzales made bets on the Astros, then Eva cooked brownies for her and winked at him, and now the gardener was bringing her roses--out of Davis’s own garden, no less. She had them wrapped around her little finger and it hadn’t even been a week. He walked back to his desk in a lightly annoyed state. The thought went through his mind again: she was going to be--hell, she had become--a distraction.
    “How was your swim?” he asked at dinner.
    “Wonderful,” she replied. “Dealing with old papers makes me feel so dirty. And I needed the exercise badly after doña Eva’s little snacks.”
    “You speak Spanish very well. Where did you learn it?”
    “Partly school, partly the neighborhood. A couple of close friends are Hispanic and I spent a great deal of time with them growing up. One of my summer jobs in high school was clerking at a hardware store catering to Hispanic as well as Anglo customers. When I took Spanish in school, I had a lot of bad habits to overcome, thanks to my informal education. What about you?”
    “Partly school, partly necessity when you’re trying to make investments in Latin America or with Latinos in this country. It’s good business to know the language and the culture.”
    “Do you like doing what you do?”
    He was surprised at the question. Nobody had ever asked him it before. “Yes, I do. I enjoy the complexities of making a deal, helping a new company get its feet on the ground or an existing one to revitalize itself.”
    Warming to his subject, he told her most of his joys and some of his sorrows about his business activities. He talked about the psychology of deal making, the personalities involved on both sides, the satisfaction he felt when one came off perfectly, the frustration when a new company’s management team could not get itself together. Each of her questions led him to another aspect of the business.
    “What about the money?” she asked at one point. “How does it figure in with your satisfaction?”
    “Money’s just a way to keep score,” Davis said.
    “To some people, it’s everything,” she reminded him.
    The saying brought to his mind a story of a man to whom money was everything. Before Davis knew it, Gonzales was taking away the dessert plates, dinner was over and they were returning to their respective offices. As a test for himself--he would work without letting her distract him--he did not close the connecting door.
    ***
     “What in the hell is this?” he said about an hour later as he looked at the document attached to a piece of e-mail. “Barrett?”
    At first he didn’t think she heard him over her machine-gun typing, but she stopped and answered, “Yes?”
    “You understand this damned word processing program, don’t you? Would you come here a minute?”
    She walked into his office and over to stand behind his chair as he scowled at the screen of his laptop.
    “Murchison sent me this file for review. Look at this mess. How do I read this?” The document was full of lines of text in different colors, some with a line through them and some not. Some lines repeated those in black, some made no sense at all.
    “This has been set up to track changes. It looks like several people passed the document back and forth between them and made revisions as they went. See, here’s one and there’s another. Somebody forgot to turn it off. It’s not hard to fix.” She leaned over his arm as she spoke, pointing out with her index finger the various authors by colors.
    Her nearness had a distinct effect on his lower body. She smelled so good, like sunshine and flowers. If he raised his arm at all, he’d be touching her breast. It was almost a relief when she stood up straight. At least he could start breathing again. “Would you please fix this?” He started to push his chair back and rise so she could get to the