“Sort of a jungle gym, I guess. Tunnels in the trunk to climb in, and the platforms for play and napping. Part of the fantasy theme that Lindsey, the director, wanted. Personally, it would scare me to death if I was four years old waking from a nap and finding myself in there.”

She made the mistake of turning to look at him. If she’d thought he was disturbing before, in the close confines of the car he was downright dangerous. The low lights from the dash cut angles and planes of shadows on his face, and the sexiness was magnified. She turned back quickly, staring straight ahead. She would not make the mistake she’d made so many times in her life. That way she had of meeting someone, seeing something in him that blinded her, then, somewhere down the road, realizing that he was simply a stranger. Matt Terrel was a stranger.

“With the right backdrop, the tree could be magical,” she murmured.

“And that’s where you come in, turning a nightmare into a…” He paused. “What would you call it?”

“Just what you did, a fantasy, and one that revolves around the children. Or the children around it.” She braced herself, then looked back at Matt. She was thankful that he was turned away from her, looking to his left up the street at the stream of traffic. “The children dancing around it, laughing, enjoying the magic.”

He exhaled, still staring to his left. “Sounds good to me. Lots of kids’ stuff that reeks of make-believe.”

She could see the way his jaw was working, and she had no idea where that cynicism came from, any more than she had any idea why he had seemed so negative about the boy involved in their “incident.” “That sounds cynical to me.”

He turned to her as they waited for an opening in the traffic that filled the street done up in Christmas finery. “Cynical? No, just realistic,” he murmured.

“There’s a big difference between cynical and realistic.”

“Oh?” His eyes flicked to hers, narrowed in the softness of the lights. “And you’re going to enlighten me? Go ahead.”

“Well, a realist looks at that tree and figures it’s a toy, a plaything and isn’t expected to look like a real tree and accepts that. A cynic looks at the tree and figures it would scare any four-year-old and wants to tear it down.”

“I never said I wanted to tear it down,” he said as he managed to finally merge into traffic.

“Would you?”

“That’s not an option. It cost an arm and a leg, so it’s staying.”

“Money’s the bottom line?”

“Isn’t it always?”

“Cynical, cynical, cynical,” she murmured.

A Santa clone walked right in front of the Jeep to weave his way across the street, and Matt braked to a stop. “No, if I was that cynical, I would have taken out Santa Claus,” he muttered.

“No one would take out Santa,” she said. “Not even a world-class cynic.”

Matt laughed then, a sound that both startled and disturbed Brittany. It was soft and rich, wrapping itself around her in the close confines of the black car, an enticing pleasure that she wanted to push away. “I guess I’m not world-class,” he said, starting to drive again, but so slowly that they could have walked faster. “Just cynic enough to look at LynTech realistically and try to make it viable.

“There’s viable and there’s viable. Right now LynTech has more money leaks than a sieve, and it has subsidiaries that aren’t exactly stable.” He eased into the next lane behind a car decorated with flashing Christmas lights around its rear window. “If we can get some cash flow from new investors, we might survive. If not, it’s a lost cause.”

She knew LynTech hadn’t been in top form when it changed hands. It had been a source of real pain for her father. After he’d spent years building the company, it had started to fail and he didn’t have the time or the energy left to pull it back up. And she hadn’t been there to help. Her sense of business would have sunk the company completely. “Can I ask you something?”

“I have no idea how many years it’s going to take to get out of this traffic,” Matt said.

The traffic was incredible, people out shopping or going off to dinner. “Why did you and what’s-his-name, Holden, walk into Lyntech and take it over, if it was on the brink of corporate suicide?”

He finally made it to the corner and turned onto the main street in front of LynTech. “Corporate suicide? What did you do, take a class to learn sound bites for the business world?”

“I’m just asking a question.”

He shrugged as he fingered the leather-covered steering wheel. “We got involved because we figured if someone was at the helm who wasn’t attached to the company, someone who could make solid, unemotional decisions, it could be viable.”

She’d heard enough about Matt and Zane Holden during the change of power. Her father’s reluctance to hand the corporation over to them had been there, but he hadn’t had a choice. He’d had to get out, otherwise there would have been an ugly takeover from some other sources. “Slice and dice” her dad had called the two of them, “but bright.” He’d chosen the ones to take it, and Matt and Zane Holden had been that choice.