Her Unexpected Admirer Page 0,4

time to tell him about all of the art classes she’d taken in college. He’d pressured her to take only accounting classes and she’d done her best. But her real passion was art. Her heart cried out for a paintbrush and canvas. It didn’t matter what emotion she was feeling, art soothed her, let her express herself in ways that lifted her up, cleared her mind and made her feel…worthy.

She hated accounting. She was here only because her father had demanded that she major in accounting. After graduation, when she’d wanted to take a couple of weeks off and explore Europe with her friends, he’d scoffed at the idea, demanding that she start working in his firm immediately.

So here she was, two years later, a misfit accountant who spent her days dredging through numbers and her nights working out her frustration on a canvas. She would never be a good accountant, she knew. Nor did she ever want to. It would be nice to impress her father once in a while, but at the rate she was going, that wasn’t going to happen.

She thought about the check she’d just received from that art studio in New York. It was huge! Much larger than she’d expected. While her father continued to harangue her about her incompetence, she focused her mind on that check, on the canvas she had waiting for her in her tiny apartment.

“Are you even listening to me?” her father yelled, his eyes reading her like a book. “Or are you off in dreamland once more? You never could focus, could you? You’re always off, dreaming about some ridiculous fantasy in your mind.” He grunted his disapproval. “If you’re ever going to become a professional, you’d better get your head out of the clouds! You can’t be successful by dreaming! And you can’t be successful by missing things like this!” He took a deep breath, obviously trying to calm himself down. “You’ll do all of this again, including this report. Be here early tomorrow morning. I’ll go through the information tonight and will have the correct answers. If yours don’t match mine by tomorrow, then you’ll do it again. You’ll do it over and over again until you get the correct answers. Got it?” he demanded.

Kate nodded her head, feeling the lead weight of her father’s disapproval come down hard on her slender shoulders. She tried hard to fight it, knowing that he was wrong. But there was just something inside of her that craved her father’s approval. All her life, she’d been trying to do what he wanted but she felt like a salmon fighting her way upstream. It wasn’t working and she was now floundering on the rocks.

He looked up at her. “Well? What are you waiting for? Get out of my office. I have a lot of work to do.”

Kate spun around, almost tripping over herself in an effort to get away from him. Shame washed over her in waves and she wanted badly to just curl up in a ball, hide herself away. The whole office had probably heard him yelling at her, knew that she’d missed something. Again. She was humiliated in front of her peers, but knew that they really weren't her peers. They were all ‘real’ accountants. They all loved numbers, loved trying to figure out the intricacies of spreadsheets and taxes. Number crunching was their life! It was their passion.

She had no passion for numbers. It seemed that she had no passion for anything that didn’t come from a paintbrush. Was she so odd that she couldn’t even add and subtract correctly? Was she truly so stupid as to have missed an entire spreadsheet of data?

Staring at her computer screen, she realized that there was no way she could work tonight. Glancing at her clock, she saw that it was already after seven o’clock. She’d come in late this morning, only arriving around eight o’clock because she’d stayed up until around three in the morning, working on her latest canvas.

Her mind cringed at the idea of going through numbers any longer today. She just couldn’t do it. Peeking out the doorway of her tiny office, she saw only a few lights still on, indicating a couple of other accountants with the firm were still working hard.

Kate bit her lip, trying to decide what to do. She couldn’t stay here. She had to get out of this office, had to escape the claustrophobic confines of these four walls. She also knew that