Anything You Can Do (22 page)

The afternoon and evening had been wonderful, and Bailey really didn't want it to end. However, the way Gordon and
Paula looked as they walked hand in hand, gazing at each other with silly grins on their faces, told her they would probably just as soon have that drink alone.

"It's been a long day," she said.

"Yes, it has. I'm beat," Austin added.

Though he was only agreeing with her, Bailey didn't want him to want the day to end. She cast a surrept
itious glance at him, but could tell nothing from his expression.

"Would you mind dropping us by Bailey's place so I can get my car?" Austin asked.

"No problem," Gordon replied.

Well, Bailey thought, examining the data, Austin had said,
dropping us
, but then he'd referred to getting his car. The evidence concerning the end of the evening was inconclusive.

Gordon drove to her condo and let them out. Austin stood beside her in the parking lot and waved as Gordon and
Paula drove away.

"We really had them going," he said, taking her hand as they strolled down the sidewalk and up the stairs to her door.

"I think Paula gave serious consideration to the idea we really were talking to the horses!" Bailey agreed, unlocking the door then reaching down to catch Samantha as she dashed out.

"They'd never believe the truth if we told them." They looked at each other and burst into laughter.

As the laughter faded and neither of them moved, Bailey wanted to ask what
the truth
really was. Instead she stepped inside the doorway.

"I appreciate your cooperation tonight," she said
, and hoped he'd deny that was
the truth
of which he'd spoken, that cooperation wasn't the only thing that had happened that evening.

He did. Following her inside, he closed the door behind them, took Samantha from her, and set the little dog on the floor. Wrapping his arms around her, he gently drew her to him, and somehow her own arms naturally made their way about his neck.

He smiled and shook his head in amazement. She understood. That was the way she felt.

His lips as they touched hers were familiar and strange. They'd kissed before, but never so easily
, never deliberately. The burst of flame she always felt when Austin touched her was still there, but a warm intimacy now surrounded it.

He moved back from her a few inches and gazed at her through slitted, smoky eyes. A slow smile curved his lips.

"You're so—" he began, then the smile widened, and he traced one finger down her cheek. "You're so—Bailey." Bending toward her, he claimed her lips again, moving, caressing, then sliding away, trailing down her throat. With a soft groan, he pressed her to him tightly.

The flames already igniting every inch of her body, especially those inches Austin was touching, blazed higher. She sighed, reveling in the exquisite feelings. Maybe they could stay like this forever. At least until the morning when she'd have to feed Samantha.

But his warm mouth was moving onward, downward, eliciting new, wonderful sensations, igniting fires that demanded ever more fuel. He slipped the top button of her blouse and pushed aside the fabric, and she wasn't sure if the heat arose from his kisses or directly from her breast. Boldly, brazenly, she tangled her fingers in his thick hair, urged him on, though he didn't seem to need any urging.

As he fumbled with the other buttons of her blouse, his gaze returned to hers. In his eyes she saw the same overpowering desire she'd seen the night on Gordon's lawn, but now there was something else. Amid the leaping blue flames a softness smoldered, demanding and offering.

Then her blouse slid off her shoulders and he pressed her closer, his lips returning to hers with that same odd mixture of passion and tenderness. A moan started in her midsection and rose from her throat into his mouth as she opened to him, tasted wine and peppermint candy, felt his moist warmth, the smoothness of his mouth, and the roughness of his tongue.

Frantically she unbuttoned his shirt, pressed her bare breasts against the coarse hairs and hard muscles of his chest, and it was his turn to moan. His fingers trembled as he fumbled with the clasp of her jeans, and that trembling increased her passion, overwhelmed any inh
ibitions she might have had left. Their desires moved together as surely as their psyches had been together all evening.

His mouth again left hers, moved down to her breast, seeki
ng and finding first one turgid peak, then the other. She leaned against the door for support, her legs and knees suddenly weak.

As if sharing the same mind, they sank to the floor together, and he slid her jeans down her hips, then tossed them aside with his own. For a moment she leaned
away from him to look, to capture his naked body in her memory, to see and incorporate every muscle, every hair, every inch of him.

With one hand he traced a gentle line down her cheek and neck, over her breast and stomach, down the valley of her waist and over the curve of her hips. She looked at him, and again it seemed her thoughts were joined with his. In his eyes she saw a reflection of the need she felt to enfold and encompass him.

Then his flesh was against hers, joining with her, and the need was met. They moved in perfect unison instinctively, and she was almost unable to endure the exquisite agony, wanting culmination but wanting it to continue forever, to be always united like this.

As their movements quickened and their passions surged to a peak, she sought his gaze, found him looking at her, and they spiraled together, bodies and souls merging in a crashing crescendo.

For a long time they remained motionless, silent, still joined. Bailey couldn't think of anything to say and felt no need to say anything. Their bodies had said it all. She was content to drift in the afterglow.

Abruptly a cold, wet nose on her cheek interrupted her mellow mood, and Bailey laughed.

Austin jerked upward, apparently as startled by her laughter as she had been by the little dog's intrusion.

"Samantha," he said when he saw the problem, "your timing is terrible."

"No," Bailey disagreed, "it could have been worse."

He grinned. "It could have been." He stood, pulling her with him and against him. "You know, she's a really short dog, much shorter than the average bed. Maybe if we found yours, we could hide up there."

His hands cupped her derriere, held her against him.

"We could try that," she murmured, and decided not to tell him Samantha regularly jumped onto h
er bed.

*~*~*

Bailey flipped the quarter for the twentieth time, recording the results on a yellow legal pad. Ten heads, ten tails. This method of eleventh-hour decision making about the merger wasn't working out any better than the more logical ones she'd tried.

The situation was bad enough of itself, but she was having a difficult time concentrating th
at morning. Austin hadn't left Sunday until shortly after noon. They'd made love most of the night, neither willing to admit to being tired, then gone out to brunch. As soon as she was alone, Bailey had fallen into an exhausted sleep, waking to the morning and the miserable merger decision.

As she flipped
the coin for the twenty-first time, the time she promised herself would be the final tie breaker, Stafford Morris charged in, descended into one of her chairs, and propped his feet on her desk.

"Good morning," she snapped. "Come in. Have a seat. Put your feet up. Make yourself comfortable."

He sipped coffee from a large, thick mug, then pulled a cigar from his shirt pocket and started to unwrap it.

"You light that in here, and I'll put it out in the exact center of your head," she warned.

"Better have some more coffee," he advised. "You need it." But he returned the cigar to his pocket. "Tough decision? I thought you'd really latch onto the idea of being in control of everyone's fate."

"Just keep it up, and I'll vote against you." Bailey snatched up her mug and drained it even though the coffee was stone-cold and pretty awful.

"So you're planning to vote with me. I thought as much. You like the status quo." He looked so smug, she thought of retrieving the cigar, lighting it, and carrying out her threat.

"Which doesn't mean I have the right to vote to keep it. What about other people's rights? What if this is the wrong decision? I don't want to control the fate of others."

Stafford lowered his feet to the floor with a thud and stood up, grinning. "Bailey, you take things too seriously. Vote the way you want to and make it a tie vote. I’ll break the tie."

"Not if I vote in favor, you won't," she retorted, springing from her chair and leaning toward him.

"Okay." He shrugged. "In that case, Hollis'll cast the deciding vote." Unwrapping his cigar, he left her office.

Typical irrational lawyer logic, Bailey thought, flopping back into her chair. Something you'd use to sway a jury.

She tossed the coin into the air again, slapping her hand on it as it landed, but not looking to see which side was up. Stafford's logic did make a kind of sense. At least, if you wanted to buy into it, it did. And boy, did she ever want to buy into it.

She rose, smoothed her navy skirt, and straightened her shoulders. He was right about some things, though. She did like the status quo, the small size of the firm, the familiar clients, even the incomprehensible way Stafford Morris chose to run things. And she could only cast her vote the way she felt was right, even if part of that "rightness" came from personal things like concern for Gordon's place in a big firm.

Having made her decision, she started confidently down the hall toward the conference room but was struck midway by a strange feeling she couldn't readily identify. After a few confused moments, she admitted it was concern for Austin. This was someone's career she was voting on, not a game or a contest, and winning didn't feel like winning anymore.

With an odd rush of elation, she hurried on
to the meeting. If she was concerned about Austin, that meant he wasn't influencing her vote. She wouldn't be voting against him, only against the merger. Perversely, that made it okay.

*~*~*

True to his word, Stafford withheld his ballot until last. However, to Bailey's surprise, the final tally showed only two votes in favor and five against.

"Feel better?" Stafford boomed as he caught up with her striding down the hall after the meeting.

"Maybe, maybe not," Bailey evaded. "If I were one of the two dissenting votes, probably not." 

"You weren't," he declared confidently.

"You sound awfully sure of yourself." She turned into her office door.

He laughed and waved his cigar as he strode away from her down the hall.

"Wait," she called, hurrying after him. "Did you know all along that someone had changed his vote?"

"Maybe, maybe not," he mocked her. "If someone did change his vote, it might be because somebody else talked some sense into him." 

She followed him into his office and closed the door.

"But you let me keep on worrying!"

Stafford settled in his chair behind his desk and pulled some papers in front of him. "You voted for what you wanted. That's all that mattered. All that ever mattered. Now get out of my office. I have work to do."

Bailey flopped into one of his chairs, settled her feet on his desktop, and crossed her ankles. Stafford glared at her, but she glared back.

"I have a problem—the firm has a problem—and, as managing partner, it becomes your problem." She told him what she had discovered about Candy Miller, omitting the more interesting details of how she uncovered the information. "It seems to me," she concluded, "that the firm has some potential liability."

Stafford shook his head and crushed his cigar to splinters in the ashtray. "I don't see how you got mixed up in this thing in the first place. That case was a
ssigned to—uh—"

"Margaret," Bailey supplied.

"Yeah, her. So I don't know what you're doing in the middle of it." 

"Helping her," Bailey responded quickly.

He gave her a suspicious look. "Whatever," he finally said. "Tell Margaret to find out what's going on ASAP, and you get out of it just as fast."

For once, Bailey didn't feel inclined to argue. Nevertheless, she soon decided she couldn't follow Stafford's orders. When she went immediately to Margaret's office and tried to explain the situation, the girl's small eyes seemed to retreat back into her round face.

"What are you trying to do?" Margaret asked. "At first you acted like you wanted to help me. Now you want to mess up the whole deal."

Bailey stood just inside the closed door of Margaret's cubicle with her arms folded, glad she hadn't elected to take a seat. It looked like she was going to have to intimidate. "This doesn't involve messing up a deal. This involves a possibility
—a probability—of fraud. This involves ethics, not to mention our firm's reputation. "

"Everything's going great," Margaret protested. "We're probably going to win. Why are you doing this to me? You don't even know for sure that something's wrong."