Once Upon a Matchmaker (20 page)

“There’s a way to test that theory, you know,” he told her.

His voice was whimsical and playful. Anticipation suddenly reared its head. “Oh? And what would that be?”

“I’ll show you.” Getting up, Micah crossed to her.

Since she didn’t know what to expect, he caught her by surprise. Framing her face with his hands, he leaned over and kissed her.

Tracy was vaguely aware of childish giggles in the background, but those quickly faded as the depth of his kiss drew her into a shining, beautiful world. This in turn brought about the rushing of blood and the heating of her skin.

She melted against him before she realized that she shouldn’t be doing this. He was still recovering from surgery. Besides, the boys were standing right there and they were far too young to be taught about a new level of chemistry achieved between a man and a woman.

Reluctantly, Tracy drew back, her heart beating a lot harder than when, eons ago, she had participated in a 5 K marathon.

“Micah,” she whispered huskily, “the boys are watching.”

“Yes, I know.” He laughed as he took a step back. “Well, it was either this, or letting the boys pinch you. They pinch hard,” he confided in a stage whisper that had the boys giggling again.

She was confused and having only half of her brain functioning didn’t help any. “What?”

“As in ‘pinch me, I must be dreaming,’” he prompted, referring to the famous disclaimer about dreaming. “I thought this might be preferable to you.”

She pressed her lips together, savoring the taste of him. Her pulse went up several notches. “Definitely preferable,” she agreed.

But even as she said it, Tracy knew she had to leave. There was just too much longing, too much desire ricocheting through her body for her to successfully ignore it for any length of time. And she couldn’t very well act on her feelings. The man wasn’t finished healing.

“Maybe I’d better leave on a high note,” she suggested.

“Don’t go.” He laced his hand through hers, but his eyes were what actually held her prisoner. “The boys will be going to bed in a little while.”

“That’s why I’m going,” she told him. “You’re still in the process of healing.”

The smile on his lips was positively wicked. He wasn’t about to give up so easily. “We could see how much progress I’ve actually made.”

God, talk about tempting. Tracy drew in a long, fortifying breath. She had to be the strong one here today, even though she wanted nothing more than to be with him. Time was growing short for her. She had a strong hunch that the case would be resolved very soon and then he wouldn’t need her anymore. She’d had no excuse to hide behind as to why she kept dropping by, no excuse to give herself as to why she kept giving in to her desire to see him. Words like love and commitment weren’t needed here, not as long as she could hide behind working on his case.

Once that was gone, she would be, too.

The thought filled her with almost insurmountable sadness.

“Tempting though that sounds, I’m going to have to pass on that,” she told him, sounding far more firm than she felt.

But he’d seen the flicker of desire in her eyes and that gave him all the encouragement he needed. “You could do all the work,” he proposed, whispering into her ear so that neither one of the boys could overhear him. “I’ll just lie there and you can have your way with me. I won’t tell a soul.”

If she felt any hotter, she would burst into flames. Just the feel of his breath along her skin sent her temperature soaring, never mind what he was saying.

“You are not making it easy to say no,” she whispered back.

His eyes held hers as he replied, quite audibly, “I want to make it impossible to say no.”

The phone rang then. Tracy was both disappointed and relieved at the intrusion. But maybe it was for the best, she consoled herself.

“Telephone,” she announced, backing up toward the wall.

“I know,” Micah acknowledged, amused. “I recognize the sound.”

Since she was now closer to the wall phone than he was, Tracy picked up the receiver and answered it. “Muldare residence.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Micah grinning at her. Most likely it was because of the greeting she’d just offered, but since he had an all-male household, the caller might think he or she had the wrong number if they heard a woman just saying, “Hello.”

“Micah Muldare, please,” a gruff male voice requested. There was something vaguely familiar about it, but she didn’t waste time trying to pin a face to the voice. So far there was no reason for it.

Micah held out his hand for the receiver, but Tracy had one more thing she felt needed to be answered. “Who shall I say is calling?”

“Sid Greene.”

Tracy’s eyes widened. Greene was Micah’s supervisor’s supervisor. He was the one she’d dealt with when she got Micah his salary reinstalled for the duration of his recuperation.

Why was he calling? It made no sense for him to be calling Micah while the two sides were embroiled in this legal battle.

“Mr. Greene, this is Theresa Ryan, Mr. Muldare’s attorney,” she reminded him in case it had slipped his mind. He dealt with a great many people each day and she wasn’t vain enough to think that she stood out. “Whatever you have to say to him, you can say to me.”

She heard an impatient huff on the other end of the line. “I need to talk to him directly about a project that he wrote a white paper for.”

A white paper, Tracy had come to learn, was a technical paper, usually the definitive explanation of the steps involved in the creation of a product or a procedure that was regarded as the go-to document. Which made the person who wrote the white paper the go-to person for that particular product or procedure.

In this case, she assumed it was Micah.

She had a gut feeling this was a good thing.

“Just a minute, please, Mr. Greene. I’ll see if he’s available.” The next moment, Micah took the receiver. “He’s available,” she managed to say into the mouthpiece before Micah put the receiver to his ear.

Bracing himself—he had no idea what to expect—Micah said, “Hello, Mr. Greene? This is Micah Muldare.”

It was obvious that the man on the other end was uncomfortable. It was also obvious that he considered this call to be of the utmost necessity.

Known to be a straightforward man, Greene got right down to business. “Questions have come up about the ground-to-air missile project. We’ve had to lay off a lot of people in the last couple of years.”

The man wasn’t saying anything that he didn’t already know, Micah thought, but he continued to wait patiently for some kind of enlightenment.

“There’s no one left who was part of the original team. The ones who are left know squat about this particular project and we don’t have time to bring them up to speed even if we could.” Greene paused, as if debating whether or not to make the next admission. When he spoke again, it was almost grudgingly. “We stand to lose the contract if the customer’s questions aren’t satisfactorily addressed. Now your bulldog of an attorney told me all about your surgery so I know it’s too soon for you to come in, but if I send someone over with a company laptop, could you review the questions and answer them as soon as possible?”

Micah was stunned. It took him a second to find his tongue. “I thought I wasn’t supposed to have any access to the company’s database.”

“Yeah, well, in a perfect world, things might be different,” Greene allowed. “But in this world, time is money and the customer’s satisfaction trumps everything else. Besides, your attorney informed me that there’s a federal task force investigating this network of hackers who got into your computer. She even brought in several special agents who made the case that your laptop was randomly targeted, just like the others were. In which case, none of this was your fault and you’re innocent of the charges against you. I’ve been informed that the agents have to dot all their Is and cross all their Ts, but it looks like they’ll be pressing charges and clearing you in the very near future. So, can we just put this aside for the good of the company and have you get to work, Muldare?”

“Absolutely,” Micah responded. A flood of emotions suddenly washed all over him. He was stunned, flabbergasted and exceedingly pleased and relieved.

“Good. I’ll send MacAfee over tomorrow morning with the laptop. Good to have things back to normal,” Greene confided, then, belatedly, he thought to ask, “How are you feeling, Muldare?” It was a personal question and Greene was uncomfortable with personal questions—asking or answering them—but the moment called for it.

Micah was still high on relief. “I’m getting better by the minute.”

“Excellent. That’s what I like to hear,” he said with genuine feeling. And then his voice dropped several octaves. “Between the two of us,” he said, “I never believed a word of the charges brought up against you, Muldare.”

Micah knew the man was only paying lip service to the event, but as far as he was concerned, it didn’t matter. He had his job back and more important, his good name.

And he knew who he had to thank for all of it, he thought, slanting a glance toward Tracy.

“Thank you, sir,” he said to Greene for form’s sake. The line went dead the next moment. That resolved, Greene had moved on to something else.

“What was that all about?” Tracy asked as Micah hung up the phone.

“It’s over.”

Tracy felt an icy wave wash over her. She didn’t like the sound of that.

Don’t anticipate,
she ordered herself angrily.

“What’s over?” she asked, struggling to keep her voice level, detached.

His grin went from one ear to the other. “I think the case against me just disappeared.”

“Why?” she asked eagerly. She knew how much being cleared meant to him. It went beyond a paycheck, it was the principle of the thing. They had questioned his loyalty, his character. And now he was vindicated. “What happened?”

“Well,” he said honestly, “mainly you.” He was well aware that the verdict could have easily gone the opposite way if she hadn’t started investigating, hadn’t personally hounded the task force and hadn’t taken it upon herself to corner Greene on his home turf. “It looks like Greene took your defense to heart. He said that the FBI is on the cusp of bringing in the hackers and that he believed you when you told him that my laptop just happened to be hacked at random. He wants to send over a company laptop tomorrow so that I can start answering some questions that came up on an old project I handled.”

That would be the government, she thought, knowing that Micah wasn’t able to specify who or confirm her suspicions when she guessed. But for all intents and purposes, the identity of the “customer” in this case was an open secret.

She gleaned the important thing out of what he was telling her. “So we won.”

He nodded. If he grinned any harder, his face would split open. “We won.”

The all important word caught the boys’ attention, drawing it away from the video game they had begun playing in the family room.

“Yay! We won,” Greg and Gary both shouted excitedly. Then Gary looked from Tracy to his father. “What did we win?”

“Daddy gets to go back to work as soon as he gets better,” Tracy told the boy. She would have added that Micah won back his good name, but the boys were too young to understand what that actually meant, or why a good reputation was so important. That was a lesson for another day.

Yes, a day you won’t be here for, she reminded herself. She could feel sadness encroaching on her and did her best to block it. This was Micah’s time and she had to be happy for him, not sad for herself.

“Did we win you, too?” Greg asked out of the blue.

She stared at the little boy, his question rendering her momentarily speechless. How had he come up with that? He was far too young to intuit the connection between her and charges against their father.

“I was just here to help your daddy with his case,” she told him.

“But you’re not going to go away just because he won, right?” Gary asked. When she didn’t answer him immediately, he turned to his father. “Is she, Daddy?” he asked nervously.

“That’s up to Tracy,” Micah told his son. “We can’t hold her here if she wants to go.”

“Yes, we can,” Greg insisted. To prove it, he latched onto her hand, holding it as tight as he could. And then he looked up at her and made his case by begging. “Stay with us. Please.”

“Sweetheart, I can’t stay.” She caressed the small, serious face, missing him already. Missing all of them. She could feel her heart aching. “Your daddy doesn’t need me anymore.”

“I didn’t say that,” Micah countered quietly.

Her heart jumped as she turned to look at him. For a moment…

But she was just fooling herself, Tracy upbraided herself. Micah hadn’t told her that her services weren’t needed any longer in so many words, but there was no need to say anything. It was a given. He’d won the case. The charges would be dropped.

It was all over but the shouting. A few details to iron out—perhaps some compensation for pain and suffering over the baseless accusation might even be given—and then life would go back to normal for him. And to a solitary existence for her. She desperately tried to make her peace with that.

It wasn’t easy.

She did her best to sound cheerful. “After I take care of a few loose ends, you won’t need a lawyer anymore.”

“No, I won’t,” Micah agreed. “But that doesn’t mean that I won’t need you.” He saw the startled look on her face and told himself it was a good thing. “Hey, I taught you how to cook. I don’t want anyone else reaping the fruits of my labor.”

Her expression gave nothing away. “So you want me to hang around for my cooking?”

He took her hands in his. He didn’t want to play around anymore. He wanted her to know what was in his heart. A heart that would slip back into a comatose state if she left.

“Well, maybe I wouldn’t go that far,” he allowed. “About your cooking,” he clarified, “not about you hanging around. I want you to ‘hang around’ for other reasons.”

She could hardly breathe. “What other reasons?” she asked, her eyes never leaving his.

“Well, to begin with, I’ve gotten very used to seeing you every day. At my age, I’m not sure if I could stand any drastic changes and not having you around qualifies as an extremely drastic change.”