Past Midnight (18 page)

“Right, and I paid for the hotel. So that makes you”—she stabbed a finger in his direction—“a
complete
tightwad.” Then she went back to the menu.

An eavesdropper would think they were fighting, but after last night, there was an easy camaraderie between them. She’d even held his hand on the two-block walk from the hotel. Like normal people. He felt ridiculously warm and content.

When the waitress came, Erin ordered her own bacon and toast. “Well,” she said when they were alone again, “that was an exceptionally naughty evening.”

“Over the top,” he agreed, trying to downplay so she wouldn’t realize how truly immense it had been for him. He was surprised she’d actually mentioned it. In the light of day, she usually pretended the nights of sex didn’t exist.

Despite the bliss of a great orgasm and fucking fantastic sex, he’d lain awake with her in his arms, thinking, analyzing. It was an engineering term, but it was how he approached problems, whether business or emotional.

“But did you like it?” he asked. “Do you want to do it again?”

Pouring creamer and sugar into her coffee, she didn’t answer right away. Time to think, time to decide.

Sometime during last night’s musings, he’d hit on the idea that she wanted him to force her to feel. It wasn’t the sex, so much as it was the emotions she wanted. It hadn’t been that way in the beginning, when she’d first started reaching for him silently in the dark. Then, she’d sought mindlessness. He understood that. But something had changed. Maybe in Orlando; maybe it had begun even before that. The idea had been rolling around in his mind after she’d gone ballistic about the through-coat patent.
Just fix it.
There’d been something desperate in her words, more than a way to end an argument. The more he thought about it, the more meaning he ascribed to it.

“I don’t know.” She used the end of her spoon to trace the silvery swirls in the Formica.

“You don’t know if you liked it or you don’t know if you want to do it again?”

She shrugged, still tracing patterns on the tabletop.

She was reaching out to him even if she didn’t know it. That’s what she wanted, for him to fix things. His heart ached that what she needed most was something he could never give her. He couldn’t fix losing Jay. He only knew that making her feel emotion, any emotion, was better than letting her go on like a robot. He’d taken her that way because she’d never let him do it before, and her acceptance of it, even as she fought him verbally, her aweinspiring orgasm, was a testament to her desire to push her limits.
Force me. Take care of me.
They were the same thing.

Propping her elbow on the table, she laid her chin on her hand and looked at him. “Maybe now that I’ve had it, I need something else.”

Didn’t she feel the enormity of what had happened between them in that hotel room? Yes, he believed she did. That’s what drove her crazy. She wanted him to help her, fix things for her, take care of her, but she was terrified of actually letting him do it. Wanting desperately yet being equally afraid. He gave, she threw it back. He couldn’t help her with that, couldn’t force her to hold on to any steps forward they made together.

But he would not give up. He’d push at her until she had to give him something to work with. “Trust me with what you want next then.” He used the word intentionally, specifically, because he couldn’t be sure how much she truly trusted him to provide for her. There was so much difference between what you wished for and what you thought you had.

Before she could answer—and he was damn sure she was glad of it—their waitress arrived, tray balanced on her hip, and slid their plates onto the table.

After the waitress was gone, Erin slathered marmalade on her sourdough toast. He picked up a crispy piece of bacon. “Come on, Erin.” He leaned in, dropped his voice. “You know what dirty, nasty thing you want next. You’ve been thinking about it, fantasizing about it, and now you’re crazy with wanting it.”

She stared at him, toast halfway to her mouth. “You think you know me so well. You think you have me all figured out.”

He smiled, swallowing the bite of bacon, the smoky flavor delicious. “I do know you, baby. I know exactly what you had in mind last night, what you were trying to do when you blindfolded me, tied me down, and didn’t say a word.” Luckily the noise around them seemed to seal them off, and no one paid attention.

She snorted. “Oh yeah? You knew? You had no idea.”

He wondered if
she
had any idea what she’d been trying to accomplish. “You wanted me to doubt that it was you. You wanted me to think it was some other woman you gave me to, wanted me to say how hot it was doing someone else, just so you could slam me down in the end.”

She stared at him a long moment. “Yes. You’re exactly right,” she agreed mildly, then added without a missing beat, “can I have a bite of hash browns?”

He laughed. “I didn’t expect you to be honest about it.” He shoved his plate toward her.

Chewing the forkful of hash browns she’d scooped off his plate, she wriggled her shoulders. Then she put a finger to her lips, swallowing. “I wasn’t sure about it being a test and all until after I’d done it and I was back in the elevator.”

“So you were going to get back on BART and leave me up there to spend the night alone?”

She raised a brow, nodded her head, and smiled. “I thought the whole silence thing was very sexy.”

It would have been if she hadn’t fucked him silently in the night so many times before. She didn’t have a clue how that tore him apart. “What made you come back?”

She stabbed a small cube of toast with her fork and dipped it in his egg yoke. His chest tightened. She hadn’t eaten off his plate like this in a long time, not since they used to go down to the corner Denny’s for Sunday breakfast, where kids could eat for free. It used to piss him off how she always stole his food; now, he relished it, wanted to shove his plate at her and tell her to take everything she wanted, everything he offered.

“I came back because I didn’t have”—she glanced around—“the big O,” she mouthed.

She’d returned because it hadn’t been enough. She’d needed more than a silent quickie just as he had. But she wasn’t going to admit it.

He’d learned something essential though. “Delightful as what you planned was, from now on, I’ll be in charge.” They both needed his dominance. That was the simplicity of her greatest fantasy, to let him take care of everything.

Elbow on the table, she propped her chin on her hand. “You’re free to
think
you’re in charge.”

Still feisty, that was good, but she hadn’t challenged him by saying she wouldn’t play at all. Even better. “You’re free to give me suggestions,” he prompted.

“No. No suggestions.” She stole more of his hash browns. “That way if I don’t like it, I can blame you.”

Once again, she was being completely honest without even realizing how close to the truth she was about their entire relationship since they’d lost Jay.

WHAT DOMINIC HAD DONE TO HER FRIDAY NIGHT WAS NAUGHTY and taboo. And completely fantastic. In the heat of the moment, the primitive act was perfection.

Erin saw things more realistically on a Monday morning, the start of the week, all the work ahead, the shipping preparation, year-end barreling down on them. And she knew she couldn’t keep on expecting perfection. She couldn’t keep on ordering Dominic to find a way to give it to her or they were both bound to be disappointed.

For now, she would relish Friday night as extraordinary and Saturday morning breakfast at Lorie’s Diner as rejuvenating. But this was Monday and the real world.

“Hey, Bree, can you do a quick analysis on how many of the through-coat gauges we’ve sold?” Erin wanted some idea of the cost if the patent problem wasn’t resolved. If Dominic found out she’d asked for the report, he’d think she was checking up on him. Erin didn’t care. She needed to know.

Bree was watering her philodendron. Statuesque, she didn’t have to stand on a stool to water it. The plant was massive, leafy green vines wrapped around the pot, trailing down both sides of the bookcase. The philodendron had been in a five-inch plastic pot when Bree started at DKG.

“Sure.” Bree didn’t ask when Erin wanted it or why. She would just do the work and have the figures on Erin’s desk, probably before lunch.

“Thanks.” Then Erin noticed her eyes, or rather the dark circles under them. “You okay?”

Bree smiled. Somehow it made her look more fragile. “Sure.”

Wow, she was a fountain of conversation today. Slender and waiflike despite her height, with long black hair and pale skin, Bree was five years younger than Erin. Erin had always thought of her as ethereal and oddly childlike. She’d worked for a big accounting firm before DKG, but she hadn’t liked the pressure, the lack of routine, or the fact that she never had her own workspace. She hadn’t even been embarrassed when she’d revealed that in the job interview.

Erin wondered if she should push. But if Bree didn’t want to talk, she wouldn’t.

“Okay then.” Despite feeling that was a weak excuse, Erin backed out, turned, then called across the main room. “Rachel, I’m going out for a couple of hours.”

Rachel waggled her fingers without saying a word, but Yvonne came to the door of her office. Yvonne wanted to know everything that went on at DKG, whether it concerned her or not, but Erin would be damned if she’d explain her comings and goings.

Besides, she didn’t want Dominic to know where she was headed. He’d say she was bringing undue pressure to bear.

Half an hour later, she pulled into the driveway of Leon’s house in the Los Gatos hills above the Lexington Reservoir. The house, workshop, and two-acre property were probably worth a couple of million, but Leon had lived there forever and she’d bet he paid practically nothing for it, comparatively speaking. Separated from the house by redwoods, pines, and bay trees, Leon’s workshop stood in a clearing. The roll-up door was open, three rows of florescent lights blazing.

Thin and rangy, Leon’s face was a mass of lines and crevices that signified years spent in the outdoors. Hunched over an inspection lamp magnifying a circuit board, he soldered a resistor. Leon was a ham radio operator, and he built his own amplifiers and other odds and ends of radio equipment. Seated on a metal stool with casters on the bottom, he was surrounded by rolling toolboxes, carts and bins of parts, pieces of test equipment, and two lazy, old mixed-breed dogs he’d rescued from the pound years ago. The black one twitched in his sleep.

“To what do I owe this pleasure, Erin?” Leon said, his eyes myopic behind his glasses.

She smiled. “I’m here to talk you out of giving up your sideline.” DKG’s transducers. Though that was only half the reason she’d driven out.

“I want to rebuild those old cars before I die,” he said, raising a shock of eyebrows that were as white as his thick hair. A couple of ancient clunkers rusted out behind the workshop. They’d been there as long as she’d known him, and probably far longer.

“You’re going to need money for the parts.”

“I can get damn near everything at the junkyard.”

The Elvis clock above Leon’s head chimed the hour with “uh-huh-huh,” Elvis’s legs rocking back and forth serving as pendulum. The Betty Boop clock booped, Felix the Cat’s eyes rolled, and the Popeye clock popped a can of spinach. Leon had grown up on the old cartoons, served in Korea and Vietnam, and had more stories than an Internet blogger, but his were real. He was history itself.

Sometimes she’d brought Jay up here. Most kids would have been bored to death with an old man’s stories and his vintage equipment, but not Jay. He’d been a sponge, absorbing everything. Erin breathed through the sudden ache.

Leon set down his soldering iron and pushed aside the inspection lamp. “You didn’t come all the way up here to convince me to keep making the transducers.”

“I was going to offer you a raise.”

“I don’t need a raise.” He lived simply, and he’d never been married so he didn’t have children to leave a fortune to. “I would have retired last year, but I figured you needed me.” He removed his glasses, his eyes a clear blue without them, not even a hint of cataracts. “Now it’s time I moved on.”

Erin stepped back, her heart beating too fast at the obvious reference to Jay. On the workbench shelf was a whittled camel. He’d started another, this one lying down, legs tucked beneath it. A standing male and a seated female. Two by two. She knew without a doubt they were for Noah’s Ark. Leon was still whittling for Jay.

“I don’t want you to move on,” she said without thinking.

“I know.”

It wasn’t merely finding someone else, paying the extra it would cost, or moving the work in-house. It was Leon. “I’ll miss you.” Even if she hadn’t been up here to see the old man in a year. He was
there
, a part of the past, a symbol. The thought of letting him go inspired terror.

“I’ll still be here when you need to visit.” He hadn’t held it against her that she’d avoided seeing him. He understood, she was sure. And instead of forcing her to talk about it, he dealt with the practical. “Here’s what you do,” he said in the rough, aged voice of his. “Get the kid to make them.”

The kid was Matt. “His failure rate has skyrocketed. I can’t trust him on this.”

“Yes, you can. On paper, it probably looks like it’ll cost you more than outsourcing with another outfit, but letting him prove himself will give you back immeasurably. He won’t fail you.” Leon had occasionally come to DKG to drop off parts. He knew all her employees. He was a good judge of character. “Give people a chance,” he added, “and they shine for you.”

She felt as if he was saying something else, something she wasn’t getting. “But you can’t really mean to spend your time on old cars?”

He waved a hand over his radio equipment. “There’s all this, and—” He stopped, gazed at her, amazing her again with the clarity of his eyes. “I want to meet some of the old geezers I’ve been talking to on the ham radio. Road trip. Lots of stuff to do, Erin.”