Past Midnight (19 page)

He had things he wanted to do. He’d only been hanging around because he thought he needed to prop her up. She’d taken him for granted. And she needed to give in gracefully. “Will you send me postcards?” she asked softly, her stomach aching.

“Course I will.” He smiled, and it was as if the old grizzled face beamed.

She didn’t like change, and she was going to miss him for more than his parts. Far more, but she’d think about that later. There was something else she’d come about. “Anything odd going on at WEU?” Leon fabbed transducers for them, too.

“WEU?” He scratched his head. “Odd like what?”

She didn’t want to tell him that WEU was going to sue them over the through-coat patent. He’d only worry. “I’ve been hearing rumors.” She didn’t get specific. Theirs was a small industry; rumors were always flying.

Leon cocked his head like one of his dogs. “They’ve been pushing payment out to thirty and forty-five days. A couple of months ago, they tried to push me out to sixty and I cut ’em off till I got my money.”

Most invoice payment terms were net thirty, but smaller vendors like Leon, one-man shops, needed payment right away. They couldn’t afford to finance big companies. Erin made sure Leon got paid on every weekly check run. Yet WEU had been pushing him out forty-five days and beyond.

“I gave them notice, too, just like you.” He didn’t want her thinking he’d drop her but keep a bigger company like WEU, but she knew he’d never do that.

So, it was possible WEU was having financial issues, and that’s why they’d jumped on this patent thing now. They were searching for different avenues of cash. All right, she had a possible reason, but she didn’t know how that helped her. DKG didn’t have overflowing coffers of cash to fight them with.

“Thanks for the intel.” She gave the old man a hug. “I’m going to do as you suggest and give Matt a chance.”

He patted her cheek affectionately. “Good girl. And you’ve still got two months left out of me. If you want, I can come down and show the little whippersnapper the tricks of my trade.”

“You’re a doll.”

“Say hi to Dominic.”

“I will. And don’t forget those postcards when you’re on the move.” She didn’t mention the camels.

The ache of loss burned at the backs of her eyes, but at seventy-five, Leon was moving on. She had no right to stop him, and she had the feeling he was telling her to do the same. He didn’t have kids. He didn’t understand that she’d never move on.

Back at DKG, Yvonne didn’t even let her get as far as her office. It was just after noon. Yvonne signaled her with a crooked finger, looking in both directions like a spy worried about being overheard. Rachel was most likely out to lunch, and Bree’s door was closed. Dominic’s car had been in the lot, but he was probably in his lab.

“In here,” Yvonne whispered loudly. She closed her office door when Erin was inside. “Something’s wrong with Bree.”

“Is she sick? Did she have to go home?”

Yvonne rolled her eyes and huffed. “I mean
weird
wrong, not
sick
wrong.”

Erin did not sigh. Yvonne claimed she hated gossip, but she was actually the worst gossip in the office. “What exactly is
weird
wrong?” Erin asked.

“Well,” Yvonne began to divulge, her eyes gleaming with an avid light, “she and that Rachel girl whisper all the time.”

That Rachel girl? The term didn’t bode well. In addition, she couldn’t imagine Bree whispering “all the time” to anyone. Bree kept to herself, she was internal, one might even say an introvert. “You’re exaggerating, Yvonne.”

Yvonne narrowed her eyes. “I see things.”

Sometimes Yvonne did too much seeing. She was wonderful at her job, friendly and caring with customers, great at solving problems. Getting her nose into other people’s business was her downside.

“I don’t like it, Erin. Maybe you should talk to her and find out what’s going on.”

“Yvonne, you need to butt out.”

Yvonne scowled. “But—”

Erin held up one finger. Yvonne slapped her mouth shut, but a scowl creased her forehead.

“If it starts to interrupt the work flow, I’ll talk to both Rachel and Bree. Otherwise . . .” She left the sentence hanging and opened Yvonne’s door.

She hated being in the middle. If it was work, she could handle it, but sometimes she got so freaking tired of people’s crap. There was nothing going on. Yvonne just didn’t like being out of the loop, or that Bree might actually confide something in Rachel rather than telling her.

On her desk, Erin found the list of through-coat sales sorted by model number. Whatever was going on, as Yvonne put it, Bree had done exactly what she’d asked her to.

Erin flipped to the last page, and her next breath nearly choked her.

Oh my God. She did a quick calculation in her mind. If WEU took them to court and won, the amount of cash they’d have to come up with to pay the royalty would bankrupt them.

MONDAY NIGHT. TWO DAYS AFTER THAT FANTASTIC EVENT IN THE hotel. Yeah, he considered it an
event
. Erin rolled again in the bed, this time toward him. Dominic glanced at the clock. A little past midnight. Balls aching, cock hard, pulse racing, he waited for her to reach for him. He wanted it, needed it, her touch, physical, mental, emotional. Brief scenarios ran through his mind, all the kinky things he wanted from her.

But she didn’t reach for him. Instead, she turned away. He couldn’t stand it anymore. He trailed a finger down her spine.

Tossing aside the covers, she sat up, keeping her back to him. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you. I’m just restless.”

“That’s okay. I wasn’t asleep.” No, he’d been waiting, breath bated. Hoping, praying, just as he’d done for a year.

“I’m going to work on the computer.”

Fuck. Before she wouldn’t touch him anywhere but in the dark and silence of their bedroom. Now she wouldn’t do it in the bed at all. When were they going to get it right?

He lay there listening to her shuffle down the hall, the closing of her office door like a gunshot breaking the quiet. Anger rumbled through his gut. She’d torn him apart every time she’d turned her back on him these last months, seeking the solace of her office computer. Alone. Without him. He was overreacting, but he’d thought things were changing. To find they weren’t hit so much harder. He punched the pillow. When was this going to end? When would she fucking let him in? He was so goddamn tired of it. Tired of her, yes, fucking tired of her shit. Christmas was less than a week away. Did she think that didn’t bother him, too? Did she think he’d forgotten? Fuck.

Dominic breathed deeply, willing his mind to calm. But he was so goddamn fed up of not being able to do anything right.

He missed Jay, his loss like a hole in his chest where his heart should have been. God, how he missed him—day, night, with every moment, with every breath. Wanting her back, wanting their life back didn’t change how much he missed his boy. It wasn’t disrespecting his memory to want more than what they had.

Was it?

Jesus. He closed his eyes, listening to the dark as if Jay might suddenly speak to him, offer forgiveness, expiation.
Daddy, it’s okay. I know you love me no matter what.

But he didn’t hear Jay’s voice. He just felt a swirling, crushing need.

Throwing back the covers, he tugged on his briefs, then went to the closet for his robe. God
damn
if he’d stand before her naked while he begged.

The hall was cold, tendrils of night air sneaking beneath the folds of his robe. He didn’t glance into Jay’s clean and empty room. If he did, he’d never make it down the hall.

He stood at her door a moment. No sound from within. But he would not stop here this time. She could close the fucking door, but she couldn’t shut him out.

Her gaze shot up, eyes wide as he thrust open the door. Then she fumbled with her mouse.

“What do you do in here?” He felt the scratchy ache in his voice. “Nothing,” she answered too quickly and without meeting his eye.

Nothing
? That’s all she was going to say? They were married for God’s sake. They weren’t supposed to have big secrets or shut each other out like this. He could feel his blood pressure rising, his heart pounding, and he wanted to smash something. He settled for rounding the desk, but the screen revealed only her vacant computer desktop, whatever she’d been looking at gone. His gut roiled with jealousy. “Are you e-mailing your boyfriend?”

She snorted, all her furtiveness and nervousness suddenly gone. “You’ve been trying to set me up with guys so why would you care if I had a boyfriend?”

He would damn well care. “It’s still
us
,” he growled at her. “You and me together. I need to watch you, to
see
your pleasure in a way I can’t when I’m doing it to you.” He wanted the sexiness of watching her skin flush with excitement, her breath quickening with desire, the scent of her arousal perfuming the air around him, the rise of her orgasm, her cries. That’s what it was about, seeing and hearing
her
.

She gave him a roll of her eyes, a glint of anger flashing in them. “Don’t be an idiot,” she snapped. “I’m not e-mailing anyone. Give me my space and go back to bed.”

Give her
space
? He’d given her so much fucking space and she still didn’t understand a goddamn thing. He’d thought that any emotion, even anger, was better than the emotionless wasteland they’d been living in. Not that it was truly emotionless, just that everything was buried where they couldn’t touch it, feel it, acknowledge it. But facing it when midnight had passed and all their defenses had crumbled was worse than the stab of pins and needles in awakening limbs.

“Go to bed, Dominic,” she whispered, her tone gentled, almost as if she regretted snapping at him. “Everything’ll be back to normal in the morning.”

Yes, it would be, back to normal where she shut him out. He could no longer abide it.

 

 

DOMINIC FOUND HER IN THE STOCKROOM THE NEXT MORNING. HE shoved a piece of paper at her. “Just so you don’t accuse me of keeping secrets from you again.”

Then he walked away.

Erin glanced around. Fred, their stock clerk, was down the far end out of earshot, staging the next two days’ parts kits at the bench.

She’d hurt Dominic last night, but she didn’t know how to change it. She’d lain awake for hours, sick over losing Leon, scared to death about the patent thing. And the camels. She kept seeing those delicately carved camels. When Dominic touched her, she couldn’t, she just could not give him anything, even as she knew he needed it. Then he’d startled her, opening the door of her office like that, and her heart galloped a mile a minute. He’d have been pissed as hell if he’d seen her screen.

So she’d turned him away again. She’d regretted it almost immediately, but she couldn’t call him back. The words he’d said about watching her were actually kind of beautiful, but she’d effectively thrown them back in his face by not even acknowledging them. Dammit, she needed to start giving him
something
. If only she had it to give.

Why was it that when you met someone, in those first glorious days, weeks, and months, you told each other everything, shared every thought? Then the longer you were together, the more you shut down, shut them out. Until you stopped sharing anything at all.

Her palms were sweaty as she read the letter he’d given her. WEU. A demand for payment. This time they’d named an amount. She gaped when she saw it.

Yvonne and Steve were in the roundhouse when she barreled through, parting them like the Red Sea. In engineering, Atul and Cam worked silently in their shared office, and Dominic had hitched himself up on his stool in front of the lab computer. He’d always favored the lab over his office.

“How can they know how much the royalty should be?”

He didn’t look at her. “Maybe they checked the sales rankings on the distributor sites.”

Though they did have some individual customer accounts, DKG sold most of their product through distributors. Any user could access the sales rankings. It helped buyers figure out what the most popular items were.

But it still made no sense. “There is no way WEU could get this kind of accuracy from those sales rankings.”

He tipped his head, looked at her, waited.

She felt her face flush. “I asked Bree to run the numbers.” There was nothing wrong with that. She might as well tell him everything. “And Leon said WEU’s been stretching out his payments. Obviously they’re having cash flow problems, and that’s why they’re checking into the patents.”

He didn’t say anything for what felt like forever but was probably seconds. “So. You didn’t think I’d handle the issue.”

“It wasn’t that.” All right, yes, but not in a totally dysfunctional way. “I wanted to know the worst-case scenario. So we could be prepared.”

He stood, held out his hand. She laid the letter on his palm, where he promptly folded it into a paper airplane and flew it right into the trash can. “That’s how much it’s worth.” He took a step forward. She moved a step back. “It isn’t even from their patent attorney. It’s not even official.” He leaned down, lowered his voice. “So we’re following the advice of
our
attorney and ignoring them while he does his job and proves them wrong,” he finished, enunciating the last three words with increasing harshness.

Okay, she’d
really
pushed a button last night. Maybe she should apologize. “About last night,” she started.

He didn’t let her finish, close and towering over her. “I told you I was in charge, and you agreed to that.”

She glanced over her shoulder at the open door, then lowered her voice. “When I said that, we were talking about sex, not everything else.”

He skirted her and closed the lab door gently. Too gently. Her pulse actually raced; her skin heated.