Red Sky At Morning - DK4 (4 page)

“What’s she doing now...oh.” Mark leaned forward. “Showing off that new hub. Yeah, lookit that.” They watched Dar shift traffic effortlessly from one port to the other, providing seamless fallback for the accounts on that particular system. “Cool.”

Dar finished her displays, then turned and laid her hands on the podium, much more at ease now. “Any questions?” The rich, powerful voice rolled out over the crowd. A moment’s silence, then a forest of hands went up. Dar seemed to find this funny, the corners of her mouth twitching as she leaned on the wooden surface. “All right. You first.”

She pointed, and the questions began.

“She likes that better.” Kerry nodded. “Questions she can deal with. She has to do that every day.” And certainly, her lover was handling them, becoming more confident as Kerry watched, moving out away from the protection of the podium, illustrating her answers with quick, precise motions of her hands. Kerry sighed. “God, she’s gorgeous.” She became aware of an awkward silence and glanced up to see Mark and Duks making strange faces at her. “Sorry, but she is.”

“Yeah, I know, but...” Mark scratched his jaw. “It’s just so weird hearing that...um...”

“From another woman?” Kerry asked wryly.

“Yeah.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Mark shrugged and laughed. “I needed some horizon broadening today.”

They turned back to the screen and watched as Dar took another step forward, her personality visibly emerging as she fielded tough questions, displaying an impressive knowledge of their industry.

“Yeah, you go.” Kerry smiled as the crowd applauded. “Rock ’em.”

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“UGH.” DAR FLOPPED down onto her back and stared up at the ceiling, flexing toes newly freed from their leather entrapment. “Well, that wasn’t so bad, I guess.” Her cell phone rang and she lifted it, stretching as she put it to her ear. “Yes?”

“You rock.”

“Oh, I do, do I?” Dar responded with a lazy smile, glad to have the entire affair behind her. “I didn’t sound too much like a walking geek tank?”

“No way,” Kerry laughed. “We all watched it on IDLN. But my God, Dar, your face when they gave you that ovation...I thought you were going to swallow your pager.”

“Erf.” Dar threw an arm over her eyes. “Caught me by surprise; but it ended up pretty good. Those West Indies investors are sharp. They had some good questions.”

“You had some great answers.” Kerry leaned back in her chair and propped a knee up against her desk. “Listen, I did call you to say hi and congratulations and all that...”

“But?” Dar drawled through the phone.

“But,” Kerry agreed, “we’ve got a real problem in Chicago, Dar. I think I’m going to have to go out there.” She heard the sigh. “Tonight.”

Another sigh. “Col said she’d watch Chino, since Mom and Dad are in Bermuda.” They were both silent for a bit. “I don’t think it’ll take long.”

“You promised me turkey,” Dar protested with a hint of a verbal pout. “Tell Chicago to stuff itself.”

Kerry gazed fondly at her speakerphone. “We’ve still got two days before Thanksgiving, Dar. C’mon, I’ll be back tomorrow night at the latest. Besides, you’re the one who said you could deal with Egg McMuffins if you had to,” she reminded her boss.

“That was before you mentioned marshmallow-stuffed sweet potatoes,” Dar retorted, then sighed. “I know, I know. I was reviewing that mess myself. I thought I might have to make a trip out there, but you’re really better at handling those people than I am.”

“Thank you.” Kerry preened silently, tipping back and enjoying the twilight outside. “What’re your plans for tonight?”

There was a momentary pause on the other end. “Bob Trancet wants to show me the town,” Dar answered. “But after Alastair warned me off today, I’m not sure I want to be shown.” Another pause. “Hey.”

“Mm?” Kerry was rolling Dar’s words over in her mind.

“Thanks for the roses, the chocolate, and the teddy bear.”

A smile grew. “I saw your jacket; it looked pretty.” Kerry turned her head to one side and regarded the phone. “Hey, isn’t he the guy there was the big scandal about over Fourth of July?” she asked curiously. “Him and a secretary, or something, in the Xerox room?”

“Yeah,” Dar admitted. “He wears his gonads on his lapel, all right.”

Kerry almost spit her tonsils out her nose. She clapped a hand over her mouth and reached for her cup of tea, half choking with laughter.

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Melissa Good

“Dar, don’t do that,” she spluttered. “I didn’t need that mental image; I really, really didn’t.”

Dar chuckled softly. “Sorry. Maybe I’ll just force him into dinner here at the hotel. I’m pretty tired after all that crap today. When’s your flight?”

“Nine.” Kerry stifled a yawn. “Wish it were landing in LaGuardia.”

She rolled her head to one side. “God, this is ridiculous.”

“What is?”

“Me feeling like a spoiled little brat denied her candy because you’re not here,” Kerry responded wryly. “Dar, this is not normal. I want you to go to Doctor Steve when you get back, so he can figure out what you put out that has me so damned hooked on you.” She paused.

“Stop smirking.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You most certainly were.” Kerry reached out and ran a fingertip along the speakerphone. “Am I embarrassing you?”

“No.” Dar’s voice dropped a note. “Flattering me.”

“Mm.” Kerry’s eyes half closed, and she exhaled. “Well, I guess I’d better get going. I want to get to the airport a little early.” She stifled another yawn. “At least I can sleep on the plane. You go and have fun with Mr. Happy Gonads, okay?”

“Oh yeah. A blast,” Dar mused. “Hey, have a good flight, okay?

Give me a call when you get to your hotel.”

“I will,” Kerry promised. “Later, sweetie.”

“Later.” Dar hung up the phone and set it on her mostly bare chest.

She’d stripped out of her silk suit almost as fast as the damn shoes, and was in her half-slip and bra, the air conditioning raising tiny goose bumps over her exposed belly. She rubbed her chilled skin, then sat up, using one hand to work a kink out of her neck. She got up and trudged over to the dresser, yanking a shirt out of her bag and tugging it on over her head.

“Okay.” Dar addressed her now rumpled reflection, blowing a bit of dark hair out of her eyes with a quick puff of air. “Dinner, a drink in the bar, and we’re outta there.” She took off her slip and exchanged it for a pair of jeans, then tucked the shirt in and buckled the belt. “Might as well get some work done while I’m hanging around waiting.”

Minutes later, she was sitting on the bed with her laptop resting on her legs, reviewing her mail and the two system status reports Mark had sent down. An e-mail opened, and she reviewed it. “Kiss my ass.”

She typed in a response and sent it back, then opened a second. “Bite me.” Another mail winged its way back. Then she opened the third, reading it several times, then cocking her head to one side to watch the tiny gopher graphic dance along its edge sideways. “Ooh. Cool, you got the toes working,” she praised Kerry in absentia.

Then she leaned closer and squinted at the small creature, who seemed to have acquired spectacles from somewhere. “Ah.” A
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chagrined look crossed her face as Dar nodded in wry acknowledgement. Kerry had been nudging her for a month to get her eyes checked, and so far, she’d found a lot of different excuses not to.

“Cute, Ker, very cute,” she replied to the e-mail, blithely ignoring the addition.

Pausing briefly, she grabbed the remote for the room’s television and flicked it on, thumbing through the channels before a graphic caught her eye. She studied the screen with a frown. “Great.”

Another flick brought the volume up.

“A winter storm warning has been raised for the Northeast,” the man on the screen was saying. “New York is expecting snow and freezing rain, so tonight’s a good night to be staying inside.”

Dar snorted. “Thanks, buddy. Now I don’t even have to make up an excuse.” She glanced at her mail. “Glad your flights going the other direction after all.” She finished typing and hit send. “No sense in both of us getting dumped on, huh?”

KERRY SETTLED BACK in her seat and debated whether or not to take out her laptop. When she traveled alone, she was always conscious of who was sitting next to her—idle eyes that might take in whatever her laptop screen had on display—and while the chances of her being seated next to a competitor were fairly slim, she never knew.

Her seatmate this trip was a bookish-looking young man with heavy glasses and an academic air about him. She spared a moment to imagine what his profession might be, a game she often played with herself while traveling.
Professor? Probably not old enough. Research
scientist? Maybe.
The man solved her musings a moment later, when he tugged a pad from a notebook and started scribing lines on it in a familiar programming language.

Kerry smiled and leaned back.
Figures. Another nerd
. She lazily eyed the dark window, observing the clearly not twinkling stars outside. She leaned a hand against the glass to shade the light and peered out, amazed as always at the complete explosion of lights spread so thickly across the sky. Below her stretched only dark land, an occasional brief island of light indicating a city. Far off in the horizon they were traveling toward, she could see a line of darkness shot through with lightning that had to be the storm front the Weather Channel had promised.

A slight clank caught her attention, and she turned her head to see the stewardess standing there, waiting to take her dinner order. “I’ll take the filet, thanks.” Kerry gave the woman a brief smile. “And if you have a beer?”

“Heineken all right?” The woman wrote down the order. “Be right back. And you, sir?” Kerry’s seatmate ordered the filet as well, with a whiskey and soda. That was interesting, Kerry thought, as she folded her hands over her stomach and stretched her legs out, crossing them at the ankles. Whiskey and soda always sounded like something her father would order, not someone of her own generation or younger.

“Do...you fly much?” the young man asked diffidently.

“Unfortunately, more than I’d like to,” Kerry replied politely. “It’s not for pleasure.”

“Oh.” The man wiped his hand off on his neatly pressed wool pants
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leg and held it out. “Josh Abbot. I just started working for Intelsat, and this is my second trip in a week. I’m not sure I like it.”

Kerry took his hand and returned the grip. “Kerry Stuart. I work for ILS.”

He brightened. “Really? Wow! So you’re headed to Chicago for the snafu with that new data center, huh?”

Blonde eyebrows shot up past Kerry’s hairline. “I wasn’t aware we’d released that to the press,” she commented.

Josh at least had the grace to blush. “No, well, I...um...” He looked up in startlement as the stewardess offered him a hot towel, taking it mechanically and looking at it as if it was a small dead white animal. “I heard my boss talking about it. I’m sorry; I should have watched my mouth.”

Kerry took her towel and carefully washed each finger with it, considering her options. “Well, it’s a small industry, right?” She gave the man a reassuring smile. “Who’s your boss?”

Josh chewed his lower lip unhappily. “Is he going to get in trouble?”

The green eyes facing him twinkled a little. “How intimidating do I look?” Kerry chuckled. “No. He won’t get in trouble.”

With a sigh of relief, Josh glibly coughed up the name of his boss, his boss’s boss—who’d told his boss—and the secretary who worked for the boss’s boss who was married to an ILS admin fairly high up in their sales department.
Jose, you are so dead meat
. Kerry decided, handing her now cooled towel back to the stewardess. “It’s not as bad as it sounds, really...just some incompatibility with infrastructure.”

“Oh.” Josh nodded. “So, you’re going to go fix that?” He gazed at Kerry with new interest. “You one of their tech people?”

“Something like that,” Kerry agreed solemnly. “You’re a programmer?”

He nodded again. “Yeah. I just graduated from Georgia Tech. I’m working on this neat new application for the control of our sats, so they can squeeze more bandwidth out of them.” He held up his pad. “I kinda hit a snag, though. I’m not really sure how to write this one little routine.”

Kerry gave him a suggestion. “Try that. It’s what we use on our big routers.” She sat back as her dinner was delivered, opening her lap tray and spreading the provided linen napkin neatly across her thighs.
Hmm
.

She reviewed the tray the stewardess set down. It contained a plate with a petit filet mignon on it in some kind of nice smelling burgundy sauce, and what looked very much like a decent sized blob of whipped mashed potatoes. And a broccoli floret, for those who had inescapable attacks of food guilt. Kerry solemnly consumed the broccoli, then turned her attention to the steaming beef.

“Wow, that works. Cool.” Josh laughed. “Hey, Ms. Stuart, are you married?”

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Melissa Good
Kerry’s hands stopped in mid-cut. “Why?” She gave him a look.

“You wanna be? I think I love you,” Josh burbled contentedly, making scratch marks on his pad.

A sigh slipped out. “Sorry, I’m taken.” Kerry resumed cutting her meat and took a bite.

“Yeah, yeah, but do they appreciate you for your mind, like I would?” Josh seemed totally absorbed in his program now, hardly aware of what he was saying. “Or are they just out after that pretty face?” His tie drooped into his burgundy sauce, but the sartorial accessory could have been a cobra for all he’d noticed.

“Well...” Kerry drawled, taking a swig of her beer, “my girlfriend thinks I’m sexy, but says she married me for my brains.”

“Damn. Just my luck.” Josh scribbled a few more symbols, then stopped cold, blinked, and turned his head slowly to look over at her.

“Did you just say what I think you just said?”

Kerry nodded and smiled, curious to see what his reaction would be. She wasn’t generally so out there about her relationship, but since they were 35,000 feet up, and he was proposing...