What's Yours is Mine (21 page)

That got to him. He looked pained. He started to say something, then stopped himself. Finally, he spoke. “I think it would better if we wait until tomorrow to talk. Is that okay with you?” He looked directly at her, and she was shocked to see the depth of emotion in his eyes, ever so briefly, before it was erased.
 

She felt as if she’d been struck in the heart. Will Dougherty was a deeply passionate man. All she had to do was look around this place to see that. It was crafted with tenderness. With soul. That was why she’d fallen in love with it. But Will couldn’t let himself feel that way about another person. Couldn’t let himself feel anger, pain, love.

Darcy nodded. “Fair enough.” She picked up her things and walked away, into the bedroom, still shaken.

Chapter Seventeen

“What do you mean, he turned Calderon down?”

“He wasn’t thrilled at all, Dad. He was pissed. You should have seen him. It totally backfired.” Darcy sat on the bed, wiggling her toes. Will’s reaction, the intensity between them, all felt nicely absurd now that she heard her father’s comfortingly familiar growl. “I think we’re going to have to shift approaches.”

“Fine, okay.” A momentary pause while her father thought about it. Finally, “Of course. It’s so obvious.”
 

She felt her tension lift. Yes. The General had done it again, had come up with a brilliant plan that would save the day, give her victory without handing Will defeat. “What is?”

“You said he’s protective of his sister, right?”

“With reason. She doesn’t seem to know which way to turn after this divorce, and—”

“Point is, we use it. She has kids, right?”

Darcy’s mood deflated. This wasn’t feeling right. “Two young boys.”
 

“Good, good. Kids are always a pull. We can orchestrate something there, maybe a health-related crisis, nothing serious, but it looks that way at first.”

“No. No crisis. No health scare. It’s—it’s unethical.”

A long silence on the line. She could hear the TV news faintly playing in the background.
 

Darcy closed her eyes. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it came out. I know you were only spitballing, it’s just—”

“It is not unethical.” His voice had a strong edge now. “I am not unethical. Never have been, never will be. But you can’t win a war by being
nice
. Where is your head? Do you want this condo or not?”

Darcy rolled over on the bed, facing the ceiling. She hit herself in the head with the pillow. It felt good in a weird, sad way. She resisted the urge to bury her head under the pillow and hang up on her dad. Who had gone from ally to something else. Or was she the one who had changed? Scary thought.
 

“I want the condo. But not this way. I don’t want to make Will my enemy.”

“He is your enemy.” Her father’s voice was flat.

She sat up, punching the pillow. “No, I don’t think so. I think we’re both stuck in this really difficult situation, and if we keep treating each other like opponents, we’ll never get anywhere.”

“Why don’t you just hand it to him and get it over with? Why are you rolling over and playing dead? This is not the daughter I raised. You’re supposed to be a fighter, not a wimp. What’s he done to you? Are you in love with him?”

She gasped. “Dad!”

He harrumphed. “I have to go. It’s one a.m. here, and your mother…” He clamped down, not finishing the sentence.

“My mother what? Is she okay?”

“She’s fine.”

“She told me she had a pacemaker put in.”

“No big deal.” But his short, abrupt phrasing said otherwise.
 

“Is she going to be okay?”

He sighed, a long wheezing exhale. “I hope so.” And that said everything. Her father didn’t like talking about anything painful. If he couldn’t fight a battle, wage a war, engage the enemy, he felt helpless. He didn’t like being helpless.
 

Neither did she.

“I’m sorry I said your idea was unethical.”

Another long pause. “I’m sorry I impugned your strength of character.”

“Tell me what’s going on with Mom. I care too, you know.”

He did, haltingly. It sounded like her mother had had a series of small heart attacks three months ago. Darcy clamped down on her desire to scream,
Why didn’t you
tell
me?
because it wouldn’t do any good. The good news was, her mother was recovering, albeit slowly, and it didn’t look like she’d need extensive surgery. Her father sounded old and tired. And helpless.
 

Darcy got off the phone in a morose mood and padded off to the bathroom to brush her teeth. She tried Will’s brand tonight, out of curiosity. It had aloe and xylitol and sounded like something you’d slather on a burn. Tasted like it too. She spat it out into the sink and went back to her own brand.
 

She peeked out the door that faced the living room. Will was frowning over his computer on the couch, his face lit only by the laptop screen, worry lines creasing his forehead and his mouth pursed in concentration. Would he come to bed tonight?

~*~

Will was having trouble concentrating. Or rather, the work was coming together just fine, taking on texture and life in his head, until he heard Darcy moving around in the bathroom. Then it all became flat lines on an LCD screen. He heard the water running, heard her shut the spigot off, heard her spit.
 

A sliver of light spilled onto the living room floor from the bathroom doorway, open the merest crack. Now he could see as well as hear Darcy’s movements. See her shadow pass through the light, glimpse her long bare legs, the drape of cloth, a sway of dark hair across her back. Flashes of images, but enough to drive him crazy.
 

He turned back to the computer. Back to work. Shut everything else out. There was no provocative, impossible woman in his bathroom right now. She had not licked her lips unconsciously as he’d moved toward her earlier tonight, welcoming his intrusion.
 

She’d probably welcome him now.
 

The lines on the screen were abstract pastiches, the curves echoes of her enticing breast, ass, and thighs.
 

He nearly set his computer aside to get up and go in there.
 

No. It would be wrong. Entirely wrong. That moment earlier today was the prime example. He wasn’t himself. She threw him off-kilter. Being around her was bad for him. He might well have to pull an all-nighter to get through this proposal anyway, but even if he didn’t, there was no way he was stepping foot in that bedroom tonight. He’d sleep on the couch. Or the floor. Or the bathtub. But never the bed.
 

He had to stay away. He had a feeling she wouldn’t say no to him tonight. And that would make this all even messier.

~*~

The pillow was all wrong. Lumpy. Cold. It was supposed to be warm and yielding and human and… Dammit.
 

She sat up and punched the pillow. This wasn’t working. She had the entire king-size bed to herself, which was great. It seemed Will had decided to spend the night in the living room. No fights over who got to sleep where after all. He’d preemptively given her the bedroom. She should be delighted.
 

She punched the pillow again and lay back down.
 

It wasn’t the bed’s fault. It was still lovely, molding to her body like a gentle caress. It wasn’t the sheets, which were still soft and smooth. It was her. After just three nights, she was no longer used to sleeping alone. Even with a grumpy bedmate, it had somehow felt better. Easier to fall asleep. Easier to feel safe.
 

She rolled over. Was he still awake? Was he brooding, or had he forgotten about her, wrapped up in his on-screen squiggles and boxes?
 

She rolled over the other way, facing the empty space that normally contained an infuriatingly sexy, superficially cool, but secretly intense, utterly fascinating man.

She slid across the bed. Might as well sleep in his spot. Hell, she’d claim the whole bed. Maybe if she acted like the asshole he thought her, she’d sleep the sleep of the righteously assholic.

It didn’t work.

Grabbing the pillow, she laid it across her face, pressing it on her eyelids, her cheeks, and her nose. It smelled like him: sage and wood chips and clean, musky maleness. She inhaled, imprinting the scent in her brain. It soothed somehow, helping her calm her restless thoughts.
 

That was how she finally fell asleep. On her side, with her head on the Will-imbued pillow, her nostrils close enough to catch the lingering wisps of comforting scent. She hugged a second pillow close, a stand-in for a human comfort object.

~*~

Around two a.m., Will stretched and closed his computer, setting it down on Darcy’s new couch. He fetched Darcy’s sleeping bag from the closet and settled back on his couch to sleep.
 

The clock ticked in the kitchen. Bright moonlight shone through the sliding glass door and the kitchen skylight. The fixtures gleamed loudly. Darcy’s couch smelled like new fabric, tickling his nose. Darcy’s elliptical loomed like a monster from the id in the corner, all sharp edges and gleaming rat-in-a-maze scientific precision.
 

Will lay awake, tensing at the quiet cacophony surrounding him. Darcy was everywhere. If she ever agreed to leave, she’d still be imprinted in the furniture, the walls, even the floors. And especially the bed.
 

He extracted himself from the cloyingly hot sleeping bag and padded across the room. First to the kitchen for something to drink. Then to the bedroom. To sleep. Because it was his bed. Because she was just a woman. Because he could maintain his distance, even in the same bed.
 

He still had that much self-control, didn’t he?
 

When he opened the bedroom door, Darcy murmured something.
 

“Darcy?” His voice was a whisper.

She grunted, almost words. Not words. She was asleep.

He squinted into the dark.
 

The aggravating woman was sprawled across the entire bed. Her head rested on his pillow, but her body lay in a diagonal, leaving no room for him. He’d have to wake her or try to somehow reposition her to get her back to her side of the bed.
 

When had one side become hers?
 

As he watched, Darcy rolled over, burying her face in the pillow, and uttered a long, low moan. She reached out, frantic, grabbed the other pillow, and pulled it close. Hugging it to herself. Then she murmured softly, still entirely incoherent, and settled back down.

Will backed out of the room and closed the door. She looked like she needed his bed tonight more than he did.

Chapter Eighteen

Darcy woke, flailing.
 

She’d been having a chaotic dream, streams of a neon-green liquid leaking from a row of vials, steaming on contact with the air, sending a blue-green tinted cloud swirling around the room, which was the living room in the condo but was also somehow the wood-paneled conference room at Golden Organics headquarters.
 

The massive cloud pulsed with frightening life and reached its swirling fingerlike tendrils across the room, seeking and then finding its target and diving down, down, down.
 

Right onto Will, who was sleeping soundly on his couch, which was somehow in the center of the room and was shaped like a canoe, with a rough wood hull and even oars sticking up from the bow. The cloud circled over his head, then settled on his chest, coalescing into a shape like a cobra about to strike. Will opened his mouth, breathing deep; sound asleep. The toxic blue-green cloud slithered into his mouth.
 

Darcy ran toward him, but the cloud was thick fog, like wading through hip-deep water, slowing her down. She ran in slow motion, kicking up pellets of murky sand and bits of shells as Will sat up, his eyes dark, opaque pools. His skin was mottled with green and violet. In horror, Darcy looked down at her hands. Inky blackness was streaming from the palms of her hands. She shook them violently, wiped them on her pants, but the tarry blackness smeared and smeared and never wiped clean, and she writhed, trying to get it off and—

She thrashed, hit herself, and woke up to find herself tangled in the sheets, pretzeled, lying sideways on the bed. She was sweating, and her heart was racing.
 

Unwrapping herself from the sheet octopus, she struggled up out of bed, feeling like she was fighting her way up from the bottom of a vast ocean, battling gravity and a vacuum that threatened to suck her back in.

She walked softly through the condo to the kitchen, glancing over toward the couches. Will was fast asleep, his hand tucked under his head, his mouth slightly open, her sleeping bag half covering his long, lean body. She shivered at the reminder of her dream, half expecting green ooze and toxic fog. But the air was clear and clean, smelling faintly of eucalyptus.
 

Staring into the fridge, blinking at the tiny light it cast, she realized she had to call Phillip. Her ex-boyfriend, the only man she’d lived with. All of three months, but still. She glanced at the wall clock. It was five a.m., which meant it was eight a.m. in New York. He’d be getting ready for work. Out the door at eight thirty, probably.
 

She took her glass of warm milk with a splash of vanilla back to the bedroom and set it down carefully on a napkin on the nightstand, feeling oddly tender toward Will’s furniture. Then she grabbed her cell phone, put in her earbuds, and called the East Coast.

He picked up on the first ring. She’d hoped he wouldn’t.
 

“Hello?”
 

“Hi. It’s Darcy.”

Silence.
 

“Phillip, I know you’re there.”

“Why did you call? I was doing fine without you.”

She sighed. “I’m not going to do anything to you.”

“Of course you aren’t. You didn’t do anything to me when we were together. I never saw you. Your boss had far more of your attention than me.”