by Lucy Monroe
She started skimming messages and clicked on one that had a blind sender and recipient. Odd. It seemed like excessive security to hide both, even on sensitive material related to a new product's launch. It took her two passes over the e-mail be-fore she realized why it had been sent the way it had.
It said: Information received, but need exact date of product launch. Terms negotiable.
If it hadn't said "terms negotiable" she would not have wondered at the request. However, those two words implied something very different from one department making a request of another. The truth was, with the sender hidden, she had no way of knowing whether the e-mail had been sent, inter-office or from the outside. She had a strong hunch it had been from an outside source—whoever was buying the corporate spy's information.
There really was a corporate spy at Kline Tech and that person was a member of the marketing department.
She couldn't ignore this piece of evidence. Not after both Sandy's and Marcus's comments about how much sensitive information had been leaked over the last few months.
Taking a deep breath, she tried to get a grip on her emotions. It wasn't working. She felt hot all over and clammy at the same time. Her stomach roiled and her cubicle walls seemed to close in around her. She was literally sick with fear.
Someone in the marketing department was selling corporate secrets, and if that information came out, she would be the first suspect. At least she would be after Marcus found out. He'd have no choice but to tell Mr. Kline about her past. His personal integrity would not allow him to keep the information to himself, even if she had slept with him.
Oh, Lord. It was more a prayer than a curse, a desperate plea for mercy and clemency for her past sins.
Marcus would never believe that she wasn't guilty, and because of that, neither would Mr. Kline. Her whole life was going to crash around her ears and she wasn't the only one who would pay the price.
She'd managed to give Jenny a chance at life, but what kind of life? The sister of a criminal? And Aaron? What child wanted to grow up knowing his mother had sold corporate secrets in a moment of weakness and desperation and had lost her job less than two years later for the same crime?
Her innocence would not matter. The weakness wouldn't matter nor would the desperation when her son wanted to look at her with respect and all he felt was disgust, or worse, pity.
Both Jenny and Aaron deserved so much better than that and she had no way of giving it to them. She could not give them a pristine past. She could not give them a secure future. Would this one act come back to haunt her forever?
She contemplated a future of lost jobs and moving from place to place, trying to hide from events that could never be erased. Right now, the only people who knew the horror in her past were Alex and Marcus. Once Marcus told Mr. Kline, that would change. Gossip would carry her misdeeds throughout the high-tech community and perhaps beyond.
Too many engineers moved from one company to another across the country for her to move away and be secure in the secrecy of her past.
She shook as she printed off the message and then moved it into a subdirectory for more study later.
She had to tell Mr. Kline about the e-mail. She supposed she should go to Jack first, but she instinc-tively felt that in cases like this, the fewer people who knew the better. Besides, if Mr. Kline decided to fire her, she could always hope he would refrain from telling anyone why. He couldn't prosecute. Not without proof, and there couldn't be any proof, because she hadn't done it.
Her stomach twisted in a tighter knot and she clicked into the subdirectory where she'd just moved the devastating e-mail. She had to delete it.
she would look even more guilty. She clicked on it, hit shift delete, then clicked "okay" when the computer prompt asked her if she wanted to permanently remove the message from her hard drive.
She folded the printed message into a small square and shoved it into her purse.
She had to have something to show Mr. Kline when she told him. She picked up the phone and dialed his secretary's number before she could lose her nerve. If she let herself think about it, she wouldn't tell him at all. Just look how she'd behaved about Aaron with Marcus. He'd been back in her life for a week and she still hadn't told him he had a son.
The professional tones of Mr. Kline's personal assistant came over the line. "Allison here."
"Allison, this is Veronica Richards in marketing. I'd like to speak to Mr. Kline, if I might."
"I'm sorry. Mr. Kline flew out of town for a meeting with IBM this morning. He won't be back until Monday."
"Could you… could you put me on his calendar for Monday, then?"
"Is this urgent, Ms. Richards? Mr. Kline is often very busy the first day back from a business trip."
But he had an open-door policy, for which Veronica was presently very grateful. She had no desire to explain to Allison what she needed to discuss with Mr. Kline.
"I can wait until Tuesday, if that's more convenient."
"Axe you sure it isn't something you can discuss with your immediate supervisor?" Veronica had always sensed Allison wasn't as comfortable with her boss's open-door policy as he was, and now she had proof.
"Yes, I'm sure. What time on Tuesday is best for Mr. Kline?" she asked, with as much professional assertiveness as she could muster with her insides feeling like taffy that someone was twisting into shape.
Allison named a time and Veronica thanked her before hanging up. Five days of thinking about the revelations she would have to tell Mr. Kline lay ahead of her in seemingly unending torment.
Closing the file on Kevin Collins, an engineer on the design team, Marcus stood and stretched. He'd been working his way through the suspect files since returning from his late lunch two hours ago. Clasping his hands above his head he twisted from side to side, working the tension out of the well-developed muscles of his shoulders and back.
He could really use a swim right now. The apartment complex Kline had set him up in had an indoor pool on the basement level. He'd have to make use of it as soon as he got home that night. Inactivity didn't sit well with him.
He briefly fantasized about talking Ronnie into joining him but gave up the thoughts as beyond his imagination. He'd give a month's salary to see her in a swimsuit but doubted he ever would. She had some sort of aversion to water. He wondered now if it had something to do with her parents dying in a boating accident.
Letting his hands fall to his sides, his attention reverted to the closed file in the center of his desk.
Kevin Collins. The engineer had worked at four different high-tech firms in the last five years. He'd had sufficient opportunity to make contacts for selling corporate secrets, not to mention live the classic lifestyle of a spy—making quick and dirty deals and then moving on. To cast him under suspicion further, he had an address in a pretty upscale neighborhood ofSeattle considering he was a single man living on an engineer's salary.
Marcus now had three piles in his suspect list. The employee files he hadn't worked through yet, the ones that showed almost no promise and the smallest stack—those that had discrepancies he planned to look into further. He moved the Collins file to that pile.
Restless, he went for another cup of bitter coffee from the employee pot. It was worse than the last one and he ended up wincing and tossing it after only one sip.
Ambling back toward his cubicle, he gave in to the urge to peek in on Ronnie.
He'd decided to avoid her for the time being, but what his mind had decided hadn't made an appreciable impact on his body, and his body was stopped dead center in the opening to her office, his eyes locked on her.
He savored the ability to simply watch her before she became aware of his presence. It was so much more satisfying than staring at the one picture he had of her, a shot taken in a restaurant on one of their dates. He'd tried to throw the thing away no less than three times, before finally giving up and leaving it on the stand by his bed.
He'd told himself it w
ould be a constant reminder never to let a woman make such a blasted fool of him again. It was a reminder of something all right, but not necessarily that.
Right now his personal torment was working on some sort of report, her focus split between the computer screen in front of her and a thickly bound document lying to the left of her monitor on the desk. With small, birdlike movements, she would turn to look at the papers for several seconds before her hands would let loose in a flurry of typing.
Watching her fingers move with such quick precision brought back almost painful memories of the way they used to move across his flesh. She had very talented fingers. She had gone from virginal hesitation to wanton willingness in her touching their first week together as lovers.
He expelled a frustrated breath as his body responded to the memories with very current need.
She must have heard him because she tensed and whipped around in her chair to stare up at him with wary eyes.
"Marcus." Lines of strain bracketed her mouth and her eyes looked haunted.
He frowned at her reaction. "Stop looking at me like that. I'm not exactly Jack the Ripper looking for his next victim."
Her eyes widened and then her mouth firmed into that prissy line that drove him straight up the wall. "No, he murdered his victims. Your game is blackmail, not that I intend to be a victim."
His jaw clenched. She knew just how to get to him.
"I'm not interested in blackmail," he bit out.
She didn't look impressed with his assurance. "Right."
He closed the distance between them until he was close enough to see the rainwater shades in her gray eyes.
"Right, When you come to my bed again, Ronnie, it's going to be because you can't damn well stay away, not because I've blackmailed you into it."
He spoke quietly, having no desire to share the intimacies of his relationship with Ronnie with the occupants of nearby cubicles.
Her face set with a mulish expression he recognized well from the early days of their dating. "I'm not coming back to your bed voluntarily or otherwise, Marcus Danvers, so you can just get that idea right out of your head."
To his knowledge, she'd never worked in a library, but she had the perfect intonation and prissy outlook to fit the caricature of an old-fashioned librarian. And right now, more than anything, including common sense, he just wanted to wipe that smug look of certainty right off her tiny features.
He leaned down and gripped the armrests on either side of her office chair. She leaned back against the black upholstery, but he just moved in closer until their faces were centimeters apart.
"You will, baby, you will, but I repeat, it won't be under the duress of blackmail. I won't give you that face-saving out. You'll have to admit you want me."
Man, he wanted to kiss her. Her tantalizing lips were so close and yet he knew this was the last place he could give in to his craving for her. She deserved better than to have her coworkers gossiping behind her back about the relationship between her and the new consultant. Steeling his resolve, he released the arms of her chair and moved away.
She swallowed, her mouth working and then amazingly, relief flickered briefly in her eyes,
"So, our past stays just between us," she said, ignoring his assertions about making love.
He tensed, wishing he could promise her that, but knowing he couldn't. Not if she was guilty of corporate espionage.
"I won't say anything as long as there's no reason to do so," he said, by way of a compromise.
She drew herself up stiffly in the chair and asked in an almost whisper, "What would constitute a reason to do so?"
"If I thought you were back to your old tricks."
"One fall from grace in a moment of desperation does not constitute old tricks, Marcus." Her voice was taut, her expression frozen but for the pain in her eyes.
He shrugged, wanting to look a lot more casual than he felt. "Then you have nothing to worry about."
He really wanted to believe that. He'd come to her cubicle feeling better than he had in days now that he had a solid suspect not named Veronica Richards. Her actions since his arrival could be explained if she was nervous about his messing up her barely together life by dredging up past mistakes.
Or she could be feeling guilty about present sins and scared to death of being caught.
She sucked her lower lip into her mouth and nibbled on it. "What if youthought I was guilty of doing the same thing again, but I wasn't? What if it looked like I was?"
He felt as if all the air had suddenly been sucked out of his near vicinity.
"The same thing?" he croaked, realizing cool and casual had just gone out the window. "You mean corporate espionage?"
She jerked in reaction to the words, her face going pale. "Yes. That's… that's what I mean."
It took all of his experience as a corporate investigator to maintain an impassive expression when all he wanted to do was shake her and demand a reason for her questions. A reason he could live with.
"I'd make sure I was right before I said anything."
Hell, wasn't that what he was doing, what he'd been doing since their first shock-to-his-toes encounter? He couldn't help feeling like a fool, though, wondering if he was just wasting his time and Kline's money. Because she sure acted like a woman racked with guilt and fear of being caught.
He turned away, deeply regretting the impulse to come and talk to her. He'd felt so good, damn it.
She grabbed the fabric of his shirt. "Wait."
He spun around to face her, bothered by the desperate tone of her voice. "What?"
She had stood up and faced him with tense expectancy. "What would you do to make sure I was guilty? You're not exactly a corporate investigator."
Her words were so ironic he couldn't suppress a wry smile. "Then I guess I'd just have to go with my instincts in gathering information."
Her hands clenched at her sides.
"So, hypothetically speaking, if there was a corporate spy here at Kline Tech, what would your instincts tell you to do in order to figure out who it is?" she pressed, depressing the bejeebes out of him.
Did she know he was an investigator? Was this all an elaborate plot to find out his method of ferreting out the guilty party?
He frowned down at her. "I'm not interested in answering hypothetical questions."
He sounded mean and curt and wasn't surprised when she took a hasty step backward.
She nodded jerkily. "Of course. I was just curious, is all."
Not likely.
"Did you have a good lunch with Jack?" she asked, in an obvious bid to change the subject.
"It was informative." The other man had been subtle in his desire to know what direction Kline planned to go with expansion, and Marcus had deftly parried his questions while digging for his own information.
He'd learned that Jack thought Kline Technology should take a much more aggressive stance in the market and diversification. That hadn't surprised him. Whathad surprised him was the information that Ronnienever dated.
Jack had made the comment that he thought she was too wrapped up in her role as a single parent. Marcus hadn't thought to apply that term to a woman who had gained custody of her teenage sister after the death of their parents, but he realized now that it was apt. Her role as a single parent hadn't stopped her dating him, he thought with satisfaction.
But it had torn their relationship apart when she betrayed their company to come up with the money she needed to take her sister toEurope for medical treatment.
Ronnie smoothed an invisible wrinkle from her skirt, drawing his attention to the shapely legs beneath. "Good. I'm sure you enjoyed the drive there and back withSandy . She can be very entertaining."
The blonde had been more than entertaining; she'd been transparent. "She wants to know what Kline Tech's future holds. I told her I wasn't a crystal ball."
Ronnie reclaimed her chair and positioned herself in front of the computer monitor again. "I'm sure that's notall she
wanted."
No.Sandy had been interested in him, too. She'd made that clear enough.She wouldn't make any sweeping statements about never darkening the door of his bedroom. And suddenly the fact that the brassy blonde wanted him and Ronnie didn't just made him mad. He'd beencelibate and all she could talk about was how she wasnever going to bed with him again.
"I don't think she'd bring me to an aching erection and leave me hanging, if that's what you're implying."
One second Ronnie had been sitting, impossibly straight in her office chair, and the next she was five feet, four inches of wounded and raging femininity in his face. "You're so crude! Youknow why I left the other night. I wasn't willing to sell my body for your silence. And it didn't take that long for you to forget about me, did it? Not with you flirting like Casanova withSandy andgetting to know her better this afternoon."