Not in Her Wildest Dreams

by Dani Collins

  “Yet I suddenly get the feeling we’re done.” He watched her flop the petty cash records face down onto the computer binder. “Or is that my imagination? I thought you had a lot of work to do?”

  She began to see she’d set herself up. If she kept working, he wanted to talk about it. If she packed up for the night, she was available.

  But really, how available could she make herself while hiding things from him?

  “We’re not getting much done here. I’ll work at home.” And maybe corner her brother about these invoices, if he wasn’t at the bar.

  Bending as much to hide her hot face as to search beneath her desk, she snagged the empty box she used to cart files back and forth to her father’s house, and brought it to the desktop.

  Sterling didn’t say anything and she didn’t look at him as she began loading the box with the incriminating files, but she could feel emotions radiating off him: confusion, anger, frustration. She deserved all of it for the mixed signals she was sending, but she was frustrated too. She didn’t want her loyalty divided. It was so unfair.

  Thunk went the binders and touch me whispered her skin. Thunk went a stack of files and please wept her trembling limbs.

  It was a struggle to lift the full box, then not, as it climbed from her arms. Sterling was taking it.

  She grasped it back, felt the rough edge of cardboard dig into her palm. She jerked and he tugged, she fought and he resisted.

  The side of the box threatened to split in the same way her priorities were suffering from the yank and wrench in opposing directions. Tears of extreme aggravation rose in a blinding sting.

  “What are you doing?” she near wailed.

  “Fine, take it then. You feminists! Can’t even let a man carry a box for you.”

  The weight of it came into her arms and she slid it onto the desktop, accidentally knocking the phone off the other side.

  The clatter made her jump, while an unreasonable wave of despair rolled over her. “I don’t know what to do!”

  He stood in front of her, all wide chest and strong arms and steady feet.

  She knocked her hip into the side of the desk, leaned there, hand to brow as she hung her head, her hair tickling her knuckles. “I have to do this audit, Sterling. There’s no getting around it. But I can’t work with you in here because...” She felt the corners of her mouth pulling down. “I don’t want to feel like this.”

  “You think I do?”

  She supposed she deserved that.

  “Come home with me,” he demanded.

  If she hadn’t already had a taste, if she hadn’t been sure her brother would turn out to be innocent, if she hadn’t had at least a little of her father in her, she probably could have resisted. As it was, her head fell back and she glared helplessly at him. Who offered an alcoholic a drink?

  Another alcoholic, maybe, who wanted company in his own fallibility.

  He touched her arm, gently urging her to come to him.

  Her body flowed forward.

  He tangled his fingers in her hair and made a growling sound of satisfaction as he started to tilt her head back for his kiss.

  She touched his jaw, stopping him. “Can we wait until later so no one knows?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  No more excuses. Today she would do the research she had put off for three days.

  Right after she made herself a cup of tea.

  Oh, she was hopeless, she decided, as she moved around her father’s kitchen, starting the kettle, glancing through the window toward Sterling’s house where smoke was not coming from his chimney.

  He was at the factory, which was a good thing. She had calls to make and she didn’t want to be interrupted.

  Still, a matinee would be nice.

  Nice. What she had with Sterling wasn’t ‘nice.’ It was torrid, greedy, and intensely focused on mutual physical pleasure.

  “Don’t watch me,” she’d said last night.

  “I want to,” he’d told her, and hadn’t let her twist or shift or try to vary the rhythm. He had held her still for long, easy strokes and within minutes she’d been cresting the hill, rolling over it with a soft cry of surrender.

  “How do you do that?” she’d asked afterward, panting. “I don’t usually get there without helping myself.”

  “Really?” With a hug and a roll, he had had her astride him. “Show me.”

  She had, with her eyes closed, riding his hips, feeling his fingers brush against hers as he learned. “Here? Or here?”

  The button on the kettle popped, snapping her out of her trance.

  With a shiver and a sigh, she poured and took the steaming mug to the dining room table where her briefcase sat open, cordless telephone beside it.

  Instead of sitting, she went to the front window, checked for the delivery truck. No mattress, but it was early yet. Waiting for it was a convenient excuse to stay home, giving her all the time in the world to find out what her brother was purchasing on company accounts.

  She looked back at the table, her briefcase, the telephone.

  She didn’t want to know.

  ~ * ~

  An hour later, she had spoken to two mechanics in Seattle, the maintenance engineer at one of her client operations, and her boss back in Seattle. She knew more than she wanted to. Lyle was definitely skimming.

  The big question was, did her father know about it?

  She shied from examining the implications if he had.

  A key in the lock on the front door had her scrambling to stack the papers back into her briefcase, hands shaking, but no one came up the stairs. Instead, the door banged and footsteps stomped down the stairs, then scuffed across the lino of the downstairs hall and opened the door to Lyle’s suite.

  “Lyle?” she called, running to the top of the stairs. He was supposed to be at work.

  “It’s me, Auntie Paige.” Zack came to the bottom of the stairs.

  He looked just like Lyle when Lyle had fathered him, barely three years older than Zack was now. And like Lyle and her father, Zack’s six-foot frame probably wouldn’t gain any significant weight until he hit thirty. He was thinking ahead, though, buying jeans that would fit when he did. They rode low on his narrow hips and were frayed where they scuffed against the ground. His backpack looked full enough to make an attempt on Everest.

  “Why aren’t you at work?” he asked.

  She came down the stairs, a defense against his climbing them and seeing for himself. “I’m waiting for my mattress. Why aren’t you at school?”

  “I forgot a text book when I was here on the weekend.” He moved into Lyle’s suite and she followed as far as the door, then watched him move around the two bedroom bachelor pad, comfortable in his second home among the big boy toys of wide screen television and free weights.

  Kids didn’t get as familiar with their weekend-parents’ digs when it was a jail cell.

  “Do you need help finding it?” she asked Zack, as he opened the refrigerator.

  “No, it’s right there.” He pointed with his elbow toward the table as he grabbed a box of pizza from the fridge, stuffed a piece in his mouth, then left it hanging out while he picked up the math text. With his backpack on the counter, Zack juggled some items in and out, finally tucked everything back inside, then continued eating the pizza.

  “Do you know how old that is?” she asked.

  “Tuesday. I was working when Dad came in for it. Hey, they’re going to let me deliver once I get my license and a car. Dad said he’d get the Chevy running by then.”

  “Egads. I think a drug habit would be cheaper than what it costs to fill the tank on that thing.”

  “Yeah, but I love the way it drives.”

  She raised her brows, and he grinned around his pizza. “Pops let me drive it a few times when he’d been drinking.”

  “Does your mother know?”

  “Dad found out. Told me to stop.” Zack closed the empty pizza box and opened a cupboard, knocking out two empty ba
gs of cookies before coming out with a handful from a third.

  “How is your Mom? I haven’t talked to her in a couple of days.” Paige suffered a twinge of guilt. She ought to be making herself available to her friend, rather than exclusively to Sterling.

  “Bitchy.” Zack slouched against the counter while he fed cookies into his mouth like quarters into a video game. “Worse’n P.M.S. I think she’s pissed with Dad about something.”

  Paige saw a lot of herself in her nephew. He was a solid kid who observed the chaos around him with deep love and equal frustration.

  “Try not to get between them,” she said lamely.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t have a choice, do I? What am I supposed to do? Stop seeing my dad? He’s my dad.”

  I hear you, she wanted to mutter, recollecting her own divided loyalties back when her parents divorced. The present wasn’t any better. That dumbass father of Zack’s was stealing from the company. She’d have to meet with Walter about it. Fun.

  She had sat with Walter last night, after everyone else had gone home. Their meeting on her preliminary audit findings had not gone well, but if she told Sterling about Lyle stealing, he’d flip. No, it had to be Walter.

  “I’d better go or I’ll be late for algebra.”

  “I’d offer you a lift, but I have to wait for my mattress.”

  Upstairs, the phone rang.

  “No prob. I can walk.” Zack hiked his backpack onto his shoulder, stole a soda from the fridge, and waved as she ran up to answer.

  Chapter Twenty

  Sterling called her in to interview a couple of candidates for the Sales Manager position.

  “Why are you so mad? I told you I wasn’t coming in today,” she told him when she had scrambled herself together and made it into the office behind the first interviewee.

  “No, you didn’t,” he said, seriously annoyed as he pointed her toward the small boardroom. “First Dad doesn’t show up, then you. The partners should set an example, don’t you think?”

  “Sterling. I told you I had to stay home today.”

  “When?” he charged.

  “You two are scrapping like an old married couple,” the receptionist muttered.

  “No, we’re not.” Paige scowled at her.

  “Seriously, when?” Sterling demanded. “Because I don’t remem—”

  He caught the significance of the look she sent him as she pulled out a chair.

  “Oh. Yeah, I wasn’t paying attention,” he admitted wolfishly, blue gaze burning like an electrical fire from her chest to her jeans. He mouthed, “What time tonight?”

  She blushed, then gave him a snooty look that was pure tease. “I’ll let you know.”

  They ran through the interviews and damn him, he made it fun. Worse, they were in complete agreement about the prospects. They were actually learning to work well together.

  If it had been anyone else but Lyle, she would have looked forward to talking through the issue with Sterling. Instead, she found herself as frustrated as he was that Walter had gone into Lasser.

  She still wanted to talk to Lyle first anyway.

  When she finally got back to her father’s house, she found a neon green card stuck in the door, telling her how sorry the mattress people were that they’d missed her and that they’d try again next week.

  “Sorry, my Aunt Fanny.” She whipped the card, and the sticky-note she’d left with both her cell and the Roy Furnishings telephone number on it, off the door and went inside.

  She checked to see if Lyle was downstairs. He’d left Roy’s before she could catch him. Of course he wasn’t home. Probably at the bar. Damn it, she needed to talk to him and he’d been impossible to pin down lately.

  Man, she felt low, not talking to Sterling about her suspicions. In so many ways, they were compatible—not just in bed, but in their vision for the factory, their approach to running it. They had the same sense of humor, the same concern for the welfare of the employees. If only she could be sure he would withhold judgment on Lyle. For anyone else, he probably would.

  But maybe Lyle didn’t deserve him to.

  Paige shut down the computer she’d left on, but it did nothing to ease the nausea roiling in her gut. She didn’t know what to do so she did what she always did when she felt this conflicted. She camped on Britta’s stairs until Britta came home.

  “Hey, stranger.” Britta groped for keys out of the turquoise vest she held draped over her arm. “I saw more of you when you were only in town twice a month.”

  “I’ve been busy.” Paige stood up from sitting on the top step, clicked off her phone and brushed her backside. “But I saw Zack today. It made me realize I hadn’t checked in for a few days.”

  “Busy with Sterling?” Britta teased, opening her door. The tiny two-room apartment off her parents’ garage was as haphazard as Britta always kept it, shoes kicked off by the door, homework stacked messily on the small table, a basket of unfolded laundry on the sofa.

  “Why would you say that?” She and Sterling were being so careful.

  “Because that’s what happens when a woman has a guy in her life, right? She stops calling her girlfriends.” Britta shed her office suit in the open door of her bedroom, stepping into a pair of hip-hugging yoga pants and tugging on a loose tank.

  It looked like Britta had put on a couple of pounds, but Paige didn’t say so.

  “Is that why you haven’t called me?” Paige challenged lightly.

  Britta shrugged, grinning cheekily. “Maybe. So are you?” she pressed, crossing to the fridge and pulling out vegetables. “Getting busy with Sterling?”

  “No,” Paige lied, for no good reason except that her nights with Sterling were hers. Private. “But working with him isn’t as horrible as I thought it would be,” she allowed, then hid her blush with a search for the carrot peeler in the cutlery drawer.

  “No?”

  “He apologized for...stuff. Meant it. He’s, well, as annoyingly perfect as he always was, but he knows what he’s doing and genuinely wants the factory to do better.”

  “Hmmph.”

  “And he wants to fire Lyle,” Paige added with a dark look at her friend.

  “I feel his pain,” Britta muttered.

  “You haven’t told him? Anyone? Cam?” Paige asked, thinking back to Zack saying this morning that his mom was bitchy.

  “Are you kidding? We’re too new.” Britta’s shoulders sagged and she lifted a powerless hand. “I was with Lyle once. Two months ago.” Her movements were jerky as she set out a cutting board and knife. “Before Cam even asked me for coffee. I keep thinking he’s the type of guy who’d be able to handle taking on another man’s child, and certainly wouldn’t want to be the reason I gave one up...” Her voice thinned and cracked. “But I don’t think he’d understand either way.”

  “If he doesn’t understand, maybe he’s not the right man.”

  Shadows of deep skepticism came into Britta’s dark eyes.

  “Okay, that’s cliché and we’ll go on the assumption that he is the right man. So he should be okay with this, right? If you tell him?”

  “Oh, yeah, guys love this shit. And even if he did take it in stride, and I kept it...” Britta’s bottom lip quivered. “No one is going to believe this mostly-white baby is his. The whole town’s going to know. Cam would never see it as his.”

  “Oh, God, Brit, you wouldn’t try letting him think it was, would you?”

  “It crossed my mind the other night,” she said with a squish of her mouth to the side and a wrinkle of her nose, “when we were in the back of his cruiser.”

  Paige felt a knee-jerk sense of doom. Britta wasn’t in the same class as the Fogarty men, but she had her own brand of denial she subscribed to. That happy-sad expression on her face, though, told of enough torture that Paige shouldn’t add to it by lecturing. She narrowed her eyes and asked, “Were the lights on?”

  Britta gulped out a giggle around her near-tears. “He said no to the siren.”

>   “Where were you?”

  “The bailey bridge on the road to the reservoir.”

  “Details?”

  “Uh, he serves and protects.”

  They laughed until Britta sobered. Her shoulders slumped. “I have to tell him.”

  “Oh, honey.” Paige moved closer and hugged her, rubbing her back. “I wish I could make this better.”

  “I know. And this is why I didn’t want to tell you,” Britta murmured into her shoulder. “If I don’t talk about it, it’s not real. I don’t have to deal with it, don’t have to think about the future. I just want to be happy for five minutes, ya know?” Britta stepped away, reaching for a tissue.

  “I know.” Paige nodded, thinking about how her five minutes with Sterling would end when things came to light about Lyle and the invoices.

  “We haven’t had an ice-cream and herbal tea orgy in a while,” Paige said.

  Brit shook her head. “Sorry.” She dabbed her mauled tissue beneath her eyes. “Just dinner. I have to go to class. Cam’ll be there.” Her smile was crooked.

  “Mmm.” Paige shouldn’t feel so relieved. She would have given up her night with Sterling if she had to, but she was glad she didn’t have to.

  Eventually she would tell Britta she was seeing him, but she wasn’t ready yet. Not because Brit would judge. She wouldn’t, but it was Paige’s way of holding back the future, of protecting something too private, too tentative, too special to share.

  Special? It wasn’t special.

  She looked at the peeler she held, took up a carrot and leaned on the counter, thinking. What she had with Sterling was sex. Straight, energetic, bone-melting sex. Which didn’t make it special. Special suggested she’d be mourning a loss soon because if something was special, you wanted to hold onto it, and Sterling would not be held.

  Their affair was too temporary to mention.

  Yeah, that’s it, she decided, as Britta nipped herbs from the plants on the windowsill. It was too temporary to mention. She was perfectly justified in holding back from telling her friend.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Paige ducked into the track alongside Mrs. MacPherson’s eight-foot panel fence, where the boughs from her father’s cedar trees sheltered her from the slanting rain. It was dark as sin along here and she’d walked through a spider web more than once this week—shudder—but the needled path stayed mostly dry and kept her midnight visits to Sterling’s bed invisible to prying eyes.