She was so thrown by Sterling still being here, she couldn't so much as force a smile, let alone form a response to break the silence.
"Finances aren't my strength." Sterling's boot made a scraping sound as he shifted to stand in front of his father, addressing the crowd and drawing their attention. "So I'm looking forward to having Paige here."
"I'll bet you are," someone muttered to the left, and the crowd's tension snapped into a ripple of muted snickers.
~ * ~
The look of acute betrayal that Paige sent Sterling hit like a punch in the throat.
"You'll appreciate her presence, too," he said, voice ringing with displeasure, "since she'll be signing your paychecks." He gave the crowd a second to absorb that. "We'll both be in your department sometime in the next hour to answer any questions. Meanwhile, Mom is ready to serve the cake."
He started to call Paige up, but she was bolting, shoulders hunched, head down, briefcase banging against her thigh.
Ah, the first day of work. Always a delightfully low set point from which things could only improve.
He hoped.
He took a step to follow her, but his father clamped a heavy hand on his shoulder and used him as a brace to step off the raised pallet.
"I told you there'd be talk with both of you here," he muttered in Sterling's ear.
And his partner, Patty, had told him when he called to ask her to start the job in Texas without him, that he'd regret it.
It was too early to let anyone start the I-told-you-so's.
His mother approached, a big cake-knife held in front of her. "You didn't read all of it, Walt."
His father snorted. "You made it sound like I was handing it over to him."
"Well, what are you going to do once you're Mayor? Sterling-"
"-can only stay a few weeks," Sterling reminded her.
"Exactly," his father said.
In the row of windows along the elevated ceiling, Sterling saw the light come on in Grady's office, behind the closed blinds.
The tension eased in him. He'd feared she was hightailing, but she was staying. Good.
If he had to be here, so did she, damn it. This was all her fault.
"Come have the first piece of cake," his mother ordered Sterling, smiling her company smile at the employees milling around the giant sheet cake she'd commissioned within seconds of Sterling's stating he would temporarily work at the factory. As his mother moved to stand behind the cartons of bed components that formed the table, she said, "You'll want some of these roses, won't you Sterling?"
Patty was right. Sticking around meant putting all the wrong ideas into his mother's head. He really wished he could have flown out as scheduled, but he could see as clearly as Paige did that the factory was dying from the top down.
If the economy had been killing it, he might have let nature take its course, but better management was what it was crying out for. As much as he hated to acknowledge Roy Furnishings as his ‘heritage,' he would hate to carry the blame if it folded. Half the town depended on their employment here. His conscience wouldn't let him turn his back.
As a compromise, he had talked his father into letting him professionally assess the factory, offer a report the same as he would on any production facility in need of a ten year plan. He also promised to head hunt a new sales manager for Grady's role and an operations manager to run the place after his father was elected.
Exit strategies were paramount when cutting a deal like this.
But he hadn't believed his father when he had claimed there would be talk. Seriously? That was fifteen years ago.
He was still having trouble seeing himself as being in the wrong with Paige, but if that remark earlier was an example of the harassment she'd been fielding over the years, he couldn't blame her for hating him.
"Sterling."
"Hmm?"
"The corner?" his mother prompted.
"Stand in it?"
She pointed at the cake, exasperated.
"Oh, yes, that's fine. Two please. One for Paige." He needed to smooth over their bad start.
His mother's smile faltered. "If she's capable of auditing the books, I'm sure she's capable of fetching her own piece of cake." She handed him a filled plate and a plastic fork.
"Never mind." Sterling picked up a second fork. "We'll share."
~ * ~
"Happy Birthday."
Paige looked up from her father's desk to find Sterling had climbed the stairs to the upper floor with a square of cake so perfect it raised the real estate value of her father's office.
She ducked her head to hide the dampness in her eyes and tucked her father's scratchy wool cardigan into a drawer, resisting the urge to hug it. She was never going to forgive her father for setting her up like this, but he was still her emotional harbor.
"Are you all right?"
She ignored him and continued her attempt to cleanse by disposing of her father's old cigarette butts, ashtray and all, into the trashcan on the floor beside the desk. It landed with a loud thunk. After the ashtray went a half-empty package of cigarettes and a rotting can of vegetable juice.
Hadn't anyone entered this room at all since his heart attack? Hadn't they noticed it smelled like he had died in here?
"If I put this on the desk, is it going into the garbage, too?" Sterling asked.
She collected all the pens, the stapler and the staple puller and tossed them into the drawer. The photo of Rosie went into the next drawer down, so she would remember to take it with her when she grabbed her purse on her way home, along with the faded photo of her own wedding and the decade-old photo of a beaming Lyle holding Zack after her nephew had lost his first tooth.
"Hi, I'm Sterling Roy. Apparently we're going to be working together." He came forward, hand extended.
She had enough control of her emotions to look up at him now, glanced at his hand, shifted her gaze to the plate in his other hand, thought about how satisfying it would be to smoosh that cake into his maroon-colored tie, but she was all the way on this side of the desk and had a lot of fumigating ahead of her. Number one item on the list being to remove this louse because she sure as heck didn't want to work with him, no matter how much he was looking forward to having her here.
Why, oh why did she have to be so affected by him? These stupid digs wouldn't have the power to humiliate her if she could quit flashing back to this pathetic desire to be noticed by Sterling Roy.
"Come on, Paige," he said, sounding patient but insistent, hand dropping.
She stacked some manila files and squared them against the desktop with a muted ripple of thumps. "I thought you were leaving."
"I told you, change of plans. It's only a few weeks."
Outside the office, voices carried from below as people began coming back to their desks. He reached backward to press her door closed.
She set the files aside. Where did he get the ability to project authority like that? Sure, the power suit was an amplifier of confidence and there'd been some superb engineering on the side of nature, but she'd put on her dark plum suit and still-
It didn't matter. She didn't want to think about how either of them looked.
"You didn't tell me about any change of plans. What do you mean it's only a few weeks? Aren't you exercising the option clause? Taking over?"
"No. I'm just helping out. Consulting. I left you a message, explaining."
She opened the bottom drawer again and dug her cell from her purse. Using her thumb, she checked and saw two texts from Anthony, both annoying conditions to her father using the condo in Palm Springs, and one from Britta that she had yet to return.
"Nothing," she said.
"Not there. Your dad's place."
"Oh. I never listen to the machine. It's downstairs and usually for Lyle."
"Give me the number for that, then." He nodded at her cell.
She hugged it to her chest. "Why?"
"Because I might have another message for you while we're working together."
Giving him her number would be a lot like agreeing to work together. "I'm extremely selective about who I give this number to."
"You're extremely selective about a lot of things, aren't you?" The look he gave her had male consideration written all over it and made her insides flip-flop.
She dropped her phone into her purse and shoved the drawer shut.
"Paige-" he began.
She turned to face the low, wide shelf over the filing cabinet beneath the window. It was cluttered with knobs and drawer-fronts, tins of wood-stain and stacks of brochures.
"What am I supposed to do with all of this?"
She heard Sterling move toward her and glanced over her shoulder, instantly alarmed as he ventured close. It was silly. She so needed to get a grip.
He set the cake on the desk and snagged a cardboard box from the top of the tall filing cabinet behind the door. The box already had a few broken sticks of doweling in it.
"Put everything in this."
She took the box and set it on the seat of the chair.
"You might want to eat before you get your hands dirty, though." He hitched his thigh onto the corner of the desk, nudged the cake toward her, fanned out two forks.