He had his feet braced wide, made it seem very casual, but she knew a test when she heard one.
Tension crept into her bloodstream, making the chair she was using feel stiff and uncomfortable. She stood up. "Are you questioning my integrity? Because I'm insulted if you are." She reached for a heavy computer binder and crushed the folder of invoices under it. "My ethics are rock-solid. They have to be, in this profession."
"The minute Lyle comes into the conversation, you pucker up like a constipated librarian."
"Lovely image." She leafed through the binder, searching for the right dates, reminded herself she wasn't going to work on this in front of Sterling, and closed it.
"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 bags 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.