"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.