“They were marked as read and then trashed, but it’s not like the system tracks how long someone had the email open so you could try and judge whether or not they’d just tossed it or actually spent time on that page reading.” John’s eyes glazed over and I could tell that he had just found himself a new purpose in life. “That’s something I should look into. I wonder if that’s possible. It could be. Everything is time stamped. We could just write a logarithm to automatically calculate the amount of time an email had been open. There are already time stamps. Then we could create a mathematical statistic based upon how long the average person takes to read something.”
“Hey, John?”
“Huh?”
Yeah. He was already miles away from my office. “Thanks for taking care of that for me.”
“I emailed you an address on the woman. I got it out of her Ebay address book.”
I didn’t actually want to know that. I had officially become a stalker. How did that make me different than Karl Kitson? Was the fine line between a stalker and a friend the basic intentions behind the desire to find someone? If that person didn’t want to be found was I any better than the creepy stalker?
John left my office and I got up and moved toward my windows. It was late in the day. The time hadn’t changed yet, but it was starting to get very dark by the end of the work day. Soon enough it would be dark before five o’clock and the days would seem as though they were nonexistent. Just a sliver of blue sky seen through my windows.
There was no spectacle going on in the parking lot right now. I could not help but wonder if Karl and Trinity realized that their constant showcasing their love affair to both me and Lena made it pretty obvious that they were wasting their entire lives trying to shove their relationship into our faces.
“Dumbasses,” I muttered.
But the fact that they weren’t making out against the hood of my car or dry humping each other right underneath my window suggested that they were out bugging Lena right now. I wondered what she was doing and whether or not their presence was making her miserable. It was a depressing thought.
My phone trilled to let me know that I had an email. I pulled the phone from my pocket and saw that the email was from John. He had sent me the address for Lena’s townhouse. John was right. The condo wasn’t far from my office building.
There was nothing else keeping me here in the office. I could go and at least see if the make-out twins were in her front yard. But there was a niggling doubt in my mind about seeing her again. Lena had made some fairly pointed assumptions about me and my sexual exploits, or interests, or pretty much the whole enchilada. That pissed me off. I didn’t like being pigeonholed.
“Oh. There you are.” Zelda came into my office. “I thought you might have gone down to IT. I saw John leave your office.”
“He brought me the information I asked for,” I told Zelda. I knew she knew that I was interested in finding Lena if only because I wanted to ask her what had happened with her job. But it was still a little weird to tell my administrative assistant that I’d gone stalker on the poor girl.
“And you’re still here?” Zelda sounded dubious. “That seems strange. I would think that you would be heading over to Lena’s house right now to ask her what happened with her job.”
That was one of the best things about Zelda. She didn’t hold anything back. It was also one of the most awkward, which was why I was wondering if I was a total idiot for turning the conversation in a slightly new direction. “Zelda, in your experience as a woman…”
“Oh Lord, you want to talk about my experience as a woman? Honey, please remember that I’m pushing seventy.” Zelda actually looked as though she were about to blow a gasket trying not to laugh.
“Uh huh.” I made a face at her. “I’m fully aware of that. I just wanted your perspective. I don’t need an anatomy lesson.”
“Well, that’s good,” Zelda snorted. “Because if a thirty-year-old man is asking a seventy-year-old woman to explain female anatomy there are bound to be some issues with the generational gap. I have absolutely no notion of what they’re calling things these days.”
“For the love of God!” I moaned. I almost quit right then, but I really wanted to hear what she had to say. “I’m just talking about whether or not women assume that all men are like the partners they’ve had in the past.”
“Oh.” Zelda looked thoughtful. “I suppose things were different when I was a young woman. We just didn’t have experience before marriage so whatever our husbands were like was pretty much what we thought all men were like.”
“What about now?” I prodded. I could not imagine what it would be like to marry in my late teens or early twenties and have that be it for my experience with a woman. For shit’s sake, I could have wound up with Trinity for good!
“Nowadays women have a lot more information available,” Zelda mused. “But I will say that what I’ve gleaned from speaking with my friends and their children about raising girls is that our culture in general makes it seem as though everyone is promiscuous. Sex is like candy that gets handed out on Halloween. People act as though it’s normal to go hopping in and out of bed with anyone.” Zelda clucked with disapproval. “I can’t imagine how that would work for anyone! Your confidence would just be shot! And once you hit your thirties and forties if you’re still indulging in this behavior you must worry constantly about whether or not your lover is comparing you to everyone else on the planet since he’s apparently slept with half of them if you believe what most men say.”
“Thanks, Zelda.” That actually answered a lot of things for me. I guess. Maybe. “I appreciate your willingness to be candid with me.”
“If I can put my two cents in?” Zelda told me suddenly. “I like Lena Schulte. I’ve only spoken with her on the phone, but she seems like a wonderful woman. Goodness knows, she’s quick in the mind and fast on her feet. She likes to laugh. She’s always polite on the phone, which is something when you’re often trading phone calls three or four times a day trying to handle logistics.”
“Three or four times a day?” I felt my mouth pop open. “Why were you talking to her that much?”
“Houses do not close on their own, my dear.” Zelda was clucking again. She was like a disapproving mother hen. I wondered if she was going to start throwing eggs at me next. “That poor woman had contractors and inspectors and permit offices and just about everyone else on the line.”
“I-I didn’t realize.” I suddenly felt like the world’s biggest ass. “I’ve never bought a house before. I thought that the real estate people and the inspectors just signed off on stuff and then I sign off on the loan or in this case the disbursement, and then boom. I have a house.”
“Hardly.” Zelda rolled her eyes in a dramatic fashion reminiscent of a pre-teen drama queen. “You needed insurance on the property, dear. That requires all kinds of inspections and other things that are more than a quick signature. Then there was the driveway renovation. And they found evidence of some mold growing in the basement, which required someone to go in and inspect, do some repair work on a sump pump, and then to repaint.”
“Seriously?”
“Do you ever read your emails?”
The look on her face made me feel as though I were facing down a teacher in school who was questioning my general competency. But instead of feeling bristly like I would have back in school, I was ready to admit that I had managed to make myself intentionally distracted.
“I suppose I usually read my emails,” I allowed. “And this week in particular I’ve been very distracted with the idea of this article in Gateway Business Weekly so I guess I focused more on that.”
“Uh huh.” She sounded far more sarcastic than I ever would have thought possible. “And while you were ignoring everything that had anything to do with Ms. Lena Schulte, Lena Schulte was tirelessly working to get your house deal to close in a record fifteen days. Do you have any concept of how incredible that is in the current market? C
losings are taking something like forty-five to sixty days!”
“Really?” Okay. So it’s probably a testament to both my naiveté about this process and also a really bad example of the obviousness that comes with my socio economic status that I had no idea it was taking people that long to buy a house. “I guess I would’ve expected that if there was a family moving out of the place, but since the house was empty, it was like buying something off the rack at a store.”
Zelda’s sigh wasn’t exactly flattering. “Sometimes I think that I want to turn you over my knee and paddle your ass black and blue.”
“Sometimes I imagine that you do.” I cleared my throat. I could at least be realistic enough with the woman to acknowledge her frustration. “But then you should remember that I sign your paychecks.”
“Oh, honey, you would be signing those even from the hospital in a body cast.” Zelda laughed. Then she shooed me toward the door of my office. “Now would you get? I think it’s time for you to at least go and pay a call on Ms. Schulte. I wouldn’t want you to be showing up at her door at some inappropriate hour like nine o’clock at night.”
“Always worried about propriety,” I told Zelda. “I’ll go and talk with her. But I’m not making any promises about what the results of the conversation will be. The last time we parted ways she was pretty adamant that—well, just adamant that after this deal was done there was no reason for us to associate. Since her part in the deal is over she might be trying to tell me she has no interest in continuing the acquaintance.”
Zelda actually snorted before she walked out my office door. “Tell me, Damion, when has that ever stopped you?”
Hmm. Never.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Lena
I think the point where paranoia reaches distraction is the moment you are simultaneously certain that someone is following you or watching you but are too distracted by some other impending disaster to see them coming until they scare you right out of your shoes.
“Lena.”
I shrieked so loud that the echo of my voice bouncing off of my still damaged front door blasted my ear drums and made them ring. Swinging around as fast as I could get my body moving, I slapped the door with my right shoulder and struck out with my left hand. I connected with something. But that only managed to knock me further off balance.
Falling backwards, I stumbled up against the wrought iron railing that bordered my front stairs. I would have absolutely flipped ass over teakettle if it hadn’t been for a strong male hand snaking out to grab my arm and pull me back up only my feet. Of course, this only served to freak me out that much more. I started blindly swatting with my hands. It felt like my vision was clouded or hazy or something. It was dark. The front light wasn’t on. And there was a weird kind of glare bouncing off the front windows of my unit from the big orange-colored streetlight. It made everything shadowy and scary.
“Lena!”
The tonality of that voice finally penetrated the raw hunted feeling of being surprised at my front door. I knew that voice. It was low and melodic and on a normal night it probably would have made my panties wet.
“Damion?”
“Yes. It’s Damion. I’m sorry. I guess I thought you saw me standing there.”
“Standing there?” I managed to focus on his face. “Standing where?”
“I’ve been waiting for you to get home.”
Well, that was a bit of a surprise. And not necessarily a pleasant one either. I mean, I really didn’t think that Damion struck me as the stalker type. He just didn’t need to stalk a girl. But the idea that he’d been lying in wait for me was disturbing. I put my keys away and stopped trying to unlock my front door. I figured there was no harm in standing out here for a few more minutes. The breeze wasn’t frigid yet and there was no reason to invite trouble into my living room until I at least found out what trouble wanted.
“Okay.” He looked kind of chagrined all of a sudden. It was difficult to catch the nuances of his expression in this freaky lighting. But he was scratching the back of his head as though he were going to pull his hair out piece by piece. “So that sounds a little creepy. I wasn’t stalking you. Well, at least not with some weird nefarious purpose in mind.”
“That’s good.” I guess! Good Lord, he was uncomfortable. I don’t think I’d ever seen him quite like that. It was worse than when his parents left him high and dry or when his brother came to pick up his car with the four flat tires. “I suppose I never really took you for the creepy stalker type. I don’t think you’d need to stalk a woman. I would imagine they pretty much come running when you snap your fingers.”
“Not like you might think,” he muttered. “Look, can we go inside?”
“Not until I’m reasonably certain that you aren’t some weird axe murderer here to spray the bushes with my blood.”
“We’re not that close to Halloween.” He was chuckling to himself. “Although I do like a good scary movie or a crime mystery, I don’t think I have any interest in starring in one. I had my IT guys find you. All right? And that was only because Zelda told me that when she called to talk to you at your office, that you had quit.”
“Is that what they told her?” I could not help the sarcastic snort that slipped out. I wondered who was answering the phones now. Maybe Bob had hired some leggy blonde secretary to wear short skirts and screw up the copy machine. “I think it was a little more dramatic than that.”
“Dramatic?”
“I tattled on Bob to his wife and then walked off the job in the middle of a day after I found out he was never going to sponsor me for my license.” I said it all in one big breath. Somehow the words had gotten easier and easier to shove past my lips the more distance I put between myself and Upscale Realty. “I suppose it was for the best if I was just wasting my time.”
“I’m sorry, Lena.” He actually seemed genuinely sorry.
At least that was what his tone said. I couldn’t see enough detail to tell if his expression was fake or not. It was frustrating. I wanted to go inside. Surely if he was going to make some kind of pervy move on me he would have done it already, right? Or maybe he was just trying to lull me into a sense of security and then he would make his big pervert move once I let him inside? And why was I even wondering these things? This was Damion! He’s not an axe murderer. I didn’t even think that!
I drew my keys out of my purse. “Here. Come inside. We can talk a little more. Hopefully our stalkers are down for the count tonight. I left them at The Cheesecake Factory a little bit ago. They hadn’t even gotten their meals yet. That’s a good sign, right?”
“They followed you to dinner?” He shook his head as he followed me in the front door. Ever the gentleman, he did not leave the foyer until I had already turned on the lights and set my stuff down on the hall table. “That’s really aggravating. They’ve been hanging out in my parking lot on a daily basis.”
“That’s awkward.” I wondered if he had been at work so often that there was nowhere else for them to try their best to get to him. Zelda had made some allusions on the phone to the effect that Damion had been working a lot. “I think you mentioned before that your security company was having to evict them? How is that going? Isn’t there some kind of three strikes you’re out thing? It’s not like they’re in front of your building because they’re customers of a tenant. They’re just loitering.”
“I looked into the loitering thing. Turns out you have to have signs posted for a certain period of time and then it’s still kind of a case by case thing where you can’t actually prosecute people for hanging out there. You can just tell them to go away.” He was gazing around my house as though he were memorizing every detail.
I’d never really thought that much about what people inferred about me when they came into my house. It was just a comfortable place that I filled with stuff I found interesting. Most of my wall hangings came from little specialty stores or thrift shops and flea markets. I liked metal signs. I have lots of those. Mos
t of them are old advertisements. That was what seemed to have caught Damion’s attention the most.
“Whoa, I remember this when I was a kid!” he exclaimed with what actually sounded like pleasure. “My dad had one of these at the garage.”
“Probably because it’s advertising motor oil,” I told him with a laugh. “Your family owns an engine shop. Remember?”
“No shit!” He shot me a droll look of indifference. “They remind me of that pretty regularly right before they tell me they’re disappointed that I didn’t go into business with my brother.”
“I get that.” And I really did. I thought about my parents. They’d been dead for two years now and I still felt the sting of their disapproval. “My folks were pissed off till the day they both died that I didn’t get a job at my sister’s company. They felt as though she was extremely successful and they wanted me to be that way too. They never saw real estate as that sort of career.”
He turned away from the gaudy orange and blue metal sign hanging in my hallway “But they approved of headhunting?”
“I don’t think they actually understood what my sister does.” This had become more and more obvious the more that they had aged. “My parents were older. They were already in their sixties when I graduated from high school. We were late children. I think they saw my sister’s job as some sort of placement service. They didn’t understand that she’s paid commission. She was working in a big office, and let me tell you, Eleanor can make it sound like she’s saving the world.”
His grin was big and broad and his face was so handsome that I almost felt a bit dazed when I looked at him. He had that sort of way about him. Like he was just so handsome and so personable and so—enormous in personality that you were just sort of overwhelmed. And yet he wasn’t actually like that. I wasn’t sure what made me so certain about that. But I was.
“The key to making your job sound like heart surgery,” Damion drawled, “is to really sell it. And since successful headhunters are actually nothing more than highly paid salespeople, you can see how that works for their family members.”
Tangled: Contemporary Romance Trilogy Page 19
