Rona gave her a wise look. “You’re so naïve. You’ve got a crush on this guy, that’s all. The sex is wonderful, and yadda yadda. It won’t last.”
“These feelings are like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.”
“Honey, it’s only sex.”
“No, it’s not. I thought it was, but it’s so much more.”
“The list of men I’ve been briefly crazy about is very long. Don’t throw away your marriage over a new boy you picked up at the theater.”
“I’ve never felt this way before in my life. I don’t want to be crude, Rona, but I’ve never experienced such wonderful lovemaking before.”
“You’ve spent over thirty years, more than half your life, with the same man.” Rona leaned over Susan, earnestness in her expression. “Maybe you got a little tired, a little bored. That’s no reason to dump him for the first hot guy you meet.”
“What am I going to do? I love Rick. I always have. But I’m in love with Michael. Yet I’d have to uproot myself and completely change my life to be with Michael. Leave Ohio and come live in New York.”
“Michael might prefer you as forbidden fruit, honey,” Rona said with her usual cynicism. “If you get a divorce and come looking for him, maybe he won’t want you.”
“I can’t believe that. What we share is so profound.”
“That’s self-deceptive thinking,” Rona said. “Based entirely on sex.”
Susan didn’t want to listen, but Rona had so much more experience with men. Years and years of different men, yet true love only for Edward.
“Talking about self-deception reminds me. I’ve got to go call Edward.” Rona turned for the door. “Buzz me if the battling Feinsteins return for another round of shouting.”
Finally alone and terribly confused, she called Michael. “You wouldn’t believe the blow-up we’ve had here. Todd and Bev had a huge shouting match.” She told Michael some of the details, but held back the fact that Bev had had sex with Rick.
Michael reacted typically. “Todd’s a knucklehead. No, a moron. But Bev loves him.”
“I think she does.”
“Does this mean that you’re not coming over tonight?” Michael asked.
“I kind of got the wind knocked out of me.”
“Then I’ll come over there. Want me to bring dinner? I’m still at the office. I can pick something up.”
“Fine.” If Michael wanted to see her, she wanted to see him.
Half an hour later, he arrived with food. Later, expecting Bev home soon, she resisted Michael’s urging that they make love. She allowed him to help her change from her office clothes, which she’d never gotten around to taking off. Michael did a very thorough job, kissing every revealed body part and nearly undoing her. Only the half-open bedroom door kept her from losing her head.
“We’ve got to cool off,” she said, wishing otherwise. Somehow she was sitting on Michael’s lap, on her bed, wearing only her newest bra and panty set. His shirt was open, and she was running her hands through the dark hair on his chest. If they were to be sensible, they needed to get out of her bedroom.
She made herself get up and grab some city shorts and a casual middy blouse. Then she slid her feet into flip-flops. She tried not to notice Michael staring at her hungrily as her flesh disappeared beneath her clothes.
“Let’s go down to the courtyard,” she said. “I’ll leave Bev a note.”
“Are there any dark corners down there?”
“You’ve got a one-track mind,” she tutted, pleased even so.
The sound of the apartment door opening sent her scurrying to the living room. Bev entered alone. She looked happier.
“How did it go?”
“We had a nice dinner. Todd took me to the Rainbow Room. I thought it would be filled with geezers, but we saw Alec Baldwin! He was having dinner with some great-looking blonde. It wasn’t Kim Basinger, though. They’re over.”
Michael sauntered out of Susan’s bedroom. His shirt was rebuttoned, but he was ostentatiously tucking the tails back into his pants.
“Hi, Mikey. Did you come to see me?” Bev asked automatically, before she had taken in the implication.
He gave her a lopsided grin. “Hey, girl.”
Then Bev got it. She gave Susan a scorching look, but addressed her words to Michael. “You do remember that Susan is married, don’t you?”
“Thanks for your concern, but what about your own marriage?” he replied equably.
Bev suddenly lost her aggression. “I don’t know. Todd wants too much from me. And he has the nerve to keep throwing my one slip with Rick in my face.”
Michael briefly looked confused, but then made the connection. “The wedding you keep talking about. This is why Susan is so angry with you?” In a flash, Michael had correlated the information. “Wait a minute. You’re the woman her husband slept with at the wedding?”
“You knew about that?”
“Yes, but she never said it was you.”
“I did it and I’m not sorry.” Bev shot her a stubborn look.
“You ought to be,” Michael said.
“It’s a long story, and anyway, why aren’t you taking my side? You’re my oldest friend,” Bev said indignantly.
Michael gave Bev an affectionate hug. Then he biffed her gently on the head. “Is this hollow? Because I thought you were smarter than to sleep with a friend’s husband.”
Bev looked somewhat ashamed. “It’s all that damn Todd. He’s constantly chasing after other women. He got drunk and made a humiliating scene at the reception. After that, he insulted Susan to her face, called her a fatso. Then he went off to drink some more. I was a wreck. Rick was a wreck. It was just sympathy.”
At Michael’s continued stare at her, Bev squirmed and finally turned to Susan. “I’m sorry I did it. I knew it was wrong.”
This was the best amends she was ever going to get from Bev. It was enough. “Apology accepted.”
Chapter 25
Rona had decided to give Edward an ultimatum. It was probably the wrong moment. She should let him stew over her last angry words after their disastrous luncheon with his daughter. She was tired of playing it safe with him. Sure, she had been aggressive and angry during the few weeks they had been seeing each other again. Sexually, she had been equally aggressive, but also accommodating and eager. Still, she hadn’t laid it on the line. She hadn’t yet told him her terms for a future relationship. With all the cleanup of past issues between them, they’d never gotten around to talking about the future. She didn’t know what was on his mind, although she knew her own. She wanted to marry Edward.
Was that so much to ask? All these years, she’d made a perfectly good life as a single woman. She had proved that she could achieve professional success on her own. She had made a stellar career at the university. Now she wanted to be with Edward for the rest of their lives.
Marriage would have to be a wholehearted commitment from him. He’d always come to her with divided loyalties, wanting to be discreet. At that disastrous luncheon, his divided loyalties had appeared again. She couldn’t abide more secrecy. The world had to see her in open and flagrant possession of this man at last. His wife.
With all the drama between Todd and Bev, and the situation between Susan and Michael that couldn’t end well, Rona wanted her own happy ending.
She clicked open her phone.
***
The next several days, Susan dragged her way through her job. Her thoughts were so scattered that she never even opened her secret files. They remained safely locked away on her flash drive in her purse. Of course all the copies of sensitive papers were at home. Did anyone care if someone at Coquette was embezzling? She wasn’t certain that she herself even did. It was a game she’d enjoyed, something to occupy her spare time here with some use of her higher-level computer skills. Merely unwrapping packages and filling cartons all day was not enough.
She debated letting it go. Still, she was bothered by the dishonesty of ch
arging a book for services never rendered. Finally, she tried again for an interview with Elizabeth Winsor. A few days later, she got it.
True to Elizabeth’s usual casual manner, they were seated in the overstuffed chairs that faced a coffee table in the seating area of Elizabeth’s large corner office. After some pleasantries, Susan got to her purpose. “I hope you won’t think I have overstepped my boundaries. I have discovered an accounting discrepancy that I don’t understand. It leads me to suspect that embezzling is occurring.”
Elizabeth looked grave. “Go on.”
Susan presented all her documentation in a neutral manner, conscious that this investigation had not been in her job description. She explained what she had done and spread out the copies of the invoices, pointing to the suspect company and the invoice amounts.
“As you can see, the suspect company invoices twenty-five thousand dollars for each book with the thirty thousand listed for promotion. Meanwhile, the regular ad agency that does the group promotions invoices five thousand for each title each month. The anomalies make a questionable pattern.”
Elizabeth nodded. “What do you think these figures mean?”
“On their own, perhaps nothing. These figures are only in the production folder. When they get to the editorial folder, they look different. They look different again in the accounting department folder. In other words, there are two sets of books being kept, and one clearly shows outsize payments to a questionable company.” She paused. “Perhaps one book per month merits some special promotional efforts? If so, why is it always numerically the first title of the group?”
“The most important or strongest book each month is always the lead title. We make it the first in the number sequence,” Elizabeth brushed that off.
“Oh.” Susan sat back. “Does that account for the disproportionate advertising cost assigned to each lead title?”
Elizabeth didn’t seem interested in explaining further or answering that question. Instead she asked, “Have you shown these to anyone else?”
Suddenly remembering Michael’s warnings, Susan didn’t pretend it was all her little secret. “A friend knows. I’ve asked various editors about pieces of this information. Naturally, I did not take the invoices and show them around.”
Elizabeth gave her a smile, as if she recognized that while Susan had hacked her way into all kinds of confidential files, she still had ethics about sharing the information she had found with everyone at the company.
“Let me keep these, while I decide what needs to happen next.”
“I hope I haven’t wasted your time.”
“Not at all,” Elizabeth said. She smiled and thanked Susan, and soon had ushered her out.
As she slowly walked to her back hall desk, she thought over Elizabeth’s reaction. It had been curiously blank. Elizabeth hadn’t been surprised that Susan could hack her way into so many databases in the company. Why not? Something else was involved that Susan did not know about.
She wrote a careful email memo to let Elizabeth know that there were other copies of the information and friends of hers who knew about them. By sending it as an email, she had additional backup, since the company kept copies of all emails. It was vaguely but carefully worded. Susan didn’t want to suffer a surprise hit and run accident. After she had sent it, she chided herself for being paranoid. She called Michael at work and told him what she had done.
“Smart. You’ve put her on notice not to try anything stupid.”
“You don’t think I’m overreacting to Elizabeth’s lack of surprise?” she asked anxiously.
“You’ve uncovered a lot by instinct. Think it through. What is most likely?”
Susan appreciated that Michael respected her opinion even though she wasn’t a paid professional forensic investigator. Although maybe she ought to become one. “Elizabeth knows something?”
“Right.”
Michael’s businesslike tone changed. His voice grew more caring, “You gave an oblique warning. If you want to be entirely sure you’re safe, quit now.”
“I’ve thought about it. I guess I want to know what happens.”
She could hear the amusement in his voice. “You’re being a fangirl, or whatever they call a romance novel reader.”
“It’s what working here was all about. Seeing the inside of a publishing company.”
“Except you saw a little farther inside than you anticipated.”
She sighed. “You’re right. Well, back to my important official duties. Are we on for dinner?”
“If the Fed doesn’t mess with the rates today.”
She was reminded that Michael’s job involved complex mathematical calculations based on money markets as regulated by the Federal Reserve. Coquette Books and all its secrets were peanuts by comparison to the huge sums of money affected by Michael’s work only a few blocks south of this office.
She hung up thinking how strange employment was. Why should she care so much about the intricacies of this small company when she was indifferent to the vastly more significant economic consequences of Michael’s profession? Maybe only because she was not working at his office? Maybe she simply liked the puzzle-solving aspect? She should think more about pursuing a forensic computer career. Computers offered the kind of problem-solving she liked to tackle. She’d done this kind of investigation before in a smaller way. She could use her contacts back home to get launched.
She wouldn’t find any answers in this publishing office. There wasn’t even anyone interested in talking to her. She had more personal issues to think about, anyway. Should she tell Rick their marriage was over? Would that make him sad, or happy? Would it free him to find a new love? These last few years had been hard on him. He had loved Kyle as much as she had.
Kyle had been special. Nancy was special, too, in a different way. Rick was so dear, and yet so distant from her now. She didn’t know if she could ever get across the vast gulf between them. She wasn’t sure she had the heart to, feeling as she did about Michael. Although her recent behavior with Michael was certainly not the way to get closer to her husband, regardless of what Rick had told her to do this summer.
She and Michael had been together every night, despite her job. Last night, Michael had persuaded her to stay overnight. They’d luxuriated in each other sexually, and then had the pleasure of sleeping in the same bed. After staying up for so many hours making love, they nearly overslept. Even so, they had dallied over breakfast, which Michael had cooked efficiently. He had paid attention to her requests about portion size. She had shown her appreciation with such abandon that they got later still. She reported to Coquette barely on time.
***
Rona and Edward met at his parish church, at his request. He wanted her to talk to his priest, Father Goggin. Religion played a major role in Edward’s life. Would the priest be an antagonist? She wasn’t raised as a Christian and had no interest in converting.
It was warm outside. The church was a typical gray stone building, probably nearly a century old, built in the classic Gothic style. It smelled of incense. How strange that it, too, reminded her of the halls of academe. So many university buildings were in this exact style.
She had worn a dress today, a dull mauve that toned with her eye color subtly. Edward was wearing a gray suit and conservative tie. He greeted her in the entrance hall with a kiss on the lips and drew her eagerly inside.
“This is Father Goggin, Rona. I’m so happy you two are meeting. You both are so important to me.”
That was laying his cards on the table.
Father Goggin was surprisingly young, perhaps in his late thirties. He had dark, flashing eyes and curly black hair. A pleasant smile that didn’t reach his eyes, which were cool and searching. He wore a black cassock, the long dresslike garment buttoned down the front that priests wore under their colorful robes. His classic garb underlined that he was a priest, not a minister. He was one of a long line of traditional authority figures in a religion with which she had only
a cultural familiarity. No allegiance, unlike Edward, whose family had always been Roman Catholic.
“Hello,” she said, offering her hand. He took it in both of his. His skin was unusually soft for a man, like a surgeon’s often-washed hands.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you at last. Edward has told me so much about you,” he said with a distinctly Irish accent.
She raised an eyebrow at his words, but said nothing.
They went into the priest’s office, and he saw them seated next to each other while he sat across from them. The chairs were wooden and not particularly comfortable. Probably good for getting sinners to confess. Sunlight tried to come in through the windows, but the thickness of the stone wall kept the beams from penetrating the gloom.
Edward took the lead, turning to her. “I asked you here because I wanted Father to explain why I am hesitating about speaking openly about our future.”
Father Goggin took up the thread. “Edward has expressed concern that his children will have a difficult time accepting his interest in you so soon after their mother’s passing.”
Her heart hardened at his words. “And?” she asked. Let them spell it out, so she knew what she was up against.
“The Church no longer insists on a year of mourning. Yet it is sensible to consider the feelings of a recently bereaved family when engaging in a new relationship. Perhaps a delay…”
She looked at Edward. “You want to stop seeing each other for a year? Is that what this meeting is about?”
Edward looked uneasy. “Not exactly, but I’d like to find some way we can soften the blow to my family.”
She asked carefully, “What ideas have you two come up with?”
“You’re not a Catholic, I take it,” Father Goggin said.
“I’m not a Christian. I’m Chinese. Our spiritual beliefs are far older than Christianity,” she said stonily.
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