by Melissa Good
“Pizza’s here. That was fast,” he remarked. “Be right back.” The MIS
chief slipped out of the door and let it close behind him, leaving the two of them alone.
There was a bit of silence. Dar remained deep in thought, memories cascading gently over her of the hours spent administering this small cog in the company. She’d been happy doing that, she realized. Probably it had been the last time she’d been able to simply go home at night and forget about her job.
Gone home and escaped to the clubs, spending her time drinking and trading bullshit stories with a group of like minded friends, dabbling 272 Melissa Good in shallow attractions and losing herself in long weekends of bumming around on the beach.
Going nowhere in particular and finding herself satisfied with that as the pleasures of the moment absorbed her interest and she let a lot of things slide—ambition chief among them.
Then there’d been Shari.
And everything had changed.
Nothing was fun anymore. She’d learned to judge herself by a different set of rules and left behind the comfort zone of the ops center to push herself into the stark challenge of project management. Proving she was everything Shari said she wasn’t. Driving herself to higher and higher levels until she’d broken through the glass ceiling and landed her butt in a plush office with a business card that said Vice President on it and everyone who ever said she was a loser could just chew that and swallow.
And you know what? No one had cared. No one had been left close enough to pat her on the back and say, “Good job, Dar. You did it. We’re proud of you.”
No one. The night she’d gotten her promotion she’d taken a bottle of champagne down to the beach and shared it with the night crabs and the hiss of the waves, feeling nothing but a sense of empty relief. So she’d decided to just allow the achievement to become its own end and convinced herself that it made her happy.
Until one damn fall day when she’d taken over a consolidation gone bad and walked into a small, boxy office to deliver a pile of bad news to some ordinary company manager she never expected to see again.
And lost her heart, her soul, and her carefully constructed self-deception all in less time than it took to think about it.
“Ma’am?”
Dar jumped a little. “Oh, sorry. Yes?”
Brent moved a little closer, the flush visible on his pale skin. “Do you mind if I ask you something?”
She shook herself, dispelling the memories and turned in her chair.
“No. Go ahead, Brent.” She issued him a brief smile. “I wasn’t upset before. I was just tweaking you a little.”
“Yeah, I figured. Um.” His nostrils flared. “You and Ms. Kerry are pretty good friends, right?” He looked around and lowered his voice.
Wild, ringing alarms went off in Dar’s head, so loud she was surprised Brent couldn’t hear them. “Yes,” she answered cautiously. “Why?”
What now? A thousand situations ran through her head, and Ankow was at the bottom of most of them. Did he have different information? Had Brent heard him hunting down facts? What was he up to? What trouble…
“Uh.” The man rubbed his jaw. “Well it’s just…”
“What is it, Brent?” Dar asked, her interest sharpening.
“Do you…um…I know this is a weird question…but d’you know…um…”
Uh oh. “Yes?”
“Is she seeing anyone?”
Eye of the Storm 273
Total silence. Dar sucked in a breath and clamped her jaw shut to keep the nervous giggle from emerging. She waited a beat. “Yes.” She gave a grave, considered reply. “She is.” Goddamn it. Is he the last person in the whole bloody company to get the bleeping memo?
“Oh.” He looked crestfallen. “Okay. Well, I kinda thought so. I mean, she’s so nice, and so pretty. But I figured it was worth asking. Thanks, ma’am. I know it’s a real personal question and I do appreciate you answering it.” He was still brick red.
“No problem.”
“She’s probably not my type anyway. Huh?” he asked in a wistful voice.
Dar stared at him. “Um…Brent…”
“It’s okay.” He dropped his eyes. “It’s probably some real smart guy with a nice car.” He exhaled and shrugged. “Kind of a stupid question.”
“Um.” The executive rummaged around, trying to come up with something intelligent to say. “I’m sure you’re…ah… There’s nothing wrong with you, Brent. She’s just…um…”
“Hey, ma’am. It’s okay, really. I understand. You don’t have to go any further.” Brent sighed. “Must be some lucky guy.”
“B—” Dar was sure her brains were leaking out her ear by now. “N–”
The door opened and Mark walked in with two boxes full of pizza.
“Hey. Look what I found.” He opened the door further and a familiar blonde figure came in behind him.
“Hi,” Dar croaked gratefully.
Kerry trudged in, circled the console, put her arms around Dar’s neck and kissed her head. “My transmission gave up just outside the office and I got roped into Country line dancing Karaoke charades. I’m trashed. Can we go home?” She let her cheek rest against her lover’s dark hair. “Hey, Brent.” Gentle green eyes regarded him wearily.
There was a tiny little silence, until Brent shuffled his feet. “Guess I had the smart and the car right,” he muttered, flushing an even deeper red as he stood up and scurried out of sight behind a couple of mainframes.
“Huh?” Kerry cocked her head. “What’s up with Brent?” She looked at Dar and her brows creased, then she glanced up at Mark, who shrugged in honest puzzlement.
Dar sighed. “A clue just bit him in the ass.”
“Ow.” Kerry peered into the gloom behind the consoles. “About what?”
Dar scratched her jaw. “Tell ya later.” She patted Kerry’s calf, absorbing the warmth pressing against her back as the smaller woman leaned against her. “Siddown. I’ve just got to finish this setup.” She turned and pulled the keyboard closer as Kerry settled in the chair next to her, watching with interest.
Dar glanced at the monitor, bemused to see her reflection faintly echoing back at her from the glare, a smile shaping her lips completely without her permission. Kerry’s hand casually rested on her knee under 274 Melissa Good the desk, and the smile widened.
A thought suddenly crossed her mind. Would Kerry care if she was just a mid level ops manager? She turned her head slightly and studied the intelligent profile next to her. She liked the perks of their respective positions, Dar was sure, but…hadn’t she said she’d be content to wander around selling poetry for food if she had to?
Was she serious?
Am I serious thinking about this? Didn’t I work my tail off for years getting to where I am? Would I really want to go back to where I was then, and just settle for being good at something, content with a steady job with decent pay and benefits?
Dar regarded the diagram on the screen, its spider web of tracings indicating the elegantly designed network’s far flung reach. Finished, it would change the way the company did business and toss them into the twenty-first century as one of the few corporations capable of projecting the last few year’s explosion of data services into the future.
The smile in the monitor grew and became a trifle ironic. With a flourish, Dar brought the rest of the system on line and dark gray web-bing came alive with the colors of the test patterns she was running.
“What do you think?” she asked the avidly watching Kerry.
Mark got up and leaned over her shoulder, peering at the screen.
“Jesus. Complete redundancy.” He deliberately deactivated one of the big ports, and they watched as the test traffic smoothly rerouted itself. “Holy shit.”
“Wow.” Kerry was running an analyzer on another console. “Would you look at that bandwidth? I couldn’t bottleneck this if I tried.”
They both looked up at Dar with something close to nerd awe.<
br />
Dar smiled, enjoying the moment completely. It was almost better than chocolate ice cream.
Almost.
Chapter
Thirty
DAR TUCKED THE edge of the towel more firmly under her arm as she poured two tall glasses of peach ice tea. Chino waited patiently at her heels, giving her leg an occasional lick. “Watch your tail, Chino,” the tall woman warned, as she returned the carafe to the refrigerator and picked up the glasses. “C’mon. Let’s go get mommy Kerry.”
“Gruff.” Chino trotted out the open glass doors and stood up on the lower step of the hot tub, looking up expectantly.
“Hey. Don’t fall asleep in there,” Dar warned as she shed her towel and entered the tub. Kerry was sprawled out in the warm water, her damp head resting against the tub back and her arms outstretched on the sides.
“Uh?” She opened one eye to regard Dar. “Oh, it’s you.”
“You were expecting…”
Kerry lifted her head and scooted up a little, reaching for her glass.
“Sorry. I am so wiped. You ran my butt ragged tonight, Dar.” She gave her lover a pathetic look. “Can I get Colleen to come over when we do that so we can double team you?”
“Mmm.” Dar wasn’t displeased at the compliment, though. They’d left the gym and Kerry’s class earlier, then taken up the routines in the workout room on the island. She felt a little sore, a little tired, but in a good way. “You did great, though. I think we’re going to have to move you up a belt.”
“Yeah?” Kerry perked up visibly. “And here I thought I was really bombing out. Thanks, Dar.” She felt happier about the bouts and pretty satisfied with herself in general after sitting through a surprisingly candid and objective review administered by her boss just that afternoon.
Criticism, she’d found, was much easier to take from someone you knew liked you, than from someone you knew didn’t. Dar’s variety was calm and impersonal and very direct—addressing specific, fixable items and staying away from the broad generalities that were intimidating to hear and almost impossible to change. Your attitude is an issue, for instance. She’d heard one of the girls in the breakroom repeating that bit of feedback from a superior. What exactly were you supposed to do about it?
276 Melissa Good Besides, she’d found that Dar had a delightful habit of doing all the bad stuff first. To sort of get it out of the way. Then she’d list off all the good stuff, so by the time the review was finished, she felt pretty good even if the start was kind of painful. Her’s hadn’t been that painful either, since she knew her own faults, and was able to discuss them with her supervisor in fairly frank honesty. “Did I thank you for my review?”
“Three times now,” Dar remarked dryly, sipping her tea. “No one’s ever done that before.” She stretched her legs out in the swirling water and sighed, tipping her head back and regarding the stars.
Kerry felt the mood change and slid a little closer, where she could feel Dar’s warmth. “Are you worried about tomorrow?”
Dar nodded.
“Me too.”
Dar studied the sky, then turned her head. “Listen. I’ve been thinking about this.” Her face was very serious. “Whatever happens tomorrow—don’t feel like you have to do anything about it, okay?”
Kerry looked puzzled. “Huh?”
“You’re really good at what you do, Ker. I think you should keep doing it, no matter what happens with me.”
“Oh.” Kerry exhaled, ruffling the surface of the water. “I don’t want to stay there without you, Dar. I’d feel really bad about that, and besides, who’d say they’d let me?”
“They need you.” It was the truth.
“They need you too,” the blonde woman shot back. “It’s so unfair.
Look at the job you do for them, Dar. How could they even think about removing you just for something as…” She shook her head. “It’s just not fair.”
Dar shrugged. “Can’t say it’s their fault. I made the decision, Kerry. I knew what I was doing.”
Kerry stared at her. “You said you hired me for my skills. Are you saying now that’s not true?”
“No.”
“That is what you just said.”
“No, it’s not,” Dar replied fiercely. “I knew I was hiring the best candidate for the job, then or now, and that, Kerrison, was never an issue.”
“Then what did you mean by that?”
Dar slid down in the water. “I meant that…I knew, when I brought you on that I was attracted to you.” She paused. “And I knew that wasn’t going to stop after you were hired.”
The turmoil subsided next to her. “Oh.” Kerry’s face eased into a sheepish smile. “Well, I’m guilty of that too, so there.” She reflected a bit, then looked up. “Dar, I want you to know how lousy I feel about the fact that it’s us that’s causing this.”
“It’s not. It’s just the excuse.”
“It’s a lousy excuse.” Kerry scowled. “I mean, Jesus, Dar, I understand why they have the rule, okay? Because it would be easy for someone to use their position to take advantage of someone, or to insinuate Eye of the Storm 277
that promotions or pay raises were contingent on you making that person happy in some way.” She shook her head. “But that isn’t the case here, and we both know it.”
“I know.”
“I should go talk to them.” Determination squared the slightly rounded jaw line.
Dar pictured Kerry storming the boardroom, facing off against the rest of her peers, and smiled in frank reflex. “Tell you what. Let’s trade.
You come talk to the board and I’ll go testify against your father. Deal?”
“In a frigging heartbeat,” Kerry blurted. “I am so there.” Then her shoulders slumped and she went very quiet. “I don’t want to go there tomorrow, Dar.”
“Maybe they won’t ask too many questions.”
“It’s not the questions. It’s not the panel.”
Dar looked at her. “Your family?”
Kerry nodded.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can, I promise.” Tell the board to shove their job, and fly back out on the next flight. Yeah. To hell with it. Maybe I could just call Alastair and tell him to... Dar sighed. No, she really did have to be there and speak for herself, that much had been made clear regardless of what the outcome was. “I don’t think it’ll take long.”
“Are they going to fire you?”
“I think so, yes.” Strange, after all the nonsense, how much that hurt.
“Actually, what they’ll do is ask me to resign. At this level, you don’t usually get outright fired. It looks bad and does strange things to the stock. They’ll make it seem like it was a voluntary thing.”
“Dar…”
“I know, it sucks. I agree, but what they’re looking at is perception.
Perception has nothing to do with reality, Kerry. And if Ankow goes public with his trial, then they have all that perception out there that I’ve gotten involved with a subordinate and maybe made decisions that were influenced by doing so.”
Kerry sighed.
“It’s the perception they’re worried about. I know not one of them, on a personal level, gives two craps about my love life, understand?”
“No.”
Now it was Dar’s turn to sigh. “It’s a matter of trust, Kerry. When you’re in a position like I am, solely in charge of billions of stockholder dollars, and making decisions for the company on a daily basis, the inference that I might not make the right decisions scares the hell out of them and also out of the stockholders.”
“That’s stupid, Dar. You’ve been making decisions for them for years.”
“Yes.” Dar gave a tiny smile. “But they never suspected I had a personal side that might possibly interfere with that before.” She paused.
“And they’d be right. In all the years I’ve worked for them, I’ve never had something in my life I’d put before my job.”
278 Melissa Good
“Until now.”
“Until now,” Dar replied in wry agreement. “But it’s not your fault, Kerry.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Dar, it most certainly is my fault.” Pale brows knitted. “Saying it isn’t is like pretending I’m this witless child who just toddled along after you when you called me.” Kerry put her glass down. “An equal case could be made that I manipulated you strictly to achieve my position and that I’m milking you along, hoping I’ll get your job when you leave.” She folded her arms. “Maybe you’re an innocent victim.”
Dar simply stared at her.
“It’s all just so—” Kerry turned and saw the look in her lover’s eyes and reached out and cupped her cheek. “That was a facetious statement,”
she stated. “Or I would have taken that VP position you dangled out a couple of months back, remember?”
“I remember.” The skin shifted as Dar smiled. “And even if you had, I trust you, Kerry.”
It was like holding a piece of precious crystal. “Thank you.” It came out in a whisper. “That means everything to me.” She smiled back. “I still think you should let me go talk to them.”
The phone rang and Dar forced herself to look away from Kerry’s intense gaze to answer it. She lifted the portable receiver up. “Hello?”
“Hello, Dar.”
Her eyebrow quirked. “Hi, Dr. Steve. What’s up?”
The physician cleared his throat. “Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner, Dar, but I made the lab run all the tests three or four times, because I didn’t want to give you the wrong information.”
A chill went down Dar’s spine that even the warm water of the Jacuzzi couldn’t dispel. “Information about what?” Her alarm must have shown, because Kerry sat up and put a hand on her shoulder. “What’s going on?” She felt her heart speed up.
“Remember that blood I took from you, when you were sick?”
“Yes.”
“We found some toxins in there, Dar. I sent them out to a bigger lab to have them check what they were.” Steve hesitated. “The results came back positive for some seriously poisonous chemicals that I won’t bore you with the names of.”
