Hot Shot (31 page)

To his surprise, he heard himself saying, "Whatever my original opinions were, you've changed them this evening."

The slow smile that captured the corners of her mouth was hesitant, but so winsome that he felt his own lips begin to curve in response.

"Is that actually a compliment?" she asked.

"It's a compliment, Miss Faulconer. Definitely a compliment."

And then he realized what it was about her that seemed so familiar. The perfect manners, the quiet courtesy, the steely determination. She didn't remind him of Louise. She reminded him of himself.

The realization floored him, and then, unexpectedly, he felt his spirit lighten. In that moment, he made his decision, knowing even as he said the words that he had set his life on a new and dangerous course. "I'll accept your terms, Miss Faulconer. But don't feel too confident, because I'm going to be looking over your shoulder every minute."

"Fair enough, Mr. Blaine. Because I'll be looking right back."

He laughed. In her own way, she had as much gall as Sam Gamble, but she packaged it so much more discreetly.

Pulling the car door shut, he pressed the button to lower the window. "Tell our business partners that I might have a better name for our new computer than the SysVal II."

"Oh?"

"Maybe we should name it after you."

Her eyes widened in surprise. "After me?"

"Yeah." He leaned out the window. "Maybe we should call it the Hot Shot."

She laughed, a lovely sound, like the tinkle of antique bells. "Hot shot? Me?"

He drew in his head and slipped the car into reverse. "You, Miss Faulconer."

Susannah watched him pull his car out of the parking lot. She was still smiling as he turned out onto the highway. Imagine anyone calling her a hot shot. It was ridiculous, of course. But nice.

She heard footsteps approaching from behind, and her smile faded. Sam's hand touched her shoulder. He sounded more weary than angry.

"Just what in the hell do you think you're doing? God, you're the last person in the world I would have ever expected to have hang-ups about power."

She wanted to make some scathing retort that would hurt him as he had hurt her, but all the spirit she had summoned for her confrontation with Mitch faded. She followed Yank to the Duster, which was parked at an awkward angle in the next row.

Sam stayed on her heels. "This company isn't going to work if you pull any more power plays like that. That's not what we're about. It isn't going to frigging work!"

Yank began tapping his pants pockets in search of his keys. An eddy of cool night wind whipped Sam's hair up from his neck. Her heart ached. Why did he have to be so fierce?

So driven?

"You've blown this deal, Suzie. I mean you have destroyed everything. Everything we've been working for. Everything we've tried to do. It's like you deliberately set out to sabotage us."

Yank tapped his shirt pocket and said in a distracted voice, "She didn't blow it, did you, Susannah?" "No," she replied. "I didn't blow it."

"She didn't blow it, Sam."

Sam stared at both of them, and then at her. "What do you mean? Did he say something to you? What are you talking about?"

Without bothering to consider how Yank had known what would happen, she managed to say, "Mitch has accepted. He's joining SysVal as our fourth partner."

Sam's face shattered as if a sunlit prism had broken apart inside him. "He told you? He's accepted? That's fabulous! I mean, that is freaking fabulous!" He grabbed her and pulled her to his chest. But the moment of shared joy that should have been perfect had been ruined for her.

He released her and threw his arms into the air. "This is going to be fantastic!" With his neck arched, he began drawing word pictures of the revolution they were about to begin.

He wasn't as tall as either Yank or Mitch, but as he sliced the air with sweeping gestures and spangled the night with his grandiose dreams, he seemed so much bigger than either of them.

She could feel his energy pulling at her, that indomitable force of will tugging her up toward his personal rainbow. She wanted to go with him on his climb, but this time something within her resisted. Only when he saw how rigidly she was holding herself did he grow quiet. After studying her for a few moments, he said, "Yank, Suzie and I are going to take a walk. Wait for us, okay?"

Yank began searching the ground at his feet. Sam extracted the Duster keys from his own pocket and tossed them over. "We won't be long."

He caught her arm and began drawing her back toward the row of stores. "You're still too chicken to fight with me, aren't you? You're incredibly pissed, but you're going to sulk instead of fight."

Some of her spirit began to come back. Was it his touch? Did he have a magical way of passing his energy through his skin and into hers? "I'm not afraid of fighting with you,"

she said. "But right now, I'm just not certain you're worth it."

Even as the words were slipping from her mouth, she couldn't believe she was uttering them. His steps faltered, and she knew that she had hurt him. It was a strange feeling to realize she had any power over him at all. She moved up onto the sidewalk. An ice cream cone lay deflated in an ugly brown puddle on the pavement. They walked past the door of Mom & Pop's. She stopped in front of the dry cleaners and stared blindly at a wedding gown entombed in a windowed cardboard box. Once again, she reached deep inside herself to find the courage to say what she must.

"Don't ever try to cut me out again, Sam," she said quietly.

"Is that what you think I was doing?"

"Yes. You excluded me and then used marriage as a bargaining chip to keep me in line."

"You're getting paranoid. I assumed we'd get married one of these days. You're not the sort of woman who's going to be happy shacking up for very long." He slipped one hand out of his jacket pocket and laid it over her shoulders. "Suzie, I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to pull any sort of power play. I just didn't understand you were so hung up about crossing all the't's and dotting the i's."

"To me, it was more than crossing't's."

"But I don't see it that way. You and I are a couple, aren't we? What one of us has, the other has."

He was so earnest, so persuasive, but this time she wouldn't let herself be swept away.

"Then why didn't
you
drop out?" she asked gently. "Why didn't you say, 'I'll step aside.

Let Susannah be your partner. What she's got, I've got'?"

He pulled his arm from her shoulders. "That's ridiculous! It's not even logical. This whole thing was my idea. SysVal means everything to me."

"I lost my father, Sam. SysVal means everything to me, too."

The harsh glare faded from his features as he took in the significance of what she was saying. Slowly he smiled—a rueful, apologetic smile. Some of the ice inside her began to melt. He tilted his head toward her and touched her forehead with his own. Her eyelids drifted shut. They stood like that for a moment, with their eyes closed and foreheads touching.

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

She knew that she was near tears, and she forced them back so that she didn't sound self-pitying. "I want to be as important to you as the company."

"You and the company are all mixed up together in my mind."

They stood like that for a few moments with only their foreheads touching. Then their noses brushed, and their mouths. Although their lips were together, they didn't kiss.

"I love you, Suzie," he whispered, his voice sounding young and scared. "I know I get crazy sometimes, but you've got to promise me you'll stick with me. Please, babe. I need you so much. Oh, God, I love you. Promise me you'll always be there for me."

He gripped her hands at her sides so tightly he seemed to be trying to couple their flesh.

At that moment, she realized how fiercely she loved him. Her throat had constricted and she couldn't talk—she couldn't force out the words he needed to hear. Instead, she parted her lips and gave him a dark, desperate kiss.

Chapter 16

"Slap some paint on his shirt, Susannah," Sam said three weeks later, as he placed a two-by-four over a pair of sawhorses. "I'm embarrassed to be in the same room with him."

Mitch looked down at his crisply pressed work shirt and a pair of dark blue jeans with razor-sharp creases. "What's the matter with the way I look? We're building a wall, for Pete's sake, not going to a fashion show."

Sam snorted, and Susannah smiled to herself. Building the partition to separate the assembly and storage areas in their new office space was the first job the four of them had done together, and despite the fact that Sam and Mitch had been trading jibes all morning, the wall was taking shape rapidly.

She had spent the first two weeks of October scouring the Valley for office space, but it had been difficult finding something that was adequate and yet met their limited budget.

With Mitch as a partner, they had easily secured a bank loan. Each of them was now drawing a minuscule salary, and their cash flow problems had temporarily eased. But they all knew the loan was only a temporary stopgap, and in order to postpone going to the venture capitalists, they had to scrimp wherever they could.

She had finally found office space at a reasonable rent in the back of a tilt-up, one of the low rectangular buildings that filled the Valley's industrial parks. It wasn't a large area, but it was bigger than the garage and, with a few additions, would meet their needs. They had begun constructing the dividing partition the day before.

"I'll bet you go to a tailor to get your underwear made," Sam said to Mitch as he held the board for Yank to cut.

"My tailor doesn't make underwear," Mitch replied. And then, "I've heard there's a market in the Orient for human hair, Sam. It occurs to me that if you'd sell yours, we could buy this building instead of just renting it."

Susannah groaned. "Tell them both to be quiet, will you, Yank? They're giving me a headache."

"You didn't have a headache this morning." Sam leered at her, and then swung the two-by-four around so that it gently slapped her rear.

She absolutely refused to blush. If she were going to work with men all day, she at least had to pretend to be one of the guys. "That's true," she countered sweetly, "but I'll certainly have one by tonight."

Mitch smiled. Although she knew he was still watching everything she did and waiting for her to take a misstep, their relationship was at least superficially cordial.

She went over to help him support a joist he was nailing into place. "Boy, are you lucky you joined up with us. They wouldn't have let you do work like this in Boston."

He looked down at her from his perch on the ladder, with a hammer in his fist and a satisfied expression on his face. "This is great, isn't it? I haven't had so much fun since I was in college."

She grimaced as she tried to ease the cramp in her shoulders. "You were supposed to be the sane person in this partnership. Now you're as crazy as the rest of us."

On the other side of the room, Yank was driving Sam wild by insisting on measuring every board to the sixteenth of an inch. Finally Sam couldn't stand it any longer. "We're not doing brain surgery, for chrissake! It doesn't have to be exact. Just saw the son of a bitch in half."

But Yank, with his engineer's passion for precision, didn't know how to compromise. By afternoon, Sam refused to work with him any longer, and Susannah was forced to take his place.

As Susannah worked, her eyes followed Sam. She kept wondering when it would wear off, this need to touch him every moment they were together. She knew that he was arrogant and frequently self-centered, but he was also the most compelling person she had ever met. He waved challenges in her face like red flags, and pushed her into another universe with his lusty lovemaking. With Sam, she could be bold and strong. Without him—But she couldn't bear to think about life without Sam. Left on her own, she would probably crawl back into her proper hollow shell and stay there until she died.

She realized that the events the night Mitch had joined the company had changed their relationship. Both of them sensed that they had nearly lost something precious. Ironically, Sam was the one who had begun to press the idea of getting married. Being Sam, he had painted word pictures for her of what their marriage could be—the endless
possibilities
of a union both spiritually and physically sublime, the
power
of that sort of synergy, the
unlimited potential
of the joining of matched minds. As always, his rhetoric had mesmerized her. They had even gone so far as to apply for a marriage license and to get their blood tested. But then Susannah had found office space and everything else stopped.

They christened the wall with a six-pack of beer that evening and spent the next day moving in. At ten that night, dirty and exhausted, they made their way to Mom & Pop's.

Mitch had been talking for some time about the need for a formal organizational chart.

Yank had said that he wouldn't accept any title except Engineer, but even Sam knew that the rest of their responsibilities had to be better denned. After the waitress had taken their order, Mitch pulled a neatly folded piece of paper from his pocket and slid it toward the middle of the table. Even before he opened it, Susannah suspected that it was the organizational chart he had been talking about.

It was illogical to hope that she could retain her position as president. Mitch had far more experience and was the better choice to head the company. But although she was reconciled to the fact that she would be demoted, she wasn't going to let Mitch give her an empty title. If it meant another fight, then so be it.

Mitch unfolded the paper and straightened it with his fingers. It was the roughly drawn chart she had expected, and her eyes first fell on Yank's name written in neat block letters slightly below center. He was listed as Head Engineer.

Sam gave a hoot of laughter and pointed to his own name. "Chairman of the Board. Yeah, I like the sound of that."