Past Midnight (2 page)

She spasmed around him, her body curling over his, but not touching, never touching beyond the fusion of their hips. He shoved his head back into the pillow, thrusting hard and deep as her climax rippled over him, around him, inside him. He filled her, forcing her to feel him, bucking hard against her, limbs trembling, sweat beading his forehead with the effort it took not to scream out his orgasm. Explosive and mind-altering in the dark, the silence, her body, her heat. They ended with quivering bodies and harsh breathing, until finally she slipped away, tipping to her side of the bed.

Even as aftershocks jolted through him, she fell into the regular cadence of sleep, what she’d been striving toward when she reached for him. Sleep. Oblivion. The place where she could dream the dead alive again. She couldn’t talk about Jay, but she could dream of him.

He was glad for her, yet he envied the ability. He’d never dreamed his son alive. For him, there were only dreams of Jay’s face the last time he saw him, in the hospital.

Long past midnight, he lay in the dark, wide awake, his body sated, his heart bleeding and in shreds.

MONDAY. THANK GOD. SHE’D MADE IT THROUGH THANKSGIVING. One more holiday to go.

She didn’t know how to tell Dominic that he was the only reason she got through the nights. Maybe it wasn’t fair to use him that way, but when she touched him, she didn’t have to remember anything. When they were done, she could finally sleep. The sex was how she managed to forget that she’d lost Jay a year ago last month, how she forgot that most people were starting their Christmas shopping, how she ignored that she didn’t need to shop anymore.

Her parents had wanted them to come home to Michigan this year. She couldn’t handle it, the memories, the one little boy no one would talk about, driving it home that he wasn’t there. She’d told her folks no. Dominic hadn’t complained, even though his parents had been hoping for a visit, too. Last year she’d been too numb to even notice Christmas or the holiday season. This year . . . she wanted to pretend it didn’t exist.

Erin DeKnight stared at the reorder point list. Dominic saved her nights. Work saved her days. There was a ton of stuff to do before the December year-end. The contract with Wrainger Electronics was up for renegotiation, ripe for eking out a few extra pennies for the bottom line. Costs had to be revised for raw materials and outsourced parts so they could roll standards for work-in-progress and finished goods, and revalue their inventory for the upcoming year. Two years ago, they’d purchased an online enterprise system, which saved them having to house their own server to run an integrated accounting and manufacturing software package, not to mention the data backups. In order for the system to operate properly, you had to feed it good raw data, which was a hell of lot of work before year-end. Work to keep her occupied. Dominic said she was a workaholic. She was. It kept her from thinking too much.

Puffing out a breath, Erin flipped the report page, hitting the transducer part numbers. Which made her think of Leon. Leon had been fabricating transducers for DeKnight Gauges the entire ten years since she and Dominic had first started DKG. He was seventy-five and fabbed the parts out of his garage. No else did it cheaper. But Leon had decided to retire.

Erin should have been finding another source, but instead she was searching for the perfect argument to change his mind. Leon was young at heart. He’d hate being retired, having nothing to do. She couldn’t let him do that to himself. He was more than a vendor. Truth was, Erin didn’t want to let him go. He was part of the DKG family. A talented whittler, he’d crafted a different animal for her birthday every year. He’d whittled for Dominic’s birthday, too.

And for Jay’s.

An image of Leon burrowed into her mind. Jay’s memorial. Leon’s grizzled face, eyes sunken. The words of grief she hadn’t let him express. He’d said them to Dominic instead. When Erin thought about Leon retiring, she felt queasy.

Erin glanced up at the light rap on her doorjamb. Rachel, a paper in her hand, her smile too exuberant. “Morning.”

Ah, saved from her own thoughts. Erin smiled a greeting. A newly divorced mother of two, Rachel Delaney had started as receptionist a couple of months ago, also handling filing, mailing, and a myriad of everyday jobs. She was blond, pretty, and curvy in a way that drew male attention. That wasn’t always good. Erin had felt sorry for her, a woman suddenly thrust into a man’s work world for which she had few marketable skills. She could easily have been taken advantage of by an unscrupulous boss.

“What do you need?” Erin said pleasantly. She’d practiced the art of smiling. She might not always feel like it, but people needed normalcy, and that’s what she gave her employees at DKG. They were like a family, and for family, you presented the illusion that everything was all right. Even when it had stopped being all right over a year ago. But Rachel didn’t know; she hadn’t been at DKG then.

“I printed out your itinerary.” Rachel laid it on Erin’s desk. “I sent it in an e-mail, too,” she added with the hint of a question, as if unsure whether she’d covered all the bases.

The printing far too small for her to read, Erin reached out an index finger to slide the sheet of paper across the desk. “What itinerary?”

“For the PRI Trade Show.”

DKG manufactured ultrasonic thickness gauges. While the gauges had testing applications in a variety of industries, high-performance racing was one of their biggest markets, and the Performance Racing Industry Trade Show, held every year in Orlando during the second weekend of December, was
the
show. But Dominic, not Erin, represented DKG.

Erin didn’t sigh. She smiled. Rachel did her best, and honestly, she rarely made mistakes. “You know, this was supposed to be for Dominic, not me.”

Rachel smiled with equal courtesy. “I booked his, too.”

Erin kept her patience. She didn’t have as much of it as she used to. She hated to think of herself as a bitch, but sometimes, if she didn’t think before she spoke, she came off sounding pretty damn snippy.

“Dominic handles our exhibit booth,” she said. Though he’d missed last year for the first time since they’d started DKG. He’d sent Cam Phan, their software engineer, in his stead. Far be it for them to actually miss the show altogether. This year, things were supposed to get back to normal.

Not that things could ever be the same again.

“He told me to book yours as well.” Rachel paused, her lips pursed as if she were slightly irritated now. “He’s going early on Wednesday, and he had me book a late-afternoon flight out for you on Thursday so you’d only miss one day of work. You’ll fly back Sunday with him.”

She’d been tamping it down, but suddenly Erin couldn’t rein in her anger. “He did
what
?” She hated the trade shows, she hated schmoozing, especially
now
, with the holidays, and hell no, she wasn’t going. What was he
thinking
?

Rachel gave her a look that clearly said,
Don’t you even know what your own husband’s doing?

Well, no, she
didn’t
know what Dominic was doing. They didn’t talk much unless it was about business. Even in the dark, when she couldn’t sleep, weakened by the need to blot out everything for a little while, even then, they didn’t talk. What was there to say?

With careful movements and a deep breath, Erin stood. “Don’t worry. I’ll talk to Dominic about it myself.” And she would be calm, swear it.

Rachel nodded and scurried out as if afraid she’d get caught in the cross fire.

God, had she looked
that
scary to Rachel? Erin followed her out of the office, the itinerary in hand.

Like cogs in a wheel, the DKG offices ringed a large common area housing their office equipment, copier, fax, high-volume wireless printer, mail machine, and a conference table. Everything out in the open, shared by all. They called it the roundhouse, though Erin couldn’t remember who’d started that. On the far side, she’d had a break nook installed, with a sink, plumbed coffee machine, microwave, and refrigerator stocked with water, juice, and other goodies. Her motto: Happy employees didn’t waste time gossiping around the watercooler. On the left lay their manufacturing area with assembly, warehousing, shipping, and receiving. To the right was the engineering wing and the no-man’s-land of Dominic’s testing lab.

She stomped down the engineering hallway. He wasn’t in his office. She found him in the lab with its walls the sterile white of a hospital room. Shoving a scrap of paper beneath the mouse pad next to his computer when she walked in, he was seated on one of the three metal stools amid parts, disassembled gauges, and test equipment that beeped too loudly. Another stool sat forlorn in a corner, its seat ratcheted higher than the others to accommodate a shorter, smaller body. It hadn’t moved from that spot in over a year. A cold cup of coffee sat on the speckled white Formica counter beside him, “World’s Best Dad” emblazoned on the mug in big red letters. She wondered how he could still use it. Her “World’s Best Mom” mug was gone; she didn’t know where and hadn’t looked.

Mother’s Day had been the worst. Jay’s birthday, or the anniversary of the day she’d lost him, she’d thought those days would be the most unbearable. But if no one reminded you, you could lie to yourself about what day it was. Mother’s Day, though, it was everywhere you looked, on TV, store flyers, even shouting at you from spam e-mails the filters didn’t catch;
everywhere
, reminding her that she wasn’t a mother anymore.

Erin swallowed past the lump in her throat. Aware of the sudden silence out in the roundhouse, she closed the lab door gently. That was the problem with working together; all your employees knew about your marital squabbles. Not that she and Dominic fought much anymore. They didn’t talk enough to do that.

She slapped down the flight schedule on the counter next to Dominic. “What the
hell
is this?”

A gauge in his hand, he glanced at it, then up to her. “It’s your itinerary for the PRI show,” he said mildly, his charcoal-colored eyes so dark they could appear black in certain lighting. Now they smoked, like coals on the edge of blazing.

“I
never
go to that show,” she said, her teeth gritted.

He wore his thick hair short. Despite being forty-three, he didn’t have even a hint of gray, and the overhead fluorescents gleamed in the black strands. He was more handsome than the day she’d first seen him in a university night class back in Michigan. Over the last year, she’d forgotten how good-looking he was. She’d looked at him, but she hadn’t really seen him. Just as she couldn’t really see him in the dark when it was long past midnight.

“We need some time away from here,” Dominic said, flicking a button on the gauge. “Together.” He watched something on the piece of test equipment he was working, and she hated the way he didn’t even look at her as he added, “Don’t tell me you’ve got too much to do for year-end because I’m only talking about one work day.”

Damn him for circumventing her argument. “You should have asked me.”

“You would have told me no.”

She could feel her heart’s vicious pounding against the wall of her chest. “I hate it when you make decisions for me.”

He turned his head, smiled. It didn’t reach his eyes. “Like when you decided we wouldn’t go to Michigan?”

“All right, so I didn’t consult you about that. I didn’t want . . .”

She hadn’t wanted to argue. Because he made her
think
when they argued. He made her feel. In a terrifying way, feeling something, anything, even anger, was dangerous. It opened her up to emotions she couldn’t deal with, things she couldn’t think about. It wasn’t like in the middle of the night when she reached for him. That was physical, akin to taking a sleeping pill, a matter of survival.

He was making her feel now, and she didn’t like it.

He flipped a switch on the meter, and it pinged at him. “It’s nonrefundable, and I’m not cancelling it,” he said, anticipating her objections again.

That just pissed her off more. “Screw the money.” Why was he being such an asshole about this?

All right,
she
was being more of an asshole than he was. First with Rachel, now with Dominic. But she couldn’t go to that goddamn show, couldn’t wear the game face, or pretend with all those strangers. It was bad enough pretending she was fine with people she knew.

 

 

“WHOA, I DIDN’T MEAN TO START WORLD WAR THREE,” RACHEL whispered to Yvonne after Erin disappeared into Dominic’s lab.

“It’s not your fault, honey.” Yvonne tried to assure her.

In the break nook, they poured themselves fresh coffees. Rachel loaded hers with creamer. The coffee was made from expensive, freshly ground beans, and the creamer came in a variety of flavors. The DeKnights treated their employees well. Rachel didn’t have to make a copayment on the medical or dental insurance, and the benefits were so good that she and her ex had taken the boys off his plan and added them to hers. Then there was the profit sharing, which was based not on salary level, but divided equally among the thirteen employees. Everyone had equal incentive and was equally rewarded. Rachel had her own office, too. Where else did a receptionist get an office, even if it did open right into the front entrance? She needed this job, and she wished she hadn’t gotten testy with Erin even if she’d only been following Dominic’s instructions.

Beside her, Yvonne eyed the hallway leading to Dominic’s lab. “They’re on edge with the holidays, and it being a year and all. You know how it is.”

No, Rachel didn’t know. But she’d felt the tension around DKG growing over the last month. She was the newbie. Almost everyone else had worked for the DeKnights at least five years. Yvonne herself had been with them the full ten years DKG had been in business. She was inside sales, handling all the existing customers with repeat business. Yvonne Colbert was a big woman, not fat, but husky and tall, over six feet. In her midfifties, she was soft-spoken, with caramel skin and gentle brown eyes. If Rachel made a mistake, Yvonne was the first to say, “It’s okay, honey, don’t worry about it.”