Past Midnight (36 page)

But of course, Al meant Yvonne. “I’m not going out there and accusing her,” he said, his voice tight.

“We won’t do that,” Erin said so earnestly he wanted to break something. Why couldn’t she be that earnest for him, for their life? “She’s upbeat right now about her daughter’s baby. I don’t want to bring her down.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Dominic said. He knew how to be diplomatic with his employees.

“We’ll do it together,” Erin answered.

He stared at her over Al’s head. Together? Was he supposed to read something into that along with her steady gaze? They weren’t together. They were nothing. His bitterness swamped him. “Fine, whatever. I’ll do the talking.”

When Al rose with him, Dominic pointed to the chair. “You stay here, and try to figure out the origin of that IP address. A name would be great.” The main thing, though, was not making Yvonne feel they were ganging up on her.

She was in her office running her finger along a line she was reading on her computer screen. “Hey there, Dominic, Happy New Year.” When she saw Erin right behind him, her welcoming smile froze. “What’s up?”

Dominic struck a casual pose, leaning his hands on the back of the chair in front of Yvonne’s desk. “You know we’ve been having this patent problem on the through-coat gauge, right?”

“Yeah, Dominic.” Her eyes grew darker, wary.

Best way to handle it, get right to it, no questions, no accusations. “We’ve been wondering why the royalty they want to extort out of us so closely reflects our real sales numbers. Lo and behold, Al found a third IP address accessing the system through your user ID, and the only thing they were looking at was financial information.” Once a user logged on, the system tracked all movement.

“It wasn’t me,” Yvonne said immediately, her tone harsh, defensive.

“We know that,” Erin said just as quickly. “What we can’t figure out is how they got your password. Any ideas?”

“I don’t give my password to anyone.” Yvonne crossed her arms beneath her ample bosom.

“We know that, too.” Dominic pulled out the chair and sat. They were losing control of the situation. He leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, clasped his hands, and looked at her over the top of his laced fingers. “But has anyone been in the office, a vendor or someone”—he shrugged, trying to put them on the same baffled level—“looking over your shoulder? It would have to be someone that comes by regularly. Because they’ve got to see it every time you change your password.”

“People sit over there.” Yvonne jabbed a finger at the chair he occupied. “Besides, Erin talks to the vendors, not me.”

He glanced at Erin; she returned the look. They had a moment of silent communication that said they were fucking this up royally. He resented that he needed her, but he did.

Yvonne’s office had only the one chair, so Erin leaned against the wall. “We’re stumped, Yvonne. We need your help because someone’s jerking us around and we don’t know who.”

We.
They weren’t a
we
. His bitterness grew, choking him.

Yvonne tipped her head, stared at her monitor for a long moment. Then she licked her lips and swallowed. “Here’s the thing about my password,” she said so softly he had to hunch forward to hear. “I don’t change it.”

Dominic sat back with jerk. “But the system prompts you to change every thirty days.”

She pressed her lips together. “I know, but I was always forgetting it. The new password, I mean.” She huffed out a sigh. “So after I changed it, I’d go back in and reset it again to the old password.”

He stared at her.

“How long have you been doing that?” Erin asked.

Yvonne glanced from Erin to him and back again. “Almost since the beginning.”

Jesus. They’d been using the system for two years. He didn’t yell. He would
not
yell.

“Well, that was silly,” Erin said mildly. Too mildly. She was as close to an explosion as he was. Yvonne had been with them from the start. She knew better than that. But he supposed she’d gotten complacent, comfortable. And negligent.

“I sure as hell hope you change your bank password more often,” he said grimly.

She remained silent, and Dominic scrubbed a hand down his face. “Jesus, Yvonne.” He knew she didn’t like taking the Lord’s name in vain, but how could she be so unaware?

“I will from now on, Dominic, I swear it. I’ll change the password right now.” She blinked, close to tears, he thought.

He wanted to be angry. It suited his mood. But he couldn’t take it out on Yvonne. He couldn’t even take it out on Erin. “All we can do is have Al keep working on the IP address and see if we can come up with something that way.”

“I’m sorry, Dominic. I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

Yvonne’s words stabbed him straight to the heart. He’d thought the same thing the day he let Jay go on that school trip. Getting slowly to his feet, he felt a hundred years old.

Outside Yvonne’s door, the troops had scattered, keeping their heads low and out of the battle lines. Erin crossed the roundhouse, turning when he didn’t follow her. “I have something to show you.”

Whatever it was, he didn’t want to see it. Yet he entered her office just as she pulled out the middle desk drawer. The sheet of paper she held out to him shook in her hand.

It took him a moment too long to read and understand, to assess the full impact, so she told him what it said. “WEU wants to buy us out.”

He stared at her expressionless face, and something shot up from the deep pit of his anger, grief, guilt, and all the other stuff she wouldn’t talk about. “You want to sell DKG?”

“That’s not what I mean.”

He knew what she fucking meant. She was done. It was over. She wanted out, away, anywhere without him. He folded the letter, shoved it in his back pocket. “Let’s do it. Let’s get the fuck out of this thing.”

“Dominic, would you just listen—”

He cut her off. “I’ve listened enough.” He turned. “You can come with me, or you can sit here and wait it out.” He left without her.

He actually enjoyed that she ran after him, that she had trouble catching up. “But they didn’t even name a price,” she said as he slammed through the front door, the glass rattling in the heavy metal frame.

“I don’t give a damn.”

 

 

HE WOULDN’T LISTEN TO HER, NOT WHEN SHE TRIED TO POINT out that they didn’t have an appointment, that Garland Brooks might not even be there, that they should strategize about what they would say.

Hands tight on the wheel, knuckles white, he ignored her.

Erin finally shut up. She’d only shown him the letter because it made WEU’s campaign strategy very clear. Squeezing them for ridiculous royalties, threatening them with a lawsuit, it had been about eliminating the competition. DKG was stealing their market share; the solution, eliminate DKG. Weaken them with threats, hit them when cash was vulnerable, then offer to put them out of their misery by buying them. WEU could pocket their cash receipts the moment the sales contract was signed. Voilà, instant market share.

There was a part of her that wanted to say yes.
Let’s just take it, let’s get out.
She was so tired of fighting. But seeing the evidence of WEU’s dirty tactics, the fact that they actually had someone steal Yvonne’s password, she was suddenly as pissed as Dominic. They were on the same side, she’d tried to tell him, but he wouldn’t listen. To him, they’d been on opposite sides since they’d lost Jay. And everything she said or, more aptly, didn’t say, only cemented that.

She pushed back into the corner of her seat to watch him, the lines of his face tense, stark, his brows slashes of anger. They had done this to each other. It couldn’t be undone. It had gone too far, the tear in the fabric of their lives irreparable.

There was one space left in the guest parking outside WEU’s headquarters. Dominic rammed the gear into park. She had no clue what he was going to say to Brooks. In this mood, she didn’t put it past him to start a fight, fists and all.

He shoved through the lobby door and marched to the black-and-chrome receptionist’s desk. “Tell Garland Brooks that Dominic and Erin DeKnight are here to see him.”

She was a pretty brunette, her eyes wide with apprehension as Dominic hit her with a glower. “Is he expecting you, sir?”

“Please”—his face was strained, the courtesy costing him—“let him know we want to speak to him.”

Never taking her gaze off him, the brunette punched some numbers into her state-of-the-art switchboard equipped with Bluetooth. “Please tell Mr. Brooks that he has visitors in the lobby, Dominic and Erin DeKnight.” She listened a moment. “Thank you. I’ll let them know.” She disconnected. “He’s finishing up a meeting right now, but he’ll be down in a few minutes if you’d like to wait.” She pointed to a couple of black leather lobby chairs. “There’s coffee.”

“Thank you,” Dominic said with tight politeness.

Erin smiled her thanks at the woman. The floor of the lobby was expensive marble shiny enough to see her reflection in, the leather furniture top quality, the feel of the place posh and worldclass. And overextending the cash flow? WEU management obviously subscribed to the policy that in a cash crunch, you didn’t stop spending, you just stretched out your payment terms. Or maybe accounts payable was so busy paying off the lobby remodel that they couldn’t pay hardworking, small-fry vendors like Leon. The coffee service had everything imaginable, even an automatic espresso machine on a granite countertop, all of it top of the line.

She pressed the button for plain coffee to soothe Dominic’s savage beast. She was actually surprised at his muttered
thank you
when he took the cup.

After settling in the chair next to him, she said, “We need to talk before Brooks gets here.”

Dominic turned his head slowly, his gaze sliding to her. “You want to get rid of DKG, we’ll get rid of it.” He leveled her with a dark, hooded look.

She eyed the receptionist and dropped her voice. “That isn’t why I showed you their letter. I wanted you to see how they were trying to make a move on us.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me about it when you got it?”

Okay, so he’d seen the date was from last year. “For the same reason you didn’t tell me about the patent infringement when you first got
that
letter. We were supposed to be going away. I didn’t want to spoil the fun.”

His eyes were sharp, narrowed. “I didn’t tell you about the trip I’d planned until the evening.
After
you must have gotten the letter.”

Shit. Yes, she’d wanted to keep it to herself, think about it, hold it close as if it were a way out of her guilt and turmoil. Then, with everything they’d done, the hellish weekend, she’d forgotten about it until the moment Al showed them how their numbers were being stolen. It wasn’t just Jay she’d stopped talking about; it was the business, their lives, everything.

Dominic gave her a small smile that never reached his eyes. He wasn’t fooled. She’d told him so many lies, shut him out so many times, he no longer had faith in her. Why should he? She hadn’t given him anything to have faith in. Not for a long time.

They sat in silence, except for the brunette’s soft, polite tones as she took calls and the beat of shoes along the hallway off to the left.

“Hey, Denise, can you give this to the FedEx guy when he gets here?” A man’s voice echoed across the lobby. A very familiar voice.

Erin knew it in a heartbeat. So did Dominic.

At the same moment, Reggie recognized them. Reggie, their ex-software engineer, the man who’d worked on the through-coat gauge, the one who’d helped Dominic research the patent.

What the hell was he doing at WEU?

“HEY, YOU GUYS, HOW ARE YOU?” REGGIE’S VOICE WAS TOO LOUD, falsely genial, and nervous. “It’s been ages. How ya been? How’s everyone at DKG? Wow, I really miss the old gang. You can’t imagine how impersonal it is working at a big place like this.” He flapped a hand in the general direction of the building’s back end.

Oh yeah, real nervous. Dominic had known Reggie almost since they’d moved to California, fifteen years, and Reggie telegraphed jitters with his fast-talk, wide eyes, and the way he shifted foot to foot like a kid who had to go to the bathroom. Tall, gangly, with a thin nose, and a pocket protector, he was the archetypal nerdy engineer.

“I’m sure you know exactly how we’ve been, Reggie.”

Reggie nodded, his head bobbing on his neck like one of those bobblehead dogs. “Man, it’s been so busy around this place”—he waved his arm to demonstrate—“I haven’t had time to poke my head out.” He laughed tensely. “Like a t-turtle.”

The brief stutter was a dead giveaway. Dominic smiled with the acrimony burning inside him. “Then let me tell you we’ve been doing great. Sales of our through-coat gauge have gone through the roof.”

“Cool.” Reggie’s eye started to tick.

Dominic had been consumed with Erin, that she wanted to sell, she wanted out of DKG, out of their marriage. He hadn’t stopped to consider the implications of the letter itself. Escalating everything at year-end, then a sweet little note saying,
oh, hey, we’ll take your company in settlement, help you get out of the mess you got yourself into.
It was so convenient. His visit to Garland Brooks had played right into the scheme, making them think he was nervous. Brooks was still playing them, as evidenced by the wait in the lobby rather than inviting them to the inner sanctum. Mind games.

He’d
let
himself be played, and that made him all the more pissed at Reggie. “But you already knew how well the gauge has been doing.” Dominic crossed his arms over his chest, smiled maliciously, like a predator ready to pounce. Beside him, Erin smiled, too, as if they were suddenly a team again. “Trying to get your profit sharing out of us any way you can, Reggie?”

Reggie’s gaze flashed between them like a Ping-Pong ball. “What are you talking about, Dominic?”