The Cost of Happiness: A Contemporary Romance (12 page)

“But I’ll tell you this—our phones were subjected to a lot of testing on billing issues. I can’t say for sure that we’d have caught this issue with text message rates, although I’d be really surprised if our phones had that error and we didn’t catch it.”

Meghan, still bent over her pad, spoke before she could stop herself. “Could we see that research you did?”

When there was no response, she looked at Dan. “What? You were about to ask for that yourself.”

He grinned at her, that sly but sunny look that made her glow. “What I’d been thinking was how confident Harvey sounds. He’ll make a good witness. You’re right, too.” Dan turned to Harvey. “How about it? Can you get us more details on testing protocols?”

Harvey said sure, made a couple of notes, then went back to his time line.

When he’d finished, Dan said, “Okay, what did you know about your competitors’ technology?”

Harvey didn’t speak at first. “Sorry. It’s been a long time since I even thought about them.”

“Why’s that?” Meghan asked. “Surely you were as concerned with their products as you were with your own?”

“Not really. We kept track of what the other companies were doing, sure. I remember that. We’d buy their phones, and I dare say they bought ours. As I recall, we looked at their phones and decided we were already on a better track.” Harvey shrugged. “I’ll have to go back over my files for more details.”

Meghan pulled out the file containing her research from the Internet. “Didn’t Argus announce that they had made significant technological advances in SMS back in 1998? Were you tracking the progress other manufacturers were making?” She caught Dan’s look. “Short message service,” she reminded him.

Harvey stared at a corner of the room, as though he was fast-forwarding through his memories of the industry on an invisible screen. Finally he said, “Yeah, okay. That sounds about right. Argus was the big name back then—well, still is, I guess.”

Harvey looked at them, eager, ready for the next command. His eyes flicked from Meghan to Dan and back.

Meghan checked to see if Dan wanted to take over, but he just motioned for her to continue.

She didn’t need to look at her notes. “So what I’m wondering is if you recall whether Argus was right about having significantly different technology back then. I’ve got the article here, if it will help to refresh your memory.” She passed a reprint over to the engineer. She handed Dan a copy as well.

Harvey skimmed it, then read a couple of paragraphs again. “Hold on.” He fished in his briefcase, pulling out a sheaf of slightly grubby papers and two dog-eared notebooks. “I found some stuff in my basement. I haven’t looked at it yet.”

He flipped through the pages, reading some bits, backtracking, then skimming other sections.

Finally, his eyes widened. “Wow. You’re right. I totally forgot about this. See, text messaging was really new in the nineties. When I started in this industry, no one used it. We—ProCell—came to the party a little late, so we had to play catch-up. Argus really led the way. I remember we got worried—what if Argus had developed some super snazzy way of sending texts?”

He pointed to a specific page. “Engineering was under a lot of pressure to make sure that Argus and the other companies didn’t have such wonderful technology everyone would want to ditch our phones. So we kept tabs on their tech advances. Only, when we looked at it, we didn’t see anything great. If anything, we thought they’d screwed up a couple of things that we thought we’d got right.”

He stood up. “Here, I’ll show you.” He started flipping through notebooks crammed with drawings and annotated diagrams. “I kept everything,” he admitted shyly.

She felt Dan’s reaction to this news. Trust the seasoned prosecutor to be concerned with how Harvey would do as a witness. Dan was almost salivating at the chance to put the retired engineer on the stand.

Harvey held out a notebook, explaining what they were looking at. Meghan hadn’t a clue what the squiggles stood for.

She wanted to grin at Harvey, as though she and Dan were proud parents watching their son at a piano recital. At the same time, she needed him to think about the legal aspects of his work. “Here’s our question. If ProCell’s design was different from Argus and Tech 3’s, is it possible it didn’t cause overbilling?”

Harvey looked at the papers in his hand, and at the papers on the table. He stared off at a corner of the room, then back at the table. “I still don’t know what caused overbilling for any of the manufacturers,” he admitted. “If I assume that it happened, and if I assume that Argus and Tech 3 phones had SMS software that caused the problems, then I think there’s a good chance our technology didn’t have the same software glitch.”

She kept her eyes on Harvey even as Dan’s relief seemed to soften the mood in the room.

“You know what would be helpful,” Harvey said.

“What’s that?” Meghan asked.

“You guys are meeting with the current team tomorrow, right?”

“Unh-huh,” she nodded.

“Well, ask Dave Divichenko what happened to the Jenner C9000 phone. Jenner went out of business in 2002, victims of the crash. As I recall, their SMS technology was unusual, and I think we had our suspicions that Argus and Tech 3 tried to reverse engineer some of the Jenner designs. I think Dave might know something about that.”

“Did ProCell use the Jenner technology?” Dan asked.

Harvey shook his head. “In theory, Jenner had a great idea, but it seemed kind of far-out. ProCell’s always been a conservative company. Jenner’s tech leaped too many frogs for our taste.”

It wasn’t the silver bullet that they’d hoped for. Still, Meghan had a good feeling about this. Maybe the Jenner technology would be the wedge Dan could use to show the court ProCell was different from the other companies.

They thanked Harvey for his time. On the way out of the building, Dan made arrangements with Lou’s assistant to have all Harvey’s notes copied.

Meghan was surprised to find it was sunset when they drove to their hotel.

“I don’t know about you, but my brain is swimming in schematics and ten-year-old technology,” Dan said. “I can’t even remember what sort of cell phone I had then.”

“Well, I was too young—” And too poor. “—to have a cell phone back then.”

“Let me guess, you were in your crib,” he teased.

“That would make me twelve. You don’t want me to be twelve.” She was thinking he’d want her old enough for law school, but the moment the words were out of her mouth, she realized what she was suggesting.

“No,” he agreed solemnly. “I don’t want you to be twelve.”

She blushed in the dimness of the car and was glad Dan didn’t talk for the rest of the drive.

They worked while eating their takeout sandwiches, going through their notes and making new lists of questions for the next day. After an hour, Meghan’s hand was cramped from writing, and Dan was pacing back and forth between the table and the TV set.

“It’s frustrating not knowing the answer,” Dan said. “I’m used to knowing the answers and just working on how to prove it, or how to convince a judge, or how to educate a jury. This business, where the answers are literally hiding in some obsolete cell phone innards, makes me crazy.”

Meghan rubbed her hand and shook it as though it was wet, trying to ease the cramp. She was startled when Dan grabbed it and started to massage the palm. He was still talking about some case he had where the bank hadn’t been able to figure out how the fraud had been perpetrated. Meghan wasn’t listening. She was staring at her hand in his, overwhelmed by the sensation of being touched by him.

The room was suddenly very close and stuffy. She pulled her hand free as gently as she could. “Thanks,” she said in a whispery voice, not looking at him.

“Is it better?” he asked, concerned.

“Much better, thanks,” she said, picking up a pen and bending over the pad. Her skin was hot—she was pretty sure her cheeks would reveal what she was feeling. She let her hair fall forward.

“Uh, do you want a soda? Something stronger?” he asked.

“No, I’m fine, I’m good,” Meghan protested, looking only at the paper in front of her. She tried to think of something brilliant to say. She wanted desperately not to be the sort of girl who went fluttery when a man touched her hand. She despised those girls.

She didn’t always get what she wanted, though. That was the great life lesson she had to relearn, over and over and over.

She made a big show of picking up one of Harvey’s indecipherable documents and pretending to decipher it.

As he watched Meghan pore over some document, Dan reflected on how primal it was to hold someone’s hand. To touch their skin. Primal in a sexual way, of course, because skin is skin, and hands are so sensitive. Shaking hands to convey welcome, taking his grandmother’s hand to help her stand on her own, stroking the head of his newborn niece—all expressions enhanced by the spark of skin to skin. Being able to ease the pain in Meghan’s hand, an ache caused by her ceaseless effort to help him, the client, the firm. That felt good.

Only it went deeper than that. It may have been a long time, but Dan wasn’t dead inside. He wanted to touch her, so he’d grabbed the first opportunity. Pure instinct. He hadn’t thought about what he’d done, at first. It wasn’t until she pulled away and broke the connection that he remembered that nameless partner on the Jumbotron.

He couldn’t be that guy. He had to be better than that.

He pushed his hand through his hair, looking around wildly for a way to get more air into the room. He knew this feeling—overload. The case confused him, Meghan confused him, his own body—well, no, that reaction was pretty unambiguous. Still, his feelings confused him. He wanted Meghan to succeed, he wanted to rescue her, he wanted to touch her—a lot, and he also wanted to leave her alone because that was quite obviously the right thing to do.

He wanted it all.

He’d not felt this way since… No, actually, he couldn’t think of a time when he’d felt like this before. Excited. Nervous. Simultaneously convinced he’d done a bad thing that was also a good thing. All because he’d touched her hand? Seriously? Could he be that Victorian in an era of hookups and booty calls and friends-with-privileges?

The window didn’t open, he discovered. He could fiddle with the thermostat, but he honestly wasn’t sure if he was too hot or too cold. He couldn’t bring himself to ask Meghan if she was too warm. Too much of a giveaway and anyway, she gave every appearance of being oblivious to his existence. He settled on getting a soda out of the minibar.

“You sure you don’t want one?” he asked as he popped the top.

“Um, well, okay,” she said from behind that curtain of hair.

“Ice?”

“Yes, please.” Still not looking at him.

He took the ice bucket out into the hall, looking for the ice machine on their floor. What was it about this woman that drove him crazy? He shouldn’t desire her, although his body was ready for a vigorous debate on that topic. It had taken a while, but he’d finally gotten to a point in his life where having sex outside of a relationship was like eating boring food—you could do it but it didn’t seem worth the effort.

The ice machine was tucked into a little room off the hallway on the far side of the elevators. Dan scooped some ice into the bucket, resisting the urge to run a cube over the back of his neck. Other parts of his body also seemed overheated. Again, no big surprise there.

As Dan got back to the suite, his nerves sounded the alarm. Meghan was in there. He could picture her hunched over, still reading something related to the case he suddenly didn’t care about. Through an open doorway was a bedroom, a large bed, nice sheets, a bathtub—
not deep enough
, his
other
brain pointed out—a shower, towels, soap. Just your standard hotel room, until you started to think about how and where you could have sex.

He paused outside the door.

Was he nuts? He had to stop this. She worked for him. She relied on him for her job, her security, her freedom from harassment. And not just harassment by assholes like Vicky and Darlene, but also harassment from horny lawyers like himself.
Remember the Jumbotron
.

Dan thought about Anne van Oostrum, Wally Leith, even the hateful Darlene. He could imagine them all frowning and saying, “tsk tsk.”

He took a deep breath, clutched the ice bucket to his chest and reached out to insert his key card. An image of Meghan interviewing the engineer stopped him.

Sexiest thing about her? Her brain. Oh, God, her brain. Watching Meghan work was like watching a bonfire flare and send out sparks. Several times during the day Dan could have sworn he and Meghan were thinking in tandem. He wasn’t used to working with someone who kept up with him. She even knew when to leap to the next issue, the next question to be asked.

And this was just work. What would she be like in bed? What would it be like to have that sort of unspoken communication when making love to a woman?

Sex could be really good here
, his
other
brain pointed out.
Think how nice full skin-on-skin contact would be along with the mental stuff.

He stifled his
other
brain and returned to the obvious arguments against having any relationship with her.

Against the rules.

Regardless of the rules, it risked being harassment.

She was his subordinate in a fairly conservative law firm, which could put her in an invidious position.

It was such a cliché—the partner and the paralegal. And a well-worn cliché, at that.

They didn’t really know each other on a personal level.

She might be dating someone.

And then there was the kicker—what if this was all just him? What if she didn’t feel the same full-moon insanity, this tidal pull towards each other? She didn’t seem the type to strip down and roll around at the first opportunity, and he’d not noticed any longing sidelong glances, or subtle body language.

He inserted the card and turned the doorknob. He was going crazy. Better he should apply all this energy to figuring out cell phones. Bluntly, they were both impossible problems. At least the client was paying him to solve the cell phone conundrum.