The Cost of Happiness: A Contemporary Romance (13 page)

“Sorry that took so long. The ice machine is really hidden away.”

“Oh. There’s a map on the back of the door,” Meghan said without looking up.

“Never occurred to me to look.” Great. Now he’s an idiot as well as a slavering horndog.

Dan poured them drinks then joined Meghan at the table. “Where are we?”

“I don’t know. I need an electrical engineer to understand this stuff.” Meghan reached for her glass.

Her wrists were so delicate, pale-skinned and slightly bony. Dan reached for a document at random even as he caught himself staring at her forearms.

The rest of the evening was a teeter-totter of the cerebral and the carnal. Dan would lose himself in considerations of short message services until a flash of Meghan’s ear as she tucked her hair behind it triggered very long and intricate fantasies of what he would do if given the chance to caress her throat with his lips, his fingertips. It was a relief—and a delicious torture—when Meghan finally stretched and pushed away from the table.

“What time do we start tomorrow?” she asked, rubbing her eyes.

Dan made a show of consulting his notes. “Um, Lou expects us at nine-fifteen, and we start with the tech guys at nine-thirty. I’d like to get there early—a little bit before nine? Do you want breakfast in your room?”

She played with her hair, pulling it back and bundling it all on top of her head, a pose that did very nice things to her figure. He stared at her eyes, not even daring to look back at his notes, afraid his gaze would linger on the way down.

“Oh, no—that’s okay. I’ll meet you downstairs. How about seven-thirty?”

“Sounds good,” he managed.

“Right, then. I’m off.” She turned to leave. She hesitated, her back to him, then walked out the room.

Dan slumped as he heard the door latch. Then he reached for his phone.

Meghan could feel her shame and guilt heating her cheeks and clenching her gut as she let herself into her room.

What the hell had she been thinking? She’d behaved like a pimply middle schooler, giggling behind her hand at lunch, passing notes in homeroom and praying Jimmy would ask her to the prom. Thing was, Meghan hadn’t done any of that in middle school. Now, fifteen years later, she has to alternate between hiding behind her hair, and then thrusting her breasts at him? Not that she was overly endowed in that area, and not that he’d even noticed.

And in typical teenager fashion, she wanted to die on the spot. What a stupid time to be attracted to a man.

She threw open her suitcase, pulled out the zippered bag containing her toiletries, which she then scattered on the counter, looking for her toothbrush. She punished her gums vigorously while mentally reviewing all the reasons Dan Howard was not the right man to be interested in.

He was a partner and thus her boss, not to mention directly supervising her.

He had to be involved with someone, no matter what he said. Or he had a past or something. Bottom line, he probably wasn’t available.

He was a former Assistant US Attorney, which ought to make him an enemy. At the very least, it was an interesting irony, given that her mother was serving three-to-five in a federal prison and the asshole doing Dan’s job in Chicago had cost Meghan her legal career.

He was too nice for her.

Even if that last one was her insecurities talking, the rest of her reasons were ironclad. She brushed harder. It hurt but even the pain didn’t help. He was still there, smiling at her as he handed her a soda. Or—oh, God, yes—massaging her hand.

As Meghan lay in the huge hotel bed, between crisp sheets and with the light out, she allowed herself to think of all the reasons why Dan Howard was precisely the man she wanted. Smart, funny, appreciative, great blue eyes, nice hands, sexy smile, sexy body, sexy laugh.

She flopped over, suddenly furious with herself. Why was she noticing how sexy a man could be? She’d been oblivious to the guys in law school, and then when her legal troubles got worse, she just wasn’t even thinking about stuff like that. Her life was simple for a reason, and dating, sex, and relationships were all more than she could handle. So why crush on her boss?

She flipped onto her back, the cool sheets feeling scratchy now. She knew she should turn on the light, or the TV, or the radio—anything was better than having her body itch with desire and desperation. She couldn’t have sex with Dan Howard. She shouldn’t even fantasize about him while satisfying herself. She knew that. He wasn’t interested in her—why should he be? She was too young and…and too dull, too gauche, too unattractive.

No, “unattractive” was too harsh. Well, she did have nice eyes, and her figure was pretty good if you didn’t want Pamela Anderson.

She rolled onto her stomach, clutching one of the spare pillows to her side. She really hadn’t thought this could happen with anyone at Fergusson. She’d put all that man-woman stuff out of her mind. When couples nuzzled each other on the street, Meghan barely noticed. She didn’t get misty when she saw a family in the park, the dad pushing the stroller or the mom with an infant, its feet dangling, strapped to her chest. Meghan assumed that some things weren’t for her. She was realistic—very few people got everything they wanted in life. The trick was to want slightly less than you were likely to get.

Now here she was, wishing her boss was interested in her sexually. That wasn’t just wanting the moon, that was wanting a berth on the next space shuttle.

He’d started to massage her hand again, at least in her mind. It was obviously an innocent gesture, one she had overreacted to. Dan probably hadn’t even noticed he was doing it. It was a nice guy thing, not a “Hey, baby” thing. Chivalrous, not lecherous.

The worst part was, she liked him for that very reason. He was a nice guy. Not at all the kind to sleep with his paralegal.

And wasn’t that the irony of ironies?

She finally found the cool spot on the pillow.

When the phone rang in the morning, Meghan was dressed and trying to tame her hair with the hotel’s anemic hairdryer. It had to be Dan—the only other people who knew they were at that hotel would have called Dan rather than her.

“Yup,” she said, juggling the phone while she brushed her hair.

“I’m heading down for breakfast. You ready?”

“Two minutes,” she mumbled around the barrette she’d opened and stuck between her lips while she tried to gather her hair up.

“What?” He sounded amused.

She took the barrette out of her mouth. “I’m doing my hair. I’ll be out in two minutes.” He didn’t say anything. Men. He probably thought she meant fifteen minutes. “You can time me.”

She thought she heard him chuckle. She hung up, knowing that it was quicker to prove her point than to argue it with him.

By her watch, she was out the door in under two minutes, so she was gratified to see Dan leaning against the wall opposite her door, staring at the sweep-second hand on his watch.

“I make it one minute forty-seven seconds,” she said.

“I would have said slightly less, but then I was still holding the phone when you hung up on me.” He grinned.

“Oh, boo hoo.” It was just too easy to forget he was a partner.

They got into the spirit of a working breakfast, using spare paper napkins to make notes to follow up.

“Aren’t you supposed to have some whiz-bang tablet or netbook for situations like this?” Meghan frowned at the scatter of napkins between them, some completely covered with Dan’s crabby handwriting.

“Bad enough I had to have a BlackBerry assigned to me,” Dan said. “You don’t get this stuff at Justice. Pen and paper still works, you know.”

Meghan started to organize the napkins into piles. She scrounged in her pocket for a paperclip. “Sure it works. Until one of us spills coffee on your genius and it’s lost forever.”

She tucked the napkin file into her bag. When she looked up, Dan’s smiling eyes were the blue of a perfect spring morning. She flushed and lowered her head. “I’ll type them up later this morning.”

“You do that.” His tone might be mocking, true. There was another note to it. One that plucked at Meghan’s senses, enticing her to follow him someplace she desperately wanted to go but shouldn’t.

The drive to the ProCell campus was awkward. Meghan could still feel the pull of Dan’s gaze from breakfast. He liked her as a paralegal—or whatever the hell she was in this case. When they got back to Philadelphia, she would slink back into her windowless office, Dan would get caught up with the work of being a partner, and she’d see him at the Monday morning meetings and maybe passing him in the hall. The intimacy of this trip would never be repeated. Face facts—even if he did like her as more than a subordinate, it wouldn’t last. It couldn’t last.

Midway through the morning’s interviews with the current tech team, Meghan started to wonder about something—something she wanted to ask Dan before they talked with Lou again.

She’d opened her mouth to form the question when Lou bounded in even as the last techie was barely out the door.

“Lunch,” Lou announced. “On me. C’mon.” He took them down a hall toward the employee parking lot.

“Hey, Dan, look at this.” Meghan pointed to a glass-fronted case displaying ProCell phones from the early nineties, when they were larger than a conventional cordless phone today, to their current smartphone design.

“Wow. Remember when the antenna had to be pulled out?” Dan asked.

“Lou, which are the phones we’re talking about?” Meghan peered at the case. “The clamshell phones? Which others?”

“See the one with the plastic nub antenna? That’s from the right period.”

Dan pointed to a model. “I had one like that. They always reminded me of miniature coffins with the display at the top like some window showing the deceased’s face.”

Lou laughed. “That’s a macabre image.”

“Time for lunch,” Meghan said, leading them out the door.

After they’d given the waitress their orders, Meghan tensed. Her preference was to ask Dan about her ideas separately. At the same time, she didn’t want to go into the afternoon interviews without mentioning them. She really hoped Dan hadn’t been kidding about it being all right for her to behave like a lawyer on this case.

“Lou,” she started. She ignored Dan’s quick glance—she’d chicken out if she thought he seemed uneasy about her talking to the client. “I’ve been wondering about ProCell’s market share in the nineties. Has it changed in the past ten years?” She could feel Dan’s gaze swing back to Lou. That gesture felt like a good sign that she hadn’t overstepped. Oh, yeah, and the fact that he hadn’t kicked her under the table.

“Well, I’ve only worked here for a few years, so I’m not sure I have all the figures exactly right.” Lou rubbed his chin. “Basically there were four companies that made cell phones in the beginning. Us, Argus, Tech 3, and Jenner. Jenner went out of business in 2001, I think. By that time Abel Dynamix and Svensen had gotten in, so we didn’t actually gain much. In fact, our market share went down a bit when Jenner died, which seems odd. I know Vince—”

“Vince Johnson, ProCell’s president and CEO,” Dan said.

Lou nodded. “Vince felt that was odd, but then our tech guys came up with something new in 2002—I mean, there’s always something new and different, right? Only this actually
was
new and different—and we regained a lot of the lost market share despite having more competition. We were still behind Argus and Tech 3, but holding our own as number three.”