Emma Holly (30 page)

Eric twisted away and got to his feet. If that wasn't the pot calling the kettle black! "Fine," he said. "Since you're so eager to
get
rid of me, I'll go screw our 'guest' senseless."

"I'll never be eager to get rid of you. I love you very much."

Eric raked his hair back and growled, then bent to kiss his infuriating boss. "I'll see you later," he said, sweeping his hand down B.G.'s cheek in a rough caress. "Leave the cameras off."

"Yes," B.G. agreed. "I believe I've learned my lesson with regards to that."

It might have been Eric's imagination, but he thought B.G. looked wistful when he drew back.

Ironically,
Eric had to resort to the cameras to find Charity. She turned up in the last place Michael checked: the V-shaped glass catwalk overhanging B.G.'s ultramodern living room. Equipped with earphones and a player hooked to a belt, she was gyrating up and down the walk like a madwoman, full out, dancing the way she lived. When she swung her body around one of the strong steel cables that held it up, Eric's heart lurched in his chest.

God help him, she was the Evel Knievel of pole dancing.

The bridge was too well engineered to sway, but that didn't stop Eric's dizziness. He put his hand on the surveillance console to steady himself. The file entry mentioning her exotic dancing dug its metaphoric elbow into his back. Her head bopped energetically, her hips rolling like her spine was made of rubber.

The Joffrey might not have hired her, but no one could fault her confidence.

"Wow," Michael breathed as she did two blood-freezing walkovers in a row. "She could get paid for that."

"She did. Briefly." Eric swallowed, distracted by the way Charity filled her bright-blue jogbra and shorts—tight, boy-style shorts that made her butt look cute enough to bite. He shook himself back to where he was. "You can shut this down now. Sorry for dragging you from your book."

Michael turned to look at him. "You're sure I shouldn't leave the cameras on? The system is completely programmed. It can stay on autopilot."

"No need," Eric said. "Security will keep whatever they need running. You can take a break until you hear differently from B.G. or me."

"If you say so." Michael sounded unsure, but Eric didn't bother worrying about his doubt. For as long as the game was suspended, they were all entitled to privacy.

"You
want to come down from there?" Eric shouted from the highly polished marble floor.

Fortunately, Charity heard him through his cupped hands. "No way," she laughed. "You come up."

Eric sighed and took the enclosed stairway, trudging reluctantly up each narrow tread. He supposed he should have been grateful she didn't volunteer to bungee jump down, but he was clammy by the time he forced himself to step onto the translucent, green-tinted glass.

The thirty-foot peaked ceiling made the room feel like a barn.

"Oh, man," Charity said, instantly noting his shaky state. She pulled off her earphones and rushed forward. "Sorry. You should have said you were afraid of heights."

"It's not that bad," he denied even as he let her help him sit on the floor. He felt better as soon as he took a death grip on one of the railing's struts. When Charity sat facing him, her knees bumping his, that was better, too.

He told himself it was only his imagination that the room was tilting like a ship at sea.

"Wow." Her hand rubbed a comforting circle on his thigh. "You look as pale as one of my ghosts. How can you stand walking in Seattle?"

"I make a concerted effort not to look down the street. Weirdly enough, it's okay when I'm in a car." He managed to meet her gaze. "B.G. doesn't know, and please don't tell him. I didn't discover I had this problem until I came out here. I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually."

"How long have you been here?"

He rubbed his nose and laughed. "Three years."

"So when you say 'eventually,' you mean it."

"I'm hoping for the best."

He appreciated both the humor and the understanding in her eyes. Charity was pretty good at not judging.

"Do you want to go down now?" she offered after a bit.

"Oh, no," he said, his voice a fraction higher than usual. "I'm fine. Well, actually, I need a few minutes to recover from coming up."

She bent over the hand that wasn't gripping the strut and gave his knuckles a laughing kiss. "Can I ask you a question? If it wouldn't distract you from holding on?"

"Believe me, nothing could do that. What do you want to know?"

"How exactly did you end up working for B.G.? I know you're friends, but it seems out
of
the ordinary for someone of your background."

"Ah, my silver spoon rears its ugly head again." He smiled at her wince of apology, not so much dreading this as resigned. "You really want to know?"

"If you don't mind."

"I don't mind. At this point, I guess you have the right to ask. I warn you, though, it's not a flattering story. In fact, it's a period of my life I'd just as soon forget."

"Don't tell me you got fired!"

He shook his head at her disbelief. "No. But quite possibly I should have been."

"What did you do?"

"My job," he said and released his breath heavily. She'd left her hand on top of his. He turned it so their fingers twined. "I was director of communications for an Internet start-up called FineEats.com. As my mother likes to put it, 'Bernes don't sit on their bums,' so I'd been working for a while, but this was my first big-deal management job since graduation. We were going to deliver gourmet groceries to people who ordered them online. Have our own fleet of trucks with pictures of brie and caviar on the side.

"The president was the father of an old school buddy of mine, and he went out of his way to recruit me.

Big salary. Stock options. I was flattered—not to mention eager to sink my teeth into the challenge. I was responsible for getting our message across to the media and, through them, to the purchasers of our shares. Let me tell you, I was good at that."

"So far I'm not seeing why anyone would fire you. I take it something went wrong."

Forgetting he needed to hold on, he rubbed his second hand across hers. "What went wrong was that the bankers decided our burn rate wasn't high enough."

" 'Burn rate' is how fast you go through the money?"

"Right. They wanted us to spend more, borrow more, and give the investors they'd lined up more opportunities to collect interest. That was how things worked in those days. Everybody wanted another Yahoo! or Amazon. Nobody took you seriously unless you spent big.

"As a result, they pressured our president to expand into areas he didn't understand, areas our employees didn't have the expertise or the numbers to support. What would have been a great small company turned into a giant mess, and my job became lying about the fact that, behind the smoke and mirrors, we had gone to crap. Because of me, because I was so freaking good at what I did, there was virtually nothing left to salvage by the time the SEC stepped in."

"Were you charged with anything?"

Eric closed his eyes and shook his head, the motion dizzying. "I had a certain amount of deniability. After a point, I knew what I was telling people wasn't true, but I hadn't been informed officially that it was a lie.

Fortunately for me, B.G. stepped in. I hadn't been in touch with him in years. I don't know how he heard I was in trouble. He pulled some strings and arranged for me to give evidence in exchange for immunity.

In the end, I had the unique privilege of not only betraying my fellow employees' trust—a few of whom are still unemployed—but I got to rat out my bosses as well. Then I walked away scot-free."

Overwhelmed, he rubbed his face. "I thought if I just kept saying everything was great, if I just kept those plates spinning in the air, I could buy the company enough time to turn itself around. Instead, I made things worse.

"I had friends at that place. Good friends. They wouldn't speak to me after that. Not to explain, not to hear my offers to help them out with money—which, I guess, it didn't help that I still had. All the times we'd spent working late, the dreams, the endless boxes of pizza, might as well have been shared with strangers."

"Okay," Charity said after a pause. "I think I understand this. Even though you lied for what you thought was a good reason, you feel guilty for doing it. You also feel guilty for telling the truth. Then, to top this guilt fest off, you think you ought to take responsibility for the fact that, in three long years, a few young, smart people didn't pull themselves together and move on. Finally, you're convinced it would somehow help if you were suffering as much as them."

Eric was too startled to take offense. "You forgot to mention my sins of pride."

"Oh, yeah. That's where part of the reason you lie is because you're ashamed to admit you joined a team with a losing coach. I bet you'd been hoping to outdo your over-achieving big sister with your success."

Her insight into his character was enough to shock him, but to his amazement, she was grinning.

"You're enjoying this," he said. "You like hearing that I messed up."

"I am small enough to admit it… or maybe it's big enough. Anyway, yes, I'm glad to hear you're human.

I admire the fact that you feel this bad about what you did, even if I think your guilt is kind of useless. If you really want to help people who are out of jobs, you'd start a new company and hire them. As for the suits you ratted out…" Charity blew a raspberry through her lips. "People like that always land on their feet. Chances are, they're dashing somebody else's dreams as we speak."

"You can't make me out to be the good guy," Eric protested. "My own sister thought I was too compromised to warn when she caught wind that the investigation was coming down. If it hadn't been for B.G., I would have been screwed."

Charity reached forward to squeeze his wrists. "I know I don't have a sibling, but from what I've heard, they're not the most objective judges of character. B.G. thinks you're a good guy, and so do I. You're just not a perfect guy, which bugs you I suspect, but them's the breaks."

"Yeah, them's the breaks." Her estimation depressed him, but also carried a certain relief. He wasn't perfect, and that was okay with Charity. He didn't resist when she pulled his hands onto her knees.

"I take it B.G. hired you after that."

"I couldn't face trying anywhere else. Right or wrong, I was a bit infamous after my bosses were led away in cuffs."

"I can see how that could happen. Of course, working for B.G. has its perks."

His smile felt creaky and new. He'd come here to make love to her. Instead, he felt as if she'd loosened a chain he'd had around his neck. His gratitude was alarming, his sense of connection. He stared into her soft violet eyes with a helpless tightening in his gut, the same helpless tightening dozens of males must have experienced ever since she hit puberty.

"You know," he said, his voice rough with emotion even though he tried to keep it light, "you're pretty smart for a girl who thinks she can't survive Harvard."

Charity gave her head a haughty toss. "I am a quantum being. You never know what I'll manage next."

He
was smiling, but it wasn't at her joke. The respect in his eyes made her feel funny. She'd worried he might be angry with her for being blunt.

"So," she said.

"So," he answered, his mouth curving farther up. When his fingers drew feathery scratches on her bare knees, a squeeze of desire streaked to her groin. Beyond the catwalk, a bank of modern windows filled the room with drizzly light. Eric's lashes dropped, fans of silver-brown that shielded his gaze. Happily for her, not everything was shielded. The blood rising to his cheeks implied a common interest.

"Um," she said, squirming a little, "since we can do what we like for now, would it be too much to hope you'd been a bit Boy Scout-y on your way here?"

He looked at her with such affection, her pulse began to skip.

"No," he said, "it wouldn't be too much to hope." He patted his pocket, which crinkled promisingly.

"Considering how hot you look in that outfit, I'm reluctant to ask you to peel out of it, but I really wish you would."

"Here?" She gestured to their perch so far above the ground. "Won't you be nervous?"

Her voice was breathy, his deceptively casual. Had it not been for the bulge rising in his trousers, she might have felt insecure.

"Maybe making love to you up here will effect a cure."

"A cure for something anyway."

"Yes, indeed." He rolled forward on his knees, the motion quick and predatory. "A cure for something very big."

She leaned back from him instinctively, the woman in her responding to the implicit carnal threat—not that she minded him crowding her. Recovering without much effort, she pulled the racerback bra over her head.

He was close enough that she heard the rush of air through his nose.

"Shorts, too," he said, beginning to empty the contents of his pocket.

To take the shorts off, she had to rise. She nearly stumbled when four foil-wrapped condoms were joined by a tube of lubricant.