Double-Cross My Heart (14 page)

“I’m the first one,” Jessica said grimly, “who’d be cheering if you were actually taking up a sport to play, but I don’t think this has anything to do with you wanting a cardio workout.”

They walked down the pet food aisle in silence, Eden wrestling with how to word her admission.

“I need Sarah Briggs with me in order to get the board to move me into the CEO position.”

“And Sarah plays racquetball, so you’re playing racquetball,” Jessica concluded, her usually animated face devoid of expression.

“Yes.” Thank god the woman didn’t bowl. Eden thought the racquetball coincidence could only be a good sign. She might not be into sweating, but she wasn’t a total klutz, either.

Walking next to her, pushing the grocery cart down the aisle, Jessica sighed. “Okay. You feel like you need to do this.”

“Yes,” Eden agreed, glad her friend understood. “And think of the side-benefits. Strengthening business contacts while strengthening my heart. It’s all good.”

“From what I’ve heard about Sarah Briggs, you might need CPR afterwards,” Jess teased. “Are you sure you can keep up with her?”

“She’s in her fifties!” Eden protested, laughing.

“So? Your point is?” Up went Jessica’s eyebrow, her face comical.

“Very funny,” Eden said with a chuckle. “I’ll hold my own. I have to.”

As they passed the prepared pasta, Jessica paused, selecting several containers. “Well, you always do what you have to do. That’s the difference between us, I guess. I saw what I’d have to do to stay in the corporate world and I wimped out.”

“That’s not true,” Eden protested. “There’s nothing wrong with choosing to have a family. Our feminist foremothers fought so we could have the choice to stay home with kids. They didn’t say everyone had to work all the time.”

Her friend slanted Eden a glance. “Yeah, sure. But our foremothers had their kids, took the hard-won six-weeks of maternity leave and jumped right back into the battle.”

“Maybe, but the important thing is that we get to make a choice now,” Eden said firmly. “There’s no one right way to do it.”

“I know,” Jessica said glumly.

“We have options,” Eden reiterated, putting an arm around Jess and squeezing. “You’re a terrific parent. There’s nothing wrong with either choice: work or home.”

Jessica slanted her a considering glance. “I love my kid and I made my choice…you do know that you have a choice, too?”

“What do you mean?”

“You have a choice in this situation with Michele and the company. A choice as to what you do in the Alex situation. You don’t have to sneak around getting the goods on Wendi and her sticky fingers at her last job. I do understand the things you’re doing and why you’re doing them, but you have to know you have other options, as well. You don’t have to jump on the ‘let’s burn everyone’ bandwagon. You have other choices. Not good ones maybe, but--”

The smile on Eden’s face felt crooked. “None that count.”

Jessica’s concerned expression prompted Eden to say in a lighter voice, “Hey, I had a stolen meeting with that
Wall Street Weekly
reporter this morning very early. All cloak-and-dagger. We met at six o’clock at a coffee bar way off the beaten track. So I’m now an ‘unidentified source’ who’s on record that there are problems in Michele Cosmetics.”

“Nothing but the truth,” Jessica commented.

“Yes.” Eden couldn’t deny that, but it didn’t make her feel any better about what she was doing. Just thinking about sitting in the small steamy coffee shop, the broad windows holding back the frosty morning air, as she leaked quasi-secrets to a reporter made Eden wince. She’d felt like an character in a sleazy detective show.

She really didn’t have a lot of choices here. It was eat or be eaten. The sharks were out in force these days. If she hoped to out-smart Wendi and Michele, she had to pretend to play along with Alex.

Damn him. She’d thought he was different. Better. So much for her instincts. Ironically, she realized his coming along with plans to destroy the company had prompted her stand up to Michele and Wendi.

“It doesn’t really matter though,” she told Jessica, a shade to heartily. “I didn’t do any irreversible damage. When the board puts me at the helm, I’ll be able to pull the company onto stronger footing. That’s what this is all about. I may have to get a little dirty, but it’s all for a good cause.”

“Yeah,” Jess said, not meeting Eden’s gaze. “I hope so.”

***

“Hello, beautiful,” Alex spoke into the mic on his hands-free headset as he negotiated the Porsche down the exit off the freeway, his mood lifting at the sound of Eden’s voice.

“Alex!”

He’d surprised her, calling her on her cell while she was at work in the middle of the day, but dammit, he’d missed seeing her last night. Soon the nights of her working late would be over. When the company was being dismantled, she could take time off while she looked around for a different position…and he had a few positions in mind himself.

So when was he getting naked with his luscious inamorata?

He wasn’t sure and that fact itself was strange. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d dated a woman this long without sleeping with her. Complex interactions weren’t usually a prohibition for sex, as far as Alex was concerned, but this situation was too damned complicated.

His original deception had clouded things more than he’d anticipated, but then he hadn’t planned on coming to care for her. If she ever found out how he’d arranged to meet her for the purpose of this deal would she hate him? He didn’t want to think about it. It was behind them. If he’d have thought it would help anything, he’d have come right out and told her about setting up the fake mugging. He hadn’t told her, though. The truth in this instance was potentially hurtful and misleading. And unnecessary.

“How is your day going?” Alex asked, picturing her with her short dark hair tucked behind one ear, her head lost in the computations of some product yield report.

“Fine,” she responded, sounding tired, a rustle of paper in the background.

“I miss you,” he found himself saying. He’d never been a particularly mushy lover, but he did miss her, and this without even the bonding of sex. Damn, he liked her. He’d never been mean or particularly deceptive with women, but he’d sure as hell jumped into this complicated mess. It made him wonder if he was so smart, after all.

His thoughts of their still-chaste relationship brought to mind their meeting with the Michele Cosmetics board member, Dave Sanders. Alex knew he hadn’t imagined the man’s overly-familiar attitude toward Eden. If she were having an affair with the jerk, would she have voluntarily brought him forward to meet Alex? He didn’t think so. Eden just didn’t play those games.

Alex’s hand clenched on the padded leather-encased steering wheel as he repositioned his earpiece. Uncertainty usually added zest to life, but he hated having suspicions about her and Dave Sanders. Alex’s ability to read people had stood him in good stead in his business dealings. Nothing he’d concluded about Eden previously lead him to suspect she was cheating, particularly with a slimeball like Sanders. But that didn’t do away with his nagging impression of intimacy between them.

Was it cheating if he and Eden hadn’t agreed to exclusivity yet? He needed to get the Michele Cosmetics deal out of the way so they could concentrate on the two of them.

“Have you heard from Dave Sanders?” Alex heard himself ask abruptly, irrationally, since he knew there was no foundation to his anxiety.

“No,” she responded, sounding surprised. “Did you expect him to contact me?”

“No,” Alex replied, “not about the deal we made, but I got the impression that he might be interested in contacting you for other, more personal, reasons.”

Her immediate chuckle was brief, but he felt reassured all the same.

“Don’t worry about that. Dave’s a whore,” Eden said simply. “He’s got a serious sexual addiction problem. He’ll pork any woman who’ll stand still long enough.”

“Oh.” Alex knew his relief was probably evident in his voice, and he knew he ought to care that she’d picked up on his concern regarding her and Sanders. He didn’t. “I’m glad to know that. I thought his interests were aimed specifically at you…and I’d have a problem with that.”

“Dave acts horny with everyone,” Eden replied, almost sounding flustered at his declaration. “And even if he were, you know, more seriously interested in me, it would be a cold day in hell before he’d get anywhere. I wasn’t always so clear about who he is, but I am now.”

“Good.” Alex knew he sounded possessive, but he really didn’t give a damn. If she didn’t know by now how he was starting to feel about her, she hadn’t been paying attention.

He was still holding back, he knew, waiting to get their business dealings more established before they became physically intimate. Perhaps in the past he hadn’t been so scrupulous in his mixing of business and pleasure, but with Eden, he cared more about the outcome.

As he was forming the words to make plans for the evening—very specific plans—Eden broke the brief silence.

“I had that meeting this morning before work—the one we talked about,” she said with significance.

Turning his thoughts away from the tender curve of her neck, Alex connected to the subject she was addressing--the
Wall Street Weekly
reporter. “Oh, yeah. Did it go well? No questions you couldn’t give solidly ambiguous answers to?”

“I gave some very unambiguous answers,” she replied evenly. “That was the point, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose so.” Alex pulled up to a traffic light, wishing he could talk to her in person and knowing he couldn’t until the evening. She sounded weary and, for a moment, he was distracted by his thoughts of how he could ‘nurture’ her into a better mood. “Are things rough there, honey?”

Before she responded, he could hear the sound of paper crackling again. “No more than usual.”

“No additional crap from Wendi or Michele?” He pursued, his radar picking up distress in Eden.

“No,” she denied, her voice muffled for a moment as if she’d taken a drink.

“You sound beat.”

“Sorry,” she responded, a clearly-deliberate perkiness infusing her voice. “I’ve had a very busy morning.”

“Eden, you’ve got to take care of yourself. You can’t let this situation run you into the ground.”

“I’m fine,” she snapped before her voice suddenly gentled. “Really. I just have a headache. I guess I need to get some lunch.”

“I’m not bitching at you,” Alex replied quietly.

“I know,” she said, apology in her voice. “I’m sorry. It’s just that Jess has been at me about ‘taking care of myself.’ She’s into vegetarianism now and she’s all worried about everyone’s diet. I didn’t mean to snap at you.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” he couldn’t keep from saying.

“Yes. Really.”

“Well, at the risk of you taking my head off,” he concluded, “I’d like to carefully suggest you get some lunch and something for that headache.”

“I will,” she promised, the tiredness more pronounced in her voice.

“I can’t wait to see you tonight,” he said.

“Me, too,” she replied, her voice warm in his ear.

***

Standing next to Lauren at the kitchen window, Alex joined her in watching his nieces play in the remnant of snow left from one of the season’s early storms.

“Those two are amazing,” he said, smiling.

“Exhausting, amazing and downright annoying sometimes,” his sister responded, her smile echoing his.

“Have you heard from Jim recently?” Alex asked, wondering how any man could be asshole enough to abandon his own kids.

Lauren’s smile faded away. “Not since this last summer when he called to talk to them. Still no child support, but I suppose that would be asking too much of a man who makes a hundred grand a year.”

“You pissed him off by divorcing him when he left with his bimbo,” Alex told her, “and now he’s making the girls pay.”

“In more ways than just the money,” she agreed sadly.

Outside, Isabel, the elder of his two nieces, landed a scattered splat of snow on her younger sister’s head. From the window, they could see redheaded Kelsey, shrieking and determined, charge after her fleeing elder sister.

Alex could half-understand how a man could feel overwhelmed by the responsibilities of raising two young daredevil daughters, but he couldn’t understand refusing to try. Lauren’s husband had done just that. Six years ago, he’d called from one of the cities he flew into as a cargo pilot, and told Lauren briefly that he wanted out. Out of the marriage, out of his parental responsibilities.

“You really should let me sic my lawyers on the bastard,” Alex murmured, already knowing Lauren’s response.

She turned away from the window with a sigh. “We’ve been over this. You know I’m okay financially. They don’t pay teachers much, but we get by, particularly with you buying the girls’ clothes and paying for this house.”

“But the jerk-off ought to be contributing something,” Alex insisted, frustrated at the injustice of his ex-brother-in-law’s escape from his responsibilities.

“He’ll suffer,” Lauren replied in her calm manner. “Someday Jim’s going to wake up and feel old. Then he’ll want to see the children he gave up. Whether they let him into their lives or not, he’ll never get these years back. Eventually, he’ll make his own punishment. I’m counting on it.”