Hot Shot (56 page)

Since only a founding partner could purchase another founding partner's shares, she, Mitch, and Yank had been forced to buy Sam out. The Blaze HI recall had severely depressed the price of Sam's fifteen percent, but the buyout was still costing each of them millions.

Susannah had been hit the hardest because she couldn't tap into any of the assets she and Sam owned jointly until her divorce was final. As a result, she was forced to deplete all of her financial reserves. She replaced her BMW with a Ford compact, and was staying in SysVal's town-house condominium on a semipermanent basis because she couldn't afford to buy anything else for a while. It was the way of the Valley, she joked ruefully to Mitch. A millionaire one day, a pauper the next.

But it was no joke. Before all this had happened, her net worth—on paper, anyway—had been close to a hundred million dollars. But as the new year arrived and she continued to pour every dollar she could lay her hands on into their dying company, she was practically broke.

The dreary, rainy months of winter slid into early spring. What had begun as a trickle of computer failures turned into a deluge. The company was hemorrhaging money. They sold off all nonessential assets—a conference center near Carmel, warehouses, land they had bought for expansion—but it was like trying to stop the flow of blood from a bullet wound with a wad of toilet tissue. By the end of June, Susannah felt as if each day they survived bankruptcy was a miracle.

As she drove home late one June evening, she wondered if Mitch and Yank would be at the town house when she arrived. Her partners had gotten into the habit of dropping by several evenings a week. Ostensibly, they met there so they could talk without the interruptions that plagued them during the day. But Susannah knew the real reason they showed up so frequently on her doorstep was simply because they knew there was a good chance Paige would be there, and Paige helped all of them forget their troubles.

She was their beautiful, blond-haired den mother. She pampered them and clucked over them, feeding their spirits as well as their bodies. When they felt too battered to go on, she restored them with her lively chatter. She was the major stockholder of their fiercest competitor, but they had stopped worrying about divulging company secrets in front of her. Paige had no interest in the business discussions that raged around her, merely in what everyone wanted to drink and eat.

Susannah's hands tightened on the car's steering wheel. She was torn between her love for Paige and the jealousy that had begun to grow inside her these past few months. If Mitch was there when she got home, he would be trading sexual innuendoes with her sister and grinning like an idiot. Frankly, she was getting sick of it. The two of them were just too revoltingly touchy-feely. Even a blind fool could see that they were ideal for each other.

Yin and yang. The perfect mating of opposites. So why didn't they just get it on and put an end to her misery?

But she didn't want them to get it on. Even though she loved them both and saw how good they were for each other, the thought of them together made her insides feel raw.

She hated her selfishness, but she couldn't seem to help it. She wanted her friendship with Mitch back the way it used to be, and his growing closeness with Paige was shutting her out.

She had been so upset about the situation that she had actually tried to talk to Yank about it a few weeks ago. He had given her his inscrutable smile and told her that everything had its proper time and she should be patient. She had wanted to slap him silly.

When she arrived home, she heard three voices coming from the dining room. Paige was feeding her partners just as she had expected. Susannah stood well back in the hallway and watched unobserved for a few minutes as Paige fussed over the men. She hopped up to go to the sideboard and choose special tidbits for their plates, fishing out mushrooms because Yank didn't like them, adding black olives because Mitch did. She was June Cleaver packaged in the body of the Playmate of the Month. As much as Susannah loved her, Paige's soft womanliness had begun to make her feel sexless. Paige was every man's fantasy woman—mother and sex goddess combined. How could she compete with that?

Susannah wondered.

Not that she wanted to compete. It wasn't as if she were in love with Mitch or anything.

She had already experienced the great love of her life, and look where that had ended up.

It was just that she'd started to look at Mitch a little differently. Which was certainly understandable. She was a sensuous woman. Her body wasn't accustomed to celibacy, and Mitch was an incredibly attractive man. The past eight months had added more gray to his temples and deepened the brackets around his mouth, but, if anything, the changes had made him more appealing, certainly too appealing to be running loose around a woman who hadn't been intimate with a man for nearly a year.

He leaned back in his chair and stretched like a well-fed cat. She felt a peculiar giddiness creep over her as she watched his dress shirt stretch over his chest.

"Too bad we can't package you and put you up for sale, Paige," he said. "We'd make millions."

Paige crossed her arms on the table and leaned forward so that her breasts were propped up on them. "Exactly what part of me would you want to package? My cooking or my…

other skills."

Mitch grinned, something he hardly ever did with anyone except her sister. "We're buccaneer capitalists. Whichever will bring us the best profit."

"Probably Paige's cooking," Yank said quietly.

Mitch shook his head in comic bewilderment. "I think you'd better start going out with women again, Yank. Ever since you quit dating, you've been losing your perspective."

"Holy men don't date." Paige's voice was silky. "Isn't that right, Yank? Holy men don't need women. They're above all that slipping and slopping around."

Yank gave her the sad, patient look he wore so frequently when they were together, and then mentally withdrew to his accustomed position on the sidelines. The bantering Paige directed toward Yank wasn't nearly as good-humored as her comments to Mitch, Susannah had noticed. Maybe that wasn't so strange. Yank and Paige were definitely from separate planets.

"Would it be possible for me to have another cup of coffee?" Yank asked.

Paige hopped up, her blond hair flying. Both men followed her round blue-jean-clad bottom as she rushed over to the coffeepot on the sideboard. As Susannah shrugged off her coat, she couldn't suppress another petty stab of envy. Even though she knew it was demeaning, she wished one of them would look at
her
bottom that way.

If only she could forget about the crisis at SysVal for a while and just be a woman. While she hung her coat away, she played a little fantasy in her mind in which she had her sister's breasts and they were barely covered by a black lace negligee. She saw herself sashaying up to Mitch and saying something sultry like, "Hey, big guy, remember me?

How's about you and me go make ourselves some whoopie?"

But this particular fantasy wouldn't work. She kept seeing Mitch's face going pale with embarrassment. She heard his self-conscious throat clearing. "Susannah, I wouldn't hurt you for the world. You know how much I value your friendship. But Paige and I…"

"Could I have a little more coffee, too?" Mitch held out his cup for Paige to refill. He had glimpsed Susannah skulking about in the hallway, but he was pretending he didn't know she was there. Paige leaned over him and poured. He smiled at her. She was so damned good for his bruised ego. He loved having that sweet small body racing around catering to him. He enjoyed trading jibes with her smutty little mouth. There wasn't one morsel of honest sexual chemistry between himself and Paige, but apparently Susannah didn't realize it, and for the time being that was fine with him.

Susannah's feelings toward him seemed to be changing now that he had stopped playing Mitch the Buddy. He hoped so. It was about time he started getting under Miss Hot Shot's skin. Although she might not know it, he had declared war and was banking on her love of a challenge. He prayed he wasn't miscalculating. How much longer would it be before she began to understand what he had known for so long—that they were kindred spirits, like personalities who viewed the world in the same way and fit together exactly the way a man and woman should fit?

Her divorce wouldn't be final until the end of the summer, and he intended to use every moment of that time to pry her eyes open. Maybe it wasn't fair for him to play games with her when they were in the middle of such a devastating crisis, but he didn't care about fairness anymore. It was obvious by now that SysVal couldn't survive the summer.

He was going to lose his company and his money, but he wanted to make damned sure that he didn't lose Susannah, too.

The only thing that worried him was Yank. Susannah kept disappearing into his lab to watch him work. It was a habit she had developed whenever she was upset about something. Mitch thought her feelings for Yank were brotherly rather than romantic, but he wasn't absolutely certain. And Yank was impossible to read. What if he was in love with Susannah? Being forced to compete with Yank wasn't something he could take lightly. The rest of the world might underestimate his partner, but Mitch had never made that mistake.

"Suze! I didn't hear you come in." Paige had spotted her sister in the hallway. "Sit down.

I'll fix a plate for you."

Susannah greeted all of them and took a seat at the table. Within seconds, she was served a glass of chilled white wine and a fragrant helping of chicken provencal. Paige did everything but plump a cushion behind her back. Susannah's spirits sank lower. She felt like the world's lowest life form for being jealous of someone who took such good care of her.

"My kids are flying in the second weekend in July," Mitch announced. "I thought I'd have a barbecue for them that Saturday. You're all invited."

"Sorry, lover," Paige said. "Big bad duty calls. That's the night I have to hostess FBT's annual party at Falcon Hill. Not that I wouldn't rather spend it with you. God, I hate those things."

"Then why do it?" he asked.

"Cal does so much for me that when he asks something in return, I try to accommodate him."

Mitch and Susannah exchanged a glance. Neither of them approved of the amount of power Paige had transferred to Cal Theroux. Since he was a forbidden subject between the sisters, Susannah had asked Mitch to urge Paige to take more interest in FBT affairs and reclaim her voting rights. Paige had told him to mind his own business.

That evening after the men had left, Paige propped herself on the living room couch with a magazine, and Susannah carried her briefcase over to the armchair. When she opened it, she discovered a fat manila folder she had thrown in just as she was leaving. For a moment she couldn't remember what it was, and then she realized it was the file on Edward Fiella that the security department had finally returned to her office that day. She had tossed it in her case so she could give it one last perusal before it was put away.

She settled back in the armchair and then noticed that Paige was staring off into space, her expression troubled.

"What's wrong?"

Paige snapped back to reality. "Nothing."

"I thought we weren't going to shut each other out anymore. Are you having problems at the shelter?" For months now Paige had been volunteering her services at a shelter for battered women. She loved her work there, but sometimes being in the presence of so much suffering got to her.

Paige shook her head, then set down her magazine. "Nothing that noble. I was just wondering… How come you haven't started dating anybody? It's been nearly a year since you left Sam. Your divorce will be final before long."

"There hasn't been much time. Besides, I'm not exactly the world's best company these days. It's hard to be cheerful when you've just laid off another seven hundred people."

"But don't you miss being with a man?"

"I'm with men all day long," she replied, deliberately sidestepping the issue.

"That's not what I mean."

Susannah knew exactly what her sister meant, but she certainly wasn't going to tell her that she had been having embarrassing sexual fantasies about Mitch. Instead, she told her part of the truth. "It takes all of my energy just getting from one day to the next. I don't have anything left at the moment for an emotional involvement."

"What about sex? Don't you miss it?"

"I miss it a lot."

Paige looked deeply unhappy. "I know it's stupid, but in Greece Yank made me promise not to sleep with anybody for a while. I don't know why I agreed, except you know how he is. Right after I got back, I got mad and told him I was going to sleep with anybody I wanted. But I didn't. And last month when I flew over to Paris for a few days, I was definitely planning on having a good time. I have a friend there. He's a playboy, but he's nice. Anyway, I never called him. God, Suze, it's been forever."

"Celibacy must be catching. Even Mitch seems to have given up all those dreary women he used to date." The moment the words were out, Susannah wished she hadn't brought up his name. Of course Mitch had stopped dating. He was moving in on her sister. She recovered quickly. "Maybe you just needed some time off from men for a while."

"I guess. But I'm starting to think about sex a lot. Which is really ironic, because I didn't use to like it very much."

And then Paige got up from the couch, almost as if she wished she hadn't said so much. "I

—I think I'd better sleep at home tonight. I have to meet with Cal early tomorrow about the FBT party. If I stay at Falcon Hill, I won't have to fight rush-hour traffic."

Susannah nodded. She knew she wasn't the best company right now and she didn't blame Paige for taking off. They walked to the door together. Paige grabbed her purse and jacket, kissed Susannah's cheek, and left the town house.

It was a beautiful night. The moon was full, the air sweet. As Paige drove home, she tried to concentrate on how pretty the sky was so that she wouldn't start to cry. But she had barely reached the highway before the tears were dripping down her cheeks. She hated to cry. It was weak and stupid and completely infantile. But from the time Yank Yankowski had walked into her life, it seemed as if she had been doing a lot of it in her private time.