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"A couple of drunk teenagers ran a stop sign. He was dead when the cops pulled him out of his car. Just
one of those things."
"We can't seem to buy a piece of luck, can we? Did you find out anything else about him?"
"Yeah. The car the cops pulled him out of was a Mercedes 380 SL convertible. He bought it new a few
weeks after he left SysVal."
"That's an expensive car. I didn't see any mention of it on his credit report."
"Funny thing about that. He paid cash."
She slid the pen between her fingers as she took in the implications of what he had said. "That pretty
much eliminates the possibility that he was just a hacker sabotaging the chip for kicks, doesn't it?"
"I'd say so, Miss Faulconer. I'd say it blows that theory right out of the water."
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."
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