Coming To Reason (A Long Road to Love) (14 page)

Why did everyone think they’d broken up? However, she
didn’t want to get into their stressed-out relationship. “I haven’t spoken to
him this week, but rest assured, when we do speak, your new line will never
come into the conversation.”

His brow furrowed and he glanced at the chair.

“To be honest, Trent is so self-absorbed right now, he
wouldn’t hear me if I talked about nothing else. All he wants to do is complain
over stuff he’s unhappy about, and I guarantee no piece of furniture will make
his list of prioritized complaints.”

“Good point.” He pointed to the places for her to sign.
Then they made a copy of both the standard and special contract. Helen even
came and notarized them. Final
ly
, she had a beautiful maroon chair built for her size. Upon
seeing Allan off, she rolled her new possession to Destiny’s office so she
could use it during their impending long night’s work.

Dan stood outside his office, smiling at her, as she pushed
it down the hall. His good-natured resilience impressed her. Trent would have
been a bear for weeks if he’d incurred all the horrible things Dan had today.

Once she arrived at Destiny’s office, she swore Destiny to
utter secrecy about her new baby. “If a leak occurs and they trace it to me,
I’ll be sued and I’ll lose my house. So never, ever, talk about the chair.”

Destiny’s eyes rounded. She placed her hand over her heart
and raised her other hand. “I pledge total silence about the object I will
never mention.”

Carrie rewarded her with a smile, pushed the big chair away,
and sat in her tiny one. It required no hopping to get into, and it conformed
to her back with perfection. However, she soon discovered one big problem. She
barely reached eye level with the desktop.

She reached beneath the seat and tugged at levers. Her
first choice caused the back to relax and a footstool to kick her feet into a
drawer. Destiny laughed herself into tears and doubled over.

Carrie couldn’t figure out how to undo the recliner
position, so she got off and looked beneath the seat. She noticed a second
lever close to the first and pulled it. The seat flew up so fast it smacked the
side of her head.

Destiny squealed in outrage, no longer finding anything
funny. “Send the damn thing back. It’s a death trap. Your temple is all red
now.”

Carrie suspected it would be purple all too soon, which might
cause a problem. Trent would notice a giant bruise on the side of her face and
demand to know how she got it. Since she didn’t want to lie to him, she needed
to avoid seeing him until after this weekend, even if he wanted to have make-up
sex, which she suspected he’d want, since they hadn’t talked all week and his
last bombardment of angry, then pathetic messages suggested he needed comfort.

Maybe she could tell him she hit her head on the edge of
her office furniture while bending over. If pushed, she would blame the desk,
but she doubted he would demand such detail. He would jump to suing Dan or some
such nonsense.

She stared at her chair, now excessive
ly
tall and laid
back. At its current height, she had great access to the levers, but still
couldn’t get the back to return to its vertical position. No one should be
reclining while at work anyway.
W
ith Destiny’s assistance, she got the back righted and the seat
lowered. Climbing in, Carrie raise herself to a comfortable level to continue
their work.

“Okay, the Lucille Ball comedy hour is over. Let’s get back
to work.”

Destiny glared at it. “The little guy has some serious
defects.”

“True, but when it’s behaving, it’s very nice.” She
chuckled. “Rather like Trent.”

“Then you should definite
ly
dump it,” Destiny muttered.

“What could you have against Trent? You’ve never even met
him.”

“True, but I’ve heard enough to dislike him.”

“What have you heard?” Carrie asked.

“He has a harem and he’s ripped my dad off for almost two
million in commissions.”

Carrie choked. She hadn’t realized the amount was so high.
No wonder Dan intended to sue.

“Well, the harem thing is a false rumor. However, the other
is real, and Trent is total
ly
in the wrong there. I offered to intervene, but Dan asked
me to stay out of the dispute.”

“Let’s focus on these reports. Dad’s depending on us.”
Destiny pouted, clearly not happy with the topic of Trent.

Carrie wanted to ask where she’d heard about the harem. She
couldn’t believe Dan would spread such lies. But Destiny had the right point of
focus. They had to get this report done before they could leave.

***

They finished the analysis at eight and walked Dan through
it by eight-thirty. He requested an additional comparison of the candidates
investigated against the list of problem names.

Destiny shook her head and gazed at him with sad puppy dog
eyes. “Dad, we don’t have the data in any system. Greg receives paper billings
from the investigator. You’re talking huge man-hours of checking for what I’m
guessing isn’t going to be there.”

He looked to Carrie, who
nodded
in agreement. “When Greg comes in tomorrow, we could verify the hypothesis, but
to check every single name and time could take months.”

“So I’ve a gaping hole in my controls?”

Carrie spoke up before he became upset. “You don’t have to.
You could require your PI to create his list of investigated people on a word
document. He could email the doc and we could drop it into a table and write a
report, matching candidates sent on interviews to those checked out.”

Destiny smiled. “I can write the report.”

Carrie added, “However, a better control would be to give
him secure input access to a specific table in our database so he can input
directly into our system, removing time lags. Thus, we could flag candidates
being sent without investigation before their actual interview occurs.”

Destiny’s hands fluttered in excitement. “Perfect! I can
write an interface as easily as whatever he’s doing now. This will enable Greg
to match billings. Right now, because the list doesn’t match up to our side due
to timing issues, Greg has to go on an estimate of what he thinks we should be
billed, versus actual billing. It’s always off, but he’s lived with it because
our estimates have always been higher than actual.”

Destiny grimaced. “Which could be due to these fake people
mucking up our estimates. Sorry, Dad. I should have questioned the matter
before this.”

Carrie wanted Dan to insist his daughter had no blame in
the matter. He shouldn’t expect an eighteen-year-old girl to question every
procedure the company had.

“Did Greg know about the discrepancy?”

“Yes. He also thought it due to timing and our growing business.”

“Given such a plausible explanation, I wouldn’t have
questioned it either. I’ll call Flint Clarke and tell him he’s going to have to
enter candidate names as he completes their investigation because, in the
future, no candidates will go to an interview until they’ve been cleared.”

Destiny hugged him. “It’s a perfect solution and will
improve a ton of stuff going on.”

“I’m afraid to ask.”

“Don’t. Just be assured you are improving the process.”

He tugged on his daughter’s fallen pigtails. “In my view,
the two of you are improving the process. His gaze showered Carrie with admiration.
“We’ll give you a ride to Penn Station as soon as I send this off to my lawyer.”

Carrie pushed her chair to her room and locked it inside.
She added a note to her list for tomorrow to bring a throw blanket.

Carrie woke at four. She had lots of work to do before
driving into New York City. Drilling a hole into a quarter-inch-thick steel
plate took forever with a hand drill. She had to clamp the plate to her
workbench before she managed it at all. A drill press could have finished the
job in seconds. Maybe she’d buy one once she received her last paycheck from
Lancasters.

She imagined what she could do with three months’ salary,
then frowned. What if Trent didn’t pay her? If he’d ripped Dan off for two
million, he might not think twice about doing the same to her.

God. Now even
she
acted as if they’d broken up.

He hadn’t contacted her last night and the new butler at
the penthouse had been downright rude, hanging up before she could ask him to
let Trent know she’d called.

But why would Trent be mad at her? Because she decided to
work for Dan rather than go work in a scary Trenton warehouse? No sane person
would have chosen different
ly
.

But Dan intended to sue him.

And he had reason to.

She threw a handful of small-holed washers into her pocket
in case the other drawers needed reinforcement. She also needed screws in case the
nail gun couldn’t do its job.

A glance at the clock made her squeal. Why did time move
twice as fast in the morning? She had fifteen minutes before she needed to be
on the road.

She loaded up the back of her Subaru. Thank God, she’d made
a list and taken the time to check it, or she would have left without the rug,
the throw, and the stain brushes.

Five minutes late, with a completed checklist, she headed
into the city.

Odd how a drive she wouldn’t consider taking on a weekday,
even at this hour, moved along on a Saturday morning. Yet zipping along on an empty
highway felt wrong. Finding an open toll both required her to cross four lanes,
but with
only
one other car to be seen, she managed it with ease.

Once inside the city, she had to deal with traffic, most
ly
trucks making
deliveries. Arriving at the office without incident, she pulled to the side of
the street, located the placard in her purse, and placed it on her dashboard.
Then she drove down into the underground parking lot.

The guard eyed her placard from his station.

Please let me through
, she prayed.

After what seemed an eternity, the bar rose, and she drove through.
Good thing Dan had shown her Jeff’s parking space because the guard stood
outside his station and watched her. Had she driven about at a snail’s pace,
searching for the small sign saying Reserved for Jeff Bloomberg, it would have set
off alarms.

Once parked, she grabbed a can of light taupe paint left
over from redecorating her mudroom and a plastic bag containing stain and
polyurethane.

Lowering, but not locking the hatch, she hurried to the
elevator, then stopped, releasing a soft curse. She didn’t have a key to make
the elevator work. With a huff of exasperation, Carrie returned to her car,
opened the hatch, and returned the items.

Seated in her car, she pulled out her notepad and made a
few more notes about the chair. The two handles beneath the seat needed to be
apart from one another and distinguishable by touch. The recliner should be a
lever on the side of the chair while the lifter should be something the person
sitting on the chair could pull up with ease while a person beside the chair,
playing about, could not activate.

She’d dreamed last night of a child being smacked in the
head as she’d been. Children had soft skulls. They could die from the
experience.

A rap on her window made her jump.

The security guard wanted to send her out. Damn it.

She looked up expecting to see an
I’m-going-to-be-more-hardass-than-a-cop face glaring down. Instead, the happy visage
of Destiny smiled at her.

She had been so focused on the possible injury of a child,
she’d failed to hear Dan’s Volvo pull up three spots over.

With their help, she got everything up in one elevator ride.
Alone, it would have taken her at least five trips. Thus, she appreciated her
assistants even before they had begun renovations. But the best part was that
Dan and Destiny hadn’t come because they thought her incapable of doing the job,
but rather because they liked her and wanted to spend time with her.

They proved their help right off by moving the desk to the
break room where she laid a plastic sheet on the floor. Dan and Destiny placed the
old desk upside down so she could first steady the creaking legs.

Intrigued with her air compressor and nail gun, they sat
down and watched her as she popped long, slender nails through the sides of the
leg into the bottom of the desktop.

“How do you know they aren’t going through to the other
side?” Destiny asked.

“I visually gauge the distance needed so it won’t penetrate
the surface.” From Destiny’s pout, Carrie realized the girl had doubts.

Dan rubbed his daughter’s back. “She’s shooting at a slight
angle, Destiny, so they aren’t penetrating as deep as you think.

Destiny breathed in with relief and leaned against her dad.