Ringing in Love (20 page)

She couldn't control the sneer. “Do you really think I'll believe that bullshit, Mister Not-One-Word-Goes-Out-Of-My-Office-Without-My-Knowledge-Because-My-Name's-On-The-Door?”

She had apparently struck a nerve because he lost the cool demeanor and started pacing. “For God's sake, Catherine, can't you trust me enough to believe I don't have any idea how this happened?” When he walked in front of her he reached for her hand, but she brushed him off.

“Trust you?
Trust
you? I trusted you with everything of importance to me—my son, my business. With me … with my … with everything, and you betrayed me.”

“How do I convince you I didn't? Tell me. Whatever it is, I'll do it.”

“There's nothing you can do to prove a negative. Even your powers of persuasion can only go so far. They don't cover this kind of deceit.” She hitched her chin toward the office door. “Out. Now. And don't come back. I don't want to see you again.”

“No, I'm staying for as long as it takes to make you see …”

“Melody, call security and tell them I have an intruder I want out of my office.” She looked at Dominic, shut her eyes, and said, “That won't work. The intruder pays their salaries.” Then an idea occurred. “I know. Call The Roundhouse. Ask for Sergeant Jenkins or Sergeant Brown. Tell whoever you get that Tony Alessandro's sister has an intruder in her office. Give them our address. Say he's probably not armed, but he's big and might be dangerous. We'll need at least a couple patrol cars with lights and sirens outside the building.”

Dominic glared at her. “You wouldn't.”

“Watch me.” She stood with her fists clenched, her arms crossed, and her eyes as cold as she could make them.

He threw up his hands in defeat. “All right. I'm leaving. But I'll get to the bottom of this. This isn't over, Catherine, not by a long shot.
We
are not over.”

She waited until he left her office before she sank into her desk chair and covered her face with her hands.

Melody touched Catherine's shoulder. “I'm so sorry, Catherine. You were right not to get serious with him.”

Catherine raised her head from her hands and looked at her friend. She let the truth show on her face for the first time.

“Oh, my God. You're in love with him, aren't you?”

“Damn it.” She felt the tears begin to fall. “I should've listened to you. But I didn't. I was stupid.”

Melody was silent for a while, comforting her friend with soothing sounds and soft strokes on her back. Finally she said, “Look, I'm pretty good at reading people, and he sure didn't act guilty to me. Maybe you're jumping to conclusions. Maybe …”

“Maybe you're a victim of Mister Sex on Legs, too, Mel. Don't fall for it. He can't be trusted. He brags about how persuasive he is. That doesn't mean he's telling the truth when he's being persuasive.”

Melody shrugged. “You know him better than I do, I'm just saying …”

Catherine wiped her eyes and got up from her chair. “What I'm saying is let's go talk to the Rittenauer team and see what the damage is. Then I think I'm going to go home until after Christmas.”

“Which, since it's on Tuesday, isn't a whole hell of a lot of time off. Maybe you should think about taking it easy while Noah's in Oregon with his uncle and come back to the office after New Year's.”

• • •

Once in his office, Dominic found out what had happened. She hadn't even bothered to hide her tracks. In less than ten minutes, the IT guy pulled up the files Edie Martin had amended, removing all mention of Bennett and Associates from the proposal, rewriting parts of it so all the work was done by The Russo Group. If it hadn't been so terrible a thing to do, Dominic would have been impressed with how easily and quickly she had made the changes.

He tracked Edie down at home and asked her to come to the office.

Expecting an ugly scene, he asked his HR manager and his IT expert to join him in the conference room. He'd have had the lawyers there, but they'd closed for the holidays already.

Edie seemed to think, from the smug and self-satisfied look on her face, she'd been called in to be praised.

“Edie, I found out what you did to the Rittenauer proposal. We made a deal with Bennett and Associates to propose jointly and you …”

“And I saved us from making a huge mistake. You said we should keep an eye on our competitors, and I did. I have no idea how she seduced you into making the deal, but I got you out of it. It would give credibility to her and her band of hipsters to be working officially with us. I expect you'll be giving me a raise for it.”

She seemed genuinely puzzled when he replied, “A raise? For lying? Cheating colleagues? I don't do business like that and you know it. You've been here long enough to know …”

“Long enough to know you have a weakness for pretty faces. You don't ever look for a woman who's solid and loyal. Someone who's done nothing but help you for years. No, you go after the newest bright, shiny thing. I've seen it happen time after time.”

Jesus, Catherine was right.
Edie was possessive of him. She was jealous of Catherine.
That's why she did this.

“Whatever you believe about me personally,” Dominic said, “I won't have the firm's reputation destroyed by what you did yesterday. You have fifteen minutes to pack up your desk. Your services are no longer needed here.”

“You're firing me? You can't do that. Not after what I've given to you, to this firm. You can't survive without me.”

“I can and I will. Security is waiting to escort you from the building.”

“You'll regret this. I'll sue you,” she yelled as the HR manager led her to the door of the conference room. “That bitch has you mesmerized. But you'll see. She's no different than all the others. You'll get tired of her.”

When he was sure she was gone, Dominic went back to his desk and slumped into his chair. What a mess. If he didn't get it straightened out quickly, both his personal and professional lives would be in the dumpster. He could rebuild the reputation of his business over time, but he'd never be able to replace the woman he'd been about to ask to marry him.

There was only one place to start. If Catherine wouldn't listen to his words, he had to convince her with his actions. He grabbed for the phone and punched in a number.

After she met with her staff, Catherine went home. It was safer there than in a building where she was bound to run into Dominic, so she planned to work from home for a while until she figured out how to deal with him and the fallout from the Rittenauer debacle. When Melody called a day later, she said she was working on a plan. When Noah asked if he would see Dominic before he left for Oregon, she said he was booked with family obligations. She lied to her mom and said he couldn't make Christmas Eve because he was out of town. She wasn't sure any of them believed her, but it was the best she could come up with.

The truth was, she didn't know what the next step was. She knew she had to at least apologize for her fit of temper with the champagne in New York. And for sticking him with a hotel bill for a suite they hadn't used. Oh, and for the scene in her office. She should probably apologize for threatening him with the police. Maybe for not listening to his explanation, although she was still sure she'd been justified there.

Every time she thought about it, her embarrassment got deeper. Her behavior was not what one expected of a successful businesswoman but more like that of a three-year-old, if three-year-olds threw champagne and threatened their lovers with the cops.

She survived, if not enjoyed, Christmas Eve and Christmas dinner with her family. As she drove home from getting Noah on the plane for his trip to see his Uncle Tony in Oregon, she made a promise to herself—she'd figure this out by New Year's and get on with her life. She'd been just fine before Dominic Russo, and she'd be just fine without him. Wouldn't she?

• • •

A week later, Catherine had not kept her promise to herself. She still hadn't put in an appearance in her office, and she was starting to feel silly about hiding like a coward in her townhouse. Even if she felt justified in her anger, she'd behaved badly with Dominic and had to face the consequences—how many times had she told her son that recently? Not that she had much of a plan of action. All she had was the same to-do list she'd started the week with: apologize to Dominic for her immature behavior. Tell Noah and her family Dominic was out of the picture in her personal life. Figure out how to deal with him on a professional level. Pick up the pieces at work and return to her usual routine.

Jesus. This was not how she planned to start the New Year. This was to be the year her favorite time of the season was going to live up to her fantasies. She was going to spend New Year's Eve with a handsome and charming man at a party that was bound to be something out of a movie. At midnight he would kiss her tenderly, maybe even tell her he loved her. There would be champagne and balloons. It would be a perfect beginning to what she had hoped would be a fresh start in her life with the New Year.

Sadly, the operative words in that sentence were “had hoped.” Because all her plans and dreams had all gone to hell with the Rittenauer project debacle.

Catherine still didn't know how to deal with what Dominic had done. If he'd been anyone else in the city, she could just ignore him for the rest of her life and talk about him behind his back. But he was her landlord, she saw him almost every day in the building, and he was in the same business. In their small community, trash-talking him would, she was afraid, only get her a black eye and wouldn't do him any harm.

In one half-serious moment she thought about sending him flowers. There was a certain symmetry to the idea. It was how their relationship had started, after all. Perhaps it was the way it should end. All she had to do was find flowers that said, “I'm sorry for throwing wine at you,” “I'm furious for what you did,” and “Here's to the end of a relationship.”

She hadn't heard from him since right before Christmas. No surprise. She'd ignored the attempts he'd made to contact her. And there was the little matter of telling him she never wanted to see him again when he'd been in her office. She'd paid no attention to his messages. He'd obviously gotten hers.

If she didn't hear
from
him, she heard
about
him. Melody relayed all the gossip buzzing around the building. Catherine pretended it didn't matter, although privately she was as fascinated by the contradictory rumors as Mel was.

And the rumors were wild. Edie Martin hadn't been seen around the building since right before Christmas, but no one knew why. Was she on vacation? Was she so outraged by what had happened with the Rittenauer proposal she'd quit? Or was she responsible for what had happened and been fired? Then there were the rumors about the proposal. The Rittenauer Foundation had awarded The Russo Group the contract. The Russo Group had lost to an out-of-town firm. The contract had been signed. Oops, no, there was some hitch in the negotiations. It seemed like there was something new every day.

Catherine knew it was driving Mel crazy. Her friend couldn't nail anything down, because her best source in Dominic's office wouldn't talk, no matter how hard Mel tried to pry the news out of her. All she had to go on was what the barista told her, and who knew where he got his information.

Then, the day before New Year's Eve, Melody called. Her source had talked and she had hot news.

She started with, “I have some good news, some bad news, and some good news. Also some ‘I'm not sure what it means' news. Which do you want first?”

“I can't begin to make sense out of that list. Just tell me what you know, please.”

“Well, first, Edie Martin was fired from The Russo Group. It's definite. Dominic had her escorted from the building the day you came back from New York.”

“You're joking. How come you didn't know for sure before now?”

“Everyone in The Russo Group was asked to keep things quiet until Dominic could sort out what happened.”

“What does that mean?”

“That's the part I can't figure out. It's apparently no secret within his company that Edie was the one who switched the proposals. No one else knew anything about it. But they were sworn to secrecy until today, when it suddenly became okay to talk about her being fired.”

“Edie did it? Oh, shit.”

“I thought you might react that way.”

“But why is everyone talking now?”

“That's the part I can't figure out,” Melody admitted. “Seems to me they should be keeping it all under wraps. She could have wrecked The Russo Group's rep with her stunt. But now it's okay to talk about her being fired, but there's something else going on that no one can talk about.”

“Are you sure about all this?”

“Absolutely. Impeccable sources. So, just to recap: Good news—Edie was the culprit. Bad news—you blamed the wrong person. Good news—Edie was immediately fired. Not-sure-what-it-is news—there's something else brewing up on the fifteenth floor.”

When Catherine didn't immediately respond, Melody asked, “Are you still there?”

“Sorry, yeah, I'm still here. Just trying to process what you said.”

“So, what're you going to do?”

“Hell if I know. This just complicates things. At least before I knew it was all Edie's fault, I could cling to a small vestige of justification for my behavior. Now …”

“Now you have to apologize big time.”

“Yeah, right. Groveling to Dominic is not exactly how I wanted to start the New Year.”

“No, I'm pretty sure you wanted to start the New Year doing something else with Mister Sex on Legs. Unless he's into the whole dom/sub thing and you haven't told me about it.”