Lucky Charm Page 5

  No.

  She couldn’t think about that, wouldn’t resurrect it, she didn’t want to suffer that pain again, that tearing grief that felt as if her heart was torn and bleeding, mourning and agony burning in her chest like acid.

  Frantically, she shoved it all back inside that mental box, slammed the lid and locked it tight. She focused instead on the warmth, the joy and passion of the past few moments. She would hold that but no more and no closer.

  It was better this way, for both of them. Better not to feel, not to get attached…not to care.

  “You’d better go,” she said, softly, with an attempt at lightness. “We’ll probably never see each other again. They say babies fail to thrive if they’re not touched now and then. I guess some adults do, too. You gave me that. It was a joy, Matthew, and I’m very grateful.”

  Matt wished suddenly and intensely that he hadn’t asked.

  Where there had been such life in her eyes there was now a terrible sadness and a deep sorrow. What the hell had happened?

  Looking in them he could tell it was all the answer he would get.

  If he had his secrets he couldn’t quibble, she was entitled to hers as well. Maybe that was all he had the right to ask, all things considered. It might be all the answer he wanted to know. He certainly didn’t want to get any more involved with her than she seemed to want from him.

  He looked down into eyes as blue as the sky and for a moment wished it could be different.

  Looking up at him, at his blond hair tousled from their lovemaking, from her hands in it, Ariel committed his face, with its good, clean, rugged lines to memory. She memorized the sensation of his firm mouth, it had been so soft when he’d kissed her, his broad shoulders strong beneath her hands. His powerful hands had drawn such pleasure from her, a pleasure she hadn’t felt in so long. And his amazing, incredible green eyes.

  She was grateful. Whatever else, she felt as if some kind of pressure had been relieved, that a release had been granted her. The need for human contact, for touching and holding, had been assuaged, if only for a little while. She’d needed his gentleness, his kindness and passion, and now that she’d had it she couldn’t bring herself to regret it.

  It was over, though. This was as close as she could bear. There was relief in that, too.

  Matt saw it in her eyes, as if a shutter closed behind her eyes.

  Strength and courage against some unbearable sorrow. She wouldn’t tell him what had happened but he could see the gratitude in her expression. It would have to be enough. At least there was no regret. He could be thankful for that.

  Quickly, he framed her face in his hands and leaned down to kiss her one last time.

  Her lips moved beneath his. It was so tempting. He could drown in that kiss.

  Instead, deliberately, he stepped away, looking back at her just once before he closed the door behind him.

  She sat cross-legged on the bed, naked, utterly unselfconscious. Her dark hair framed that elfin face, tumbled over her pale shoulders and full breasts.

  Ariel,

  Blue eyes and that soft rosy mouth. He wouldn’t forget her soon, or easily. He owed her his life and one intense and passionate morning.

  Deliberately he shut the door, closing off that vision.

  Now he had to concentrate on Bill, on why he’d died. On who had killed him and why?

  What had happened the previous night had been only more proof Marathon had something they wanted to hide and badly. As had everything else since he’d gotten the phone call from Bill that night.

  Something was going on at Marathon Corp.

  Bill had either found it or stumbled over it somehow. All Matt knew for certain was that Marathon was involved.

  It wasn’t just Bill’s phone call.

  While Matt and Bill’s wife had been arranging for his cremation the house had been robbed. Although the thieves had stolen the television, they’d also ransacked Bill’s office. At the same time Marathon had cleared Bill’s office. The speed with which they’d done it had been revealing.

  They hadn’t started tailing him, though, until after his break-in of their office. Another tell-tale but not something Matt could take to the police.

  The unknown ‘they’ had missed something, though. They hadn’t cleared his trash can.

  They’d missed Bill’s doodles.

  Doodling had been Bill’s way of clarifying his thoughts, clearing his mind.

  On his blotter at home, on scraps of paper and the few items Matt had found in Bill’s trash were circles and arrows. Those doodles linked Marathon and another financial company called Genesis. How they were linked Matt didn’t yet know. It was that knowledge, or something about it, that had caused Bill’s death.

  Matt just couldn’t prove it, couldn’t get into Marathon’s records to find the evidence he knew had to be there.

  That last view he had of Ariel O’Donnell, though, hovered in the back of his mind.

  Clothed only in her black hair she was lovely. A nymph or an elf.

  Chapter Four

  Fort Lauderdale in the summer was beautiful. The sky was brilliantly blue. Palm trees and palmetto bushes swayed in the ocean breeze. It was also hot and very humid, sticky and close, despite that breeze.

  Ariel wished she could enjoy it more. She didn’t know how it happened but she always traveled to southern states in the summer and northern states in the winter. It would have worked so much better the other way around. It was one of the ironies of life. It was a good thing, too, that the taxi had good air conditioning or she’d have been wilted before she arrived. In fact, it was better than her rental car, lost somewhere in the parking garage.

  The cab dropped her off in front of the glittering steel and glass tower that housed Marathon Corp. She’d already noticed that if you stood by one of those dark tinted windows you could feel the heat radiate from it. Not that she would see any windows or natural light all day. No, she was in sunny Fort Lauderdale with no chance to enjoy it. Instead, she would be locked in a training room all day and resolving software issues for half the night.

  Only day two, she thought with a sigh, as she rode the elevator up, with three more to go in this region before she moved west. Next week, there would be another city. Marathon had offices all over the country and she was going to see almost all of them. Sometimes more than one a week.

  The doors opened on the bottom of the two floors that Marathon occupied in this building. She knew which way to turn here.

  “So,” Steve Parsons asked as she walked into the office, falling in beside her, “how did it go last night?”

  He was the computer technician for Marathon. A whiz at setting up and maintaining the servers, he knew little about the software Ariel was about to set up and less about finance.

  She could have given a dozen answers – frustrating and terrifying among them – but that would only have led to more questions. For which she didn’t have answers. So she kept it simple. Of the morning, well…that she would hold in memory.

  Instead she answered with part of the truth, the real reason she was here – work. As a software consultant for Titan Communications, she traveled all over the country installing and training the new software in their client’s offices. It had been a big coup for Titan to get this contract. Her contract. Her first major sale, a company with offices across the country. The commission was more money than she’d made in one month, much less a week. She was under a lot of pressure to get it right.

  “The program installed fine, no major problems. I had to tweak a few things, that’s all, and will probably tweak it more. Everything should be up and ready to go this morning, though. Did you get your end done?”

  Something in his expression looked strange – almost as if he was somehow relieved – but he didn’t say anything, instead he simply answered her question. “Yes, we should be good to go.”

  “Okay, so training will be our test. Whatever problems we run into, we can solve as we go.”

&n
bsp; “I’ll leave that up to you,” he said, with relief, “you’re the expert.”

  She grinned. “So they tell me.”

  It was what she’d worked so hard to achieve. Not for her the assistance of doting parents like so many of her classmates in college, the money simply hadn’t been there. Instead, she’d worked, taking night and weekend courses. One job had led to the next, each building her résumé. She’d changed course a little to concentrate on software rather than hardware. That had carried her to her last job and led to this one. Now she was the financial software guru for Titan. It was her job to make sure everything was installed and working properly.

  The only way to be certain, though, was to test it thoroughly, which you could never really do. Every company was different, with different hardware, different software already installed and possibly conflicting with theirs. Added to that was the certainty that the software would change every sixteen months.

  Titan had solved the problem by combining the duties of a tech and a trainer into one job. It was twice the headache but Ariel had learned that the training sessions helped her find a lot of the bugs. Especially the first day – today – which would only make it more all the more trying.

  With a sigh, she walked to the room assigned to her for training and looked around at the windowless space. Long tables with computer workstations were set at regular intervals. The only decoration was an OSHA poster and a long whiteboard. Other than that it was painted institutional beige, featureless and empty. Her home away from home for the next few days.

  The employees filed into the room. She smiled at each of them as they sat until the last to get there had to take the seats up front. She perched a hip on the edge of the desk at the front of the room once everyone was settled.

  “Hi, I’m Ariel O’Donnell and I’m a consultant with Titan Communications – the provider of your new software program,” she said and launched into her spiel with well-practiced ease.

  She’d installed and trained this software so many times she could practically do it in her sleep. Once, after a particularly difficult install, she very nearly had. She had the bad and good jokes timed well enough apart to keep the trainees awake and learned from the first few offices which part of the program they would love and which they would disliked, so she could hit the ones they’d love hard and soft-pedal the ones they would probably hate.

  The perfect software system had never been written that she knew of. No matter what the people at Microsoft and Apple thought. Linux, either, for that matter.

  “So,” she finished, “why don’t you introduce yourselves, tell me a little about what you do here at Marathon and a little about yourselves?”

  Their answers would tell her what to train and where to focus it.

  Looking at each person as they spoke, she tucked the pertinent information into the back of her mind.

  The receptionist, Claudia, was in this group, so she’d need to review the section about calling up the files and finding where she’d need to direct a call to the right person. Others she listened to, knowing she’d be lucky to remember their names before the last one gave his but she made certain she looked interested. As she listened, she assessed the group, trying to gauge the dynamics – who might be an ally, and who might become an enemy. She knew she had to step carefully, as if she walked through an imaginary minefield. Someone in this office considered themself the go-to person on the software system Marathon already had. Whoever that was needed to be converted from enemy to friend or half of what she taught would be undone by backbiting and nay-saying.

  She also had to find an ally, someone to guide her through the intricate interrelationships that dominated all offices. Who to watch out for and who to kowtow to. Who was the dragon at the gate, the person whose self-appointed job was to make things difficult? She also had to be careful who she picked as an ally. If she picked the wrong person, she was sunk again.

  As much as she disliked it, it was essential. Every office was like high school in a way, with its cliques, its losers and renegades. If her ally was one of the losers or the renegades, she’d be relegated to whatever status they had in the corporate pecking order. Some renegades were respected, some weren’t. A loser or geek, no matter how nice, would take her to the bottom with them. The same was true of the cliques. Pick the wrong clique and the other cliques got their collective noses out of joint. What she needed was the one or two people who were tolerated by everyone.

  There was one girl who caught her eye.

  Normally, Ariel might have passed her over.

  Big and big boned, with dark hair and eyes, the girl was chipper and enthusiastic but dressed wrong for this office, her clothes too cheap, cheery, too brash. As Ariel watched and listened to the others, however, especially as they related to this girl, she realized she might have found her ally. The others seemed to view the girl in the same way family members accepted a new puppy, as awful as that sounded. That’s what this girl was – the office puppy. Bouncy, happy and eager to please. She was also nice and definitely friendly.

  It was a good session, with some decent people in it. This group was more attentive than some of those in the last office had been and more dedicated to learning the software they had to know. Maybe someone had clued them in as to how important this was and how much of a pain in the neck it would be if they didn’t learn it.

  They were so good she broke them for lunch ten minutes before noon, to give them time to order something to eat, decide where to go for lunch or catch up with their snail mail, e-mail or voice-mail.

  “Hey, Ariel.”

  Ariel turned.

  The dark-haired girl peeked around the doorway, grinning.

  She’d actually seemed to pay attention during the session, which was a nice change of pace. Many blew off their training sessions and didn’t really give it any attention. Two days after she left they’d call tech support to walk them through a simple procedure and claim she never trained them in it. Sign-in sheets covered some of that but she’d still get complaints. So this was more than she could have hoped for. It would make it so much easier.

  Besides, she liked the girl.

  Ariel had never had a problem making friends. She liked people in general and could usually make conversation with strangers easily but having the first step made by someone in the office smoothed the way considerably. If she read this girl right, she now had a guide past the office minefields and possibly a friend besides. Ariel had friends like her all over the country. They’d call the help desk and ask for her or she’d call them for a follow-up. They’d spend half an hour catching up on their love lives, the office gossip and general chit-chat. It was one of the better perks of the job and off-set, sometimes, the fact that Ariel didn’t have time to make real friends at home.

  “What can I do for you…?” she asked. What was the girl’s name? Mary Ann? Something like that. After a while names and faces ran together. Miriam, Miriam Weber. “Miriam.”

  “What’re you doing for lunch?” Miriam asked. “There’s a bunch of us going out.”

  With a sigh, Ariel said, “I’d really like to go but you know the problems we ran into during training? I really have to fix them. Can you give me a rain check?”

  There had been a number of bugs, big and little, while they’d been training. Not big enough to stop but too big to let go for the afternoon session.

  Sympathetically, Miriam made a face. “Sure. Do you want me to pick you up something?”

  “My guardian angel!” Ariel said before she sighed gratefully but wryly, knowing there wouldn’t be time. “Although actually there’s no point, even I can’t type and eat at the same time but I appreciate the offer. Don’t forget me tomorrow, though?”

  “I won’t,” Miriam promised before leaving with a cheerful wave.

  Ariel smiled. It seemed she’d been adopted, there was actually a chance Miriam would remember.

  In some offices it was as if Ariel disappeared down a rabbit hole. Out of sigh
t out of mind.

  Once an entire office had left while she’d been working on an issue, leaving her with no clue how or where to find a place to eat.

  With luck Miriam’s cheerful, thoughtful nature wouldn’t allow for that. Every once in a while Ariel ran into someone like her. It was a pleasant change of pace.

  Gary Tolan, the branch manager, poked his head into the training room. “How are you doing, Ariel?”

  Surprised, she looked up from the computer screen and the little bug she was trying to fix for the next session.

  “I ran into a few problems but nothing major.”

  “Did you have any problems when you left last night?” he asked.

  That was an awkward question. Answering truthfully was obviously out. Had they noticed her rental car in the garage? She hated to lie so she gave him part of the truth, enough so she wouldn’t have more questions to answer.

  “I got lost trying to find the parking garage so I finally gave up and took a cab.”

  He smiled apologetically. “A lot of people have that problem. You should be fine tonight though?”

  Ariel shrugged. “It depends on these issues. I might have to stay to resolve them. As I said it’s nothing major but I’d rather get them fixed.”

  It would be another late night but it was better than returning to an empty hotel room and scanning through channels to find something to watch. Sometimes she turned on the TV just for the sound of another voice while she read a book on her e-reader, if she had energy enough left to read after checking in with the office, checking her voice mail and e-mail.

  “Good enough,” he said, and ducked back out again.

  Relieved, Ariel turned her mind back to the thorny problem of resolving the conflicts.

  Nothing worked so she called the support desk back at the office. They gave her a couple of options, none of which she could implement from the training room, she put them off until later when she could gain access to the server again. That had been one of the things Marathon had insisted on, that they host on their own server. Given that it was a financial company, it wasn’t unreasonable.