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gh he truly couldn’t make sense of it.
Yet, when he had fired the manager that had been cheating him, the current floor manager had told Crista that Dawg practically lived in his office until he had the books and the store straightened out.
He had an instinct for what people needed and what they wanted, and he hired people who could provide it. And every employee hired had been hired by him personally.
“Well, I need your help anyway,” she told him firmly. “Your manager, Layla Matcher, has a pretty good handle on things, but I was going through some of the more recent catalogs gathering dust in the office and noticed you hadn’t ordered for the Christmas season yet. You need to get that in. ”
“It’s in. ” His lip curled in disgust, self-disgust. She could tell by his expression that admitting it didn
’t set well with him.
“Then I need the order log. ” She turned and rinsed their dishes. “We also need to get a stack of files taller than I am filed. The stock boy I sent for the file cabinets yesterday hadn’t arrived by time I left. ”
“They’re waiting in the office. ” If his voice could have become shorter, it did.
Crista hid her smile as she stacked the dishes in the dishwasher.
“Good; then you check the problem Layla told me was building in the lumberyard behind the store. For some reason, orders were missed with surprising regularlity last week. Several of your best contractors have threatened to use the chain lumberyard rather than Mackay’s because of the mess-up. ”
She turned in time to catch the narrowing of his eyes.
“Why didn’t Layla report this when it began?” His lips flattened in irritation.
“Check your cell phone messages. ” She shrugged. “She left several texts. ”
A heavy grimace tightened his expression then. “I had a problem with the phone last week. ”
“There you go then. ” She moved across the kitchen where her purse sat on the far counter.
Before she could make it halfway across the room, Dawg caught her arm and turned her firmly back to face him.
“Don’t start trying to run my life, Crista. You’re the one being blackmailed here, not me. There’s only so much I’ll let you get away with. ”
She restrained her smile; gloating wasn’t the best way to handle Dawg.
“Keep telling yourself that,” she told him instead. “And while you’re at it, ask yourself the same question I had to answer sometime last night when I was still trying to catch my breath. You wouldn’t blackmail someone you believed was a criminal, Dawg, and we both know it. No more than you would see an innocent person imprisoned. No matter the cost. So what are you doing in this relationship?”
“Getting the fuck of my life,” he snarled.
Her lips did twitch then. “So you are,” she agreed, pulling her arm from his grip before moving back to her purse, then turning and glancing at him over her shoulder. “Now, the question is, what do you really intend to do with it? Or me, as the case may be. Because we’re both smart enough to know that the thing you’re not going to do is turn me over to Homeland Security. Fuck me to death maybe, but you wouldn’t turn me in. ”
“Are you betting your life on it?”
“Yeah. ” She nodded slowly. “I’m betting my life on it. ”
It was a damned good thing her brother had raised her, Crista thought later as they pulled into the parking lot behind the lumber store marked Employees Only. Because Dawg was snarling and growling and being a general pain in the butt just for the hell of it. From her experience with Alex, she could tell the male irritability factor was in full swing here.
But he hadn’t called his agent-in-charge, and she was fairly certain there were no agents en route to slap restraints on her. She might get lucky, and the worst she would have to deal with was a snarling Dawg.
Not that answering her own question in the middle of the night had been easy. Because Crista had known from that first night that Dawg wouldn’t arrest her, and he wouldn’t see her arrested. He knew she wasn’t involved.
So why was she letting him blackmail her?
She had to fight to keep from laying her palm against her abdomen as they drove from the houseboat to the store. That was why she was letting him blackmail her. Because nothing had been finished when she had left Somerset eight years before. But everything had been lost.
Her dreams. The man she had loved for what seemed most of her life. And the child she had carried from that night.
The miscarriage had destroyed something inside her, something she hadn’t been able to recapture after leaving town. And she had never forgotten Dawg: his touch, his kiss, or the pleasure that had filled every cell of her body.
