Page 3 of The Focal Point

“Wow.” I shook my head. “This is revolutionary, man. Seriously.”

The flush grew brighter. “Yeah, well—”

Tom didn’t take compliments well, but he couldn’t find a way out of it this time.

“What about the instances of false readings?” I asked.

“About what you would expect. The team is working on the bugs,” Tom replied with a shrug. “There were a few times it caught falls by little kids, which we have to figure out to account for. Another one was for someone dancing.”

“Dancing?” My eyebrows rose. “Really?”

It was Tom’s turn to grin. “You would know. Your dancing looks more like a medical condition than what anyone would call ‘moves.’”

“Excuse me? I don’t think any girl in our high school prom could resist this.” I started my patented dance moves that had, I was sorry to say, done the exact opposite of attracting the opposite sex. But they had Tom laughing as much as they had that night eighteen years earlier.

He was wiping tears away when he finally shook his head. “I have a growler from the new brewery out in the fridge in the garage. I’ll get it while you get my laptop, and I’ll show you the results and the bugs.”

“Yeah, sure.”

I wound my way upstairs and to Tom’s spacious office that looked out over his even more spacious backyard. The door was open a crack, and it swung open when I pushed on it to step through...

...and stopped instantly.

A woman was leaning over Tom’s desk, her dark hair a curtain hiding her face as she studied a tablet on the surface before her, the black pencil skirt smoothed over curves. The floor creaked as I put my foot down, and she jerked up, the hair falling away to reveal a face that made my heart flutter in a way it never had before, her blue eyes settling on me, the full lips curving into a slight frown.

“Sorry,” I managed, caught by surprise, stuck between moving into the room and wanting to step right back out. I had entirely forgotten about the fourth presence in the house, but here it was—here she was—and I couldn’t look away.

I had no idea who she was. Thomas’s new girlfriend? He hadn’t mentioned anything to me. Then again, romance wasn’t entirely his thing. Maybe it was casual, and he was keeping it under wraps.

Whatever it was, I felt a pang of jealousy and had to swallow it away as I stepped farther into the room. Who was the woman? Even if she was Thomas’s girlfriend, I had a sudden urge to know.

Chapter 2

Bailey

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THOSE DAMN CURTAINS.

I stared up at them, hands on my hips, my toe tapping on the perfectly polished wooden floor—with which the curtains contrasted perfectly—marking a staccato rhythm.

“They’re too damn short.” The rhythm became a hard tap as I crossed the room one more time and knelt awkwardly in my pencil skirt, extending the tongue of the measuring tape. Just like the last two times I’d measured them, they were too short by a foot.

I wasn’t imagining things.

“I told them I wasn’t imagining things,” I muttered, though no one had said a thing, and no one else was in the room.

They had implied, of course, they being the textile company I had called to point out the mistake.

“We double-check our measurements,” the woman on the other side of the phone had insisted, her voice nasal and strident. “And we double-check them against the measurements our clients send.”

An oblique way to tell me I was the one who had made a mistake, and they wouldn’t do a damn thing to correct it. I had nearly thrown the phone across the room but had instead smiled and replied politely that I would get back to her.

Then I had hung up and let out a string of curses—but not too loud. The last thing I needed was for my client to hear me swearing like a sailor.

But what I needed even less was to have a set of curtains that were too short, throwing what was supposed to be a calm, masculine, cohesive space into chaos. Okay, maybe chaos was a bit dramatic, but it felt that way. Even someone who wasn’t an interior designer would notice that something was off, and off wasn’t something I gave to my clients.

I gave them aesthetic. I gave them professional. I gave them perfection.