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Fortunately, she answered her phone.
“Hello, dearest,” she said dryly.
He got out of the truck quickly and shut the door. “Save it for your girlfriend, Heidi. Are you at home?”
“Yep. In case you forgot, I left work early yesterday to go to Clay’s, so I’m making up the time now. I’ve got numbers to crunch for that contract you aren’t sure you want to sign.”
“Fuck.” Tim pinched the bridge of his nose and leaned against the bumper. Heneededher to run those figures so he’d know if he’d be throwing bad money at a deal that might not be as lucrative as the dealer made out.
Heidi had been working with Tim since the very beginning. Romantically, they were a comical disaster. As business associates, they were a force to be reckoned with.
“Uh oh,” she said. “What happened?”
“I bailed Kevin out again. I brought him over for you to mind because I’m tied up tonight. I left a…guest…at my house.”
“Jesus Christ. Bring him in. I’ll keep one eye on him and the other on my calculator. When’s the hearing?”
“I think Garrett said it was Wednesday. I was so pissed that I was probably only catching every other word.”
Tim pulled the passenger door open and gestured for Kevin to get out.
Kevin rolled his eyes but got down.
“I guess I’ll have to bring him into to office on Monday,” Heidi said.
“I can’t really see leaving him unsupervised.”
“Fuck that,” Kevin muttered as he walked away.
Tim dug deep and tapped into his internal storage bin of self-restraint, and somehow mustered up enough to not respond to the rude quip.
As they approached Heidi’s garden-level unit, she was leaning in the doorway with her reading glasses pushed down her nose and her arms crossed over her chest.
Kevin squeezed past her without a word and disappeared into the back of the condo—probably to throw himself onto the guest bed and stare bleary-eyed at the wide-screen television.
“Well?” She tucked her glasses into her shirt pocket and raised an eyebrow at Tim.
“I don’t know. We could always take my parents up on their offer.”
“So we’d feel even more like failures?” She shook her head and that cheeky grin she was so known for wearing all the time fell away. “No thanks. We didn’t mess up. We did everything we could for him, didn’t we?”
“I don’t know the answer to that.”
But Tim did know. They’d given it their best shot. They’d even stayed married longer than they should have to give Kevin the security he needed, but it hadn’t made a difference. He was an entitled kid with a chip on his shoulder, and there was nothing they could do to change that.
___
Tim had been gone for so long and Valerie had all the measurements she needed, so she left. Being in his house without him there made her uncomfortable. He wasn’ttechnicallyher client, just someone she was doing a favor for…and someone she was pretty sure saw through her like a cheap, clear shower curtain.
She could have resisted a little at his request for her to go down on him, but she’d wanted to please him. It pleasedherto please him, and she barely knew the guy. That should have frightened her more.
Crossing the fingers of her left hand, she backed her car out of his death-defying driveway and drove to Shora. The entire drive, she pondered how she would tell him that his architect’s work hadn’t been worth the cost of the gas he’d used to get to Tim’s house. She also thought he deserved to have his credentials revoked. All the while, she tried to shove aside thoughts of how fixing Tim’s house plans meant that she would have to see him again.
