Breaking Boundaries (SEAL Team Heartbreakers Book 5) Page 7

  “Sleep with!” His voice rose. “You’ve only been out with this guy once and you’re planning to sleep with him?”

  “Says the man who had a different SEAL bunny in his bed every week as soon as he graduated BUD/S.”

  “Who told you that?” His outrage was a mixture of expressions. Possibly a blend of guilty conscience plus wondering who the hell had spilled the beans.

  “You just told me. It was a shot in the dark.”

  He raked his fingers through his thick auburn hair, or was he tearing at it? He turned his narrowed green eyes on her. In that moment she recognized their shared heritage. Anyone could see it in the color of their eyes and the shape of their faces. Thank God he’d gotten the red hair and freckles.

  On his masculine features, with the scruff of copper-colored beard darkening his jaw, his freckles just looked like he had a tan rather than the rash it would have looked like on her. She had enough on her plate with the body shape she’d inherited from her mother.

  “Relax, Zach. I’m not in a rush to sleep with anyone. Trust me on that. After what Lee did… You’ve fulfilled your brotherly responsibilities. You’ve warned me off of all men. Now will you please stop acting like a cliché and let me run something serious by you?”

  He leaned forward to plant his elbows on his knees. Because of his training, he’d bulked up since leaving home, and his broad shoulders and muscular arms looked strong enough to carry whatever load she needed help with. “Shoot.”

  His directness triggered a smile. She told him everything about her first day on the job, Warren’s sexist attitude toward newly-hired women, and his aggressive dislike of Cal.

  “Document this prick’s behavior and take it to your boss. He’s a lawsuit for the corporation waiting to happen. They’ll make short work of him.”

  “That’s one of the problems, Zach. I can’t afford to be known as a whistle-blower this early in my career. That’s probably how he gets away with his behavior, in fact. If I go into my boss’s office three days in and tell him his project manager is a sexist pig, it won’t be Paul Warren who’ll be out on his ear, it will be me. I have to wait and give him the opportunity to put his hands on me or do something overt. Then I can knee him in the balls and go to the boss.”

  Zach flinched.

  “There’s another consideration, too. I think the woman I work with has real feelings for the jerk. They may have had a relationship. If he continues to ask me out, it’s going to put a strain on our working relationship. If I get him fired, the working relationship will be nonexistent. So it benefits me to have a boyfriend. And if I go out with Cal, I can say in good conscience I’m seeing someone and keep Warren at a distance.”

  “It sounds like you have all this thought out.”

  “I did until tonight.”

  His brows went up and he leaned in closer. “What about tonight?”

  “If I was a team player, I’d continue to keep my mouth shut, but I feel guilty as hell that I didn’t say something to Cal about Warren. I should have warned him the man has it in for him. I don’t know what Warren’s reasons are, but it’s obvious he does.”

  Zach threaded fingers through his hair to push it out of his eyes. It looked like he’d taken a hatchet to it and cut it himself. “You’re holding back telling the head office about this sexist pig you’re working with. And you feel guilty because you’re straddling the line with this guy, too. Does that pretty much sum it up?”

  “Well you didn’t have to make me sound so spineless,” Kathleen complained.

  Zach grinned. “I’m just jerking your chain.” He turned serious. “You’ve been out on one date with this guy. Are you going to see him again?”

  “On Saturday. And there’s one thing I didn’t tell you about Cal, Zach.”

  “What is it?”

  “He’s an ex-Marine and an amputee. His right leg below the knee.”

  “And he’s working construction.” It was a statement not a question.

  “Yeah. And he’s as good as the others at it. I didn’t know there was anything at all wrong with his leg until he ran on it. He said they offered to allow him to go back into combat, but he turned them down. He didn’t want to go back if he wasn’t certain he could do the job without putting his guys at risk.”

  “So you went out with him because you have this connection with guys like Jason, Mark, and me.”

  “No I didn’t. I went out with him because he’s the complete opposite of Lee and he’s a good guy, like I told you.” And he was sexy as hell. And he was the first guy she’d been attracted to since the breakup.

  “You’re giving this guy Warren ammunition to use against Cal by dating him, Kathleen. Warren is just looking for a way to get to him. He’ll say something nasty about you, and if Cal cares at all, he’ll feel duty bound to kick the guy’s ass, and he’ll lose his job.”

  “I don’t intend for Warren to know we’re seeing each other.”

  “And Cal’s okay with that?”

  “Well, I haven’t said anything to him about it. But it will make both our lives easier if Warren stays in the dark about it.”

  Zach’s features grew serious. “Kathleen, the fact that you’ve decided to avoid letting anyone know you’re dating Cal just to avoid conflict with this Warren guy isn’t good. You’re allowing him to manipulate you.”

  “I’ll handle Warren from my end.” She hoped things would level out once she let him know she was seeing someone. “What do you think Cal should do about the job situation?”

  “Shit. I don’t know, Kathleen. Bringing suit against the company seems a chickenshit way to keep the job, but threatening it may be his only resort if this guy keeps putting pressure on whoever hired him.”

  “He won’t do it. He’s too much of a straight up guy.”

  Zach’s brows rose. “If you’re that impressed, maybe you need to bring him around so I can meet him.”

  Yeah, that was going to happen when snow fell in San Diego. She shook her head. “Nice try. Not happening.”

  Zach frowned. “Afraid he won’t stand up to scrutiny?”

  “No. I’m not afraid of that at all. But I know your interview and intimidation tactics. We’ve only been out once, and I don’t want him to think I’m more trouble than he needs.”

  Zach leaned forward again, his expression earnest. “I’d never do that, Kathleen.”

  She studied his rugged features. He was a master at lying. Hadn’t the Navy trained him to lie under torture? “Yeah, right. If it were up to you and all my other dear brothers, I’d be cloistered in a convent like some seventeenth century heroine in a romance novel.”

  “If you’d let us vet—” Zach cut himself off, his lips compressed.

  If she’d let them vet Lee, he’d never have passed muster. So why the hell had he passed it with her? And what about Tamara, her college roommate, her best friend since sixth grade? “Lee wasn’t the only one in that bed when I walked in. And you all met Tamara. Would you have thought she’d betray me?”

  He studied his laced fingers. “No. I’d never have believed it. She was the sister you never had. I’m sorry I said anything.”

  At least she hadn’t been the only one fooled. Although there was little comfort in knowing that. In some ways Tamara’s betrayal and loss hurt more than Lee’s. Kathleen stared down into her wine. “I need to know I can judge someone’s character without needing backup.”

  He nodded. “I get it.” But he had a morose scowl when he rose to his feet. “But we all need some help now and then.”

  He’d had his own losses with a girlfriend who dumped him while he was deployed in Iraq or right after. He hadn’t let a woman get close emotionally since. Kathleen read that in his avoidance of the subject.

  “I have to bug out at zero four thirty. We’ll catch breakfast at the base so you don’t have to cook for us again. As much as I appreciated it this morning, you’re not used to the hours. You look wiped out right now.”

  “I am a little
,” she admitted.

  “I’ll probably be back at nine hundred, but don’t worry if you don’t see me. I’ll have my cell phone with me in case of an emergency.”

  “Okay. I have a couple of apartments I’m going to check out after work.”

  He tucked his hands in his back pockets. “I’m not here much anyway. You know you can stay here as long as you want.”

  “Yes, I do know, and I hope you know just how much I appreciate it. But we need to work out some kind of signal so when we bring dates home there won’t be any embarrassing moments. Like I can always leave a bra hanging on the bedroom door, you could hang your underwear out there.”

  “Kathleen—” He pressed the heels of his hands against his temples as if his head might explode.

  Kathleen threw her hand up with a snicker. “Okay. I’ll stop.” She set aside her wine glass. “You’re just so easy to tease.” She went over to give him a sisterly hug, then tilted her head back to look up into his eyes. “I’m not anywhere close to the loose woman I’ve led you to believe. But you need your privacy as much as I need mine, and the plan was that I’d only stay as long as it took me to find my own place.”

  True, moving out would leave her totally alone in a city she didn’t know—yet. But she’d needed some distance from home, room to allow the hurt and humiliation to heal at their own pace. She’d felt just as isolated there as she did here. Somehow Lee’s friends had become her friends, and she ended up being the one abandoned after their breakup. Despite his being an unfaithful, lying, conniving asswipe.

  Tears threatened, and she closed her eyes against them. “I’ll still want to see you as much as possible, Zach.” She tightened her arms around him.

  “I get it, honey.” He gave her a gentle squeeze, and buffed her forehead with a kiss. “But if you need me to have a man-to-man discussion with the asshole, just let me know.”

  “I will.” She stepped away and pretended to retrieve her wine glass to hide her shaky composure. “Be careful tomorrow.”

  “Always am.”

  She knew that wasn’t necessarily so.

  He meandered down the hallway to his bedroom. “And Thorn?”

  “Yes.”

  “Knee that supervisor in the nuts if he fucks with you again. No job is important enough to put up with a bunch of shit.”

  How much shit would Zach put up with before he walked away from being a SEAL? He put his life on the line every time he was called up. What she was experiencing was nothing by comparison.

  She gave him a nod. “I will.”

  Chapter 6

  ‡

  Panic made it hard for her to breathe. Her heart drummed in her ears so loudly it drowned out everything else.

  The AutoCAD program was open on her computer monitor, cursor blinking on a blank page. She’d looked three times, but her project was gone. She saved it when Paul Warren was here. She distinctly remembered doing it. Even if the program hadn’t saved the rest of the work she did after he left, what she finished before should all be there.

  And that wasn’t all that was missing.

  She had to calm down. Her drawings and rough designs had to be in this room somewhere. Please let them be here somewhere.

  When she left to meet Cal, she’d stacked everything on her drafting table in plain sight. The pristine emptiness of the surface glared at her now.

  She swallowed in an attempt to moisten a mouth gone bone dry. Someone had deleted her CAD file and moved the drawings. But why? She backed away from the space to lean against the dividing wall between her cubicle and Edward’s.

  Hillary sauntered in. She was already shrugging free of her lightweight jacket before she reached her cubicle. “Morning, Kathleen.”

  “Hey.” The word came out breathless and weak.

  Hillary paused in midstride, her brows rising. “You’re white. What’s happened?”

  Kathleen struggled to maintain her composure, but tears weren’t far off. “All my work from yesterday is gone.”

  Confusion flitted across Hillary’s face. Her jacket still hung from one arm, snagged on the purse dangling from her hand. “Gone? What do you mean gone?”

  “The project I started in my CAD program is gone, deleted. I left the drawings and my copy of the prospectus stacked on the drafting table. They’re not here, either.”

  Hillary dumped her purse and jacket on the floor. “They can’t be gone.” She moved to the shallow stack of drafting paper left on the Formica countertop and thumbed through it. When she found nothing there, she bent to look under the counter.

  Kathleen hadn’t had time to accumulate any clutter. The emptiness of her cubicle stared back at them both. The only thing new was the bulletin board she’d hung beneath a shelf running head-high above the counter with her photos of the project building site.

  “You guys aren’t playing a practical joke on me, are you?” Kathleen asked.

  “No.” Hillary’s expression was grim. “For one thing, we don’t touch each other’s work, and for another…this is not one damn bit funny.”

  Kathleen drew a tiny bit of comfort from Hillary’s solid support.

  “I’ll call down to maintenance and ask them to look through yesterday’s trash.”

  “I didn’t throw my work away.”

  “I know, but if some other idiot did, maybe we can catch the drawings before they’ve disposed of them.” Hillary reached for the phone.

  While Hillary was making the call, Ed and Dave came in. Kathleen approached them and explained what had happened. While Dave tried to recover the file on her computer, she, Ed and Hillary—when she wasn’t answering the phones—started a systematic search of the room.

  At one point Ed went out to ask the secretaries and receptionist to look around the office supply areas.

  “I’ve called down to tech, and they’re sending someone right now to see if they can recover your file. Have you looked in the hanging files for your drawings, Kathleen?” Dave asked.

  His calm questions were helping her remain hopeful. “No. I don’t have a key to the cabinet.”

  “I’ll get mine.” He retrieved his key from a desk drawer and opened the cabinet.

  Eighteen by twenty-four inch pieces of drafting paper hung in large sections from bars and clamps suspended from a wall unit. Kathleen carefully looked from one side, while Dave started from the other.

  “Kathleen,” Dave called her attention to a clamped section. Suspended neatly from the file hanger were her drawings of the building façade from different angles, and several other sheets with her calculations.

  Relief lifted the weight of anxiety from her, leaving room for tears to rush up, and she bit her lip to still its trembling. Dave laid a hand on her shoulder. “This couldn’t have been a mistake. Someone had to put them in there on purpose. I thought you might have deleted your CAD file by mistake, but since the drawings disappeared, too…” He shook his head.

  She nodded. What else could she do?

  “You need to set up a password on your computer right now to lock out everyone but you. And you might want to transfer all these drawings and calculations to the computer, too, for safekeeping, and then store it on the server so it can’t be messed with,” he suggested.

  “I will.”

  “How the hell did they get in there?” Ed asked. “Hey, Hillary, Dave’s found them.”

  Hillary hung up the phone, which had rung three times since they arrived. She rushed to join them.

  “Kathleen may be the only one besides the receptionist and the secretaries who doesn’t have a key. Whatever practical joke someone was playing, it was damn stupid.” He removed the papers from the clamps and handed them to her.

  “I’m real sorry this happened, Kathleen. I can’t imagine why anyone would touch your work,” Ed said.

  “Nothing like this has ever happened before,” Hillary added.

  “I really appreciate you all helping me find them,” Kathleen managed around the knot in her throat. “They we
ren’t anything I was going to give the client, but it’s just part of my process to work things out on paper before I start the design on the computer.”

  Dave’s features looked set with anger. “Scan them and put them in the computer, just to be safe. Then you can print them out and take the originals home. You should frame that one.” He pointed at the montage of the different façades. “The design is beautiful.”

  She didn’t know if he was saying that to make her feel better or if he truly thought it. “I may do that.” She forced a smile. “I’d love to take you all out to lunch as a thank-you.”

  “Not necessary, but…” Ed grinned. “We could all hit Wally’s down the street for corn beef sandwiches.”

  “That sounds good,” she agreed.

  Hillary gave her shoulder a squeeze. “I’ll call maintenance downstairs and tell them to call off the search.”

  “I’ll go out and tell the secretaries,” Ed said.

  Dave closed the cabinet and locked it. “I’ll make sure you get a key to the cabinet. The tech guy should be here in just a few minutes.”

  As they all dispersed to give her some time to regroup, Kathleen moved back to her cubicle and sat at her desk. She spread the drawings out on the table. For all his oddities and passive-aggressive behavior, she couldn’t imagine why Paul Warren would do something like this, or anyone else. She barely knew these people. But this couldn’t have been a mistake.

  She wouldn’t be played for a fool again. She’d watch her back from now on.

  *

  Cal attempted to ignore the cell phone raised in his direction as he heaved the last heavy plastic drainage tube onto the truck. Hector and Julio had made a competition out of filming him at work. Every time he started to do anything, they both whipped out their phones.