Erin jumped, slamming a finger down on the mouse to switch the screen she had open on the computer, the reaction automatic. Just as it was if Dominic surprised her at home.

Steve, her quality control guy, completely blocked her doorway, the lewd tattoos on his arms flexing in agitation. His parents obviously hadn’t taught him the art of knocking even when the door was open. After all, a person could be on the phone, in the middle of important business. Or exchanging kinky e-mails. So what if she had an open-door policy?

“Which kid are you referring to?” She already knew.

“Matt,” Steve said with a very hard t. “I gotta reject seventy-five percent of his assembly work.”

Erin was head of operations, and her bailiwick included assembly, quality, repair and return, shipping and receiving, production control, purchasing, and employee therapy. She was sure she was missing one of her roles in there, but that was all that came to mind at the moment. Matt was having girlfriend problems. Obviously the talk they’d had a couple of weeks ago hadn’t solved them. He’d jumped from a 60 percent failure rate to seventy-five.

“I’ll take care of it, Steve.”

Steve pursed his lips in old-maid fashion. It was the strangest look on a five-feet-eleven beefcake, former Hells Angel, especially when the naked-lady tattoos on his arms started to . . . undulate. “It’s time and money, Erin.”

“I appreciate you pointing that out to me, Steve. And I said I’ll talk to him.”

He stood straight, hands on his hips. “You gonna fire him if he doesn’t shape up?”

Erin rose from her desk and crossed her arms. In his steel-toed boots, he was taller than her, and much wider, but she was still the boss. Steve was a good guy, he took his job seriously, and he didn’t like anyone messing with his accuracy percentages. And Matt was afraid of him.

“I will to talk to him again. That’s all you need to know,” she said with a bit of a hard edge.

Steve might be eight years older than she was, but sometimes, she was big sister to them all. And the truth was that taking care of them had gotten her through the last year.

Steve hung his head on his thick neck. “All right, Erin, you haven’t let me down yet.”

He hadn’t let her down either in the six years he’d worked for her. Despite his badass bald head and tattooed arms, Steve was hardworking and conscientious, with an endearing little-boy grin when he smiled. Even with the gold front tooth.

She shooed him away with a flap of her hand. “Now get back to work.”

Okay, what had she been doing? Reorder point. No, sex. Hot sex. What did Dominic have planned? What should she wear? Short skirt, high heels, yeah, but which short skirt and which sexy high heels? She had a pair of red shoes and a matching red suede skirt stuck somewhere at the back of her closet.

The rap on the door frame was so light she almost thought it was footsteps on the carpet outside her office. This time, Atul darkened her door, though a hell of a lot less of it than Steve had. Atul might be a couple of inches taller than Steve, but he had far less bulk.

“Erin, you must help me work with that Cam Phan.” He slicked his dark hair back off his forehead with a nervous hand.

Cam Phan was too quiet to cause trouble. “What’s the issue, Atul?”

“I believe she makes her accent heavier when she speaks to me so that I cannot make out what she says without much deliberation.” Atul spoke with a lyrical East Indian accent.

He was responsible for their documentation, the instruction manuals, product catalogues, and website design, and therefore worked closely with the engineers, which would be Cam Phan and Dominic. Starting at DKG when he was twenty-five, Atul had been with them over four years, whereas Cam Phan had joined their team only fifteen months ago, when their original software engineer, Reggie, had gotten pissed off. The episode still left a bad taste in Erin’s mouth. She liked a happy family. Reggie had stirred up a lot of animosity before he left.

“Atul, you both need to be a little more patient with each other.”

He puffed, his nostrils flaring. “She speaks much more clearly to Dominic.”

Which was probably true. Erin herself had never had any problem understanding Cam. Though Vietnamese was her first language, Cam had an extremely good understanding of English, and she spoke quite well. She’d immigrated to the United States when she was ten, had been educated here, graduated from college here, and at thirty-three, had worked in the industry for over ten years. Erin had a feeling that the language barrier was between Atul and Cam only. Atul could be condescending when he thought he knew more about a subject than someone else. He’d wanted the software design job, but he wasn’t an engineer. While Erin believed in allowing people to stretch their capabilities, she’d known that giving him the position would only increase the burden on Dominic. Cam was a few years older than Atul, with the experience and the education that Atul didn’t have. Like Steve, though, they were both good workers. Erin had to figure out how to get them to work together instead of at cross-purposes.

“I’ll mediate,” she said. Which would require Atul to be respectful and Cam to clean up her language, so to speak.

She should have called Dominic in on the mediation, since, technically, they worked for him, but she knew what he’d say. She babied them, not only Cam and Atul, but everyone. She wouldn’t dream of saying they were acting like children who couldn’t get along on the playground. Dominic would simply tell them to grow up. They had very different management styles. She believed involving employees in the solution had a bigger impact on behavior.

“Let’s get together tomorrow,” she said.

“That will be acceptable,” Atul agreed, then left.

She sat down, then clicked on her e-mail to see if there was anything new from Dominic. Nothing. She felt a tick of disappointment. She’d wanted more banter. The weekend’s sex had somehow brought her to life again. She needed more of her drug addict’s fix.

Now, the red high heels and suede skirt? Or all black?

Rachel laid a stack on Dominic’s desk amid all the other stacks of . . . stuff. Trade magazines, schematics, miscellaneous parts, pamphlets and brochures he’d brought home from the trade show and giveaways, pens, Post-its with company logos, key chains, laser pointers. There was even a plastic toothpick holder. He liked the more ingenious stuff people came up with to stamp the company name on. It gave him ideas for next year’s trade show on what he could have made up with DKG’s logo.

“Need a mouse pad?” He held out one with a team race car on it.

“Thanks. That’s nice and colorful.”

Rachel was a pretty woman, but she always seemed to try too hard, as if she were expecting to piss off somebody if every word out of her mouth wasn’t perfectly sweet.

He smoothed a hand over the crap on his desk, spreading it out so she could see better. “You want any of this junk?” In years past, he’d always given Jay first dibs. Jay had loved the freebies. He would have thought the mouse pad was cool.

“No thanks.” Rachel flapped the pad. “This is enough.” Then she left him alone with his junk and his mail.

Most of the general mail went to Erin, but if anything looked vaguely technical, Rachel gave it to him. He opened one envelope after another, junk, junk, junk. Until . . . What the hell was this? He scanned the letter, cocked his head, then scanned it again.

He sat there for five beats, his teeth clenched.

Goddammit.

It was a cease-and-desist letter from WEU Systems for patent infringement. On the through-coat gauge. Goddammit. WEU stood for Worldwide Excellence in Ultrasonics. The name was a crock, and not merely because WEU was DKG’s direct competitor. Their CEO, Garland Brooks, was an ass. He was a bottom-line man, and ethics be damned. He’d been known to grind smaller companies to dust with the power of his money. WEU manufactured an ultrasonic through-coat thickness gauge, but Dominic and Reggie had checked out the patents from every angle. Yes, there was a patent, but it shouldn’t have been granted because there was clear prior art by two different companies before WEU rolled out their gauge at last year’s PRI show. Prior art meant that someone else had come up with the basic process you were using, but had never gotten the patent on it. Companies did that all the time if they didn’t want to reveal exactly what their process was. Like Coke not wanting to reveal its recipe. A patent was on the process, not the product itself.

Now WEU wanted him to take the gauge off the market, or pay them an outrageous royalty fee. Fuck. Dominic slammed his fist down on the letter, then stood, sending his chair rolling until it hit the wall. Pacing, he shoved his hands through his hair, pulling on the ends.

That goddamn gauge. It had been nothing but a fucking nightmare getting it on the market. He laid his hand over his mouth, closed his eyes. He’d wanted to take it to the last PRI show, didn’t want WEU to outgun him. He pushed it through the engineering, through manufacturing, and when there were issues, he’d spent hours trying to figure out what was wrong. Not just hours, but days, weekends. The day Jay went on that school trip. Dominic should’ve gone with him. He was scheduled to be one of the parent chaperones. But time had been running out; he’d needed to fix the problem. So he let Jay make the day trip without him. There were other parents, teachers. It wasn’t as if Jay was alone out there. That’s what Dominic had told himself.

Leaning over, fists clenched on the desk, he squeezed his eyes shut so tightly it hurt. He thought of all the minuscule decisions that had led to that day. If Reggie hadn’t quit, leaving Dominic in a bind with the gauge’s software. If Dominic hadn’t felt compelled to have the damn thing ready for the trade show just so he could compete head-on with WEU. If he’d decided to pull Jay out of the school trip instead of allowing him to go. If he’d thrown the goddamn gauge to hell and gone anyway, because time with his son was so much more precious. In the end, he hadn’t gone to the show, hadn’t released the product until the first quarter, and that hadn’t cost DKG much of anything.

But it had cost him his son.

A shiver racked his body, trembled in his very bones. This was why Erin couldn’t talk about Jay. She could never say she hated him for not being there that day. He didn’t know if he could survive hearing it from her either. There were so many fucking things they couldn’t talk about. He wanted to tell himself the lack of communication and connection was her fault, but he couldn’t say what needed to be said either. Stalemate. All he could do was come up with kinky sex acts to indulge in, a way not to think about what really lay between them. Fuck.

They’d have to involve their patent attorney, document the research, send letters, all the while paying an exorbitant hourly fee.

Brooks was probably hoping this would drive them out of business. Dominic would fight him on it. Because if he didn’t, he would lose Erin. No matter what he’d told himself about their recent bouts of hot sex, DKG was the only real glue that held them together.

He passed a hand over his face, suddenly feeling years older.

Then he grabbed his chair, pulled it to the desk and sat down. Screw WEU and Garland Brooks for now. He wouldn’t tell Erin about the letter, at least not today. Let her leave him tomorrow, but tonight, he fully intended to blow her mind.