She wasn't going to discuss their marriage, and she certainly wasn't going to discuss Mindy. "Why do you want to sell SysVal?"

"I told you. We've made a fortune, and we need to get out now. You have to listen to me, Suzie. It's all going to crash down. I can feel it. We need to get out while we can."

The old passion was back in his eyes, and it stirred a sense of apprehension within her. "You know something that you're not telling me."

"When did you get so goddamn suspicious? There aren't any hidden secrets here, Susannah. Just look at the fucking economy."

"We're not selling SysVal."

"The hell we're not. The rest of the board will go along with me. They're bean counters, Susannah. They don't like it when I get nervous. In the end, you won't have any choice. You'd better trust me on this, because if you don't, you're going to end up looking like a fool."

"I don't think so. I think you're the one who'll look like a fool."

"We went into this together, and I'm going to see to it that we go out together." He strode past her toward the door. "Don't fight me on this one, Susannah. I'm warning you. If you fight me, it'll be the last big mistake you make with this company."


* * *

At three o'clock the next afternoon, when SysVal's Board of Directors convened, Mitch, Susannah, and Yank were conspicuously absent. Sam paced the floor of the boardroom while one of his assistants scurried to locate them. The assistant returned with the news that Mitch had made an emergency trip to Boston and that Susannah and Yank were nowhere to be found. The board overruled Sam's objection and voted to postpone their meeting.

Sam stalked out into the corridor. He couldn't believe she was defying him like this, that she was being so goddamn stubborn about everything. He should have known she would freak if she ever found out he slept with other women. She didn't understand that sort of shit didn't mean anything. She didn't understand that she was the only woman he wanted to spend his life with.

When he reached his office, he pushed through the line of people waiting in the reception area to see him and told his assistants they had fifteen minutes to find out where she was. Then he shut himself in his private office. She wanted a baby. Okay, he'd tell her a baby was okay. Maybe having a kid was what he needed. Maybe it would settle him down.

He realized he was sweating. Jesus, he was scared. Everything was happening so fast. Somehow he had to convince his partners to sell SysVal. And he had to get Susannah back. Not because of the company, either. Because of him.

Now that he was seeing things a little more clearly, he realized that it wasn't all her fault he wasn't happy. Maybe most of it was his fault. But she knew how crazy he got sometimes. She should have understood that he was just going through a hard time. She knew he loved her. He needed her. And if she left him, she was going to take all his missing parts with her.

"I don't mind coming with you, of course," Yank said to Susannah as they explored the empty bedroom of a newly built, multimillion-dollar luxury condominium that came complete with indoor pool, solarium, and a spectacular view. "But I don't need a babysitter. I wish you had trusted me to make myself unavailable this afternoon."

Susannah glanced at her watch. It was four o'clock. The meeting should have broken up by now. She gave Yank an apologetic smile. "I couldn't afford to take a chance that you'd get distracted today and forget the time."

He didn't return her smile. He merely gazed at her, his expression inscrutable.

Feeling uncomfortable, she looked away. There was something so mysterious about Yank. She never knew what he was thinking. She doubted anyone did.

The realtor had left them alone so Susannah could go through the house a second time. This afternoon had seemed as good an opportunity as any to find a permanent place to live. She gazed unenthusiastically through the arched windows to the mountains beyond. "I guess this is all right."

"It seems adequate. Furnishings will add a lot, of course."

Susannah thought of the gaudy gilt and brocade interior of Yank's house, a decorating scheme favored by one of his early girlfriends.

A noise sounded below-the bang of the door being pushed open and then slammed shut. She caught her breath as she heard a pounding on the stair treads. Yank frowned.

Sam burst into the room. "I can't believe this. It's like I don't know who to trust anymore."

Susannah's control snapped. "Don't you talk to me about trust."

"You have a house, Susannah!" he exclaimed. "My house. Our house. You don't need another one."

"I don't want to talk about this now, Sam. I want you to leave."

He stalked toward her. Yank stepped forward, moving without any appearance of haste, but effectively blocking Sam before he could reach her. "You'd better leave, Sam," he said quietly. "Susannah doesn't want you here."

"Get out of my way!" Sam punched at Yank's chest, trying to push him aside. But Yank was wiry, and although he swayed to the side, he didn't budge. A vein in the side of Sam's neck began to pulse as he shouted, "I thought you were my friend. You should have been at the board meeting today. Instead, you were helping my wife leave me."

"Yank came with me because I asked him to," Susannah said. Sam's rage was embarrassing. Once again she had a sense of detachment as she studied him, a feeling that she was seeing him with newer, wiser eyes.

"I'll just bet he jumped all over himself trying to help you out," Sam retorted nastily.

Yank pressed his eyes shut and his mouth twisted with pain. "I think I'm going to have to give up on you, Sam. Susannah and I-we're both going to have to give up on you."

Sam winced and for a moment his face seemed to crumple.

"I saw a lawyer this morning," she said quietly. "Nothing you do now will make any difference." Clearing a wide berth around him, she walked out into the hallway.

"Don't do this, Susannah," he called from the doorway. "Come home with me right now."

But she wasn't going into battle with him, and she walked away.

Instead of returning to SysVal, Sam found himself driving to his mother's house. She was sunning herself in the backyard, wearing a bikini in some shiny bronze fabric that didn't look as if it had ever seen water. The headset of a Walkman was strapped over her ears, and her eyes were closed beneath a pair of sunglasses with the gold script letters A.G. glued to the bottom of one lens.

Even though he had offered to buy Angela a new house anywhere she wanted, she had refused to move out of the old neighborhood. She said she liked living here because she knew all the neighbors and her old ladies depended on her. He'd told her that she didn't have to work anymore-he had more money than he knew what to do with-but she said she liked her independence. He'd even offered to buy her a first-class salon that she could run any way she wanted, but she'd said she didn't want to work that hard.

As he reached down and shut off the Walkman, her eyes snapped open. "Hi, baby." She pushed her sunglasses on top of her head and sat up a bit. Her stomach wrinkled a little as she moved, but she still had a great body for someone who was forty-nine.

"Don't you look snazzy," she said, as she always did. "If anybody had told me when you were eighteen that you'd be running around someday in eighty-dollar neckties, I'd have told them they were crazy."

He took the webbed chair next to her, noticing as he sat that rust had formed around the screws on the arms. "Clothes aren't important."

"Try giving them up."

He stretched out his legs, looked up at the sky and closed his eyes. "Did you talk to Suzie?"

"She called me yesterday."

"She's got this stupid-ass idea that she's moving out."

"Uh-huh."

"Well?"

"You want some spaghetti?"

"So what did you tell her?"

"I didn't tell her anything. Suzie's a grown woman."

"So what did she say to you?"

"She said she's leaving you, Sammy."

He pushed himself out of the chair. "Yeah, well that's what she thinks. See, she wants a kid."

"I know. She wants a husband, too. You're getting what you deserve, kiddo. I've been trying to tell you that for a long time."

"You know, you really piss me off. You're my mother, not hers. You're always taking her side. Right from the beginning."

"I'm my own woman, Sammy. I call it like I see it."

He splayed his hand on his hip and glared at her. "Yeah? Well, you see it all wrong. She's important to me, you know. I need her."

Angela sighed and reached out to touch him. "Oh, baby. You're so hard to love."

"Databeck tendered an excellent offer, Susannah," Leland Hayward said over lunch at a pretty cafe in Ghirardelli Square. The venture capitalist was still one of SysVal's most influential board members. In addition to Hayward and the four founding partners, SysVal's board consisted of bankers and investors who had been brought in as they needed expansion capital. They were, by nature, conservative men, and as Susannah had visited privately with each one over the past four days, she had been dismayed to discover how nervous they were. Even Hay-ward, who was accustomed to taking risks, was worried.

He sprinkled Sweet'N Low into his coffee and shook his head. "You have to understand that when someone who's as much of a wildcatter as Sam starts getting cold feet and says we should sell, I have to listen."

"The company is solid," she insisted. "There's no reason to sell."

"You're behind schedule on the development of the Wildfire. You've just lost the contract with the state of California. That doesn't seem so solid to me."

"We only lost the contract because of the rumors about the sale."

"Maybe. Maybe not."

Susannah understood only too well. If she or Mitch had expressed worry over the financial state of the company, the board members would have been concerned, but not frightened. But when a swashbuckler like Sam said he wanted out, the board was thrown into a panic.

They finished their coffee and prepared to leave. As Leland rose from his chair, he frowned. "By the way, Susannah, I'm not too happy with your service people right now. They picked up my computer a few weeks ago when I was on vacation, and they haven't returned it or brought me a replacement."

Susannah pulled out the small notebook she kept in her purse and jotted a reminder to herself. SysVal policy dictated that any employee who received a complaint was responsible for following through on it. No one at SysVal-from the Chairman of the Board to the newest member of the typing pool-was exempt.

"I liked that machine," Leland went on. And then he chuckled. "Having one of those Blaze III test models made me feel like a pioneer."

Susannah looked at him curiously. "You had one of the test models?"

"Sam gave it to me. He found out I hadn't been using a computer and said I was a disgrace to the company. It took me a while to get used to it, but now I can't get along without it."

Susannah thought of her own missing computer and wondered if someone in Engineering had pulled in all thirteen of the original test models to troubleshoot them. She reassured Leland that she would have a replacement machine sent over that afternoon, and once again asked him to reconsider his position.

"I've learned to trust my instincts," he said. "And right now my instincts are telling me that SysVal is in trouble."

She returned to her office frustrated and depressed. Her secretary handed her a pile of phone messages and she flicked through them, hoping to find something from Paige. For days, she had been leaving messages with the maid at Paige's villa in Sardinia, but so far she had heard nothing.

She was still thinking about her sister the next morning when Lydia Dubeck, an eager young MBA from Harvard who was one of the company's newest directors, poked her head into her office. "It's the darndest thing, Susannah. No one in Engineering seems to know anything about a recall of those thirteen test models. There aren't any work orders, and no one has heard about any problems. I guess that's good news."

Susannah was still troubled. "Sam's assistants should have a list of all the people who have one of those computers. Have someone get hold of it and find out the status of every machine."

But when Lydia caught up with her late that afternoon, she looked tired and irritated. "I don't know what the big deal is. Sam's apparently the only one who has a list. You'd think it was some sort of state secret. None of his assistants will give it to me, and he was in one of his moods when I finally ran him down."