Polished Slick (Natural Beauty) Read online

  “Well, keep on doing that, then, Trin. Make sure you lock up good. Night-night.” He closed and latched the door.

  Trinity slumped into the nearest chair with a sigh.

  Only took her five seconds to notice it was Jerry’s.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “So, how exactly does this set-up work?” Nikki shook the crushed ice in her lidded, insulated tumbler. There was a micro-speck of lemonade left at the bottom, and Jerry knew she wouldn’t give up on it. She was tenacious about that lemonade. Hell, she’d consumed a half-gallon of the cheap, imitation lemon, grocery store stuff by lunch.

  It was one of her few remaining vices.

  He stood atop the long metal cabinet of file drawers installed in the main laboratory space, attaching long black cords to the wall. They connected discreet, but powerful, webcams. “Well…” He jumped down and wiped his dusty hands on his cargo pants.

  Nikki took a step back and cast her gaze toward the network of wires.

  “I’ve installed the cameras with motion sensors. One camera is pointed toward the main door.” He indicated the right-most unit. “The other gets a view of the storage area and main floor.”

  He walked to the conference table, lifted his laptop lid, and beckoned Nikki over.

  “Hmm?”

  “Look. I’ve installed this same software on your take-home computer, so you can log in and see what’s going on in the barn whenever you want. Just activate the cameras.” He paused to make sure she was paying attention. She got bored easily lately.

  She made a get on with it motion with her hand.

  “Okay, so if someone comes in late at night after we’ve left, the cameras will automatically activate and record to the server for about half an hour.”

  “What if they spot the cameras?”

  “Not really a problem. Since the footage is stored separately from the cameras, even if they found them, and vandalized them, we’ll still have some images. However, if the vandal is an employee…” He paused and scanned the room, for emphasis.

  Most members of the small staff were busy with their usual tasks. Only Trinity was paying them any attention. She sat at her bench, turned brazenly in her rolling chair to watch them.

  Her arms were crossed over her chest, and there was a hard set to her jaw that seemed choreographed for him specifically.

  What the hell did I do now?

  He cringed, and turned his attention back to the impatient boss lady. “Anyhow, if it turns out the saboteur is a member of the staff, well…we’ll deal with that when we get to it.”

  “All right.” Nikki waddled away with her cup of ice, then stopped abruptly, turned around, and cocked her head to the side. She squinted at Jerry as if he had a second nose growing on his face.

  He was pretty sure he didn’t, so he squinted back. “What’s wrong?”

  She moved so her big belly was a few scant inches from his body, and tilted her face up to his, still assessing him silently.

  “Whatever it is, I didn’t do it.” He put his hands up, palms-out.

  “How do you feel about female impersonators?” She shook her ice some more.

  An odd question, for sure. “I’m friends with a couple, so I don’t feel any particular way about them.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, you probably wouldn’t.” She pointed at his chest and waggled her finger. “Don’t go too far. I need to call Beth.”

  “Okay.” He gave Nikki a slow nod, and kept his eyes on his suddenly mysterious boss. Usually, going along with her half-explained schemes was easier than questioning them. “I’ll be here all day.”

  “Yeah. Don’t leave until I talk to you. I mean it, Jeremiah.”

  “Yeesh.”

  Nikki hobble-danced with an atypical glee, and congratulated herself for something he couldn’t quite hear.

  “She’s gonna sprain her bladder doing that.” He climbed back onto the file cabinets, now with a roll of electrical tape in hand, and set about shoring up the sagging cords.

  He’d made his way to the end of the cabinet before he realized the prickling sensation at the back of his neck wasn’t the overzealous air conditioning, but rather a hard stare locked on him. “Oh, look. An audience.”

  He turned his head ninety degrees to the side, then down, to find the blonde with the pixie cut leaning against the far edge.

  She watched him with an obviously forced casualness.

  Nothing about Trinity was casual. In fact, she was the most meticulous person he knew besides Nikki. If he had to guess, she’d be the kind of girl who’d iron her underwear. He laughed at the thought.

  “’S’up, Trinity?” He popped his chin up gangsta-style in acknowledgement, still chuckling at his internal comedy act.

  “Nice plan,” she said testily.

  He cocked up an eyebrow. Shit. Pretty sure I just heard her claws come out. All right, pussycat. Want to play? “Well, it’s what I do.”

  He crouched, sat, then slid off the edge to admire his handiwork from the floor.

  “Tell me, how exactly does a person go from being a beachwear model to an IT guy?” she asked. “Just curious.” She cocked her pretty little head to the side, and pressed her lips into a flat line.

  Oh, that’s the game we’re playing? All right, then. Try as she might, she wasn’t going to faze him. He offered her his most photogenic smile and wrapped spare cordage in a figure eight between his palm and elbow. Oh, he’d model for her. He kept right on smiling, making love to her with his gaze.

  She flushed an unhealthy shade of pink and turned her eyes away.

  That didn’t take long. “I’ve been taking computers apart and putting them back together since I was nine,” he said glibly. He walked past her to the bin where he stored miscellaneous computer components, and intentionally grazed her side with his own on his way past.

  She backed away as if his touch had burned her.

  “As you might guess, it’s easy to take shit apart. Not so easy to put it back together. That’s where I earn my pay, you know. Putting shit back together.” He closed the tote lid and walked toward the conference table to fetch his computer.

  Trinity followed on his heels. They always followed, those women who thought they could tame him. He didn’t understand the allure.

  “And yet you don’t have a degree.”

  “Little bit of a superiority complex, there? I don’t need a piece of paper to prove I’m competent. Do you?”

  She was smart enough not to respond, so he got close and put his lips near her left ear. In a whisper, he said, “I’ve proven my skill time and time again to rave reviews. Ask any of my regulars. They always leave…satisfied.”

  He worried the innuendo would be lost on her. She didn’t seem like the kind of girl who rolled with the punches. She’d probably cry if she were ever trapped into a round of The Dozens with Juan. Juan’s “yo momma” jokes could make Eddie Murphy blush. When Jerry pulled back and looked at her face, her eyes were wide and cheeks flushed.

  He let the smile he’d been suppressing be his gloat. Normally he was all about “live and let live,” but this little twerp was making his workspace toxic. He didn’t like that, so if he needed to assert a little dominance to let her know she wasn’t the Big Bitch in Charge…so be it.

  “I don’t need paper, sweetie.” He winked at her as he’d done the night before at Christine’s, and walked away just as the photographer appeared in the barn door with a camera and laptop bag, ready to start the day’s catalog shoots. “Better go get Nikki, Trinity,” he called over his shoulder. “You look like you could use the break. Perhaps sit down while you’re in the office. You look faint with all that blood rushing to your head. Feeling all right?”

  * * *

  Damn him.

  Trinity joined Nikki near the hay bale backdrop outside the older red barn. The staff was in full-on hustle mode, arranging props and corralling their young models into holding areas.

  Nikki believed in recruiting locally as often as s
he could, so instead of using an agency, she and Beth hand-picked some girls from the dance squad.

  Gabby and the rest of the girls were clad in modest tank tops in similar tones to the lip balms they were slated to model. Ranging in ages from fourteen to seventeen, they looked fresh and youthful, but mature enough to appeal to adult consumers as well. Good call by Beth.

  “At least we’ll be on time with this one spread,” Trinity commented with a sigh.

  “I fell asleep last night pondering how we could downscale the print catalog at the last minute if we had to pull those nail polish pages. I hope it doesn’t come to that. Laying those things out is a nightmare as it is. Editing out products at the last minute always feels like picking which of my toes I’d like to cut off in order to fit my foot into a killer shoe.”

  Trinity waited for Nikki to laugh or betray some clue she was just joking, but no. She just whisked her fingers over her tablet’s touch screen idly, browsing what looked like spreadsheets.

  Jerry stood next to the photographer detailing the photo orientations and resolutions he needed for the website product showcase. Trinity thought it all sounded like a lot of gibberish. Pixels and DPI? PNG versus JPEG? She’d always considered herself reasonably tech-savvy, but maybe she’d barely scratched the surface of Internet technology. Getting her standalone e-mail client to fetch messages from the POP server had seemed like a genius move on her part, but…maybe she’d set the bar too low.

  She blew a raspberry and accepted the crate of props Beth thrust at her in passing.

  Being wrong about anything had always caused Trinity a special sort of stomach discomfort, and she could feel it working itself up now: the muscles of her gut tying in knots, acid churning. It was just like that time in pre-calculus when she’d proudly thrust her hand in the air to answer a question, only to find she’d truncated some numbers in the theorem she’d copied down. No one else in the class would have cared so much about the error, if it weren’t for the fact she’d turned scarlet red—according to Nate Freeman. She’d never raised her hand again.

  Maybe it was that same sort of arrogance rearing its ugly head again—the kind of hubris a woman who strives for an A-plus even when she knows the curve would top out at a C would exhibit. Perhaps she’d forgotten what being brought down a peg felt like. In two years, why hadn’t she realized Jerry’s job required him to know foreign languages she would never be fluent in?

  Java? HTML? C++? Building N-by-N’s propriety computer systems from the ground up?

  She must have thought Nikki had shaken some CDs out of a box and installed it all that way, but she’d been floored to learn that morning that even the software she and Nikki used to track their formulation changes, their trials, and patent data was designed by the man with the dreads.

  He was scary good, but even if the man was a genius, which she was beginning to suspect, he wasn’t a leader. Hell, he didn’t even make much of a follower. Jerry operated on the fringes—provided support where necessary, but mostly worked outside the flow of manufacturing.

  He was simply a necessary evil. An obstacle in her path.

  No way could he lead Nikki’s team the way Trinity could, seeing as how he had neither the chutzpah nor the drive.

  Time for a change of tactics. He didn’t have to follow her, but still, she needed him to get the hell out of her way.

  She realized she was staring at the man with her forehead furrowed when Nikki tapped her on the noggin.

  “Yo! You look like you’re about to lay an ostrich egg.”

  Trinity shifted the props to her other arm. “Sorry.” The distraction didn’t ease up, though. Although she’d made up her mind to ignore the man going forward, he was hard to ignore. His presence was too magnetic, and she couldn’t stop looking at him any more than a clothespin could resist clamping.

  Thankfully, he finished his consultation and backtracked to the N-by-N barn.

  When he was out of earshot, Trinity sidled closer to Nikki near the hay bales and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Hey, Nikki. This may be inopportune timing, but can I ask you a personnel question?”

  “Mmpfh.” Nikki held up an index finger, asking her to wait, and transferred the bobby pin clamped between her lips to Gabby’s too-long bangs. When the teen’s hair was as close to perfect as it was going to get, Nikki said, “Okay, shoot.”

  “All right.” Trinity set the box down behind the prop table and clapped her hands on her pants. Spit it out, girl. “I’ve always wondered, and the curiosity is eating me up. Why exactly did you hire Jerry? I mean, he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d want to work at a cosmetics company. Couldn’t you find some girl? You know, someone with a feminine touch?”

  Nikki and Beth, who’d returned with a bag of styling tools, shared a long look, and after a moment both doubled over with laughter.

  Well, Beth doubled over. Nikki, with her big belly in the way, sort of just bowed.

  “I have no idea what’s so funny about that,” Trinity huffed.

  Nikki smile was as broad as a piano keyboard. She gave Gabby a dismissive little swat on the bottom, and when the girl had walked away, she and Beth closed in on Trinity. “Jerry and I go way back. He’d done work for me before I incorporated, and freelanced for a lot of other ladies I know. He’s very thorough.”

  Trinity tried to school her features into a Nikki-esque blank, but feared her twitching cheeks gave away her eagerness regarding the subject. “What kind of work?”

  “Why? You’re mighty chatty today, Trinity. Did Juan pour tequila into the coffee urn again?”

  “Oh God.” Trinity’s head went light at the mere thought of that incident. It was last December during the height of the holiday manufacturing rush. She didn’t remember how, precisely, she’d gotten there, but at one point following a Monday meeting, she ended up on Jerry’s lap.

  He’d crooned Christmas Carols into her ear in a surprisingly decent singing voice, and she learned later he wasn’t even drunk. He’d been fucking with her the entire time.

  She dragged a hand across her heated brow and swallowed. “No, I’m just curious. I…”

  My, is that what everyone else feels when asking Nikki for time off? Now I totally get the sweating. Those green eyes were intense.

  “I’m just wondering how you come about building a team,” she hedged, and shit, even she knew it was lame.

  “Bullshit.” Nikki bobbed her head toward the barn, and Beth sighed, but sashayed away, leaving the two women in relative privacy. She patted a hay bale, and Trinity sat like the well-trained puppy she was.

  “Look, I know you two butt heads. I’m not blind, and I totally get it. I know what it’s like to have a strong personality and having to deal with people who don’t want to play nice.”

  “Exactly!”

  Nikki held up one hand and shook her head. “Hear me out. Jerry’s one of the must trustworthy people I know. For all the shit he puts up with at work and especially with his mother, he should be sainted. He’s a loose cannon, but I’ve learned the hard way that ninety-five percent of the time, his energy is pointed in the right direction.” Nikki stood and grabbed a handful of Chex Mix from the craft services table. “Truth be told, he reminds me of Charlie in some ways.”

  “I don’t see that.” Not even superficially. Charlie was pretty close to the ideal man as far as country boys went. He had a bit of scruff, but he earned it being so busy on the farm. Unlike Jerry, Charlie actually made efforts to clean up every now and then, and the results were spectacular. David Gandy himself couldn’t wear a suit with the same raw sex appeal Charlie did. Trinity had only seen him in a suit once—during the company’s launch—and she’d ogled him in a most impolite fashion. That had been before he and Nikki got it together, so she didn’t feel too guilty about it.

  “Well, I don’t mean physically, obviously. They have a lot of similar personality quirks. On the surface, they’re both really laid-back, but can be rather tenacious about people and things they c
are about. You shouldn’t write him off.”

  “Who, Charlie?”

  Nikki bopped her on the forehead. “No, silly, Jerry.”

  Trinity’s resulting expression must have been quite telling because Nikki threw her head back and laughed. She gave Trinity a hearty pat on the back and leaned in close. “I’ll let you in on a bit of a secret. He doesn’t date much. He’s ridiculously discriminating.”

  Coming from Nikki, that was saying a lot.

  “If you could snag him, it’d be a real feather in your cap. A win for the underdog.”

  The ligaments holding Trinity’s jaw to her skull popped, her mouth dropped open so fast. “First Aunt Ginger and now you? What am I missing?”

  “Just look at him.”

  “I did!”

  “So, what’s the problem?”

  Trinity scanned the area for bystanders, and seeing none, leaned in to whisper, “I’m no snitch, but…I’m pretty sure he smokes pot.”

  Nikki crossed her legs at the ankles and clamped her hand over her mouth. Her olive skin flushed to a dark red tone, and the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes deepened from unrestrained mirth. Finally, she snorted behind her hand, then laughed outright because she couldn’t hold all that in and the baby at the same time, apparently. “Stop or I’ll pee myself. Jerry wouldn’t even smoke a peace pipe if offered. Guess you’ve never seen him harass smokers outside of Christine’s.”

  “I’ve never had that particular privilege, but second, the un-showered beach bum look isn’t something I’m programmed to appreciate. I just can’t look beyond the un-showered component.” Maybe he looked it, but he didn’t smell it. He smelled wonderful, actually. Not that Trinity had been taking notes. But if she had been taking notes, they’d say he smelled like salt air and good soap.

  Nikki’s laughter trailed off, and she flicked a hand in Trinity’s general direction. “Okay, that’s a matter of preference I can’t fault you for. Can’t really do anything about that if you don’t like it. I don’t particularly like plaid and faded jeans, but I hooked up with Charlie, right?”

  “How’d that happen, anyway?”