Susan Phillips - Hot Shot

"Why didn't you ever tell us?"

"You all kept going on about it. I was embarrassed. I meant to tell you, but then I waited too long, and it got awkward."

Sam could have cried foul, but Yank was the greatest engineer he'd ever met, and he deserved respect. "It's a good game, Yank," he said huskily. "A real good game."

He turned to walk out the door.

And collided with Mitchell Blaine.

Mitch exploded into the office. His face was flushed, his blue dress shirt stuck to his chest with sweat. His light blue eyes held a savage, awful gleam none of them had ever seen before. "What in the goddamn everlasting hell is going on here?" he roared.

Paige's feet seemed to move of their own volition as she raced toward him and threw her small body into his arms. Safe, solid Mitch. He was as good as a daddy. The only force of stability in a world filled with familiar people gone crazy. She had telephoned him right away, as soon as she had realized they were actually going to play this crazy game. But he hadn't gotten here in time.

"You're too late," she said. "It's over."

Mitch circled Paige's shoulders and hugged her against him. His arm was strong and protective, like her father's should have been when she was a child. She wanted to cuddle up against him and let him keep the wolves away.

"Somebody'd better start talking fast," he hissed, hugging her close. "Right now. Susannah, tell me what happened."

She shrugged with all the nonchalance of SysVal's unshakable corporate president-the valiant female warrior who had taken on everything and everybody who had threatened her company. But as she watched her sister cuddled into Mitch's big arms, her bottom lip began to quiver. "Yank won me."

Mitch's eyes shot to Yank. He pierced him with an icy gaze as deadly as any of Victors' missiles. "What does that mean?"

"It's very simple, Mitch," Yank said. "Sam refused to accept the fact that Susannah no longer wanted him in her life, so he and I had a contest. Whoever won got to take her to bed. I won."

Somewhere in Mitch's solid thirty-eight-year-old body, the reflexes of an Ohio State wide receiver still existed. With a muffled roar, he released Paige, shot over the corner of the desk, and charged straight for Yank Yankowski.

Yank went down immediately.

Paige screamed, Susannah yelled, both women raced across the small office and threw themselves on Mitch, one of them pulling at his legs, the other at his arms.

"Get off!" Paige screamed, straddling his hips. "Get off, you'll kill him!"

Susannah grabbed a handful of blue Oxford-cloth dress shirt (light starch only) and pulled. "Stop, Mitch. No! Don't do this!"

Sam stood by the doorway and watched the four of them grappling on the floor. God, he was going to miss this place.

Susannah lost one of her high heels. Paige knocked a Rolodex to the floor and the cards went skidding everywhere. The glowing screen of the Victors game flickered above them.

Mitch shook off the women, pulled Yank to his feet, and slammed him against a dividing partition. The partition promptly collapsed, sending the men crashing into the next office.

Sam watched it all, took in the expressions on their faces, and finally understood how these people fit together. This was the vision that had escaped him, the one he had been too preoccupied to see. He shook his head at his own stupidity.

"Let him go, Mitch!" Susannah cried. She had a death grip on one of Mitch's arms. But something distracted her, a small movement in the periphery of her vision. She twisted her head and caught sight of Sam just as he was turning to leave the office.

He gazed back at her. She sucked in her breath as she saw the resignation in his eyes, and realized that he had finally let her go. "So long, babe," he said. "See you around."

For the briefest of moments, their eyes locked, and then she nodded her head in a final gesture of farewell toward her first true love. Good-bye, Sam Gamble. Godspeed .

His mouth curled in that old cocky grin, the grin of the motorcycle pirate who had stolen her away from her wedding and reshaped her destiny. Then he turned his back on all of them and set out to conquer another brave new world.

The loudspeaker began to play "Twist and Shout."

"Fight, dammit!" Mitch ordered. He sounded mean, but he was having difficulty summoning the will to smash in the face of an opponent who was proving to be so pathetically inept. "Fight me, you son of a bitch!"

But Yank was mystified when it came to physical violence. Although he found he rather liked the idea of finally being in a fight after all these years, he didn't really like fighting . There was no time to think anything through. No time to ponder or plan.

In actuality, Mitch was having more trouble with the women than he was having with Yank. The Faulconer sisters hung onto him like burrs. No sooner had he shaken off one than the other came back again. Paige had him by the neck, Susannah was pulling on his middle. His knee was starting to hurt, and he had banged up his elbow when the partition collapsed. What in the hell was he doing? He was thirty-eight years old, father of two, a member of the United Way Board of Directors. What in the sweet hell did he think he was doing?

He let go of Yank and loosened Paige's grip from around his neck. When Susannah realized he had stopped the fight, she relaxed the arm that had been clamped around his waist.

Yank was blinking his eyes. Mitch glared at him. "You're not taking Susannah to bed."

"No." Yank blinked. "No, I don't think that would be a good idea at all."

There was a long silence. Mitch stared at Yank. Then at Susannah. All the tension left his body like air from an overinflated balloon.

Yank continued to blink. "I'm sorry, but I seem to have lost my contact lens."

Then they were all down on the floor, relieved to have an excuse to pull themselves back together while they crawled around to find Yank's lens. Paige located it, still intact, under one of the Rolodex cards. Mitch straightened his necktie and rubbed his sore elbow. Susannah looked for her shoe.

"It's difficult…" Yank said, after he had inserted his lens and inspected a scraped knuckle. "It's difficult to see exactly how we might extract ourselves from this. Sam and I had a deal. I'm not proud of the fact that I didn't behave in an entirely honorable fashion. I should have told him I'd invented Victors, of course. But in any case, two wrongs don't make a right. Sam and I had a deal, and I have a certain obligation."

Now Susannah was the one who wanted to smack him. She stalked toward Yank, wobbling because she still hadn't found her shoe. "Yank, will you let it rest? It's over. The contest was meaningless."

To her astonishment, Mitch began to yell at her. "Shut up, Susannah! You may be dynamite when it comes to running a corporation, but you're hopeless when it comes to organizing your love life. I've let all this go on far too long. For six weeks I've been walking around with my tail tucked between my legs waiting for you to stop looking like you're going to break in half. Well, I've had enough!"

"Don't you dare talk to me like that!"

"I'll talk to you any way I like. Right now, I'm in charge." He spun toward Yank. "Let's make a side deal."

"A side deal? Yes. Yes, I think that's a good idea."

Paige's heart began an arhythmic thumping against her ribs.

"How do you want to go about it?" Mitch asked, all business now that he was once again in control. "Your deal, your call."

Yank was thoughtful. "Perhaps you could make me a monetary offer for her. That should make it official."

Mitch had cut his teeth on making deals, and he knew how to go for a quick kill. "I'll give you five dollars."

"Five dollars!" Susannah lurched toward them. "Did you say five dollars?"