Trust Me

he doesn’t want any competition. Isn’t that the real truth, Stark?”
    “Desdemona’s right,” Stark said. “This isn’t personal. It’s business. Very big, very dangerous business. I’ll give you some advice, Wainwright. If you’re playing games with the international industrial espionage crowd, you’re way out of your league.”
    “I’m not playing games of any kind.” Tony switched his gaze back to Desdemona. “Is it going to work, Desdemona?”
    “Is what going to work?”
    “Is he going to succeed in turning you against me?”
    “No one can do that, Tony. You’re my brother.”
    “Your stepbrother,” he corrected softly. He lifted a hand and touched the side of her face. “There’s a difference, kid. And Stark knows it.”
    He turned and walked out of the kitchen. Desdemona felt the tears well up in her eyes.
    Bess, Augustus, and Juliet watched in shock as Tony went out the door. Vernon stood in the center of the kitchen clutching his half-melted ice sculpture in gloved hands. He glanced nervously from face to face, clearly unhappy at being caught in the middle of a family scene.
    “Tony certainly knows how to make an exit,” Stark said laconically. “I’ll give him that.”
    The cutting edge of Stark’s voice jerked Desdemona out of her momentary paralysis. She whirled around to face him. “It’s a family talent. If you’ll excuse us, we’ll finish cleaning up, and then we’ll all get out of here. Right Touch has a policy of leaving the client’s home in the same condition it was in when we arrived.”

12

    He should have known that she would make a scene, Stark thought the following morning. Desdemona was a Wainwright. Theater people. Everything had to be done with a melodramatic flair.
    His intention had been to deliver a simple warning, but she had turned it into a confrontation worthy of a soap opera. It was his own fault, he decided. He had virtually accused Tony Wainwright of attempted theft, and in Desdemona’s mind, an attack against anyone in her precious family was an attack against her.
    He had made a serious miscalculation. He had put Desdemona in a position where she felt forced to choose between his version of events and her stepbrother’s. He should have thought it out more clearly ahead of time. He should have realized that he could not expect Desdemona to trust him rather than one of the Wainwright clan.
    The kitchen was empty. Stark went through the routine of making coffee and pouring cereal into a bowl with a sense of weary fatalism. 1 he day matched his mood, somber and gray.
    He had gone over the scene with Desdemona a hundred times during the night in an effort to figure out how he could have handled it without alienating her.
    He had not found an answer.
    Another relationship down the tubes. Although he was not standing alone at the altar this time, for some reason the kicked-in-the-gut sensation was a lot worse than it had been the day Pamela had failed to show for the wedding.
    What the hell was wrong with him? he wondered as he poured milk on his cereal. He had known from the beginning that it was not a serious long-term relationship. He’d only been to bed with Desdemona once. It wasn’t as if he’d asked her to marry him. He had told himself that he would go with the flow this time.
    The flow had turned into Niagara Falls, however, and he had just discovered that he was going over in a barrel.
    What was he supposed to have done? Pretend that her beloved Tony had never tried to steal the hard disk?
    “Morning, Sam.” Jason charged into the kitchen and grabbed the box of cereal that Stark had left on the counter. “You sure missed a good film last night.”
    “Is that right?” Stark carried his bowl to the table and sat down.
    Kyle appeared. “It was all about this android that everyone thinks is human. Only he’s not. He’s really a super computer with all sorts of weapons.”
    “For some dippy reason he thinks he wants to be a real human being.” Jason made a face as he upended the cereal box and proceeded to dump a large portion of the contents into his bowl. “That was the only dumb part. Who’d want to be human if you could be an android?”
    “Good question.” Stark munched cereal.
    Kyle grabbed the cereal box from his brother. “The android’s hand was actually a gun. And his eyes projected computerized heads-up displays of his targets the way computers do in the new fighter-bombers.”
    “There were a lot of really