Loved Me Once (Love, Romance and Business)

by Gail Hewitt

  "Don't worry about that one," Tom said, beginning to sound irritated. "My lawyers will be better. All I want from you now is a time frame. According to the posted work schedules, Wells is here this afternoon from three to eleven. Tomorrow he works from noon to eight. So which day is it you'll have someone coming to give him the word and get whatever you need from us at this end to process the papers?"

  "That could be a problem," Hunt said cautiously. "This is the twenty-third. Given the holidays, we don't work tomorrow, and we're closed until the twenty-ninth, the Monday after Christmas."

  "Then you'll have to do it today. Now that I think about it, that's better anyway. I don't want him here any longer than absolutely necessary."

  "It's late for the last day before a holiday," Hunt said, now even more cautiously. "A lot of the staff is already gone . . . "

  "Then you'll have to get someone back. I want Wells gone by the end of his shift today." Tom's tone wasn't hateful, Maggie noticed, just cheerfully entitled.

  "It'll be done," Hunt capitulated. "I'll get back to you with a time within the next hour."

  Tom hung up and turned back to Maggie.

  "Handled. What's next on that formidable-looking list you're carrying around?" He nodded toward the two script binders.

  "I'd like to know the specific parameters of my position here and any procedures you want me to follow," she said. "The job description in the binder doesn't make it clear, and I don't know who else to ask. What I need to know is how much latitude I have regarding the target population."

  "No parameters. As of now, they're yours to do with as you will. But I'm curious about what prompted the question," he said, his formerly somewhat smirking tone now totally businesslike.

  "Raw research. I want to hit the road in January and do some on-the-ground interviews and focus groups with three target segments in the nine Georgia counties: first with the appropriate school personnel; second, with parents of students in the age groups your initiative is targeting; and third, with economic development entities."

  "We haven't already done that?" Tom asked, seeming surprised. He evidently hadn't been keeping up with everything TTI, Maggie realized.

  "Not that I can tell," she said. "Rachel Inman, the librarian, did a thorough check of her central database and can't turn up anything related to what I'm after."

  "What are you after?" Tom asked her, suddenly almost suspicious. "This isn't one of those corporate 'here's how I justify my existence and delay having to produce real results' things, is it?"

  "Let me put it this way. TTI to this point seems to have spent a lot of time and money building a better mousetrap and then hiding the entrance to it from the mice."

  Tom laughed, but stopped when he saw she wasn't kidding.

  "That bad?" he grinned.

  "It's all in there," she handed him one of the binders. "We need to learn more about the mice as quickly as we can so we'll be able to use the right bait for the trap the first time around."

  He shrugged, obviously unconvinced but apparently willing for now to let her have her head. "Then do whatever you have to do. When you know the schedule you want to set up, just have your assistant coordinate it with Alysha to make sure nothing will be going on here that requires you to be in town."

  "That's another thing. How do I get this assistant?"

  "How did you get your assistant before, at WHT?"

  "They screened several people and had me talk to the final three to see if I had a strong preference."

  "Works for me," he told her. "Just have Alysha call PeopleMatters and arrange for them to call you to get your specs for the job."

  "Thanks," she told him. "I appreciate it."

  "My aunt tells me she met you here in the hallway yesterday," he told her. "How'd you get in? Normally, that door is kept locked."

  "I was standing outside Alysha's office, waiting on the elevator when Mrs. Evans came out of her hallway, chasing her cat. I helped her catch him, and she asked me to carry him back into her apartment. I wasn't trying to invade your personal space."

  "That wasn't what I meant," he said, but he looked somewhat awkward, and she felt that, at some level, it was. Still, what did he expect, keeping personal living quarters and TTI business premises so intermingled?

  "I'll make sure it doesn't happen again," she told him.

  "Don't be ridiculous," he snapped. "She likes you. I think she gets lonesome. It'd be great if you'd call or pop in and see her occasionally."

  "Mrs. Evans didn't strike me as someone who needs help from me," Maggie pointed out, "but I like her too. I'll certainly keep up with her if that's acceptable to you."

  "She said you're planning to work through Christmas, and she's decided that can't be allowed. I'm having her flown down to Georgia on my personal jet early Christmas Day to have lunch and an afternoon visit with a friend. She insists that I ask you if you'd like to go with her and visit your mother while she's seeing her friend. She'll be returning late the same day."

  "I really need to stay here and work," Maggie told him, "but I appreciate it."

  "She'll be very disappointed," he told her. "Couldn't you take the work with you and get a few things done on the plane? She always falls asleep. A car could meet you at the airport and take you to your mother's while she visits her buddy."

  "I just can't, Tom. I'm sorry," Maggie told him. "Not if I'm going to finish what I need to do before that meeting next week."

  Tom grinned and reached across the conference table to pat her right hand. "No one's going to fault you for not doing all of your homework, Maggs. Even if they wanted to, they wouldn't. Everyone understands that you are a member of my team." He spoke to her as if to an oblivious child to whom a difficult concept was being explained.

  "Yeah, well," Maggie told him, "their perspective and yours may be somewhat different on that." She looked down at her list and realized she hadn't asked him the item at the top. "You called this meeting, and I seem to have absconded with it. What did you want to see me about? The message said something about giving me input on preparing for the status meeting."

  "I want to give you a heads up on who else will be there and what their role is. It's always good to know the players involved before you put your money on the table."

  "That'd be helpful," Maggie told him, getting out her pen and opening the pad she'd just closed.

  "You've met Jameson Halbrooks, of course. I don't know how much he told you about himself, but he's probably the most interesting of the bunch. He was an Episcopal priest, a true believer. After his wife was murdered, pretty brutally, as I understand it, he couldn't come to terms with it and lost his faith. He went back to school and got a Ph.D. in Psychology and went into the corporate consulting game, something like a smaller version of WHT except that his crew specialized in one-on-one executive coaching. A couple of years ago, we hired him to work with some executives from the east who were talented but having trouble adjusting to our culture in California. The guy's style impressed me, so I started talking to him. I'd already been thinking about TTI. It turned out that he'd always wanted to work with something like that, so I retained him full time. To begin with, he helped me through some personal stuff that was causing me to second-guess what I was doing. His role now is to do general coordination and make sure the overall focus isn't lost in a sea of detail. He's not a big proponent of research, by the way, so you'll probably get some pushback from him on the focus-group thing. Just let me know what you think you need to do and don't worry about it."

  "Okay," Maggie said skeptically. Halbrooks sounded like trouble.

  "Next is Lucy Underwood. She's an escapee from IBM. The executive recruiters found her. She has an unusual educational background, a master's in philosophy and a Ph.D. in economic development. She's our mission coordinator. Very no-nonsense lady. She's the one who wrote the binder I gave you. It's her role to mesh the philosophical implications of trying to change a system with the realities of the economic development world. Her i
dea is to treat the region like an underdeveloped nation in order to get a fresh perspective. She's done a lot of meetings with experts around the world on how those who do the econdev thing successfully prioritize in order to change the structure."

  "Interesting," Maggie said thoughtfully. "Who else?"

  "Hamilton Vandergrif. Ham's one of your eastern nobs. He talks to legislators and foundation directors, as well as to wealthy individuals who might be interested in working with us, particularly in terms of cloning in other locations what we do after we see that it works."

  "Interesting," Maggie repeated.

  "Then there's Bill Wragg. He's in charge of figuring out how we integrate the latest technological processes and hardware to accelerate the acceptance process. And, finally, there's Annbeth Deerfield. She's something of a guru in educational theory."

  "She wrote that bestseller on learning styles a couple of years ago, didn't she?" Maggie asked. "Your Lesson, Your Life, wasn't it? It had some decent ideas in it."

  "I'm sure she'll be pleased you think so," Tom said drily. "She's keeping us on track in regard to integrating classical educational approaches with the most-effective approaches to voc ed, within the context of individual learning needs."

  Tom stopped and poured himself a drink, then offered her one. She shook her head.

  "The thing to remember about all these people," he told her, "is that they're big-picture types. They see possibilities I hadn't dreamed existed. When you meet them, get the lay of the land before you say much."

  "Who's responsible for the PR part?" she asked.

  Tom looked mildly surprised. "I don't think that's been addressed yet. Jameson is probably waiting until we're further along. Do you think we should be addressing that now?"

  "I think that should probably have been the first post you filled," she told him, "since you're asking me. There seems to be a lot of curiosity about you right now. That would have ensured a wider range of media coverage for TTI than someone will be able to generate later when the focus, of necessity, will be more on TTI itself."

  "Well, as I told you, we didn't really want publicity up front," he said defensively. "We wanted to spring TTI more or less ready to go. Anyway, I've pretty much trusted Jameson about that kind of thing."

  He paused, waiting for her to say something else, but she was looking at her pad, distilling her notes into a 1-2-3-4 list.

  "So you've got no one on PR; Deerfield working on the education part; Wragg on the technology part; Underwood on the philosophical rationale in re economic development; Vandergrif on lobbying, fundraising and proselytizing; with Dr. Halbrooks to oversee the whole thing on a day-to-day basis."

  "And now you on the target population part, which I'm guessing you think we've left late in the day."

  "Is there anything in particular I should know about any of these people?" she asked. "I want to make sure that what I'm doing is genuinely productive for everyone."

  "Can't think of anything," he told her. "Except for Vandergrif, who's pretty laid back, they're all raving egomaniacs, of course, but I expect you've dealt with plenty of that."

  "Yeah, I worked with corporate officers for years," Maggie told him absentmindedly, still looking at her notes.

  "I appreciate your conscientiousness," Tom said, "but just remember what I told you. There's only one person here whose opinion matters in the end, and you're looking at him. The TTI lead team knows that."

  "It's not a matter of approval, as you put it," Maggie protested. "It's a matter of being able to work effectively with these people."

  "I'll give you this," he grinned. "You're a bear for staying on topic, and there's nothing wrong with that." He looked at her indulgently. "Well, think about flying to Atlanta on Christmas Day. Aunt Martha is, as I said, very taken with you. She wants to talk Georgia gossip with another female."

  "Tell her I appreciate it," Maggie said, beginning to gather up papers, "Well that's everything on my list, so . . ."

  She looked up and saw that Tom was staring fixedly at her hands.

  "What's wrong?"

  "I just realized something. Where's the gossip-column diamond?"

  She repeated what she'd told Susan Broad.

  He grinned. "You're sure it's not because there's a coolness in the air?" He thought for a moment. "Did Lover Boy make the mistake of laying down the gauntlet when you told him about this job?"

  "I am not discussing Miles with you," she said firmly. "I haven't asked you about your personal life."

  He shrugged as if to say that was no big deal. "Whatever . . . I'm assuming you've told him about the impetuous Mr. Wells then?"

  "What I do here has nothing to do with Miles or anyone else who doesn't work here," she said. "I don't discuss business outside of business."

  "You are so stern, Maggs," he said, almost wistfully. "When did you get so stern?"

  "I am not going there," Maggie told him. "It isn't appropriate, and it's counterproductive."

  "Well, excuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse me," he said, imitating Steve Martin, undeniably laughing at her.

  "Well, I know you have another meeting . . . " Maggie said, standing up, hoping her face wasn't visibly burning. He was treating her like a kid.

  "And you are dying to get back to your content-generation machine. I know."

  "I'm glad my being here gives you so much amusement," she said sarcastically, so irritated by now that the skin on the backs of her hands was turning pink.

  Tom laughed. "God, Maggs, don't be so damned prissy. I don't remember you being such a prickly pear."

  "Yeah, well . . . " She finished stuffing the material she'd brought into her case.

  "Well, you have to admit," he grinned, "that it is kind of funny, after everything the two of us have been through together, to be sitting here in New York, shuffling papers."

  "Different place, different time," she said decisively, standing up, somewhat self-consciously aware of the briefcase full of paperwork she was carrying away.

  Tom grinned and slid his copy of the binder back toward her.

  "And, Maggs, honey, you might as well take this with you because I don't do binders."

  A Not So Merry Christmas Eve

  It was barely daylight on the morning of Christmas Eve when Maggie, having paid off the cab that brought her there, stood on the TTI stoop, her breath almost crystallizing in the still, frigid air. It was surprisingly quiet, but that wouldn't continue. Even in the middle of what was shaping up to be a long and painful economic meltdown for the city, habits linger, and she knew that, later in the day, well-dressed crowds would almost certainly begin the last-minute holiday ritual, going from Bergdorf's to Bloomingdale's and all points in between, carrying colorfully wrapped packages peeking from the open tops of designer shopping bags. Ice skaters at Rockefeller Center would radiate a busy, delighted hum as they moved, clumsily or gracefully, around the rink. Suburbanites would haul cranky children from one set of store windows decorated for Christmas to another, to allow them to experience rituals they remembered from their own childhoods, wondering why their offspring did not seem to feel the same delight that they remembered. The windows of bars and restaurants would glow with frost-obscured light, the faces and bodies of those inside no more than blurs of different colors. Salvation Army collectors would stand beside tripods and ring bells. Traffic would snarl, and travel reports would tell of cumulative delays at area airports. The entire metropolitan area would be crowded with people executing their last-minute holiday errands against a cacophony of Christmas carols and hurried greetings. For now, however, when the memory of daybreak still lingered, she might have been almost alone in the city as she stamped snow from her feet.

  The dull thud as her snow-caked boots hit against the mat, combined with the gray-white light and relative silence, created an effect that was almost spectral, which was appropriate, she thought, because she was in an odd, ambiguous mood. She didn't feel she'd accomplished very much the day before in spite of working late, on top of
which she'd slept poorly and awakened with a residual ache in the back of her head. Now, she faced a day of solid work, work about which she was beginning to have doubts.

  She still thought Tom's basic idea for TTI sounded great, but she had not been impressed with his description of the staff that had been put together to make it happen. It might be a rock-star group, or not, but it sounded more like a team assembled for effect than one that had been put together specifically to focus on a shared goal and execute it to completion. She'd heard a lot of titles and high-minded descriptors and very little of who was actually doing the kind of spade-and-bucket grunt work that her experience had taught her was critical when dealing with community projects. Also, there didn't seem to be any strong attempt at integration of the individual efforts. It was almost as if each team member were doing whatever struck her or him as appropriate and assuming that it would all work together, somehow, in some form of visionary osmosis.

  It was only when the buzzer sounded, and the door lock clicked that she wondered if they'd completed the dismissal of Josh Wells the day before. If so, was the Security person observing her saying to one of his coworkers, "There's the bitch who got poor Josh canned?" Or – if they hadn't and the guy wasn't going to get the word until today – could it even be Josh himself who was watching, perhaps called to work early on a presumably slow day when others with more seniority might not wish to come in? Now, that was a creepy thought. She knew she could handle Josh, but she admitted to herself she was not comfortable at the thought of his being able to observe her without her knowing it. She was relieved when the opening door revealed a couple of cleaning women standing by the elevator in deep conversation.

  Inside her office, still feeling dull and letdown, she locked the door and hung hat, overcoat, and gloves on the nondescript rack that stood in the corner. Reconnecting the laptop to the network, she clicked to wake it from its sleep mode. Then she picked up the phone and called Rachel Inman. The librarian sounded as jolly as Maggie wished she felt.