Sweet Rendezvous

by Danielle Stewart

  “You might not feel anything for me once you know more about me,” she croaked out, wondering if she should just hop in her car and drive away. Running. Instant gratification, poor long-term strategy, she reminded herself.

  Davis’s hand froze, the brush mid-stroke as he shook his head. “Give me a little more credit than that. I’m not those guys in Sweet Caroline’s the other morning. I’m not someone from New York you used to know. At least give me a chance before you decide how I’ll feel about something.”

  “You’re right,” she stuttered apologetically. “I’m embarrassed. I’m scared. I don’t want to lose you.” As though she’d been standing in front of a locked door, uttering every magic phrase she could think of, she finally hit the right one. Davis dropped the brush into the bucket of paint and made his way hastily down the ladder. When he reached the bottom, he stared at her as though he needed to hear it again, so she obliged. “I just don’t want to lose you.” Like an antsy horse let out of the gate, he ran to her.

  His lips crushed hers as he lifted her off her feet. She might have winced under his tight grip had she not been clinging equally as hard to him.

  “You won’t lose me,” he breathed, breaking the kiss but keeping their lips just centimeters apart. “Come inside.”

  His hand was in hers, leading her toward the door when she tugged back a bit. “Davis,” she started then stopped abruptly, looking over her shoulder nervously. Her car was there. Escape was within reach. But it wasn’t what she wanted anymore.

  Davis shook his head and continued to lead her into the house. “Elaine, this cabin is my sanctuary. I’ve hidden here on my darkest days. I hardly let anyone in. These walls have saved me.” They sank into the plush cushions of the couch, and he held her hands reassuringly. “When you’re in here, no matter what you’re worried about, it can’t get you. Nothing and no one comes through that door unless I let them. I don’t think anyone should spend their life hiding out, but I think everyone deserves a place they can hide once in a while. Let this be your place. I’ll be the gatekeeper. I’ll be the one who keeps everything you’re worried about at bay. Just let me do that for you. This house is the safest place you could be.”

  She lost her breath as the emotion welled inside her. Suddenly the half purple cabin felt like a fortress. Visions of a crocodile-filled moat, a big steel gate, and high stone walls crept into her mind. In here there was no New York. There were no mistakes. Only Davis’s large warm arms promising her protection. “Davis, how can you so blindly believe in me?”

  “I have no idea who you were before this. Maybe I wouldn’t have liked that woman very much. Who knows? But I know who you are now. I saw you sitting on the curb that night, a broken spirit, and I watched you put yourself back together. You might think I did everything to help you, but you are the one who put one foot in front of the other every day. You were ready to give up, and you didn’t. That’s someone I can believe in.”

  “I’m a coward.” She sighed, her head falling into her hands. “I literally ran away from my life.”

  “Tell me why,” he said, his voice gentle and as welcoming as an overfilled pillow and warm sheets at the end of a long day. “You can tell me.”

  “I was fired,” she replied, knowing that was a very small tip of an enormous iceberg she was about to expose. “I broke ethics rules at work, and I was very publicly fired.”

  “Oh,” Davis said, his face reading unimpressed, almost let down by the revelation. “Are you in legal trouble because of it?”

  “No,” she shot back quickly. “I didn’t break any laws. I would never do that. I handle client’s entire futures. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I broke the law.”

  “Then what?” Davis asked, lifting her chin upward and out of her hands so he could see her better. “It doesn’t sound that bad. Losing your job must have been a real blow, but you could get another job, right? I don’t mean to dismiss how you’re feeling. It must have been hard.”

  “I was very successful,” she started, the pang of regret raging in her stomach like a bottle of soda that had been shaken for days. “I dedicated every minute of my life to advancing through the ranks, even though the odds weren’t in my favor. Most people in my position had a pedigree, a family who gave them opportunities. My father was a disgraced businessman. I had to fight against his reputation instead of benefit from it. But clients liked me. They trusted me, and I was making them a fortune. I was making my firm a fortune. I couldn’t believe how close I was to reaching my dreams. But I screwed up. I fell for a guy.”

  “And he broke your heart?” Davis asked, pursing his lips as though the idea of another man, especially one that hurt her, didn’t drive him crazy.

  “It’s more complicated than that. I’d like to believe I could deal with a simple broken heart. I made the mistake of letting my guard down. I was mentoring a woman who’d just graduated from college. She got wind of my success, and her dad was a powerful guy. He set it up for me to coach her. When you spend that much time together you become friends. We had a lot in common, and she was really nice to me. I liked her. Elizabeth was what I thought I’d been missing for years. A good, reliable friend. One day I risked sharing a secret with her. I told her I was dating Mick Lawrence.”

  “Your boss?” Davis asked, jumping to a pretty reasonable but misguided conclusion.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Have you ever heard the term Chinese Wall?”

  “No,” Davis said, furrowing his brow to try to dissect the term.

  “I hate the term and don’t use it myself. It’s one of those lingering terms people still throw around, but I think it’s offensive. There’s a lot of that antiquated garbage in this industry. Once I explain it, you’ll see what I mean.”

  “I’ll try to keep up,” Davis assured her.

  “Mick was technically my peer, though he’d been in the business longer. At a firm like ours they call the rule that should block insider or privileged information a Chinese Wall. It’s essentially an information barrier. I worked on one side and Mick on the other. I held the information about what deals were coming down the line that could be very lucrative. I dealt with equity research, investor relations with potential clients and running models to determine how a stock or company might perform. Does that make sense?”

  “Uh,” Davis said, his brow still furrowed, “for the purposes of this conversation I think I’m following you. It’s like a referee in a basketball game doesn’t get to bet on the outcome. You don’t get to make the calls and benefit from it. There’s no way to be impartial that way.”

  “Right. That’s a good way to think about it. I’m frequently in a position to advise a company outside of my firm about merging or taking over another company. That would dramatically influence future stock prices and disseminating that information to someone like Mick would not be legal. It’s an unfair advantage because the facts are not yet known to the public. Being in a relationship with someone on the other side of that wall isn’t illegal, but it’s ethically wrong.”

  “You can’t help who you fall for I guess,” Davis said, muddling through the part of the conversation that implied she was once in love with Mick enough to jeopardize her career.

  “I thought it was getting pretty serious between us, and I wasn’t sure what to do. Our firm has a non-negotiable no-fraternizing clause we all sign when we get hired. We hold a lot of power in our hands every day and interpersonal relationships can cloud judgment. It can muddy water even if we all act in a technically legal way. But Mick assured me the first few times we went out that people didn’t take that clause seriously. He named a bunch of people who’d been in relationships in the office and never had any trouble. I guess you believe what you want when you’re starting a relationship. Sure, he told me we had to keep it a secret, but that was only until we knew where it was heading. If we became serious we’d go to our boss and work out some solution. I told Elizabeth I thought it was time we do that. Mick had told
me he loved me earlier that week. I assumed our boss would have to work with human resources and then likely restructure our department so Mick and I didn’t have any conflicts of interest. He told me it had been done before for others.”

  “Would you have to step back from your job?” Davis asked, and whether he meant it or not she felt the heat of judgment rolling up her neck.

  “A little bit, probably. Mick had been there longer. He was very successful for the firm, in a different capacity than I was. But I thought we had a real future, so I was willing to do it if that was what it took. We never had the chance to talk to our boss though. What I didn’t know when I was confiding in Elizabeth was that she and Mick were dating too. I don’t think she knew about us before I told her. I certainly didn’t know about them. From that moment on, she started working on taking me down.”

  “Taking you down? How exactly does someone do that? And why? It’s not like you were the one stealing this jerk from her. He was who needed to be taken down.” She could feel Davis tense up, holding his breath for long moments as if to keep from saying too much.

  “Maybe,” Elaine agreed. “But I was, by far, the easier target. So she made a video. Acting like she was utterly fascinated with my blossoming relationship, she asked me a ton of questions, and I answered them, sounding like a lovesick puppy, explaining exactly where we were when he said he loved me. I told her everything, the way you’d tell a best friend at a sleepover. Mostly because I’d been so isolated and so focused on work that I’d missed what it meant to connect with someone. I was easy to fool because I was out of practice.”

  “Did she play the video for your boss?” Davis asked, looking angry on her behalf.

  “That would have been far kinder than what she actually did. If I could have signed up for a private viewing of my humiliation, I would have. Apparently she minored in video production. She turned my relationship with Mick into a short movie where I was the idiot who had no clue he was also dating Elizabeth. But more than that, he was using me. The way Mick became successful over the years was exactly what he was doing with me. He convinced women they had to keep their relationship a secret. He acted like a mentor, but he was soliciting client information and angles from me. I was giving away minor information without knowing how he could spin it and use it to his advantage. Elizabeth recorded him at lunch with two of my biggest clients, who were on the verge of taking their company public. There was only a small circle of people who would have known about their plans. I never technically told him what was happening, but he pieced together pretty innocuous conversations of ours and figured out the important stuff. You could do that when you spent so much time together, when the other person had their guard down. No laws were broken. Elizabeth strung all that together so perfectly it was like a cinematic masterpiece. She could have won an award for it.”

  “Why would anyone spend that much energy trying to hurt someone else?” Davis asked, his teeth grinding together in rage.

  “Every Friday morning the firm has a meeting,” Elaine continued, knowing the worst part of the story wasn’t over. “The entire office stands on the floor of the assembly room, and we put our numbers up for the week. It’s competitive and it’s motivational. Elizabeth switched out the numbers for her movie. She played it for all fifty-two of my coworkers, my boss, and the president of the company, who happened to be in that day. It was four minutes and twenty-seven seconds long but every single second of it felt like a stab wound. I couldn’t breathe. Every person in the room stared at me. Mick started out angry, demanding someone take it down, then after seeing how it painted him, he and a few of his buddies began laughing. That was my breaking point.”

  “I’d like to get my hands on that guy,” Davis said, his hands balled into fists. “Who would let you just stand there and be destroyed like that?”

  “The president of the company looked over the crowd and asked who was in the video. I was too shocked to raise my hand, but luckily my long-time coworkers had no problem pointing me out. In a booming voice he called me a disgrace to the company, a woman with no moral standings, and an employee with no credibility. He made an example of me, berating me a few more minutes and then telling me to get out.”

  “What?” Davis asked, shooting to his feet. “That is insane. You are the victim here.”

  “I broke the rules. I should never have discussed private client information with Mick, no matter how small it was. I should have never been involved with him on a personal level. I knew those things, and I did them anyway.”

  “Because you trusted him.” Davis was pacing now, his legs fueled by indignation. “You could have a lawsuit on your hands. I mean this guy, Mick . . . he must not have been laughing when he was fired.”

  “He wasn’t fired,” Elaine breathed out, with a humorless laugh. “His uncle is the CFO of another prominent company my firm frequently works with. Before I made it out the door, someone came and told me he would get a slap on the wrist, but he wouldn’t be fired. He was too valuable. Which in turn made me completely valueless, apparently.”

  “That’s not true,” Davis replied quickly. “This entire situation is screwed up. There has to be something you can do. Fight it.”

  “I probably could,” Elaine agreed, raising her brows high and considering it. “But for what? Those people are connected to other firms. I’d never get another job in New York even if I cleared all this up. And I don’t want one anyway. I don’t want to go back to that lifestyle. It was crippling. I didn’t realize it until I was out of it. Until I was sitting on your porch listening to the far away thunder, watching fireflies whizz by. I didn’t know how fast I was going, how close I was to crashing until I got to Indigo Bay and slowed down.”

  “So the video was leaked onto the internet,” Davis said, connecting all the remaining dots. “That’s how those boneheads in Sweet Caroline’s knew about you?”

  “Worse,” she said, dropping her head, not wanting to look at him. “It was re-edited to include my dismissal. Being yelled at. Mick laughing. And me running out of the building like an idiot. That’s the version that’s on the internet. I was trying not to face it, but I finally had my doorman ship my things here. When I turned my phone back on today I saw the video had over a million hits. Reading some of the comments, I can tell you, no one is rooting for me.”

  “Every word I said when you first came in here stands true. Nothing out there matters. I can keep it all as far away as you want me to. You’re safe here. I know the truth, and I know you didn’t deserve any of that.”

  “Those guys at the cafe posted a picture of me and said where I was. There are all kinds of hashtags and stuff. My phone came in the package from the doorman and I have 100 voice mails from internet sites and bloggers who want to talk to me. If I stay in Indigo Bay, they’ll turn this place into a circus. I don’t want to do that to you.”

  “The only thing you can do to me that I won’t be able to handle is leave me. If you really want to be with me, if you want to make a life here, then we face this together.”

  Davis reached for his ringing cell phone and saw it was Dallas. He’d missed two calls from him already and figured he better check in. “Hey what’s up?” he asked, popping it to speaker phone. “I’m in the middle of something right now if it can wait.”

  “It can’t,” Dallas cut in. “You need to go get Elaine from the bed and breakfast. The town is swarming with people looking for her, and I’m afraid someone is going to tip them off to where she is. You don’t want this group spooking her.”

  “She’s here with me.” Davis smiled, looking bashful for having known where she was the past couple of days. “I don’t care how many people try to get to her. They don’t stand a chance.” He disconnected the call and closed in on Elaine, who was shaking with emotion.

  “You knew where I was these last couple of days?” she asked, as his arms wrapped around her. She pressed her ear to his chest and listened to his steady heartbeat.

  “I wanted t
o give you some space,” he admitted. “It was killing me, not going down there and begging you to tell me what you were going through. But I had faith you’d show up here.”

  “What if I ran? What if I snuck over, got my car, and you never saw me again?” Elaine asked, swallowing back the lump in her throat.

  “Then I’d know you weren’t right for me,” he admitted somberly. “The one lesson in my life I’ll never be forced to learn again, is how easy it is to confuse the chase with real emotions. When someone leaves, everything feels more intense. The rejection creates this hole in you. The real crime is you start to believe that hole they left is shaped like them, that they are the only one who can fill it completely. That’s the lie we tell ourselves. The one who left, them coming back, is the only way to get better. There’s a million ways to get better.”

  “But I came back,” she said, squeezing him tightly.

  “And somehow, I knew you would.”

  Chapter 17

  Davis put another log on the fire and stoked it until embers flew toward the night sky. “Dallas called and said most folks have moved on. Your story will be old news in no time. Someone else will do something slightly more interesting, and they’ll be chasing that story. Then you can get on with your life. I’m sure you’ll have stuff to sort out.”

  “I have to go back and close up my apartment, but other than that I’m free and clear. I have my credit cards now and access to all my savings. I can do anything I need to do.” She pulled the blanket tighter over her shoulders as the wind picked up.

  “Should we go back inside?” Davis asked. “Is it getting too cold for you?”

  “I’m fine,” she assured him, patting the sand next to her so he would sit. “You can keep me warm.”

  “A job I’d sign up for every day.” He sat, wrapped his arm around her, and kissed the crown of her head. “Are you sure you’re not going to miss any of it? Indigo Bay is about as different from your old life as it gets. Don’t you think you should give it all more thought? You went through a lot, and maybe you’re just having a gut reaction to the stress. I don’t want to be too influential if you have regrets.”