“Or how about Join your spirit with mine and live the rest of our lives together.” Robyn chortled. “Lives. Get it? Lives, plural.”
“Sheesh!” Joe groaned.
“Marketing, Joe! Marketing!” Carole reminded him.
“Oh, this is cute!” Now Elyssa was truly getting into the swing of the idea. “My planet would like to be in your house. Clever.”
Joe shook his head and laughed, bowing to the inevitable. “I know—marketability. Usually I’m the one pushing the bottom line. Tell the truth, Dana: Did this Kieran fellow brainwash you the week you were in that place?”
If he hadn’t been so obviously teasing, Dana might have jumped to Kieran’s defense. Instead, she teased right back. “There are some around here who might say my brain needed a good washing, Joe.”
Everyone at the table laughed. “Hear, hear!” Alix applauded.
“If you ask me,” Robyn snickered, “that Kieran could brainwash me any time he wants. His website just put up a really hot photo of him. A real sizzler.”
Dana riveted her attention to Robyn. “Kieran has a website?”
“You didn’t know?”
“I told you about it,” Alix insisted.
“I guess I didn’t think anything of it when you told me,” Dana said thoughtfully.
“It’s cool. Nice design.”
Carole slanted Dana a smile. “Apparently Kieran is a nice design, also.”
Elyssa stood. “All right, children. This meeting is deteriorating into a hen party, so let’s be about our business. Dana, this is an innovative idea, and I think Joe will agree that we should try to develop something along these lines.”
Joe conceded with a wry smile. “Those who stand still in business are generally left behind. We do have to take changing ideas into consideration.”
“Dana,” Elyssa continued, “get with Alix and put together some firm ideas, both for a distinctive new line and possible additions in this direction to our established lines. Especially the sympathy and romance-oriented cards. New Age seems very appropriate there. And Carole, explore the possibility of bringing on board some advertisers that could take advantage of this approach. Call on Robyn for help if you get in a crunch. She could use the experience.”
Robyn rolled her eyes. “Like I don’t have enough work?”
“What was that, Robyn?” Elyssa drilled her with eyes that were only half amused.
“Me? What? I said I’d welcome the work.”
“Is that what it was?”
“It was!”
The others filed out of the conference room, and Carole whispered to Robyn in passing, “Enjoy living on the edge, do we?”
Robyn looked at her watch and sighed. “All everybody around here thinks about is work. God, is it only eleven-thirty?”
Dana wasn’t about to let the subject go too far afield. “What is this about Kieran’s website?”
Robyn shot her a smug look. “Interested in that, are you?”
“Don’t make me get harsh, Robyn.”
Robyn feigned terror. “Ooooh! Touchy, touchy. Come with me, Miss Lovelorn, and I’ll show you.”
“I am not lovelorn!” Dana denied vehemently. But she followed.
Robyn pulled up the website with a speed that showed she’d been to that particular URL plenty of times before. Dana’s knees turned to water when Kieran’s photo came up on the screen. He wasn’t smiling. The photographer had made him look contemplative, wise, sensitive, farseeing—all the things one expected in a nationally acclaimed instructor in meditation and self-healing. He had glossed over the wry humor, the wicked smile, the mischievous glint that sometimes sparkled in his eyes.
“Tell the truth, Dana. Is Kieran really that hot, or did they do a touch-up job on him?”
Dana sighed. “He’s really, actually, positively that hot, Robyn. Hotter.”
“Whew! A week with him, and I’d come back with some soul-searing smarm, too.”
Dana grabbed a pen and Post-it note and wrote down the url. “Robyn, no drooling over this website. This is mine.”
“Hey! No fair. This is a public forum.”
“Yes it is. If you want Steve to know about the night you got hammered and told us all about your scoring system for bedroom gymnastics. His in particular.”
Robyn’s eyes grew wide. “You wouldn’t. That’s treason!”
“That website is mine.”
“It’s yours. It’s definitely yours.”
“Very wise.”
Time heals all wounds, makes passion fade and sends even the fondest memories into the back of the mind— supposedly. For Dana, time wasn’t working. Two weeks passed. She labored hard at the office. The new Valentine’s Day line was a done deal. Her New Age concepts were well along the way to being a reality, thanks to Alix’s enthusiastic input and Elyssa’s support. Her social life, at least the duller part of it, resumed. She went to Deep Blue with the girls and managed to hide her envy when Steve sat with them between sets. She and Alix spent a Saturday at the Smithsonian Art Museum, one of Dana’s favorite kickback spots. She had a halfway civilized phone conversation with her sister discussing the wedding plans—only halfway civilized, because Dana was only human, after all. And she went to the movies with Carole, whose young senator beau was politicking in his home state of Colorado.
But in spite of her best intentions to return to a normal, obsession-free life, Kieran still shadowed her every move, pushed his way into every thought. His website rose to the top of Dana’s “favorites” list. She was almost surprised that her home computer hadn’t learned to call up that site the moment she launched her web browser. He still waited for her every night in bed, his slow smile promising passion when she came to him in her dreams.
Just as well, Dana reflected more than once, because in her sleep was the only place she found passion. She asked herself severely why she clung to the stupid idea of reclaiming her “virginity.” Just who did she think she was saving herself for? The notion that some Mr. Right, her true spiritual and physical mate, would come along and sweep her into his arms was patently ridiculous. She was depriving herself for nothing. Not that she’d met anyone tempting since returning from Arizona. On the contrary. Every man she saw Dana compared to Kieran, even her friends’ men.
Joe Monteigne was truly a hunk, but he was too conventional.
Steve Rood was a very sweet guy, but so brooding at times.
Carole’s Mitch Evans was a hottie, but a politician. Even a good politician was still a politician.
Dana’s own ex-heartthrob, Paul—cripes! What had she ever seen in Paul?
Her sister Lara’s fiancé, Dr. William Ringle, was okay, but very stuck on himself.
Jim Tremaine—the guy her mother tried to fix her up with when she’d suffered through a family “engagement celebration” dinner—had long hair the same color as Kieran’s, but Jim’s looked as if it came out of an upscale styling salon. The wind wouldn’t dare to move a single curl.
It was hopeless, Dana finally concluded. The man she wanted might not be Mr. Right, but he had a stranglehold on her desires. She wondered if Kieran had laughed about winding her heart around his little finger, or if that was something he did so naturally that he didn’t even think about it.
Then one early morning her world changed. She walked into her office, took off her overcoat, replaced her snow boots with a pair of stylish—but comfortable—Gucci mules. Who knew that Gucci could design a shoe that was comfortable? If you looked hard enough, you could find anything.
A gulp of hot coffee gave her the energy to turn on her computer, and there waiting for her was e-mail from [email protected]. Her heart pounding in double time, she rushed to open it. Her hand trembled so on the mouse that she almost opened a note from Elyssa instead.
“Scotch that!” Dana muttered to herself. “Right now, whatever Elyssa wants can wait.”
Kieran’s note was just like the man who had sent it—open and friendly with an undertone of something
deeper. Dana wished she knew exactly what that something deeper was.
I have been thinking about you since you left, he wrote. I hope the insights you gained here are shedding light on your everyday world.
Dana smiled. Always the guru.
Remember that happiness comes from what is inside, not from what the world tosses our way from the outside. If you continue to meditate, calming your spirit will become easier with practice. You have too rich a spirit to allow stress to impoverish you.
He thought she had a rich spirit? That was something.
A new workshop started today with eight students, so all the hours of my day belong to others. I need to follow my own advice and reserve time for my own meditation. Physician, heal thyself!
If he needed some comforting strokes, Dana would be only too glad to provide them.
Remember that one of the keys to your happiness is the recapture of the essential innocence that resides within you, Dana. You might be unable to see it. We are frequently blind to qualities in ourselves that others can see very plainly. That is simply the way Nature made us. But I can see an untouched purity about you that is still intact. Find it. Preserve it for the one who will appreciate it. It may be that this one is closer than you know. Life has a way of surprising us.
“There you go again,” Dana said to the screen with a sigh. “Just as I was about to decide you’re nothing but bunk, you reach across cyberspace and give me a tweak.”
“Who are you talking to?” Alix asked from the doorway. “I knocked, but you didn’t answer. Have you grown deaf?”
Dana hurried to get Kieran’s e-mail off the screen. “Uh . . . no. I’m sorry, Alix. I guess the caffeine hasn’t kicked in yet. Can I do something for you?”
“Goodness but you’re polite this morning?” Alix arched a suspicious brow. “What are you up to?”
“Me? Nothing! I’m just checking my e-mail. Oops! Here’s a note from Elyssa. She wants new instructions written for the send-your-own-message cards. She thinks the current ones aren’t clear enough.”
“Want to do lunch with me and Marc?”
Dana snorted. “Three’s a crowd. Thanks for asking, though. I’m going to have lunch with my computer.”
“That sounds exciting.” Alix grimaced.
Dana merely smiled. If Alix only knew.
Over the next week Kieran e-mailed her every day. He urged her to take time for herself and assured her that daily meditation would lower both her stress levels and listlessness. He also entertained her with profiles of his workshop students. Of course he didn’t reveal anything that would be considered confidential, but his reactions to his current crop of disciples did show how well he understood the human spirit. He was particularly taken with an eighty-one-year-old lady who had raised nine children and outlived two husbands. He related her words, “It’s about time I looked for myself after too many years of looking for toys under the beds, cookie crumbs in the couch cushions and dirty dishes in every room in the house.” Sometimes, Kieran told Dana, the oldest students are the best listeners, both to him and to themselves. As the body ages, the spirit grows richer.
Dana wondered what Kieran would be like when he was eighty. As far as she was concerned, he was remarkable even now, with just thirty-five years of living under his belt. How strange that among all the men she’d dated, not one had prompted her to speculate what he would be like anytime further in the future than a couple of weeks. Of course, a couple of weeks just about maxed out most of her relationships. That probably explained it.
Dana e-mailed Kieran faithfully, once he had started the correspondence. And if she longed to make the computer keyboard sizzle, she did manage to refrain. Instead, she sent him amusing stories about her cohorts at Allheart, insider perspective on the antics in the nation’s capital, news of her wonderfully balanced state of mind. Okay, she lied a bit. Her state of mind was balanced only if one considered sexual obsession to be balanced. Not that she was really obsessed, Dana told herself. She was simply into heavy daydreaming. And night dreaming. And didn’t every woman think of sex when she sharpened a pencil or ate a hot dog? Of course she was balanced.
Then came the Friday evening that she had nowhere to go. Every one of the Allheart ladies had weekends planned that started Friday night. Dana’s mother had invited her to come home for a weekend in Virginia. She had promised to be there Saturday afternoon to attend her sister’s bridal shower. Turning that down would have been too small-minded. But no way was Dana going to spend the whole weekend listening to her sister gloat.
So that Friday evening she curled up beneath the covers of her bed with a romance novel. If she couldn’t have a love life of her own, at least she could read about someone else’s. Her television chattered away at a low volume, just for company. Lately the silences in her small apartment made her feel lonely. She had always enjoyed living alone. Solitude had never been a problem for her—until she had returned from Sedona.
She was absorbed in a very heavy breathing scene in her book when something on the TV caught her attention. She reached for the remote and turned up the volume. A chirpy reporter for the ten o’clock local news was talking about upcoming events of interest. Dana could have sworn she’d heard Kieran’s name spoken by someone other than her own inner voice.
“A noted New Age healer and authority on what he calls the art of meditation, Kieran’s workshops have won praise from mainstream therapists and counselors as well as the more esoteric.”
Yes! She’d been right. Cripes, to hear this woman talk, Kieran was some kind of a public icon. A photo of Kieran flashed onto the screen. He was shown against the backdrop of Sedona’s vermilion castles and cathedrals, but as far as Dana was concerned, the background scenery didn’t hold a candle to those eyes looking out of the screen at her.
“As part of their program on modern philosophies, the University of Maryland is sponsoring his two-day seminar entitled ‘Relating Ancient Wisdom to Modern Life.’ Less than one year ago, Kieran was the subject of controversy after NBC’s The Bottom Line took hidden cameras and microphones into his learning center and resort at the Gardens of Oak Creek.”
How did they dare! The jackasses!
“The controversy was settled in Kieran’s favor, however, when the show’s producer admitted that they had no real basis for stating on their show that the Gardens was another Guyana waiting to happen. Dr. Thomas Myers, a U of M professor of psychotherapy and private counselor, claims that if more people practiced the methods preached by Kieran, half the country’s clinical psychologists would be put out of business.
“Anyone interested in attending the seminar should call the U of M Department of . . .”
Dana punched the remote to switch off the set. Kieran was coming to the U of M. He would be within an hour’s drive. He was going to be here! Right here! In the flesh! And he hadn’t told her.
“Aaaaaagh!” She threw her hapless romance novel against the wall. Her pillow followed it.
Dana’s pique lasted all through the weekend. Monday morning she stormed into the Allheart offices fifteen minutes late, lightning and thunder brewing in a dark cloud over her head. She mumbled a greeting to Robyn at the front desk and stalked into her office.
“Uh-oh!” Robyn sighed. “Relapse.”
But five minutes later, when a wary Alix stuck her head into Dana’s office, she found only sweetness and light.
“I got an e-mail from Kieran!” Dana declared.
“Didn’t you say that he e-mails you every day?”
Dana grinned. “True. But this e-mail says he’s coming to the DC area, and he wants to see me. He’ll be here on Friday!” She practically sang the last few words.
“And this is the guy that you’re not, positively not, hooked on?”
“I lied.” Dana was unabashed as she danced around her office. But after a few pirouettes, she hedged. “Not positively hooked. No.” Her mouth twitched upward in the beginning of a wicked smile.
“Not in love?” Al
ix teased.
“In lust? Does that count?”
“Can you tell the difference?”
She pirouetted to the door, singing, “Of course I can!”
As she danced down the hallway, Elyssa and Carole stuck heads from their offices to view the commotion.
“What happened?” Elyssa inquired dryly. “Is the war over?”
“I’m in heaaaa-ven!” Dana sang.
“She’s flipped her cork,” Carole concluded.
“My ridiculous virginity is about to come to an end!” Dana announced to the Allheart crew.
Robyn’s snicker was pure disbelief. “You’re not a virgin!”
Dana postured. “I have reclaimed my spiritual purity and I am ready to surrender it. You see before you a genuine born-again virgin.”
“Call 9-1-1,” Carole advised.
“That man is not going to know what hit him,” Dana crowed.
“Who?” Robyn asked.
“My guess would be a certain sexy guru from out west,” Elyssa said with a smile. “You better be careful, my young friend. These guys are used to this sort of adoration . . .”
“I don’t think he’s that sort, E. He’s so present, so real . . .” Dana’s voice trailed off blissfully.
“Oooh! He’s coming here.” Robyn squealed like an excited teenager. “You will bring him here, won’t you, Dana? I’m going to wear my new bustier.” Her eyes twinkled.
Dana laughed. “I’ll beg the Master to grace us with his presence. But . . .” She paused for effect and swept them all with a stern look. “Keep your greedy hands off the man, you guys. My inner tigress is on the prowl, and I’d hate to see any of you get clawed.”
Chapter 6
Kieran called Dana from the airport at 11:30 Friday morning. He suggested lunch. When Dana’s heartbeat slowed enough for her to speak, she offered to pick him up.
“I have a rental car,” he told her.
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