Power Play: A Novel

by Steel, Danielle

  “One day they’ll all meet,” Marshall said to her, and for a long moment Ashley didn’t answer. His double life was getting to her, and had been more acutely since the threatened sexual harassment suit. Ever since she’d learned that he had cheated on her, things were different—even if it had been a one-night stand, which she didn’t believe. He had lied to Liz for eight years, and maybe now he was doing the same to her. “This isn’t easy for me either,” he reminded her, as though to elicit sympathy from her, but it didn’t. He had the option to do it differently, but until now had chosen not to. He was still lying to Liz and keeping her and the twins in the closet. And now she had been inches away from one of his children, and they had passed like ships in the night, as though she and the girls didn’t matter at all. And when they hung up, Ashley cried herself to sleep that night, realizing it might never be any different. She was beginning to lose hope that their situation would ever change.

  Chapter 11

  When Fiona went back to work, she was swamped, as she always was, for the first few days. But it was totally worth it, she had had a ball with her kids. And when they got back, Alyssa went up to Tahoe to visit John, and Mark went with her for a few days and then flew back to New York to meet up with his girlfriend and leave for Kenya. Fiona was working ten-hour days in the office, and several more hours at home every night, trying to catch up.

  She was just beginning to get a grip on it when Logan Smith called her, this time in the office. He wouldn’t have dared to use her cell phone again, although he had kept the number. She was about to tell her secretary to take a message when he called, and then decided to pick it up. She didn’t want to add another call to return on her list, and she was aware that she had been curt with him the time before. She had been trying to return calls all week, and answer e-mails, along with everything else. There were problems in several plants, documents she had to sign, letters to answer, reports to read and analyze and respond to, and meetings she had to attend. When she took Logan’s call, she was so busy she sounded vague.

  “Yes?” For a minute, she’d forgotten who was calling as she looked for something in a stack of papers on her desk.

  “Fiona? It’s Logan. Logan Smith.” How many people did he think she knew named Logan? she wondered.

  “Yes, sorry. How are you?” She sounded as though she were going in ten directions and trying to be polite.

  “I’m fine. How was your vacation?”

  “Terrific,” she said with a smile. “I hate it when my kids leave again. I love waking up in the same house with them every morning. It’s miserable after they’re gone, but I’ve been so busy since I got back I hardly have time to notice.” She sounded warmer as soon as she mentioned her children. And he realized it was the way in with her. “So what can I do for you?” she asked, putting on her business voice again. “Not an interview, I hope.” He could tell she meant it.

  “I know you’re busy, but I was wondering if you’d like to have lunch. I enjoyed talking to you when I called about Marshall Weston, and instead of harassing you for an interview, or disturbing you on vacation, I was hoping we could have lunch.” He sounded a little nervous, and Fiona was confused.

  “As a basis for an interview?” She was faintly suspicious, and she rarely stopped for lunch.

  “No, just lunch. You can tell me about your sister’s book.” He had remembered what she said.

  “I don’t usually eat lunch.” But she didn’t want to be rude again. He had been nice every time he called, and she had enjoyed talking to him too. And she could hear her sister’s voice in her head, telling her to go. It wasn’t a date. Just a smart guy who might be nice to talk to over lunch. “Okay,” she said, sounding hesitant. “Sure. Why not? As long as you promise not to print anything I say.”

  “I promise. And I won’t ask you for any trade secrets, or about the sexual habits of the male CEOs you know. That leaves weather and sports.” She laughed at what he said.

  “That could be a problem, I know nothing about sports.”

  “Okay. We can stick to weather. It looks like it might rain today.”

  And then she wondered if he would mind coming to Palo Alto to lunch. “I don’t have time to come into the city,” she said apologetically.

  “I didn’t think you did. I actually have an appointment out there this afternoon. Would today work for you?”

  She thought about it for a minute and decided that it would. She didn’t really have time, but as buried as she was, an hour off wouldn’t make that much difference, as long as they were quick.

  “I can get out of here for about an hour,” she said, sounding slightly panicked, as she glanced at the stacks of files and folders piled up on her desk. She tried not to think about it and focused on lunch.

  “That’ll do.” He could easily imagine how busy she was, and was happy she was willing to see him at all. He named a simple restaurant she liked where they could get a salad or a sandwich and eat outside, and she agreed to meet him there at one. He told her he was wearing a blue shirt, tweed jacket, and jeans. And he knew what she looked like.

  She didn’t have time to think about it. As she was driving to the restaurant, she realized that it was the first lunch break she’d taken, that wasn’t for a meeting, in many months. She parked her car outside the restaurant and went in. She found Logan sitting at a table in the garden, reading e-mails on his phone. He looked up as soon as she approached the table and stood up. She was wearing one of her business suits, this one with a skirt, and had left her jacket in the car. She had on high heels, and a simple white silk blouse, and her hair in a bun. She looked very serious and businesslike in her work clothes, what she referred to as her “uniform,” and she was surprised to see how attractive he was. He had dark hair with gray at the temples, and as Jillian had remembered, he was close to her age. And as she sat down at the table, she decided that he looked the way a journalist should look. Slightly intellectual, but interested and alert. He had lively brown eyes and a ready smile, and he looked very pleased to see her when she sat down. She was five minutes late.

  “Sorry I’m late. I can never get out of my office without someone calling me right as I’m going through the door.” She put her cell phone on vibrate as she said it, so they wouldn’t be disturbed during lunch. And then she looked at him politely. “Thank you for inviting me to lunch.” It was a first for her, without clients or associates.

  “I felt like I owed you an apology, for calling you when you were on vacation and disturbing you with your kids.”

  “You couldn’t know,” she said pleasantly, and started to unwind. She had forgotten till then how good it felt to get out of the office in the middle of the day. “I try not to let my work interfere with my home life. When I’m with them, I belong to them. That’s always been my rule.”

  “Your children are lucky. Both my parents were physicians, and I don’t think I ever had a conversation with them, without one of them answering the phone or flying out the door. My father was an orthopedic surgeon, and my mother was a pediatrician, and still is. In a small town in Vermont. She’s seventy-one years old, still practicing and going strong.” It sounded good to Fiona, and an interesting way to grow up.

  “How did you wind up here?”

  “Like most people who come to the West Coast, by accident. I came out for a summer, fell in love with it, and stayed. But I travel a lot. Mostly to L.A. and New York. But I get a lot of work done here. I enjoy what I do.” He was easy to talk to, and they only stopped long enough to order lunch. Caesar salad for both.

  “So do I,” Fiona said, about enjoying her work. “I always did, although I felt guilty about it when my kids were small. I stayed home for three years with my son, and I knew I couldn’t do that anymore. I need to work. But I managed to be with them a lot too. It was a juggling act, but it worked. I was committed to the idea of having both, a family and a career. I still believe that, but it’s not always as easy as it sounds.” In fact, to him it sounded damn
hard, with a career like hers, and he knew she had had big jobs for a long time. She’d been a major player in the business community for nearly twenty years, and by his standards she was still young. He didn’t consider forty-nine old. He was four years younger.

  “Did your husband help with the kids?” He was curious how marriages among the powerful worked, as a point of human interest, not just for his book.

  She laughed before she answered his question. “No. He thought that was my job. So I did both. A lot of women do. But he was never happy about my career. He wanted me to help him with his family business, but I thought that would be a mistake, and an invitation to arguments and a bad situation. So I took jobs with other companies, and we fought about that instead. He really wanted a stay-at-home wife, and got it right on the second round.”

  “And you? No second round?” He was intrigued by her, and wanted to hear everything she was willing to say. He liked people and was always fascinated by them. She had been very open so far. And her divorce from David Carson was not a secret. It was even listed on the Internet, in her bio. It didn’t mention the cause of their divorce, but she had told Logan the way it was.

  “No time,” she said in answer to his question, and she smiled again. “We’ve been divorced for six years. I’ve been busy with my work and kids. It doesn’t leave me much time for anything else.” And she didn’t look deprived. She looked like a happy woman, who was doing what she wanted with her life. He liked that about her, and he was surprised by how attractive she was. She was prettier than her pictures. And her hairdo, with her hair pulled back in a bun, and her simple white silk blouse and straight navy skirt reminded him of what corporate women were supposed to look like. He couldn’t help wondering what she would look like with her hair down, in more casual clothes. But she could hardly go to work in a T-shirt and jeans.

  “How old are your kids?” he asked, and she smiled at the question.

  “My gut response is always two and five. Unfortunately, they’re nineteen and twenty-two. My son is getting a master’s in social work at Columbia, my daughter will be a junior at Stanford this fall. She’s a business freak like me and wants to get an MBA. My son is the family saint. He’s off to Kenya with his girlfriend this week to help lay pipes to bring water into a village.”

  “They sound like interesting kids,” he said admiringly.

  “They are, and nice people,” she said proudly. “Do you have any?”

  “Not that I know of. I’ve been divorced for twenty years.”

  “That’s too bad,” she said sympathetically, and then realized that not everyone felt about children as she did. Like Jillian, for instance, who was happy to have none at all.

  “Yeah, I suppose it is,” he said, sounding vague. He hadn’t thought about having kids for years, and had decided long ago they weren’t for him. It had actually broken up his marriage. His ex-wife had married someone else and had six. He was happy for her. “I’m not sure it even counts by now, it was so long ago. And I was only married for two years, fresh out of college. I married a gorgeous girl from Salt Lake, and after we got married, she told me she wanted to move back, have a million babies, and I was supposed to work for her father, in his printing plant. I tried it for a while, and I figured I would kill myself if I stayed another six months, so I ran. I came to San Francisco then, and I’ve been here ever since. I wanted to be kind of a journalist at large, freelancing from all over the world, or a sportswriter, and I wound up covering some interesting stories in Silicon Valley, and got pegged as an investigative reporter on business issues. I wound up discovering some criminal activities that fascinated me, and I got hooked. Maybe I’m a detective at heart and I’m good at that stuff. But I love the real human stories, like Mandela. Interviewing him was the high point of my life. Opportunities like that don’t come up very often.”

  “My sister read those interviews and said they’re fabulous.”

  Their salads arrived then, and they continued talking while they ate. They covered a variety of subjects, and he almost asked her about their boardroom leak and decided against it. He didn’t want her to think that he’d had lunch with her to pump her for information, which he hadn’t. He had taken her to lunch only because he admired what he knew of her, and wanted to get to know her better. He was fascinated by her, and how normal and modest she was, despite her very important job. Nothing about her suggested that she was one of the most important women in the country, running a mammoth corporation, and she was easy and unpretentious on top of it, and incredibly bright. But he liked how unassuming she was, and she made him laugh when she talked about her sister, who sounded like a character to him.

  “I think you’d like her,” Fiona assured him, and having gotten a good look at him now, she was sure that Jillian would be crazy about him. He was not only very smart and well educated, he was also very good looking, in a casual, easygoing way. “She’s in Tuscany right now. She’s a hell of a tennis player, if you like to play.”

  “Are you pimping for her?” he asked with a grin.

  “She doesn’t need my help.” Fiona laughed at his question. “My sister always has a guy, when she wants one. She looked like a beanpole as a kid, she’s just over six feet tall. And tall or short, young or old, guys drop at her feet. She has such a great personality, I’ve never met anyone who didn’t like her.” Even David, with all his complaints about Fiona, had thought Jillian was fun. And she always made him laugh.

  “What about you? What were you like as a kid?” he asked her, and looked genuinely interested. He was asking her questions he normally wouldn’t have asked at a first lunch, and she would have deflected them, but he was open with her, and she was so much more personable and warm than he’d expected, that they were surprisingly forthcoming with each other.

  “I was shy. And I wore glasses and had buckteeth until I had braces,” she said with a modest smile.

  “And then you turned into a swan,” he said, looking at her, and she blushed at what he said.

  “Not exactly. I wear contacts, and a night guard at night when I’m stressed, so I don’t clench my jaw.”

  “Scary,” he said, and they both laughed. “With all the stress you must have in your job, I’m surprised you don’t wear a helmet and shin guards, and a protector for your teeth. I don’t know how you do it. The responsibility for a hundred thousand employees would kill me. All I have to do is turn in my stories on deadline.”

  “That’s stressful too,” she said practically. “I don’t know. I like what I do. I think that helps.” She seemed totally focused on her job, in a very human way. She was completely different from the arrogant CEOs he met and interviewed every day, like the one he was meeting with that afternoon, whom he didn’t like but was an important story. His subjects usually spent hours talking about themselves, telling him how great they were. And Fiona talked about having buckteeth as a kid, and wearing a night guard to bed. It was hardly a sexy image, despite her natural good looks, and she didn’t seem to mind pointing out her own flaws. He thought there was something very touching about it. He found her astonishingly humble, particularly given how important and powerful she was.

  “What’s the one word you would use to describe your job?” he asked her, trying to get a sense of how she felt about it, but he already knew. And she was quick to answer.

  “Hard. Second word: fun. What about you?”

  He thought about it for a minute—he wasn’t used to anyone asking him the questions. “Fascinating. Surprising. Different every day. Exciting. I’m never bored by the people I meet, even if I don’t like them. And people never turn out to be what I expected.” She wasn’t either. She was even better than he had thought. He was only sorry that she wouldn’t let him interview her. He could have done a great piece. But if they wound up friends, by some sheer stroke of good luck, that would be even better. And Fiona was happy she had had lunch with him too. She realized that Jillian was right, and it was interesting to meet new people. And she genuin
ely liked Logan, more than she thought she would. She had accepted lunch with him to be polite, and she was having a terrific time. She looked regretful when she finally glanced at her watch, saw that it was almost two o’clock, and knew that she had to go. She had a meeting in twenty minutes.

  Logan paid for their lunch, and they walked out of the restaurant together.

  “Thank you for meeting me for lunch today,” he said sincerely as he walked her to her car. “It’s nice to meet the woman who goes with the voice. You’re nothing like I expected. Well, a little, but not a lot. You’re just a regular person.” He loved that about her.

  “Yes, I am,” she said simply. “Most people expect the Wizard of Oz, or the Wicked Witch of the West.” She reminded him more of Dorothy than the witch the house had fallen on, although he had met plenty of those too. But not Fiona. She didn’t take herself too seriously, and listened to what other people had to say. She had an innocent quality that he liked about her too, as though she were so clean and straightforward that she expected everybody else to be too, and they both knew they weren’t. But she seemed like the kind of woman who gave people the benefit of the doubt and brought out the best in those around her.

  “I hope your interview goes well this afternoon,” she said as she unlocked her car and slid behind the wheel.

  “You don’t use a driver?” He looked surprised, and she shook her head.

  “I’d rather drive myself. It’s simpler. I only use one if I go to the airport.”

  “Yeah, me too,” he said with a grin. “Well, take care, and thanks for joining me. Maybe we can do it again sometime. And I’d like to meet your sister.”

  “I’ll e-mail you her number. You should call her.” But even he wasn’t brave enough to call her out of the blue, and he would have felt foolish calling her, just because Fiona said so. “Believe me, she’s not shy. And she’d love to meet you and talk about her book.”