by Dorien Kelly
“What I’m looking for is a voice of reason outside my family. I spent weeks in your pub, Daniel. I saw how you operated with your family. You’re a born peacemaker.”
“I’ve had a lifetime of experience with that lot. What am I to do here?”
Hal didn’t answer directly. “I’m going to have an artery unplugged with a stent or some other damn thing put in, a week from Tuesday. You and Eva are the only two, other than my doctors, who know.”
It shocked him none that Eva D’Onfrio knew, since he suspected that she’d been Hal’s lover for decades. The rest did come as a surprise, though maybe not as much as it should. In the weeks that Hal had stayed in Clifden, he’d infrequently mentioned his sons.
“Why not tell your family?”
“The boys are already pushing for more responsibility. They’ll be circling like wolves if they know I’m sick.”
It was all Daniel could do not to remind Hal that the eldest of “the boys” was past fifty and likely well ready for more responsibility. Or early retirement.
“You underestimate them,” he said instead.
“If anything, I overestimate them. But it’s my own damn fault. They are what I made them.”
To live the life of a kingmaker… “What do you want me to do for you, Hal?”
“Come to the hospital.”
He nodded. “Of course.”
“And not a word to anyone until this is done. I need your promise.”
This was harder to give, for it didn’t take a seer to know that sooner or later he’d be putting himself in a bad way with Annie. Yet Hal’s privacy was his own, and despite his frustration, Daniel counted the man among his friends.
“You have my word,” he finally said, knowing that in exchange he’d eventually suffer death by ice from Ms. Annie. It shouldn’t matter. He’d be moving on, after all, and in a matter of months she’d be no more than a memory. The thought sent a cold spear through Daniel’s heart.
“Thank you,” Hal replied. “You won’t be sorry.”
But he already was.
11
ON MONDAY, THE SEVENTH floor, where Annie’s office was located, was in battle mode. The secretarial pool and corporate drones sat stone-faced at their cubicles. Those employees lucky enough to have doors to their offices had shut them. The galley was a wasteland, with an open box of chocolate chip cookies languishing uneaten on the counter. Annie rescued one, then moved on.
As she walked down the corridor, tension knotted tighter under her skin. Headquarters had always been a loud place, taking its cue from Hal’s personality. This tomblike atmosphere was unnatural. Whatever was going on would have to wait, though. Annie had another unnatural silence to address.
Sasha was proving harder to raise than the ghost of her black sheep uncle Rob, and Annie was getting desperate. It totally sucked to have experienced an event as wild as her travels with Flynn, and not be able to dissect it with Sasha. Annie knew she needed someone to talk some sense into her, or better yet, tell her that it was okay to indulge in the mad, mindless fling she’d been considering as she lay in her cool and empty bed the past three nights. Sasha was the girl for the job.
Yesterday, Annie had even considered camping outside her house, except she had laundry to do, food to buy, a zillion e-mails to answer and hours of research to finish on restaurant design groups. Besides, she knew she could corner Sasha this morning.
Annie knocked on her friend’s door. Before she even had time to respond, Rachel, Evil Queen of Marketing, strolled up and said, “Sick day.”
“Is it anything serious?” Annie asked, then immediately realized she’d committed a tactical error. Her one consistent defense against Rachel’s venom was being more in-the-know.
Rachel’s mouth edged from its usual flat-line mode to a smug curve. “You’re asking me? What, there’s trouble in paradise?”
“Other than the standard annoying reptile, no,” she replied.
Rachel turned heel on her faux-lizard pumps and stalked off, but not without first issuing her obligatory hiss.
Giving up on Sasha for the time being, Annie inventoried the cubicles for someone who might be willing to talk, but came up empty. Among the downsides of being so firmly linked with Hal Donovan was the fact that most people assumed she was a snitch. Not that anyone had the nerve to say it to her face.
Annie returned unhappy and uninformed to her office. Waiting on the desk were glossy presentation materials from a few of the designers she’d contacted prior to her forced march across the USA. Beneath them she found new copies of trade magazines from the franchise associations she’d joined.
Annie pushed aside the magazines as dead—or at least dead-for-now—issues and dialed into her voice mail. She had three messages from her sister, whom she’d apparently forgotten to tell she was leaving town—or that she’d returned.
She phoned Elizabeth and assured her that she’d neither been kidnapped nor drowned in the bathtub. Luckily, Elizabeth was in her work mode, which meant that there was precious little time to spare for sisterly lecturing.
“I’ve heard back from Paul Housden,” Elizabeth said.
“Who?”
“My corporate recruiting contact in New York. He wants you to forward your résumé. If he likes what he sees, he’ll meet with you.”
“In New York?” Annie couldn’t quite fight down the panic. She’d barely recovered from the flight home. Daniel had once again held her hand and done all those wonderful Flynn-like things, but that didn’t make her especially excited to repeat the experience on her own.
Lectures were in short supply, but Lizzie still had time to sound annoyed. “Yes, in New York. That is where you want to be, right?”
Annie’s answer was automatic. “Of course.”
“I made the contact. Knock yourself out and do the follow-up.”
Annie dug in her desk drawer for a pen, then flipped over the first available sheet of paper. “Give me his number.”
Elizabeth reeled out number, company name and address. Annie frantically scribbled, then repeated it back to her. When she hung up, she found Daniel Flynn standing in her doorway. Pleasure at the sight of him warred with alarm over what he might have heard.
“Been there long?”
“Not so very,” he said, giving nothing up in his expression. “Mind if I step inside?”
She flipped over the information she’d just written, then said, “Come on in.”
He was dressed for business today, not in a suit, but in freshly pressed khakis and an olive-colored sweater that looked like fine woven silk. Annie folded one hand over the other, hoping that would quell her urge to reach out and touch. He settled in one of the two guest chairs opposite her desk.
“Did you have a fine weekend?” he asked.
“It was a game of catch up.”
“It must have been brutal, what with you not having the time to return even one of my calls.”
“Sorry. I was really busy,” she said, which sounded a whole lot more mature than “I needed to hash out the pros and cons of sleeping with you.”
And since the matter remained unhashed, seeing him again was messing with her already scrambled sense of order.
“I’ve furniture now, and a full fridge,” he said. “And some hope of surviving till August.”
“That’s great.” Maybe she didn’t want wild sex with him—or maybe she did—but she definitely didn’t want to think about Flynn leaving. She nudged the mouse of her computer and brought up the time line she’d made for the pub. “I have two chefs coming in this afternoon to talk about menu. Are you free?”
“I’ll have to check.”
Check what? she wanted to ask. She blew past a couple of lesser design candidates she’d felt compelled to see for form’s sake and focused on the following week’s schedule. “We also have the Ars/Ullman design team coming in next Tuesday. You should probably be there.”
“Tuesday? I won’t be able to make it.”
�
�Nothing you need to check to know that one?”
“Not a thing. Any possibility of moving the meeting to Wednesday?”
Could the guy never simply follow? “Nope.”
“Then go on without me.”
“What’s up on Tuesday?”
“A prior obligation.”
“Work?”
He glanced out the window, then back at her. “In a sense.”
“Ah.” Tricky, setting one foot outside the domain where she was allowed to pry. As she considered her next step, she rolled her mouse back and forth across its pad. Daniel’s expression bordered on wary as he watched her. That, she supposed, was some consolation.
“It’s no loss, going forward without me,” he eventually said. “My idea of good design is sufficient seats at the bar.”
“No problem. I was only asking because I should. I can handle it myself.” Her words were the truth as far as they went. What she couldn’t handle was her unhealthy level of curiosity over his alternate plans.
Annie quit torturing her computer’s mouse. She wanted to deal with Daniel in the same direct manner with which she’d flattened Garth’s toes. Wanted to, but somehow couldn’t. Maybe it was because she didn’t want to risk the feeling that something really cool had begun to happen between them. Or maybe she was just a victim of the blanket of doom that hovered outside her office door. Either way, she found herself playing coy—and coy really put a knot in her stomach.
“Annie, what’s bothering you?”
“Nothing,” she lied, then pinned on a more cheerful expression. “You know, I spent the weekend looking for the missing connection and just couldn’t nail it. What was the link between all the places we went last week?”
He smiled. “You could have ended your suffering by picking up your phone and talking to me.”
“Humor me now.”
Daniel shrugged. “It’s basic stuff, really. It was the welcome. At each place there was a sense of community…of truly belonging.”
Belonging. The word nearly knocked the breath from her, and not because she cared in more than a vague get-past-this-mess sort of way about Hal’s pub dream. No, this was a sudden, personal, to-the-gut blow. When had she started feeling as if she no longer belonged?
“That’s the key to what Hal wants,” Daniel was saying. “What you need to deliver.”
How the hell had this slipped by her?
She realized she must have let at least part of her question escape aloud when Flynn laughed. “How? Magic, alchemy…I haven’t a clue. If I did, I’d be a billionaire. In Ireland, the welcome’s simple. It’s not such as easy a task in a country as diverse as yours.”
He stretched his long legs out before him and leaned back into the chair. “And as long as we’re asking questions, here’s one I’ve been waiting since Friday to ask you. In Seattle, you called yourself a short-timer. What did you mean by that?”
Annie was the one to look away this time, mostly to see if anyone was in earshot. Just to be safe, she walked to her door and closed it.
“Nothing concrete,” she said after she’d turned back to Daniel. “I’ve just been playing with the idea of relocating.”
“And have you anyplace in mind?” he asked.
“New York.”
He smiled, but there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of happy backing it up. “Ah, the overflow room for hell.”
“Funny, Flynn.”
“And true, too.”
Annie was about to rebut this piece of insanity when her phone rang. She quickly covered the five steps back to her desk and lifted the receiver, hoping it was Sasha. Instead, Mrs. D. was on the other end, wanting to know if Annie had seen Daniel.
“He’s right in front of me,” Annie replied, frowning as she caught him reading the papers on her desk. She edged between him and his snooping range.
“Then ask him to tell you that everyone’s waiting for the two of you in the boardroom,” Mrs. D. said.
Saving her annoyance for its proper target, Annie gave Mrs. D. a quick thanks, then hung up. While she grabbed a notepad and a pen, she asked Daniel, “Any reason in particular you didn’t tell me that we’ve got a roomful of people waiting for us?”
He rose from his chair. “You owed me a chat.”
“Yeah, and someone owes me about three weeks of vacation on a tropical beach with a fifth of rum, but that has to wait, too.”
“Not too long, I’m hoping,” he said. “I’m finding I’m not as good at waiting as I once was.”
Annie paused. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just this.” He came to her and unclipped her hair from the workday knot she’d twisted it into.
Using her free hand, she tried to shoo him away. “Don’t mess with my hair.”
“It’s so beautiful down,” he said as he combed his long fingers through it. “Now relax. The Donovan boys can sit and contemplate the reach of their empire for a few minutes longer, but I need to do this.”
His kiss was slow, full, rich—and dangerous in the extreme to a woman who’d just begun to think about what it means to belong. She allowed herself to enjoy him for about five seconds, then found the willpower to step away.
Daniel handed her the clip he’d slid from her hair. Annie tossed it onto her desk, then did her best to straighten up and look unkissed.
“You bend beautifully, love,” he said just before she opened the door to her office.
To Annie, it was feeling a whole lot more as though she was about to snap.
WHEN ANNIE AND DANIEL stepped off the elevator on the top floor, it seemed to her that the headquarters’ tension level had increased with the altitude. Even the unflappable Mrs. D. appeared harried. Her usually sleek silver pageboy looked frizzy, as though it had flirted with an overheated blow-dryer, and her expression was equally heated.
“You’d better go on in,” she said, motioning toward the boardroom door.
“And I wish you luck,” Annie thought she heard the woman say just as she and Daniel cleared the double doors to the room. Inside, Hal and his four sons sat on opposing sides of the enormous oblong rosewood table.
“Sorry we’re late,” Daniel said as he slipped into a chair at Hal’s right hand—the one where Annie normally sat. “My fault entirely.”
Of course Hal’s sons still chose to glare at Annie as she took up a compromise position to Daniel’s right.
“Can we get this moving?” Duane, Donovan’s General Counsel and son number three, asked while glancing at his watch.
“What’s the matter, are we cutting too close to a tee time?” asked Richard, the eldest surviving son after Miami Rob.
Annie had never figured out how a man so wed to Brooks Brothers clothes and a holier-than-thou attitude had managed to father Sasha. And only because he was Sasha’s dad could Annie tolerate him at all.
Sons two and four riffled through their papers like the number crunchers they were.
Annie glanced over at Daniel, who intently watched the scene. She’d lived in the middle of the infighting for so long that she generally tuned it out.
“All right, just to spare myself some aggravation, let’s get going,” Hal said. He glanced down at a sheet of paper in front of him. “First on the list, I want to shut down the State Street location for renovations effective June twenty-fifth. Howard,” he directed son number four, “tell the regional manager to offer the staff temporary jobs in the Lansing and Royal Oak locations.”
Howard looked nearly as shocked as Annie felt. Her stomach began to fight the chocolate chip cookie she’d eaten earlier. She’d assumed that despite all of his “need to know” puffing days earlier, Hal had actually already given the details of his plan to his sons. Considering the family track record, that assumption pretty much proved the old “assume=ass out of you and me” formula. She slumped lower in her chair, trying to keep out of the line of fire.
“I agree the place is in need of updating, but why not just have the contractors work after-hours
?” Howard asked his father. He could be a little slow on the uptake, so she was relieved that he’d pegged the problem on the first try.
“Won’t do,” Hal said, rolling his fat pen between his fingers as though it was a cigar. “This will be a total revamp. I’m figuring it will be down for six weeks.”
The statement gained Richard’s attention. He leaned forward, steepling his perfectly manicured hands in front of him. “What do you mean, revamp?”
“We’re going from pizza to a pub,” Hal said. “It’s the first location for the new chain.”
“Let me see if I have this. Just to amuse yourself, you’re going to close our most profitable location in the state and keep it shut down right through Art Fair?”
Each July, Ann Arbor hosted two massive, juried outdoor art fairs. Restaurants in the area couldn’t turn out food fast enough during that week.
“It doesn’t matter if you ‘have it,’ Richie,” Hal said. “It’s a done deal and you don’t need to bother with it.”
“How about the fact that our same-store numbers are down from last year, utility costs are up thirty percent and we’re bleeding money from workers’ comp claims? Should I bother with those, Dad?”
Annie watched as Hal’s usual hypertensive flush grew even more crimson. His eldest son was almost a matching hue. It was a modern-day duel—heart attacks at thirty paces. Annie might not be crazy about Richard, but outside of one or two recurring evil fantasies, she didn’t want to see him keel over.
“End of discussion,” Hal said. He glanced at the list on the table in front of him. “Next up is chain performance in Northern California. Duane—”
“We’re not done with State Street,” Richard cut in.
“Duane,” Hal repeated through clenched teeth, “I want—”
Looking none too thrilled, Duane took on the role of peacekeeper. “Richard, maybe we should—”
Richard’s eyes narrowed. “Shut up.”
“You shut up,” Hal snapped. “I’m in charge here. I grew this place from nothing.”
Annie pondered how long it would take her to talk her doctor into a ninety-day scrip for antianxiety meds.