The Boss's Proposal, page 14
“Just because I’m going back to Dubai doesn’t mean that I leave everything here behind.” He pulled out of the medical center grounds and onto the street. “What’s going on with us isn’t just a passing thing. I have no intention of letting it go. So if you’re concerned because of what you heard on the phone call last night, don’t be. You and I are going to keep going. No matter what it takes, we’ll figure out a way.”
“No, Dylan,” she said tightly, “I don’t think we will.”
“What?” He stopped at the light and looked over at her. “What’s going on, Max? You haven’t looked right all day.”
“Gosh, thank you very much.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“I’ll tell you what happened,” she snapped. “Guess what I heard this morning when I was going to get coffee? It was Eli, talking to a buddy. It seems he forgot one of the files he was supposed to take home last night so he came back and guess what he saw?”
“Oh hell.”
“Yes, oh hell,” she mimicked. “It was all over the office. I don’t know how you missed it. I overheard people talking about at least twice more. Just like I told you at least twice more last night to please stop. But no, you were really in a mood. Even though we had so damn much work there was no way we were going to get it all done, you still had to take a break.
You just wouldn’t listen.” Her voice rose.
“Look, I’m sorry it happened. I know it’s embarrassing, but we’ll live it down, we’ll survive.”
“We’ll live it down?” she repeated. “Do you think you’re the one they were making jokes about in the office today? Do you think you’re the one they were staring at? I wondered why Eli was asking me if I was tired this morning and winking at me. And then I found out why.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry? You should be happy. Your rep has gone way up. The guys I overheard were very impressed that in less than three weeks you—”
“This isn’t about the guys in the office,” he interrupted, “this is about you and me.”
“There is no you and me,” she flared. “There never was. You were in town, we were working together, we fooled around a few times. Period. You go back to Dubai next week for your prince, so even if it wasn’t already over it would be then. And trust me, buddy, it’s over.”
“Because I didn’t stop?”
“Because you wouldn’t listen when I asked.”
“As I recall, you stopped asking pretty early on in the proceedings,” he said.
She looked at him as though she’d been struck.
Dylan let out a breath. “Look, I didn’t mean that to come out the way it did, but I still don’t understand why you’re so upset. It’s going to blow over. It doesn’t matter.”
“It sure as hell matters to me,” she shot back. “I don’t get to escape to Dubai. I have to keep living with this, day after day.” She shook her head blindly. “I can’t believe I did this again. I cannot believe that I was so stupid.”
He pulled the car over to the side of the road and turned to face her.
“Why are you stopping? We’re two blocks away from the office.”
“Because we are going to talk about this,” he snapped. “What did he do to you? The guy in Chicago you told me about, there’s more to the story. What happened?” She reached for the door handle and he caught her shoulders and held her in place. “You are not going to walk away from this, at least not without an explanation. You owe me that much.”
“I don’t owe you anything at all,” she retorted.
“But you’re dying to talk about it, aren’t you? Go ahead, tell me. Tell me why you want to wipe me out right now.”
Her throat tightened. “You want to know what happened? Fine. It began a few weeks after I started at the Chicago Design Group. Even though I was an intern, I had so much experience that within a couple of weeks, I was working with their entry-level architects. I figured that was why Elliott Seymour came by to talk to me.”
“Elliott Seymour?”
“He was a partner.”
Dylan let out a breath. “Yeah. I know him.” The tone of his voice told her all she needed to know about his opinion of Seymour.
“He said he had a special side project that he wanted to work on with me in the evenings. I couldn’t believe it. Here was this internationally known architect and he wanted to work with me. I thought that he was interested in my mind.” She gave a bitter laugh. “God, I was more naive than I had any right to be. It started out with takeout at the office, then dinners. When he touched me at first, it almost seemed accidental. But it turned into more.”
Of course it had, Dylan thought.
“He said he and his wife were separated, that they’d filed for divorce. When he took me to his condo, there wasn’t a trace of her. And we slept together.” She stared down at her hands. “It lasted for a couple of weeks. He kept telling me that I was special and that as soon as his divorce was final, we’d go public.”
Max swallowed. “And then the company had their annual picnic. I don’t know what I was expecting, it wasn’t like he’d given me any reason to think he was going to announce us to anyone, but still…” She’d hoped. She’d bought a new dress she couldn’t afford, spent hours getting ready. “I walked in and saw him standing there with this very beautiful, sophisticated woman. Who happened to be his wife.”
“Oh, Christ,” Dylan breathed.
“There wasn’t any separation or pending divorce, just a wife staying with family in Europe for the summer. A wife and two sons. That was the worst part.” She shook her head. “I felt dirty, just…sordid. I’d always sworn I would never have an affair with a married man. And here I’d done it.”
“Not of your own choice,” he said.
“It didn’t matter. It happened.” She let out a long breath. “The second worst part was the whispering. Someone had seen us one night, so they were all waiting for me to show up at the picnic, watching to see how I’d react. Especially the entry-level employees, who thought that Elliott was the reason I’d been on the fast track.” She remembered the greasy nausea even now.
“I learned a lot about people that day, Dylan,” she whispered, her voice barely audible. “All kinds of people. The liars, the users, the Teflon people and the ones who like to feed on other people’s misery.”
“They were watching?”
“Some of them were making bets,” she said aridly. “Apparently this was a yearly habit for him. I’d won the intern sweepstakes for that summer but his wife had come home early. Most years, the interns never even knew.”
She’d managed, just barely, to hold it together through the introductions, stood long enough to have a cocktail. And walked calmly and casually inside to the bathroom and threw up. She’d left as soon as she could manage.
“It all fell apart pretty quickly after that,” she said. “His wife figured out what had gone on. I got called in to HR. Officially, they were downsizing me because of budget cuts but everyone knew the real story.” And however irrational it was, she couldn’t escape the fear it would happen again.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Of course it was. I thought I was way too smart to be taken in and I fell for one of the oldest lines in the book. So I figured I’d never let it happen again. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” She laughed bitterly. “It’s shame on me, because I walked right into it again.”
Dylan shook his head. “The hell you did. This is a totally different situation.”
“Is it? I report to you on this job. Do you have any idea what people are going to think about me sleeping with the boss’s son? Do you think anybody’s going to believe I’ve earned the spot I’m in now?”
“Anybody who’s been around this firm for five minutes knows you have. Max, I know this is hard, but it doesn’t have to matter. It doesn’t have to change things with us.”
“Of course it does. It changes everything.”
“Why?” he demanded. “I’m not that other guy. It’s not the same situation. I’m not married, I’m not lying to you, I’m not using you. Dammit, I love you.”
Panic sprinted through her. “Don’t tell me that,” she ordered, voice shaking. “I don’t want to hear your lines.”
“It’s not a line.” And he never would have thought it would hurt so much that she’d think so.
“I don’t know why you care, anyway. You’re going back to Dubai in a week. There’s no reason to keep this going.”
“I’d say there are a lot of reasons to keep it going,” he said angrily. “We’re good together, you and me, really good. But that doesn’t matter to you, does it? You’ve been looking for an excuse to run from the beginning. This isn’t about you and me, this is about Elliott Seymour.” He held on to the steering wheel and stared out through the windshield.
“You’ve got a choice, Max,” he said finally. “You can let it go. But you don’t really want to hear that, do you? You’d rather keep doing the same thing you’ve always done, keep buffing up that pain. I always thought you had guts, but now I wonder if you really do. Maybe for the easy stuff, but when it comes to you, though, when it comes to really risking yourself, you’re as big a coward as they come.”
He turned the key in the ignition, but she already had the door of the car open. “Where are you going?” he demanded.
She was out before he’d finished saying the words. “Forget it, I’ll walk from here.” She had to be out of the close confines of the car, she had to be moving. If she could do that much, maybe she could stop thinking about everything she’d lost—the man she loved, her reputation, possibly even her job. A headache throbbed in her temples as she strode down the sidewalk. At the door to the BRS building, she hesitated, tempted, oh so tempted to keep moving. With every fiber of her being, she wanted to avoid going inside. She straightened her shoulders and strode forward.
Her cell phone rang, and she felt a clutch in her throat. Dylan. She was furious and frightened, but somewhere deep down, almost too far down to admit, she wanted him back. The phone rang again and she dragged it out. “Don’t you ever—”
“Max.” It was her mother’s voice, but the tone sent chills down her spine.
“Mom, what’s the matter?”
There was a silence. “Mom?” Max repeated.
“Max, come quickly. Your fa—your father’s had a heart attack.”
Chapter Twelve
The coronary care unit was dim and hushed. In this quiet place, no sense of the outside world intruded, only the beep and shush of the life-support machines. Privacy didn’t exist for the critically ill—instead of separate rooms, the beds stood in open bays separated by dividers, allowing the staff to easily monitor and reach the patients. A brightly lit nurses’ station occupied the center; around the periphery, all was dim.
Max followed the nurse to where her father lay unconscious, covered with a pale blue blanket. He looked gray and shrunken in some indefinable way. Fear choked her as she stopped beside his bed. Breathe, she ordered herself.
“Oh, Daddy. If you wanted attention, all you had to do was tell us.” She gave an awkward laugh and reached for his hand. “You’ve got to get through this. We need you back. You’re strong,” she told him. But he looked so weak. She swallowed. “You’ve got to get through this for all of us. Most of all for Mom, because I don’t think she can do without—”
Across the room, an alarm shattered the quiet. Bright lights flipped on all over the floor. Instantly, the staff sprang into action. “Code blue on 303,” someone said urgently. Furious activity replaced the calm. Everyone there seemed to converge on the same bed all at once. “Defib, stat,” a voice demanded. “Get me that adrenaline, now.”
Adrenaline sprinted through Max’s veins. A nurse walked over to her swiftly. “We need you out of here, pronto.”
Max headed toward the big double doors that led out to the real world. Behind her, she heard the thud and snap of the defibrillator. “We’re losing him,” someone said.
Then she was outside the doors and they were closing behind her, sealing out any further sounds.
But her heart still hammered, as though it were trying to do the work for the person who’d coded behind her. As though it were trying to do the work for her father. She hadn’t told him she loved him, Max realized. There hadn’t been time.
The families in the waiting room looked like refugees from some natural disaster, clustered together in anxious knots, hands clenched, faces pale. An almost palpable tension filled the air. Whoever had decorated the room had chosen subdued colors, probably intending them to be calming. Of course, anybody who thought colors could make a difference in a situation like this had never been through one.
Max crossed the room to her mother. Amanda McBain mustered up the ghost of a smile when her daughter sat down.
“How is he?”
Heartbreaking, Max thought. “Fine,” she said. And compared to the patient in 303, he was fine. “They’re going to be taking him into surgery.”
Amanda’s expression tightened. “They said they would.”
“It’s a good thing, Mom,” Max said. “They’ll fix whatever’s wrong so he can recover.”
Please, let him recover.
It was funny how everything suddenly got very simple in a situation like this. An hour before, her life had seemed unbearably complex. She’d felt buffeted by emotion at every turn: anger, sadness, loss, humiliation. Everything she’d tried to protect herself against for years had come to pass.
Now, none of those things mattered. They all seemed distant, receded into some distant, unreachable past. She couldn’t even cry. Now, there was room for only one emotion—fear.
Max took her mother’s hand. “Where’s Cady?”
“Keeping an eye on the inn. We’ve got guests, someone has to. Damon’s out in Las Vegas this week.”
How much harder it must have been to be Cady in that moment, unable to know exactly what was going on. And Walker down in New York, scrambling to get a flight up. It was going to take time for the family to get together, Max thought.
She only hoped they had enough.
“It looks like you and Max did the job,” Hal said to Dylan as they walked out of the BRS conference room after the debriefing.
Dylan nodded. It was hard to remember that it mattered. He’d gone through the session on automatic, his mind returning over and over to Max and what had happened between them. She hadn’t shown up in the office after they separated. It wasn’t like her to walk out on work, but maybe she’d needed some time to get her emotions in order after their…what? Argument? Breakup? How could he tell his father the truth of why she had skipped the debriefing when he had no idea what the truth even was?
It was a hell of a thing, he thought later as he sat at his desk, waiting for the travel agent to find him a ticket to Dubai. He’d spent the better part of his adult life avoiding commitment. And now, when he’d finally found the woman he wanted to be with for good, she wanted nothing to do with him. It would have been almost funny if it hadn’t been so pathetic.
And if he hadn’t felt so damned empty.
He rose to walk past Max’s office, glancing at his watch. Over three hours had gone by since she’d walked away from his car. It was hard not to wonder where she was. And yet the last thing he could do was call her. She’d made it very clear that was no longer his prerogative.
Dylan knocked on the open door of his father’s office. “Any word from Max?”
Hal glanced up. “No. I’ve got to say, I’m starting to wonder. It’s not like her to miss a meeting and it’s definitely not like her to just disappear for half the day.”
“Give her a call if you’re worried,” Dylan suggested.
Please.
“I probably will,” Hal said, reaching for the phone.
Dylan made himself walk out of the office, even though everything in him screamed to stay, if only to hear her voice. But he’d heard her voice in the car. It still tore him, the things she’d said. Her hurts had been deep and lasting and it was naive to think they might suddenly evaporate, that like Glory’s sculpture, the wall might transform to an open gate. Maybe at some point she’d get past it, but it wasn’t likely to be soon. And it wasn’t likely to be with him.
“Dylan.”
He turned to see his father coming out of his office, staring at him. Dylan felt the quick clutch of fear.
“What happened? Where is she?”
“Portland General.” Hal paused. “Her father just had a massive heart attack.”
Time passed differently in the hospital than it did in the outside world. In the waiting room, with its glare of fluorescent lights, the minutes crawled by while they wondered and waited. And yet there was no sense of time in this place where they couldn’t see daylight, couldn’t see the movement of the sun. It was like the outside world didn’t exist. It was like they’d always been trapped in this place and this endless moment of uncertainty and fear.
Max tried without success to focus on a magazine. Across the room, a younger couple spoke in urgent tones too low to be overheard. By the door, a gray-haired volunteer in a blue vest sat at a desk with a green phone. Max glanced at the door for the third time in as many minutes, as though doing so would make the surgeon appear.
For hours now, her father had been in the operating room. For hours now, they had waited for word.
Next to her, Cady shifted restlessly. “Do you think we’re ever going to hear from them?”
“Eventually.”
“They could at least give us an update.”
There was no point in being impatient with Cady when she was only voicing what they all thought. “I imagine they have other things to do, Cades,” Max said.
“It’s not like I want them to stop. I’d just like one of the nurses to stick her head in the door and let us know how it’s going.”
“I’m sure it’s going fine.”
