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Rob made it easy to lose myself in business, since Salvatore Dex, one of the key shareholders on the board, had tipped Rob off to a plan by four other key shareholders to sell to SonicCom, which would put SonicCom in control of almost half the company. Salvatore was an old friend of Adam’s, one who was evidently still loyal after my eight-month absence.
“This is happening, Oliver. We can’t just pretend it isn’t.” Rob paced back and forth in my office, his hands raking through his hair and his tie hanging loose. “You can’t keep disappearing. I called you all weekend and you never answered.”
“I was . . . busy.”
“Busy fucking your employees,” he spat.
I was across the room with my hands fisting his shirt before I’d even thought about it. I realized what I was doing as I stared into his surprised eyes, my face inches from his, and I relaxed my grip. “I didn’t mean for this to happen, Rob. I didn’t plan it.”
“It’s not exactly kosher,” he said in alow voice. “I don’t have a problem with it, unless it’s keeping you from focusing on the things that need your attention.”
I dropped my hands to my sides. “Sorry, Rob. It’s complicated. But I’m here. The MLB deal appears to be coming through. And I want a new counsel on as soon as possible. Any progress?”
Rob shrugged. “Met a candidate last week who might be promising. A woman. Maybe you could interview her.”
“Set it up.” I heard my voice, a low growl. I added, “Please.”
Rob turned to walk out and then turned back around. “Do you want your girl in the meeting?”
“Ms. O’Dell is notmy girl.” My voice was icy.
Rob spread his hands in front of him. “Sorry. Look, I don’t know how to handle this situation.”
That made two of us.
“She doesn’t need to be present. Let’s make it happen.” I walked to my desk and buzzed Pamela. “Pamela, can you come in here, please?”
Pamela opened the door, her face professional but wary. “Yes, sir?”
“Come in.” I waved her to the couch. “We need to schedule an interview with this lawyer.” I handed her the resume Rob had given me. “And we’ll need some materials gathered for the MLB meeting next month.” I gave her all the details and she promised to make it happen.
When Rob and Pamela had both left my office I walked to the windows and stared out at the city below me. How had everything changed so much in such a short time? Icouldn’t deny the anger I felt at Holland, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to write her off completely. Though she’d brought the latest emotional turmoil, she’d also pulled me from the darkness in which I’d been lost after the death of my parents. I braced my hands on the window and shook my head, feeling warring emotions threatening to explode inside me. She’d dangled the one thing I’d never had, and then she’d ripped it away the next instant. I didn’t know if I could ever forgive her for that. But I knew for sure I was still in love with her despite it.
I ignored several texts from Holland and left the office at exactly six, taking myself home and pushing through the toughest workout I’d done in months, hoping to reach an exhaustion deep enough to sleep, hoping maybe tomorrow things would be clearer.
CHAPTER 22
Holland
Iwatched Oliver walk out my door and down the hall with a sinking feeling like finality. Something deep inside me throbbed with aching pain, the ragged edges of a wound so recently healed had been ripped open again. He was gone. I knew it as surely as I knew I was pregnant, and my life had changed and changed again over the course of a short month. My legs felt as if they would crumble beneath me. I closed the door and stumbled to my bed, curling into a ball and lying there. I fell asleep that way, willing my mind to stop, trying to keep from turning over and over again the way things had happened. The way he’d left.
Artificial insemination was not something I’d seriously considered. Delia believed it was a viable option, but the way I saw it, I had until I was forty to have a family the traditional way. That was a lot of years between now and the day I might walk into a sperm bank looking for a father to my unbornchildren. It was funny how things worked out. Nothing in my life had ever really gone according to plan, despite the things I sketched out and carefully detailed in my notebook. Oliver hadn’t been part of the plan, and getting pregnant now—on the brink of the professional success I’d been working toward—was absolutely not something I’d intended. In the bigger scheme of things, though, falling in love and having a child seemed like exactly what I wanted. But not like this.
Oliver left because he believed I’d lied to him. He believed I’d tricked him, manipulated him, and that I was a person capable of perpetuating a lie for my own purposes. For money. The idea made me almost physically sick. The knowledge that he thought of me like that—as a woman capable of playing a man for money . . . I couldn’t understand it. I’d been honest with him. I’d been open and clear. And as soon as I knew I was pregnant, I’d told him. I had expected nothing.
But I hadn’t expected him to turn it around and accuse me of planning the entire thing either.
As the days passed, anger replaced the ragged pain I felt. I was not the kind of person Oliver believed me to be. I might have come from nothing, might not have the money and the privilege he’d always had, but that didn’t mean I spent my life looking for ways to get it from other people. I’d spent every single day of my life figuring out how to do things for myself, learning how to build myself up from nothing and how to find a security no one could take away from me. I thought Oliver understood that. I thought he knew me.
I was wrong.
I had canceled on Pamela more than once, and it had been a long time since we’d really talked. I agreed to meet with her Friday. I wasn’t in a place where I really wanted to talk, or to trust anyone, but I also realized I needed friends. And Pamela was a single mom—something I might need some insight about.
“That bad, huh?” Pamela said, sliding into the booth across from me at the café around the corner from work. I hadn’t met her in the office because I was afraid of running into Oliver. My office seemed to be off-limits for him, but any common space in the executive tower—including my beloved coffeehouse—was ripe for a run-in that I didn’t want to have.
“Am I that transparent?”
“Don’t look for a second career in poker, that’s all I’m saying.” Pamela’s eyes twinkled as she smiled, the freckles across the bridge of her nose giving her a sweet and nonthreatening look. “What’s up?”
