Chapter 5
Caleb Marshall told himself not to be a heartless ass and to make the damn call.
It was already four, which meant it was after ten in Paris. Pretty soon it would be too late to phone, and he knew he needed to get it over with today.
So he stopped procrastinating, hit Send on his email, and reached over for his phone.
He’d known Wes since first grade, but he hadn’t talked to him in more than two years. He hated making calls like this.
“Fuck,” Wes said, answering on the second ring without any semblance of a greeting. “If even you are making a pity call, then I must be in really bad shape.”
Typical.
“Are you?”
“What do you think?”
“I have no idea. But I’m sorry about your mom.” Caleb said the words automatically since they were the ones he’d called to say. They felt artificial though, as if they weren’t the ones that needed to be spoken.
“Yeah. How did you hear?”
“I ran into your dad the other day. What’s the prognosis?”
“Less than six months? They don’t really know. They’ve got nothing left to try.”
“And there are no clinical trials or anything?”
“No. There’s nothing to hope for here.”
Caleb didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say, and he didn’t like feeling that way. He was tempted to end the conversation quickly, but if he had a real friend in the world, it was Wes.
“Are you coming home anytime soon?” he asked at last.
“I’m going to try to get there in a couple of weeks.”
“Good. Give me a call when you’re in town.”
“Will do. Any new trauma with you?”
“I don’t do trauma.”
“I guess the one was enough for any lifetime.”
A brief cringe shuddered through Caleb at the words.
“It wasn’t a trauma.”
“Yeah, it was. One that lasted more than a year.”
Caleb sat in silence, his whole body tense for a moment before he made himself relax. This was why he hadn’t wanted to make this call, why he hadn’t touched base with Wes for so long.
His friend knew everything—his entire history—even things that didn’t need to be remembered.
Caleb wasn’t that helpless boy anymore. He’d constructed a life to ensure he wasn’t. And he didn’t like to be reminded of who he used to be.
“Well, maybe I can catch you when you’re in town,” he said at last.
“Still the same old Caleb. The minute it turns real, you’re out.” Wes sounded resigned, not annoyed. “But thanks for calling anyway.”
After saying goodbye, Caleb set down the phone and tried to focus again on his email.
His father had died in his sixties and his mother a few years ago.
He had a lot of family still in Baltimore, but he’d never really felt connected to them.
There was no one left who really knew him anymore. No one but Wes.
He brushed away the thought—and the memories it evoked—so he could work. He had other things to focus on now anyway.
And a date tonight he was looking forward to.
Caleb had a long-standing habit of working in the office on Sunday afternoons.
He usually took Saturdays as a break, except for email and the occasional phone call, but by Sunday morning he was itching to get back to all the work waiting to be done in the office. So years ago he’d given up on the pretense of a weekend and just started going in.
His staff technically had the weekend off, but a lot of them ended up coming in on Sunday afternoons anyway.
It made things easier for him, so he never tried to stop them.
He’d been in the office for five hours already, since eleven that morning, and he’d completed the project he’d wanted to get done today. He wasn’t meeting Kelly until seven, so he’d started to go through some of his email before he’d called Wes.
His inbox was a bottomless pit. Anytime he got even close to clearing it out, it would pile up again in less than an hour. Even with Linda culling through it several times a day, they never made any progress.
Sometimes he was tempted to just delete his account and tell everyone to contact him by mail or phone. He was in charge here. What could they do? There were plenty of executives who demanded companies adapt to their eccentricities. Maybe refusal to use email would be his.
Even as he stared at the screen right now, at just after four on a Sunday afternoon, three more emails came in, and he felt the familiar tightening at the back of his skull at the thought of all the email still waiting for him.
He was replying to one of the messages Linda had tagged as priority when she tapped on his office door and walked in. She was a plain, quiet woman in her fifties. She’d been his assistant for fifteen years, and she was always in the office when he was.
“Here’s the information you wanted on Miss Watson,” she murmured, placing a file in his inbox. “And are you available for a call from Richard Helms?”
Caleb made a face but nodded his affirmation as he reached for the file Linda had just put together. “Give me fifteen minutes.”
When Linda left his office, he opened the file to find a picture of Kelly, standing with a friend of hers outside a stone building. She wore jeans and a fitted T-shirt, and her hair was pulled into a long ponytail. She was smiling broadly, as if she’d been laughing.
She looked different in the casual clothes, but she had the same fresh beauty—glowing with a kind of innocence that was impossible to ignore. As if she wasn’t jaded and corrupted by experience with the world.
She’d said that appearances could lie, and he knew it was true, but he still felt that pull of attraction and curiosity. Like she was a quest that must be undertaken.
He genuinely hadn’t known if she would agree to a second date with him. He’d believed her when she’d said she didn’t do seconds. He was a little disappointed that she’d given in so easily, but another round of sex like the first one they’d had would do a lot to ease that disappointment.
He glanced through the information on her that Linda had collected. Twenty-seven. The only daughter of Mel and Irma Watson, who had obviously had her very late.
She’d gotten through high school without any honors and then had gone to an expensive art school. She’d started building her business as a pet artist immediately afterward, and nearly everything available online about her was connected to her work.
She’d never been married. Never been arrested. Never done anything particularly noteworthy.
There was no reason she should be so fascinating to him. But the sex had been really good. That was reason enough, as far as he was concerned.
Sex had been boring lately. He dated often enough but never for very long. The women would start to whine or cling or demand he change his habits. So he’d send them an expensive gift and end it with as little mess and drama as possible.
More and more, he’d been using women from an expensive escort service since it was easier and cleaner. But that got old after a while too.
Kelly was the first woman to leave him wanting more in a really long time.
After reading the file, he slid it in his top drawer and tried to focus on work again. He had to talk to Richard Helms, who led his marketing division. Helms was putting up a fight about Caleb’s directive to trim the marketing staff by ten percent, so now Caleb had to deal with the headache.
He didn’t take pleasure in layoffs. They were unfortunate but necessary in the current environment. Sometimes hard decisions had to be made to protect the company—even if it meant hurting people in the process.
One of the reasons he was sitting where he was now was because he could make the hard decisions without flinching.
Business was business. And taking it personally was always a mistake.
Almost three hours later, he was leaving the building, having gotten through the conversation with Helms and two more hours of work besides.
The cute blonde who was temporarily working building security in the lobby smiled at him as he walked by.
He smiled back. They’d had an eye flirtation going on for a few weeks now ever since she’d begun the job—filling in for one of the regular staff who was out for surgery. As soon as her temporary position was over, he was definitely planning to give her a good fuck.
He had no doubt she’d be amenable to the idea.
He stopped at the coffee shop next door to grab a coffee and mentally cringed when he saw who was behind the counter.
He never should have screwed that redhead.
He’d known she worked next door to his building, so he would likely continue to see her occasionally.
They’d had one hot night, and he would have been satisfied with the encounter, but she’d kept coming on to him in the days afterward until he’d had to be rude to get her to back off.
She looked at him now like he was some sort of monster as she coldly handed him his coffee.
It had been one time, and he’d never claimed to want anything but sex. If she’d imagined something else might happen afterward, then she’d deluded herself.
He didn’t do relationships. He simply didn’t have time. He liked women and he liked sex but only if things were kept simple.
And he hated this lingering messiness, a silly girl’s attempt to guilt him into thinking he’d treated her poorly.
He forgot about the redhead as soon as he’d crossed the street, walking the two blocks to the hotel bar where he’d arranged to meet Kelly.
He arrived a few minutes after seven and glanced around to see if she was there yet.
When there was no sign of her, he went to the bar and ordered a scotch, glancing down the line of stools and idly admiring the long legs of one of the women sitting on the opposite corner. He glanced up, but she wasn’t pretty enough to interest him, so he let his gaze move on.
At a quarter after seven, Caleb was starting to get annoyed. Being a few minutes late for a date was normal. Women seemed to do it on purpose so they could make an entrance or feign a degree of disinterest. But Caleb was not used to waiting this long for anyone.
She better not have stood him up.