Page 98 of Ten Years and Then…
She knew the answer. It was going to be so hard—so impossible—to say goodbye again, for good again, two days from now.
She didn’t have to.
Last night, she’d thought about what would have happened if she’d thrown caution and everything else to the wind, and asked him to marry her that morning on the quad when she gave him the necklace.
She could do it here. There were jobs in Chicago; it was the second—third?—biggest city in the country.
She could give her notice when she got back to the office on Monday, spend the next two weeks packing up and job searching and then go to him, where he’d already have a new apartment ready for them to move into together.
A month from now, they could be buying furniture together as husband and wife. She’d be Mrs. Nora Keller. Or maybe Mrs. Nora Langley-Keller? He wouldn’t care if she took his name, or hyphenated or if she kept her own.
She’d care, though. She’d want everyone to know she was his wife. She’d carry his name proudly.
But it couldn’t happen. He’d say no—not because he didn’t want it, but because he loved her too much to let her make that kind of sacrifice. No matter how much it broke his heart, or hers.
She took a deep breath, tried to clear her head. She couldn’t be thinking about Daniel now. She was waiting for the CEO of Gateway 2000 to come out of his meeting. She’d managed to convince his assistant to give her ten minutes this morning, and she needed to be completely on her game.
Daniel would tell her the same thing. Nora, this is the kind of thing that could get you a promotion. Forget about me, he’d probably say.
When she saw the man a moment later, stepping out of the Monarch Room in a suit not nearly as fashionable as she’d have expected from a major tech company CEO, Nora found she was able to do exactly that.
Daniel, half an hour later
“You all know what to do?”
Thomas rolled his eyes. “Yes, for the third time. Nobody burned the booth down when you were running the demo yesterday, or when you took Red to first aid. Go tell everyone in that ballroom why fiber optics is the wave of the future.”
Red spoke up. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re looking for excuses not to go get up on that stage for your panel.”
“Which would be really stupid,” Blue added. “You know everything cold, and you look—well, as good as any skinny twenty-three year old in a polo shirt can look.”
Reminding him that he was just a skinny twenty-three year old didn’t really help. But he did know everything that realistically might come up in an hourlong discussion about The Future of High-Speed Residential Internet. The Senior Vice President for National Sales at Comcast, and the Director of Regional Network Marketing at AT&T he’d be sharing the stage with might both have twenty years of experience on him, but there was no way either of them had spent more hours preparing for this panel than he had.
“I get it,” Daniel said. “I’ll be back in an hour.” He wondered if Nora might be in the room to cover the panel. It was something that Modern Computing would probably be interested in, and—so long as she wasn’t sitting directly in his line of sight to distract him—he liked the idea of her seeing him “in action.”
Maybe she could even interview him afterward. It would be cool to be featured in a national magazine. Although there were probably ethics rules against it, now he thought about it.
He shook his head as he headed for the Union Ballroom. Better to put Nora and fantasies about being on the cover of a magazine aside, and just do his job. That approach had gotten him this far, hadn’t it?
Nora, the same time
She probably shouldn’t have been surprised. Of course the CEO of a billion-dollar corporation would have constant demands on his time. Nora had been sitting next to him for nearly thirty minutes, and they’d had maybe ninety seconds of actual conversation in between multiple calls on his cell phone and interruptions from his personal assistant.
And another call now. “Yes, I heard you,” he was saying to whomever was on the other end of the call. “They won’t reschedule? You told them that I’m supposed to be announcing this partnership at three o’clock today?” He listened, then made a frustrated, almost grunting sound. “Fine. Call the travel office, have them call the airport and get the jet ready and file a flight plan. I should be able to get to HQ by one o’clock. That gives us two hours to hammer things out and they can put me on speaker in the ballroom here for the announcement.”
So much for her big interview with the CEO of Gateway 2000. Unless …
No, that was insane. She couldn’t ask him to let her come with him and do a truly in-depth interview with him on his plane. Why would he ever agree to something that ridiculous? Asking a CEO to let her tag along on his private jet was career suicide. Wasn’t it?
“Mr. Whittaker?” He put his phone back in his pocket and turned to her. “I have a proposition for you.”
“Make it quick, Ms. Langley. I’m sure you were listening, I have very little time.”
Now or never. “There’d be more time to talk on your jet. Let me come with you, answer my questions, let me be there at your headquarters while you finalize your agreement with Intel, and it’ll be the cover story for next month’s issue of Modern Computing.”
He stared hard at her. “You can guarantee that?”
Of course not. She’d be lucky if Mr. Brooks didn’t fire her for daring to offer it. “If I bring back a good enough story, my editor won’t have a choice but to put it on the cover.” Even if she did bring back a killer story, Mr. Brooks might fire her anyway. This might be the stupidest thing she’d ever done. But she was committed now.
