Page 85 of Fierce

So that was another week when I didn’t break it off with her. But then, that was because she’d seen it my way.

I almost didn’t go to San Francisco after all.

I knew how upset Hemi would have been at the idea. He hadn’t been happy about my limited availability. And as much as I hated the thought of losing him—well, losing him sooner—I was more afraid of what would happen if I gave into him. If I went against my own better judgment, my own urgent priorities, for something that, no matter how my treacherous brain tried to spin it, wasn’t love and never would be. If I lost not just my heart, but my self-respect.

He’d made it more than clear that he wasn’t in this for the long haul, and I couldn’t afford to lose my head. Even if he’d never said a thing, a few minutes of research in any business magazine would have clued me in. It wasn’t that there was gossip about his private life. It was that there wasn’t, because he didn’t have relationships to gossip about. He had arrangements, complete with nondisclosure agreements. I didn’t do arrangements, though, and he didn’t do relationships. So instead, we had something that existed in the uneasy space in between, something I didn’t want to examine too closely, because its balance felt so precarious, the slightest touch could send it toppling and shattering.

So why did I almost not go to San Francisco, knowing that that failure could have been the shove that would break us? Because of Karen.

She was restless all Thursday night. It seemed like every time I fell asleep, she shifted again, and I woke. Finally, sometime in the wee hours of the morning, she sat up, turned on the light, and scrabbled for her pills, then lay down again while I stroked her hair and felt the tension in her body. And ten minutes later, she dashed for the bathroom and lost everything in her stomach.

“Really bad?” I asked, wrestling my way out of my own fatigue to follow her with a glass of water, help her clean up, bring her the medicine so she could try again. To rub her back and try without success not to worry about this.

The migraines, instead of getting better, had been getting worse. The medicines weren’t doing the job anymore, and no matter what the doctor had said last time I’d taken her, she needed something better.

She didn’t answer me, just curled up in the fetal position on the bathroom rug. “Just let me lie here,” she said, her voice thready. “No light.” So I went for a pillow and blanket and covered her up, sat with her a little longer, held her head twice more when she was sick again. And finally, when she said she was better, took her back to bed so we could both get a few hours’ sleep.

“Do you want me to stay here this weekend?” I asked in the morning, suppressing a pang at the thought of Hemi.

Despite everything I’d said, she was getting into her school uniform. “No,” she said. “I’m fine. It’s always worse in the morning, and then it gets better. Anyway, the pills are working now. I’m OK.”

“Next week,” I said, “we’re going back to the doctor again, and I’m going to tell him they need to do more tests or something. I’m going to insist. We’re going to sit there until he listens.”

“We can’t afford tests. You know we can’t.” She sat down on the bed to pull on her tights.

“We’re going to get them anyway.” I smoothed her hair back from her face, and for just a minute, she leaned into my hand. “You sure you wouldn’t rather I stayed, just in case?”

She shook my hand off irritably. “Yes. I’m not ten. I just have a headache.”

I still hesitated, until I got the bright idea of calling Debra. I had a feeling that her services weren’t cheap, but there was no way I could fly across the country without knowing we had a backup plan. And it probably wouldn’t be necessary. Karen wasn’t sick every day. And maybe I could ask Hemi for help paying her, if it came to that. Maybe.

“Sure, hon,” Debra said easily when I made the call. “If she gets feeling real bad and needs to come home, have her give me a call. I’ll take care of her. You go on.”

With that sorted, and a promise from Karen to call me, and Debra too, if she needed us, not to mention my own unannounced plan to call her often enough to get her thoroughly annoyed, I took a car service to the airport on Friday afternoon. A call to Karen from the airport told me that (a) she was fine, and (b) I should stop bugging her, so I decided that for tonight, at least, I would enjoy myself.

My third flight ever, and this time, it was first class, which was as different an experience as Hemi’s wine was from anything I’d ever drunk before. It might not have been a private jet, but it was good enough for me. I didn’t get as much as I should have out of the experience, though, because half an hour after the flight attendants served dinner, I fell asleep, and only woke when we were beginning our descent into the city.

That part of it was worth it, though. The plane banking, turning in a wide circle over the winking necklaces of light marking the path of the bridges that stretched across the dark expanse of the bay, with the entrancing, compact San Francisco skyline, all towers and hills and undulating shoreline, laid out below me like the world’s biggest present.

And when I wheeled my suitcase out of the security area of San Francisco Airport at seven o’clock, Hemi...wasn’t there.

Of course he wasn’t. He was having dinner—a business dinner—with the Brunette Bombshells. I ignored my absurd disappointment and took a cab to the Fairmont Hotel. We started with a thoroughly uninteresting ride down a dark freeway until the lights of the city were visible, then embarked on a much more exciting journey through busy city streets and up ever-steeper inclines, past cable cars with passengers hanging off the outside, the rattle of the underground cable clearly audible together with the merrily clanging bell that announced that I was here. Until, at last, we were climbing one final hill that felt nearly vertical, all the way up to what the driver informed me was the top of Nob Hill. And pulling into a semicircular driveway in front of another grand entrance. More flags fluttering in the breeze, another historic stone building rising above us.

As soon as the cab had had pulled to a stop, a uniformed doorman was reaching for my bag, and I was walking into another impressive lobby, all carved wood and stonework, being handed another keycard across a marble counter, taking a sedate ride to a high floor in a richly paneled, gold-railed elevator car, wheeling my suitcase down a floral-carpeted corridor and into another suite, and doing my best not to feel like a mistress.

Still no Hemi, of course. But every sign of him. This time, we were sharing, and his clothes were hanging in the closet, which made me ridiculously happy. There was a huge vase of red roses on the table, too, their spicy scent perfuming the air. Red for passion, I guessed, which worked just fine for me. Next to that, a media player with a little iPod stuck into it, asking for me to press a button, which I did, filling the room with soft, sexy music. A piano, the sultry purr of Norah Jones, and a whole lot of longing.

And, finally, a tray holding a bottle of red wine, a corkscrew, two glasses, and a note.

Back by 9:30. You’ll have to get started without me this time.

Which made me smile more than a little.

I thought about opening that wine, and then I thought about how delicious it would taste if I were drinking it wearing only Hemi’s favorite bra and underwear, his black heels, and a smile. About how he might feel about that, and what he might do about that. So I got started on the first part of that plan: getting clean, and getting pretty.

And then, all right, maybe I got a little distracted. But in my defense, it was a very, very nice bathroom.

I stepped into the tub, turned on the rainfall-style showerhead to the perfect temperature, closed my eyes, and let the water wash over my hair and down my back. I’d just...hang out here for a minute, I decided. It felt so good after the stress of the night before, followed by a day of dealing with Martine’s demands, the look on her face when she’d told me that Marketing had requested my help, and then the long journey.

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