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“La Jolla,” she supplied.
“La Ho-ya,” he repeated incredulously. What kind of a name was that for a place? “You don’t belong in a place like that,” he insisted, “With all those laid-back, surf-obsessed weirdos running around. You’ll go stir-crazy inside a week.”
Spoken like a man who had never traveled outside of Minneapolis. “You’re getting your information from some bad movies made in the seventies, Frank.” She knew that, in his own way, he was concerned about her. That touched her. “I’ll be fine,” she assured him. After debating with herself, she decided to confide in him, at least partially. “I want to turn this little side holding of Grandmother’s into something she would have been proud of.”
Not everything needed to be tampered with, Frank thought. He didn’t want to see her fail. God only knew what sort of repercussions that would have on her work when she returned. Not to mention on her. “Seems to me that if Kate Fortune would have wanted to change it, she would have done it herself.”
Maybe. And maybe there was a reason she hadn’t. “Not necessarily. She might have been too busy.”
He thought of the mountain of details still waiting to be tended to before the campaign was launched. “And you’re not?”
It was time to go. If she let him, Frank could go on like this all afternoon. And she had packing to do. “You can handle it, Frank.”
He rose behind his desk, his voice rising with him. “How will I reach you?”
“You won’t.” She tossed her reply over her shoulder. “I’ll call you.”
When I feel like it, she thought.
She had left everything in her customary meticulous order. Frank had all her notes on the new ad campaign and though she knew for a fact that she was the new blood that had been pumped into the veins of the stodgy department, she also knew that there wasn’t anything here that couldn’t keep, or be handled by someone else, until she returned. She’d done all the preliminary work. All that remained now were the uninspiring details that had to be overseen and implemented.
Kristina placed all thoughts about the department and the pending ad campaign on the back burner and turned her attention to the future.
A new future.
Who knew? This could be the start of something big. She had a feeling…
“Hey, Max!” Paul Henning cupped his mouth with one hand as he shouted above the noise of the crane. “It’s for you.”
He held up the portable telephone and waved it above his head, in case Max couldn’t hear what he was saying.
Max Cooper turned toward the trailer. He’d thought he heard his name being called. The rest of the men were too far away for him to hear one of them. Then he saw his partner waving the telephone receiver.
With a sigh, he took off his hard hat and ran his hand through his unruly dark brown hair. He sincerely hoped that this wasn’t from someone calling about yet another delay. The construction of the new housing development was already behind schedule. The December mudslides had set them all back at least a month. He had his people and the subcontractors working double shifts to try to catch up. The last thing he wanted was to pay the penalty for bringing the project in late.
Every time the phone rang, he mentally winced, anticipating another disaster in the making. Nature didn’t use a telephone, but errant suppliers and subcontractors did, and they could wreak almost the same amount of havoc Mother Nature could.
Replacing his hard hat, he waved at Paul. The latter retreated into the trailer that, at the moment, housed their entire operation. Max followed.
He made his way into the cluttered space, hoping that by the next job they could see about getting something larger. Right now, a new trailer was the least of their priorities.
Paul, a tall, wiry man, was as thin-framed as Max was muscular. He pressed himself against the wall to allow Max access to the telephone.
“We’ve built closets larger than this,” he muttered, still holding the telephone aloft.
Max indicated the receiver. “Who?” he mouthed.
Paul knew who it was, but he thought he’d string Max along for a minute. It appealed to his sense of humor, which hadn’t been getting much of a workout lately.
“She said it was personal,” he whispered.
He was between “personals” right now, Max thought as he took the receiver from Paul. He and Rita had come to a mutual agreement to go their separate ways. Actually, the word agreement was stretching it a little. She’d been screaming something about his “freaking fear of commitment” at the time. Those had been her parting words to him, ending what had otherwise been a rather pleasant, albeit short, interlude.
Warily Max put the receiver to his ear, wondering if Rita had decided to try to make another go of it. He hoped not. He’d kept his relationships short and predominantly sweet—the former fact being responsible for the latter—ever since Alexis.
But then, no one had touched him, or hurt him, like Alexis. And no one ever would.
“Hello?”
“Max? It’s June,” the voice on the other end of the line said. Normally pleasant, June’s voice was anxious and uncertain. “I hate bothering you at work, but I think you’d better come out here. You’re going to want to see this.”
June Cunningham, sixtyish, even-tempered and efficient, was the receptionist at the Dew Drop Inn, the small bed-and-breakfast inn that Max had found himself the unwilling half owner of. He would have sold his share in it long ago, if it wouldn’t have hurt his foster parents’ feelings. John and Sylvia Murphy were the only parents he had ever known, taking in a scared, cocky thirteen-year-old and turning him into a man, when everyone else had elected to pass on him. He owed them more than he could ever hope to repay.
So if they wanted him to take over their half of the inn, he couldn’t very well toss the gift they offered back at them. He left the management in June’s hands and stopped by on Fridays after six to look in on everything. Right now, knee-deep in construction hassles, the inn was the last thing on his mind. When he thought of it at all, it was in terms of it being an albatross about his neck.
He couldn’t imagine anything that would prompt the unflappable June to telephone him here, of all places, and request his presence at the inn. She’d never asked him to come by. What the hell was wrong?
“This?” he repeated. “Exactly what do you mean by ‘this’?”
“Ms. Fortune.”
It was a minute before he reacted. “Kate? She’s dead. She’s been gone for nearly two years.” He remembered seeing an article in the paper saying that the woman’s plane had gone down in some isolated part of Africa or South America, someplace like that. Her lawyer, Sterling Foster, had sent him a letter saying probate would take a long time, considering the size of Kate’s estate, so he should just continue to run it as always. But now it seemed there would be some changes.
“Not Kate,” June quickly corrected. “Her heir. Kristina Fortune.”
This was all news to him, although he had to admit that he’d been rather lax as far as things at the inn were concerned. It hadn’t even occurred to him, when he read about Kate, that whoever inherited her half would be coming by to look the place over.
“She’s there?”
“She’s here, all right.” He heard June stifle a sigh. “And she wants to meet with you. Immediately.”
June took everything in stride. He couldn’t remember ever seeing her hurry. “Immediately?” It was a strange word for her to use. “Immediately?”
There was no humor in the small, dry laugh. June lowered her voice, as if she were afraid