Bulls Island Read Free

thing.”
    My body temperature must have been over one hundred degrees. Bruton had offered me the opportunity of my whole career and I had blinked.
    I took the elevator all the way down to the street and began to walk toward Fifth Avenue. I was shaking with nausea and it was all I could do to keep from being ill. I kept walking, sweating all over, and realized after several blocks that I was heading home. I couldn’t work that day. I would be useless if I returned to my office. That was it. I would go home and take the day to sort this out. I pulled out my cell and called my secretary, Sandi.
    “Where are you?” she said. “You’ve got a meeting five minutes ago with the Japanese investors—they’re in the conference room and…”
    Crap. Crap. Crap. Wonderful. I had to go back. What was I thinking? Hadn’t I set this meeting up? How could I forget just like that? What was the matter with me? Okay, I was slightly traumatized! But if I blew the chance to see their presentation on public transportation in Tokyo after we had flown these guys in to meet with the Metropolitan Transit Authority and two of our senior partners, I would be in serious disgrace.
    “I’ll be there in five. Tell them I lost a cap and ran to my dentist to cement it back in. Keep serving muffins and juice. Tell Paul McGrath to show them the slides of the Los Angeles project and to be brilliant, which he always is anyway. I’m on my way…”
    It was going to be a rough day for “the belle.”
    It was. By the time I got home that night at nine-thirty, after a dinner of steak and lobster large enough to feed the New York Giants and a family of six, I was exhausted. All the conversation across the huge table in the private room at the Gramercy Tavern had been about the future of the cities of Tokyo and Nara. For those few hours I had been able to relegate the Charleston assignment to a separate compartment in my mind. But once I was back home, Charleston and J. D. Langley came whooshing through the walls and windows of every room like poison gas. How on earth would I handle this?
    I glanced at my wristwatch. It was almost too late to call Sela. Sela O’Farrell, the closest friend of my entire life, would be finishing up the last dinner seating at her restaurant in Charleston, buying some tourists drinks, and thinking about things on the next day’s menu she needed to discuss with her chef. Sela was a night owl, which was partly why the restaurant business was a perfect match for her in every way. Sela would know what to do.
    She answered on the fourth ring.
    “Hey, you! If you’re calling me at this hour, it must be drama. Aren’t you usually in bed by now?”
    “I hate caller ID,” I said. “Takes all the mystery out of life.”
    “Well, not all of it. What’s going on?”
    “How busy are you? Should I call you tomorrow?”
    “No, heck no. I’m in my office just signing a pile of checks…spill it!”
    A long and mournful groan escaped my throat to set the stage and then I told her the story.
    “Whew!” she said when I was finished. “So, what’s the plan?”
    “I’m thinking that I have to do this or my career at ARC is freaking flattened, no pun intended. So, I’m coming down there, renting a condo in an obscure location, and bringing my smart assistant,Sandi, who can wear a wire and attend all the meetings with J.D. No one will know I was ever there. Ever.”
    “Yeah, sure. That’ll fly.”
    “No, huh? You don’t think I can do this and then slip back into the night?”
    “No.”
    “Crap. So what should I do?”
    “Listen, you’re not going to like what I’m about to tell you, but it needs to be said.”
    “Go ahead. I’ve been waiting years for an honest assessment of my life.”
    Sela sighed long and hard. “Well, girl, here it is. It’s time you came clean. That’s it. You don’t talk to your daddy and he’s as old as Adam’s housecat. That’s wrong because if Vaughn dies before you two reconcile,