Think About Love Read Free Page B

meeting room's double doors. Over dinner it would be difficult to avoid explaining the reasons for her trip to Canada, almost impossible to keep the distance she needed between her private and professional lives.
    She didn't want Cal thinking of her as someone with encumbrances, someone he couldn't count on because of a complex personal life.
    She headed for her own office to pick up her purse, cell phone, and portable computer. Downstairs in the parking lot, the spring evening felt pleasantly warm. She breathed in the salt air from the harbor and remembered childhood days spent running on the grassy hill below Dorothy's house, sea smells carried on the wind, and Sarah laughing as they raced for the water.
    Sarah, who would never laugh again.
    Cal opened the passenger door of his low red sports car as she approached. Better to take separate cars but awkward to tell him so. She'd never felt so awkward with Cal before. Their relations had always been strictly business.
    This was business, too, and of course he wasn't going to be unreasonable about a personal emergency, but it could change the way he thought of her. She'd never to let him down … until now.
    She wondered what her stepfather would say about this whole predicament, and she figured Wayne would probably tell her she should get comfortable with having weaknesses, that maintaining the image of superwoman was an impossible task.
    Better not to make an issue of sharing the ride in Cal's car, she decided.
    "Thanks," she said, slipping into the passenger seat. Leather and horsepower, the red Porsche suited its owner to a "T".
    "I thought Eduardo's," he said as he started the engine.
    Should she tell him before dinner? After?  
    After, she decided. Less time for him to work on getting details from her.
    "How's Tom doing in New York?" she asked when the waiter seated them in a quiet corner of Eduardo's.
    The distraction worked, and they discussed Tom's struggles to make sense of Lloyd's outmoded computer network until the waiter delivered seafood salad to Samantha, and a medium-rare New York steak to Cal.
    He cut a piece from his steak and said, "Once we've got the e-commerce teams in place, you should take some time off."
    Now was the time to tell him she'd be taking tomorrow off, abandoning him in the crucial hours before Friday's event. It shouldn't be hard to say the words, but her throat felt dry. She realized she was hoping for a magic solution that would let her look after both Tremaine's and Kippy's needs without sacrificing either.
    "What about you? Will you be taking time off?"
    "I might grab a week, once the teams are in place and working."
    She speared a prawn with her fork, but her stomach protested at the thought of food. "Where would you go?"
    "Maybe fishing. A week in the mountains."
    Cal hadn't been fishing in more than a year. There'd been that one trip, two months after she started working for him. He and an old friend had flown into the mountains for a week with fishing rods and packs. He'd returned four days later, exploding with questions about events in his absence.
    "No cell coverage in the mountains," she said wryly. "With this new project, you'd never last forty-eight hours."
    "True," he admitted. "I can’t go off the grid, not now. I'll probably visit the family in San Francisco. "
    "Go to Hawaii or Tahiti. You'd still have cell and Wi-Fi, but also beaches and sunshine—and it's harder to hop a shuttle home."
    If he did go to one of those island paradises, she wondered if he'd take a woman with him. Dee, his personal assistant, had mentioned sending flowers to one woman, booking dinner for Cal and another. He was an obviously virile man, but she'd seen little evidence of his private life over the last eighteen months. If he had a steady girlfriend. Dee didn't know about it.
    "What about you, Sam? Where will you go on your vacation?"
    "I haven't decided."  
    She would go to Gabriola Island, help Dorothy clean out the storeroom and hold Kippy,