Marry in Haste

She didn’t mind. She accepted the fact that she was the least senior of the group.

Until a few moments ago.

Abby checked her watch. No time for lunch today, though she was so excited she wouldn’t have been able to eat.

She immediately started work updating the schedule and was transcribing the tape when at ten after one, Nancy and Barbara returned. They were late, Abby noted, and they’d left five minutes early.

They probably thought no one had noticed, but now Abby knew that Valerie must have. Abby never left early and was never late. In fact, it was rare for her to take the full hour allotted to her.

Abby could hear the women talking in the office they shared. Through the fogged glass, she could see that Valerie was back in her office. She had to tell them Abby’s new position soon.

Sure enough, she heard Valerie’s voice on the intercom.

Feeling cowardly, Abby grabbed her purse and slipped away from her desk. She took the stairs to the floor below and headed toward the vending machines.

She should eat something so she would be sharp this afternoon, but her stomach rebelled at the thought of food. Abby settled for a plastic container of orange juice though she had to force herself to drink it.

No one else was in the tiny snack bar so Abby closed her eyes and took several deep breaths, trying not to think about the fact that she was about to embark upon the greatest opportunity of her career.

Even though it was only for a month, Abby would forever after be able to say on her résumé that she had worked as Acting Executive Assistant to Parker Laird, CEO of Laird Drilling and Exploration.

She would be an experienced Executive Assistant.

Abby threw away the empty orange juice container, then stopped by the ladies’ room to touch up her makeup and comb her hair.

She heard the voices even before she pushed open the door to the outer sitting area.

“I heard what she said, but I still don’t understand!” Nancy’s angry voice bounced off the tiled floor and walls of the rest room area. “One of us should be in charge while she’s gone, not Abby.”

Abby froze.

“Oh, it makes perfect sense.” Barbara’s voice was moderated.

“Yeah, right. You’ve been here six years, I’ve been here three, and Abby’s got less than two months under her belt. Perfect sense.”

“It’s not worth getting angry over.”

“Maybe you don’t mind spending the rest of your working career as a secretary to a glorified girl Friday, but I want to know that someday, I can aspire to be...that girl Friday!”

Barbara laughed. “Then pay attention. How many times has Valerie gone on vacation?”

“She never goes on vacation.”

“Right. And now she’s going to be gone for an entire month, a month in which Parker Laird will discover how much he depends on her because things are not going to run smoothly with Abby in charge.”

“Which is why one of us should be in charge.”

“Which is why one of us is not in charge.”

There was a silence.

Abby tried to understand what Barbara was saying, but couldn’t.

Nancy apparently couldn’t, either. “I don’t get it.”

“Valerie wants to have a job when she gets back—her well-paid, perk-laden job. She’s got Parker thinking she’s indispensable. If either of us took her place, Parker would discover that we can do the job just as well as she can, but Abby will mess up so much, Parker Laird will be thrilled when Valerie comes back.”

“She is so smart!” Nancy said, awe in her voice. “I’m going to remember this.”

And so would she, Abby vowed and slipped out of the rest room.

So she was expected to fail.

Well, then she wouldn’t. Abby climbed the stairs back to the twenty-sixth floor. She’d prove everyone wrong. She could do this job, she knew it.

Now all she had to do was prove it to Parker Laird.

CHAPTER TWO

THE following Monday, Abby arrived on the twenty-sixth floor at seven o’clock in the morning. She was armed with pieces of paper on which she’d scribbled the last-minute instructions Valerie had telephoned from the airport in Houston and astonishingly, again from Athens, waking Abby up in the middle of the night.

Quite frankly, Abby hadn’t relaxed until she’d called the cruise line to see if the ship had sailed. Even then, it wouldn’t surprise her if Valerie managed a ship-to-shore call.

Abby automatically sat at her own desk, then smiled when she remembered she was entitled to use Valerie’s office for the next month. Nancy and Barbara would be sharing receptionist duty. While she transferred her nameplate, calendar and glass paperweight from her desk to Valerie’s, Abby made a mental note to inform Mr. Laird of their schedule.

Arms full, she fumbled with the key to Valerie’s office door, the scratching sounds loud in the silence. Though always quiet, the twenty-sixth floor seemed eerie just because Abby knew she was alone.

The first thing she did after dumping her armload on the desk was to put Valerie’s nameplate in the drawer and replace it with her own. Abby had invested in the heavy etched glass because the design looked substantial, yet feminine, and more important than the brown plastic plates Laird issued to its employees. Beside it, she set the matching calendar.

The paperweight, though also of a heavy glass, wasn’t part of the set. Floating in the oval were foreign canceled stamps, reminding Abby of the places she could travel if she kept working toward her goal. She set the paperweight by the computer monitor.

Before she started to work, Abby drew the blinds all the way to the top of the windows and stared across the city of Houston. An orange sun burned through the exhaust haze as rush-hour traffic clogged the freeways.

No one in her family could understand the appeal of the big city to Abby. “Full of people, noise, traffic and pollution,” they said.

But Abby felt the excitement and energy—she’d yield on the pollution.

The city—this building—was where things happened and now Abby was an important part of it all.

Or she would be as soon as she figured out what to do next. Sorting through her notes, Abby shook her head. For a week, she’d been Valerie’s shadow and the recipient of volumes of minutiae, yet she wasn’t as secure in her knowledge of the routines as she’d like to be. It seemed that no day was a typical day, and Valerie kept entirely too much information in her head. She dispensed pieces of information out of context and whenever she remembered.

Abby decided that she’d start an instruction journal for the next time someone had to fill in as Executive Assistant.

She spent several minutes transferring notes into the master schedule, an oversized portfolio, and tossing snippets of paper before discovering a lump underneath the bottom layer.

A cassette tape. Mr. Laird’s cassette tape. It had probably been on Valerie’s desk when Abby dumped the papers onto it.

Popping the tape into the machine, she put on the headphones.