Seaview Inn

“No, Gran, I didn’t quit,” Hannah explained patiently. “I’m just on vacation for a couple of weeks.”

“Well, you should give it up for good. This is where you belong. You’d be your own boss here.”

No, Hannah thought, she’d be answering to her grandmother, and as annoying as Dave Harrow could be from time to time, he was easier to deal with than Gran.

“Let’s not go there right now, okay?” Hannah pleaded. “I’m here for a couple of weeks and that’s it.”

Her grandmother waved off the explanation as if it were of no consequence. “But you’re still down here on your own time, am I right? Your boss shouldn’t be taking advantage of you like this. Anyone who works as hard as you do deserves to have a vacation that’s really a vacation. A boss who appreciates you would know that.”

“He’s not really taking advantage of me, Gran. I left without much notice. There are a lot of loose ends that need to be tied up. Look, the call shouldn’t take long. You start on that list of renovations and we’ll go over it when I come back inside. I can get better cell phone reception on the porch.”

“Well, you’d best hurry. Some of the things we’re going to need aren’t available on the island. We’ll need to catch the eleven o’clock ferry if we expect to go to the mainland today.”

Hannah grimaced. That was yet another reason not to live in Seaview. It was too inconvenient. If they missed the eleven o’clock ferry, there wouldn’t be another one until four-thirty, too late to head over to the mainland to shop. In all there were only four ferries daily, these two, plus one that left at 6:00 a.m., mostly for people who worked on the mainland, and a final one at eight, which catered mostly to those who’d taken a day trip to Seaview Key, stayed for dinner and then wanted to head back.

“I’ll hurry,” she promised.

She took her cell phone and coffee out to the porch, choosing a comfortable wicker chair at the far end where the sun had created a pool of warmth on the chilly morning. She took a long sip of coffee, then turned her face up to the sun, wishing she didn’t have to make the call. It wasn’t going to go well. Dave hadn’t been happy about her asking for this unplanned vacation, especially after all the months when her schedule had been totally unpredictable because of her chemo treatments.

Reluctantly, she dialed the direct line to his office. “Hey, Melinda, it’s Hannah. Dave was trying to reach me yesterday, but I was traveling and had my phone off. Is he available now?”

“Yes,” his secretary said, then lowered her voice. “But I should tell you he’s on the warpath. Even though you briefed Carl before you left about the deadlines for the Parker account, he blew the very first one and Dave caught the fallout. Ron Parker was furious.”

Hannah muttered a few choice words. Carl Mason was useless, but Dave kept giving him second chances. He’d insisted that Hannah turn her accounts over to him while she was away. It was his fault that things had gone wrong, but she was going to have to bail them all out.

“Look, don’t put me through now. I’m going to call Ron and see if I can smooth things over. Then I’ll call back to speak to Dave.”

“Sure, hon,” Melinda said, but before they could sever the connection Hannah heard Dave in the background.

“Is that Hannah? Put her through right this minute,” he commanded.

“Sorry,” Melinda murmured.

“Not your fault.” She waited for Dave to pick up, then tried to do a preemptive strike. “Melinda filled me in on the problems with the Parker account. I was about to call Ron myself.”

“There wouldn’t be a problem with that account if you’d been handling it yourself,” he grumbled.

Hannah barely resisted the urge to correct him and say there wouldn’t have been a problem if Dave had assigned someone competent to fill in for her. She’d have been wasting her breath.

“Ron’s not going to be pacified with a phone call,” he told her. “You need to get back up here and do your job.”

“You know I can’t do that. There’s a family crisis and I need to handle it.”

“You’ve had a lot of crises lately,” Dave said. “Maybe this job isn’t as important to you as it once was.”

Hannah gasped at his insensitivity. “Do you honestly think I chose to have breast cancer just so I could inconvenience you? Do you think I wanted my mom to die or my grandmother to have difficulty coping with that, so I could take more time off?”

He backed down at once. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have phrased it that way. I know you’ve been through hell, but you’re the best person on this team. When you’re out of the office, it has an impact.”

“Nice save,” she said dryly. “Look, it’s only for a couple of weeks. I gave Carl notes on every single thing that needs to be done, along with the deadlines. Maybe you need to look over his shoulder for the next couple of weeks and make sure he follows through. If that doesn’t work, then I’m not the one to blame.”

Dave sighed. “I know he’s not pulling his weight around here. That’s why I assigned him to work with you. I thought maybe your organizational skills would rub off on him.”

“You always were a dreamer,” she said lightly. It was one of the reasons they’d always worked well together. She’d been his first hire after he and Lou Morgan had opened the firm fifteen years ago. He was a genius when it came to thinking up unique PR campaigns for their clients, but Hannah was the one who kept the projects on schedule, pacified nervous actors and authors and contributed her own share of creative ideas. He also counted on her not to mince words, so she didn’t now. “Dave, you’ve given Carl more than enough chances. Maybe it’s time to think about cutting your losses and letting him go. Get someone in that position who can cut it.”

“You’re probably right,” he admitted with obvious reluctance. “If I hadn’t promised my wife that I’d give the guy a break, I’d have fired him months ago. He’s her nephew and she adores him. Do you know the kind of grief I’m going to get if I let him go?”

“Compare that to the grief you’re already taking from clients like Ron Parker,” she said. “Look, I’ll call Ron now and fix this mess, but there can’t be a next time, Dave. You know that.”

“Yeah, I know it. Hurry back, okay?”

“Two weeks,” she reminded him. “You’ll hardly notice I’m gone.”

“That’s a joke. You weren’t out the door two minutes when we had our first crisis.”

“Careful,” she warned. “I’ll start to think I’m indispensable and you’ll have to give me a raise.”

She hung up slowly, then spent several minutes tamping down her annoyance over Carl’s screwup before calling Ron Parker and apologizing profusely. Fortunately, he was a reasonable guy, and the promise of a few perks on his next PR campaign calmed him down.

“I’m sorry Dave bothered you on your vacation,” he told her. “I was still angry when I spoke to him, so I was blowing off steam. I was never going to take my business elsewhere. You’re the best, Hannah. So is Dave.”

“And we love working with you. We’ll get together for lunch as soon as I’m back in town. You pick the place and it’s on me.”

“It ought to be on that idiot Carl Mason,” he said. “Enjoy your vacation and don’t worry about any of this, okay?”

“Thanks for understanding.”

When she finally got off the phone, she felt drained. Her head was still pounding, though the caffeine and aspirin were starting to kick in. One more cup of coffee and she might be able to cope with Grandma Jenny and whatever she had in store to destroy her peace of mind today.

* * *

“I don’t understand why you’re going to Florida,” Jeff told Kelsey as she packed her suitcase. “This is no time to go running off when we have so many things that need to be settled.”

“Things are settled, Jeff. No matter what you say, I am not going to marry you, and that’s final.”

“But we’re having a baby!” he said, as if she needed reminding.

“I’m the one having it,” she retorted. “Not you. I’m the one whose entire life has to go on hold because we were stupid one night and had sex without a condom.”

Jeff paled. “And that’s my fault. I accept that. It was stupid, but no matter how many times I say I’m sorry, it won’t change anything. Now we have to deal with where we are. I love you. I want to marry you. I want us to be a family. I wanted that before you got pregnant and I want it now.”

“And I’ve told you that I’m not ready to get married,” she said.

They’d been arguing like this for two solid weeks now, ever since she’d seen a doctor and told Jeff about the baby. Sometimes she wished she’d kept the news to herself, but she’d known how unfair that would be. What she hadn’t realized was how pressured she’d feel now that Jeff wanted to do what he saw as the right thing.

For him, the baby was only a tiny blip on a road he’d apparently mapped out when they’d first started dating last year. For her it changed everything. It took away her options and backed her into a corner. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him or that she didn’t envision them having a future together...eventually. It was about being forced into making a premature decision, one far too important to be made in haste.

She was a child of divorce, and while her mother had done everything in her power to see that Kelsey never wanted for anything, Kelsey had never stopped wishing that she’d come from a two-parent home. She and her dad barely had any relationship at all beyond an occasional check at Christmas or for her birthday and even rarer phone calls. In the beginning she’d seen him at least occasionally, but then he’d remarried, had more kids and the kind of family life she’d always wanted.