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“Maggie? What’s up?”
“Are you still home?”
“Just on my way out the door … Why, is there a problem?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“What’s happened?” His tone sharpened noticeably.
“I don’t want to talk about it over the phone. Can I come to your place?”
“I really need to get to the office. People are waiting for me.”
Her fingers tightened around the phone. “I’d really like to talk to you alone.”
“It’s a pretty big building and it will be mostly empty. We’ll find somewhere.”
Damn. But she could tell that she wasn’t going to convince him to do anything different. So she was just going to have to suck it up and go meet him.
“Fine,” she managed, trying to keep the snap of frustration out of her tone with limited success. “I’ll just see you there.”
“The security guys will give you a pass. Just tell them who you are when you get there. Are you far away?”
She calculated in her head. “No. Half an hour maybe.” Depending on the trains or traffic. Alex’s offices were in the financial district, near Wall Street. Right where you’d expect a wheeler-dealer like him to play.
“Okay, I’ll see you then. We’ll talk after I get everyone organized.”
Maggie’s mood hadn’t improved much when she reached Alex’s offices, her brain still whirling with an endless recital of pros and cons and possibilities. It was ridiculous. Surely she was old enough to know what she wanted? And what Will was offering was what she had always said she’d wanted.
She cut the circle of thoughts off with an effort and accepted a security pass from the uniformed guard who approached her as she walked into the soaring glass-and-steel lobby of Alex’s building.
She’d been here before, had come to poke around the lobby and try to get a feel for the man on one of her weekends at home while she’d been studying him. She didn’t remember the design being quite so cold then. There was a huge sculpture of—an eagle maybe—some sort of soaring bird, wings back, beak thrusting forward in dark bronze dominating one corner of the foyer space.
Energy. Drive. Homing in on the target.
Yep, that was pretty much Alex.
The elevator whisked her up forty floors in about a quarter of the time it took the ancient rumbly lift at Deacon to travel four. The doors swooshed open like something from Star Trek and disgorged her into a discreetly lit reception space that was currently empty. It was less steely than the foyer downstairs but it was still heavy on gleaming surfaces and the minimalist approach to interior design.
She looked around but there wasn’t much to give a clue about which direction she was supposed to go. She couldn’t hear any voices. She couldn’t hear much of anything. Apparently the soundproofing was pretty damned good in Alex’s kingdom.
Hopefully the same was true beyond the reception walls. That was where she might have a chance of telling Alex about Will without anything else happening.
Or, she could just turn right around and go home and pull the covers over her head as the knots in her stomach were pretty much urging her to do.
But the knots were wimps. And she, Maggie Louella Jameson, was anything but.
No wimps allowed in baseball or anywhere else.
She pulled out her phone again, getting ready to text Alex to ask where the hell he was, when Gardner appeared at the glass doors beyond the reception desk and came toward her with an apologetic expression on his face.
“Sorry, Maggie, I got held up on a call just after they rang to say you were coming up. You haven’t been here before, have you?”
She shook her head, grateful for the sight of a familiar face, for anybody at all at this point. “No.”
“Okay.” He gave her a quick orientation on where everything was as he ushered her through the doors and led her down a hallway. Her heels sank into plush dark gray carpet that silenced their footsteps. They walked past a series of offices, the walls between the doors hung with huge black-framed photos of craggy snow-covered mountains, before they came to another huge reception-type area with two desks that faced each other framing a big black door.
Gardner paused. “That’s Alex’s office. He pointed at the door. He said he wanted to see you first. My office is just around the corner and the conference room we’ve been using is down that way.” He nodded toward another hallway that led off to the right. “Call me when you’re done if you get lost.” He smiled again, distractedly, and hurried off. It was the closest she’d ever seen the unflappable Gardner come to looking harried, which said something about the current level of craziness that they were experiencing. She waited until he’d vanished down the hallway before she took a deep breath and walked into Alex’s office.
