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CHAPTER TWO
After the first few weeks in that damn bed, Lissa knew with a sickening certainty that there was no way a hospital would ever be a comfortable place. She’d tried and tried, but no matter what you did, within the strict guidelines set by the hospital, it remained bleak and nerve-wracking. Part of her desperately wanted to hire someone to paint the walls bright red or something else outrageous. Not that she particularly cared for red walls, but it would shake off the monotony of the place.
Of course the room was meant for sick people. It was a place for taking care of those who needed care.
Lissa needed care, but she wasn’t sick. Even her doctor admitted she was healthy as a horse, assuming the horse was unable to get up off its back, had to lie with its feet in the air, was forced to eat hospital food, and was pregnant with triplets.
Yeah, that kind of horse. Huge-bellied with more kids than she thought possible. Just not sick, except for being sick of the damn hospital.
Her care was all precautionary stuff. She could’ve gotten a bed at home that would be just as uncomfortable and hired a cook and avoided the abysmal hospital food, but the doctor insisted that she needed to be monitored, in case she went into labor. And being in bed all the time, she needed nurses to make sure she didn’t get bedsores or blood clots. So everything that was being done was to keep bad things from happening.
And the doctor insisted she had to be in the hospital. Hell, if she went home she’d miss out on having her blood pressure and heart rate on permanent display. Who’d want to miss out on all that? Besides her.
She was doing it for the babies. Once she’d decided that she could see herself as a mother, everything became about the babies, especially since there were three of the little tykes. The doctor suggested “reducing” the pregnancy, but that was basically aborting one to let her body take better care of the survivors. That didn’t sit well with her. No, it was all or nothing, and she wouldn’t consider nothing.
They were six months along and she didn’t know their sex. She didn’t want to know. A large sign pasted on the door served as a reminder: “Mention the sex of the patient’s children and die!” it said. Even so, twice now she’d had candy-stripers almost blurt it out. She managed to stop them before she had to order their execution, but she had no serious hope that the babies would come to term, or however close they got, before some overeager do-gooder would decide that she HAD to know.
Lissa liked surprises. She also liked that refusing to learn the sex annoyed people who made other people’s business their own. She was getting her fair share of surprises. First her lover had disappeared, more or less. At any rate he’d become unreachable. The triplets were the next surprise—they counted as two, in fact. First, there had been finding out that she was pregnant, and then learning that happiness came in threes, at least in her case.
“I always thought I might have several children,” she told her sister, Joan. “I just didn’t expect they’d all come the same day.”
“You never do things the way other people do,” Joan said. “It’s endearing.”
The discomfort didn’t bother her as much as she expected. Having her hands ripped from the day-to-day events in her life, being unable to take part in her business, bothered her more. She didn’t care that much about doing the routine things, but that was how you monitored your business. Now she had to run it by remote. She couldn’t grow it that way, but at least she needed to keep it afloat until she could get back to it.
So it was boredom that made her smile when she saw Tina Peters opening her door. She was delighted to see her…and she didn’t even like Tina all that much.
“Tina! Come in, sit down, bring me up to date.”
Tina was an elegant blonde, carefully coiffed, well dressed in a business suit that was very feminine and all business, and a face that was all smiles, most of which Lissa thought were fake. They looked phony as a three-dollar bill.
Tina took a chair. “You relax, Lissa. Things are under control.”
The smiles and assurances made Lissa uneasy. You didn’t hire people because you wanted friends, but to grow the business, to make it run smoothly. She knew Tina to be a hard but capable woman. She was efficient. Being honestly friendly wasn’t her thing. She hadn’t paid it much attention before, but now she was seeing Tina the way her clients did. Tina was trying to impress her, and the smiley show was unsettling. Serious clients weren’t fooled by smiles any more than she was.
“Great, good news. But what things are under control?”
“Everything.”
“That’s not an answer, Tina. I need specifics. What are you controlling? Which accounts are you working on? I don’t want assurances, I want—I need—details: tedious, picky, nagging, and niggling details.”
“Tomorrow I have a meeting with Tom Acker about a project in Europe.”
“Tina, that is a generalization… What project? Where in Europe? Where are you meeting him? What’s our role?”
Tina scowled. “You are supposed to be taking it easy.”
“And how can I do that when I have no information? How do I relax when I don’t know what’s going on?”
“You’re impossible to please, Lissa. I’m running things in your place and they are going smoothly. Do you want me to do that or prepare reports and make presentations to you? I can’t realistically do both. If you insist on running things from a hospital bed…” she cocked her head, “with your head below your womb, apparently, then you need someone else.”
“Look, Tina, I’m not trying to micromanage you. I do appreciate what you are doing. You’ve stepped up and are keeping the business going. It’s just that I can’t put my mind on pause for three months. I don’t know how. I’m stuck here all day with no connection to the world but the visits you and my sister make. I need juicy business problems to tackle. It’s my body that’s confined to bed, not my brain.”
Tina sighed. “Okay. I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you something to work on. Acker’s proposal needs work. I’ll messenger over what he’s given me and my notes, and I’d appreciate any ideas you have. Tomorrow we are just meeting to discuss a general association—the mechanics of how we will work together, and it would be nice to be able to tell him he will have a full-blown Lissa Edwards proposal once we move along.”
“Yes! Okay, Tina, that would be wonderful.”
“Then I can deal with the rest as I see fit?”
“Yes. I suppose you’ll have to.”
The woman stood up. “Then I better get back. The staff is running some background checks on Acker and his past work. All I know about him is what’s been in the press. I’d better know more than that before I meet him, or I won’t know what buttons to push. If I screw up, my boss will chew my ass out. She’s tough.”
“You bet she will. So get that document over here first thing. And send the laptop from my office too. It has some things on it I want to check.”
Tina looked uncomfortable. “I suppose so.”
“I’m going to need my laptop to write out my feedback, that feedback of mine that you’d be so delighted to have.”
“Okay.” A question appeared on the woman’s face, hanging there, waiting for gravity or something to dislodge it. Finally it came off. “What about after the birth? Will you come right back to work? Work from home? What will you do then?”
“When I decide, I’ll let you know.” Lissa smiled to herself. She wasn’t being gruff, she simply hadn’t thought about it. Being pregnant had seemed unreal. Being her was unreal. Having the babies was unreal. Things would get real soon enough, though. And she hadn’t begun to think about it.
When she left, Lissa watched after her. It took a moment to realize she was trying to analyze the unsettled feeling she got after each of Tina’s visits. It was vague, a hunch, but she was certain the woman was up to something. Of course, there wasn’t much she could do about it, no matter what it was, and knowing the specifics probably wouldn’t put a brighter face on thing
s. She was stuck. That didn’t keep her from trying to pin it down.
Under normal circumstances, Lissa wasn’t the greatest businessperson in the world; she had a great reputation for her skills with analysis, but running a business involved more than that. If she were more of a businessperson, someone who promoted themselves, her consultancy would be far bigger. Still, she made good money and was well known, and she’d been involved in enough high-powered negotiations to smell a rat when a dead one was under the table. Like now.
“Your lunch.” She looked up to see a sickeningly cheery candy-striper bringing in a plastic tray.
“I was just thinking of dead rats,” she said. The cheery face improved with a look of puzzlement. As she brought the tray to the bed, Lissa’s quick look at the array of tiny plastic containers told her she wasn’t in for Indian cuisine today.
“That’s my lunch?”
“The pudding is lovely today,” the woman said, sounding like she almost believed it.
“If you say so, although in civilized countries that sort of offering would be considered an affront to all that’s holy.”
“You are so clever,” the woman said.
“Not clever enough to find a way to get a real meal in here,” she said, sighing. She let her thoughts slip away from the noxious tray and to the manner of skullduggery Tina Peters might be engaging in. The topic was no less irritating, but she could at least fantasize chasing Tina through the streets of New York with a bullwhip if her suspicions were correct.
There wasn’t a damn thing she could do about the lunch.
