The woman she’d eaten dinner with was warm, open, and genuinely funny in the way that didn’t perform itself. A scientist who cared about things and had never learned—or never bothered to decide—that caring less was more efficient. Who’d had at least one ex-girlfriend. And no mention of a current one.
A woman Sawyer found more captivating by the minute.
But she was also, in so many words, an adversary. A woman who could potentially cost her company an eighty-million-dollar expansion project. That was the reality. That was the document they’d verbally signed in front of nineteen thousand people in the middle of a forest. That was what this was.
Sawyer Alburn had not built a multi-billion-dollar company by letting herself mistake a distraction for a direction.
She was also aware that she was not quite acting like herself, as evidenced by the ten gallons of diesel currently sitting beside Nellie’s porch.
Herporch. This was Sawyer’s cottage, Sawyer’s land, Sawyer’s domain. Yet this infuriatingly confident—but somehow not even the slightest bit cocky—woman had strolled in and turned everything upside-down.
Sawyer banged her head against the steering wheel a few times, thinking she ought to knock some sense into herself. Visions of Nellie Fuller’s plump lips and freckled cheeks swam behind her eyelids.
“Well, that didn’t work,” she grumbled to herself.
She hastily put the car in reverse.
7
CHAPTER 7 – NELLIE
The hold music Alburn Systems used was minimalist jazz that had been engineered, Nellie was fairly certain, to make callers feel they were wasting everyone’s time, including their own.
She’d been on hold for four minutes, sitting on the cottage porch with her secondary pack already loaded and her topo maps spread across the railing.
“Ms. Fuller.” Martha’s dry tone finally greeted her. “How can I help you?”
Nellie shifted the phone, already irritated that she had been forced to call Sawyer’s office with a matter that by no means or by any stretch of the imagination concerned the CEO. Unfortunately, all other contacts at her disposal had failed to come up with an answer for her. “The permissions revision Gina Marsh sent me restricts survey work near active water features to supervised access only. The northern ridge survey today includes three riparian zones. Per the new terms, I need an escort. Everybody I’ve spoken to at your company has cheerilytried to hand me off as somebody else’s responsibility this morning.”
“I see.” The keyboard percussion began immediately. “I can arrange for one of the site representatives to?—”
A sound in the background. A second voice—clipped, direct, immediately recognizable in the way a thunderclap was immediately recognizable. Martha’s keyboard stopped clacking.
“Is that Ms. Fuller? Did Gina specify who was considered appropriate company? I wasn’t even aware the permissions had been revised. Why is it the first I’m hearing of this? Forget it, I’ll go.”
Nellie’s coffee mug stopped halfway to her mouth.
“Ms. Alburn—” Martha began.
“Cancel my eleven and my two. Reschedule the infrastructure call.”
“The infrastructure call has been rescheduled twice.”
“Then it can survive a third. Nellie, are you still there?”
Nellie pulled her phone away from her face and stared at it as if it were some strange device that had spontaneously transported her to an alternate dimension. “Yes.”
“I’ll be there by nine.”
Nellie sat in dumbfounded silence as the distant sound of tapping high heels faded away completely.
“Um… Martha?” she tried.
“Please standby, Ms. Fuller.” A long, quiet exhale. “Your company escort will be there soon.”
“She just—” Nellie gestured at the air with the phone, realized this was useless, and put her hand down. “She canceled three meetings to walk me through a forest.”
“Two,” Martha corrected. “The infrastructure call will be postponed, so it wasn’t technically—” She stopped and sighed again. “Yes. She did.”
