The floor buckled beneath her feet. Her vision blurred—the tiled walls, the shampoo bottles, the bath sponges became little more than blotches of white and pink and yellow behind a waterfall of tears. The clammy, cold wall slapped her back, and she slumped against the marble.
No. Not again.
Time stopped. Nothing existed but heart-racing fear.
The water turned lukewarm, yet she remained almost catatonic. When the water turned cold, and she still hadn’t moved—
The Motivator—
who had resided in her head since she’d run her first mile shouted, “Get your ass moving. Now.”
The voice had pushed her through endless training miles, five marathons, and cancer surgery. It had also kept her company during the bleak days at her late husband’s bedside and the final hours with her father. She never ignored it. Obediently, she turned off the water.
The phone rang, shrill and intruding. The answering machine picked up, and her executive assistant left a message. “You’re probably in the shower. I was tracking you on MapMyRun. Why’d you do a nine-miler today. That’ll put you behind schedule. Let me know if you want to postpone the 10:00 media call. That frustrated newspaper reporter is still stomping through the vineyard hoping to be the first to write a review of
Cailena.
Call me.”
Meredith stumbled out of the shower stall, cupping her small breasts. God made one, man made the other, and while it wasn’t a bad imitation, it had scars and a fake nipple. She sighed. “I’m a runner. Not a model.” She hadn’t dated since her husband died, and she didn’t intend to start now. Who’d want a woman who’d had a mastectomy. Who’d ever want a woman who’d had two?
She snatched a heated towel from the warmer and dried off, thinking of her father’s last words:
The winery is all that matters. Put it first and everything else will fall into place.
“Will it, Daddy?” She squeezed her eyes shut. Then fighting back tears, she squared her shoulders and called her assistant.
“Hey, why’d you run this morning?” Katie asked. “It’s a rest day.”
“Jetlag messes with my schedule.” A cold finger traced Meredith’s spine as she debated whether to tell Katie about the lump.
Not this time
. Keeping her assistant focused on the launch was more important than having a shoulder to lean on. Meredith blew out a hard breath. “I’ll get there before the conference call, but I may need to delay my departure a few hours, possibly forty-eight.”
In her trademark clipped voice, Katie asked, “Why. What happened?”
Meredith massaged the lump. “Nothing that can’t be fixed.”
MEREDITH SLAMMED THE outer door of the San Francisco Medical Clinic, then slipped on her sunglasses, hiding her eyes that looked sunken, almost bruised.
The needle aspiration is inconclusive.
She had expected to get the results before she left the doctor’s office, which is what happened five years earlier. But not this time. This time she had to wait for the tissue sample to come back from pathology. Her head pounded. Fear and tension created an explosive headache.
“You can stay home and fret over the holidays, Meredith, or you can go to Scotland,” her doctor had said
.
That’s exactly what she intended to do. Get the hell out of town. It didn’t matter where in the world she was when the call came. The news would be the same, and odds were good she’d be alone regardless.
Her cell phone rang flashing Katie’s name. Meredith pasted a smile on her face, hoping it’d come through in her voice. “Hello.”
“What’d you decide? Are you going or not?”
Meredith opened the car door and slung her purse to the passenger’s seat. “Heading to the airport now. Will you contact the B&B and let them know I won’t be there until late?”
“I’ll do it before I leave,” Katie said.
“I’m not even out of town and you’re taking the day off?”
Katie huffed. “Yeah, right. I’m looking at the stack of work in my in-basket. You cleaned off your desk last night and put everything on mine.”
Meredith climbed into the driver’s seat and fastened her seatbelt. “Not everything.”
“Could have fooled me.” Katie shuffled papers. “Oh crap. I spilled my coffee.” More papers shuffled and something hit the floor with a thud. “Okay, I’ve got your itinerary now. Looks like you’re already confirmed for a late arrival. Anything else you need before I go to the marketing meeting?”
“I hope the letters I signed don’t have coffee stains.” Meredith popped her second or third Pepcid of the day and took a swig of bottled water.
Katie chuckled. “If they do, I’ll white out the stains.”
Meredith started the engine and put the car in gear. “I should be going to that meeting. The latest slicks for the gala and the new website pages are ready for review, and I know they’ve screwed them up.”
Katie hissed, shuffling more papers. “The home page should have that gorgeous picture of you that appeared on the cover of last month’s
Wine Digest
.”
Meredith hit the brakes, stopping inches from a car pulling out behind her. “Damn
.
”
“Don’t you want to use that picture?” Katie asked.
Meredith’s heart sounded like a jackhammer pounding in her eardrums. She mouthed the words, “I’m sorry,” but the driver only glared at her with beady eyes and raised his middle finger against the window.
“Well, screw you, too,” Meredith said.
“What?” Katie asked.
Meredith forced her fingers to make a fist so she wouldn’t return the gesture. “Whose idea was it to use that picture?”
“Are you mad at me?”
“I was talking to the driver behind me. Tell me about the picture?”
“Your marketing VP—” Katie stuttered. “—says you’re beautiful, and your face sells wine.”
“Pshaw. You know what Daddy would say if he was still president.”
“Oh, I can hear him now. ‘A skinny, forty-two-year-old widow isn’t the right image for my winery.’ But he’s dead, Mer, and you’re president.”
“I’ll make the decision after I see the web pages. Email copies as soon as you get them.”
“I will, but only if you relax. Take a few days off, work 22/6 instead of 24/7, and stop worrying about what’s happening here.”
“I might as well stop breathing.” She pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward the freeway. “While I’m thinking about it, call Hank and tell him I’ll be gone for a few days. If I call him now, he’ll be between lessons and will keep me on the phone. Ask him to find someone to ride Quiet Dancer, then call the florist. I ordered flowers for Daddy’s and Jonathan’s graves. I want to be sure they’re delivered to the cemetery before Christmas.”
“Did that already. Now, do something for yourself. Go to Edinburgh, find a handsome, smooth-talking Scotsman and have some fun.”
“I don’t have time. I have a wine to launch.”
And a lump in my breast.
Meredith dropped the phone into the console. Maybe after she completed the genealogy research at the archives and drafted the Montgomery family history, she’d relax for a few hours and drive up to the Highlands. If she didn’t have the material to the printer by deadline, the brochure would print without the winery’s history. The 150
th
celebration deserved the best from her, even if she had cancer.
She fished her to-do list out of her pocket. The Springsteen contract and addendums were numbers one through five. As soon as she boarded the plane, she’d send the agent an email reminder to return the original signed documents. Panic could easily set in if she thought about all that could go wrong with the launch. The event had to be perfect in every detail.
Cailena
wouldn’t have a second chance to make a great first impression.
THE CHAUFFEUR DROVE the Lincoln Town Car onto the tarmac at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey and parked alongside MacKlenna Farm’s Gulfstream. The driver stepped from the vehicle and opened the rear passenger door just as a cell phone beeped. Elliott connected his Bluetooth and answered, “Fraser.”
“Galahad’s still not on the ground,” Julian Roberts, the Thoroughbred farm’s chief financial officer, declared in the nasal voice of one mired in the throes of a winter cold.
Elliott checked his watch
.
“Where the hell’s the plane?
That stallion’s been in the air over eighteen hours.”
“I talked to the equine transportation manager at Prestige International. Air traffic control rerouted the plane due to weather.”
His heart rate shot up as if he’d been sprinting. “To where? The South Pole? If my horse stays on that plane much longer, he’ll get dehydrated.”
“He’s made the trip before without side effects,” Julian said.
“New South Wales is too far to shuttle him.” The faster Elliott’s heart pounded, the louder he spoke. “I don’t give a crap if Hazy Mountain Stud has Galahad covering a full book of mares. This is his last trip.”
“You’ll have a battle over that one.” Julian sneezed into the phone before continuing. “If you want him to be commercial, he has to ship to the southern hemisphere.”
The limo driver handed Elliott a pair of crutches. He put his left foot down and stood, bringing his right leg around slowly. Then he glared at the six steps leading to the cabin door. “We’ll talk about it at the shareholders meeting. For now, keep heat on the people at Prestige. They’re the agent for both the Breeder’s Cup and the Dubai World Cup. If anything happens to Galahad while he’s in their custody, I’ll see that they lose both contracts. They’ve got to land that plane, or we’ll all own shares in a very sick horse.”
Elliott climbed the first step with his left foot, held the injured leg steady, and gave more than a little groan when pain lanced through his right side from his foot to his shoulder.
You okay?” Another sneeze punctuated Julian’s question. “You sound like those New York doctors are cutting you open without anesthesia.” Julian laughed. “You should have stayed in Kentucky.”
“Hell no, I’m not okay. I’m trying to get up the damn stairs. And I would have stayed but my doctor refused to operate on me again.”
“You’re a non-compliant patient. I hope to God you listen to your doctor this time.”
“Shush.” Elliott halted on the third step to readjust the crutches. The release instructions from New York-Presbyterian Hospital folded up in his pocket said to keep the leg immobile for four weeks, and he hadn’t made it forty minutes? He took another step. “Call Jim Manning and let him know what’s going on. I haven’t looked at Prestige’s contract since last year. Ask him for an opinion. I want to be clear on liability.”
Julian blew his nose. “Get on the plane. I’ll call you back as soon as I talk to him.” Elliott disconnected the call, wondering if he should spray the device with a disinfectant.
His full-time body man and part-time flight attendant stood poised at the cabin door. “You need help, boss?”
“Just move aside.” Elliott reached the last step, and Kevin made room in the passageway but still hovered. “Tell the captain I’m ready to depart.” Elliott eased down the aisle toward the sofa, where he sat back and elevated his leg.
The limo driver handed up a laptop case. Kevin stowed the bag and gave a quick wave to the ground crew before securing the cabin door. “You want coffee?”
Elliott nodded, powered down the Bluetooth, and slipped the device into his shirt pocket. “What’s the flight time?”
“We’ll be in Edinburgh in eight hours.” Kevin set a cup on the table next to the sofa. “This is the good stuff. Not like that weak hospital brew you’ve been drinking.”
Elliott slipped his fingers around the mug with the new MacKlenna logo. “You made the last five days bearable. Thank you.”
“After four surgeries, I know the routine.”
“Five.” He sipped the coffee. “If you think I’m difficult now, you should’ve been around for that first one.”
Kevin laughed. “I heard about the catheter incident.”
“Whatever you heard was only half true.”
“The story I got was that you woke up to find a twenty-year-old nurse about to insert a tube into your dick and you pissed yourself.”
Elliott groaned. “That damn hospital is an incubator for rumors.”
Kevin headed toward the front of the plane to secure the aircraft for takeoff. “My source is pretty reliable, boss.”
To be twenty-eight again.
Although at fifty, Elliott hadn’t slowed down a bit and kept a very active social life, but the stress of running a multi-million dollar Thoroughbred breeding operation was hell on his blood pressure. His satellite phone rang, yanking him out of his reverie. “Fraser.”
“Manning’s in court,” Julian said. “I left a message with his paralegal.”
“If I need to return to Lexington, tell me now.” Elliott didn’t want to be in town for the holidays and the first anniversary of the deaths of the MacKlennas.
“No reason to come back. There’s nothing you can do to get your horse on the ground any sooner,” Julian said.
“What’s the weather doing there?”
“They’re predicting ice storms from Texas to Maine. If Kentucky’s in the bull’s-eye, our airport will close.”
“Damn.” He glanced out the window. The plane was leaving the gate. “Call me as soon as you hear anything.” His gut told him to go home. The CFO had made two costly mistakes recently and leaving him in charge inspired Elliott with little confidence. But Julian still had the support of the board of directors. Until that changed, he’d remain in the position.
Elliott tapped his fist on the sofa arm. If anything happened to his twenty-five million dollar Thoroughbred, the loss of the projected cash income could put the farm on the auction block.
Kevin picked up the half-empty coffee cup. “We’re next in line. You’ll need to buckle up.” Elliott pulled the belt across his lap, and ten minutes after boarding, the plane lifted off. When the aircraft reached cruising altitude, Kevin returned with another cup of hot coffee and Elliott’s laptop. “I thought you might want to work.”
He took the computer, remembering the syndication agreement he’d been in the middle of reviewing before he’d left the hospital. “Thanks.”