Chapter 1
Instead of the peace and coffee she’d been looking for before boarding her plane, Margo Keyes’s latte came with a side order of idiot-on-a-cell-phone. Anyone within twenty feet of the man in the blue blazer heard some of the conversation. Where she was sitting, it was in Dolby digital surround sound.
It figured her trip would start like this. She’d been apprehensive about it from the get-go. Not that she had a fear of flying. It was the landing — or rather, what was waiting for her after she landed — that was the problem.
Her chance for quiet acquisition of caffeine courage diminishing by the second, she glared at the man in the blue blazer, hoping he’d take the hint and shut up. Too intent on his call, he seemed to miss what was, she was quite sure, a stunning look of disapproval.
“Are you interested or not?” he yelled. Allowing no answer to what was apparently a rhetorical question, he continued, “If you don’t want what I’ve got, I know someone who does. So, what’s it worth to you?” After he paused, presumably for the response, he said, “Good. I’ll let you know what the bid is after I talk to my other customer.” He ended the call, shoved his phone in his pocket and glared back at Margo before storming off.
Walking down the concourse, she consoled herself that if the coffee break hadn’t worked, at least she had a business class seat reserved on the plane and a hotel suite waiting at her destination. She’d indulged in both, rationalizing if she was making this trip at least it should be comfortable. Interesting concept, that; comfortable discomfort.
As the plane taxied out to the runway, she pulled out her BlackBerry to review her schedule for the next ten days, hoping some magic wand had been waved over it, making it all shiny and fun. However, as usual, her fairy godmother was AWOL. She put her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. What the hell had she been thinking, saying yes to this? Ever since she’d moved to Portland, she’d restricted her Philadelphia visits with her mother to long weekends in the spring and fall. It got her points for being a good daughter, avoided too much time being fussed over and kept her out of the two East Coast seasons she didn’t like. This trip? Ten days in mid-June when she’d just been there two months before.
Checking the airline schedule online, she found a flight home the day after the presentation she was to give the following week. That would cut three days off the trip. But before she could change her reservation, the flight attendant asked her to turn her phone off.
Nothing left to do but work. She opened her stuffed-to-the-gunnels messenger bag and took out what she’d brought to help her craft her speech. It looked like she’d included everything in the courthouse except the old law library. Being tapped as the last-minute stand-in for your boss at an important conference will make you do that.
While trying to organize it all, she lost track of her jacket. She eventually saw it too far under her seat to grab and asked the person sitting behind her to get it for her. A man threw it back. When she turned to thank him he added a dirty look — a familiar dirty look. Shit. The man in the blue blazer from the coffee stand.
Finally settled, she began to review case files. Unfortunately, the steady stream of orders to the flight attendants from the seat behind her distracted both her and the cabin crew. When she’d read the same report three times and still didn’t know what the hell it was about, she gave up trying, put her work away and replaced it with her iPod. By plugging in the ear buds she could drown out ABB (“Asshole in Blue Blazer,” as he had now morphed into being) with Pink Martini, Colbie Caillat, Suzanne Vega and Alicia Keys.
By the time she’d worked through most of her current favorite albums, the pilot announced their imminent arrival in Philadelphia. Winding the cord for the ear buds around the iPod before stashing it away, the thought occurred that ABB had now wrecked a second part of her day. Two strikes against her and she hadn’t even gotten to the hard part yet.