LITMIR.BIZ

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Atlanta. Anyway, I promised him I’d give you his card the minute you walked in the door, which is what I’m trying to do if I can just find where I laid the danged thing….”

      Robyn’s bright chatter was accompanied by her busy hands searching though the clutter on her desk. Karen was too hot and emotionally drained to be interested.

      I should have gone straight home from the airport, she thought. Not come here. But the idea of being alone in the house with her defeat was unbearable. Soon enough to deal with all of that tonight when she faced Michael with her decision.

      Besides, she had needed the reassurance that she knew Dream Makers would offer her. Its showroom, with the traditional fabrics and furniture that were a specialty of the interior design firm, told her that at least she could count this part of her life as a success.

      Her friend and partner, Maud Dietrich, was on the phone occupied with a client. She had lifted her hand in welcome when Karen stepped through the door of the turn-of-the-century yellow brick building located off Hennepin Avenue. And that, too, was a comfort.

      “Here it is!” Robyn announced triumphantly, handing her a rectangle of cream-colored pasteboard.

      Karen, who had impatiently started to edge away from Robyn’s desk, accepted the card and glanced at it casually. The prominent logo of a golden hawk on its face leaped up at her. Clutching the card, she could suddenly hear the blood pounding in her ears.

      “I’m having trouble imagining that this P.I. has come looking for you to redecorate his office,” Robyn said, too busy closing drawers she had opened in her search to notice her employer’s distress. “Not when that office is way out in Denver, anyway. Hey, maybe you’re a missing heir he’s trying to—” The sight of Karen’s face finally stopped her. “Are you okay, Mrs. Ramey? You look kind of flushed.”

      Karen snatched at an excuse. “It’s the heat out there.”

      True enough. The Twin Cities were wilting under a blast of summer heat, and it had been a long walk with heavy luggage to where her car had been parked at the air terminal.

      Robyn nodded, but she continued to eye her with curiosity.

      I must look as shaken as I feel, Karen thought, gazing again at the business card. The Hawke Detective Agency, it said. She had never told anyone about Devlin Hawke, neither Maud nor Michael, and she had no intention of trying to explain him now, and certainly not to Robyn.

      “I have no idea why this P.I. wants to see me,” she said.

      But Karen had a fearful suspicion of exactly why Devlin Hawke was here in the Twin Cities. His arrival, with what she already had to contend with regarding her marriage, couldn’t have happened at a worse time.

      “Is he planning to show up here again today?” she asked Robyn.

      The young woman shook her head. “He didn’t say. He sure looked like he had questions on his mind, though. I’m just glad he didn’t try asking them, because it would have been awfully hard not giving him whatever answers he wanted to hear.”

      Yes, Karen thought, she knew all about Devlin Hawke’s rugged appeal and what it could obtain. But she didn’t want to remember that. Nor did she want to deal just now with his sudden reappearance in her life. Her mind and heart were already too heavy with the burden of her failed marriage.

      She was tucking the business card in her purse, trying to bury it along with the image of the man it represented, when Maud got off the phone. The tall, attractive blonde rose from her desk and came forward to greet Karen.

      “Sissy Baldwin,” she said, explaining the call with the slight trace of the accent she still bore, though she hadn’t lived in Germany since her childhood. “She was trying to reschedule that canceled visit you were going to pay her in Savannah after the trade show. I told her we’d have to let her know.”

      Sissy Baldwin was a good client, Karen thought, but she could be a problem.

      Head tipped to one side, Maud considered her. “So, how was the trade show?”

      “Well, you know how exhausting they can be, and Atlanta was no exception.”

      Maud didn’t press her for an explanation, but Karen knew that she had to be aware of her anguish. Her face always seemed to betray her emotions, even in moments when she was convinced she registered the look of a perfect stoic.

      Maud deserved to know that she had used the trade show as an opportunity to get away on her own for some serious thinking, and that the tough decision she had reached had brought her home ahead of schedule. Karen would tell her everything, but not until after she faced Michael tonight.

      “You do look beat,” Maud observed sympathetically. “Why don’t you just collect Livie from her sitter’s and go on home?”

      Her partner’s suggestion was a strong temptation. She would have liked nothing better than to be with her daughter, but she resisted. “She’s scheduled right about now to go down for her nap, and I don’t want her routine upset.” This whole thing was going to be hard enough on Livie as it was.

      Maud nodded understandingly, but Karen knew that her friend thought she was overprotective. Well, Maud wasn’t a mother, and even though Livie hadn’t suffered an asthma attack in months, Karen needed to be careful with her.

      “Besides,” she added, “I have all these dealer quotes from the show that I want to log into the computer.” It was another excuse. She needed to keep busy.

      The phone rang. Robyn answered it. “It’s the salvage outlet about that Victorian fireplace mantel,” she said.

      Maud went to take the call. Karen used the opportunity to flee into the office off the rear of the showroom. Despite the air-conditioning, her face still felt warm. She didn’t know whether to blame it on shock or the sweltering weather.

      Slipping into the bathroom that adjoined the office with its clutter of catalogs, wallpaper samples and designs in progress, she splashed cold water on her face. Then she spent several minutes at the mirror, combing her casual-style, jaw-length auburn hair and repairing her makeup.

      Her wide hazel eyes stared back at her, a troubled expression in them. Well, why shouldn’t they look haunted? Dissolving a marriage was a painful prospect. Not that she expected Michael to object to her request for a divorce. He no longer seemed to care about anything.

      What happened? Karen wondered. In the beginning Michael Ramey had been a loving husband and the perfect father for Livie. But in these last months he had turned into a glacial stranger.

      Michael had refused to discuss their problem, wouldn’t agree to counseling. He just kept pulling away from her, becoming someone so remote she was no longer able to reach him. She had wondered at first if he was having an affair, but somehow that didn’t seem to be the explanation.

      Maybe it was all her fault. Maybe she had deceived herself that she’d loved him because she had wanted so much to have a father for Livie. She had tried to be a good wife, needing perhaps to compensate for the passion that was never fully there in their marriage. And if Michael ultimately resented that…

      She just didn’t know, but she refused to remain in an empty marriage.

      Leaving the bathroom, Karen resolutely seated herself at the desk. She eyed the telephone while she waited for the computer to bring up the program she needed. Should she call Michael at his office, tell him she was no longer in Atlanta? No, bad idea. He would want to know why she was home ahead of schedule, and she didn’t want to risk getting into anything over the phone. They needed to be face-to-face for this.

      She spent another moment struggling with the urge to call Livie’s sitter, longing for the reassurance that her three-year-old daughter was thriving but eager to see her mother. But that also wasn’t a good idea, not when she had called so often from Atlanta that first day and a half to check on Livie that Mrs. Gustafsson must have considered her a nuisance. Livie was in safe, capable hands, and she would be with her in another few hours. Karen could wait.

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