LITMIR.BIZ

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sighed, holding her head with one hand. There was no happy ending in sight here.

      But then, she remembered, there hadn’t been one for Romeo and Juliet, either.

      Her head was really beginning to hurt, Marlowe thought. And it didn’t exactly help her condition any to have both her desk phone and the cell phone she had left next to it when she’d walked into the bathroom ringing like crazy now. The phones sounded as if they were jointly heralding the end of the world and doing so just slightly out of sync.

      Maybe they were, she thought darkly, still staring at the offending stick.

      “Why don’t they shut up?” she cried, helplessly putting her hands over her ears.

      As if that would stop the noise, Marlowe thought angrily.

      She rose to her feet—her legs felt oddly shaky, she realized, holding on to the wall for a moment to get her balance—and opened the bathroom door and glared accusingly at the offending phones.

      If they were both ringing like that, something had to be very, very wrong, she thought.

      Something other than an offending white stick with its glaring pink cross.

      Taking a deep breath, Marlowe made her way over to her wide custom-built desk. Part of her was hoping that the ringing would abruptly stop by the time she reached the phones.

      No such luck.

      Braced for almost anything—after all, the worst possible thing had already happened, she reasoned—Marlowe picked up her multiline desk phone. Thinking it was one of the company’s many administrative assistants on the other end, she said tersely, “Okay, this had better be good.”

      “On the contrary,” she heard her father’s deep voice rumbling against her ear, “this is very bad. And where the hell have you been? Why aren’t you answering your phone?” Payne Colton, chairman of the board of Colton Oil, demanded angrily. “Your damn phone’s been ringing off the hook. Why were you just ignoring it?”

      “Dad?” Marlowe said shakily, still looking at the stick she was clutching in her hand.

      Payne snorted. “Well, at least you still know who I am,” he retorted in disgust. “Did you forget your way to the boardroom?”

      “What?” What was he talking about? It was after five o’clock. There was no meeting scheduled this late, at least none that she recalled. “No,” she responded after a beat.

      “Well, that’s good, because that’s where the rest of us are, sitting around that big old table and twiddling our thumbs, waiting for you to make an appearance.” His voice hardened. “I sent you a text,” he snapped, the fury he was feeling now more than evident in his voice. “Didn’t you see your email?”

      No, Dad, I didn’t see my email. All I see is this big, ugly white stick that’s about to topple my whole world, Marlowe thought numbly.

      “Well, Your Highness, we’re still all waiting for you to deign to put in an appearance,” her father was saying while she was having her crisis. “So read that email I forwarded to you and get that skinny behind of yours in here. Pronto! Do you hear me?”

      Hovering over her laptop, Marlowe hit a key. The screen that was currently there gave way to another one that contained her corporate email. She scrolled up the page to the latest message to see what had set her father off like this.

      Her mouth dropped open when she got to the subject line.

      She reread the words twice.

      “Oh my Lord!”

      Her father took her shocked response to mean she had looked at the email. Or at least she had seen enough of the email to shake her up, which was good enough for his purpose.

      “All right, get in here now, Marlowe!” Payne screeched. “I’m not going to ask you again.”

      Marlowe’s knees were shaking so badly, she had to sink down into her chair. This had happened to her twice in the last fifteen minutes, she thought, feeling as if she was completely losing her grip on the immediate world.

      Despite her father’s voice reverberating in her ear with his loudly shouted demands, Marlowe opened her email, hoping that maybe the contents weren’t as bad as it initially seemed.

      It was worse. Marlowe’s head was suddenly filled with a swirling kaleidoscope of memories, all grounded in her childhood. Adventures and events that she and Asa, whom everyone called Ace, had shared as children. Ace was her big brother. He was a big brother to all of them, even to her adopted brother, Rafe. Ace didn’t care. He treated Rafe just like he was a real brother.

      That was just the way that Ace was.

      Marlowe looked back down at the email’s subject line.

      That was absolutely absurd, she thought. Who would say such a crazy thing? Who would even come up with such an idiotic idea, she silently demanded, stunned beyond words. Maybe this was the work of some competitor in an attempt to disrupt the company.

      “Marlowe? Marlowe, are you there?” Payne Colton’s deep voice thundered, bringing her back to the moment and her suddenly cold and incredibly inhospitable-feeling office.

      It took her a second to focus and come around. Thinking took another second. “Yes,” she said, breathing heavily, “I’m here, Dad.”

      “No,” her father corrected her sharply, “you’re there. I need you to come here. Now!” he declared. “Can you do that for me?” he asked his daughter sarcastically. “Can you hightail it out of your overdecorated office and get yourself to the boardroom five minutes ago?” Payne shouted.

      It wasn’t just Marlowe’s knees that were shaking now—it was all of her.

      With effort, she gripped the armrests of her chair and literally hauled herself up to her feet. Testing the strength of her legs for a second to make sure that she wouldn’t just fall flat on her face with the first step she took, Marlowe slowly moved her hands away from the armrests. By now her heart was pounding against her chest like a drumroll.

      “I’m coming,” she told her father in what seemed like a whisper.

      “What did you just say?” Payne demanded angrily. “I can’t hear you!” he declared like the marine drill sergeant that all his children, at one time or another, had felt he was.

      Marlowe took a deep breath, filling her lungs with air before she repeated the words. “I said I was coming.”

      “Then get here already!” Payne snapped.

      The next moment, the connection was abruptly terminated. Only her father’s disapproval and anger lingered in the air around her like a dark, malevolent cloud.

      This wasn’t happening, Marlowe silently insisted as she closed down her laptop.

      That done, she raced out of her office. None of it, she tried to console herself. None of this terrible stuff was happening. Not this hateful email and not that positive pregnancy test.

      It was all just a bad dream, and any second now, she was going to wake up, Marlowe promised herself. And when she did, all of this was just going to be an awful, fading memory.

      Her high heels resounded, clicking rhythmically against the highly polished marble floor as she ran down the corridor to the Colton Oil boardroom. The staccato sound seemed to mock what she had just told herself.

      Her heart fell with a thud as she reached the open boardroom door.

      It didn’t look as if she was going to wake up from this one after all.

       Chapter 2

      It was almost surreal that after all these years of being on the opposing

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