LITMIR.BIZ

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a little bit of both. I have to go back to the beginning, don’t I?”

      “It’s a good place to start, Pete. You do realize you cannot invade people’s lives, don’t you?”

      “Hell, yes. That’s one of the things that’s killing me. God, I was so stupid. Why the hell didn’t I just take a semester’s leave, work my ass off, then finish up? Why?”

      “Is it because you are so goal-oriented? So on target, so anal, you can’t get sidetracked in any way? There are people like that, you know,” Harvey said quietly.

      “You mean that in my haste to become a millionaire at the age of forty, I didn’t give two shits about anything except myself?”

      “Something like that. Do you want some advice?”

      “Yeah. Yeah, I do, Harvey.”

      “Then find the elusive Miss Lily and take it from there. It’s not that misery loves company, but more like you two have so much in common, maybe you can help each other. I’m just a phone call away, Pete.”

      “I can’t unring the bell. This is never going to go away, right? I have to come to terms with what I did and didn’t do. I guess I’ve known that all along, just didn’t want to face it.”

      “No one is perfect; nor is it a perfect world we live in. We all make mistakes, and we have to live with them. Sometimes you get up to bat again, and sometimes you don’t. You have to make the best of it.”

      “And that about ends our session,” Pete said, getting up off the chair.

      Harvey clapped Pete on the shoulder. “It’s not the end of the world, Pete. It might seem like that right now, but eventually there will be light at the end of the tunnel.”

      “I’ll call you.”

      “From California?” Harvey asked.

      “Yeah, from California.”

      Chapter 2

      Lily Madison stared off into space. She was jolted out of her thoughts when the office manager of Sandcastle Ltd. entered her workroom to drop her personal mail on the desk. Penny Lyons knew better than to intrude when her boss was designing. Lily looked down at her sketch pad. Lines. Nothing else. It wasn’t happening that day. The truth was, it hadn’t been happening for some time. All of her creativity seemed to have vanished into thin air. She wondered, and not for the first time, why she’d left her teaching job years ago to go into designing children’s clothing. Because, she answered herself, I didn’t want to deal with children. And, yet, here I am, designing and managing one of the largest children’s clothing lines in the country. Nothing made sense anymore.

      Children.

      It always came back to children.

      The story of her life.

      Better not to dwell on that at the moment.

      Lily slid off her drafting stool and walked over to her desk. She felt a head rush when she saw the large square envelope from her old alma mater. Now what did they want? She’d sent an extremely generous check, and that should have been the end of it, but here they were, writing to her yet again. Her heart jumped up into her throat as she slit open the envelope with her nail. Her sigh of relief was so loud it bounced off the walls of the workroom. A thank-you card. She was so light-headed with relief, she sank down on her chair to pull herself together. Seconds later, she was rummaging in her desk for her scribbled notes. She’d called PAK Industries twice to try and locate Pak, as he’d introduced himself to her years ago, to no avail. Mr. Peter Aaron Kelly was out of town, she’d been told. She’d even tried through the Alumni Association to find Pak’s home address, but they wouldn’t give it out. She supposed that was a good thing.

      Lily sighed again when she struggled with her thoughts in regard to the head of PAK Industries. She’d thought of him often during the past years because they had so much in common, and yet they didn’t really know each other. A brief encounter, a five-minute lunch, yet she still remembered him so clearly. He had become one of the richest men in the world. She was no slouch in that department herself. While her revenues couldn’t quite match Peter Kelly’s, they were up there with so many zeros she often got dizzy when she looked at her financial statements.

      How clearly she remembered the day she had decided to track down Peter Kelly. It was the day the first invitation had arrived. She told herself that if there was a way for her to find out if he was attending the fund-raiser, she would consider going herself. She needed to talk to him. Or someone. Preferably him.

      Lily pushed the thank-you card around on her desk with the tip of a pencil. She moved it one way, then another until she finally tipped it into an open drawer. Good. Now she didn’t have to look at it. She slammed the drawer shut with way too much force.

      The phone on her desk chirped. She pressed the button for the speakerphone to activate.

      “Are you ready for your lunch, Lily?” Penny asked.

      “Sure, send it in. And bring the paper and two cups of coffee.” Like she was really going to eat lunch. These days she nibbled, and that was about it. She wasn’t sleeping either. A dangerous combination, Penny had chastised her. Half the time she was walking around like a zombie. Why? She knew why but didn’t want to face up to her past. No sense lying to herself. That was why she wanted to talk to Peter Kelly.

      Lily looked up when her lunch was set in front of her. It looked good, but, as usual, she wasn’t hungry. She reached for the coffee and gulped at it as she opened the paper. She always went to the financial section first. Coffee cup in hand, she looked down at the photo and article that took the entire half of the financial page above the fold. The cup dropped from her hands as she stared at the man she had just been thinking about. She stared at the picture for a long time as she tried to control her trembling body until she realized it wasn’t Peter Kelly she was now staring at but Senator Hudson Preston.

      Why did this particular picture of those two men put her in such a state of panic? When she couldn’t come up with an answer, Lily sat on her hands to stop them from shaking. What was wrong with her? It was Peter Kelly who rendered her witless. She didn’t even know Senator Preston.

      Almost an hour later, Lily managed to get up off the chair she’d been sitting on. Her hands felt numb. She gathered up the newspaper with averted eyes and scrunched it into a ball. Then she mopped up the spilled coffee that had soaked into the blotter and puddled on the carpet. While she was doing that she was talking to her secretary, instructing her to book a flight to San Francisco so she could attend the fundraiser at Berkeley. “An early flight tomorrow morning.”

      Lily leaned over her desk, her hands gripping the edges. She’d made a decision. She’d actually made a decision. Not just your run-of-the-mill decision but an important one. So important, she felt like her very life hung in the balance. At least that was how she felt at the moment.

      Lily jammed her cell phone into the pocket of her jeans. She looked around to see where she’d tossed her straw bag. She slung it over her shoulder, but not before she jammed a matching straw hat on her head. She almost ran from the office, shouting orders over her shoulder. Before she ran into her private elevator, she shouted, “I’ll call, and you’ll see me when you see me.”

      How blasé that sounded, Lily thought as she climbed behind the wheel of her Range Rover minutes later. Her stomach in knots, her thoughts all over the map, she barreled out of the parking lot and on out to the road that would take her to Interstate 26 and downtown Charleston, where she lived on the Battery. A half-hour drive, depending on traffic. Time to buy an outfit for the black-tie dinner at Berkeley. Maybe another new outfit for the day after. A travel outfit. Lily tried to remember the last time she’d gone clothes shopping. When she couldn’t, she gave up. She wondered if she had enough time to get a facial and a haircut. Just the thought of getting a haircut sent shivers up and down her spine. Some inner instinct warned her that she needed to look as successful as she was if she was going to see Peter Kelly. Assuming she would meet Peter Kelly if

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