Running from Love: A Story for Runners and Lovers (13 page)

“What if you did?? What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I realized I’m not with the right woman.”

“And who might the right woman be?”

“I think it might be you.”

She eyeballed him silently. It was flattering to hear his words, but did she believe them?

Will stared back, his eyes finally sparking, coming to life. His hand closed over hers on the table.

“This is a bit sudden,” she finally got out.

“I know.”

“I hardly know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything. Just let me take up where we left off. And meanwhile—I’m not proceeding with anything further in my present situation.”

“You’re not really in a position to speak with me like this if you’re living with someone, are you?”

“I’m thinking of moving out.”

“Well when you do, I’ll think about it.” Why had she even said that? “I mean, if I’m available.” Why should she take anything he said seriously? From the looks of it, he didn’t know how to take the institution of marriage seriously, not that she was an expert.

“Are you available?” He looked startled. “I mean, you aren’t seeing someone, are you?”

She burned at his assumption that she was still single, pining away for him. Yet she more or less had been, until the evening before. The memory of Jude’s firm fingers danced on her neck.

“When you move out, you can ask me then. Otherwise, it’s not your concern,” she said sharply then took a long sip of her tea. The evening before she’d felt genuine passion at Jude’s touch. Right now she felt the passion of reawakened feelings with Will. Which was real?

One thing was certain. Will would find her more interesting now that she hadn’t fallen back into his arms. He would pursue her like a hound, as he’d done before, until she’d succumbed. Then what? The past didn’t bode well for him looking like a safe bet. But he had been the love of her life, and now he was open to giving their love another try. Could she possibly say no?

Before confusion wrote itself all over her face, she got up and bade him goodbye. Looking down into Will’s handsome, yearning face, she knew she had him. But for how long? Even more importantly, did she really want him?

Eager to distance herself, she walked away briskly. She needed time alone to think. All she knew was that she really wanted to be wanted. And she doubted her former boyfriend knew how to sustain that sort of feeling over the long term.

A
T THE OPENING
presentation for the fall sales conference in Phoenix that Monday, Farrah mentally mapped out her next two days. If she didn’t stay up schmoozing too late after that evening’s gala dinner, she planned to run along the three-mile bike path bordering the golf course the next morning before her brunch meeting with her boss, where they would hash out strategy for the final quarter. Then she’d hop her flight back to New York to get home in time for the Tuesday night workout.

Her boss had suggested she attend that afternoon’s cross-selling seminar. Farrah’s main competition in the Northeast division, Alison Keane, was running it.

With only two years of sales experience, Farrah was on the shortlist to become top salesperson in her division for the year. She hardly knew how that had happened, but ever since the break up with Will, all she’d wanted to do was work. She’d brought in account after account, until there was no time left in her week to go out and find more. Her boss had advised her to take it to the next step—cross-selling and bundled products. Farrah couldn’t help but think it sounded like selling the same product the client had already bought back to them again, but she buried that thought in the back of her mind. Alison Keane was a master of the technique. With Sun-Tzu’s adage in mind, “keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” Farrah decided to keep a close eye on Alison at the conference.

Alison was roughly Farrah’s age, around thirty, a well put together blonde with a sexily disarming “You don’t have my full attention” air that attracted men to her like horses to alfalfa. She’d gotten an MBA in night school, and she knew how to use it. Farrah’s boss referred to her as the division
maestra
of cross-selling and bundled product techniques. Earlier that year, Alison had landed an account with a major eye surgery hospital in which she’d structured a deal so complex that even Farrah’s boss hadn’t been able to figure it out. Instead, she’d suggested Alison give a talk on cross-selling at the conference and commanded Farrah to attend.

Farrah hoped Alison would explain enough of the deal so she could explain it in turn to her boss, but she knew Alison too well to expect her to give away the full secret of how she’d landed the company’s biggest account of the year. What smart salesperson would?

“Hey Farrah, I heard you’re on the shortlist for top salesperson for the division,” Mara Cortez, administrative assistant for her group, congratulated her.

“Yeah, I guess. We’ll find out tonight at dinner.” Farrah, Alison, and Meredith Russell were rumored to be the top three contenders. But the announcement of top salesperson for the year wouldn’t be made until the following February at their winter get-together. It all depended on fourth quarter results. Meredith had just had a baby, so she’d be out. It came down to Farrah versus Alison.

“I heard Alison’s up, too, for landing the Deming account.”

“Yeah, she’s a tiger,” Farrah replied, thinking Alison was more of a shark in custom-made suits with a halo of light blonde hair floating ethereally around her face and shoulders. Her rival was approaching now, in a pink Chanel-style suit with a few fussy gold chains. She looked very much like who she was, a crack saleswoman. Farrah could hardly wait to see her shoes.

Sure enough, as Alison approached, her taupe-colored platform heels revealed a gold strip sandwiched between the sole and heel. Amazing. Only a
fashionista
would notice—a group that included just about every female attending the conference.

An hour and a half later, Farrah walked out of the seminar having learned that Alison had signed up Deming Vision Institutes, a nationwide chain of 400-plus LASIK procedure clinics for what looked like a one-year commitment to purchase a single product. But for every one-year exclusive contract signed for one of her product lines sold, the subsequent year the product price would decrease significantly below that of all other competing brands. Then she’d offered a deal whereby if the company picked up a second product line in an exclusive one-year package, the cost of the first one-year package was reduced 40 percent outright and another 10 percent per unit bought, making it more cost-effective every time the company bought another unit. At the end of the year, the deep discount would continue contingent upon the purchase of yet another product line. As a result, Deming distributed its products to all of its clinics and associated doctors. It had been the deal of the year, resulting in millions of dollars worth of new business.

As she exited the conference room, she scratched her head. She still couldn’t figure out exactly how Alison had tied up every loose end to the point that Deming ended up on the hook for a minimum of five years. Who was the decision-maker who’d signed off on that? It was crazy, considering how fast eye surgery technologies changed. Every salesperson in the room knew most of the products they currently sold would be obsolete five years from now. The manufacturers of the products had designed them with built-in obsolescence in mind. But if anyone could do it, Alison could. She had to hand it to her rival. She knew how to sell.

That night after dinner, Farrah snuck up to her hotel room to avoid the exodus to the leather-chaired, wood-paneled bar where she knew most of her colleagues would congregate. She wanted to clear her head and take a dip in the hotel hot tub. After Friday evening’s date with Jude then meeting Will on Saturday, her head was as confused as her heart. By the time she’d boarded her flight to Phoenix Sunday afternoon, she’d been relieved to travel for work, something she usually resented having to do on weekends.

She took the service elevator directly to the gym, then entered the pool area. There was something utterly sensuous about attending a conference in Arizona. No wonder it was a top conference destination spot. At dinner she’d been applauded as she stood along with Alison to receive congrats for being one of the top three performers for the first three quarters of the year. Meredith was back home, enjoying her new baby. That left Alison and her to duke it out in the fourth quarter for the top salesperson spot. The winner would receive a large bonus as well as increased sales territory for the following year. Farrah could use the bonus and tried not to think about the increased territory. The last thing she wanted to do was travel more.

She pulled off her hotel spa robe and draped it on a chaise lounge. If she was lucky, the hot tub would be all hers.

Around the corner, past huge flowering bushes she spotted Mara Cortes in the spa.

“Hey.”

“Hey Farrah. Congratulations on the top three mention at dinner tonight,” Mara said, her voice deferential.

“Thanks, but that was just Barbara’s way of pitting Alison and me against each other for the top spot. Have you seen Barbara, by the way?” The last thing she wanted to do was run into her boss just when she was ready to kick back and relax.

“I saw her at the bar. She’s talking to Alison Keane.”

“Oh.” A twinge of uneasiness ran through her. Silly. Alison was one of her boss’s top salespeople. Of course she would seek her out at the sales conference. “Great. Saves me the trouble of explaining Alison’s seminar talk to her tomorrow.”

“Did you understand it?” Mara asked.

Farrah stared at her. Should she tell her the truth? She hadn’t been able to make heads nor tails of it.

“I—uh—it sounded pretty complicated,” she hedged.

“It didn’t make sense to me.” Mara gestured to a poolside wine chiller next to her. “Doug went in to call his kids. He left half a bottle of Chardonnay. Glass?”

Farrah tried to look hesitant. Only one thing could be more heavenly than sitting in a hot tub under a starry sky: that would be sipping a glass of good Chardonnay while doing so.

“Umm.”

“That’s a yes.” Mara gestured to a passing waiter, who came back within seconds with a glass.

They toasted, and Farrah sank back against the hot tub’s side. Heaven. Jude Farnesworth’s fingers seemed to play on her throat. She wished he could have been there beside her. Will would have liked it, too. But in a flash of anger, she felt the old eagerness to please that came over her when she was with him. That wasn’t the way a top saleswomen should feel. Never mind the way she wanted to be loved by a man.

“So what did you make of Alison’s talk?” Mara again asked.

The wine hit her with the first sip. Suddenly, she was completely relaxed, ready to float away into the starry night.

“I couldn’t understand how she tied up the company for a five-year commitment,” Farrah admitted.

“Me neither,” Mara agreed. “There’s no way they would have gone for it, the way she explained it.”

“But why would she explain exactly how she did it? She’s not going to give away her secrets just like that.”

“She definitely used a secret angle landing that deal.”

Farrah studied her colleague’s face. She knew something Farrah didn’t. Quietly she took another sip of the buttery Chardonnay. The American West had its advantages: good weather and good wines. But Farrah loved the challenge of constant weather changes back home. She had to admit, having it too easy wasn’t her style. With her mother’s death, Farrah’s sense of play had died, too. After that she’d thought of life as tough, full of unexpected turns. The only further emotional chance she’d taken had been years later with Will, but that had been difficult, too. She’d constantly felt judged by him, sometimes measuring up, usually falling short. Although she’d wanted a challenge, she’d wondered after awhile if true love was really supposed to be so hard.

All she could count on was what she could build for herself. And that was a solid career with cold, hard cash in the bank at the end of every year—a career like Alison Keane’s. She needed to find out what Mara Cortes knew.

“So what’s the secret angle?”

Mara looked at her slyly, taking a long sip of her drink, then putting it down slowly.

“Maybe I shouldn’t say.”

“Maybe you should.” It was like being back in junior-high school. Except this was the big, bad business world. Mara was about to toss her a tidbit, and she was ready to catch it. Then she’d make it work for her.

“Maybe something was going on between Alison and that head guy over at Deming’s.

“Which guy?”

“Remember the guy who was in the breakout discussion with us on LASIK post-care at the Spring Lakes conference last fall?”

“You mean the one who does triathlons?” Farrah asked.

“Yeah.”

Max Baumann, right? The one who was telling us all about how he used to be fat then he lost sixty pounds training for his first biathlon?

“Yeah.”

“He was sitting next to Alison at the dinner. He told me he was going to be a father in a few weeks. Is that the one?”

Mara’s face fell. “That’s him.”

“So did they have the baby?”

“His wife had the baby.” Mara seemed downcast for making a birth announcement.

“So that’s great! Why the long face?”

“And Alison didn’t.”

“Alison didn’t?”

Mara shook her head slowly.

“Alison didn’t have the baby? What are you talking about? She’s single.” She thought back to the dinner that night. Alison had talked exclusively to Max the entire evening. The only reason Farrah had learned he was to become a father was because Alison had left the table to take a call, and Farrah had leaned over and asked him about his family.

She stared at Mara’s face, eloquent in its stoniness.

“What are you telling me?”

“Nothing.” Again, her work colleague shook her head.

The truth slowly dawned on her. Fluffy, blonde, distractedly dreamy Alison all over Max at dinner; Max completely engrossed in her, his back to the rest of the table. “Do you mean Alison was, um—she wasn’t like—involved with him was she?”