The View from Suite 2100 (4 page)

I started walking away but he commenced to pound on the door louder. The last thing I needed was for him to wake up my neighbors. A senator and his family lived on one side of me, and a local television personality lived on the other. We were all quiet, private people, which was what made us all good neighbors. I wanted to keep it that way! I couldn’t allow Drew to blow that for me with his nonsense.

“You stop this now, Drew! I mean it!” I peered through the peephole at him again and saw him leaning against the door clearly prepared to pound all night.

“I need you to open the door, Rowena. I’m not going away.”

Don’t ask me why, but I jerked the door open suddenly and he fell in. The scent of his cologne, Black by Kenneth Cole, filled the room instantly, as did his movie star good looks. A bottle of Dom Perignon was in his left hand and he thrust it towards me as he struggled to regain his balance.

“Be real,” I said, throwing my hands up, refusing to take the bottle from him. “Champagne?”

“Just hold it a minute, Rowena, please. I left something on the porch.”

He jammed the champagne into my hands, stepped halfway back out onto the porch and leaned over precariously, careful to keep as much of one leg as possible inside the door. I knew he was afraid I’d slam the door if he stepped completely outside. He was right!

When he turned around with an armful of roses, at least three dozen of them, I gasped. I noticed him also quickly stuffing something into his pocket, but he was still just a little bit off balance and as he swung back around I had to catch him to steady him once more. I nearly dropped the champagne, so as soon as he was steady I set the bottle on the floor near the door and stepped back.

I let out a sigh of disappointment and shook my head. The roses were magnificent and Drew looked like a puppy dog standing there, but my mind was screaming at me that I needed a man, not a pet. I realized I didn’t want the roses, the champagne, or him. Not as long as he was willing to allow the kind of nonsense he did to keep compromising our relationship. Especially the manipulative ploys he allowed his mother to get away with time and time again.

“Don’t you get it, Drew? We’re much too old to be going through these childish changes. I have four,” I held up four fingers, “count them Drew, four businesses to run and you have your own business obligations as well. I want some substance in the rest of my life, Drew, not this bullshit. Okay? I’m tired. I’ve had enough!”

“Rowena?”

I shook my head sadly, blocking the threshold so he couldn’t come any farther into the house. “I need to find someone who is going to be able to appreciate my worth; someone who’ll honor me, just like I want to honor him. I don’t think you can do that, Drew.”

Suddenly he let the flowers fall and they tumbled all around my feet. Almost in slow motion I followed their descent with my eyes before looking back up at him. Just at that moment he came out of his pocket with a small red velvet box.

“Wanna bet?” He held the box out to me.

My heart started making a swooshing sound in my ears, and I felt my hands fly to my mouth. I knew what was in the box, but I still couldn’t make myself reach for it.

“Please baby, take it. It’s long, long overdue.”

I searched Drew’s face, shaking my head ‘no’, but then I froze. Everything I had ever wanted to see in his eyes was suddenly seemingly there. Love, the commitment, promise and strength. He nodded as if to affirm what I was seeing and held the box out to me farther. Wasn’t this what I’d been waiting on? What I’d been dreaming of from him?

With shaking hands I finally accepted it, cupping it for a moment in both of mine.

“Open it, Rowena.”

I lifted the lid. A two-carat yellow pear shaped diamond in a vintage platinum setting glistened as if it had been touched by starlight. It was absolutely the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

I must have stared at it for a long, long time before I felt him gently ease the box from my hand, remove the ring, slid it onto my ring finger, and there, in my open doorway, get down on one knee.

“Rowena Justina Wilkes,” he said, staring straight into my soul. “I
need
you to be my wife?”

Chapter Six

“Are you okay, sweetheart?” My mother, DeBorah, asked coming out of a deep, foggy sleep. It was 4:30 AM in Kansas, 5:30 AM for me in D.C., but I couldn’t wait a second longer to share my news.

“He proposed, mama! Last night! We had a big fight, and,” I paused to catch my breath. “I told him I was through, later he showed up at my door, refusing to leave…”

I heard the rustle of covers on her end of the line and knew she was slipping out of bed so she wouldn’t wake my father. I could imagine her tiptoeing into the kitchen, her long salt and pepper braid dangling over her shoulder. I could just see her pulling out a chair at the butcher block table, slipping into it and leaning on her elbow, phone pressed against her ear, ready to talk. We shared all our news, good and bad, at that table when I was growing up. Imagining her there now made me homesick.

“No, it isn’t. If Drew is who you love and want for sure, I couldn’t be happier, but it’s the for
sure
part I want you to think about. Please.”

“Why don’t I call you later, mama, okay? I’m
sure
when you’re completely awake you’ll be happy for me.”

Chapter Seven

I broke the connection and stood in the middle of my bedroom numb, glad Drew had already left before I called my mother. Glad I was alone trying to sort through my confusion. I could not have anticipated that reaction from mother under any circumstance, especially not when I was calling to tell her Drew just asked me to marry him.

I have always been her and my father’s hearts. I came late into their life, mother was just a few days short of 40 when I was born, and I’ve been told too many times to try to count by their friends and our relatives how thrilled they both were to have me.

No one needed to tell me, I knew. My childhood was like living in a fairytale. It was as though we celebrated my life everyday. Their love filled me to overflowing with confidence. If I thought it up, they found a way to support me in it.

I loved flowers, especially the wild flowers that grew in the fields around our house. We were about 30 miles from Kansas City, and although ours wasn’t exactly a farm, it wasn’t city living either. I turned my love of flowers into images of them every chance I got. When I drew pictures of daisies in my tablet, Mama noticed and bought me a canvas and paints. When I cut a sunflower out of construction paper, mama taught me how to cut its petals out of fabric and sew them together into quilts. When our church had a fair, Mama and Daddy would set up a booth to sell the little things I had made. Daddy even built a little theatre in the backyard and invited all our local relatives over to watch me perform the one girl play I wrote when I was in the 5
^th
grade.

I’m not sure whether it was their love that made me feel I could conquer the world, or I thought the only reward good enough to repay them for that love was by conquering the world. I just remember that somewhere along the way someone started calling me Miss Efficiency. It stuck, and later my dad condensed it to Miss E. Well, Miss E wasn’t feeling so efficient at the moment. With the water mama had doused on my good news I was really feeling quite confused.

Shortly after nine I pulled my vintage canary yellow 450SL Mercedes into the reserved stall near the garage elevator in the Manectan Building on K Street. I slid from behind the wheel and decided to take the stairs rather than the elevator. I was parked on level five and since I was only going to the ninth floor walking up four flights would make up for the workout I’d passed on before leaving home.

My dating service, 2-of-A Kind, Inc., was the only one of my enterprises that wasn’t housed on the 21
^st
floor in the Trenco Building NW. It was the nature of the dating business that made me decide to locate it elsewhere. I wasn’t completely sure my commercial real estate clients or some of the business clients who were my export trading partners could appreciate all my diversity. I sure wanted to keep my celebrity clientele at a distance from the dating service too, for an entirely different set of reasons. Plus, the K Street location put 2-of-A Kind, Inc. right in the heart of D.C., making it a prime location to pull professional women and men from every walk of life.

Alexia met Sean through 2-of-A Kind, Inc., although she exercised the client privacy privilege in her contract to swear me to secrecy. It is beginning to look like her relationship with Sean is a match made in heaven though, even if it did get started at 2-of-A Kind, Inc., and if it is, I told her she’s going to have to come out in the open with him real soon. I keep telling her that they need to become our poster kids but she just laughs and shines me on. I really don’t blame her. Some things aren’t meant to be shared.

Actually, 2-of-A Kind, Inc. has been experiencing extraordinary success with our match ups. We have two couples headed to the altar in the middle of the month, and another three scheduled for weddings over the next few months. We’ve got to be doing something right!

Weddings! I glanced at the awesome yellow diamond on my own finger and touched it to my lips. It’s my turn, mama! I thought, but try as I might I can’t drown out her words.
Be sure, I just want you to be sure
.

It was clear my staff was not expecting me when I walked through the door. On one hand that’s good, because June, the exceptional young woman I hired to process applicants and verify preliminary background information on candidates, was hard at work helping a couple of clients, as was Phil, the marketing guy, who seems like he’s got ten hands as he inputs information, scans, prints and copies our new brochure. On the other, Lila, the receptionist, was totally zoned out. She didn’t even look up to see if I might be a client. Alexia mentioned she wasn’t particularly happy with how she was treated by Lila the first day she came in. I was seeing first hand what she meant. I can’t afford that at my front desk. As I got closer, it became quite clear why Lila hadn’t looked up. A thin white wire ran up to her ear. I recognized it immediately. The silly child was plugged in to an iPod and completely oblivious to where she was.

Note to self! Have Carolyn set up interviews pronto for a new receptionist
!

I tapped a couple of times on the V-shaped reception counter Lila sat behind before finally catching her attention. I motioned for her to pull the ear plug from her ear. Mouth open, she looked up with her wide gray eyes like she swallowed a mouse.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Rowena. My boyfriend just bought this for me last night. I was seeing how it works!”

“Put it away, Lila. Good morning, by the way. I’m expecting a Mr. Charleston from VanBuren Laboratories. Show him into the conference room when he arrives, please.”

“Of course. Ah, Rowena, is he with the laboratory that does DNA testing?”

I was shocked! The day was starting to be full of surprises! I hadn’t mentioned anything to anyone at my office about my interest in DNA testing. How the heck did Lila, of all people, know that?

“What makes you ask that, Lila?”

She looked nervous. “Oh, I think I read something about them in the… ah, that company’s name, on the internet – if that’s the same company.”

I smiled, but with a hint of distrust. “Could be.”

I left her staring after me, but something told me it wasn’t the internet she was searching. I had a sneaking suspicion she might have been rambling through my desk when I wasn’t there. I had penciled in my appointment with the fellow from VanBuren on my desk calendar. Lila was the type of young person that hadn’t a clue about decorum. Anything went if her curiosity convinced her she should follow it. Yep, I thought, I definitely want Carolyn to hire another receptionist for 2-of-A Kind, Inc. as soon as possible. I cannot stand a sneak.

****

Martin Charleston, the director at VanBuren, turned out to be a really nice guy, not at all what I expected. His mannerism over the telephone had left me with the impression he was the classic scientist in the long white coat, peering into a smoking test tube, surrounded by bubbling cauldrons. Although he wasn’t a flashy dresser, he did have a refreshingly clean cut style. He wore a conservative blue pinstripe Brooks Brothers suit with a white button down shirt which set off his rich dark skin. His meticulously groomed dreads threw in just a hint of rebellion, and they made him incredibly sexy.

He had such an unmistakable sense of confidence about him when he strolled into my conference room. His stride was long and slow and I got the immediate impression he took his time doing
whatever
he did.

What is wrong with you, I asked myself! Why are you checking this brother out so hard? I touched my new ring with my thumb. Sorry Drew, I thought.