The Time of Her Life

by Jeanie London

  Even Karan calling at the most unexpected but perfect moment and dispensing uncharacteristically practical advice.

  That’s when it hit Susanna—there was something here, something particularly unique to The Arbors.

  Hope.

  That’s what Jay fought hard to protect, was afraid to let slip away. Maybe that’s what she needed to prove to him—she understood what The Arbors was all about. Not paperwork or procedures or federal regulations.

  The Arbors brought hope to people and their loved ones who’d lost hope with the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. That’s what The Arbors provided, and it was far more valuable than the caregiving.

  “You’re the best, best friend, Karan. Have I told you that lately?”

  “Just returning the favor,” she said.

  “Well, enough about me. Why did you call again at this ungodly hour? I’m sure it wasn’t to listen to me come unglued. Did we get to that part yet?”

  Bubbly laughter filtered through the line. “We did, Suze.”

  “Did we?” Funny, Susanna couldn’t remember.

  “I just missed my best, best friend, that’s all.”

  There was something more in that admission, Susanna was sure. She had no idea what. But she totally appreciated the sentiment and said, “Ditto.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  JAY COULD HAVE CALLED Gerald Mayne from home had he programmed the man’s direct line into his cell phone. Hadn’t ever occurred to Jay he might need to. He was so used to operating out of his office—former office—he didn’t carry a laptop or briefcase. Wasn’t like he ever left.

  But that was his first mistake: he’d given his office away to the wrong person, and now all the information he needed to work was locked behind Susanna’s door, where he would need her permission to get at it.

  His second mistake was that he’d taken Northstar at their word. Gerald Mayne had talked up Susanna as the perfect new administrator. He’d told Jay everything about her qualities and strengths, the respect she commanded from her coworkers, how valued she was as a corporate employee.

  Jay could see how all of that was true. But Gerald had left out a few important details, and Jay, after meeting Susanna, had allowed himself to be distracted by her, amused by her, impressed by her, and had never questioned any further.

  He wasn’t sure whom he was angrier with—Northstar for ignoring his wishes or himself for never questioning their word, which completely smacked of desperation.

  Desperation meant what was going on in his head wasn’t lining up with the way he felt. He blamed Northstar for getting everyone’s hopes up, which was another bone to pick with Mayne.

  Northstar had set everyone up for disappointment. Susanna. The staff. And after a night of brooding, Jay was still angry as hell, but he knew he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t make the call. He’d promised Walter to do what was right. The staff expected no less from him, either. He’d have to figure out some way to deal with the extension. A few more months wouldn’t make any difference.

  Except to him, because he had a future waiting for him at the end of the six-month transition. He would travel. See some of the places he’d missed while slaving away in Charlotte. He’d take that beach trip he’d missed when he was a high-school senior, after Drew had gone, when Jay hadn’t had the heart to leave Gran alone because she refused to put Mom in the facility one second before she had to.

  Only he wasn’t heading to Bermuda but Tahiti with tiki torches and beautiful women in grass skirts.

  Then when he got bored of the beach, he’d finally make the trip to Ireland to see his mom’s cousin, who had invited him to visit when Jay had been younger.

  He wasn’t sure where he’d go after that. He’d always wanted to see the rain forest and ski somewhere with awesome slopes. Just depended on how he felt. The dogs would be bunking with Walter until Jay figured out where he wanted to settle down, and once he got the travel bug out of his system, he’d decide where he wanted to call home—anywhere but North Carolina.

  The thought of his plan inflamed his anger all over again. Damn Northstar for their nonsense. This entire situation was inexcusable. Jay booted Walter’s desktop and located the number. He placed the call, which rolled straight to voice mail since most offices wouldn’t open until the start of the business day. He requested an ASAP return call.

  He hadn’t even disconnected when a familiar voice said, “Good morning, Jay.”

  Turning, he found Susanna showcased in the open doorway, as beautiful and fresh faced as the brisk air and sunrise that had accompanied him on his walk to work this morning.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” Her gaze fixed on the phone he held against his ear.

  She quickly stepped into the hall.

  For an instant, he felt as if a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “No, no, don’t go. I’m done.”

  That distracting blue gaze darted past him to Walter’s desk. She was jumpy. It was all over her from the way she’d ejected from the office to her tight smile.

  Another heaping helping of guilt, anyone?

  “Mr. Jankowski seems to be on the mend,” she said. “Wasn’t sure if you knew.”

  He shook his head. “Haven’t touched base with anyone yet, but I’m glad to hear it.”

  “So where are we today, Jay?” Her tone was no-nonsense ultraprofessional, a perfect match with her business suit. “I’d like to address what happened yesterday, and if we’re still moving ahead as scheduled. I didn’t want to tackle data transfer if we’re changing the plan.”

  Oh, he was changing the plan, all right, which would eliminate the need for her to do anything. Add a lot of guilt to the list of things he shouldn’t be feeling for this woman. Not for making a choice best for the people who depended on him.

  But not best for him, unfortunately.

  Handing Susanna the key, signing the papers, packing his bags and getting the hell out would be best for him.

  “So, how are we going to handle this situation?” she asked, which actually meant: Are we still going through with this?

  Jay had the wild thought that he should call this off right now, before they got in any deeper. He’d waltz in tell his staff, Just kidding, folks! False alarm.

  They’d all be relieved. Change never came easily. Management would be thrilled. Walter would say, About time you came to your senses, boy.

  But that would mean he had to stay here running this place until he dropped dead or lost his mind, whichever came first. He refused to waste any more time. He’d given the first thirty-two years of his life to The Arbors, the next thirty-two were his.

  The honorable thing to do was tell her. He would be diplomatic and make sure she understood his decision wasn’t personal. But when Jay opened his mouth to explain, only a very dishonorable “I’m still weighing the situation” came out.

  Weighing the situation?

  By the time that registered in his rebellious brain, he was staring into her beautiful face, saw the desperate relief all over her exquisite features as she asked, “My office?”

  He could practically feel her relief across the room. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe he was delusional, cracking under the pressure of more obligations.

  The residents. The staff. Walter. His unavailable brother. His dead grandmother. His dead mother.

  Susanna.

  He nodded, afraid to open his mouth and say something else to get him in any deeper.

 
Returning the phone to his belt, he followed her, rationalizing his actions. A discussion with Susanna’s boss wasn’t cowardice but the appropriate place to begin the proceedings. His deal was with Northstar Management. They’d chosen to change the plan, so they would have to inform their employee. That wasn’t Jay’s place.

  He didn’t feel any better.

  A quick procession through the administrative corridor emphasized the change between them, impossible not to notice, a huge change from the easy camaraderie of the past five weeks.

  “Why don’t you sit there? It’ll be easier to work.” She motioned him toward his former chair behind his former desk.

  There was no mention of coffee, although he could see her mug sitting in a place of honor atop the water dispenser, a cylinder of the instant coffee she liked perched against it.

  He did as suggested and fixed his attention on the system, squelching his conscience and ignoring the way she shimmied around the desk with a few sure-footed moves, a contained grace unique to her.

  She was making a difficult situation even more difficult. Especially when she dragged a chair around the desk.

  He stood to offer assistance with the bulky chair. “Let me—”

  “Got it, thanks.”

  She wasn’t accepting his help today. He remembered what she’d said when they’d first met.

  “I take care of me.”

  He should be grateful, he supposed. Distance was for the best since he’d already placed the call, and this situation would be awkward enough. But he felt anything but distant with her beside him, so close he inhaled the fresh scent of her hair as she leaned across the desk. Was there anything about her that wasn’t distracting?

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Just let me grab my notebook. I need to take notes to figure out what you have compared to what I need.”

  She wouldn’t need anything, and he guessed she would handle that knowledge with the same ultraprofessional demeanor she was using to handle him right now.

  Why she was so determined to be independent? Because she’d had to be since losing her husband?

  Jay was back to wondering about her again.

  Why didn’t make any difference. His future was far away from The Arbors. Susanna Adams wasn’t a part of it.

  So he sat there maneuvering through screen after screen, explaining the data, trying not to feel guilty or cowardly and failing miserably, the same way he was failing to ignore the way wisps of her hair trailed his cheek when she leaned close to type in a password on the keyboard.

  Oh, he was aware of her, all right. Straight down to the pit of his stomach.

  “Want to go through the management reports now?” he asked, determined to focus on the computer if it killed him. “You’ve already seen most of them.”

  “I know everything I need is in your system. I need to identify what you’re calling it versus what Northstar calls it. Then we can figure out the best way to instruct the staff to make this as simple as possible.”

  But nothing about the situation was simple. Not the decision to let her go. Not his awareness of her. Not his own urgency to turn over The Arbors to someone qualified to run it.

  He glanced at the computer display—9:02 a.m.

  Why hadn’t Mayne called yet?

  “You’re making this harder than it needs to be,” he said more sharply than he intended. Anger was getting the better of him. “Every function leads back to the hub, which makes your job easier. Trust me. Northstar’s system design is prehistoric. Looks to me like they keep building onto an archaic program. They should ditch this entire system and design one that streamlines the process instead of wasting valuable management hours compiling all this unnecessary data.”

  Susanna blinked those big blue eyes at him but couldn’t seem to think of anything to say.

  He sighed inwardly and tempered his tone as he scrolled through the system map. “Personnel. Med data. CareCharter. Accounting. Administrative. Maintenance. You can access everything that goes on here. Press one button to download.”

  She jotted instructions on her notebook, but her only reply was a quiet, “Got it.”

  The system prompted for her password again. She depressed the Enter key as he steadied the keyboard, and their fingers accidentally brushed, warm skin against warm skin.

  He could feel her touch straight down to his crotch.

  She pulled back as if she felt the awareness, too.

  Great. What a mess.

  When his cell phone beeped, he couldn’t decide who was more grateful, him or Susanna.

  “I have to take this.” He maneuvered around her as she slid back her chair to make room, giving him a choice shot of those shapely legs in the process.

  “Canady,” he growled into the receiver while making his way through the door.

  “Gerald here, Jay. Returning your call.”

  Pulling Susanna’s door shut behind him, Jay got straight to the point. “We’ve got a problem.”

  There was a beat of silence on the other end, then, “Sorry to hear that. What’s up?”

  Jay headed for the emergency exit at the end of the corridor. Inputting his passcode, he shoved the door wide, dragging in a deep gulp of the morning air, suddenly able to breathe again.

  “I remember being specific about my needs when we hammered out the preliminary arrangement.” He made a supreme attempt to sound professional when every breath seared his larynx.

  “This is about Susanna’s experience, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “Jay, before we go any further, be reassured I heard everything you said about the sort of administrator you felt would be best suited to run The Arbors.”

  “If that’s the case, then maybe you’ll explain why you sent someone with no memory-care experience. She hasn’t even run a facility before.”

  “I considered everything you said, Jay. So did the board and the attorneys and the execs with Rockport and University. We all want this deal to pull through as much as you do.”

  Not even close.

  “We’re achievement oriented at Northstar,” Gerald continued. “We want to meet your needs and reach our goal at the same time. Our goal is your goal, Jay. You came to us because we’re a corporation you can trust to move The Arbors into the future. A corporation you felt would do the job right.”

  “You don’t have to tell me.” Or sell me.

  Clearly, Jay had been wrong. God knows it happened.

  “You’ve got the experience for sure,” Gerald said. “But as the administrator of a private facility. We’re looking to expand the definition of service at The Arbors. That’s why you came to us. You trusted we’d be your best bet to accomplish that goal. That’s my point, Jay. You can trust us.”

  Gerald was on the offense, ready to run the ball. Jay should have known Susanna would have already spoken to her boss.

  “How’s that? I asked for one thing and you sent me something else entirely and didn’t bother to mention it.”

  “Is that the issue here? That we didn’t inform you?”

  Gerald’s question trivialized Jay’s concern and made him sound petty, which spiked his anger big. But while Jay ran a private facility, he ran an efficient business. Top-notch care. Consistently balanced budgets. If Northstar didn’t want to chuck this acquisition out the window, they’d better reevaluate their approach right here and now.

  “I’m not happy you didn’t do me the courtesy of explaining why
you sent Susanna,” he said. “We’ve got a transition period in place to establish a relationship. Any relationship that isn’t based on trust isn’t one I’m interested in. I get that you need to flex your corporate muscle. You don’t answer to me. You made your point, but you undermined Susanna in the process, and that’s not how I operate. If you’ll roll your own employees under the bus then what’s in store for mine?”

  The silence over the cell connection was complete. Whether Gerald needed to regroup or was simply taken aback by Jay’s bluntness, he couldn’t say. He headed across the dewy grass, where cuttings from yesterday’s mowing clung to his shoes. The morning sounds of wildlife chirped and rustled in the trees, indicating a day off to a much better start than his.

  “No one’s trying to flex anything,” Gerald finally said. “I’m sorry you feel that’s what’s happening.”

  That’s exactly what was happening, whether Gerald owned it or not. Add snake-oil salesman to his list of sins.

  “Jay, you came to Northstar because you believed we could reach a mutual goal. That’s precisely why we sent Susanna. The Arbors needs a supervisor to bridge the distance between private and corporate and create a new level of service. She’s a change agent, Jay. Smart. Professional. People oriented. She’s experienced enough to do a top-notch job, but she also has a learning curve, which means she’s open to the way you do things. We send in some die-hard with a few decades of experience under his belt, and he’s going to be set in his ways.”

  The way Jay was set in his? Gerald didn’t say that aloud, but the implication was there. Or was Jay only defensive?

  “You insisted on this transitional period,” Gerald pointed out. “One of the benefits of hanging around for six months is training your replacement. Susanna’s open to what you’re doing there. She’s also at a time of her life where she can give you her undivided attention.”

  That much was true at least. Jay had been witnessing her work ethic since the day she arrived on the property. And he thought he was the only one with no life.