Free Open Arms by Marysol James Page B

the blue of his eyes. She hadn’t really seen or spoken to him since the day before, when she sat in his office and told him that she was going back to New York in a month. At the meeting this morning, he sat quite a distance from her, and although he gave her a warm smile from across the room, she had wanted a hug. She wanted to be pressed up against his large, strong body, his heartbeat against her own.
    She shook her head. Nope. No way for this to work out . And really, what did she and Rob have in common, anyway? She had learned quite a lot about Rob the night that she had stayed at Julie’s. They had sat up all night drinking wine and then tea and then coffee – they had watched the sun rise and then finally fallen in to bed around nine o’clock in the morning. Tammy had asked all about Rob; she hadn’t been able to help herself.
    She learned that Rob was a college graduate; he had his MBA from Daniels College at the University of Denver. Apparently, he had won a place in the highly-competitive one-year program, and graduated top of his class. He was smart, way smarter than she was, obviously. Tammy had scraped by in a general Fashion Design degree in community college. At the time – so many years ago, now – she really thought that she could make it as a designer. She had been young and excited and enthusiastic, and she had loved working with color and material and fluid lines.
    But school had been hard for her, it had always been hard. Julie had found the energy and drive to fight her way through, despite everything, but Tammy just didn’t have that in her. So she got a mediocre degree from a mediocre school and ended up having to temp wherever she could find work, trying to support herself until she found a job in design or fashion.
    A cleaning job turned in to a waitressing job; that turned in to a secretarial job and that turned in to more secretarial jobs. The hours were long, the commutes were brutal, the money was a straight-up joke, and she had no energy or creativity left when she got home. She stopped sketching after work and started vegging out on the sofa watching brainless TV. Eventually, her ambition faded and then it died.
    Now, she was now pretty much stuck in temporary office work, though the job she’d had when she was attacked in the alley had been pretty OK. Well, sort of. It was a pain to have a boss like Reg who micro-managed every damned thing, but she had kind of liked the predictability of it all. She didn’t have the job any more, of course: she was fired within three days of being beaten and left in the snow and cold. She couldn’t even be too upset about it; she didn’t have any kind of contract, and that was reality.
    Rob, though. He had education and job experience – real experience. Working in large companies, running marketing departments, heading up sales teams. Julie said that he was one of the main reasons Open Skies was such a raging success, and Tammy believed it.
    So. He was intelligent. He had a good job. He ate healthy and he worked out. He wore suits. He drove an expensive car. He even had a great apartment, Julie said, and he’d done most of the work himself. He had bought it for next-to-nothing, and then spent every weekend and evening for a year doing it up: sanding the floors, knocking down walls, painting. Julie said he had even done the whole kitchen himself, as some kind of creative project – he built the cabinets from scratch. He’d had a house-warming party when it was done and he had moved in and even though Julie hadn’t been there – it was about three years ago, long before she had even heard of David Reid or Open Skies – she had seen the pictures. She said the place was fantastic.
    His girlfriend had been there in the pictures, too, Julie said. What was her name? Carol? Karen? Well, whatever. She was long gone now, off to Hong Kong or someplace. She had accepted a glamorous banking job and had left Rob behind. So even his girlfriends were super