Free Third Time's the Bride! by Merline Lovelace Page A

code, but Dawn could do the corporate diva look when necessary, with the requisite pencil-slim black skirt and appropriate blouse or jacket. Most of the time she was in slacks and loose, colorful tops.
    Which was pretty much all she had with her at present. Frowning, she surveyed the items hanging in the guest bedroom’s closet. If she stayed in DC much longer, she would definitely have to zip up to Boston and replenish the closet’s contents. Then again, she could be heading home for good very soon. Her frown morphing into a scowl, she dug her iPhone out of her hip pocket and hit the speed-dial number for Callie.
    “Where are you?”
    “Still at Kate’s. Travis leaves this morning for Florida, so she talked me into staying another few days.”
    “Good. I’ll pick you up in an hour and we’ll hit the mall.”
    “Is this a ‘my shoes are sooo last year’ excursion?” Callie asked cautiously. “Or ‘I need some serious shopping therapy’?”
    “A combination of both. Ask Kate if she’s free for lunch. We’ll hook up with her somewhere. I have to be back by three, though. It’s Tommy’s first day at school. I’m picking him up.”
    “I hope he has a teacher with a megasize store of patience,” Callie said, laughing.
    “I hope so, too!”
    Dawn hung up with a resurgence of her usual ebullient spirits. Tommy had school and Brian had billion-dollar deals to wrangle, but she had friends who’d shared almost every joyous and not-so-joyous moment of her life. She figured she came out the winner by every count.
    * * *
    Brian would have agreed with her. After the sweet, poignant fun of getting his son settled at a shiny new kid-size desk, the rest of his day had pretty much gone to hell.
    Given his tight schedule, his executive assistant had ordered the limo for his ten o’clock meeting at the FCC. Dominic wove through the usual downtown DC traffic and delivered his boss right on time. The chief of the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology had been sitting on EAS’s application for access to a new ultrahigh frequency satellite band for weeks now. Determined to pry the application loose, Brian conferred with him and several other officials for two frustrating hours before finally convincing them EAS’s requirements fell within their frequency allocation and spectrum usage projections.
    He left the FCC with barely enough time to make his working lunch with Northrop Grumman’s VP of Engineering Technologies at the corporation’s headquarters in Falls Church, Virginia. Dominic negotiated the traffic skillfully enough to get him to lunch, but hit a major snarl on the way back to EAS headquarters. As a consequence, Brian arrived ten minutes late for his two o’clock appointment with Ms. Margaret Davidson.
    The slim, fifty-ish former teacher looked elegantly professional in a calf-length navy blue skirt, a white blouse and a paisley scarf draped over one shoulder of her red blazer. She rose when he appeared at the door of the visitors’ lounge and accepted his apologies with a gracious nod.
    “Mrs. Jones has kept me well supplied with conversation and jasmine tea.”
    Brian shot his executive assistant a grateful smile. “Thanks, LauraBeth. Let’s go to my office, Ms. Davidson, and get to know each other.”
    The ever-efficient LauraBeth Jones had done more than just compile a list of candidates. At Brian’s request, she’d hired Joe Russo’s security firm to conduct in-depth background checks. Joe’s bloodhounds had verified each candidate’s employment and educational history, run a state and local criminal record check, screened sex offender registries, reviewed driving records and requested credit reports.
    “I understand you graduated from Bryn Mawr,” Brian said when he and Ms. Davidson were comfortably settled in hunter-green leather armchairs positioned to provide a panoramic view of Bethesda’s ever-growing skyline.
    “Yes, I did. I was actually in the same class as Drew Gilpin