Chapter 102

The fundraising dinner was almost at an end when a face Phil hadn’t seen in close to seven years stopped by. She wasn’t one of the guests but instead stopped to pick up the water glasses from the table.

“Amberleigh?” Phil asked when she turned his way. “It is you, isn’t it?”

Hailey knew she had heard the name before and she searched her memory for why it was familiar.

“Hi, Phil,” she said. “You’re looking well.”

“You, too,” Phil replied.

Indeed, Amberleigh Hayes was looking magnificent even in her waitress outfit. She wore black pants and a white formless top but one glance could tell anyone that she had a great body beneath it. Hailey suddenly remembered why she knew the name.

“Amberleigh,” she said. “Phil’s first girlfriend!”

“Uh, no,” Phil hastened to point out. “I mean, she probably would have been. You know, if I had ever worked up the nerve to ask her out. How have you been?”

“I can’t really talk now,” Amberleigh said, looking around the room. “I’ve got to clear the rest of the tables in this section before the money exchange can start.”

“Oh, of course,” Phil said, shaking his head. “Sorry. Well, if you do get a minute, stop back by.”

Amberleigh nodded and walked to the next table.

“She’s gorgeous!” Molly said as the brown-haired girl walked away. “Jesus, Phil, she is way out of your league.”

Hailey cleared her throat and glared across the table.

“We already know you’re out of his league,” Molly said with a wink. “That was never in doubt. I figured you were the anomaly, though. Turns out he’s been swinging for the fences since he was just a wee lad.”

“So why didn’t you ever ask her out?” Katelyn wondered. The girl was almost as tall as Katelyn – who was only an inch or two shorter than Phil’s six-foot frame.

“We moved,” Phil said. “I was just hitting dating age when Mom took over Barton. We left Cutter’s Crossing just before I turned 13.”

Bob was sitting quietly but suddenly felt four sets of eyes on him.

“Why didn’t she speak to you if you’re both from there?” Katelyn asked.

“Bob was a year older than us,” Phil hastened to point out. “Plus, well, he was the star up there. She was probably terrified at the prospect of speaking to him.”

“I wasn’t that bad!” Bob said, noticing the narrowed eyes of the females at the table. “I didn’t know her. I mean, I recognized her but it isn’t like we’ve ever talked or anything. Some of her friends dated some of my friends but I didn’t know her that well. I dated the same girl all through high school and I think Amberleigh dated the same guy. You probably remember him, Phil, Jeremy Kraus.”

“He’s a putz!” Phil remarked, frowning. “She could have done a lot better than him.”

“He wasn’t too bad once you got to know him,” Bob replied with a shrug. “He got over the immaturity and stopped farting in people’s faces about the time you moved.”

“Boys and their flatulence,” Tiffany said with a sardonic smile. “My brother used to do that to his friends. It must be like a dog marking its territory.”

Phil nodded but Hailey couldn’t help but notice that his eyes were tracking the waitress as she gathered up the glasses from the surrounding tables.

“Is something bothering you?” Phil asked as he and Hailey ascended on the elevator to the hotel’s 25^th floor.

Hailey held Phil’s hand but she didn’t speak. She simply shook her head. She knew she had no reason – and no right – to be jealous of a young woman Phil hadn’t seen in seven years. They had been good friends when Phil was a boy and Amberleigh was a girl. There was no reason they wouldn’t still be good friends if they got to know one another again.

“I’m sorry if I put you on the spot there,” Phil said. He was referring to having Hailey make the presentation for Barton Holdings instead of doing it himself. “I figured it would be a good chance to get your face out in the public since you’re going to be the public image of Barton in a few years.”

Hailey was still considering Amberleigh Hayes and didn’t get the reference. She just nodded absently.

“If it’s not that, what is it?” Phil wondered.

“I guess it was weird to see you with your first girlfriend,” she finally admitted.

“I told you she wasn’t my girlfriend,” Phil pointed out.

“But she would have been,” Hailey interrupted. “You two might still be together if you hadn’t moved from Cutter’s Crossing. I ... I saw the way you watched her all evening.”

“I was just looking for a chance to talk to her for a couple of minutes,” Phil explained. “That’s all.”

“She’s really pretty,” Hailey countered.

“Yeah, I guess she is,” Phil answered with a shrug. “She’s not prettier than you if that’s what has you worried.”

“You two were best friends for 10 years!” Hailey told him. “You know practically everything about each other.”

“Oh, crap,” Phil muttered. “We knew everything about each other when we were 13. We don’t know anything about each other now. That’s why I wanted to talk to her. You know, to see how she’s doing, if she’s in college, that sort of stuff. Look, we could have kept in touch when I moved. I mean, we e-mailed each other a few times once I got to SouthPointe. Then we didn’t. We made new friends and found different interests. We were friends because we lived close to one another and we both played on the same youth soccer team. We both liked to read science fiction. That’s hardly enough to form a lifelong relationship on.”

“But you could like the exact same things now, too,” Hailey pointed out as they entered the hotel room where they would spend the night.

“Maybe,” Phil agreed. “So what? I know you and I enjoy the same things. Well, we enjoy a lot of the same things. We can talk for hours and never cover the same topic twice. We share a love not only of mint-chocolate ice cream but also similar goals and ideals. That’s the sort of thing you build a life around, Hailey. Tell me, do you look back at the first guy you had a crush on and compare him to me?”

“Of course not,” Hailey said as she kicked off her heels and sat heavily on the end of the bed.

“But I’ll bet you still wonder how he’s doing,” Phil told her in a soft voice. “You still wonder where he is from time to time and how he’s getting along.”

“I guess,” Hailey admitted.

“And if you saw him again, you’d want to ask him all those things,” Phil continued. “That’s all that was. I saw someone I hadn’t seen in a long time and I wanted to check to see if she was getting along OK. I wasn’t looking for a reason to hook up with her or even spend more than five or 10 minutes talking to her. I just wanted to see how life is treating her.”

“I’m sorry I get silly sometimes,” Hailey said, chagrined that she had watched Phil as he walked to the restroom to make sure he didn’t veer off to chat up the waitress.

“It’s OK,” Phil told her. “I get that way, too. I’ll see you leaving class with some guy from the Beta Club and I’ll want to find some way to destroy him for having the temerity to speak to my woman!”

“Am I your woman?” Hailey asked.

“You better believe it,” Phil answered with a smile.

“Well, your woman would like to make love to you right here in this bed,” she replied, her smile mirroring his. “I mean, if you’re interested in something like that.”

“Let me show you how interested I am,” Phil told her as he started to run his hands up her thigh-high stockings. “Let me show you just how interested I am.”

Beth called her son’s cell phone before he and Hailey had even left the room.

“Well?” she asked. “How did it go?”

Phil chose to answer a different question than the one his mother was asking.

“I had Hailey do the presentation and she was her normal marvelous self,” he told her.

“I don’t care about that!” Beth cut in. “I was asking about the other thing.”

“Uh, that had to wait,” Phil informed her. “Oh, we ran into Amberleigh Hayes last night.”

“Really?” Beth replied. “That’s nice. How is she? No wait, I’m sure she’s doing fine. Why did you have to wait?”

“I didn’t get the chance to talk to her but she seemed to be doing well,” Phil said, ignoring his mother’s query because Hailey was sitting right across from him. “She was working on the wait staff. I’ll have to see if she’s permanent here or if she worked for the caterer to set up the spread last night. If she’s in the city, maybe I can track her down and Hailey and I can take her to lunch one afternoon – or her and her boyfriend if he’s here too. I think I still have an e-mail address for her somewhere.”

“Oh, Hailey got upset because you were trying to talk to her?” Beth asked.

“Something like that,” Phil replied. “I think they’re above $4 million in donations. They did well last night but Barton was the highest donor. Maybe they’ll give the corporation first dibs on punishing the creeps that hurt their wife or child. That would seem like a fair deal.”

“I think I finally understand your evasiveness,” Beth said with a laugh. “You’re still at the hotel. I thought checkout was 10 a.m.”

“I called down and got a later time,” Phil replied, winking at Hailey. He had actually set up a late checkout when he’d booked the room because he had firm plans to propose to Hailey after the dinner. But as with the other three times he’d made plans, it hadn’t worked out. He had planned to ask her at the group gathering after Christmas but her excitement over finding her father again had caused him to delay. Then he was going to pop the question after the yearly meeting in March but Hurricanes Maddy and Dani had blown in and pushed the possibility out the window. Finally he planned to ask her on their last night in Emerald Cove but Hailey had wanted to go dancing with the friends she’d made there.

“You know, there might never be that perfect moment,” Beth advised.

“I’ll keep trying until I get it right,” Phil replied. “Look, we’ve got to get ready to head out. Hailey’s first game of Ultimate is this afternoon and I want to make sure she has time to practice with her teammates beforehand. I’ll call you tonight and give you the rest of the gory details about last night’s events.”

“Be sure you do!” Beth told him. “Otherwise I’ll get them from Hailey tomorrow morning.”

Hailey, Tiffany, Molly and a guy named Greg who worked in accounting with Katelyn comprised a team in the beginner’s division of the Park and Rec Division Sunday Ultimate League. Katelyn, Chaz, Tara and Jackie were playing in the Intermediate Division.

Neither Phil nor Bob played because they were participating in an amateur baseball league on Saturday mornings. That left them to coach the teams – and since neither of them had a clue about the game, it made things interesting.

None of the beginners had much of an arm and Molly was the only one who could run with anything resembling speed but the beginner’s league was just for fun and all the teams were lacking in skill.

The biggest problem had been convincing Hailey to trim her fingernails back for the summer. It took only one broken nail to bring her around, though. Molly’s fingernails were always cut short and Tiffany wore hers at moderate length.

The biggest sensation of Sunday afternoon came when the girls stripped down to track shorts and sports bras for the game. They wore matching blue shorts with white mesh sides and black tops. Greg wore a black T-shirt instead of a bra, of course.

The opponents’ eyes tracked the girls whenever they’d move either to watch Hailey’s bobbing breasts or to try to catch a glimpse of Tiffany or Molly’s panties in their loose shorts. The referee missed several obvious infractions from Hailey’s team because he was too busy watching a player run to notice what the girl (or guy) with the Frisbee was doing. In the end, Hailey’s team won their first game, 5-3.

She raced off the field after the winning score and jumped in Phil’s arms, taking him with her to the grass as she kissed him.

“We won!” she exclaimed when she finally came up for air. She joined her teammates in celebrating the first victory they had ever witnessed from a team that housed anyone they knew. Phil could only shake his head as the three girls jumped up and down as though they’d just won the seventh game of the World Series instead of a Sunday afternoon game in the park. They eventually settled down long enough to shake hands with their opponents. The two guys on the team laughed at their antics but the two females were a little perturbed, Phil saw.

The team in the Intermediate Division didn’t fare as well. Chaz was OK on defense but he was terrible on offense. That left Tara as the only person who could throw the Frisbee more than 30 feet with any sort of accuracy. It also left Katelyn as the only one who catch the Frisbee with any sort of consistency. That led to a 7-4 loss in their first game.

“Next time I’m coming out in a thong and pasties,” Katelyn muttered. “It seemed to work for those three.”

“You’ll get better,” Bob consoled.

“Oh, bullshit,” Katelyn replied. “We’re as good as we’re going to get. Jackie and Chaz are nice people but they are for shit as athletes. If we didn’t have Tara on the team we could drop down to Beginner but she’s too damned good. They’d boot us in a heartbeat.”

“You’re too good for beginner, too,” Bob told her. “Remember what you told me yesterday? It’s only for fun and exercise.”

“That was for you,” Katelyn replied, smiling for the first time since she came off the field. “God, your team is horrible.”

“It’s a bunch of guys who played in high school but weren’t good enough for college,” Bob explained. “That’s why they wouldn’t let Phil and me play on the same team. It’s the same as you. If you want to win, boot Greg off the team and move to Hailey’s team.”

“There has to be a guy,” Katelyn told him. “It’s coed. There has to be at least two women and one male on the team. That’s why we have to keep Chaz or replace him with a guy. You and Phil should just drop out of the baseball league and join our teams.”

“We made a commitment,” Bob told her. “And you have a commitment to Chaz. He switched his work schedule around so he’d have Sundays off. Remember?”

“Yeah,” Katelyn muttered. “But losing sucks!”

Phil had just settled into his desk on the Monday – in the office he shared with Hailey – when Beth buzzed and asked the two of them to join her in her office.

“How far along are you on the Grayling list?” she asked Hailey as they sat in the small conference room in Beth’s office.

“I have the lower-level officers pretty well identified,” Hailey said. “The upper-level jobs are more difficult. It’s going to require relocation and I know that can be tricky.”

“You’re farther along than I figured you would be,” Beth said with a warm smile. “Very nice work. I’m glad to hear that because I want you to shelve it for a few days.”

Hailey nodded and pulled out her tablet so she could jot down particulars on her next project.

“Go ahead and put that away,” Beth suggested. “What I have in mind for you won’t require notes.”