Ships in the Night

Danielle Murray strode briskly through the front door of the downtown hotel, a bellhop trailing behind with her suitcase and a hang-up bag. She walked up to the front desk to confirm her reservation, complete the check-in process and obtain her key card.

Once she had completed her business, she thanked the manager who was working the desk with a brief smile, then walked purposefully through the ornate lobby.

As she walked through the lobby, she happened to look over at a man reading a newspaper in one of the lobby chairs, and there was just the briefest of eye contact, a hint of a smile, then she was gone toward the elevators at the back of the lobby.

At age 41, Danielle was a success by anyone's measure. Confident, self-assured and well educated, she had used a considerable inheritance to form a holding company that had acquired a half-dozen companies in the area of home maintenance, of which she was the president and CEO.

Among her group, there was a nationally known drain-cleaning company, a widely recognized carpet cleaning service and other such companies that weren't quite as well known. She had used her estimable work experience and her business acumen to position her group among the leaders in the industry.

She had arrived in the city that morning, and had a meeting scheduled with the directors of one of those companies, which was about to launch a major advertising campaign. She needed to stow her belongings in the room, freshen up quickly and make her way back downstairs to catch a taxi to the company's headquarters.

Stan Conway really wasn't terribly interested in anything he saw in USA Today, but he liked to scan through it just so he could say he was well informed.

He was much more interested in the woman who strode into the hotel like she owned it, followed by a bellhop pulling a cart with her things. He watched as she efficiently completed her business at the front desk, and gave her a quick mental appraisal.

The woman was slightly taller than average, probably 5-foot-7, maybe 5-8, and he guessed her age at around 40, although she was a young-looking 40. There was nothing about her body that stood out; her hips, breasts and legs were all in perfect proportion, and she was dressed for business in a smart suit with a knee-length skirt that was snug but not tight.

She wasn't classically beautiful, but she was quite nice-looking, with sandy blonde hair cut in a style that was very short in back, but swept up from her forehead and off to her left. Stan found himself nodding in appreciation, all the more so when she strode past, glanced his way and smiled briefly.

Stan stared at her receding backside – and it was very nicely put-together backside – until she turned the corner to the elevators, out of sight from where he was sitting. It was only then that he sensed a presence next to his chair.

"Know her?" John Motta said with a knowing smile.

"No, but I wish I did," Stan answered as he folded his newspaper and stood up to greet the man he was meeting for lunch. "Nice piece of work."

"That she is," John said as the two men shook hands. "How is everything, Stan? Are we about ready to kick this deal up a couple of notches?"

"Let's have lunch, and we'll talk," Stan said.

Stan Conway owned a modest-sized construction company and John Motta was a potential client, one whose business could put Stan's company into a brand-new market, both in terms of location and the type of construction.

At 38, he was just about to realize the dream he'd had when he'd started with the company, back when it had been owned by his ex-father-in-law.

Stan was an average-sized man, about 5-foot-10 and fairly lean. He still had a full head of brown hair that was just starting to show some silver, dazzling blue eyes and a thick moustache that failed to mask a ready and winning smile.

Stan and John had sat down at their table in the hotel's restaurant, and had just placed their orders, when Stan happened to see the blonde woman he'd noticed earlier stride back through the lobby, briefcase in hand, and head out the door.

He was shocked to feel little butterflies in his stomach, something that hadn't happened at the sight of a woman in a long, long time.

It wasn't that Stan didn't think about women, or that he didn't enjoy looking at them. On the contrary. He dated a few women back in his home city, and sometimes, when the need became too great, he would avail himself of the services of an escort service, usually on business trips like this one.

But he hadn't gotten the butterflies like that since college, when he'd first laid eyes on the girl he'd eventually married, the woman who had broken his heart six years earlier.

Even as he watched through the window as the woman climbed into a taxi, all of the bittersweet memories came rushing back, unbidden and unwanted.

God, he'd loved her! They had been the perfect couple at their college; she was the homecoming queen and he was a starter on the varsity baseball team.

Angie had been a raven-haired beauty that every man on campus had tried to nail. But Stan had gotten there first, and after they graduated from the college, they had gotten married.

His father-in-law owned a construction company, and he gladly gave his new son-in-law a position in the company.

Stan had proven to have a natural affinity for the work, and he quickly won over the foremen and other workingmen he came in contact with. He may have been the boss' son-in-law, but he'd come from a working-class background, the son of a maintenance foreman for a chemical plant, and Stan knew all about hard work.

By the time he was 30, he'd moved up to become vice president of the company, with all of the responsibilities that entailed. It should have been the turning point in his life, and it was, but not the way he had hoped.

He wasn't sure when he began to suspect that Angie was cheating on him. There were just little things. She wasn't as affectionate; there were mysterious disappearances, when she was supposed to be some place and wasn't; and she adamantly refused to start a family, which he wanted.

She had taken to going off on vacations, either by herself or with friends, and living something approximating a jet-set life, which they really couldn't afford.

Whatever it was, it all started to add up a year or so after he was promoted to vice president. He caught his wife in a few little lies here and there; she was going out, "with the girls," a little too often, then coming home late and fairly disheveled.

Stan decided to lay a trap and see what happened. He hired a special crew, men he knew from jobs around town, to build a large deck behind his house. He installed several hidden cameras, in a number of locations, including the den and their bedroom, then sat back and waited.

He didn't have to wait long. The men he'd hired were all uniformly athletic-looking – muscular and handsome – and they had been instructed to flirt with his wife and see what she'd do. Angie wasn't working, so she was around the house a lot.

Within two weeks of the start of the project, his cameras had caught Angie taking one of the young men upstairs to their bedroom for a tryst, then another one, and finally, she took them all on in a furious gangbang.

Stan was crushed, but his revenge was grim. He filed for divorce, then paid his father-in-law a visit. Angie, of course, had filled her father's ear with her version of events, and Stan was about to become persona non grata at the construction company. He couldn't have that.

He walked straight into his father-in-law's office with glossy photos and the tapes of Angie in action with his crew of workers. Plus, by then he'd hired a private investigator that had turned up evidence of his wife's antics on trips to places like Cancun and the Bahamas.

Stan's terms were simple. He wanted the company. Period. If his father-in-law would turn over the company to him, and legally surrender all rights to its ownership, he'd give Angie a no-fault divorce and none of his evidence of her cheating would see the light of a courtroom.

Initially, the man had balked. His father had founded the company, and he was loath to see it pass out of the family's hands. Stan simply turned the screws. Unless he got the company, not only would he drag Angie's name through the mud, but also all of the workers and the foremen would leave the company and follow him to a new competing company.

Stan had earned their loyalty through hard work and dedication, and for the fact that he'd brought a significant amount of new business to the company. They'd leave his father-in-law high and dry, with a shop and equipment and no one to run it.

It had been a huge gamble on his part. Had his father-in-law called his bluff, Stan would have been forced to go deeply in debt to finance his new company, and he would have had to painstakingly build a new clientele.

The threat had worked, however, and his father-in-law caved in. It had taken several months for all of the legal wrangling to be completed, and Stan did eventually give his ex-father-in-law a nominal amount of money as a token to purchase the company. But he assumed ownership of the company, and he had worked his ass off to make it profitable.

Stan had thoroughly modernized the company's equipment, increased salaries and wages across the board, and had steered the company into some new areas and different types of buildings than the company had been involved with before.

He'd become a success, but it was hollow, because he had no one to share it with.

Even as that thought passed through his mind, all in but a second's reminiscing, the same thought was passing through Danielle Murray's mind as the taxi drove her toward her destination.

She had everything a successful person could want: position, power, wealth, possessions, but she had no one to share it with. She had never married, never had children and her family was all gone. Her parents were both dead, and her only sibling, an older brother, had been killed in a traffic accident many years ago.

Danielle had a few close friends, a few old girlfriends that were her confidantes, and a few longtime boyfriends she could turn to for sex if her need for physical release and intimacy became too much.

But her girlfriends all had families of their own, and while she often enjoyed sex with her boyfriends, there was a detachment, a lack of passion to those relationships that left her feeling empty.

Moreover, she felt her biological clock ticking away, and she sometimes found herself wanting a child, if only for the companionship.

Out of the clear, a face flashed through her memory, the face of a man she'd seen earlier that morning.

Where had it been? Yes, the hotel lobby, sitting on a chair reading a newspaper. What was it about the man that had diverted her attention? The mere fact that she'd noticed him was significant; usually when she was traveling on business, her focus was narrow, straight ahead.

But she'd looked over at him, made eye contact and even smiled, albeit very briefly. Why? Danielle had something close to a photographic memory, and she brought her acute mental facilities to bear, and suddenly it hit her.

It was his attire. He'd been dressed utterly casual, in a sport coat, checkered shirt, blue jeans and top-siders – without socks. A man was sitting in the lobby of an upscale downtown hotel, apparently waiting for a meeting of some sort, and he looked completely at ease, totally without pretense, dressed in clothes he was comfortable in.

There had been something else, too, once she put her mind to it. He'd had two of most dazzling eyes she had ever seen on a man. As the taxi slowed at her destination, Danielle Murray found herself hoping that the man was staying at the hotel overnight, rather than just in for the day.

Stan's day had gone well. After lunch, he and John had looked over the plans for the building that John wanted to construct. Stan already knew them by heart, but he had specific questions he wanted answered, and John was happy to oblige.

After they had discussed the project at some length, John had driven Stan out to the site where the project would be built. Stan had looked over the area with a practiced eye, looking at things like drainage, access to power, transportation routes into and out of the site, anything that might impact the construction process.

John had chosen well, he decided. Everything seemed favorable, they had come to a tentative agreement on a bid price, and Stan had been in an exuberant mood when John dropped him back at the hotel.

He was going to head back to his room when he happened to look over at the hotel bar, and his stomach once again fluttered nervously. Sitting at the bar, her manicured finger idly circling a wineglass, was the blonde woman he'd seen earlier. Only she didn't look quite as confident or as authoritative as she'd appeared earlier.

Stan really didn't even think; he just turned toward the bar, and, fortunately, there was an open seat next to the woman. He sidled up to the bar and looked over at the woman.

"Excuse me, is this seat taken?" he said.

The day had not gone well for Danielle. She had arrived at the company headquarters to find that their ad campaign wasn't what she had hoped it would be. There was just something that wasn't right about it. It was a little too corny, a little too juvenile for her tastes.

She had ended up rejecting the whole idea and told the company's creative staff that they had two weeks to come up with an acceptable alternative or she would fire the whole department.

Danielle truly hated being a bitch like that, but sometimes the person at the top had to crack the whip to get things done the way they needed to be done. And after her fit of anger, she had taken a minute to compose herself, then sat down with the department and discussed some ideas and offered some suggestions, trying to point them in the right direction.

Still, the whole episode had left a bad taste in her mouth, left her a little irritable. So she had detoured to the bar when she returned to the hotel, in hopes that a couple of glasses of wine before dinner would improve her spirits.

She was well into her second glass when she sensed someone next to her asking if the chair was taken. She was prepared to just give a perfunctory nod, when she looked up into the eyes of the man she'd seen earlier that morning.

Danielle's smile gave her away.

"No, go ahead," she said. "I could use the company."

"Thanks," Stan said, sitting in the seat next to Danielle.

He ordered a Bud Light, and suddenly found himself tongue-tied. The butterflies were rolling in his stomach like a symphony, and he couldn't understand why.

Danielle, too, found that her mouth was dry, as she fumbled for some opening. She had taken note of his eyes earlier, but the quick look she'd gotten then hadn't done justice to just how handsome this man was.

Finally, it was Stan who managed to break the ice.

"Rough day?" he asked a little nervously.

"Is it that obvious?" Danielle asked in return.

"Well, when a pretty woman clenches her jaw like you are, it usually signals that something isn't going well," Stan said.

Danielle told Stan a little bit of what had gone on earlier that day, how she had had to put the spurs to some people, and that it wasn't something she liked doing.

"There are times when it's no fun being a boss," Danielle said. "Know what I mean?"

"I know exactly what you mean," Stan answered. "So what do you do?"

Danielle told him just that she was president of her company, without elaborating. There was another awkward pause, then they both remembered their manners.

"Oh, I'm sorry, it's Danielle, Danielle Murray," she said, and added where she was from.

"Stan Conway," Stan answered, and he told her where he was from.

They were pleasantly surprised to learn that they only lived 100 miles apart, and that just made both of them a little more nervous. It was all the more so from the fact that when they shook hands a sort of sizzle seemed to pass between them.

They both felt like they were on the brink of something momentous, and they weren't sure how to proceed. After all, they were still strangers, two ships in the night passing each other at a critical juncture in their lives.

Danielle tentatively asked Stan about his work, about what brought him to that particular city, and he told her a little about his company and the kind of work he did.

"Did you start your company from scratch?" Danielle said.

Stan just looked wistfully away at something in the far corner, and she knew immediately that she'd hit some kind of nerve.

"No, I, ah, I took it," Stan said finally. "It was part of my divorce settlement."

"I'm so sorry," Danielle said, a touch embarrassed. "I didn't mean to pry."

"Oh no, that's all right," Stan said. "That's the way it happened, and you didn't know. Let's just say my ex hurt me pretty badly."

"You know, it's not good for the soul to hold that kind of emotion in," Danielle said quietly after a moment of silence.

She'd seen in a flash that this was a man who'd been severely wounded by love, in much the same way she had, only his wounds were much deeper and more recent.

"Have you ever been married?" Stan asked, with the barest trace of bitterness.

"No," Danielle said. "I haven't let a man get that close to me in a long, long time. There was one, though, back in college."

Maybe it was the wine, maybe it was the empathy she sensed, but Danielle then told Stan a story she had only told a select few people, close friends mostly.

In college, she'd fallen hard for a young man, a guy named Kyle, and he had appeared to fall for her, as well. They had gone together for over a year, even talked about marriage. She was starry-eyed in love, then out of the blue he just dumped her.

A week later, she saw him with another girl, one of the campus beauties. Danielle had confronted him later, and he'd told her his new girlfriend was much better looking, and she was far better in bed.

"I just felt ... rejected," Danielle said. "He wasn't the least bit apologetic about it, either. He just tore out my heart and stomped all over it, and I've never quite gotten over it."

Stan listened with a growing lump in his stomach. Here, finally, was a woman who knew what he'd felt when Angie had betrayed him.

"Well, at least you were lucky enough that he showed his true colors before you married him," Stan said. "That doesn't make it any easier to accept, but it does count for something. I gave my wife 10 years before I finally figured out what she was like."

"What happened?" Danielle asked, almost afraid to know.

She felt herself tearing up as Stan told her his story. How a woman could do that to a man she professed to love was a mystery. All the more so because Stan seemed to be such a nice, decent person, a hard worker with a bright future.

Danielle could feel something else, too, as she listened to Stan's painful story. She could feel herself tingling between her legs. She had looked him up and down as they had talked, and she liked what she saw.

Stan could feel it, too. He found himself growing hard as he let the raw emotions out. He'd shed plenty of tears over Angie, but it had always been in private. He'd never really unburdened himself to another person, not even his own mother.

Stan took several deep breaths to compose himself and he dabbed at his eyes with the back of his hand. It took him a few seconds to realize that Danielle had a hand on his upper arm and she was softly stroking him, comforting him.

He needed to steer things forward in a more positive direction. He could sense that perhaps this was heading some place nice, and he didn't want things to turn on his or her bitterness over past relationships.