Playing to Win (Summer Beach Vets 2) - sweet contemporary romance (7 page)

A loud bang woke Ellie up. She raised herself up on her elbows, blinking groggily. The room was spinning around her slightly and her head was pounding.

“Ohhhh…” she groaned, sitting up slowly in bed.

Last night was a blur. She seemed to remember laughing a lot and doing Elvis impersonations with Libby as they downed cans of beer. At some point, a cute guy named Jack Daniels had joined the party and, after that, she couldn’t remember much except staggering home way after midnight and barely getting undressed before slumping into bed.

Ellie groaned again and swung her legs over the side of the bed, trying to move as gently as possible. Did she really have that much to drink? She didn’t think so. But she didn’t usually drink much these days—and she had never been a big drinker, even back in college—so her tolerance was probably pretty low.

Should have thought of that last night
, Ellie berated herself as she gripped her bedside table and slowly stood up. She swayed as the room spun around her for a moment, then steadied. Outside her room, she could hear the sounds of movement and then quick footsteps coming to her door.

It must be Sara
, thought Ellie hazily.
That bang must have been the front door. Funny, she’s back early. I thought she was going to stay at Craig’s the whole weekend…

“Ellie? Ellie?”

Her door flew open and Sara stood there, looking fresh and pretty in a turquoise dress that hurt Ellie’s eyes.

“Ellie? What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

“No…” Ellie mumbled, covering her eyes with one hand. “I went over to Libby’s last night and we had a bit to drink—”

“You mean you guys got wasted,” said Sara, laughing. “I never thought I’d see the day when you’d have a big night out and a hangover. Funny, though, I saw Libby just now on the street and she seemed fine…”

Ellie groaned again. She shuffled slowly out of the room and into the bathroom. After splashing some cold water on her face, she felt marginally better. “She must have a better tolerance than me,” Ellie commented, drying her face with a towel. She dropped it back on the rung and looked at her cousin. “How come you’re back so early? I thought you were staying at Craig’s the whole weekend?”

“What do you mean, ‘so early’? It’s nearly four o’clock in the afternoon and I was planning to be back by five anyway—”

“It’s
what
?” Ellie stared at her. “What time did you say it was?”

“Nearly four. Why—”

“Oh, shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!” Ellie ran into the living room. She paused for a moment by the couch as the room tilted around her and a wave of nausea rose up her throat. It passed and she started looking frantically for her laptop and folders. She found them stacked in a pile on the side table.

“What is it?” asked Sara, who had followed her into the living room.

“My presentation for the board meeting tomorrow! I was supposed to work on it last night—but I thought it would be okay to leave it until today. I thought I’d have the whole day! Oh God, I knew I should have come home! I shouldn’t have listened to Dan! I need to email the presentation to my boss by eight this evening and I won’t have—”

“Hey, it’s okay,” Sara said soothingly. “You’ve still got a few hours. Look, why don’t you go and have a hot shower first? You can’t just sit down like this and expect to start working. And drink some water. You’re probably really dehydrated.”

Sara was right. Ellie took a deep breath to calm herself down, then went into the kitchen where she drank two glasses of cool water, followed by a couple of paracetamol tablets. Twenty minutes later, freshly showered and dressed, she sat down in front of her laptop. Her head was still pounding and everything felt like it was a huge effort, but she diligently brought up her PowerPoint presentation, opened up the reports with the latest figures, and got to work.

The minutes ticked by. Ellie found it hard to concentrate, her eyes constantly darting towards the clock to check the time. She felt a wave of panic threatening to overwhelm her. She’d gone through half the presentation before she realised that she had made a mistake and had to go back to change everything from the beginning.
Shit
. She corrected the error and started again. Sara quietly brought her a cup of black tea and some dry toast to nibble on, then left her alone.

Five-thirty…

Six…

Six forty-five…

Seven twenty…

Seven thirty-five…

Finally, at a quarter to eight, Ellie hit the “Send” button on her email and sat back in relief. She felt absolutely drained.

“You know you’ve got a few messages on your phone,” Sara said, coming over and handing Ellie her cell phone.

Ellie scanned the display. She had missed a couple of calls from Dan earlier today and he had sent a text message while she was working. Her mouth tightened. She didn’t feel like talking to him. Ignoring the message, she tossed her phone onto the table and stood up and stretched. Suddenly, she was ravenous. She wanted something hot, salty, and greasy.

“Hey,” she called to Sara. “Should we order pizza?”

Dan carefully inserted the intramedullary rod into the hole he had drilled in the centre of the cat’s femur. He checked the alignment of the internal splint and joined it to the other section of fractured bone. Skilfully tightening the screws, he approximated the two ends of bone, giving the compound fracture the best chance to heal. Hopefully the Siamese would regain full use of her broken leg in a few weeks. In the meantime, he hoped the elderly owner would be able to keep the mischievous young cat quiet enough to allow complete recovery.

Pulling his mask off, Dan tilted his head back and stretched the stiff muscles in his neck and shoulders. Rachel, the vet nurse, came to help him move the cat to a cage in the ICU for observation while he went to write up the post-op notes. His mind drifted as he sat at the desk…

What was Ellie doing? Why hadn’t she returned any of his texts or calls? He frowned. She knew that he was on-call at the animal hospital this weekend and she hadn’t seemed to mind that they couldn’t do much together. He didn’t think she was the kind of woman that expected a man to be by her side all the time. The last he had heard, she had been planning to spend most of Saturday on the beach with Will and Milo. But it was Sunday evening now and he hadn’t heard a single word from her. He missed her, missed hearing her voice, with that soft American twang that was somehow so sexy.

Maybe she was working, he thought. He knew that she had an important presentation tomorrow morning to the board members at her resort. And impressing her bosses seemed to be very important to Ellie. Well, that was understandable, especially when you were young and climbing the career ladder, he reminded himself. Being his own boss and one of the senior partners at the animal hospital meant that he often forgot that.

Sighing, he stood up. He had to go out and speak to Mrs Gordon, who had rushed her Siamese in and was now waiting anxiously for the results of the emergency surgery. As for Ellie… maybe it would be best if he gave her some space, Dan decided. He would try and see her after work tomorrow evening.

Ellie smoothed her skirt down as she took her place at the conference table on Monday morning, nodding and smiling politely at the senior board members. She had met some of them before, but she wasn’t familiar enough with them to feel completely at ease. Not that they stood on ceremony. She marvelled again at the casual style of Australian culture as she watched her other colleagues drift in and exchange greetings with the senior executives. From their manner, you would have thought that they were all “mates heading down to the pub for a drink”. Well, maybe they were, Ellie reflected. Australians took the concept of equality very seriously. Just because you were the company CEO didn’t mean that people should treat you any differently to the junior trainee. As a colleague had explained to her in her first week on the job, Australians didn’t like “tall poppies” that grew above the rest and thought they were better than everyone else.

“Shall we begin?” Ellie’s boss, the director of marketing, smiled at her as he motioned for the lights to be dimmed. The projector whirred into motion.

Ellie nodded and stood up to take her place at the front of the room. All eyes around the long conference table turned to her. She smoothed her skirt again nervously and put on her best professional smile, then launched into her presentation. But she hadn’t gone past four slides before Stuart from Account Management signalled for her attention. Ellie felt a flash of irritation. Stuart was one of those know-it-all types who always liked to interrupt every presentation with some patronising question and then argue pointlessly over the topic, just to show how clever and witty he was.

She paused and said, “Yes, Stuart?”

“Are you sure about that campaign total? It looks a little off to me.”

“Yes, of course, I’m sure,” snapped Ellie. “I’ve gone over these figures several times.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t make sense. Even allowing for market saturation, your proposal would mean that Summer Beach Resort would get diminishing returns on this PR campaign…” Stuart clucked his tongue. “That doesn’t make good business sense to me.”

“Well, it makes perfect business sense to me,” said Ellie acidly. “And since I’m the PR manager here, I imagine that my experience and expertise count for more than your personal feelings.”

The vice president spoke up. “Ellie, sorry, but aren’t these last year’s figures?”

Ellie froze. She turned and stared at the slide.

Oh God.

The whole room looked at her expectantly. Ellie wanted to die. Her lips felt numb as she stammered. “Uh… yes, you’re right. Sorry… I don’t know how that happened…”

Stuart chuckled. “Had a big weekend, eh, Ellie? About time you let your hair down and went on a bender.”

Everyone around the table laughed. Ellie felt her cheeks burning. She gave a sickly smile. She had never felt so humiliated. She had always prided herself on her cool professionalism and faultless reputation. In all her jobs, she had never made a mistake like this. And after Stuart had called her out in front of the board of directors too!

“I… I’m sorry,” she murmured, tears smarting in her eyes.

“Hey, no dramas,” said the vice president kindly. “We all make mistakes.”

I don’t!
thought Ellie as she blinked fiercely.
I never make mistakes!
She took a deep breath. “I… I can go back to my desk and look for the right figures but it’ll take me a while—I’m sorry—and I’d have to recalculate the sponsorship budget based on—”

“Nah, don’t worry about it,” said the vice president, waving his hand. “We’ll just go over it next week, eh? John…” He turned to another man at the table. “Why don’t we have a look at your reports on the progress of the spa design.”

Ellie returned to her place at the conference table and sat down miserably. Her cheeks were still burning and her eyes felt hot. She barely heard John’s presentation. Instead, she stared at the table surface in front of her, her mind churning. She was furious with herself—furious that she had ignored  her original instincts to put work first, furious that she had been tempted into letting go of the tight control she had always maintained over her life, and furious that she had rushed her presentation and been so careless. She had always prided herself on being meticulous and efficient. Ellie Monroe just didn’t mess up!  

Most of all, she was furious with Dan. It was all his fault. If she hadn’t listened to him, hadn’t followed his stupid advice to relax more and take things more casually, she would never have been humiliated like this. She had worked so hard to get to where she was now, career-wise, and she couldn’t risk losing it all because she started making embarrassing professional blunders like this.

It was all a mistake
, she thought frantically.
I should never have gotten involved with Dan
. She had let his easy-going attitude infect her—and look what happened! He was a bad influence.
I’ve got to stop seeing him.
Even as the thought entered her mind, Ellie felt a stab in her heart, but she gritted her teeth and ignored the feeling. There was no future for them anyway, so why prolong it? Especially when it was affecting her in such a bad way?

“Ellie?”

Ellie felt a gentle hand on her shoulder and looked up in surprise to see that most of the seats at the conference table were empty and there was a cluster of people filing out the door. The meeting was over. Her boss stood beside her chair, a tentative smile on his lips as he looked at her.

Ellie sprang out of her chair. “I’m so sorry about what happened with my presentation. Please let me apologise again and, I promise, I won’t ever let something like that happen ag—”

“Whoa…” He held his hands up, smiling. “Relax, Ellie. I wasn’t coming to rake you over the coals. Just the opposite, in fact. I was coming to say don’t take it to heart. It’s no biggie. Everybody makes mistakes.”

Ellie swallowed. “Thank you. That’s really nice of you to say—”

“I mean it. So don’t let it get you down.” He turned away, then paused and added over his shoulder, “By the way, I’m looking forward to your talk this coming Saturday at the awards dinner.”

“You… you’re still happy for me to do it?” Ellie asked him.

“Of course! Like I said, Ellie, nobody holds what happened today against you.” He smiled again. “So don’t dwell on it. Just focus on your talk for this Saturday.”

“I will. I won’t mess that up, I promise,” said Ellie fervently.

She repeated it to herself after he’d left the room. She couldn’t screw up again. This awards dinner was a chance to salvage her professional reputation—show her colleagues that she was someone to be respected, not laughed at. It was the most important thing in her life now. She had to get back to her old self—the cool, efficient, workaholic Ellie Monroe who never made mistakes.

And that Ellie had no place for Dr Dan O’Brien in her life. 

There was a figure by her front door as Ellie slid her car in close to the curb in front of her house. She shifted into park, pulled the handbrake, and killed the engine. Then she got slowly out of the car, trying not to make eye contact with the tall man standing on her front doorstep. It was Dan.

“This is good timing.” Dan smiled as he came towards her. “I finished early today and thought I’d walk over—see if I could catch you getting home from work. Want to come for a stroll on the beach with me and then maybe grab a bite to eat at—”

“I can’t.”

He raised an eyebrow at her tone of voice. He reached for her, his voice soft with concern. “Is something wrong? Did something happen at work?”

Ellie shook her head, pulling out of his arms. She could feel tears smarting in her eyes again and was furious with herself. Was she crying? She didn’t do “blushing” and she didn’t do “crying”—and yet ever since she met Dan, she was just a mess of emotions! It was just another sign that he was bad for her.

“Ellie?” The tenderness in his voice was almost her undoing.

She hadn’t meant to tell him, but suddenly the words came tumbling out. “I screwed up really badly at the meeting this morning, okay? It was humiliating—in front of all the senior board members too. And I even snapped at one of my colleagues who called me out on it—I thought I was putting him in his place—but then it turned out that
I
was the one who was wrong! Oh God!” She grabbed a tissue from her bag and blew her nose.

“Hey…” said Dan gently, pulling her back into his arms. “She’ll be right… Shh… Shh… she’ll be right.”

His body was solid, warm, and comforting, and Ellie had to fight against the urge to just melt into the embrace.
I can’t
, she reminded herself
. I can’t let myself be seduced by Dan’s tender words and charm again. He’s bad for me.
She stiffened and pulled out of his arms again. This time he let her go and stood looking down at her quizzically.

Ellie took a deep breath. “Dan… I… I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”

“What?” His brows drew together in a frown.

“I… we’re two really different people and I just don’t think it would work.”

“It’s worked fine until now.”

“No, it hasn’t!” Ellie burst out. “If I hadn’t listened to you and your stupid ideas, none of this would have happened!”

“What are you on about?” Dan stared at her.

“You… you telling me constantly to relax and take things easy. You made me ignore my old instincts of putting my work first. I ended up going out on Saturday night and then having a hangover most of Sunday! If I hadn’t listened to you, if I wasn’t trying to please you and change myself to be something I’m not, I would never have gone out—and then my presentation would have been fine and I wouldn’t have been so humiliated this morning!”

“Hang on a minute—you’re blaming me for that?” A flash of amusement showed in Dan’s grey eyes. “Ellie, I think you’re taking this all a bit too seriously. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s no—”

“
I
don’t!” yelled Ellie. “At least, I never did until I met you!”

Dan’s grin vanished. He said impatiently, “Look, I know your work means a lot to you and I know you’re upset about what happened this morning. But that’s just dumb. Everyone makes mistakes—it happens. And it’s not the end of the world. It’s only human.”

“Well, that just proves my point exactly,” cried Ellie. “You think it’s okay to mess up all the time—guess that must be your great Australian relaxed attitude! Well, I might be an uptight American, but I don’t think it’s okay! I have standards!”

“I never said it’s okay to mess up all the time,” said Dan, his grey eyes angry now. “I just said that it’s understandable. It happens sometimes. Nobody is infallible—and if you think you are, then you’re a bloody fool. And Australians have standards too,” he added coldly. “Just because we have a better work-life balance doesn’t mean that we don’t take pride in our work.”

Ellie bristled at his tone. “I’ve built my career on my reputation of being faultless at my job. I don’t make mistakes.”

“Then you’ve built your career on a fantasy,” snapped Dan. “Mistakes happen. Get over it. Pick yourself up, learn from the mistake, and move on.”

“Fine,” said Ellie, stepping away from him. “I’ve learnt from this mistake and I know what I need to do now.”

She opened the door to her house, went inside, and slammed it behind her.