Moira looked up at the clock and watched the second hand tick, tick, tick slowly around until it rested on the twelve. Four minutes, she counted in her head. That’s how long she had been sitting there watching it, and that’s also how long she had left to go until she could switch off her computer, gather up her things and get the hell out of there.
It hadn’t been an easy week. Or an easy month. In fact, when Moira really thought about it, her whole year so far had been nothing but trouble and even now, on the eve of her escape to freedom for two weeks, she was sitting there completely weary and dreading the exit from the office.
She should have listened. They had all warned her about him and she had even known that she was setting herself up for a fall, but the moment Jack Tranter flashed his glistening baby blues at her, she had been sucked right in.
“He’s a player, Moira,” her colleague Erica had told her over lunch one spring afternoon as the girls sat outside their local coffee house flipping through magazines and snapping pictures of their Caesar salads.
“He’ll only hurt you,” Claire had confirmed.
“But I think I can change him,” Moira had said naïvely. “I think we have something special, and I’m pretty sure he can’t be faking.”
Erica and Claire had both looked at each other as if they didn’t have the heart to burst her bubble any more, but Moira dismissed it because she hoped she was the one who was right. After all, neither of the girls had had firsthand experience with Jack. They had just been told various bits of information from one or two other secretaries from around the office. And when Moira asked for more details, they couldn’t even tell her. For all of these reasons she was skeptical, and she and Jack were having such a great time together, she just couldn’t imagine it going any other way but up.
How she wished she would have listened.
After three months of amazing sex, deep conversations and grand plans, Jack had simply fallen off the face of the earth. When Moira finally managed to track him down, he had his arm around another woman, was cuddling up to her in plain sight for anyone to see and was nibbling her earlobe. When Moira had approached them, he looked at her as if she were a stranger and then declared at the top of his voice for everyone in a mile radius to hear, “What’s the matter with you, you psycho? We had one date. We were never exclusive.”
His companion had looked at her as if she were crazy and Moira had scuttled away, completely heartbroken and torn in two. How could he have done that to her? Less than a week earlier they had been planning on a trip over to Moira’s ancestral home of Scotland to discover a bit more about her roots and reconnect with her family’s past.
She had cried solidly for one week and then she got angry. No one was going to treat her that way. She was determined to pull herself together and move on with her life. As the sun set on a warm Sunday afternoon, she had curled up on the couch with a glass of red wine and opened her laptop.
She had never been to Scotland before, but after losing her parents several years earlier, she had felt a strange pull to go there and see what it was all about.
Her parents had always lived in the United States, but she had been told countless stories of their distant ancestors and the legends surrounding them. She had fantasized for a long time about taking the plunge and booking her flights over to Glasgow, but she had never had the nerve…
Until now.
She cradled the warm glass of wine in her palm of thought of the look on Jack’s face when he had so publically humiliated her. She was so much better than him, and now she was going to prove it. She opened up the British Airways website and booked her flight. Two weeks in Scotland and leaving as soon as possible. As she drained the rest of her glass and rested the laptop down on the couch beside her, her heart was racing and her palms were sweating. A part of her couldn’t believe that she had actually done it!
Now she was waiting for her work day to end, and finally, when she looked up at the clock again, her four minutes were up. She put on her “out of office,” closed down her workstation and slipped her jacket around her shoulders. Now all she had to do was get the hell out of there without Jack Tranter seeing her as she went.
She ducked out of her office and walked swiftly with her head down as she passed his room. She was sure she heard him call her name, but there was no way she was going to wait and find out. She pushed her way out of the shining double doors, into the sunlight and out into freedom.
She was on her way!