Falling Awake

still has a job. I’ll get her c-contact address and phone number from HR and call her personally.”
    “As soon as she knows you want her back, she’ll realize that she’s in the driver’s seat,” Webber warned. “She’d be a fool not to try to negotiate an increase in salary.”
    “She can have whatever she wants, including caviar pizza delivered every day for lunch so long as she comes back,” Amelia snapped. “We’re talking about a potential bankruptcy here, in case no one else has noticed.”
    “Trust me, I’ve n-noticed,” Randolph said.
    The anger was so thick in his throat he was about to choke. Damned if he would let the old man do this to him, he thought. The center was the only thing of value he’d ever gotten from his father. The bastard never had any time for him when he was growing up, never showed any signs of approval no matter how hard he tried to please him. Martin Belvedere had cared only about his dream research.
    “The s-sonofabitch set me up for failure,” he said, reaching for the phone. “But I’m not going to let him s-screw me over this time.”

9
    w ho was that man I saw you having coffee with yesterday?” Leila asked.
    Startled, Isabel laughed.
    Leila frowned. “What’s so funny?”
    “Nothing really.” Isabel closed the Kyler Method instructor’s manual she had been studying. “I just realized that it’s been quite a while since anyone asked me that kind of question.”
    Leila’s brows rose. “What kind is that?”
    “One that makes it sound like I might actually have a social life.”
    They were sitting in Leila’s office. All of the Kyler executive suites were first class, Isabel reflected, just like everything else involved in the business, but her sister’s position as vice president ensured a particularly fabulous view. The darkly tinted, floor-to-ceiling windows looked directly out over the bay.

    The elegant space was decorated in rich, warm neutrals with accents of black and Kyler red. The furnishings were expensive, modern pieces imported from Italy. Leila had overseen the interior design of every building at the Kyler headquarters. She had excellent taste.
    But then, that was Leila through and through, Isabel thought. Her younger sister was not only extremely attractive, with her delicate features and excellent figure, she had a natural flair for style. Her hair was streaked with subtle blond highlights and cut into a fashionable bob. Her close-fitting cream-colored silk blouse and camel trousers sent a message of good breeding and refinement.
    They were only two years apart, Isabel reflected, but they had always been opposites in many ways. Leila had played the role of the overachieving good girl, the one who made their fiercely competitive, highly successful executive father proud and pleased their socially ambitious mother.
    From time to time Isabel had tried to warn Leila that her efforts were for naught. It had been clear to her early on that nothing either of them did was going to hold their parents’ marriage together, but Leila kept on trying to do just that by being Miss Perfect.
    Even after their parents had divorced and remarried, Leila continued to be the good daughter. She was the one who brought home the long strings of A’s on her report cards, signed up for endless after-school activities in order to make herself look good to potential college acceptance committees, got elected to the student council and dated the kind of boys who were voted mostlikely to succeed. She attended an excellent college, established herself as a successful interior designer and topped off her list of accomplishments by marrying Farrell Kyler, a fast-rising executive in their father’s corporation.
    Isabel was well aware that she, on the other hand, had been a major disappointment. She loved her parents and as a child had wanted to please them. But as she grew older, the mysteries of her rapidly developing capacity to dream extreme dreams fascinated and consumed her. She needed answers but no one she talked to even understood her questions.
    She had been labeled an “overly imaginative child inclined to daydream,” a diagnostic understatement if ever there was one, and had spent a lot of time chatting with some very nice people in the counseling profession who tried to get her to participate in more school activities.
    But the long line of therapists failed to draw her away from the consuming strangeness of her dream world. Her life, until she met