You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(89)

He must have gotten the hint because he nodded. “Thank you for coming with me on this journey. I’m not sure where I’ll end up come summer, but I know that the past couple days with you have had a profound effect on me. If I end up doing something else great, it will be because I listened to you. If I don’t, it will be because I wasn’t smart enough to take your advice.”

She smiled even though her heart felt as though it was cracking in millions of pieces. “Good-bye, Marc.”

He opened his mouth to say something, then apparently thought better of it, turned and got in his car.

She didn’t let herself cry as he drove away.





Chapter Twelve





There was no denying that Marc’s room at Snowdance was nice. When he’d started this trip, he’d have been thrilled at the space, the expansive views of the mountain, and the luxury of his surroundings. But now he’d rather be back at the middling hotel off a freeway exit in Jerome, Idaho. At least then Selina had been with him.

And Selina had made all the difference in his life.

The bellhop stashed Marc’s bags where Marc had asked him to, then left with a generous tip. Marc tossed his backpack onto one of the queen beds, then flopped onto the other. The vast emptiness of the room stretched out from the bed to the mountains, echoing back off the snow. God, he wished Selina were here. But she didn’t want to be with him.

No, he corrected himself. He shoved up to a sitting position and forced himself to get up and walk over to the window. Selina wasn’t here because what she wanted in her future was different from what he wanted in his future.

Only that wasn’t true, either. He didn’t know what he wanted in his future. He could have stayed in Salt Lake with her. It’s not like he had to be anywhere at any particular time. But it wasn’t fair to her to use her to keep him entertained and distracted while he found himself.

Whatever that meant.

Here you are, he thought as he looked out over the slopes that would be covered in skiers tomorrow. He would be skiing tomorrow, too, and the next day, and the next, and the next . . .

When he thought about it that way, his future stretched out into a long stretch of skiing and driving between resorts. What had sounded like a dream a couple of months ago now sounded like a life sentence.

Selina was right. He wasn’t looking for a future in all his travels. He was trying to not commit himself in case his past called him back. He wanted to be able to leap when that phone call came asking for his help.

He pressed his head against the cold windowpane. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe Curtis and the team he now headed couldn’t do the work to keep their baby afloat, or even that Marc was angry over being left out. He had chosen not to take a position with the company that had bought their platform. With all that money on the table and the chimera of freedom beckoning, he’d thought moving on to something new was what he wanted.

Moving on was a hell of a lot scarier than staying put.

All the more reason to admire Selina and the guts she’d shown to get in his car and find a new place to live.

He banged his head against the window until his headache reminded him that his head was better used for thinking than as a hammer.

As he was digging through his backpack for his laptop, the phone in his pocket buzzed with a text message. Curtis. A name he’d not seen in his texting app since Marc had started sending him e-mails about key exchanges.

Interested in work?

Marc’s heart began to pound.

Yes!

Not our project. That’s done.

God, text messaging could be so annoying for conversations like this. Seeing one small sentence pop across his screen and wondering what would follow but having to wait for it was the worst.

Group working on improved mobile security for banking. Focused on banks in developing countries. Want more info?

Marc tossed the phone to the bed. Mobile banking security was . . .

He was going to say boring, but the more he thought about it, the less boring it seemed. He’d read enough stories in the news about the importance of mobile banking in developing countries to know that something so simple could change the lives of millions. No, billions of people.

He grabbed the phone.

E-mail me.

Not that his decision was made, but he could at least start doing research.

*

Marc skied while he was at Snowdance. He’d paid for the skis, the room, and the lift tickets. Plus, it was fun. But he skipped the pool in favor of room service and lots of time spent in front of his laptop, doing research and negotiating positions. He found the hotel’s business room where he could print for exorbitant amounts of money and use a scanner. He contacted old computer geek friends for information and got put in touch with some new contacts with experience in mobile banking.

By the time the end of the week rolled around, Marc was barely able to bend his knees after all the skiing, but he had a new job lined up and ideas on how to improve security in mobile banking while keeping the application flexible enough to be used across countries with various cultural expectations of banking and money.

Ideas that would translate into months and months of work to get off the ground and perfect, followed by years of tweaking as technology changed.

Marc shoved his dirty ski clothes into his bag, not able to remember when he’d last been so excited to sit in front of a computer for hours on end. The best part of the job was that it would give him stability and something to work on, but the international goal of the work meant he’d also have an excuse to travel.