A Special Relationship Read Online Free Page A

had made for herself in Jacksonville and how Florida, of all places, was fast becoming the promised land , the place of refuge where even a marked woman like Popena could find her way.   That was why Carrie made up her mind and left without looking back.   She was going to find her way too.

 
     
    THREE
     
    In downtown Jacksonville, on a rainy, dreary day, Marva Cox walked into the extremely large office on the top floor of the Dyson Corporate headquarters building and sighed in great frustration.   Robert Kincaid, her boss, a man she’d known and worked with for nearly ten years, was standing there in shirt sleeves staring out of his huge, wall-sized window as if he didn’t have a board meeting in less than thirty minutes and needed to get prepared.
      She was worried about him.   He’d been this way a lot lately, where he’d just stare out into the wide blue yonder as if such penetrating, hard looks could make what happened to him two years ago finally stop haunting him.   And she wanted so much to help him, to reassure him, but she knew she couldn’t.   He was not the kind of man who opened up to anyone, especially not to his fifty-four-year-old black secretary who wanted, as he once told her, to smother him with mothering , and especially not on a day like today.   On any other day over the past two years, Robert Kincaid was not a soft man.   He was not an easily affectionate individual on his best day.   But today was different.   It was the second anniversary of his wife’s shocking news, the day his life changed forever, and he could not have been more hard to reach.     
      He wasn’t always so aloof and stand offish.   Marva could remember a time when her boss was the kindest human being she’d ever known, a man who would move heaven and earth for her and anybody else he cared about.   But his experience with that Gloria Kincaid had changed him.   Now he would just as soon be left alone.   Now he didn’t give out any affection and didn’t want any in return.   But that still didn’t stop Marva Cox from trying.
      “Have you had your dinner yet, Robert?” she asked him as she moved further into his office and sat a folder on his desk.   He ignored her, which she’d come to expect too.   “I can run over to Polly’s and pick something up for you.”
      “No thanks,” he said without turning around.
      “It’s no trouble at all.”
      “Marva,” he said in an even but firm voice, a voice she knew was his early warning to knock it off.  
      “Okay, okay,” she said.   “Forgive me for caring.”
      “Did you get that projections report?” he asked her.
      She shook her head.   The man was all work all the time.   “Yes, I went downstairs and got it myself.   I just put it on your desk.”
      Robert moved away from the window with such a reluctance that it appeared as if he was being forced to do so.   Marva watched her boss as he walked slowly to his desk, his tall, elegant frame still imposing and self-assured despite the air of somberness that nowadays surrounded him.   Although he stood behind his desk and began looking through the pages in the folder rather than at Marva, he could apparently feel her stares.   “Why are you still here?” he asked without looking up.
      “Because you are.”
      “I told you about that.”
      “I know.”
      “You need to get a life.”
      “I have a life.”
      “Yeah, you and me both.”
      “Oh, stop complaining,” Marva said.   “You wouldn’t last a day without me and you know it.”
      Robert’s entire demeanor changed into a kind of stricken stupor.   He hated being attached to anyone.   But Marva, with her motherly affection for him, with her loyalty and devotion, was the closest he would probably ever get to a soul mate.   “A day,” he said, his eyes still focused on the papers before him rather than his pushy secretary.   “I wouldn’t last an hour.”
      Marva wanted to smile