Kitabı oku: «The Father Factor», sayfa 2

Chapter Two

“W ait!” said Jared’s voice, overtaking Shallis as she went back along the street toward her car, which was still parked in the drugstore’s lot.

She stopped and turned reluctantly, watching him catch up to her. His stride lengthened, strong and full of purpose, and then he stopped short, keeping safely out of her body space.

But whose safety was he concerned for, here?

“Do you really have to do this?” he said.

His voice stayed low, in an instinctive bid for privacy that Shallis appreciated. The intimacy that it seemed to weave around them she appreciated a lot less.

“It’s a half hour drive to Carrollton,” he went on. “Banks and Moore’s billing rate is considerably higher than my grandfather’s, and they have no familiarity with your family’s legal affairs. I’m not sure what’s making you so reluctant—”

She threw him a look that said, “Oh, really?” and his face changed.

“Okay. You got me.” He spread his hands, then he sighed.

His voice had gone husky, suddenly. Deeper, too. Its masculine notes curled around her legs and misted upward, as sneaky as the smoke from the cigarettes Shallis had tried a few times at fourteen.

“I know exactly what’s making you so reluctant, don’t I?” he said. “But this is a simple business relationship and I’m a good lawyer. My grandfather wouldn’t have handed the practice over to me if I wasn’t. I wouldn’t be considering partnership offers from three major Chicago law firms if I wasn’t.”

He stepped a little closer, and Shallis didn’t know if it was deliberate or not. She did know that she was far too aware of the movement, and of its results. She could see the tiny chips of gold deep in his brown eyes, now, and a couple of equally tiny freckles just above the corner of his mouth.

She narrowed her eyes and pressed her lips together, but couldn’t close off the effect he had on her. The effect he’d always had.

“At least let’s go through with our appointment this morning,” he continued. “We can set things in motion regarding your grandmother’s estate. You can talk it over with your mother later. And if either of you still has a problem about my involvement, I’m sure my grandfather will agree to handle the next phase when he gets back from his fishing trip, since your family has been with him for so long.”

“When is he getting back?”

Soon. Please let it be soon, so that I don’t have to deal with this. Again.

“He wouldn’t commit himself, unfortunately. I’d imagine it’s going to be at least a month, judging by the huge pile of gear and supplies in the back of his pickup when he left.”

“Why are you so keen about this, Jared?”

He studied her for a moment, and she got the impression he was sorting through his possible answers in search of the one she was most likely to believe. She’d seen a lot of men with that particular look on their face, as they sorted through their possible come-on lines in search of the one that was most likely to get a beauty queen into bed.

“I don’t want to be responsible for taking your family’s business away from my grandfather,” he said eventually.

“It’s a bread-and-butter estate settlement, isn’t it?” It hurt her to talk about her grandmother’s legacy this way, but she could put on a cool front just as successfully as Jared himself. What lay beneath the cool front was surely hotter in her case, however. “Your grandfather must deal with this sort of thing all the time. Losing one client isn’t going to bankrupt him.”

“Losing the Duncan family is going to send the wrong message around town, and he’ll lose other clients as well, as a result. Look, it’s up to you.” He shrugged. “I just don’t think it’s necessary, that’s all. It seems petty, or something.”

“Petty on my part?”

“Petty that either of us should feel that your grandmother’s estate has anything to do with a personal and much-regretted mistake I made six years ago. I’ve moved on. I’m sure you have, too.”

Oh, he had a good line in sincerity. The voice really helped, as deep and buttery, now, as a bottomless bucket of popcorn. So did the eyes. And the lashes. And the tiny glint of ironic awareness almost lost behind the lashes.

Shallis almost believed him—enough to consider that, yes, Banks and Moore would be more expensive and less convenient, and to finally decide to give him the benefit of the doubt. It was just a straightforward legal matter, after all, and it wasn’t fair to Mom to let it drag out longer than it had to, or get it tangled in personal feelings.

“All right,” she said. Her nerve-endings jumped and squealed, treacherous things, like giggling teenagers glimpsing their latest crush. “We’ll do what needs to be done today, and then I’ll find out how my mother wants to proceed.”

She would talk to Linnie about it, too, only Jared didn’t need to know that.

“Would you like coffee while we talk?” Jared asked as they entered the front office once again.

“Yes, please.” You could hide a surprising amount behind a steaming cup, Shallis knew, and she might need to do exactly that.

“Andrea?” he said to the receptionist.

She nodded. “Coming right up.” If she was curious about Shallis’s sudden departure and unexpected return, she didn’t let on. “How do you like it, Miss Duncan?”

“Cream and no sugar, thanks.”

“And I’m sorry, Mr. Starke, you made your own this morning and I didn’t see…”

“Just black.”

So he wasn’t too exalted to make his own coffee. Or maybe he was just softening Andrea up with a good first impression so he could load her down with unreasonable requests later on.

What, me? Cynical? About Jared Starke? Never! Shallis thought.

This time, he sat behind his desk while Shallis sat in front of it, which acted as a useful reminder that their meeting was purely business. He ran through the steps that had to be taken before the proceeds of the estate could be disbursed, and asked to see some of the papers and documents that Shallis and her mother had found amongst Gram’s things so far.

“She wasn’t a very organized person,” Shallis told him.

“But you forgive that in some people, don’t you? From what I’ve heard, your grandmother was one of them.”

“She was wonderful. Generous and fun and creative. Wicked sense of humor. Really surprising take on a whole lot of things. Cared a lot about people. Drove us totally nuts, sometimes, especially my dad, but the whole world always seemed that much fresher and more interesting when she was around. I—I actually can’t believe that she’s gone.”

“No, I bet,” Jared said quietly. “And it’s only been two weeks, right?”

“Just over.” Shallis couldn’t have said more than two words, at that moment.

She kind of hid in the coffee for a couple of minutes and Jared didn’t rush her, which she had to be grateful for, even though at some level she didn’t want him to have the slightest clue about how to behave so well. It would really have helped with this crazy nerve-ending problem if he’d been crude, insensitive, obvious and a flagrant con artist.

Why had she told him so much about Gram in the first place, she wondered. Because he’d paved the way by talking about his father’s death, earlier?

“Your mother didn’t want to wait a little longer on all this?” he finally asked. “Sorting through a person’s whole life can be very draining and difficult.”

“I think it’s helping Mom, in some ways. And she had a little time to prepare before Gram died. Gram was eighty, and the stroke was a severe one. We knew she wouldn’t want to linger for a long time without hope of recovery, and her wish was granted. She died in her sleep ten days after she first collapsed.”

“You said she wasn’t very organized. Did she at least keep all her papers in one room? Did she have any kind of a filing system?”

“Uh, no.” Shallis smiled a little. “There are boxes and stuffed envelopes and loose file folders all over the house.”

“Right.” He smiled back. “That kind of a filing system. I know it well.”

“And then there are all Gram’s wonderful knickknacks and souvenirs, precious memories folded away in tissue paper, bits of jewelry, old evening gowns, so much.”

“Some hard decisions. You’ll need to put aside anything you want valued. There are a couple of local valuers my grandfather recommends.”

He reached into a drawer of the desk and took out two business cards. He didn’t hand them to her directly, but reached across to put them down just in front of her. There was never any risk that they’d touch, and Shallis wondered if that was his intention.

“Thanks,” she said.

She picked up the cards and slipped them into a pocket inside the lid of the open briefcase, which she’d place on the desk to her left. Then she looked back at Jared and found him with his jaw propped on his two thumbs and his elbows on the desk for support.

He looked a little tired. Stressed out, even. She wondered what lay behind his decision to take a break from his jet-propelled ascent up the ladder of success in Chicago, but realized she might never know. She definitely wasn’t going to ask any searching questions that might bring the information out.

“Should we make an inventory as we go?” she asked.

“It might be better to sort through everything first.”

“There’s so much. We’re not tackling any of it systematically.”

“Room by room?”

“That’s what I’m trying to do, but Mom goes off on a tangent, sometimes. We keep getting distracted, and we still have a lot more to go through. I’m taking next week off work, but it’s not going to be enough.”

Shallis realized that once again she’d begun to unload a level of detail that Jared didn’t need. She hadn’t expected him to be such a good listener, in his new professional role.

“Anyway…” she added in a more businesslike tone.

“Yes, let’s take a look at the papers you’ve found so far,” Jared said. He sat up straight again and started paging through some of the sheets in front of him. “This is the deed to the house.”

“That’s right, but before you look at that, there’s one thing we found that we don’t understand and I wanted to ask you about it.”

Leaning forward, she slid a sheet of paper out of the file folder that came next in the pile. It was a property tax bill dated just a couple of months earlier, and it had a line of her grandmother’s distinctive spiky handwriting scrawled across it in the rich, royal blue ink she always used.

“Paid Feb. 20,” it said.

“Look at the address that this tax bill relates to, Jared. Chestnut Street. Gram’s never lived in that part of town, and we’re sure she doesn’t own rental property there or anywhere else. We can’t understand why she’d even have this bill in her possession, let alone why she’d have paid it.”

“Grandpa Abe lives on Chestnut Street.” He looked at the address more closely. “I’m staying there while he’s out of town. Just a half dozen houses down from this place. I’m trying to picture number Fifty-six, but right now I can’t.”

“It’s a very nice street, the whole length of it, with all those gracious old Victorians.”

“It’s beautiful,” he agreed.

“The grounds of the Grand Regency back onto a part of it.”

“That’s where you’re working now, right?” He looked up briefly from the paper he was still studying. Knowing he would be seeing her today, he must have done some research. “Their events manager? That’s a big job, at a place like the Grand.”

“See these gray hairs?” she joked.

“Oh, yeah, hundreds of them,” he drawled in mock agreement.

Their eyes met for a moment and they were ready to share a laugh, but then memory intervened and both of them looked quickly away—Jared down at the tax bill, and Shallis toward the window.

Linnie and Ryan had had their wedding reception at the Grand Regency Hotel six years ago. Jared had heard about their impending marriage, flown in from Chicago and gate-crashed the event, five years after he’d dumped Linnie and practically shattered her heart—she’d cried for months. He’d gate-crashed the church ceremony before the reception, also, hot off the airplane.

In fact, he’d tried to stop the whole wedding, right in front of the minister at the altar and the entire congregation. “You can’t marry him, Melinda Duncan. I know this is my fault. I’m an idiot. I always thought I had plenty of time, through law school and beyond. But you know it, don’t you? You’ve always known it. You have to marry me!”

Wrong, Jared.

Bad call.

You weren’t even serious, were you?

You were just testing your power.

Linnie and Ryan were made and meant for each other, but they’d had a whirlwind courtship and they really hadn’t known each other all that well, on the day of their wedding. Made and meant for each other didn’t always mean that things worked out. Ryan had seen Linnie’s flash of doubt.

“You know what we always had together,” Jared had claimed, and for a few long, horrible moments, Linnie had remembered all those tears she’d shed for him. She’d bought his whole act.

Jared had grinned at Ryan, already acting as if he’d won. “Sorry, buddy, but this woman belongs to me.”

Only then had Linnie been able to speak. “No, Jared, you’re wrong. I don’t.”

You could have cut the air with a knife, even after Linnie and Ryan had gone through with the ceremony as planned. It took the whole of the wedding reception and some important talks with other family members for the two of them to sort out what they really felt and what they really wanted. A couple of times, Shallis had seriously feared they were headed for an instant annulment or divorce.

She would never forget it, and she would never forget the way Jared had purely wanted to win, the way he’d selfishly wanted to prove he still had power over Linnie’s heart. Shallis had spent nearly an hour with him at the reception, decoying him safely away from Linnie—flirting outrageously, in fact—so she knew how he’d really felt. He hadn’t cared about her sister, and he hadn’t even pretended to care about Ryan’s feelings.

Winning was all.

Shifting the power balance in his favor.

Showing the whole town who was in control.

And even though he’d lost the game that day and Ryan had won, Jared had finally left the big hotel with the cocky attitude of a cheating gambler who knows his luck’s going to come around again one day, because he has the aces up his sleeve to prove it.

A part of her wished the subject of the Grand Regency had never come up, but another part of her was very glad that it had. She didn’t want to lose sight of the kind of man Jared Starke really was, beneath the smooth and adept professional facade, beyond the unwanted havoc he wrought with her woman’s needs.

What the heck was wrong with her?

“Back to this mystery property tax bill,” she said, making each word clipped and cool. “Will you follow it up for us? My mother is a little concerned that Gram could have been conned into parting with her money to cover some false tax claim.”

“If you find anything else of a similar nature, bring it in right away, won’t you? You’re right, there are people who’ll take advantage of an elderly woman living alone, and someone comes up with a new scam every week.”

“I can’t imagine Gram falling for something like that.” Shallis clicked her tongue and sighed between tight teeth. Jared’s gaze seemed to follow the sound of her escaping breath, and her lips felt dry again. She gathered her train of thought and kept speaking. “She still seemed so sharp in her mind, right up until the day of the stroke, and she was very vocal on the subject of men who preyed on naive women. But we’re definitely confused so, yes, anything else we find I’ll bring right over.”

She stood up and looked deliberately at her watch. It was after noon. “I’m sorry, I need to get back.”

“I’m about to order in a sandwich lunch.” Jared stood, also. He narrowed his eyes for a moment, then looked down at his thumbnail and pushed the cuticle back with his middle finger. His head came back up, his regard steady again. “Andrea can pick up something for you, too, if you want. It’ll only take twenty minutes.”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“You’re sure? There are a couple more things we could get through while we eat.”

He came around the desk and put a hand under her elbow. Suddenly their eyes were fixed on each other, locked together, giving off naked heat, drowning. A blast of awareness hit her—the same physical and emotional ambush Shallis had felt when she’d first found him here instead of his grandfather. Jared looked at her as if the chemistry of her physical response to him was written on her skin, as if it had made her whole body turn blue.

She froze, unable to pull away as she needed to, unable to stop looking at him or hide her reaction. It scared her to feel like this, when she so seriously didn’t want to, when she had so many reasons not to.

Whatever had happened to the strength of the human will?

“What do you want from me, Jared?” It came out on a whisper.

There was a tiny beat of silence before he spoke. “I’m just trying to do my job.”

“No. I don’t think you are.” She snatched her arm out of his grip, about thirty seconds too late. “I think there’s something more.”

And it wasn’t the princess thing.

“Do you?” His lids flickered, and a shuttered look came onto his face.

He was lying, evading the truth in some vital area, only she didn’t know what. The whole way he held himself right now, so stiff and wary and closed, reluctant and almost angry, in such contrast to the bland professional bearing he’d seemed to have in the beginning.

Everything had changed with her mention of the Grand Regency Hotel. The air itself seemed electric, crackling with complex tensions she couldn’t read.

“If you want me to tell you that I forgive you, and that Linnie and Ryan forgive you, and it’s all water under the bridge and we know you’ve changed, that’s not going to happen,” she told him. “If that’s what this is about, then you can have it straight, without the sandwich lunch.”

“Why, thank you, ma’am,” he drawled.

She ignored him. “I don’t believe you have changed. If you could behave that badly six years ago, on Linnie’s wedding day, you could behave that badly still. I love my sister, and she’s hurting right now, over Gram’s death and—and—other stuff. If she has anything whatsoever to do with why you’re back in town for the next six—”

“She doesn’t,” he cut in, hard and fast. “Okay? Let’s get that on the table right now. She doesn’t have anything to do with my being here.”

“No? Good.” If she believed him. What had she seen in his eyes? “Because some mistakes you just have to live with. You have to live with this one, Jared. Linnie doesn’t, Ryan doesn’t and I don’t.”

“I guess not.”

“We’re done here.”

“Sure…”

“Thanks for your time.”

He put on a crooked, cynical smile. “Thanks for the insights.”

“You’re more than welcome, if they’ve gotten through.”

“Oh, they have.” He glanced behind him toward the shelf where various polished trophies gleamed, as if reminding himself that he was still a winner. “I’ll keep you and your mother posted on how I’m doing with the estate.”

“Sure. And I can leave any messages or papers with your secretary.”

“Right. No personal contact necessary.”

But Shallis didn’t reward this barbed observation with a reply. She simply snapped her briefcase shut, picked it up and left.

Jared watched her go—the graceful walk, the squared yet feminine shoulders, the pretty, bouncing hair.

“You are such a damned idiot, Jared Starke,” he muttered to himself seconds after the door shut behind her.

It didn’t slam, because Jared couldn’t imagine that Shallis Duncan, ex Miss Tennessee, would ever slam a door.

She was far too perfect for that.

As perfect as a splinter stuck under his thumb. As perfect as a melody in his head that wouldn’t go away. As perfect as some twisted form of hell, in which a man didn’t see a certain woman for six years and when he did, he discovered that he still hadn’t gotten over a gut-level response to her that he’d never wanted, that maddened him and embarrassed him and confused him to the point where he could barely walk straight.

He ought to feel proud of his performance this morning. Professional and courteous and pleasant. Bland as vanilla pudding. For most of their meeting, he was positive she’d had no idea. Even when his guard had slipped a little and she’d seen something, she’d gotten it wrong. She still thought he was on some twisted quest to change the balance of power between himself and Linnie.

Thank heaven, he wasn’t. One thing to be grateful for, at least.

He’d behaved despicably toward Melinda Duncan Courcy in the past—twice—his arrogant ultimatum on her wedding day wasn’t the first time—but he was in no doubt as to how he felt about her now.

There remained a brotherly sort of affection which she’d probably never know about and wouldn’t value if she did. There was also a recognition that her wedding day had started a chain reaction of questions inside him that he was still trying to deal with.

But nothing more.

Nothing like what Shallis feared.

It was Shallis herself who twisted him up inside, and he was as appalled about it as she would be, too, if she knew.

Apparently she didn’t know, and he would make sure he kept it this way until he could somehow delete the unwanted attraction from his emotional hard drive like deleting a piece of e-mail spam.

“Yeah, and how’re you going to do that, tough guy, if you have to have a half dozen meetings with her over her grandmother’s estate,” he muttered again.

He should have let her go to Banks and Moore.

It was the same problem he’d always had. Against all good judgment, against everything the rational side of his brain understood, and even with the odds stacked monumentally against him, his instinct was always to try to win.

Frowning, he stepped over to the breakfront and moved the Sore Loser trophy to a more prominent position on the shelf, right next to his favorite golfing photo of Grandpa Abe, himself and Dad.