Surrogate Dad

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Surrogate Dad Page 16

by Marion Smith Collins


  “We’re finished.”

  “We’ve barely started.” He tenderly brushed feathers of hair away from her face and cradled her head on his shoulder. “I am not going to let you feel guilty.”

  She wouldn’t deny that she felt guilt, but she looked up at him, peeved. He was getting to be darned good at knowing what she felt.

  His smile was slightly twisted. “Your face is easy to read. David, more than anyone, appreciates how you have coped since your husband died. Alexandra, he wasn’t complaining when he talked to me. He’s so proud of you that he beams with it. He told me the whole story of how you got your career off the ground, how hard you work, all the famous people you’ve done special caricatures for.”

  She felt tears burn against the back of her eyes. She fought them and kept the firmness in her voice. “Then why do you think he’s unhappy?”

  “Not unhappy. Don’t misunderstand—that wasn’t what I said. But he’s made a few statements that I found revealing.”

  “Like what?”

  “Let me see if I can remember.” Luke thought for a minute. “You’ve been to the house. He liked the big garage because it has a place for the race car and plenty of room to tinker. He was impressed with the fact that it can’t be seen from any of the neighbors’ houses or from the road. He liked the idea of privacy, he said.”

  Actually, the boy had said that he couldn’t remember how it felt to go out to toss a ball or just lie in the grass without feeling self-conscious about some grown-up watching. But he wasn’t going to tell Alexandra that. “He wondered if I was going to buy a dog, or put up a basketball goalpost in the driveway.”

  “I’m sorry he didn’t feel comfortable enough with me to talk about this.” She heard the frailty creep into her tone and she hated it. “Please, let me get up. I’m uncomfortable.”

  He let her go and she immediately began to pace, but she didn’t run away. “Sweetheart, a boy naturally wants a house with a yard large enough for a dog to run in. Do you realize how much David wants a dog?”

  She stopped dead still in the middle of the room, her hands on her hips. As he watched, she seemed to go someplace else. “I had a house I loved. It was my dream house.”

  Luke sat forward, suddenly attentive, not to what she said but to her demeanor. Something was wrong with her, he noticed in alarm. A deep, gut-wrenching fear that appeared in her green eyes, turning them dark. He’d seen a lot of emotions cross her face, but he had never seen fear. What the hell had caused it?

  “I worked on the plans with an architect for a year. It was beautiful.” Her voice broke on the last.

  Her words were coming out in stop-and-go jerks; her voice climbed with a touch of hysteria. He started to rise, but she gestured for him to stay where he was. She took a breath and quickly had the hysteria under control. But the fear remained, and anger joined it. “I couldn’t keep the house. Okay?”

  Luke waited, wanting to help, wanting to do something, anything. Her heart swelled with sadness as he witnessed her pain. He took a breath and blew it out through pursed lips. “Sweetheart, I’m so sorry...”

  She didn’t even hear him. She was preoccupied, profoundly upset. He could have kicked himself. She certainly didn’t need anything else to upset her right now.

  He stood up and came to her, but he didn’t touch her. He would be there, but he wouldn’t interfere, not unless she needed him.

  “I lost my house because I couldn’t pay the bills. Not only couldn’t I pay the mortgage, I couldn’t pay the gardener, or the pool man, or the electric bill, or a hundred other bills that go along with a house.”

  “And you had no one,” he said heavily.

  The statement didn’t require a comment. She took a deep shuddering breath and crossed her arms before she faced him squarely. He was relieved to see that most of the fear had faded from her gaze, but a trace of it still lingered.

  “I can afford the condo, Luke. Me.” She jabbed herself in the chest with her thumb. “I can make the payments. I don’t have to worry about spending myself into homelessness to keep up a house. David...”

  All the fight went out of her. She shook her head and sighed as she sat down in the nearest chair. “He was only ten. I tried to shelter him. Maybe too much. I didn’t want him to feel any more insecure than he was already. But maybe I should have explained some of it.”

  Luke was quiet for a minute. Then he slid his hands into his pockets and leaned a shoulder against the wall. “It isn’t too late to let him know.”

  She looked up. “Do you think I should tell him?”

  “Do you remember...” He shook his head once, violently. “That’s an absurd thought, of course you remember. I thought I had made you angry the morning you sent David to the Chadwicks’.”

  He knew from her studied blank look that she remembered vividly. “I know now, from the things you’ve told me, that you weren’t angry as much as threatened. I feel very badly about what I did. I was interfering between you and your son, and I had no right to do that.

  “But, sweetheart, I thought I was—no I was doing it for David. He needed to be the man in the family. That’s a cliché and could be better put, but it tells the story.”

  He went on as gently as he knew how. He didn’t want to hurt her but he suddenly felt it important, perhaps vital, that she understand. “David needed to let you know you weren’t alone, that you had him, that he would help take care of you.” He looked away from the realization in her eyes. “He needed you to need him.”

  Alexandra stared at him, feeling sick. Had she, in her bid for independence, in her determination not to need anyone, shut out her own son? Failed to understand the wishes of the most important person in her life?

  Before she could take the thought further, Luke said, with a bitterness he’d never shown her, “Believe me, I know how it is to be a boy, helpless to support someone you love.”

  At the sight of his tortured face, her heart went out to him. Her misunderstanding of David’s needs could be set aside until she was alone and could analyze it. “Your parents?” she asked softly.

  He levered himself away from the wall and went to stand at the window, staring out. But she had seen his features twist into a hard taut mask.

  “My father took off when I was a baby. I didn’t give a damn about my mother. She was a selfish bitch. The only good thing she ever did was to give birth to Diana, my little sister.” He moved his shoulders, as though adjusting a burden. “Diana was an unbelievably sweet child. From her first smile, she was like sunshine in our house. I can still hear her laughter.” His voice faded for a minute. When he resumed, it was in a harsher tone. “She was an asthmatic. My mother hated her coughing. Said it got on her nerves.

  “I tried to keep her healthy, to take her to the doctor, to make sure she had her medicine...but she got the flu during an epidemic one year. They both did. My mother came down with it first—she died because she was a drunk and undernourished and her body was used up. But Diana’s case turned into pneumonia. For a six-year-old child with her condition...she didn’t stand a chance.”

  Alexandra held her fingers to her mouth and blinked back her tears. A child—baby, really. Dear God. “How old were you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  She went to him then and wrapped her arms around him from behind. She laid her cheek against his back and shut her eyes. “You were only two years older than David,” she whispered.

  He turned and embraced her. “Yeah. That’s why I was trying to bring him into the decision-making process. We, the adults in the room, were packing him up and shipping him off without any attention to his fears or his feelings for you. That was why I asked his permission to be responsible for you.” He leaned away and smiled at her. “Not because I didn’t think you could take care of yourself. You do a damned good job.”

  She tilted her head back. “But because David needed to be in charge of making one arrangement. Thank you for helping me see that. I will talk to him now about the prob
lems I had after his father’s death.”

  That night, they made love again, softly, tenderly. Alexandra felt closer to him than she ever had to anyone.

  * * *

  Luke thrust his hands through his hair forcefully, as though he could pull out a good idea by the roots. Unfortunately it didn’t help.

  The feds had picked up the two men, one of them Ned Austin, who had broken into Alexandra’s condo and who had tried to snatch David at the racetrack.

  Zarcone had come by with the news that the men had been taken at the airport. “We are still trying to get them to open up. No luck so far,” he told Alexandra. “But we’re sure they are working for someone else. If your son is all right where he is, I’d like you to leave him there for one or two more days.”

  Alexandra had felt a surge of joy at Zarcone’s first words, to be supplanted by another letdown. She wanted David home. Now. She wanted the dirty clothes and the too-loud stereo and the never-ending appetite. She felt like her life, or her control over it, was slipping through her fingers.

  She was ready to get things back in order, to come to some kind of decision about her relationship with Luke and to think about her relationship with David.

  Luke had given her a lot to think about. The thought of the sixteen-year-old boy standing over the graves of his mother and sister still brought tears to her eyes.

  “All right,” she told Zarcone. “David is enjoying himself immensely. It won’t be a hardship for him.”

  And according to West, his parents were having the time of their lives. “A lot more fun than they ever had with me,” he’d added harshly, making her wonder.

  After Zarcone had left, she asked Luke about West. “He doesn’t seem particularly close to his parents.”

  Luke shrugged. “I’ve never met them.”

  “I need to work for a while tonight,” she told him. “I have to get a sketch in the mail tomorrow.”

  “May I watch?”

  She was surprised. “Watch me draw?”

  He grinned, eyeing her shorts with a gleam of anticipation. “Yeah.”

  She hid a smile of response. “Okay, but I have to work. If you distract me, you’re out.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What are you working on?”

  “Come here and let me show you.” When he joined her, she turned on her swivel stool and smiled at him delightedly. For a minute, he was blessed with a glimpse of the woman David had described, the woman with a quirky sense of the absurd, who gave great birthday parties and laughed a lot. “Look.”

  On the drawing board was a rough sketch of a large shrimp—in white tie and tails, no less. A top hat tilted rakishly on his head and a cane hung from his elbow.

  “Well, well,” Luke said.

  “Do you like him? Is the cane too much?”

  “The cane is okay, but I never knew shrimp had elbows.”

  “My shrimp does. His name is...” She wrote as she spoke and he quickly realized why. “Sheldon de Vaned.”

  Luke’s smile grew into a chuckle, then into a laugh. He lowered his head and planted a soft, warm kiss under her ear. “David was right. You do have a weird sense of humor.”

  “He’s going to be on the new menus at The Shrimp Society.” He looked blank and she added, “The restaurant on Piedmont Street.”

  “I thought that was a club for short people.”

  Alexandra made a face and punched his arm. “My sense of humor is weird? You’re as bad as I am.”

  “Let’s be bad right now,” he urged in his low, sexy voice. Wrapping his arms around her beneath her breasts, he pulled her off balance against him.

  Later, as they lay together in the afternoon sunlight, she said, “You know, you’re very good for me. I didn’t think I would be able to laugh or enjoy myself until this was all over. But these past couple of days have been—” She searched for a word. “Fun?”

  Luke laughed and rolled her toward him.

  It was very late before Alexandra got back to Sheldon.

  * * *

  “I need to run out to the house for a little while. Would you like to go?” Luke asked from the door of Alexandra’s studio. “I’ve cleared it with Zarcone.”

  Her skirt today was navy blue. With it she wore a blouse the color of her eyes. “I was sort of waiting for David to call,” she replied hesitantly.

  “I won’t be long. West is coming by to work.” Luke’s worries were beginning to take on enormous proportions. The deadline was fast approaching. He and West had thought that capturing Ned Austin and his cohort would move the FBI forward. But nothing had come of their arrests except that indictments were being prepared for the grand jury.

  The FBI had managed to get bail denied; for now, anyway, the men were safe in jail.

  “Okay, then.” She dropped her charcoal pencil and swiveled her chair. “I’d like to see the progress you’ve made.”

  “I like you in skirts,” said Luke when he joined her on the deck of his new house an hour later.

  She smiled over her shoulder. “Do you?”

  “Yeah.” He pinned her against the rail. “They show off your long luscious legs,” he growled in her ear.

  She rested her arms on his. “I hate to disillusion you, but I don’t wear them for that reason. I wear them because they’re cool.”

  His head came up. “Speaking of that, is it me or is the breeze off the river cooler today?”

  “It’s definitely cooler.”

  “I used to get depressed when summer was over, did you?”

  “Yes, but not anymore. Now I breathe a sigh of relief. What did the builder say? The house looks almost done to me.”

  “A couple of weeks more. They’re going to fill the pool tomorrow. And pour the driveway next week.”

  And then you will be leaving the condo, Alexandra said to herself. They would see him again, she didn’t doubt that now. But when he moved away, nothing would ever be quite the same.

  “It’s a beautiful house, Luke.” Determinedly she shook off her blue mood and grinned over her shoulder at him. “I’m glad I won’t have to make the mortgage payments on this place. Or pay the electric bill.”

  He chuckled, but then he sobered.

  “I won’t have any mortgage payments. I paid for this place outright. Every nail, every block, every brick and rock are mine.”

  Alexandra was stunned into silence. “I didn’t know people did that,” she said.

  “It isn’t the most productive way to tie up your money. But I wanted to own my own home, to know it was mine. And I had the money. I haven’t had a lot of time over these past ten years to spend it.”

  Alexandra was rather intimidated by someone who built a new house for cash. She kept quiet about it, though.

  Shortly after they returned from the house, West entered the condo with two briefcases and a sour expression. “That damned retirement dinner is tomorrow night. I’m not ready to lick the floor for Henderson, are you?”

  “Hell, no. But we’ve got bigger worries. The week’s deadline is up tomorrow, too. If something’s going to happen, it will happen then.”

  Luke called Zarcone to see if any progress had been made. The FBI man told him that a substantial deposit had been made to Ned Austin’s wife’s bank account. Now they were trying to trace the corporation, a dummy, of course. They hoped to have an answer by Monday.

  Luke hung up and waited until they had closed themselves in the dining room before he repeated the conversation to West.

  “Monday will be too late to nab the guy,” West said unnecessarily.

  Luke worried his lower lip with his thumb and forefinger. “Listen, West, I have an idea. See what you think....”

  Chapter 11

  The Bolton retirement dinner was to be held downtown at one of Atlanta’s oldest and most prestigious clubs. Alexandra had heard of the place but had never been a guest there.

  She dressed carefully for the evening in a floor-length gown of white silk. The halter style
was classic—thank goodness, for it was several years old. The silk draped gracefully over her breasts, nipped in at the waist and left her shoulders and back bare. She had arranged her hair in a loose French twist. As she slid her feet into silvery sandals, she realized that, if she hadn’t been so focused on the perilous situation, she would have enjoyed dressing for a formal party again.

  When the doorbell rang, she picked up a small silver bag and a white stole with gossamer silver threads and went to answer.

  West, dressed in a tuxedo, stood staring at her for a long minute. “Well, hell,” he blurted out. “I shouldn’t have given up so quickly.”

  She smiled. Though West was a flirt, he rarely lost his composure and she was flattered that he’d lost it now. “Thank you. That was a compliment, wasn’t it?”

  “You look like a Greek goddess.”

  “Oh, come now. A goddess?” She laughed.

  Luke’s deep voice rolled out of the hallway behind Alexandra. He had brought his clothes here to dress. “Not a Greek goddess—they’re made of marble. Like an exquisitely beautiful, flesh-and-blood woman,” he said, his husky tone leaving her breathless.

  He joined them at the door. And her eyes went to him immediately. He was magnificent, tall and strong, his broad chest and wide shoulders clearly defined in the black and white of formal evening clothes.

  They both missed the wry smile that swept across West’s face. “I’m driving,” he said. “Shall we go?”

  * * *

  Alexandra felt more than one glance of appraisal as she entered the club between the two good-looking men. She barely had time to scan the elegant lobby before they were greeted by the honoree.

  The senior partner was a refined gentleman of obvious dignity. But, having been introduced, Alexandra decided there was no warmth in the man. She didn’t like him.

  “Lucius, West, good to see you,” he said stiffly. Indicating the woman who joined the group, he added offhandedly, “You know my wife?”

  “Yes,” said West, shaking hands with his boss. “How are you, Mrs. Bolton?”

  Luke took over. “Mrs. Bolton, may I present Alexandra Prescott?”

  “I’m very happy to meet you,” Alexandra acknowledged. “Thank you for having me.”

 

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