Breathing heavily, she closed her eyes and rolled her head to the side. Why? Why? She ached to ask, to scream, but she didn’t want to hear the answer. She had heard it before. It was too painful.
When a tear slipped from beneath her lid, Jordan moaned, then gathered her in his arms and held her tightly. “Don’t cry, sweetheart. It was good.”
“Not for you,” came a muffled sob from his chest. “Nothing happened.”
“I wouldn’t say that. I felt a pleasure I’ve never felt before.”
She raised her head then, her eyes beseeching and wide. “Let me do it for you,” she whispered and reached for him, but he caught her hand and raised it to his heart.
“No, Katia. Not now. It’s enough for me to know what you felt.”
His voice came gently through a soft smile, but there was a finality to his words that Katia simply couldn’t bear. So she buried her face against his chest and let him hold her until it was time to go. He helped her carefully over the rocks, and they didn’t talk as they walked back along the beach, then up to the house.
It wasn’t until the following morning, after she had returned to her spotless apartment in New York and spent long hours tossing and turning in bed before finally falling asleep that she was ready to talk. But, of course, Jordan wasn’t there.
* * *
Jordan wasn’t talking to anyone. His associates puzzled at his moodiness, his secretaries gave him a wide berth. The look in his eyes went from sadness to despair to fury, then back many times in the course of the day.
When he flew to Baltimore on Wednesday, he barked at the flight attendant who mistakenly handed his credit card to the passenger on his right. When he jetted from there to Kansas City on Thursday, he snapped at the cabbie whose sensible driving made him five minutes late for his appointment.
And when he returned to New York on Friday, Katia wouldn’t see him. Only for business, she said. But they could talk business over dinner, he argued. Only in the office, she insisted. But she had to eat, he pointed out. She had a date, she said, then hung up the phone.
It was only after a weekend that came closer to hell than any he had ever known that Jordan made the concession he had fought and fought for years. He flew up to Boston to see his father.
Oh, they had been together many times in the course of those years, but never to talk, as Jordan needed to now. There were some things on which he and his father had never seen eye to eye; rather than argue, as they had done once, they had taken to skirting around each other. But Jordan knew the time for that was done. Even if his question brought on the most vicious of arguments, the answer he sought was worth it.
Jack Whyte was not the easiest man to find. He never had been, which irritated Jordan every time he thought about it, but it appeared that not even age had slowed the old man down. He wasn’t in his office when Jordan arrived. Nor was he in conference, or at an appointment, or at the men’s club, or at the barber shop. Jordan half suspected that he was at the Bradford, screwing a dim-witted redhead with mammoth boobs. But he wasn’t.
He was, Nick informed Jordan, only after the latter had threatened the staff at the Whyte Estate headquarters with mayhem, in the Public Garden feeding peanuts to the ducks.
It wasn’t quite the setting Jordan had imagined for a showdown, but it would have to do. He had come too far and gone through too much grief to postpone the inevitable for so much as an hour.
What Jordan saw, though, as he entered the Garden from Arlington Street and approached the bench that, according to Nick and unbeknownst to the public, Jack Whyte had been regularly occupying for the past seven weeks, was a sad and lonely man. Jordan stopped for a minute to stare, finding it hard to identify this figure with the tall, straight-shouldered man he had seen a week earlier.
This man sat alone. There were no grandchildren on his lap, as there were on the laps of several senior citizens sitting on benches across the pond. There was no laughter on his face, no spirit in his eyes. A fall breeze whipped through his hair, but he didn’t seem to notice, or if he did he lacked the strength or will to repair the damage, as he would have done in the past. Jack Whyte was proud of his appearance, his reputation, his status; this man seemed not to care at all.
Against his will Jordan felt a stab of compassion. This was his father. There were many things about the man that he didn’t like, but he did love him.
But he loved Katia, too. So he pressed his body into motion, walking on until he came to the bench. Jack didn’t see him at first. His eyes were focused blindly on the ducks in the nearby water. His hand was buried in a small bag of peanuts, but it was as unmoving as the rest of him.
Then, apparently sensing more than a passing presence, he looked up. His eyes widened when he recognized Jordan, and his posture straightened instantly. A faint tinge of red brushed across his cheeks and he scowled.
Jordan didn’t think he had ever seen his father embarrassed before. For all the times he might have wished it, the reality made him more uneasy than he would have guessed. He shifted his stance.
“Nick told me where to find you.”
“I didn’t know you were in town.” His tone was gruff.
“I just flew in.”
“Business?”
“I wanted to see you.”
“Don’t worry,” Jack snapped. “I’m not about to die tomorrow. Nick keeps telling me I ought to slow down. I think he’s getting impatient to take over the reins.” He paused, then grew wary. “What about you, Jordan? You never wanted anything to do with the Estate. What do you want from me?”
“An honest answer to a simple question.”
Jack eyed him distrustfully, which was very sad when Jordan thought about it. “Sounds too easy.”
“It’s not. It’s a tough question. A touchy one, given some of the things we’ve said to each other in the past.”
Jack sighed, closed his eyes, and rocked his head from side to side as he spoke. “Yes, Jordan, I do love your mother. Yes, Jordan, I care about her. Yes, Jordan, I know that I haven’t been a model of the faithful husband. Yes, Jordan, I know that I’ve hurt her.” He opened his eyes. “There. Has one of those answers fit your ‘simple’ question?”
He obviously remembered their last touchy encounter as clearly as Jordan did. “No. I had another question in mind.”
“If you’re going to ask me to reform you’re wasting your breath. Your mother and I came to terms with our relationship a long time ago. We’re comfortable with it as it stands.”
“I can’t believe she is,” Jordan retorted, “but that’s neither here nor there. I haven’t come here to discuss your relationship with Mother.”
“Then why have you come?” Jack bit out. “Say it, boy. Ask your ‘simple’ question.”
Jordan turned his head and stared off toward the far curve of the pond. His father was always impatient with him. He wondered if his decision to shun the Estate had had such a profound effect on the man that it still lingered. But that too was neither here nor there.
Retraining his gaze on his father, Jordan spoke evenly. “Are you Katia Morell’s father?”
Jack’s eyes flinched, but there was no other change in his stern expression. “What brought that on?”
“I need to know,” Jordan answered in the same even tone, but there was a sinking feeling inside him. Jack hadn’t denied it.
“Why?”
“Because I love her, and I can’t do anything about it if she’s my half-sister.”
Jack seemed to take that confession in stride. His gaze didn’t waver from Jordan’s face. “Henry was her father.”
“I’m talking biological.”
“What makes you think Henry wasn’t that?”
“I just know it. She’s too good.”
“Now that’s a bigoted statement if I’ve ever heard one.”
“And who did I learn it from?”
“So we’re back to slinging insults?” Another reference to their last argument.
“You started it. I’m just pointing out the facts.”
“I am not a bigoted man,” Jack stated with indignance.
“Perhaps not. But that doesn’t mean you haven’t made your share of crude statements over the years.” Abruptly he grimaced in disgust. “Ah, hell, I don’t want to get into this. I’m not putting down what Henry was, just saying that Katia’s different.”
“Cassie’s different. Maybe Katia takes everything she has from her mother.”
But Jordan was shaking his head. “No. There are other things. Katia’s sharp. She’s outgoing and ambitious—”
“So Cassie instilled that ambition in her. And she grew up with the rest of you. She caught on to what it takes to be successful.”
Jack was saying nothing more than Jordan had himself said that day in Maine after the funeral. He’d been trying to pacify Peter then. His instincts told him that his father was trying to do the same to him now.
“There’s more,” Jordan argued, but he had slid down onto the bench, albeit leaving a generous space between Jack and himself. “Take Henry. He was never overly warm to Katia. Kenny, yes. I can remember that well. But I can’t remember one instance in which Henry held Katia, or hugged her, or took her aside and spent time with her.”
“That was Henry’s problem. Things had started going downhill for him by then.”
“And why was that? Hasn’t it occurred to you that he started to drink soon after Katia was born? Isn’t that a strange coincidence?”
Jack blinked, but that was all. “None of us know what was going through Henry’s mind. The guy was strictly lower working class.”
“Bigoted statement,” Jordan muttered under his breath.
Fortunately, Jack missed it. He was lost in his own thoughts. “I never could quite figure him out. He went along for the ride, I guess. Cassie had already become indispensible to the Warrens by the time she married him. He must have walked through those years in her shadow. Poor bugger. I don’t envy any man who has to do that.”
“Chauvinistic statement,” Jordan muttered, again under his breath.
Jack wasn’t so lost this time. He turned on Jordan with one gray brow arched high. “Would you want to do that? Do you want your wife to wear the pants in the family?”
“I don’t have a wife, which brings me back to my original question—”
“Don’t change the subject. We were talking about Henry. And I was about to say that, for all we know, the man might have made something of his life if he hadn’t married Cassie. If he’d been forced to stand on his own two feet, if he’d had a wife who depended on him for food and clothes and companionship—but he didn’t. Cassie’s life was the Warren household. She worked far harder than he did and earned the bulk of the money they took in. As far as industriousness goes, Cassie had more than enough to pass on to her daughter.”
Jordan was growing impatient. “Are you or are you not Katia’s father?”
“Are you accusing Cassie of being unfaithful to Henry?”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing.”
“And you think I’d be attracted to Cassie?” He laughed, but it was definitely forced and therefore worried Jordan all the more.
“Cassie is a very lovely woman.”
“In her little frocks, with her little white gloves on, walking through a room full of guests carrying a silver platter neatly lined with hors d’oeuvres.…”
“You’ve done worse,” Jordan said. He resented Jack demeaning Cassie.
“Ah. So we’re back to that.”
“No, we’re not back to that—”
“This is ridiculous, Jordan! Do you really think that I’d sneak off in the middle of the night, tiptoe through the orchard, steal into Cassie’s cottage and take her with her husband lying there watching?” He held up a hand. “No. Don’t say it. You pictured something more like a little tryst in the stable. Or,” his eyes widened, brimming with mock-horror, “even rape? Maybe that thought turns you on.”
“It doesn’t.”
“But you thought—
“Rape didn’t even enter my mind. Now that you mention it, though—”
“Forget I did,” Jack growled, crushing the bag of peanuts in his hand. “I have never had to resort to rape.”
“Your women are willing. I know.”
“Aren’t yours? Don’t tell me that I didn’t pass a little bit of masculine charm down to you?”
Pressing the heel of his hand to his forehead, Jordan shook his head slowly. “God, I don’t believe this discussion.” The eyes he turned on his father were angry. “This is irrelevant! All of it! I just want you to tell me whether or not you’re Katia’s father. Is that so difficult? Yes or no—that’s all I want to hear!”
Jack’s voice was as steady as the gaze he leveled at his son. “Why are you asking me this? That’s what I want to know.”
“Because I heard you talking once,” Jordan began, offering the one thing that he knew would force his father to take a stand. “It was eleven years ago, when Katia was first starting college. You were in the den with Gil—”
“You eavesdropped on a private conversation?”
“I didn’t know it was private, and I didn’t maliciously eavesdrop. But you were talking about Katia, so I stood there for a minute because even then everything that concerned her concerned me.”
“What was I saying?” Jack asked cautiously.
“You were saying that she should be taken care of. Always. You were saying that Henry, the damn fool—to quote you—hadn’t had a penny to leave her, but that that wasn’t surprising, given the facts.”
“Which you interpreted to mean that he wasn’t her father?”
Jordan ignored what he considered to be one more attempt at diversion. “You said,” he went on, “that she had good blood in her on both sides, and that if she was to fulfill her potential and make us proud she shouldn’t have to worry about things like living expenses or her mother’s finances. When Gil pointed out that Katia had already gotten a scholarship you said that we’d just have to compensate for it, that we owed her a responsibility, that—” he paused, then took a breath, “that it was sad enough that her name was Morell when she could have been fully sharing the glory. You said,” his eyes narrowed in accusation, “that it was a shame she’d never know the truth.”
Jack’s hesitation was minimal. He was determined to retain the upper hand. “And from that you deduced the truth to be that I was her father?”
“Yes!” In a flash, Jordan recalled the many times growing up when he had been called to the carpet by his father. The situations may have been different—a mediocre report card, an ongoing thing with a less-than-reputable girl, a hefty repair bill for the interior of the car that had been ruined when the convertible top had been put down for the sheer joy of riding in the rain—but the defensiveness he felt was the same. He resented it. He was no longer a boy. And the way his father was looking at him made him feel as though he had misinterpreted everything. Which, if it was true, meant that he had lived through eleven years of unnecessary agony and that he had caused much of the same for Katia.
He drew in a shuddering breath as he faced his father. “Is it true?” he asked wearily.
“Eleven years. Why have you waited so long to ask?”
“I didn’t think it mattered that much at first. Katia was young. So was I, relatively speaking. I assumed we’d both find other partners, so if it turned out that we were related it wouldn’t have been important. Maybe I thought it was puppy love at first, but it survived the years she was with Sean and it’s grown. There’s been no one else—”
“Come on, Jordan. I know damn well you’re no monk.”
“Christ, can’t you get your mind out of the bedroom?”
“Watch your mouth. I’m still your father.”
“And I’m only trying to answer the question you asked,” Jordan stated, using every one of his resources to curb his temper. “Sure, I’ve had my share of women—”
&nb
sp; “Your share,” Jack snorted facetiously.
“Yes, my share,” Jordan returned, passing up the opportunity to make a remark about being a chip off the old block because he knew it wouldn’t accomplish anything. “But there’s never been one I loved like I love Katia, and you can make fun of that if you want, but it’s the truth. And maybe it was Mark’s death that brought it all home and suddenly made me impatient—I don’t know. I might have come to you sooner if it hadn’t been for the disagreements we’ve had. You know what I think of your lifestyle. And now, basically, I’m accusing you—again—of being unfaithful. But, damn it, I don’t care about your philandering anymore. All I care about is Katia.”
Jordan had been so emotionally consumed by his monologue that he hadn’t noticed the change in his father’s face. “Do you miss Mark?” Jack asked. There was no anger, no indignance. Just sadness.
It took Jordan a minute to adjust. “Of course I do.”
“So do I. We were never close. I didn’t understand him. Maybe I didn’t try. But he shouldn’t have died that way. No human being should die that way.”
Jordan looked at his hands and flexed one. “I know,” he said quietly.
“Your mother’s taken it hard,” Jack went on. His voice was distant, as was his gaze. “I try to talk to her about it, but she’s angry, and I guess I can’t blame her. I thought I was doing the right thing—working hard, building up the business, providing for my family in the only way I knew how.”
He looked at Jordan then. “You don’t know what it’s like to grow up with nothing. I do. We had to save and scrimp for every blessed thing we had. My father may have been clever, but most of what he earned he pissed away in hush money. He was a crook—a clever one, but a crook. I was sixteen when I literally took over the business.” He gave a skewed smile. “You didn’t know that, did you?”
Jordan shook his head.
“No one does, and it’s a damn good thing. The old man was running bootleg liquor and I was handling the finances. I let him fly his planes and pay his hush money, but I stashed an equal amount away without him knowing it. Part of it went to my mother to buy the things we needed, part of it went into a kitty for college, and part of it went into an account I planned to use when I’d graduated and really taken over. It wasn’t all that much money, but it was enough for a start.”
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