Friday's Child

by Kylie Brant

  As the meals arrived, she reached for her purse and withdrew two pamphlets and handed them to him. “I almost forgot. I picked these up for you.”

  He read the title from one aloud. “Preventing Bedtime Bedlam.” His eyebrows rose. “You must have been spying on us. Bedlam is a good word to describe our house at eight-thirty every night.” His gaze shifted to the other pamphlet. “Homework Habits.” He looked at her. “Homework? She’s a little young for that, isn’t she?”

  “Good habits take time to learn,” Kate replied. “Both of those brochures have tips helpful for all children, not just those diagnosed with ADD. I think you’ll find them…”

  Her voice tapered off as she realized his attention had shifted. The change in him was startling. His expression went set and still, and his entire body seemed to tense, although he didn’t move a muscle.

  “Well, Michael, I shouldn’t be surprised to see you here.”

  At the interruption, Kate turned to look at the man who stopped at their table. A well-preserved sixty-five, she estimated, with chiseled features and iron gray hair. In his dark blue suit he managed to look at once elegant and remote. It was his eyes, she decided. The pale blue gaze held all the warmth of the North Atlantic.

  The man smiled, a cold, humorless stretching of his lips. “After all, sharks like their fish, don’t they?”

  Michael clenched his hand where it lay on the table. “An interesting analogy coming from you, Jonathan. You’ve always been the most ruthless predator I know.”

  “Congratulations on that NASA contract, by the way,” Jonathan said. “I won’t inquire as to how you won it. Heard it comes with a tight deadline. It would be a shame if you didn’t make it, wouldn’t it? I doubt those folks would be too understanding.”

  “Your concern, as always, is touching,” Michael drawled.

  “But you might want to spend a little more of it on yourself. From the looks of you, your fourth—or was it fifth—marriage was a rough one.”

  “Not so rough, actually. I’m accomplished at extricating myself while holding on to what’s mine.”

  “Don’t I know it.” Michael’s voice was hard and bleak, and Kate looked at him, mystified. She didn’t understand what was going on here, but the undercurrents of animosity were unmistakable.

  Suddenly, the penetrating beam of the man’s chilly blue eyes were turned on her. “As usual, Michael has forgotten his manners. Although we haven’t been graced with an introduction, I’ll do you a favor and give you a little advice.” He leaned toward her, and Kate had to restrain herself from recoiling. “Don’t trust him, not even for a second. He’s the most ungrateful, ruthless bastard you’ll ever meet, and the instant you take your eyes off him, he’ll have the shirt off your back.” Straightening, he added, “Or in your case, that pretty black dress.”

  Michael’s chair clattered as he rose abruptly. His voice was low, icily controlled. “Your time just ran out, old man. I’d advise you to leave. Now.”

  Jonathan gave her a wintry smile. “Remember what I said.” Then he turned and strolled away.

  Michael remained standing, his gaze burning a hole in the man’s ramrod-straight back. Time stretched, and still he didn’t move. Kate grew concerned and touched the back of his hand. His gaze dropped to where her hand lay on his, and slowly, imperceptibly, he relaxed. She watched him reach for the rage that had enveloped him so briefly and tuck it back out of sight.

  He sat down again and said grimly, “I’m sorry you had to witness that.”

  When it became apparent he was going to say nothing more, Kate burst out, “Michael, what just happened? Who was that awful person?”

  He gave her a terrible parody of a smile and reached for his wineglass. Toasting in the direction of the man who’d just left their table, he replied, “That ‘awful’ person is Jonathan Garrett Friday.” He took a sip from his glass before adding, “My father.”

  Chapter 6

  Michael reached across the table and tipped more wine in her glass. He took a few moments before he spoke again. When he did, neither his face nor his voice revealed his earlier anger. “As you could probably tell, the Fridays aren’t a particularly close-knit bunch.” He picked up his fork and cocked an eyebrow at her. “What about you? What’s your family like?”

  Kate picked up her glass, considered the wine bubbling inside. Witnessing the earlier scene had left her shaken. And despite Michael’s sternly controlled features, she was aware of the emotion still swirling beneath the surface.

  “I’m the oldest of nine children.”

  He paused, his fork half-raised to his mouth. “What was it like?”

  “It was…poor.” Invariably people romanticized her childhood, imagining something out of an Alcott novel, with a house full of a noisy brood stringing popcorn together. She’d always been thankful that people couldn’t know how wrong they were.

  “Your parents?” Michael reached for a roll, breaking it apart to butter it, his gaze never leaving her face.

  “Live in West Virginia, where I was raised. We moved several times when I was a child, always small towns, though, always in the state. Right now my father is a custodian for a rural church. My mother has never worked outside the home. She takes in sewing.”

  “How many of your brothers and sisters are still at home?”

  “Five. My youngest sister is ten.”

  “Do you get to see them often?”

  She almost flinched, as if he had touched a particularly painful bruise. “Not as often as I’d like.”

  “I can’t even pretend to imagine it. I was an only child and on my own a lot. I wished for brothers and sisters…well, mostly brothers.” He took another bite of lobster, chewed reflectively. “I imagine our childhoods had more in common than you think, though.”

  Kate looked at him askance. “I can’t imagine what that would be.”

  He continued to eat, his face expressionless. “You said you grew up poor. When I was eight, my father walked out and took his money with him. My mother worked two jobs most of the time to pay the rent on our apartment.” He shrugged, as if his next words were of little consequence. “I spent the better part of the next twenty years hating him.”

  Michael turned off the ignition and went around the car to open the door for Kate. When they reached her porch, he silently held his hand out for her key. She opened her mouth to protest, but one look from him silenced her. She handed it to him, and he followed the same routine that he had the last time he’d seen her home, entering the door ahead of her and doing a quick, thorough search of each room.

  “You missed your calling,” she drawled when he finally joined her again. She slipped out of her coat and turned to hang it up. “You should be with the DCPD.” Even as she spoke, he went into the living room and pulled her curtains aside, examining the latches and frames on her windows.

  “Hazards of the job. No matter what kind of security we’re in, we tend to be paranoid.” He moved to the kitchen, leaving her to trail after him.

  “Don’t tell me. You’re looking for a burglar in my pots and pans.”

  He turned back to her with a quick grin. “No, I’m looking for a cup of coffee. What are my chances of having you offer me one?”

  His tone was undeniably wheedling and had its desired effect. “All right. I’ll make us some.”

  Minutes later they were facing each other across the small kitchen table, sipping coffee.

  “Déjà vu,” he said. “When I came here before you fed me cookies and milk.”

  “I remember.”

  “There are no cookies this time, of course,” he went on, shamelessly hinting.

  “No,” Kate said firmly, her eyes meeting his. “No cookies.”

  He smiled and shrugged, unembarrassed to be caught begging. “I have an acquired appreciation for baked goods,” he said. “Trask, despite his many fine qualities, doesn’t claim to be a cook.”

  “Just what is it that Mr. Trask does for you?” Kate asked curiou
sly.

  “Not ‘Mr.,’” Michael corrected. “He’s just Trask. He started out as my security adviser. He became much more.” He stopped, considered for a moment. “Since Chloe’s come to live with me, he more or less runs the house, keeps track of appointments.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “Had you made the conference appointments with him rather than me, he’d have made sure I got to them.”

  “You don’t have a secretary to do that for you at work?”

  He grimaced. “My secretary and I don’t always communicate effectively. But speaking of Chloe, we never did. Finish, I mean.”

  Kate wrapped both her hands around her mug. “No, we never did,” she said steadily.

  “I’ve made an appointment for her to be seen by a pediatrician,” he said bluntly. He waited for her startled gaze to meet his. “I still have a lot of doubts, but I remembered what you said. I figured too much information is rarely a problem.”

  He paused for a moment to enjoy the sudden transformation as her smile lit up her face. A corresponding heat bloomed low in his belly. That smile of hers should be outlawed. It had the impact of a thousand volts of electricity and, aimed at him, was damn near lethal. He basked in its glow for a moment.

  “I’m so glad, Michael,” she said, impulsively leaning forward to touch his arm. “I know you won’t regret it.”

  He stared at the slim, elegant hand lying on his broad forearm. His gaze followed the slender line of her arm up to her shoulder and across the delicate hollows of her throat and settled, finally, on her mouth. It was getting more and more difficult to remember his plan, his strategy to go slow. Especially when she looked at him like that. Touched him like that. As the moments stretched, her smile wavered and faded away. But when she would have withdrawn her touch, he covered her hand with his.

  “I’m not promising anything else,” he warned. “Just that I’ll get a medical opinion and listen to my options. Even if Chloe is diagnosed with ADD, I’m nowhere close to agreeing to medication for her. Right now, I can’t promise any more than that.”

  “For right now, that’s enough.”

  He looked down to where his large hand completely covered her much slimmer, more delicate one. “I made the appointment with Dr. Sachar. Do you know her?”

  Kate thought for a moment and then shook her head.

  “She’s supposed to be very good. Her office is downtown D.C., and we’re on a standby list. She was booked two months ahead, but if I agree to very little notice, I can get in when she has a canceled appointment.” And it had taken fifteen minutes of his most persuasive coaxing to convince the receptionist of that idea. But once he’d reached the decision that he would proceed with a medical evaluation, he hadn’t wanted to wait two months. “I’m going to have to talk to Deanna about it soon.”

  “How will she react?”

  He lifted a shoulder. “I’m not sure.” He hadn’t ever really known what to expect from Deanna. He’d been wrong when he’d thought they shared the same interests, the same dreams. He’d been wrong about a lot of things.

  “Does…your father…ever see Chloe?”

  “No.” He released her hand and pulled away from her touch. Her eyes were wide, somber, and he knew she was judging him, weighing him. As he’d so often weighed himself. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure he’s aware of her existence. I know damn well he wouldn’t care.”

  “How do you know that?”

  He simply looked at her, wondering if she could begin to understand. She’d come from a large family. Though she’d said they hadn’t had money, there must have been plenty of love to make up for the lack. His own experience was just the opposite.

  When he spoke again, it was without passion, the resentment safely buried again. “He didn’t care about his own son when he left. Hell, I’ll say this for him—he didn’t make me a bunch of empty promises that he never delivered on. The only vow he left us with was when he told my mother she’d never see another nickel of his. That was true enough.”

  “He didn’t keep in touch with you?”

  “I didn’t hear from him again until I was sixteen. I was making a name for myself in high school football, being mentioned in the papers.” He lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know what was going through his head. Maybe in some weird way he thought I’d proven myself worthy of his attention. Because all of a sudden, that’s what I got. He started sending me things, issuing invitations.” He fell silent then, the taste of remembered bitterness filling his mouth. If the old man had shown him even a fraction of that attention after he’d left, maybe it would have had some effect. A boy of eight or ten would have been dazzled by the authentic athletic jerseys, the autographed game balls. But at sixteen, Michael hadn’t been a boy.

  “I went with him once. My mother made me. Said he owed me, owed both of us. I think I was supposed to be impressed when he took me sailing. Instead, I kept thinking that for the cost of that damn boat, my mother and I could be living in a real house, in a decent neighborhood. Maybe even have a car that actually ran.” Maybe she could have quit one of her jobs. Perhaps the lines would have faded from her face, the weariness lifted from her shoulders.

  “So you refused to go with him again,” Kate guessed.

  Michael reached for the coffeepot and refilled his mug.

  “Yes. But people don’t say no to Jonathan Friday. Six weeks later my mother was slapped with a summons. He took her to court to sue for custody.” It had been an ugly, vicious battle. The old man had had a set of witnesses bought and paid for to testify to his former wife’s supposed lack of morals, her unfitness as a mother. It had made a lasting impression on Michael. Money, when used callously, could buy almost anything.

  Kate’s gaze was sober and steady. “Did you have to live with him?”

  He shook his head. “I was plenty old to have a say in the proceedings, and I told the judge in no uncertain terms where I wanted to live. He must have believed my mother and me, because he allowed me to stay where I was.”

  “That’s it, then? That’s the reason he seemed so hateful to you this evening?”

  “Oh, I have no doubt he hates me, all right.” His voice was carefully blank. “I started my own business right out of college. I worked hard to get ahead, acquired some contacts who helped me.” He held her gaze deliberately, wanting to watch her reaction to his next words. “And the first company I ever took over was my father’s.” He’d dismantled it piece by piece, raided the solvent funds and sold it off in parcels. And he’d enjoyed every second of it.

  “I had my mother quit her jobs. I took some of the money from the old man’s business and I bought her a house on a golf course. One of those country club places, you know. A couple of cars…” His voice trailed off. He’d gone about setting his mother up in the life the old man had robbed her of when he’d dumped them both. His mouth twisted. “Very Freudian, huh?”

  He didn’t see the horrified fascination in her eyes that he’d learned to expect. Didn’t see the pity that he’d learned to despise. The absence of either nearly undid him. Her voice was soft when she replied, “Human, at any rate.”

  It would be all too easy to lose himself in her clear blue gaze, which reflected the easy warmth that was so much a part of her. There was compassion there, the kind that had a man blurting out his life story, that made a man feel he was better than he was. He wondered how much understanding he’d see there if she realized how close he’d come to the abyss. How close he’d come to turning into a heartless SOB, just like his father.

  She looked past him at the clock on the wall. “It’s late.”

  He wondered—hoped—he heard a tinge of regret in her voice. Surely he had enough regrets for both of them. Regret for the way the evening had ended and for giving her a guided tour down his own personal path of grief. She could tempt a confession from a closemouthed priest.

  Discomfit filled him. This hadn’t been part of the plan. By baring his soul like that, he’d risked making her even warier of him. For the
first time it occurred to him that his plan for luring cautious, sexy Kate Rose closer wasn’t going to be as clear-cut as designing a dispassionate corporate takeover bid. When he was with Kate, emotion crept in. And emotion clouded logic, turned objectivity aside. When he had a goal in his sights, retaining his objectivity was imperative.

  He got up and followed her to the front door. When she reached the hallway, she turned around, seeming unsure about what to do with him. He crooked a smile at the flicker of uncertainty on her face. It wasn’t as strong as the full-blown trepidation she’d worn when she’d opened the door to him tonight. As the evening had worn on, that expression had eased. Now an echo of it was back, just enough to let him know that she wasn’t all that comfortable with a man in her apartment after midnight. The knowledge was primitively satisfying, and rather than moving toward the door, he deliberately stepped toward her.

  He recognized her reaction in the way her mouth trembled for a moment before she made a visible effort to firm it. His gaze lingered on the combs holding back her hair, and he let his imagination go for just a second as he wondered what she would do if he reached over and released them.

  He remembered the last time he’d left her like this, and the frustration he’d carried with him that he hadn’t given in and tasted her, just once. He didn’t want to scare her, didn’t want to give her a reason for the anxiety to bloom into real fear of him. His goal for the evening had already been accomplished. She’d agreed to spend a few hours with him, alone. They were closer than they had been before, even if things hadn’t progressed exactly as he would have liked. Michael was a careful man, one who’d never been accused of rushing his fences. A retreat was in order now, a little space in which Kate might wonder, might crave more.

  But his mind didn’t seem to have any control over his body. Instead of moving toward the door, he closed the distance between them and allowed himself to breathe in deeply of the scent at her delicate jawline. The pulse that beat below it was an overwhelming temptation, and he wasn’t doing too well avoiding temptations right now. The tip of his tongue touched that delicate pulse, and at her shudder, his lips pressed there, lingered.