Tangled Web

by Cathy Gillen Thacker

  And she’d thought Edmond was persistent! She saw now he had nothing on his son. “I’ve already done that,” she countered reasonably. “He’ll be fine by tomorrow. Trust me.”

  Chase wasn’t so sure Joey would be fine. Small for his age, slightly built, he seemed to be constantly trying to prove himself. It was okay for him to want to be healthy; it wasn’t okay for him to be taking unnecessary risks. Chase had a hunch, from the guilty look on Joey’s face this afternoon, that forgetting his inhaler had been no mere accident. It was an attempt to deny his illness. Hope didn’t want to believe that, of course. But her refusal to see the situation for what it was wasn’t helping any, either. Right now Hope and Joey weren’t listening to each other. He was telling her he felt singled out and hated it. And she was trying to tell him if they hid long enough it would all go away, as if by magic. If his father were here, Chase knew it would have been different. Edmond could have made her see reason. But he wasn’t his father. And Joey wasn’t his son. This didn’t have to be his problem. But it was. And it had been ever since he’d been back.

  Chase sighed. He knew they’d said all there was to say. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been in situations similar to this before. He had, especially with Lucy. He’d tried to talk some sense into her, too. Only she hadn’t listened, either. Just like Hope wasn’t listening. And he had learned the hard way it was impossible to help someone if they didn’t want to be helped. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said, still staring at Hope.

  “Everything is going to be fine, Chase,” Hope said, trying her best to convince him.

  Chase yearned for that to be true. Because if anything did happen to Joey, Chase knew he’d never get over the guilty feeling that he’d somehow let them all down.

  “MORE FRENCH TOAST, Joey?” Carmelita asked the following morning. “Half a piece.”

  Joey eyed the plate hungrily, trying to gauge the limits of his appetite. “Half a piece.”

  “What about you, Mr. Chase?” Carmelita said as Chase entered the kitchen via the back route. “Would you like some breakfast?”

  “I just came over for a cup of coffee,” he said. He looked at Joey; he was pleased to see he had his old color back and looked none the worse from his traumatic experience the day before. “Going to school, I guess.”

  “Yes, sir. I have a spelling test today.” Joey made a face. “I hate making up tests.”

  “Good morning, Chase,” Hope said from the other end of the kitchen table.

  Carmelita handed Chase a steaming cup of coffee. He smiled his thanks, then turned back to Hope. If she was still mad at him for speaking his mind, she wasn’t showing it. “Morning.”

  Looking fresh and rested in a navy Anne Klein suit, she smiled at him over the rim of her own cup. “Joey looks good this morning, doesn’t he?”

  Knowing a loaded question when he heard one, Chase nodded. He reached out and ruffled Joey’s hair. “He sure does. Keep eating that way, slugger, and you’re going to be an iron man before we know it.”

  Joey grinned. “Sounds good to me.”

  Hope gave Chase a smug smile and went back to her paper. Okay, he thought, so maybe in this instance Joey’s mother did know best. Maybe he was letting his imagination run away from him. Unfortunately, his gut feeling wasn’t concurrent. His gut feeling told him that like it or not this was a situation that had to be dealt with more fully. He knew Edmond would’ve wanted him to intervene, in his absence, and that there was no one else who could do so. He also knew Hope wasn’t likely to appreciate his efforts, now or at anytime in the future.

  “Hey, Chase,” Joey said breaking into his ruminations. “Do you think I could ride in your Jeep sometime, with the top down?”

  Hope opened her mouth to protest.

  Chase shrugged evasively. “I don’t know. We’ll see. All right, buddy?”

  Joey’s small shoulders slumped beneath the tailored school blazer. “Okay,” he said, visibly depressed, obviously thinking it was his asthma getting in the way again. And since it was, Chase didn’t know what to say.

  Hope gathered the papers she had been studying and stuffed them into her briefcase. Consulting her watch, she said, “Hurry up and finish your French toast, hon. We’ve got to go. I don’t want you to be late.”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  Her mood pleasant but aloof, Hope passed Chase in a cloud of perfume that would haunt him for the rest of the day. By the time five o’clock rolled around and he received a person-to-person call from Costa Rica, he was ready for a break. “Chase, old buddy, how are you?” his co-worker shouted through the staticky lines.

  Bored, Chase thought. Fenced in. “Anxious to be back to work,” he said. My real work. He kicked back and put his feet up on the corner of his desk. Swiveling his chair, he glanced out at the blue Texas sky outside his office window. It was pretty, but not nearly as entrancing as the beautiful, mysterious rain forest. Aware of what this call must be costing his friend, he shouted back clearly and loudly, “How’s it going out there?”

  “Couldn’t be better! I got the last of the samples we needed today. I’m shipping them back to the National Cancer Institute for testing and I’m heading home.”

  Chase felt a moment’s regret that he hadn’t been there to see the project through to the end, then pushed it aside. He had family responsibilities here. In the past, it was the kind of thing he had generally tried to duck, but with his father gone, he had to fill in. That decision had been made; he wouldn’t waste time feeling sorry for himself. “Are you going to be able to go to New Zealand with me in July?” his partner asked.

  Chase knew he couldn’t leave until absolutely everything was in order here. He also knew he’d work like crazy to see that it was. “Probably,” he answered, confident he could clear up every problem in that amount of time, including Hope’s unnecessary coddling of Joey. “What’s up?”

  “The NCI has a lead on a possible cure for arthritis. I thought it might bear checking out.”

  “Sounds good,” Chase said, willing to go just about anywhere, for any length of time, in the name of medical research. “The only problem is funds. I haven’t got any.” And it generally took months and months of red tape to get a grant.

  “Well, you know I don’t, either. You’re the only one of us who’s filthy rich.” His partner paused. “Any chance you can raise funds by then?”

  Chase sighed and immediately thought of Rosemary. This was precisely the sort of thing she loved, and she was very good at raising money. That might get her mind off the store and her vendetta against Hope. “I don’t know. I can try,” Chase said.

  “OF COURSE I’d be happy to help you raise funds for your research, darling,” Rosemary said when Chase approached her, later the same afternoon. She was in her office, busily trying to find fault with the plans he and Hope had set up for the after-hours party. “You’ll have to be there in person, though,” Rosemary warned. She examined a faint chip on one rose-colored nail.

  “You’ll have to wine and dine the possible contributors.”

  “It won’t be a problem,” Chase assured his mother. He could live through one more black-tie event if it meant he could get back to the rain forests in July.

  “Will you bring a date or shall I get you one?” Rosemary asked cagily. She pulled out a bottle of polish from her purse and began repairing the slight imperfection in the veneer.

  Knowing the kind of woman his mother was liable to fix him up with—beautiful, empty-headed and filthy rich—Chase passed on the matchmaking. “I think I can find someone to go with me, thanks,” he said dryly.

  “I know you can, darling. The problem is you usually don’t.” She paused. “Have you been seeing anyone since you got back?”

  No one except Hope, Chase thought as he left his mother’s office. He’d been seeing Hope with alarming frequency. At work, at the estate. In the past, he’d had no problem avoiding her even when he stayed in the guest house. Maybe because his father had been there t
o handle anything that came up, like Joey’s trip to the emergency room. Chase didn’t want to be Hope’s savior. Hell, considering her past and all she still wouldn’t tell him, he wasn’t even sure he should trust her at all. But more and more he found himself being cast in that role. More and more he found himself thinking of her as a woman. When he’d held her in his arms and felt her soft body pressed up against his, he had known without a doubt it could be very good between them. It still bothered him that she had been married to his dad, but he also knew his father was gone now. And Edmond wouldn’t want Hope to be alone. Not for the rest of her life. He would want Hope to be happy, to be loved again.

  If his father was all that was standing in the way of them, maybe in time it all could have worked out. But he wasn’t. Chase knew that unless Hope opened up to him and trusted him enough to tell him everything, that nothing more would ever be possible. And that thought made him feel depressed and dejected as hell.

  Chase sighed and raked a hand though his hair, tired of fighting his feelings and tired of continually wrestling with his sense of what was right and wrong. His partner was right. He had to get back to the rain forest. He had to go to New Zealand and do his real work. And the sooner the better.

  “YOU DISAPPOINT ME, Hope,” Russell said over drinks at Maxim’s. It was Monday evening, after work. Russell regarded her with a smug, insinuating look that made the muscles in her neck stiffen with tension. “You’ve turned into a fine businesswoman. You should have been able to sell the deal I’m proposing.”

  “I tried,” Hope said with as much calm as she could muster, trying hard to ignore the cloying smell of his after-shave and the disturbing memories it evoked. She remembered Edmond’s advice, to always treat her enemies with as much courtesy as her friends.

  “You can ask Rosemary,” she said pleasantly.

  “I didn’t have to ask her,” Russell continued in his slick, insincere voice. His soulless blue eyes fastened on her face. “She called me as soon as the meeting was over. She said you mentioned the deal but you did not stand behind it.”

  Sweat gathered between her breasts and under her arms but Hope faced him equably. “I let the Board of Directors make up their own minds.”

  His expression turned ugly. He lifted his Scotch to his lips and drank deeply. “They would’ve bought it if you had persevered.” He set his glass down on the tablecloth with a thud.

  Unable to look at him a second longer, Hope focused on the plush red interior of the restaurant. “I don’t think so,” she said calmly.

  “Well, we’ll never know now will we?” he asked sarcastically, his displeasure evident in the cruel twist of his lips. He lifted his glass and took another lengthy sip.

  The way he savored the taste of the expensive liquor brought back a lot of memories, too. Please, she said in silent prayer, not another migraine. “Look, I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” she lied. “But now that it hasn’t, maybe you can sell your proposal to someone else.”

  “And maybe,” he said, in a voice that was both soft and harsh, “you’ll just have to figure out another way to appease me.”

  Something in Hope went very cold and very still. “What do you mean?” she whispered hoarsely. “I’ve done what you asked.”

  “No, you pretended to do what I asked because you didn’t see any other way around it.” His blue eyes narrowed.

  Unable to contain her anger now, Hope clenched her hands together on her lap and snarled, “Did you really expect me to help you? After what you did to me, the way you ruined my life?”

  “I didn’t ruin anything, Hope. You did.”

  “That’s a lie.” Hope felt the blood begin to rush to her face.

  “Things could have been so easy for you, so sweet, if you had only gone along—”

  She got up so suddenly she jarred the table. Blindly she headed for the exit. Russell caught up with her and closed his hand around her upper arm. He exerted pressure, unmindful of the fact they were in a very public place. “Sit down, Hope,” he said behind a fixed, deadly smile. “We haven’t finished.”

  People at the bar were beginning to stare. Russell smiled even more broadly and made a loud, flirtatious joke for the benefit of their audience, making it look as if they were in the midst of a lover’s quarrel.

  “Sit down,” Russell prodded softly, beneath his breath, “or I’ll have no choice but to bring up how we knew one another before.”

  Knowing she had no other choice if she didn’t want a very ugly scene, very public scene, Hope reined in her quaking fury, returned to the table and sat down.

  “You owe me, Hope,” Russell said cordially, as soon as they were seated again. “I thought I made that very clear.”

  Two could play this game, she thought as she met his gaze courageously. “And I thought I had made it clear I can’t help you.” She spat out the words like shards of glass.

  His look hardened. “Maybe not in business. But fortunately for you, I am not a picky man. I will accept cold hard cash.”

  She stared at him in shock. “You’re crazy,” she whispered disbelievingly.

  He leaned forward, rested both elbows on the table, and spoke in the arrogant, amoral tone she detested. “No, just blunt. I want two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Hope. Within the next few weeks.”

  “I won’t—”

  “Oh, I think you will, that is if you don’t want our secret past leaked to every gossip columnist in town. It’d be interesting, wouldn’t it, to see how your son would react to the news of what his mother was really like.” He sat back smugly.

  The thought of Russell anywhere near her son made her skin crawl. Unable to bear looking at his face a second longer, Hope fastened on the open collar of his silk shirt. Seeing a glimpse of his darkly tanned skin, she shifted her gaze again. “You bastard.”

  “I thought you’d see it my way.” Satisfied he’d done all the damage he could, he tossed a bill on the table and stood up. “I’ll be in touch.” And then, with a smile, he walked away.

  Hope sat there for several minutes, feeling sick and shaken. The waiter came back and asked her solicitously if she were feeling all right. She nodded and said yes, but as soon as he left she reached for her purse and removed a small brown vial. In it, was her migraine medicine. She’d had the foresight to get it from her family doctor before her meeting with Russell. Now, with her vision beginning to blur and her head beginning to pound, she was glad she had it.

  She swallowed the pill, and then put the bottle away. She knew from bitter experience that taking a pill during the onset of an attack often was enough to prevent a full-blown migraine. All she had to do was sit here, and wait for the medicine to take effect. The only problem was she couldn’t drive after taking the medication, as it made her drowsy.

  CHASE WAS OUT BACK, playing catch with Joey. He and Joey were both surprised to see Hope emerge from a cab.

  “I wonder where her car is,” Joey said, pushing his Astro’s cap back on his head.

  “I don’t know,” Chase said, absently thumping his mitt. Hope didn’t exactly punch a clock with him. But all day today she seemed a little distant, troubled. He had tried to talk to her once, to fill her in on the invitation list for the cocktail party, but had given up and just left a typed list for her because she was so distracted.

  “Maybe she had car trouble,” Joey said.

  “Maybe,” Chase agreed slowly. And maybe, Chase thought suspiciously, something else was up, something she didn’t want him to know about. After catching the grounder Joey had sent his way, he closed the distance between them. “I think that’s about enough for tonight,” he informed his half brother genially.

  “Okay. I gotta go in and watch The Cosby Show at six-thirty anyway,” Joey said. “Thanks for playing ball with me, Chase.”

  “Anytime,” Chase murmured. He handed over his mitt and the ball. He watched Joey run off, their gear cradled in his arms, and then headed for the front of the house. Hope was in the living room when
he entered. She had put down her briefcase and was sitting in the fading light; her hands were knitted together in her lap and she was just staring ahead of her. He knew at once that she was in some sort of distress. It was impossible to tell whether it was physical or emotional.

  “Hope?” he said softly, watching her turn slowly to face him. She didn’t look as if she wanted to see him or anyone else. “Everything all right?”

  She blinked, still looking a bit stunned. “Yes,” she said quietly. “Everything’s fine.”

  She didn’t look fine, Chase thought. If she was so fine, why had she come home in a cab when she had driven to work? He knew she’d left early for an outside appointment—with whom or where, he didn’t know. Was that outside appointment responsible for her upset state? Or was something else bothering her? He was tired of Hope’s lying.

  He stepped closer, able to see how pale her face was. He’d never been able to resist helping a person in need, and right now she had never looked more vulnerable. “I saw the cab outside. So did Joey.” Unable to help himself, he took a closer look at her shuttered expression. “Are you all right?” And then it hit him, he knew by the faint waxy look of her skin. “Are you having another headache?”

  For a moment he thought she was going to deny it. She swallowed as if in great pain. “Yes, but it’s all right,” she answered, her voice low and irritable. “I’ve already taken some medicine. I’ll be fine. I just need to lie down for a while.”

  Her bad temper didn’t alienate or offend him; he was grumpy, too, when ill. He regarded her carefully. He was still ready, willing and able to help. “You’re sure?”

  She turned and took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said flatly, her patience for conversation exhausted. “I’m sure.” She touched a trembling hand to her temple, doing her best to keep up the barriers. “Have you seen Joey?” She wouldn’t look at him directly.

  Hurt that she wouldn’t let him help her, Chase said, a bit miffed, “He was going up to watch The Cosby Show—”