The Heiress

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The Heiress Page 29

by Cathy Gillen Thacker


  “Sounds challenging. Are you enjoying it?”

  “Yes, very much so,” Daisy was pleased to admit. Grace couldn’t have been nicer to her once Daisy started working on the show. There were still moments from time to time when Daisy could tell that Grace was uncomfortable having Daisy around, but those moments were getting fewer and farther apart, and Daisy could imagine a day in the not so distant future when she would simply be Daisy to Grace, not her ex-husband’s illegitimate child. And that was a relief. To both of them.

  “It must have been a hard job to get,” Dr. Rametti said conversationally as she stripped off her gloves and tossed them into the medical waste can.

  Daisy nodded. She had been beyond stunned when Grace had called her just hours after Grace had flatly eliminated Daisy from the running, and said she wanted to let Daisy give the job a try after all. Daisy didn’t flatter herself by thinking it was her talent that had gotten her in the door. She knew she was getting hired simply because Grace wanted to prove she could coexist peacefully with Daisy, and saw that as a way to do it. That sort of reverse nepotism had almost been enough to make Daisy refuse the job, but in the end, her need for money of her own, and the freedom it would buy her, prevailed over her stubborn pride. Whether or not the job worked out in the long run, Daisy had reassured herself firmly, didn’t matter nearly as much as the experience she would get from working on a television show.

  Dr. Rametti picked up Daisy’s chart. “You’re not too tired?”

  Daisy shrugged off the circles under her eyes as she sat up with the assistance of the nurse. “Tired can be a good thing right now.”

  Dr. Rametti made a notation, then looked up. “How are you doing emotionally?”

  Daisy shrugged again, not really wanting to get into that—with anyone. “I’m fine.”

  Dr. Rametti lifted her eyebrow. Her nurse looked equally skeptical.

  “There are times when it’s tough, but each day it gets a little better,” Daisy confessed after a moment.

  “What about Jack?” Dr. Rametti gave her a brief, assessing glance, then continued empathetically, “This kind of thing can be tough on husbands, too, you know.”

  Another road Daisy didn’t want to travel, she thought as she adjusted the paper gown across her waist. “Jack’s been busy, too.”

  “I thought he might show up here with you.”

  Daisy was still trying to figure out what to say that wouldn’t disclose what she’d done—or more accurately failed to do—when a knock sounded on the exam-room door. Another nurse stuck her head in. “Mrs. Granger’s husband is here. If it’s okay, he’d like to come in.”

  Daisy swore inwardly. She had been hoping to avoid just this.

  “Sure.” Oblivious to the nature of Daisy’s thoughts, Dr. Rametti turned back to her. “Well, I guess that answers my question,” she said with a smile.

  Looking capable and handsome in an olive-green business suit, Jack strode in and shook hands with Dr. Rametti. Briefly, Dr. Rametti brought him up to date. “Daisy’s doing just fine. Recovering nicely. So you’ll be happy to know you two have the green light to resume intercourse.”

  Easy for you to say, Daisy thought uncomfortably, doing her best to avoid Jack’s eyes and not feel so exposed in her current position. You’re not trying to keep your heart intact. It was dangerous for her to be feeling so dependent on him, given why and how they had entered into their marriage. Risky for him, too. She knew he was determined to be gallant about all this and do the right, the honorable thing. She also knew that he wasn’t looking to get hurt any more than she was. Pretending they could make their marriage real via wishful thinking was a shaky supposition to make. People, Daisy knew from bitter experience, just didn’t work that way. If they did, Charlotte would have been able to convince Richard to forget Daisy’s origins and love her unreservedly. But that wasn’t the case. And as far as Daisy’s father was concerned, she was still just “Iris’s mistake.”

  Dr. Rametti continued cheerfully counseling them both, “I know you’re probably both anxious to try again, but I’m going to advise you to be cautious and wait another few months, give Daisy’s body a chance to recover fully from the trauma it suffered, before trying to have another baby. So, if you’d like to go on the Pill in the interim, Daisy…?”

  “Sounds good.” Daisy blushed despite herself and couldn’t look at Jack as Dr. Rametti wrote out a prescription. No harm in being safe.

  Dr. Rametti handed the prescription to Daisy. “It’ll take a month before it’s effective, so in the meantime, please use condoms and/or contraceptive foam. Okay?”

  Daisy and Jack nodded their understanding. Jack thanked Dr. Rametti for all she had done. “Don’t hesitate to call if anything comes up,” the doctor cautioned. Then she and the nurse left so Daisy could get dressed.

  “You could have told me about the appointment,” Jack said the moment they were alone. “I would have been here with you for the entire time.”

  Daisy knew that, which was precisely why she hadn’t told Jack about her medical appointment. “How’d you know I was here?” she asked as she scooted rather ungracefully toward the edge of the table and put her feet onto the step down.

  Jack steadied her with a hand under her elbow, another at midspine. “I called you at the studio. They told me you’d left early because you had a doctor’s appointment.”

  Daisy allowed him to help her down, then padded in her socks toward the tiny cubicle where her clothes were hanging. “Why did you call me?”

  “Because Tom Deveraux asked me to,” Jack said, reminding Daisy once again just to whom Jack’s first loyalty really lay.

  Jack looked Daisy in the eye. “He needs to see you.”

  “DID YOU GET the papers from your sister?” Richard demanded as soon as Iris sat down in the country-club dining room.

  Wishing she had made her excuses instead of showing up, Iris pretended to consult the lunch menu she already knew by heart. “Not yet.”

  Richard gave Iris a glare only she could see. “I told you I wanted them.”

  Heat crept into Iris’s cheeks. “It’s not that easy,” she said, returning her eyes to that day’s seafood specials. “After all the trouble Daisy went to get them, she’s not just going to hand them over.”

  Richard closed his own menu and shifted it to the side of his plate. “So just take them and bring them to me.”

  Iris closed her menu, too. “I have to find them first.”

  “You were over there the week before last,” Richard said with a smile as he sipped his sparkling water. “You had the perfect opportunity.”

  “I looked,” Iris retorted irritably. At least she had tried to look while Daisy had been in the kitchen talking with Charlotte.

  The waiter appeared, to bring Iris her usual unsweetened iced tea and take their orders.

  “And?” Richard demanded impatiently as soon as the waiter had left again.

  Iris shrugged. “Daisy’s red file wasn’t in the kitchen, family room, living room or the study at the front of the house.”

  Richard’s forehead knit together. “You checked everywhere?”

  “That I could.” Iris studied the vase of fresh flowers in the center of the table. “Jack’s desk and the file cabinets in the study were all locked. And of course I couldn’t rifle through every drawer with Daisy right there.”

  “That’s no excuse.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Iris blotted her fingers on the starched linen napkin spread across her lap. “Break in?”

  Richard’s stony silence was Iris’s answer to that. “What about the bedroom?” he asked after a moment.

  Iris took a sip of her tea to soothe her parched throat. “I didn’t have a chance to go back to that wing of the house because Jack came home and it was obviously time for us to go.”

  “We can’t leave that paper trail in Daisy’s hands. You know how impetuous she is when she’s angry.”

  Iris broke open a paper packet of artif
icial sweetener and added a little to her glass. “I also know she’s had plenty of opportunity to use it against us, and she hasn’t.” Iris paused to stir her tea. “If Daisy were going to tell anyone what she found out, she would already have done so.”

  Richard’s eyes darkened. “I’m not just worried about her at the moment. I’m worried about Bucky Jerome and the way he keeps popping up wherever any of us are.”

  Resentment boiled up inside Iris. “If he’s interested in the activities of our family, Father, it’s only because—”

  “What?” Richard leaned forward slightly, daring Iris to confront him.

  For once, Iris refused to back down in the face of her father’s considerable wrath. “You’ve gotten Bucky interested with your flagrant extramarital activities,” she hissed right back.

  Richard slashed her a warning look. “You need to be careful how you talk to me, dear.”

  “And you need to be careful where you are when you indulge in such foolish and reckless activities,” Iris returned just as angrily. “I saw Ginger Zaring at the elementary school last week. I read Bucky’s column.”

  Once again, her father was all ice. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Richard said.

  Yes, Iris thought, her father did. “If you don’t care about the business or the rest of us, you might at least think about Mother,” Iris said angrily.

  The guilt Iris had hoped to see was simply not there. “What does Charlotte have to do with this?” Richard asked.

  “Everything,” Iris’s low voice quavered emotionally. “She would be so hurt.”

  Richard regarded Iris evenly. “She does not ever have to know.”

  “You can’t keep—” Iris stopped, drew a deep breath, tried again. “You can’t do things like this right under her nose and keep expecting to get away with it! Sooner or later your luck is going to run out.” And then what would they all do? How would they survive that? Talk about scandal!

  But once again, her father seemed not to care about his own sins, only those of his offspring.

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” Richard said tightly. “Now, back to what we were discussing. I want you to take care of that file as soon as possible.”

  Iris gritted her teeth. “I won’t do it.”

  “You’re defying me?”

  Looks like, Iris thought, but aloud she said nothing, simply stared at him.

  Richard stared back at her while he pushed away from the table and stood. “I trust you will take care of the check.” He walked off, leaving Iris alone with her black thoughts.

  The knowledge of her father’s fooling around was not news to her. She’d had her blinders taken off when she was ten and had accidentally walked in on him and the pretty blond landscape architect in the potting shed out at Rosewood. Iris hadn’t understood a lot about lovemaking at the time, but she’d known not to tell her mother what she’d seen Richard and that woman doing, even before her father’s sternly voiced warning.

  After that, Richard had become a lot more careful. Iris had had no doubt he was still having affairs—her parents’ separate bedrooms had told her that—but at least her father had had the good grace to keep it away from his family.

  That had changed.

  Now he no longer seemed to care, and in fact, appeared almost to want to get caught. And Iris had no idea what to do about that.

  SEVERAL HOURS LATER, as Iris turned the Closed sign to the window of the shop and switched off the lights, she caught sight of Bucky Jerome once again. He was seated at a table against the window in the Starbucks across the street. He appeared to be working on something while enjoying a cup of coffee, but she knew he was really watching her. Watching all the Templetons. Too late, Iris realized she should have asked Tom Deveraux to meet her somewhere else, but when Tom had phoned her twenty minutes ago, needing to see her, she had suggested he simply come to the store. Tom had agreed. And since that moment, she had been able to think of nothing else.

  How was it possible, Iris wondered, that she could still have feelings for a man who blamed her for the eventual breakup of his marriage?

  Especially when Iris knew that Tom Deveraux had never loved any woman other than Grace. And probably never would.

  Of course, that hadn’t stopped her from trying to win him anyway, Iris recalled with no small amount of regret. Faced with the bankruptcy of her family and mounting pressure to marry an uninteresting man thirty years older than herself, she had thought, hoped, dreamed that Tom might rescue her. She had used her MBA to finagle her way into an internship in the executive offices of Deveraux Shipping Company, and then made herself indispensable to Tom. She had worked impossibly long hours on business matters she had no interest in. She had buoyed Tom’s ego, been as supportive of him as his wife, Grace, should have been in the wake of his own father’s death and the sudden handing of the company to him. Unlike Grace, who had been, in the days before her own meteoric career success, uncomfortable with the trappings of wealth and privilege, Iris had reveled in it. Appreciated it for the gift it was, and the responsibility and yes, duty, it demanded.

  But that hadn’t meant she had wanted to marry Randolph Hayes IV. Even if the future of her entire family depended on it. No, she had wanted Tom, with his own newly acquired wealth, to save her from that fate. So she had bided her time, waited until the time was right, and Tom had had both a major business reversal and a fight with the wife who had never once deserved him, never mind appreciated him, in the same day, and then she had sent out her own SOS. She had called Tom at home around midnight, crying almost incoherently, telling him something terrible had happened, that he had to come to her apartment immediately.

  She’d made it sound as if there had been a death, and in a way, there had been—because unless Tom Deveraux saved her, her own life would be over. She’d been waiting for him in a beautiful negligee that revealed much, much more than it hid. She’d told him her father had just sold her to the highest bidder and sobbed in his arms. She’d told him she couldn’t go through with it, couldn’t marry someone who repulsed her. She was flesh and blood. A warm, willing woman. Too young to squander all that unused sexual energy. And to prove it, she made use of everything she had inherently known and given the performance of her life. She made him feel like the most desired man on earth. And it was then, when he had been collapsed on top of her, groaning and coming, in the middle of the living-room floor, that his wife had walked in.

  MITCH DEVERAUX WAITED for the Deveraux-Heyward Shipping Company promotional tape to end, then hit the stop button on the VCR. “Mom did a great job on the voice-over, didn’t she?” he said proudly.

  Tom nodded. He, too, was pleased by the excellence of Grace’s work. “The customers from both companies should feel reassured that the merger is going to benefit us all and result in even better, faster service.”

  “Mom refused payment for the half day she spent in the recording studio doing this. She said she couldn’t accept money from family, but I think we should do something nice for her in exchange. Maybe make a donation to her favorite charity in her name and take her out to dinner. Or I could do the first and you could do the second.”

  Tom glanced up from the calendar on his desk. He had a meeting with Iris Templeton in thirty minutes. And though her antique shop was only a few minutes away by car, he didn’t want to be late. This discussion had been too long in coming as it was. “Tell me you’re not matchmaking,” Tom said, giving his second-oldest son a stern, warning look. He’d had enough of that from Amy over the years. Now that she had finally stopped trying to force new life into Tom’s relationship with Grace, he didn’t want his three sons picking up the baton.

  “You want me to stop beating around the bush and get straight to the point?”

  “Please.”

  “We four kids have talked. Now that we know what happened to cause such big problems with you and Mom, we understand why you couldn’t be together and make things work back then.”

  Tom was
aware of that. After weeks of avoiding him like the plague, his four legitimate children were slowly but surely beginning to forgive him for what he had done, and coming back into his life once again. He knew they were still disillusioned and disappointed in him, and probably always would be. His involvement with Iris made him human, and they didn’t want a father that flawed. But they were stuck with him, just as he could never separate himself from what he had done. And gradually, to Tom’s relief, all four of them and their spouses were coming to realize that.

  “But that’s no reason you and Mom couldn’t make things work now,” Mitch continued hopefully.

  Tom wished that were so. He gave his son a rueful half smile. “It’s not that easy, Mitch.” He and Grace had made reconciliation attempts before, only to have them fail. It was true they had both changed in the past few months. But had they changed enough?

  “It could be,” Mitch argued with the enthusiasm he usually reserved for two things, business and his new wife, Lauren, “if you and Mom forgave each other and agreed to move on, start fresh.”

  Tom paused, not sure what his son was referring to. “What would I need to forgive your mother for?”

  Mitch shrugged. “There must have been something. I know you, Dad. You’re not a dishonorable man. You wouldn’t have turned to another woman and cheated on Mom without a darn good reason.”

  WAS THERE EVER A GOOD REASON for infidelity? Tom wondered as he cut short the conversation with his son and walked out to his car. At the moment it had happened, God knew he had felt justified, because he had believed his marriage to Grace was over in every way that counted. And for the life of him he hadn’t been able to figure out why she had stopped loving him and started shutting him out the way she had.

  The start to the relationship couldn’t have been sweeter. Tom still recalled walking into that ice-cream shop near campus, the summer before his senior year of college, with a group of his friends. Grace had been working behind the counter. Her blond hair had been long back then, and it had been clasped in a bouncy ponytail. She’d had to wear a silly peppermint-striped uniform and matching hat, but she had looked adorable nevertheless.

 

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