As You Wish

by Jude Deveraux

  Kathy smiled. “It was a wonderful day! We didn’t leave the office until after two a.m. We were exhausted, but we had some good-looking campaigns to present to my father.”

  “How did he take your presentation?”

  Kathy got up and went to the window to look out for a moment, then turned back. “Sorry, but it still makes me angry. My father—” she swallowed “—refused to look at them. It was the next afternoon and he was in a bad mood—as he always was when Ray was out of town. He had an office full of men and he was telling them their ideas were garbage. I was standing there with Martha, Bob, and Dave behind me, our arms full of storyboards and recordings. That man, my father, gave a snort of derision, then waved his hand for us kids to go away. And we did. We backed out of the office like the cowards we were.

  “‘That’s that,’ Martha said. ‘Ray will have to show him what we did.’

  “‘And take credit for all of it?’ I said.”

  When Kathy said no more, Elise and Olivia stared at her.

  “What did you do?” Elise asked.

  “Let me guess,” Olivia said. “You used what you’d learned from Ray and attacked.”

  “Exactly!” Kathy said. “I’d gone back in time to change things, but that man just dismissed me like I didn’t matter? Not this time! It turns out that I really am my father’s daughter because I lost my temper. What was really making me angry was that half the good ideas Ray presented were from me. But my father only wanted to hear them if they were filtered through a man.”

  “The worship of the penis,” Olivia said. “I see it in my work all the time.” She saw the shock—and interest—on the women’s faces. “Sorry. This time around, I’m a psychologist.”

  “Disappointing,” Elise murmured. “I thought you were speaking from experience.”

  Olivia laughed.

  “You’re right,” Kathy said. “That’s what it was. I went back into my father’s office but then I turned coward. You can’t break a lifetime of fear in just seconds. But then I saw Cal. He was smirking at me. I could take what my father handed out but not him. Why did he always look at me with contempt? What had I ever done to make him so nasty to me? The whole thing with Felicity hadn’t happened and never would, so what was his problem?”

  Kathy took a breath to calm down. “That’s when I really and truly lost it. Because of Cal, not my father. I slammed all the papers down on Dad’s desk, leaned over him, and made him look at them. After a flash of surprise, he showed no more emotion. But children know their parents. He was shocked, stunned. Not by me, but by how really, really good my ads were. They were finished products that I knew would work. The next year, one of them won a People’s Vote prize for the third-best ad of the year,” Kathy said. “Is there any more of this white wine?” She sounded as though she was finished with the story.

  Olivia looked at Elise. “Shall we sit on her?”

  “I’ve heard of something called waterboarding. I think it’s a torture, so I say we use it.”

  They looked back at Kathy with laser glares, and she smiled. “Okay, so things changed between Cal and me.”

  * * *

  After she left her dad, Kathy went back to Ray’s office—and her body began to shake. Anger had given her strength when she’d faced her father, but now that was draining away and fear was filling her. When she’d finished her presentation, he’d said, “What title do you want?”

  She knew what he meant. He was never going to say that he liked her campaigns. Praise was not something Bert Cormac gave. But what he did give were jobs and bonuses.

  When she realized that her father had just offered her a real, actual job, it was as though all the energy suddenly drained out of her. She was leaning over her father to the point where their noses were almost touching, and she stood up straight.

  The room was still full of her rage. She could feel it, and it was an anger she hadn’t possessed before she married Ray. Marriage to him had changed everything inside her.

  Suddenly, she could see her marriage more clearly than she’d ever been able to. His ferocious ambition, his obsession with body image, his insatiable work ethic, had all seeped into her. It was Ray who’d pulled her into the advertising firm. His mantra had become “Kathy can do it.” He’d volunteered her to plan company parties, arrange schedules, whatever was needed. At home, he’d started handing her ads and having her rewrite copy. When she made a suggestion, he’d listened.

  By the second year of their marriage, they were discussing his every ad campaign. By the third year, she was as involved in his work as he was. In the fourth year, he began plopping accounts down on her home desk and telling her to take care of them—and she did.

  When she met Elise and Olivia, Kathy had been married for six years, and she was as involved in her father’s advertising firm as any of his employees.

  But Kathy wasn’t paid. Or acknowledged.

  Ray thanked her. Praised her. But he didn’t offer to try to get her a job in the company.

  When she mentioned it, he said, “Baby, you know that what is mine is yours. Go buy yourself something nice. Something sparkly.”

  As she stood in front of her father, his desk stacked high with papers and boards and tapes of recordings, it hit her that everything with Ray hadn’t happened yet. There was no reason for the rage Kathy had just shown. Sure, her father had dismissed her, but then to him, she was a girl who only planned office parties and entertained clients.

  And to the men sitting in her father’s office, she was just the boss’s pretty, plump daughter who sometimes brought them homemade muffins.

  The face Kathy wanted to see was Andy’s. He was the man who got away. Her father had just offered her a job so maybe she and Andy could work together. Had he been impressed with her?

  Kathy turned around slowly to look at the men in the chairs behind her. A couple of them seemed to be admiring. Impressed. But Andy, he was disgusted. Repulsed. His upper lip was curled into a sneer and he wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  She thought of the woman Andy would eventually marry. Yeah, Cheryl was built like Kathy, but she was so gentle and sweet that the whole office took advantage of her.

  Kathy didn’t pick up any of the papers she’d slammed on her father’s desk, didn’t look at another person, just went to the door and opened it. None of the men held it for her, not after the unfeminine display she’d just made.

  The distance to Ray’s office seemed long, but she made it and was even able to close the door behind her. But she was standing there shaking—and she didn’t know if it was from fear of having at last stood up to her father or from having seen the disgust on Andy’s face.

  Okay, she thought, as she walked to Ray’s desk. She’d achieved one of the things she wanted, which was to get herself into her father’s company. She was not going to think about what happened when the three weeks were up and she no longer knew about the future. How was she going to live up to what she’d just done? Maybe she shouldn’t have—

  “Don’t turn coward now.”

  She turned to see Cal Nordhoff standing in front of the closed door. She hadn’t heard him enter. Kathy dropped down into Ray’s chair. “Go away.”

  “And miss the aftermath of that display? Never!” He went to a cabinet, opened it, and poured vodka and tonic water into a glass and held it out to her.

  “No thanks,” she said, but when he didn’t put it down, she took it and drank half of it in one gulp. “Shades of Mad Men,” she muttered, not knowing if the show was on the air or not.

  Cal smiled. “Are you Peggy, but you look like Joan?”

  Kathy almost smiled at his allusion, but she didn’t. “Why are you here? To tell me I’ll never make it in a man’s world? That my father and the other men will eat me alive?”

  Cal’s handsome face lost its smug look and he seemed genuinely puzzled by what she’d said.
“No, not at all. I was glad of what you did, and I think it’s about time. You’ve been helping your dad for free for too long.”

  It was Kathy’s turn to be puzzled. “I’ve never done anything.” Since this was before she’d married Ray, that was true.

  “You’re kidding, aren’t you?” Cal sat down on Ray’s black leather Chesterfield sofa and looked at her. “You aren’t aware that Bert Cormac owes you for his own personal market research?”

  “I know he asks Mom and me what we think of products, but I’ve certainly never made a presentation to him.”

  “Not that you know of, but ole Bert tells me. ‘Kathy likes this one,’ he says. ‘She thinks the blue they used in the package is off. Let’s present it in a darker shade.’”

  She knew exactly which campaign he was talking about. Her father—thankfully—stayed in his apartment in the city most of the time, but when he came home he talked only of advertising. And he always brought home cartons of products and asked what they thought of them. When he left, she and her mother sighed in relief.

  “Kathy, pretty girl,” Cal said, “you’ve been part of your dad’s advertising business since you were on a bottle. He told me he experimented in formulas with you. One of them made you throw up.”

  She was leaning back in Ray’s big leather chair, the one that had been custom-made to fit him, and thinking about what Cal had said. “Why do you always sneer at me?”

  He couldn’t hide the shock on his face. “I didn’t know you saw that.”

  It was true that before she married Ray, she hadn’t noticed Cal at all. Between Larry and Andy and her fear of her father, she hadn’t seen much else in her life. But she had an idea that it was only after her marriage that Cal had really begun his looks of contempt. And with Ray’s boundless energy around her, she didn’t have time to dwell on why one of her father’s employees didn’t like her.

  In fact, if it hadn’t been for Olivia asking about Cal, she probably wouldn’t have been so angered at the way he’d smirked at her in her father’s office today. And if she hadn’t been enraged, she might have slunk out without presenting the ads.

  She watched him go to Ray’s bar, pour himself a whiskey, then go back to the couch.

  “So who are you going to settle for?”

  “You mean which account?”

  “No, which man? You’ve got four men hanging around you.”

  “You know, I’m not liking this conversation. I want you to leave.”

  “It’s not your office,” Cal said. “First there’s that skinny kid. What’s his name?” Kathy didn’t answer.

  “Three last names. Laurence Winbeck. That’s it. He wants your daddy’s money. Then there’s Andy Donaldson.”

  Kathy drew in her breath. No one knew she was interested in Andy. Ray thought she had a crush on him.

  “Andy says he’s playing hard to get so he won’t be accused of going after the boss’s daughter.”

  “He says that?” Kathy whispered.

  “Only to a company VP who takes him out to lunch. After two martinis he enjoyed telling me what his goals in life are.” Cal snorted. “He’ll never make it in advertising. Blabs too much truth.”

  Kathy was frowning. “Why would you do that?”

  Cal didn’t answer her question. “Then there’s Ray.”

  Kathy’s lips tightened.

  “Oh, I see that you do know about Ray’s interest in you. He’s catching on that clients like tablecloths and that those two forks have different uses. He’s beginning to think marriage is a business proposition. You could give him what he doesn’t know, and in return, he’d give you the privilege of being near his glorious self.”

  Kathy couldn’t help it but that image made her give the tiniest bit of a smile. “That’s three men. Who’s the fourth?”

  “Me.”

  All Kathy could do was blink.

  “Didn’t know that, did you?” He got up and walked to the window to look out. “Those men want you for how you can advance their lives, for what you can give them. But me? I want you. I like your brain, the way you think. You’re smarter than you give yourself credit for.”

  Turning, he looked at her—and his eyes were hot. Like something out of a movie, she thought. Cal looked as though he might throw her across the desk and tear off her clothes.

  No man had ever looked at Kathy like that and it made her heart leap into her throat.

  He took a step toward her. “I like that glorious, lush body of yours.” He took another step. “I like women.” He was standing beside the desk and he gave her a look up and down that made her feel like she might melt into the leather of the chair.

  When he held out his hand to her, she started to take it, but she glanced at the door.

  “I locked it,” he said, his voice throaty. “And I told Martha we weren’t to be disturbed no matter what she heard.”

  She took his big hand in hers.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “OMG,” Elise said. “That’s... Oh! That’s wonderful. Great. I love it!”

  Olivia was smiling in an I-told-you-so way.

  “Don’t you dare take credit for this!” Kathy said to Olivia, but she was laughing. “Cal and I would have happened eventually. It’s just—” She stopped. “No. It never would have happened. After being married to Ray, I would have been too scared to even think about marriage again.”

  She picked up her wineglass and twirled the stem in her hand for a moment. “I didn’t know how bad my life with Ray was. The comparison I had was my parents, and my marriage was a lot better than theirs.” She looked up. “When people ask about a bad marriage, the only thing they really want to know is, Does he hit you? If the answer is no, then you’re put into a category labeled SAFE. Whatever else is done to you is okay.”

  She paused. “Ray never yelled at me, was never unkind. But he beat me down in a way that killed the inside of me. He didn’t mean to because he truly loved me, but he wasn’t in love with me.”

  Kathy smiled. “Cal and I fight. We have arguments. He thinks he knows everything in the world and I have to stand my ground to make him even hear me.”

  When she looked up, she was smiling. “But we make up in bed. Fabulous sex. The kind out of novels. And out of bed we’re kissing. And hand holding. And cuddling while we watch TV. Every day he lets me know that I am loved. Good moods and bad, I know he loves me.”

  “I know what you mean,” Olivia said. “Reliving our lives made the dynamic between Kit and me change. When we got married when we were older, even though I loved him, under the surface I still harbored a lot of anger and resentment that he’d ruined my life. I loved him but I hated him too. But I was so afraid that rage would come out that I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t talk about the bad that had happened to me. We were only married for a year and it was sweet, but I was afraid that if I let my anger out, it would destroy everything.”

  She paused. “And there was the guilt. I was a woman who’d given up her child. The guilt ate at my soul. When I went back, I yelled at Kit, cursed him, but he was still there. He didn’t go away. I don’t know whether he believed me or not, but he helped me.” She smiled. “And also, when I met him so many years later, he’d had a lot of time of being a big shot and he kept that attitude. He decided things, gave orders. All decisions were his.”

  “And now?” Kathy asked.

  “Now we’ve lived together all that time. I saw him go from being a mostly naked boy to counseling presidents. If he gets too uppity, I know how to stop him.” She smiled. “To me, he’ll always be that worthless boy.”

  “And you had children,” Elise said. “Alejandro was made to be a father.”

  Olivia laughed. “I have to say that the boys took any hint of pomposity out of their father. One time Kit unexpectedly got caught in what was escalating into a desert war. He was freaking out
because Tully was with him. Our son felt his father’s fear and threw up on him. An absolute gusher. It was so human, so normal, that everyone stopped screaming and started laughing. It was easier to negotiate with laughing men than with rage so the problems were solved. Kit said it should be named ‘Tully’s War.’” When she looked up, there were tears in her eyes—but they were tears of happiness.

  Elise looked at Kathy. “How is Ray doing?”

  “Last year he left Dad’s firm and started his own. He’s doing well.”

  “Did he leave because of Cal?” Elise asked.

  “I think so. Dad started spending time outside work with Cal, then when I gave him a grandson, Dad kind of became another person.” She took a breath. “He’s thinking about retiring.”

  Olivia’s eyes widened. “You are going to head the agency, aren’t you?”

  Kathy’s smile was slow. “I am. Dad’s been spending time with Mom and they’re so mad about our kids that...” Kathy trailed off and gave a shrug. “I’m happy. That’s the highest, most important thing I can say. I am happy.”

  “Me too,” Olivia said.

  “And me,” Elise said.

  They smiled at each other, leaned back, and sipped their drinks. There wasn’t anything more they needed to say.

  Epilogue

  It was early morning and Olivia was lying in the bed. Kit had already gone downstairs.

  She opened her eyes enough to see that it wasn’t quite daylight so she closed them again.

  Only yesterday they’d returned from... From what? Their life experience? None of them were yet used to their new lives.

  Last night at dinner Elise had teased Alejandro that Olivia’s sons were so gorgeous that she might trade him in. Alejandro was a sweet, gentle man who looked at his wife with so much love that it was almost embarrassing. He didn’t seem to be worried that she was going to run away.

  Kit had insisted that everyone spend the night in Camden Hall. “It’s too big and empty now.” His voice was wistful.