“Congratulations!” Cal chuckled. “You aren’t a proud mama or anything, are you?”
“Of course I’m proud. But I’m also very thankful for you and your father. Without the two of you…”
“Don’t, Morgan. If you’re going to start downplaying your part in this, I’m hanging up. He’s your son. Take credit for his accomplishments. It won’t kill you, I promise.”
Sighing, but with a huge grin on her face, Morgan relented. “You should have seen him, Cal. The second I picked him up from tryouts, I knew he’d done well. He practically danced into the center and stopped to talk to every little kid who noticed him.”
“What did you do to celebrate?”
“We stopped for pizza on the way home. His choice, of course. And then spent a couple of hours on the internet tonight, reading up on everything related to basketball that he could find. From stats to strategies to success stories of short players. He’d been wound so tight, he was actually tired at eight-thirty and went to bed at nine without any argument.”
“When is the second cut?”
“Tomorrow. I was hoping your dad would take him again. I called a couple of times but he didn’t answer. I figured I’d catch up with him in the morning. If he can’t do it, I know Julie can.”
“I’m sure he’ll do it. I actually got him to agree to go out for a steak dinner with me tonight and then stop off for some new jeans. He added some new sweatpants to wear when he’s playing with Sammie. And the whole night he was after me to call and find out how tryouts went. But I wanted to give you guys your time together.”
“You could have called.”
“Maybe I wanted to talk to you in private.” Cal’s voice grew serious. “You have no idea the change your son has made in my father’s life, Morgan. It’s truly me who owes you, not the other way around.”
“Or maybe neither of us owes anyone,” she said, running her finger around a barely visible wood grain on the table. “That’s how it works with…friends, isn’t it? The give and take is mutual.”
“Friends?”
“Well, I mean…”
“I have plans for us to be much more than friends, Ms. Lowen.”
Her body flooded with desire. She swallowed. She should have brought in a cup of tea. Laced with every calming herb known to humankind.
“You have nothing to say to that?”
“I’m too busy thinking about tea,” she said, grinning just a bit.
“Your herbal stuff?”
Squirming in her seat, she said, “Maybe.”
“The aphrodisiac kind, I hope?”
“No!” The word came out far more strongly than she’d intended. “I’m sorry,” she quickly added. “But you are more of an aphrodisiac than I seem to be able to handle, Professor, so just be nice and let me think about my tea.”
“I turn you on, huh?”
“So much so that I am sitting fully dressed at my dining room table, with a fully padded, serviceable bra and white briefs on under my clothes. I couldn’t take a chance on anything more comfortable.”
“Or what?”
“Or what, what?”
“Why couldn’t you take a chance? What would have happened?”
Her nipples were hard.
“I don’t know and I was afraid to find out.”
“I like the sound of that.” Even his voice was sexy. This wasn’t fair.
“You are still my teacher, Cal. And I have a custody hearing to worry about. I can’t start a relationship right before the judge makes his decision, no matter who it’s with. It would just feed the image of me that my parents have given him.” She’d thought a lot about this. “And even if it didn’t, being with you, in any capacity, would take my focus away from Sammie right now. I can’t afford that. Not with my father as the adversary.”
“Did your mother talk to him like she promised she would?”
“I have no idea. I haven’t heard from either one of them. If Mom had something to report, she’d have called either way. The silence is actually making me nervous. I’m sure my father’s plotting something again.”
“Or maybe he’s just taking some time to cool down and think and will do the right thing by you.”
She’d like to hope so, even though experience told her differently. Still, Cal had met her father. He knew what she was up against. And Cal was a smart man. If he thought her father might bend, then maybe he was right.
“Maybe I’m just too close to the situation to read him clearly after all these years.”
“Or maybe you do read him clearly, but this is an entirely new situation for both of you. Your father is wrong, Morgan. Apparently that’s not something he’s had a lot of practice with. But as you’ve said, he’s not a bad man.”
“No, just an emotionless one.” Her father would do what he thought was right. But he acted with his head, not his heart.
* * *
THINGS HAPPENED IN THEIR own time and sometimes at exactly the right time, Morgan thought as she answered the phone the next morning.
“Hello?” She’d dropped Sammie off and had just pulled into the day-care parking lot.
“Morgan? It’s your father.”
She knew that from the number that appeared on the display. “Hi, Daddy.”
“I’m calling to arrange a meeting with you today during the lunch hour,” he said. “I have something to discuss with you.”
“You want to meet at the restaurant?”
“I’d like you to come to my office.”
He wasn’t planning to just railroad her into his way of thinking, then. He could do that at the restaurant.
With a smile on her face, Morgan agreed to the meeting and went into the day care to greet her preschoolers.
There was no mistake about the timing of her father’s request.
* * *
“COME IN.” GEORGE LOWEN buttoned the jacket of his black suit as he opened the door of his inner sanctum to Morgan a couple of minutes before noon.
“Where’s Nancy?” she asked, referring to the woman who’d been her father’s personal secretary since Morgan was little.
“Early lunch.” George closed the door behind them.
Ordinarily she’d have been intimidated by that closed door, by being alone with her father in his office. Ordinarily she’d have felt self-conscious about the casualness of her calf-length colorful cotton skirt and yellow peasant blouse, but today she had an entirely different feeling about meeting with her father.
She’d still pulled her blond hair up into a chignon, though. Some things just set her father off. Morgan’s hair down, unkempt as he called it, was one of them.
She went straight toward the armchair she usually occupied.
“Let’s sit over here,” George said, motioning to the two maroon leather armchairs in front of his massive cherry desk.
“Is Mom joining us?”
“She’s downstairs arranging lunch.” So she was on the premises, but not present? Morgan studied her father, the stiff way he sat, the slight unsteadiness in the hands that reached for the single folder on top of his desk.
“What’s going on?”
He put the folder on his lap, with his hands on top of it.
“I want you to know I don’t blame you.”
“For what?” What did the folder contain?
“You do your best. I believe that.”
“What’s going on, Daddy?”
“As your mother al
ways says, you’re a good girl.”
Morgan stared at him. “I’m a grown woman.”
He handed her the folder. “Maybe there’s more I could have done with you, should have done with you… .”
She held the folder, but was too confused by what he was saying to look inside.
“Tell me what’s wrong.”
He met her gaze, his brown eyes the same brown as hers and Sammie’s. His face was lined. For the first time in her life, her father looked old to her.
“Your mother has made a point, Morgan. She’s shown me that in one thing I was wrong. Your choices in men aren’t your fault, Morgan. They’re mine. Your mother says that girls are attracted to men like their father. She pointed out that you choose men who are as you see me—someone who will expect things of you, expect you to listen to them and believe what they say, without listening to you or what you need.”
The concept of her father listening to her mother was novel to her. His admitting that he was wrong…? Unbelievable. But his conclusion about her choice in men was utterly wrong. “Look in the folder, Morgan.”
Slowly, keeping an eye on her father, Morgan did as he asked.
After glancing at the letterhead, the papers had her full attention.
Her father had hired a firm she’d never heard of to do a private investigation.
Caleb and Frank Whittier were the names on the first line.
Her first reaction was anger. The kind that blinded you for a second. How dare he do this? How dare he bring Frank and Cal into their fight? How dare he have her friends investigated?
And then, although she wasn’t proud of it, she read on. Only the initial paragraph of the report, at first. The part that gave the investigator’s opinion that Frank Whittier was a danger to Sammie.
“Where did he get his information?”
“I’m not sure and I didn’t ask. This guy does what he has to do. When we saw Sammie over the weekend every other word out of his mouth was about these men—Cal and his father, Frank. I had my regular team run a check on both of them. Your professor checked out, but they couldn’t find any recent mention of Frank anywhere, so I hired someone.”
“You couldn’t just accept that they’re good people?”
“No.” Her father shook his head. “We found so much nothing that it bothered me. Frank has not owned a home in more than twenty-five years. He hasn’t held a job that we could find. He hasn’t even had a mailing address or a driver’s license.”
“Frank works as a janitor,” she told her father. “He’s a retired schoolteacher.”
“He didn’t retire from teaching, Morgan. He took a forced resignation after he was held for questioning in a criminal case involving a young child in his care.”
Oh, God, no. The blood drained out of her face. It felt as though it drained out of her body. She shivered. And was afraid she was going to be sick on her father’s plush beige carpet.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“TELL ME.”
Morgan faced her father, feeling thankful for once that the man had enough money to move mountains and enough distrust to have the people she and Sammie associated with investigated.
“Frank is the prime suspect in the disappearance of a little girl, Morgan.”
Her heart pounding, she asked, “Where?” But she knew. God in heaven, she knew. And she’d just made the biggest mistake of her life. “It was in Comfort Cove, Massachusetts, wasn’t it?”
The abduction that Cal knew about, the two-year-old little girl. He’d said that he and his father lived in the town. That they didn’t know the child well.
“Who was she?”
“Her name was Claire Sanderson. She was two years old. Frank Whittier was engaged to the girl’s mother, Rose. Cal and Frank lived with Rose and her two little girls, Emma and Claire.”
“You said he’s the prime suspect. They didn’t ever prove that he did it?”
“No, which is why he’s free to prey on my grandson.”
George had no evidence that Frank had hurt Sammie.
“Caleb Whittier stayed all night the evening that Sammie went missing because he needed to make certain that his father wasn’t involved. Or if he was, so that he’d know what the police knew. He’d know how to protect his father. That’s why, as soon as it was determined that Sammie ran away, he took off. Didn’t you find it odd that he didn’t hang around at least long enough to meet the boy he’d spent the night worrying over?”
She had found that odd.
“I suppose Mom agrees with you?” Not that she would admit if she didn’t.
“Yes.” Her father didn’t gloat. She’d give him that.
“Think about it, Morgan. The man is their only suspect. I don’t know all of the details of the case, but according to the papers back then, the child was seen in Frank’s car after she’d gone missing. And when the police searched his car later, her teddy bear was stuffed under the front seat. He was the last person to have seen her. And even with teams scouring the area and everyone being interviewed, there was never a second suspect. Are you willing to risk your son’s life with a man whom a school system considered unsafe to be around their children?”
Morgan knew Frank. And Cal. She couldn’t believe either one of them would hurt a child.
But she didn’t always see the bad in people, did she?
And Cal had lied to her about that little girl. He’d told her he and his father barely knew the child who’d gone missing in his hometown.
Could she afford not to believe her father’s evidence? Had she put her son in the hands of a child abductor?
Morgan’s entire emotional being shut down.
“Call your team, Daddy. Sammie’s at school and then Frank is taking him to basketball tryouts. I’ll call Julie and have her take Sammie there instead. And I’ll let Frank know I’m taking care of the tryouts. I don’t want to alarm Sammie at this point. And he’s not going to miss those tryouts. I’ll take off work for the rest of the day, but I don’t want Sammie suspecting that there’s something going on. Please tell your men to watch him like a hawk until I get there to pick him up. And then I’m bringing him home to live. You’re right. He’s better off there.”
She just couldn’t take the chance that George was wrong. He seldom was when it came to getting the facts.
“If that man’s done anything to Sammie… If he’s touched him…”
“I sure as hell hope he hasn’t. There’s nothing in my report to indicate that they were anywhere but the basketball court outside. Until yesterday when he took Sammie to a junior high school.”
Sammie showed no signs of having been improperly touched. To the contrary, he was happier and seemed healthier than she’d ever seen him.
And he’d been seeing a counselor. If he’d been in danger with Frank, Sammie hadn’t known about it.
So maybe she was right, and Frank had been wrongly accused.
But she couldn’t take that chance. The bottom line was, at the moment, she didn’t trust her own judgment any more than her father did.
“I’m glad that you’re finally doing what’s right,” George said.
“Just make sure someone is watching him until I get there, without letting him know there’s anything amiss. I want him to be able to finish the tryouts.”
“I’ve had men on him since Sammie ran away,” George said. “And the second this report came through this morning, I put them on Frank full-time, too.”
In the end, it paid to have an unemotional know-it-all for a father.
* * *
“I NEED TO TELL SAMMIE that he’s going to be staying with you,” Morgan said. She’d called the day care, Julie and Frank. She’d seen her mother. She’d read every word of the report on Caleb and Frank Whittier. She had two hours before she had to pick up her son from basketball. She was alone with her father again and ready to leave. “He’ll be less likely to resist if I tell him that this is my choice.”
“Okay.” Her father’s face hadn’t changed at all. If he felt compassion for her, it didn’t show.
“Promise me, Daddy. You’ll let me tell Sammie. You aren’t going to have one of your men show up to bring him home. They can watch Sammie but let me get him and bring him to you.”
“I give you my word.”
“I have to go see Cal,” she said.
“I don’t advise it.”
“I know. And I suspect you’re going to have someone following me, too, now, which is why I’m telling you up front that’s where I’m going. I… We… I have to break up with him.”
Her father’s chin tightened. “So he got to you personally? I thought he was dating some art teacher at the university.”
“It’s complicated.”
George straightened. “Life doesn’t have to be so messy, Morgan. I hope you realize that now.”
“After I see Cal, I’m going to pick up Sammie and bring him home to you and Mom,” she repeated, keeping her mind on the facts at hand and refusing to let her father get to her.
After all, he’d just possibly saved her son’s life.
At the door, she turned. “Thank you.”
* * *
CAL WAS IN THE À LA CARTE cafeteria on the west side of campus having a late lunch when Morgan’s ringtone sounded.
Since she almost never called him, it took him a second to realize what he was listening to. Dropping his burger on the paper wrapper in front of him, he grabbed his cell before he missed her call.
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