Then Sylvia saw tall, dark-haired Cliff Ames, whom she knew to be a friend of Lyle. A quick scan of the nearby seats did not reveal him.
Her eyes met Cliff’s. Shoving to his feet, he put his hands together.
One clap. Two. Loud against the silence.
Red-haired attorney Shana Weston rose beside Cliff. She began to applaud.
Slowly as first, then like a rising wind, the approbation spread. Those seated clambered to their feet.
A man shouted, “Good to have you back.”
“We love ya, Sylvia.”
Her eyes overflowing with tears, Sylvia waved to acknowledge their welcome.
As soon as the ovation died down, she fled to the ladies’ room.
On Ice’s rooftop terrace, beneath the outdoor awning, Lyle heard people clapping and cheering inside. He supposed the band must have arrived.
After a glance over his shoulder into the blue grotto, he turned back to Julio Castillo.
“I’m offering you an exclusive,” he told the reporter.
“In exchange for what, amigo?”
“I’m not your friend. But you have something I need, and I have something you want. I get your camera and airtime at eleven this evening. You get the story I give you.”
“What story?”
“Let’s just say it has to do with Sylvia Chatsworth.”
The reporter’s dark eyes widened.
Inside the granite-walled bathroom stall, Sylvia blew her nose and tossed the tissue. The last time she’d been in here crying it had been in humiliation. Tonight, she shed tears of joy.
For all the terrible stories, all the bad press, it seemed a lot of people did like her. They really had worried about her.
Reaching for the handle to flush the tissue, Sylvia heard heels tapping on the tile outside.
“It’s just amazing,” said Corinne Walker. “Those idiots were applauding her. Don’t they—”
Sylvia opened the door. Corinne saw her and closed her mouth. A wonder she didn’t bite her tongue.
Shana Weston, her back to the stalls, said to Corinne, “You’re making a fool of yourself because you’re pea green with envy.”
Sylvia thought about jumping in. Saying something appropriately bitchy… throwing punches and pulling hair like in fourth grade. After all, she had a perfect right.
It wasn’t even tempting.
She stepped around Shana, touched her lightly on the shoulder. On her way out, Sylvia noted that Corinne did look a little green.
Back on the crowded club floor, Sylvia headed straight for Cliff Ames. If anybody knew where Lyle was, it would be him. And he certainly had Lyle’s cell number on speed dial.
She would borrow Cliff’s phone, step outside where the patio was deserted due to the weather, and make the call.
But she didn’t see Cliff now. If he’d been with Shana, maybe he was in the gents.
It took her a few minutes to work her way over toward where she’d last seen Lyle’s friend. People kept stopping her and shaking her hand or hugging her.
“Give ‘em hell,” said more than one person. She assumed they meant when she testified against Andre Valetti.
She remembered now what she didn’t like about the club scene. When it was this crowded, a shorter person like her got a little claustrophobic.
There was something going on over by the bar. A commotion and the blue glow of Ice washed out from the camera lights.
It must be Julio Castillo, out doing roving reporting for “On the Spot.” At least his cameraman hadn’t filmed her coming in … unless he did it from somewhere in the club without extra illumination.
About ten feet away from whomever he was immortalizing, she started to turn back.
Impossible. The crowd was crushing closer to the spectacle, hoping for a movie star or something. Sylvia stretched on tiptoe. She saw the top of a blond head. She saw the camera held up, the red light come on.
The microphone amplified a male voice. “This is for Sylvia Chatsworth.”
“Lyle?” she said.
“I wanted to do this on the air, like those people who put up a billboard that says, ‘Honey, I love you.’”
The people around Sylvia started to murmur.
Lyle’s voice went on. “Sylvia, I just want to be clear …”
The crowd parted like the Red Sea, leaving an open corridor between her and Lyle.
“In front of your parents …”
She saw him, struck anew with his blond splendor. He was magnificent, giving the camera, and by extension her, a look any woman would die for.
“She’s here,” someone murmured.
“Right here,” a fellow next to her called, holding up his arm.
Sylvia saw Lyle scan the crowd. Their gazes met, locked.
He pulled the mike closer to his mouth. “In front of God and everybody …”
Her heart slammed. His expression telegraphed his next words, but she waited to hear them without breathing.
“Sylvia. Will you marry me?”
People in the bar begin to clap again.
Lyle handed the microphone to Julio Castillo and gave him a significant look.
Castillo nodded at the cameraman. The red light went off. The bright light extinguished.
Sylvia began to walk toward Lyle. She did it slowly, solemnly, as though the dress she wore were white. It would feel like this, she believed, her throat tight with emotion.
The isolated clapping became applause that was even louder than before. Someone yelled, “Say yes!”
The crowd took up the chant. “Saaaay! Yesssss!”
Sylvia reached Lyle. The chant became a roar.
So this was it. Her heart felt too big for her chest. Wherever they ended up, would it all be worth it? Who could know?
Lyle took her shoulders and smiled down at her. His hopes and dreams shone in his eyes.
Their blue matched the lights behind him.
Her dreams matched his.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
Chapter 1
Mariah Grant hugged her slender body against the deepening chill of the San Francisco twilight. Behind her, music and party chatter drifted out through the French doors of Davis Campbell’s Seacliff mansion. Perched on the brink of a precipice, the stucco-walled edifice boasted three wings, handmade clay roof tiles and a two-story wall of glass overlooking the Pacific. Mariah’s view from the terrace swept from the Golden Gate Bridge south to the trackless sea, while a line of ships headed for the expanse of open ocean. Their purpose and motion made her wish she were bound for some exotic port, to be anywhere but in the home of her father’s most bitter rival.
Only a month had passed since she joined the family company and, due to her dad being under the weather tonight, she represented Grant Development alone for the first time. Her hope this evening was to meet Senator Lawrence Chats worth, former head of the Bay Area Regional Planning Commission, a man whose influence had opened doors for many.
Though she might feel confident invading the Campbell domain for business reasons, she had trouble setting aside her personal feelings. She expected Davis Campbell’s son Rory to be here, she counted on it, but the prospect of seeing the man she’d once loved made her chest feel hollow.
As the sun sank into the molten ocean, a salt breeze stirred her hair. She knew she should go back inside and look for the Senator, but instead stood compelled by the rugged San Francisco terrain, achingly familiar, yet now more precious for having spent her college years at UCLA, and four more working in Southern California. Virtual exile from her father, but it had been necessary both to pay her business dues and heal the wound inflicted by Rory Campbell.
Fixing her eyes on a deepening ochre sky, she steeled herself to rejoin the party. All the key players in the Bay Area developers’ community were here. Hundreds of guests crowded the elegant high-ceilinged rooms, drinking premium liquor and vying for information to help their interests or hinder others.
Before she co
uld turn back toward the house, a hand brushed her forearm. “Mariah.”
Startled, she turned and looked up into warm brown eyes. Six-foot-two inches of well-built man in a tailored tuxedo, Rory Campbell brought back all the memories she’d tried to forget.
“It’s been too long.” His voice sounded familiar, deep, and even though she could no longer replay that seductive tone in her mind, her heart remembered. Treacherous images swirled of being in his arms when she was eighteen and innocent.
Rory’s gaze traveled from the straps of her gold sheath down to the curve of her waist. In the San Francisco boutique, the dress had seemed the perfect revenge, but now she wondered if it revealed too much. With a coolness she didn’t feel, she looked up at wavy, black hair above dark angled brows, high cheekbones, and a square jaw softened by a sensuous mouth. The scent of his aftershave wafted to her, bringing back a bygone summer when she’d sprinkled the fragrance on her pillow so she could dream of him. He’d been a slim blade of youth then, with a gaunt face composed of angular planes. Tonight, he wore an aura of self-confidence that declared the heir to Davis Campbell Interests had come into his own.
“How did eight years get away?” he asked.
“You were married for seven of them.” She failed to state that his rush to the altar indicated how little she had meant to him.
He looked pained. “You know Elizabeth and I… that I’m single?”
She studied the sea cliffs. “Your divorce made the news.”
Last fall when she was visiting her dad for Thanksgiving, the lead story in “On the Spot,” the city’s video equivalent of the tabloids: “City’s most eligible bachelor once more at large.”
“The paparazzi are relentless.” Rory looked annoyed. “Ten minutes after you joined your father’s company, the word was out.”
Through the French doors, Mariah spied Davis Campbell’s tall frame cutting a swath through the party crowd. “And for the past few months you, too, have been with your father.” Her tone hardened. “You swore you’d never work for him.”
Rory’s mouth twisted. “I remember saying I wanted to run white water raft trips.”
They’d played that kind of “what if,” sailing on the Bay where sunlight sprinkled diamonds over the water.
“We thought we’d do whatever we wanted when we grew up.” Though Mariah knew he’d recently turned twenty-eight, Rory spoke with the sadness of a much older man.
To remind herself, and him, how he’d once caved in to his father, she looked a challenge at him. “What happened to your dream of being your own man?”
“The same thing that happens to so many with a legacy.” Though his words rang with finality, his dark expression conveyed something like regret. “At least you’re where you’ve always wanted to be, training to run Grant Development. You said that was your dream, and here you are.”
When she was a little girl, her father had taken her to construction sites. While he took notes on his aluminum, weatherproof clipboard and talked with employees, she watched with a child’s single-minded fascination. Dreams of a future where she saw her creations take shape had consumed most of her life.
Rory glanced over his shoulder at the crush inside. “I’m surprised you came tonight.”
“Dad was a bit taken aback when we both got an unprecedented invitation from Davis Campbell. Then he decided it must have been a business courtesy.” Reluctant to mention her father’s health lest it get back to his rival, she finished, “I came alone.”
Speaking of her father, she realized that the wall of glass on the rear of the house exposed her standing with Rory. If the ever-active grapevine paired them, Dad would be sure to hear and be hurt by his daughter’s indiscretion.
“Would you be here if you’d known the invitation was from me?” Rory spoke with a trace of what could not be hesitation, not in the “the city’s most eligible bachelor.”
Mariah went still inside, afraid of trusting too much in his statement. She had trusted him once before, and look where that had gotten her.
“Why would you invite me?” She tried to sound casual.
He smiled for the first time. It softened his features, making him more like the youth she’d known. “Maybe when I heard you’d come back to town I got curious.”
“Curious.” She too, had wondered how they would react to seeing each other again. “If you did invite me, why include my father?”
Rory’s eyes twinkled. “Asking you both seemed less obvious.”
Like his smile, his teasing tone took her back. When his gaze took another tour from the top of her head to the tips of her strappy gold sandals, goosebumps prickled her skin.
“You’re chilled.” He shrugged off his jacket and draped it around her.
She wasn’t sure she wanted the remembered intimacy of wearing his clothes, but with bowed head, she let him cover her shoulders with the coat. His hand brushed her collarbone, left a tingling spot on her skin, and she wondered if it were her imagination that his fingers were unsteady?
Before she could stop herself, she looked up. In his eyes, she found the same smoky look that had so often preceded a kiss. With a flutter in her stomach, she realized how easily he could have her back under his spell.
She tried looking away, at the flagstone, the railing around the turquoise swimming pool, but it was no good.
“Mariah.” Rory tipped her chin up so she met his eyes once more. Rather than lower his mouth to hers, he studied her in silence, as though measuring his next words. “You ever think ‘what if?’”
Closing her eyes, she rode a wave of pain. Why couldn’t she be immune to him after so many years of silence?
“Admit it,” Rory’s voice was soft. “You remember, too.”
Memory held it all, from the times she had raised her face for his kiss to his vow that nothing would come between them, not school, long distance, or their parents. Did she feel his breath, a faint stir of air before her?
Before she could decide, Davis Campbell’s imperial tone intruded. “Rory!”
Her eyes snapped open.
Rory stepped back, and turned from her toward the French doors where his father stood.
Davis must be about fifty-eight now, her father’s age, as they had been classmates at Stanford. A complimentary scatter of silver threaded his thick, black hair, but he still carried his tall frame proudly. Though undeniably good-looking, his predatory expression chilled her enough to draw Rory’s jacket closer around her. Behind him in the great room, his big game hunting trophies festooned the walls.
Davis fixed on Mariah, his dark eyes as hard as she remembered, reminding her of the night he’d caught her and Rory making love on his yacht. Drunk on freedom and the heat of their bare skin, neither of them heard the tap of footsteps on the dock until it was too late.
Though the sea breeze cooled the terrace, the memory of shame heated her.
“What are you doing in my home?” The man she blamed for destroying her dreams glared down at her.
Shaken by the recollection of Davis’s unleashed rage upon catching his son with John Grant’s daughter, Mariah nonetheless drew herself up. “I was invited.”
Davis’s scowl deepened; now he would demand she leave. She wondered if Rory might object and admit he was the one who had wanted her here.
To her surprise, Davis put on a calculating expression. “Our guest lists are long,” he said at last, dismissing her with a wave of his hand.
Mariah gave Rory an uncertain glance. Had he been playing games about inviting her?
“I told you to visit with Senator Chatsworth,” Davis growled at his son.
It was happening again, as it had years ago. Expecting Rory to do his father’s bidding, she said coldly, “Your jacket,” and held it at arm’s length.
Rory took it with a deft motion and slipped it on. Yet, even as her spirits sank, he gave his father a defiant look and took her elbow. “Come and meet the Senator,” he urged.
Her instantaneous react
ion to his touch reminded her not to risk getting hurt again, but it suited her evening’s mission to allow him to lead her through the French doors.
Inside, Rory bent to kiss the cheek of a petite woman. “Mother. You remember Mariah Grant.”
Eight years ago, Kiki Campbell had been an attractive, rather plump woman. Now, she wore the ascetic look of a woman who dieted religiously. Her red hair was obviously the result of salon visits, and though her face wore the faintly surprised look that comes with plastic surgery, Mariah suspected she really was astonished to see John Grant’s daughter with her son.
With a gulp from her half-empty wineglass, Kiki said, “Love your dress.” An out-of-place giggle suggested she’d had enough to drink.
Mariah studied Kiki’s lime green bouffant dress, fashioned for a woman half her age. “You look nice, too,” she said gently.
Behind his wife, Mariah saw Davis enter from outside, his alert gaze assessing and lingering on the gathering’s beautiful, elegant women. Kiki noticed, too, and for an instant her green eyes rested on her husband with what could only be yearning. “On the Spot” routinely implied that she endured his philandering, just as the gossip rags suggested that Rory, too, discarded women like used tissues since his divorce.
Despite that Mariah had agreed to come in with Rory, this reminder of his marriage and the news stories about his recently playing the field made her turn away as though she had business with someone. The next feat was making it happen in a crowd where she knew so few people.
No one familiar was in sight, yet she left Rory and his mother with purpose in her steps. Fortunately, she spotted a man standing next to the buffet of jumbo shrimp, lobster, and caviar, his face familiar from development industry magazines. Takei Takayashi, a hearty middle-aged man with the compact muscles of a linebacker, watched her approach with alert dark eyes.
“Hello, I’m …”
“Mariah Grant.” Takei’s broad face broke into a smile. “You’re the image of your mother.” His California accent suggested he was American-born, but he dipped his head in a series of traditional Japanese bows.
“How are things at Golden Builders?” she asked. A fleeting glance told her that Davis Campbell was taking in their conversation.
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