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Children of Dynasty

Page 2

by Christine Carroll


  The Senator focused his spotlight on Mariah. “So, what does Grant have in the works to pull things back up?”

  Her mind raced. There were several large tracts of ranch land coming up for bid in the late summer. She knew that her father had his eye on at least two of them with Pacific frontage. And as surely, she knew that mentioning any interest in either of them in front of Davis Campbell would be foolhardy. Better he go to the bid table ignorant of which contest John Grant intended to enter.

  “I can’t discuss our plans,” she parried.

  Davis shot a sidelong glance at the Senator, and Mariah gave up any thought of further conversation with the powerful politician. His allegiance was clear.

  “I see someone I must speak to,” she said with as much coolness as she could muster.

  Walking away, she was once more aware of the sea of unfamiliar faces that surrounded her. To hide that she was meeting no one, she searched for and found the powder room off the main foyer. The decorator’s gem of a bath with solid gold fixtures underscored the difference between Davis Campbell’s ostentation and the simpler way her father preferred to live.

  A gilt-framed mirror over the alabaster sink showed her color was high. Taking deep breaths, she smoothed her blond hair, wind-blown from the terrace, over her shoulders. Then she washed her hands and pressed a damp paper towel to the sides of her neck. Noting the décolletage of her small breasts in the sequined dress, she tugged at the neckline and blushed at the folly of wearing it to make Rory see what he’d missed out on.

  Could it be true that he’d invited her tonight? A flush darkened her already pink cheeks at the memory of his steady regard when he spoke of them being prisoners of their inheritance. Yet, if Davis had been the one to include her on his guest list, as he’d implied, he might have hoped inexperience would loosen her tongue. Prying questions delivered so casually from the Senator could have been engineered to start her bragging about Grant’s plans. Then Davis would know where to place his chips against his rival when the next package of raw land came up for bid. The question was whether Rory would have begun his own sly exploration had they not been interrupted on the terrace. If her own dedication to her family company was any yardstick, his allegiance to DCI must run deep.

  Freshening her lip gloss, Mariah debated leaving, but she refused to be driven away so early in the evening. The last thing she wanted was for Rory’s father to believe he’d gotten the better of her.

  She returned to the party, head high and smiling.

  As she moved from group to group, she saw that Davis kept up with her movements, watching those with whom she spoke and often drawing near enough to eavesdrop. In turn, she noted the people he cultivated. A young and eager state representative, a florid older gentleman who was current head of the Bay Area Regional Planning Commission, and there was Thaddeus Walker, Grant Development’s usually lugubrious, big-eared banker at First California. Mariah moved closer, but was unable to hear what he and Davis discussed with such animated camaraderie.

  She also watched Rory. Standing easily on the balls of his feet, he seemed to fit here in his father’s house. Could he be trusted, or had he grown into a man cut from the same cloth as Davis and the Senator?

  As if he felt her looking at him, Rory turned and met her eyes with a peculiar emphasis that seemed to charge the air. After a moment that had her breathless, he took two glasses of champagne from a caterer’s tray and came toward her. “Thirsty?” Pinpoint bubbles of effervescence welled in the crystal flute.

  Torn between suspicion and the rekindled magnetism between them, she reached for the stem. “I suppose I should thank you for the fine food and wine, that is, if you did invite me.”

  Before she could take the glass, Davis appeared beside them with a striking twenty-something beauty who snagged it ahead of her.

  Mariah recoiled.

  Sylvia Chatsworth, the Senator’s daughter and the latest woman linked with Rory in the tabloids, lifted the champagne and drank. In her twenties, with a spill of sleek black hair over bronzed shoulders, she had what Mariah’s high school art teacher would have called “good bones.”

  While Davis beamed as though he’d found a match for his son, Sylvia kissed Rory, missing his mouth and leaving a smudge of crimson on his cheek.

  He swiped at his face. “Mariah …”

  She had had enough. As violent as her reaction to seeing him again was, she must put a stop to this. He might have the gift of transforming a woman’s bones to putty, but she refused to get caught in the Campbell web again.

  “Lovely party,” she announced coldly, looking toward the mammoth carved doors where she had come in from the front courtyard. With a false smile curving her lips, she walked blindly through the foyer toward the exit.

  From behind, she heard Rory call for her to wait. For the barest instant, she hesitated, but too many unanswered questions sent her on into the spring night.

  The day after the party, Mariah drove through the Sunday evening rain to the Stonestown neighborhood where she had grown up. The older, but pleasant, district lay south of Golden Gate Park and east of Ocean Beach. Once rolling sand dunes, the terrain now marched up and down gentle hills where modest stucco homes built with post World War II financing lined quiet streets.

  Parking in front of her father’s bungalow, she was struck once more by the contrast between the simple way he lived, plowing every spare dime back into Grant Development, and Davis Campbell’s lifestyle. Her jaw set as she prepared to break the news about Campbell and Chatsworth’s scheme to defame him.

  Dodging raindrops up the walk between double rows of pampered rosebushes, she let herself into the house and pocketed her key.

  In the narrow hall, she paused beside a wooden chessboard to study the move her father had made since she was last there. This set was dedicated to an ongoing match that only moved forward when she dropped by home. When she was in L.A., this had lain dormant for months. Of course, then they had played on the computer, sending moves back and forth by e-mail. Mariah studied the board, lifted a knight, and moved it two spaces forward and one to the right, a little closer to her father’s king.

  From the hall, she followed the familiar mouth-watering smell of marinara sauce to the kitchen. Golden oak cabinets glowed and produce spilled over white marble countertops.

  “You didn’t call.” John smiled from where he was stirring the contents of a saucepan. “I hope I have enough pasta.” He wore his usual at-home uniform of khaki slacks and a worn out blue dress shirt, the ceiling spotlights accentuating his shock of silver hair.

  Setting her keys and purse down, she stretched to kiss his cheek. “How are you feeling?”

  “Fine as can be.” He appeared well rested, his gray eyes alert and clear.

  “You do look better than you did Saturday,” she tempered, checking the sauce, and finding a generous amount of Italian sausage.

  He saw her gaze. “Fat’s where the flavor is.”

  The familiar sight of him stirring a pot touched her heart, reminding her of days when he cooked, and she did homework at the kitchen table. Now he asked her to make a salad with cherry tomatoes and peppers and to boil salted water laced with olive oil.

  While she was washing lettuce, he held out a spoonful of sauce. “Taste.”

  “I don’t have to. It needs more sugar.”

  “Wrong.” He grinned. “When I saw your car pull up, I added some.”

  Turning back to the stove, he took an experimental sample of his creation and added another pinch of salt. “Now, tell me about last night at Campbell’s. I expected you to call earlier.”

  Mariah rummaged under the cabinet for a cutting board. “Quite a turnout, and an amazing place. I didn’t realize the Campbells lived so high.”

  “Who all was there?”

  She sliced tomatoes. “Well, of course I didn’t know many folks.”

  Not wanting to spoil her father’s appetite after he’d gone to so much trouble, Mariah managed to entert
ain him with details unrelated to Davis Campbell for the time it took to get the meal ready.

  John carried plates heaped with linguini and sauce to the butcher-block table. As they sat down, he beamed at her proudly. “You don’t know what it means to finally have you at Grant Development.”

  “You don’t know how glad I am to be here.” This past winter when she’d finished work on the Desert Hot Springs Convention Center her father came down for a tour. In the grand ballroom beneath a crystal chandelier, he took both her hands. “It’s time.”

  He twirled pasta with a spoon. “With you here, we’ll beat out Davis Campbell and be the biggest in the Bay Area.”

  Suddenly, the blend of basil and sweet tomatoes wasn’t as appetizing as before.

  Though she hated to break the news during dinner, she put down her fork.

  “Dad.”

  His face sobered.

  “There’s something you should know.”

  Briefly, she told him the rumors circulating about trouble within Grant Development, and that both Chatsworth and Campbell appeared to be fueling them.

  John shoved back his half-eaten plate. “Davis had been against me for almost thirty years, so there’s no surprise there.” His voice was grim. “But it disturbs me that he’s got the Senator in his pocket.”

  The memory of Sylvia Chatsworth’s possessive certainty of Rory made Mariah’s stomach ache. “I think maybe it has something to do with his daughter and Rory Campbell.” She couldn’t keep an acid note out of her voice.

  Her father gave her a sharp look. “Did you see him at the party?”

  “I saw him,” she admitted. “For the first time in eight years.”

  Although John had never taken the inflexible stance against Rory that Davis Campbell had against her, he’d obviously felt relief when she was safely in Southern California and Rory married to another woman.

  Now he studied her, his face troubled. “I’ve always thought you should live your life the way you wanted … but you don’t want to see him again.”

  The part that stung was that Mariah did want to see Rory. Even as everything in her knew it would be a mistake. “He’s with Sylvia Chatsworth, Dad,” she protested. “You don’t have to worry.”

  He ran a hand through his silver hair, a sure sign he was concerned. “You and I are the same. We’ve never moved on from our first loves.”

  He glanced toward a gilt-framed photo of her mother on the counter. It could have been a picture of Mariah, with a smooth line of jaw, blond hair falling over her shoulders.

  “Catharine was even more slight than you. Like a pale bisque doll near the end.” He touched a fingertip to the cool glass, as though he could reach the sweet soft corner of his wife’s mouth if he moved his hand in just the right way. When he rubbed his palm over his own face, Mariah imagined he was aware of the loose flesh and wrinkled skin.

  She touched his hand and saw a sparkle of tears matching her own. Memories of her mother were hazy; golden eyes like her own, a soft touch while being tucked in, playing tag in the spring grass.

  John cleared his throat. “I came home, one of those perfect sharp blue days, and saw her with you out on the lawn. She said you’d set a record at twenty steps. The two of you in the afternoon sun were the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”

  Mariah had always figured he remained in this house because it held so many memories. “Why do you single out that day?”

  “When we went inside, the phone rang. It was her doctor, asking us to come in again after her routine physical.”

  Ovarian cancer, swift scourge of the youngest women, had stolen Catharine from them when Mariah was but three. When the loss came back to her, it was in bits and pieces; the hospital’s antiseptic smell, crying and being carried out of the memorial service, the mound of flowers turned sodden in the rain.

  “After the call, I tried to kiss her and rekindle the spark, but the fine light was gone.” John’s eyes rested on that faraway day. “Light has never held that quality for me since.”

  Seeing his sadness undimmed by years, Mariah tried to ignore a familiar twinge of pain. Whenever she wondered if the kind of joy her parents had shared would come to her, she was forced to admit her father was correct. No one had ever moved her like Davis Campbell’s son.

  Rory had been right last night, too; she had wondered “what if” so many times she’d lost count.

  And, as the rain made rivulets down the kitchen window, she did so again.

  CHAPTER 2

  Two hours later, Mariah busied herself straightening the living room of the apartment she rented in a Marina District Victorian. After stacking the same magazines for the fourth time, she sank onto her new wicker sofa. Though she stared at the ivory and green swirls in the matching rug, she saw a long-ago June morning …

  Eighteen-year-old Mariah discovered from the Sunday morning Chronicle that John’s rival Davis Campbell kept his racing boat on a Sausalito pier. A photo showed him holding aloft a silver cup, not even the newsprint blurring the sharp intensity of the man. He looked at his trophy with the same expression he’d used over the years to examine Mariah, an avarice that always made her uneasy.

  Studying the photo, she caught sight of a younger man beside Davis, a fit and slimmer version of the yacht’s captain. She had never formally met Rory Campbell. Nonetheless, despite the lack of introduction, she was utterly smitten with him. Two years ago, she had watched this bronzed youth with flashing limbs destroy an opponent at a tennis party. In the milling aftermath, while she waited at courtside to attract his attention her father had announced abruptly that they were leaving.

  Mariah set aside the newspaper, and, tiptoeing so as not to wake her father, left a noncommittal note. Then she drove his Pontiac across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito.

  When she arrived at the marina, an unforecast squall played an eerie piping chime, beating the sailboat halyards against their masts. Fog streamed into the harbor, pleasure boats sat idle at the piers, and the houseboat community was battened down. For a moment she hesitated, but with this weather, she should be able to look over the yacht without being discovered.

  Once on the pier, she had no trouble locating the knifelike vessel Privateer. A towering mast stretched up into the mist, and at least fifty feet of sleek hull shone bright even in the gray light. Water drops beaded the rich teak deck trim.

  “Come in out of the rain,” said a male voice from aboard.

  Even with her tennis shoes’ traction, Mariah nearly lost her footing on the slippery boardwalk. Steadying herself on the boat’s wet aluminum rail, she turned to see who had spoken.

  A tall, narrow-faced man stood in the shadowed companionway. Dark eyes peered at her from beneath the brim of his ball cap.

  Instinctively, she pulled her damp denim shirt tighter around her. Caught flat-footed on the owner’s pier, she steeled herself and hoped Davis Campbell would not recognize her since she’d grown up. “I was just admiring your boat.” She tried to smooth her wind-tangled hair.

  “Privateer is my Dad’s,” confessed a voice she now recognized as far less commanding than Davis Campbell’s.

  Mariah nearly sagged with relief, but her heart began to race. Hadn’t she hoped to run into him, without daring to admit it?

  “I’m Rory Campbell,” he said. A rough blue cotton shirt over loose khaki shorts complimented his taut body.

  When he reached a hand to help her aboard, his skin felt callused against hers, a suggestion he knew his way around the yacht’s winches and lines. Reluctant to break the spell by telling him she was a Grant, she tempered with, “Mariah.” The rain came down harder, blowing beneath the canvas bimini over the broad cockpit.

  “Come below,” he urged.

  Though she compromised by taking a seat on the ladder down to the cabin, drops still splattered her. Rory reached to close the Lexan hatch, his chest only inches from her face. She caught his scent, a pleasant aroma like geranium petals warmed by the sun. Strung tig
ht at his nearness, Mariah was nonetheless disappointed when he turned away.

  In the spacious galley, he lighted a brass lantern and suspended it from a hook over the table. Thus illuminated, the teak-lined cabin was as large as her father’s living room. Rory filled a kettle and put it on the stove, ferreted out teabags, and set out mugs with Privateer on them in gold letters. Waiting for the water to boil, he leaned against the counter and sent her a swift appraising glance.

  She shivered.

  “You’re cold.” He unbuttoned his shirt, revealing a nest of crisp hair and rosy brown nipples drawn tight against the cabin’s chill.

  Embarrassed by the flush that warmed her cheeks, she hugged herself to hide her breasts’ inevitable reaction to his splendid bare body.

  He came toward her, a lithe animal on a stalk, and draped the shirt over hers. Once more nervous at him standing so close, she threw out the first thing she thought of. “Do you go to school?”

  “Stanford. Business, that I may be worthy to wear Davis Campbell’s crown.” He gave a sardonic bow.

  “You sound bitter.”

  “You’d be, too, if your father expected you to follow his footsteps without a thought.”

  Mariah had never considered anything other than taking over for her dad someday. The love for building came to her naturally; it didn’t make sense that, as his father’s son, Rory would want anything else. “What would you rather be?”

  “An architect, an archaeologist …” He waved an impatient hand. “I only know I’ve never been given a choice.” The kettle whistled. He poured, dunked teabags, and fished them out with a spoon. “You don’t get to pick your father.”

  He handed her the cup, and their hands touched.

  “My father is John Grant,” she confessed.

  “I thought so,” Rory said evenly. “Mariah’s not a common name.” In the rain-scattered light, his eyes held hers. She felt her pulse flutter at the base of her throat, but in the embrace of his shirt, she felt inexplicably safe.

  He set his cup aside. Very carefully, as though she were a wild thing, he lifted her hair and spread it over her shoulders. She sat still and told herself she should be afraid here alone with Davis Campbell’s son. Yet, she could summon only a buoyant elation. Rory seemed different from what her dad told her of his father. Honest rather than scheming.

 

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