Blue Clouds

by Patricia Rice

  “No, just an observation. Your son has the makings of a true leader.”

  Seth’s frozen features almost softened. “Or a bully, depending on circumstances,” he agreed.

  “I hadn’t thought about that. There’s a fine line, isn’t there?” Pippa watched all traces of shyness between the children disappear as an animated discussion over ages and teams ensued.

  “And now you’ll tell me it’s adult guidance that will determine which path he follows.” Seth shoved his hands into his pockets and glared at the noisy group as if he could force the right decision with the power of his vision. “And if you tell me I haven’t got what it takes, I’ll fire you.”

  Pippa chuckled. “I’m stupid, but not that stupid. Anyway, I was going to say that a lot of it isn’t in your hands. Peer pressure, the child’s own nature, anything can mold a character. Maybe Meg has the right idea—pray a lot.”

  “Right, and throw coins in a fountain. I—”

  “Mr. Wyatt, could we speak with you a minute? We’ve had an idea for the shower room.”

  Seth threw a disgruntled look toward the two women across the room. “You had to drag me into this, didn’t you?” he said in an aside to Pippa.

  “You could have stayed home with your mother,” Pippa replied cheerfully, leading the way since it was obvious Seth would drag his feet otherwise.

  “I suppose you invited her just to drive me out of the house,” he grumbled. “Next time, I’ll specify a male assistant.”

  “Next time, you’ll be lucky to find anyone at all. They won’t bite, I promise.”

  “They’ll chatter. They’ll whine. They’ll expect me to agree with everything they say and cry if I don’t. I don’t get along well with women, Miss Cochran.”

  “You don’t get along well with anyone, Mr. Wyatt. And none of that has stopped you from disagreeing with me at every corner.”

  “That’s because I can fire you.” Straightening his shoulders, Seth stalked up to join Meg and the therapist.

  They ignored his glower and launched into a description of whirlpool baths and safety ramps.

  “Kids don’t need whirlpools,” he interrupted coldly.

  “This is a community gym,” Meg reminded him. “There are veterans here who have to travel all the way to L.A. for treatment. How much more could one whirlpool cost?”

  “Find out,” Seth ordered, “but let the damned state pay for it. There ought to be federal funds for vets.”

  “Excellent idea!” Mrs. Turner’s eyes lit with enthusiasm. “I’ll look into it. We might be able to get grants for those ramps, too.”

  Pippa had begun to recognize the stunned look at the corners of Seth’s eyes. He’d expected to terrify, not excite them. It made one wonder what kind of women he’d dealt with all his life.

  Remembering the whining, querulous old woman at the house, she had some idea. Which gave rise to the question: What had his ex-wife been like?

  An ominous cracking noise and an outcry from the direction of the children immediately turned their attentions elsewhere.

  “Shit,” Seth muttered under his breath before loping across the floor to the place where Mikey’s wheelchair tilted dangerously into a hole created by a rotten floorboard.

  Racing after him, Pippa picked up speed at the pop of still another cracking board. Mikey’s chair tilted even farther, and the children screamed at the top of their lungs.

  “It’s all right,” Seth shouted at the children. “Just back off so you don’t fall through, too.”

  “Mikey’s hurt,” Chad cried in response. His knuckles were white as he grasped the arms of his own chair. “Look, his foot’s caught!”

  “It’s all right,” Seth answered soothingly, stopping behind the tilted chair. “There are big supports under the floor, so it can’t go through. Can you hang on, Mike?”

  With amazement, Pippa watched Seth quiet the children, survey the problem, decide on a solution, and put it into action, all without requesting help from anyone. The man behaved as if there weren’t another adult in the room. She wouldn’t argue with the result, but her curiosity inched another notch higher. Had he grown up in such total isolation that he relied only on himself?

  As Seth eased the chair out of the hole and backed Mikey to safety, Meg cried out in relief and raced to examine the damage to Mikey’s foot.

  “Do we need to take him to a doctor?” Seth asked.

  Startled, Pippa realized Seth stood beside her. She had been so focused on Mikey that she had lost track of everyone else. Watching as Meg gingerly moved her son’s foot, she shook her head. “Just for safety’s sake, maybe, but I don’t think there’s any harm done. He’ll be bruised, no doubt. We’d better remove the other kids before someone else gets hurt. Looks like this place may not be as sound as we’d hoped.”

  Seth looked vaguely perplexed as he contemplated the problem. “If your friend needs to take her kid to the doctor, she can’t take all these others home.”

  Pippa bit back a smile and nodded solemnly. “Maybe you can drive her to the doctor in the car, and Doug and I can take the van.”

  The expression of alarm on his face was priceless. Pippa would give anything for a camera. The man very definitely was not accustomed to dealing with people.

  “You drive her to the doctor. I’ll go with Doug in the van,” he decided, not looking particularly happy about this solution either. Then another thought occurred to him as Meg tried to wheel the bent chair toward the door. “That kid’s chair isn’t worth the metal it’s made of. Why the hell didn’t they find him something stronger?”

  “Because they don’t have any money,” Pippa said softly. “Because his father is self-employed with limited insurance, and his customers are moving out of the valley as fast as they can find jobs elsewhere.”

  Seth shot her a malevolent look. “And you probably planned this whole incident. I’ll carry him out to the car. You round up the kids.” With that, he stalked away.

  A good swift kick to the rear wasn’t sufficient. Maybe a shotgun blast to the head might succeed.

  Chapter 15

  “We can call in Social Services to observe Chad’s home life. It will sound much better to the court if a state employee gives a positive report than if we paid someone. And they could recommend a child psychologist who will verily that your son is well adjusted and well cared for.”

  Seth gave a mental groan and covered his eyes. He could just imagine a state employee observing Doug staggering down the drive in one of his drunken sprees or getting hit with a blast of water from the demented gardener. Better yet, they could observe the dynamics of his household with his mother in full sail. That should give them a unique observation or two. He wouldn’t even consider what a child psychologist would report about a six-year-old who read Stephen King.

  He shook his head. “It won’t do, Morris. I’ll not have smarmy clerks crawling all over the place. Chad can speak for himself. I have an assistant who’s also an RN. She can testify, if necessary. Natalie is just drumming up excuses. She has no case. I’ll not dignify her charges with my protests.”

  His lawyer sat back in his leather chair, twirling a pen between his fingers. Seth didn’t like the considering look Morris gave him, but he didn’t flinch before it. He’d dealt with lawyers all his life. They were a different species from women and kids—lawyers understood authority.

  “Your assistant isn’t exactly a disinterested third party.”

  “You haven’t met my assistant,” Seth replied, attempting to keep the wryness out of his voice. “If she saw anything so much as resembling abuse, she’d be down my throat and calling for the authorities faster than a speeding bullet. I’m not entirely certain she wouldn’t be on Natalie’s side if presented in court.”

  Morris raised his eyebrows. “I’d like to meet her sometime. I don’t want to present a witness who’ll do more harm than good.”

  Seth let his imagination roam to a meeting between Pippa and the stiff-necked Morris
. She’d probably pinch his cheeks, pat his head, and offer him a cup of herbal tea, then sit down and take dictation of the exact testimony he wanted presented. Morris would swallow his teeth. It should be a good show.

  Realizing he was thinking of that pestilent nuisance almost with affection, Seth ground his teeth and sat straighter. “You’re welcome out to the house anytime, Morris, you know that. I’ll warn you, my mother’s visiting.”

  Morris coughed into his fist, flushed red under his dark skin, and nodded. “Well, we’ll see about that. I just want you to understand the seriousness of the situation. The courts traditionally favor the mother. The public thinks you bought off the judge the first time. A new judge will have to be harsher just to keep his image clean. You really ought to reconsider my advice about the social workers.”

  Seth stood. “Visit sometime, Morris. You’ll reconsider your own advice.”

  He left his lawyer’s high-rise L.A. office with a twisted, sinking feeling in his stomach. He had, essentially, bought the original judge, not with money, but with influence. The Wyatt name carried wealth and power. Natalie had neither. Her family had left her enough to be comfortable on, but not enough to build an empire.

  He supposed he could do it again. In general, people couldn’t resist a man who could command the best that money could buy. He could trot out the high-priced physicians and psychiatrists again, prove that a boy needed a father, that Chad’s condition required facilities and treatment Natalie couldn’t afford, that Natalie’s high-society life didn’t leave her with the time or inclination to give her son the attention he needed.

  Heaven only knew, the doctors had been right about that one. Despite all her screams of protest, Natalie seldom took advantage of the visitation rights she’d been granted. He could use that against her, too, along with his detective’s proof that Natalie was bankrupt and married to a financial idiot and professional snake-in-the-grass. It would serve her right for telling everyone that her first husband was a drunk who had wrecked the car and destroyed Chad’s life.

  If only he could prove that he hadn’t been drunk and hadn’t done just that.

  Not liking the direction of his thoughts, Seth slammed his Jag into gear and steered toward Tracey’s house.

  Tracey had arrived to hold his hand shortly after Natalie had filed for divorce. A so-called friend of Natalie’s, she’d just gone through a nasty divorce herself. Seth suspected she’d marked him for Husband Number Three, but she’d offered sex with no strings attached and he’d been too shell-shocked to refuse. Once he’d won Chad and returned to the isolation of Garden Grove, he hadn’t been offered any similar opportunities for physical gratification, and the pattern had been set.

  He needed sex right now. Mindless, selfish, greedy sex with any available female body. He needed oblivion, and without alcohol, sex filled the duty. Maybe then he could quit looking at his annoying mosquito of an assistant as if she were the last cookie crumb on the face of the earth.

  Although Pippa Cochran was more like the whole cookie.

  Fantasizing about round curves and plump cheeks, he missed the turn to Tracey’s condo.

  Cursing, he jerked the car around in a driveway and screeched back to the road. A line of cars backed up on the cross street prevented his driving through the green light.

  Left with engine humming and libido steaming, Seth summoned the image of his assistant in her oh-so-proper one-piece bathing suit. No Hollywood bikini for Miss Kentucky. What did she think she was hiding anyway? No amount of spandex could disguise curves like those. Administrative assistants ought to be skinny and flat as a board. Like Miss MacGregor.

  Following that line of thought, assistants ought to be efficient, obedient, self-effacing, and invisible.

  So how had he hired a cheerful, disobedient, overconfident busybody instead?

  She was efficient. But definitely not invisible. Far from invisible. She flaunted herself when she wasn’t even in the same room with him. He could hear her soothing Chad’s tantrums and wanted that honey-coated voice pouring over him. He’d watched out the window as she exchanged bouquets with Durwood and wanted her to bring flowers to him. And damn it, he’d watched her with Chad and the others at the gym and wished he could be a similar beneficiary to her quiet guidance. She knew how to handle people. He’d never had the knack.

  By the time he’d recovered from his reverie, he was on the road back home. Without a second thought, Seth hit the gas and continued in that direction. Tracey might offer sex, but she had never stimulated his imagination or convinced him that life could improve, given the proper care. Miss Pippa Cochran had opened a window and let in more sunlight than he’d seen in a lifetime.

  So, he was nuts. He’d hire a psychiatrist and sue himself.

  ***

  “Did you and my mother have an enjoyable dinner together?” Seth asked maliciously as he picked up his phone messages on the way past Pippa’s desk the next day.

  “After I convinced her that she had to smoke outside, we did fine.” She jotted another note on her steno pad, stuck a pencil in her thick, bobbed hair, and swung her chair to face the computer instead of him. “I think she’s lonely.”

  “I paid several million dollars for a condo in a neighborhood of suitable people so she could have all the friends she wanted.” Seth dismissed his mother’s complaint and sifted through his messages.

  Pippa pushed a box across the desk. “Doug opened these. They didn’t have a return address.”

  Seth glanced at the colorfully wrapped box of toffees and shrugged. “They’re not my brand. I didn’t order them. Find out who sent them and heave them out.”

  She raised her eyebrows in apparent condemnation of his wastefulness and didn’t do as told. As usual.

  The dress she wore today had a green top resembling a high- collared halter, revealing rounded white shoulders and little else. Had it been Natalie or any other woman of his set, the collar would dip down to reveal the curves of her breasts. Not Miss Proper. Oh, no. Hers buttoned right up to the neck. She just didn’t realize he could tell as much from the tailored fit of the dress as if she wore nothing at all. Imagination was a wonderful quality.

  Miss Proper hit a few keys and the computer screen swirled, but Seth could see the wheels in her head whizzing faster than the computer. Instead of proceeding to his office to return phone calls, he lingered, waiting to hear the result of her thought processes.

  “Family is more important than neighbors,” she announced, apparently following their earlier conversation about his mother and the condo. “There’s a bond there that doesn’t exist anywhere else.”

  All right, so he’d asked for that. Imagination was always better than the real thing. Seth wandered toward the escape of his office. “Dream on.” He dismissed her lecture.

  “My mother died last year.”

  Damn. He’d almost gotten away. Leaning against the door- jamb, Seth watched her through narrowed eyes. She still wasn’t looking at him. “I’m sorry. You were close?” What else could he say?

  “I was the youngest. I guess so. I still want to pick up the phone and call her, ask for her advice, or her sympathy, or just an understanding word. She’s still here with me, somehow. How about your father? Do you miss him?”

  Now that she had him by the throat, she swung around and nailed him to the wall with those wide, green eyes. Double damnation.

  Seth shrugged. “Not particularly. We didn’t see each other much. He was always away on business trips, and then I went off to school and didn’t come home often.”

  “I thought you were privately tutored.”

  He didn’t want to go into all this. It wasn’t any of her damned business. Nobody ever questioned him. No one else had the impertinence. Irked at his inability to slam the door in her face, he shoved his hands in his pockets and contemplated the space above her head.

  “Through most of grade school. Then they sent me to boarding schools.” After his mother started gambling, after he’d ca
ught his father with one of his bimbos, after he’d nearly burnt down his parents’ wing of the house, and other similar disasters. He had no desire whatsoever to reminisce over those years.

  “That must have been hard,” she said nonchalantly, her fingers flying over the keyboard as if she weren’t listening at all. “Home-schooled kids always have a hard time adjusting to public schools. They don’t know how to cope with other kids. And middle-school age is one of the roughest for boys.”

  Tell me about it, Seth snorted mentally. He hadn’t been too successful at setting fire to the first school they sent him to, but the experiment had been enough to get him kicked out. After that, he’d discovered it was just as easy to insult the class bully and get pounded to a pulp, resulting in his mother’s jerking him out of school. He’d been something of a wimp at that age, to put it mildly. He’d overcome that handicap with an adolescent growth spurt and an education his parents had known nothing about, but the wimpy kid still cowered inside him. He supposed that feeling never went away.

  “I survived,” he replied grumpily. “Have you finished those chapters yet?”

  “I’ve almost finished the typing. I have to format them and run spell check. Must you write such gore? You know teenage boys drool over this stuff.”

  “And if they go around killing gophers, that’s a bad thing?” he asked dryly, turning toward his office and away from his too perceptive assistant.

  “Some teenage boys understand analogies,” she sang out.

  He shut the door between them.

  ***

  Standing at the pool later that day, watching Seth Wyatt emerge from the cabana in his swimsuit, Pippa wondered how much California psychiatrists charged. She really ought to have her head examined for suggesting the swimming lessons. She’d dated a lot of men, but she couldn’t think of a single one who matched Seth’s physique. Billy had been big, but beefy. Seth was... Heck, Seth was everything a woman could wish for, and then some. He crossed the blue-and-earthen-colored tiles with the athletic grace of an Olympic swimmer. He must work out regularly.