Читать книгу Mixing Business...With Baby - Diana Whitney - Страница 11

“It’s about time you answered. I’ve been calling for two hours.” Rick shifted the tiny cell phone, touched the brake and cruised to a stop at the light. “You missed a terrific steak dinner.”

“I wasn’t aware we had a date.”

“We didn’t, but we would have if you’d answered your phone two hours ago.”

The familiar feminine chuckle on the other end of the line never ceased to make him smile. “I suppose I should be flattered that a handsome scalawag like yourself would waste a perfectly good Friday night on an old woman.”

“You are not old. You have simply blossomed fully.”

“Such a silver-tongued lad! No wonder you have to beat women off with a stick.” Her chuckle rolled into a tinkling laugh that warmed him from nape to spine. “I’m thinking you must have whacked a tad too hard if you’ve a free weekend. Either that or the young woman at the office who has taken your fancy must not be as easily persuaded by your charms as you’d hoped.”

“Can’t a fellow hold a Friday night open for a date with his favorite Mom without being taunted and abused?”

“She turned you down, did she?”

“Not at all.” An impatient honk from behind startled him. He touched the accelerator to join the thrumming rush of vehicles across the intersection. “I’m sure if I’d invited her to dinner, she’d have leaped at the opportunity.”

A gleeful whoop made him grimace. “Aha! She slammed the door in your face, didn’t she?”

“Not literally.” Although Rick had little doubt that if he’d had the chutzpah to appear on her porch, the seemingly unattainable and undeniably gorgeous Catrina Jordan would have done just that. “The subject never came up, that’s all.”

“Yes, well it’s difficult to ask someone out on a date if they won’t give you the time of day to begin with.”

Rick found himself giving the cell phone a wry stare. “Thank you for the maternal support and encouragement.”

“Why should I encourage you to break another woman’s heart?”

The allegation stunned him. “I’ve never broken any woman’s heart. Every woman I’ve ever dated has become a lifelong friend.”

“Your charm is both a curse and a blessing, dear. People are drawn to you like a magnet, but just as one side attracts, the other propels those who would move too close a safe distance away.” Her sigh was poignant, heavy with a sadness that Rick understood, although he wished he didn’t. “It seems that we always most desperately want that which we cannot have.”

“Mom, please. Don’t start.”

“Don’t start on what? The fact that I will be laid in my grave without a grandchild to grieve my passing?”

He whipped the steering wheel, pulled into a drive that sloped sharply below street level, and stopped at a striped gate. “We’ve been over this before.”

“Yes, we have. Tell me again why the very thought of marriage and family makes you break into a cold sweat.”

“You know why.” He pressed a button on the armrest with more force than necessary. The window slid down, allowing him to slide the parking-garage access card through the reader. He hated this conversation. He’d always hated it. “I’m flying up to Tahoe next week to talk to a man about renovating a casino. How about joining me? You’ve never met a slot machine you didn’t like, and I promise to keep a never-ending supply of quarters handy—”

“You are thirty-six years old, Rick. It’s time you settled down.”

“Mom—”

“I want grandchildren!”

“Then rent some.” Regretting the snap of his tone, Rick sighed, eased his vehicle into his parking space and shoved the transmission into park. “Mom, please. Trust me when I say that I am doing the females of the world a favor by removing myself from the marriage pool.”

Her voice softened. “Don’t let my failures harden you.”

“You didn’t fail. They did.”

She sighed, a whisper of disappointment that stirred something deep inside Rick’s soul. It was the sigh of a woman scarred by pain, wounded by betrayals that she refused to acknowledge. But Rick acknowledged them, those traitorous emotions that had blinded his beloved mother to the cruelty of misplaced trust. After all the hurt, all the pain, she still viewed life through an optimistic aura of hope, the staunch belief that there was no pain so intense that it couldn’t be eased with love and chicken soup.

As much as Rick adored his mother, he saw in her the same cynical naïveté that he’d recognized in Catrina Jordan’s eyes, eyes that reflected past pain and betrayal, yet still sparked with wounded vulnerability and a silent hope that had touched a chord deep inside him.

He didn’t know why he’d felt such instant kinship, such intense desire to nurture and protect. He didn’t know why her image haunted his thoughts, why her scent floated through his dreams. It was as if he had suddenly discovered a lost part of himself, an appendage of his soul that had been missing for so long he’d forgotten it ever existed.

“Rick, are you still there?”

“It’s late,” he whispered. “You should get some rest.”

“I suppose so.”

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

He paused. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, dear. Good night.”

A soft click, a crackle of static and she was gone.

Darkness shrouded him in the dim parking bunker. An eerie concrete coldness enveloped him. It was, he thought, like being entombed in a vehicle graveyard, surrounded by idle hulks of steel that had been tossed aside and forgotten until they could once again be useful.

The analogy was strangely unsettling.

It was a discomfiting mirror of his own life, a life he reflected upon only during times like this, times when he was completely alone, undistracted by the comfortable chatter and bustle of people with which he deliberately surrounded himself.

Quietly alone. Silently alone.

Alone.

Panic crept softly, slithering through the shadows of his mind, chilling the unlit corners of his soul. Loneliness was a dark destiny, but Rick accepted it. There was no other choice.

Frowning, Frank Glasgow stepped off the elevator, clasping his hands behind his back. He took two steps into the hallway, then spun to glower at Catrina. “Surely you were informed that certain training sessions would be required.”

“Yes, of course—”

“Then it’s settled.” Pivoting sharply, he strode toward the warren of executive offices at the north side of the floor.

Catrina hurried after him, feeling frantic. “But a two-day seminar halfway across the state? Even if I could afford the travel cost, I can’t possibly leave my daughter for that length of time.”