Читать книгу The Father Factor - Lilian Darcy, Lilian Darcy - Страница 7

“E xcuse me, I think you’ve given me a tad too much change.” Shallis Duncan held a handful of bills and coins toward the teenager at the checkout, but he continued to look goggle-eyed, openmouthed and blank-faced.

“Huh?” he said.

His glazed focus dropped to her where her cleavage would have been if she’d been wearing a bikini instead of a businesslike dove-gray suit. His mouth fell open a little farther, revealing his disappointment at such a chaste amount of fabric.

“Too much change,” Shallis repeated patiently. “See? I gave you five dollars on a two-dollar-and-six-cent item, and you’ve given me forty-seven dollars and ninety-four cents back.” She tried a teasing, big sister kind of smile. “I don’t think this is what your boss wants from you.”

“Oh. Right,” he answered vaguely. “Did you want to see him?”

Okay. Still not getting through.

She gave up.

“Here.” She took his hand, turned it palm upward and dumped two twenties and five ones into it. His hand stayed frozen in place as he stared down at it. “Put it back in the till, okay?” she coached him. “And you have a good day, now.”

Those last four words seemed to make some kind of low-wattage lightbulb click on in the young man’s head. He stopped looking at his hand. “Uh, yeah, have a good—” He frowned. Hadn’t someone just said that? “…uh, Miss Ameri—Miss Duncan,” he finished vaguely.

On her way out of the drugstore with the tube of lip balm still in one hand and a leather briefcase in the other, Shallis sighed. At some point, surely, this kind of thing had to stop.

But not yet, apparently.

“Well, hey, it’s Hyattville’s very own home-grown princess!” said the man who’d just emerged from the real estate office she was passing.

“Good morning, Mr. Delahunty,” she answered, digging the appropriate smile out of her extensive repertoire the way she might have dug the right lipstick out of a crammed makeup case.

The law office of Abraham Starke beckoned to her, several doors down. It had slatted cedar blinds in the windows, a polished brass knocker and name plate on the door, and a facade of pretty, cream-painted nineteenth-century brick, trimmed in Wedgwood-blue.

If she had pocketed that extra forty-five dollars in the drugstore like a felon, and left the unfortunate youth to explain the discrepancy to his boss, she would have missed crossing paths with Mr. Delahunty. By the time he’d appeared, she would already have gained the comparative safety of a private appointment with a man who was old enough to be her grandfather and was surely therefore not about to be impressed—or reduced to a gibbering heap—by former beauty queens.

Should she conclude that sometimes crime did pay?

Mr. Delahunty was her father’s assistant manager at the Douglas County Bank, so she couldn’t be rude. In fact, if she was ever rude, to anyone, anywhere in town, at any time, day or night, the story would probably make the front page of Hyattville’s weekly newspaper.

“Hyattville’s Very Own Home-Grown Princess says, ‘Scram!’ to Local Puppy,” or something.

It got wearing, after a while. Made some of life’s curlier issues a little harder to resolve. Who she was and what was really going to make her happy, for example.

Mr. Delahunty was asking questions. How did she enjoy being back in town? Three months, wasn’t it? How did it compare to L.A.? Didn’t she ever hanker for the bright lights and the celebrity lifestyle she’d left behind?

She couldn’t possibly give him a truthful answer. Even if he had all day, she didn’t. Abraham Starke would be expecting her at any moment, and she had to be back in her office at the Grand Regency Hotel right after lunch, to deal with a To Do list six feet long.

“Hyattville is a great little town,” she told him. “I don’t have any regrets about leaving L.A.”

Which was true as far as it went, but it didn’t go anywhere near all the way.

“Well, you have a great day, and I’ll tell your dad I ran into you. You know, if that Miss America had only turned out to be a prison escapee, or something…”

“I know,” Shallis drawled, smiling. “How unfair can you get, huh? How dare the woman have led such a blameless life!”

“Smart, beautiful and funny, too.” Duke Delahunty said to the April sky. His expression began to resemble the expression of the drugstore counter clerk a few minutes ago.

“It was good to see you, Mr. Delahunty,” Shallis said quickly.

Then she smiled at him again because, like almost every other citizen of Hyattville, he was genuinely proud of her and genuinely sorry that she’d so narrowly missed winning the Miss America crown. It would be ungracious to get angry about the level of support she’d always had here, when the cleavage gazers were well in the minority.

But the pageant was more than five years ago.

She wondered if Hyattville would ever let her move on.

An old-fashioned brass bell tinkled when Shallis open the front door of Abraham Starke’s law office, and his middle-aged receptionist looked up from her computer screen.

“Oh, Miss Duncan!” She beamed. “I’ll let Mr. Starke know you’ve arrived. He’s waiting for you.”

Instinctively, Shallis looked at her watch.

“Oh, no, you’re not late,” the receptionist said, fast and breathless. “I’m sorry, I just meant he’s expecting you.”

She pushed her swivel chair back too fast, stood up and stumbled over one of its wheels. A sharp curse word escaped her lips, and she threw a panicky look back at Shallis, as if a one-time first runner-up in the Miss America pageant had the right of citizen’s arrest over any woman who swore in public.

What next? Would Abraham Starke have an attack of hospital-strength heartburn at the sight of her, or something?

He’d been the Duncan family’s lawyer since before Shallis was born. Surely he might be one person who wouldn’t think of her in a ball gown with a pageant princess’s tiara on her head, but would have memories of some less exalted outfit from her past. A diaper and a sunhat, for example. Or a Girl Scout uniform. She’d seriously prefer either of those.

The receptionist rapped at the door of his private office, opened it and poked her head inside. “Miss Duncan is here to see you, Mr. Starke.”

“Yes, please show her in,” said a voice that didn’t sound like it belonged to someone in his eighties.

Two seconds later, Shallis came face-to-face with the man who six years ago had gotten dangerously close to ruining not just her sister Linnie’s wedding day but Linnie and Ryan’s whole marriage.

Jared Starke.

Not Abraham.

Oh, yeah, this Mr. Starke would have memories from her past, all right.

Her whole body went hot, and then cold. Reaction rushed through her, changed direction, rushed back again. She felt as if she’d been ambushed by ancient feelings she hadn’t enjoyed at the time and liked even less now. Surely it all should have gone away, after so long?

She’d felt so fiercely protective of her sister since getting back to Hyattville three months ago, when she’d learned the full story behind the fact that Linnie and Ryan weren’t parents yet, after six years as man and wife. She didn’t want anything to come along that might impinge on Linnie’s happiness any further.

If Jared still had the power to do that…

He was probably the one person in the world who could have made Shallis nostalgic for the princess treatment she regularly received from everybody else in Hyattville—everybody except her dad. She couldn’t stand the princess treatment, but at least she knew how to handle it.

She’d never known how to handle Jared. At best—as on Linnie’s wedding day—she’d only pretended.

He was Abraham Starke’s grandson, and she’d had no idea that he was back in town, let alone that he’d apparently taken over his grandfather’s law firm. He was sinfully good looking, impossible to trust, and she didn’t like him one bit.

No, really.

She didn’t.

She wouldn’t betray Linnie like that, and she wouldn’t be such a fool. She’d developed some pretty powerful instincts toward self-protection in recent years.

“Shallis,” he said, standing at once, and fast, so that he was on his feet almost before she’d fully entered the room. The Southern courtesy bred into him since childhood hadn’t been abraded by Chicago’s brasher style.

The noon sunshine reflecting into the office through its east-facing window caught the natural blond highlights in his hair and made them stand out against the thicker and darker strands beneath. His tan was no doubt the artificial result of frequent sessions on a big city tanning bed but it suited him all the same, even around the outer corners of his eyes, where a couple of fine, tiny wrinkles had begun to form.

His dark tailored pants and plain white shirt covered a strong male body that seemed at ease in its own skin, full of latent power but with nothing left to prove. He must already have proved himself plenty of times, with plenty of women. The electric aura of sensual success hovered around him, yet he acted as if he had no idea it was there.

Yeah, right. Like I’m buying that! Shallis thought. A man like him would always know it was there.

He must be around thirty-three years old by now, or maybe just turned thirty-four, against her own age of going on twenty-eight. He’d been her sister’s first serious boyfriend, starting from when Linnie was in senior year of high school and Shallis herself had hit thirteen. Thirteen was an impressionable age, and Shallis had been…

Yup, impressed.

Round-eyed.

Envious of what Linnie had.

In fact she’d had a wild hormonal crush on Jared that had lasted until she was sixteen. For most of those three years he’d hardly seemed aware of her existence, but, ohhh, had she ever been aware of his! The kind of aware that resulted in clammy hands and hot cheeks, clumsy outbursts and ill-timed episodes of tongue-tied silence, an obsession with certain hit tracks featured on MTV and the scribbling of secret, tortured and very, very bad poems. The way she’d behaved on the night he’d finally deigned to notice her was not exactly one of her proudest memories.

As if Jared sincerely had no notion that she might have any reason to feel hostile or negative toward him, let alone that her feelings might be a whole lot more complex and jumpy than that, he came around the side of his grandfather’s huge oak desk to shake her hand. His smile was as steady as his grip, and contained just the right amount of professional warmth. There was a respect in his golden-brown eyes that you sensed might eventually turn to friendship given the right encouragement and points of connection.

And there was nothing in his attitude or his body language that said, “Another blond bimbo, big yawn…or maybe a one-night stand,” which was the way she’d been treated in Los Angeles, and nothing that said, “Oh, wow, I’m in the same room as Hyattville’s beautiful prodigal princess,” which was the way she got treated here.

Not fair!

He was too good at all of this.

It was exactly the kind of behavior that Shallis wanted from every other citizen in town, but she didn’t want it from Jared Starke, not when she knew from Linnie’s experience and her own that it had to be part of some game plan of his that could lead to only one outcome—a win for Jared himself.

“Jared,” she answered him coolly, because sometimes an ex first runner-up in the Miss America pageant could be good at this, too. And she dropped his grip a little too soon. Deliberately. “I wasn’t expecting you to be here.”

“I wasn’t expecting me to be here, either, until a couple of days ago,” he drawled. “Please sit down.” He gestured not to one of the two upright chairs that faced the desk, but toward the leather armchairs positioned near the window, on either side of a low coffee table which matched the antique oak of the other furnishings.

Reluctantly, Shallis took a seat. Her lips felt dry, which was why she’d stopped into the drugstore to purchase the lip balm just now. She’d spent most of yesterday out in the open air at Linnie and Ryan’s thoroughbred stud farm and she’d gotten burned by the spring sun and wind, as if the weather itself wanted her to regret her recent attempts to wean herself away from full daytime makeup.

And why was she doing that?

The princess thing, again. New theory. Maybe if she looked a little more down-to-earth…

So far, it hadn’t worked.

“I arrived back in town Friday,” Jared said, “and Grandpa Abe basically pushed a bunch of keys into my hand, picked up his fishing pole and headed for the mountains.” He gave a bland kind of grin and turned his hands palm upward. “I thought I was here for a break, but he had other ideas.”

“So this is a temporary setup? Just a few days?”

Shallis let way too much relief show in her voice, and this time it wasn’t deliberate. She wished at once that she’d hidden her reaction better. Jared was definitely hiding something.

“That’s fine,” she went on. “I can arrange another appointment when your grandfather gets back.”

Jared looked at her in steady silence for a moment, reading every bit of her discomfort. Hopefully not reading all of the reasons for it. He gave another brief smile.

“Sorry, I guess I’m giving you the wrong impression,” he said. “My grandfather and I had a good talk before he left on his fishing trip, and I’ve agreed to take over his law practice for the next six months while we have a serious look at options for the future. He’s overdue to retire, but he wants to take some time to consider things. My dad’s death rocked him, six months ago.”

“Oh, yes, of course. It would have done. I was sorry to hear about it,” Shallis told him.

“It was hard,” he agreed. “We didn’t see each other all that often after he and Mom got divorced—he moved to Nashville, as you know—but we were still close.”

“Of course.”

She’d already noted the enlarged, silver-framed photograph on the most prominent shelf of the antique breakfront behind his desk. In the photo Jared, his father and grandfather all grinned toward the camera against a backdrop of the manicured green grass and foliage of Hyattville’s members-only golf course.

Jared didn’t look much like the two older men. The bone structure in his face was more angular, his jaw more prominent and determined, his build stronger and denser, but the closeness between the three of them was self-evident.

“Anyhow, we’re talking a lot more than a few days until my grandfather’s return, I suspect,” Jared continued. “I’ve looked at a couple of the relevant files and I’m sure your business can’t wait that long.”

“My grandmother’s estate. No, it can’t. My mother is finding it hard.”

“I can imagine.”

Once more, he seemed to know just how to pitch himself. His sympathy was sincere but not cloying. It had to be a professional skill, studiously worked at, part of the Attorney Ken act. It couldn’t be natural, not in a man like him, Shallis told herself. Surely his arrogant behavior at Linnie and Ryan’s wedding had given her all the warning signals she needed in that area.

“I’ve heard a few great stories about your grandmother,” he said. “Laughed at most of them. Of course it’s hard for your mom.”

Shallis stayed cool and wished her throat hadn’t gone so tight. She nodded. “They were very close. If I can get the practical, legal stuff taken care of for Mom, some of the decisions she needs to make about Gram’s possessions and so forth will be easier.”

“Well, you could go to Banks and Moore over in Carrollton, if you want,” Jared offered. Was that the glint of a challenge in his eyes? “Or you can deal with me.”

“I’m surprised you’re here,” Shallis said, stalling for time. Then she realized she sounded as slow on the uptake as the drugstore clerk who’d tried to give her too much change. Jared had just explained why he was here. She added quickly, “I mean, I’m surprised you were available to do what your grandfather wanted. You’ve been in Chicago for quite a while, now. I would have thought you had commitments there.”

“Taking a break,” Jared answered, offhand. He was confident that the complexity of his feelings on the issue didn’t show.

And he ignored Shallis Duncan’s cool tone, because he understood the reasons for it all too well. No doubt about it, he’d behaved very badly in the past. To Melinda Duncan—Linnie—and to Shallis, her baby sister. More than once. He didn’t like those memories.

“Thinking about a couple of opportunities,” he continued. “I don’t want to commit myself to the wrong choice.”

He knew that many people in Hyattville wouldn’t believe him on this. There was an element in the town that would love to see him crash and burn, and would interpret his return home as a signal that it was about to happen, big-time. He expected rumors about shady dealings, massive debts, financial scandals, or disbarment from the future practice of law.

That was the downside to being a self-proclaimed high flier, in a place like this, and unfortunately his ambition and his arrogance had led him into a few poor choices in the past, which would make the rumors more plausible.

Yep, no doubt about it, at times he’d been a jerk and he made sure he never forgot the fact. Grandpa Abe had put a slew of Jared’s old golfing and racquetball trophies on the breakfront shelves, “to put your own stamp on this office, since it’s yours, now.” Jared had added a trophy of his own—the fake one that a couple of old law school buddies had presented him with a few years ago.

Sore Loser it read, in beautiful copperplate engraving. The really telling point about the trophy was that when his friends had made the mock presentation, he hadn’t been able to laugh. Three years on, the trophy was the first touch of personality he gave to a space any time he shifted offices, and he laughed at himself a lot more often now.

The only thing he could do about his reputation, he knew, was to get his head down, take heart from his own growth and his family’s faith in him, and prove everyone else wrong.

No, not everyone.

Just the people who mattered.

The impossibly beautiful Shallis Duncan shouldn’t be one of them, and yet without a doubt she was. Six years since he’d last seen her face-to-face, and he still hadn’t been able to get her out of his head.

She stood up, and instinctively so did he. “Banks and Moore has a good reputation,” she said.

Her golden-blond hair bounced around her face, and her blue eyes looked as big and clear as pools of sea water. Her suit was neat and conservative and plain, but on her curvy, long-legged frame it somehow managed to look as pretty and feminine as a lace negligee.

She appeared to have almost no makeup on at all, apart from a translucent sheen across her lips, but her skin was so clear and fine and her coloring so perfect that Jared preferred her with the natural look, and every molecule of testosterone in his body refused to leave the subject alone.

“Your secretary will be able to arrange to have the files sent over to them, I assume?” Shallis finished.

Jared felt his stomach drop an uncomfortable couple of inches.

Shoot. Drat. Darn.

Or words to that effect.

She’d called his bluff.

Well, no, she didn’t look at it like that, of course, and neither should he. She was simply taking the perfectly reasonable way out he’d just offered her—but he might not have offered it if he’d thought she’d catch hold of it so smoothly.

Helplessly he let the rest of their short conversation unravel like a piece of yarn… I mean, sure, if she wanted, yes, she should go over to Carrollton, to Banks and Moore… And it wasn’t until she’d closed the outer office door behind her that the real Jared Starke took control of his actions again.

Jared Starke the winner.

Jared Starke the fourth generation lawyer.

Jared Starke who heard the word, “No,” the same way a bull saw a red rag.

Jared Starke who could laugh at his Sore Loser trophy now, but who still wasn’t going to let what would surely be his last chance to make something work out right with the Duncan family just walk out of his grandfather’s law practice on those sexy pale gray heels, while he stood here rooted to the floor, imprisoned by an agonizing rush of physical need as tangible as iron bands.