Читать книгу The Tycoon's Son - Shawna Delacorte - Страница 7

One

Vicki Bingham stood on the porch of the country store. The shiver of trepidation started as a little twinge, then spread throughout her body. After fifteen years, Wyatt Edwards was about to step back into her life.

Hunching her shoulders against the cold tremor that engulfed her, she stared up at the empty house standing in stately grandeur on top of the hill. It seemed to look across the valley and out to the ocean like a dark, brooding monarch surveying his kingdom. No one from the Edwards family had lived in the house since the death of Henry Edwards ten years ago. And now it was about to be occupied again by Wyatt, Henry’s only child.

Her ever increasing anxiety forced her to look away. Nothing good could come from this, but she did not know what to do about it.

“Victoria Dalton Bingham!”

Vicki stiffened at the sound of her name. She recognized the voice immediately. It had the same quality as chalk squeaking on a blackboard and affected her the same way. Alice Thackery, a prim woman in her early sixties, was the town busybody and selfappointed guardian of everyone’s morals. Vicki forced a smile and turned around to face the unavoidable.

“Yes, Mrs. Thackery, what can I do for you?” She could tell by the woman’s pinched expression and tightly pursed lips that she was about io be involved in yet another unpleasant confrontation.

“I realize, Victoria, that you had to make certain adjustments when you returned to Sea Cliff to run the store after your father died, but you’ve been here for two months now and I feel that’s long enough. I’ve mentioned this to you on numerous occasions in an attempt to be a good neighbor, but you seem determined to ignore all my attempts to be gracious in this matter.” Mrs. Thackery shifted her shopping basket from one arm to the other as she waited for a response.

Vicki allowed a sigh of resignation. “What seems to be the problem this time, Mrs. Thackery?”

“It’s that boy of yours. You’re allowing that teenage hooligan to run wild around the streets and I won’t have it!”

Vicki stretched herself to her full five-foot-seveninch height and glared down at the shorter woman. She took a calming breath, determined to control her temper. “I will thank you to stop referring to my son as a ‘teenage hooligan.’ Richie is no such thing. He’s a healthy, normal boy who needs his exercise. He’s not a troublemaker and does not run wild around the streets.”

“Not an hour ago, Victoria, he came speeding around the corner on that two-wheeled contraption of his and nearly ran into me. He was with that Forsythe boy and everyone in town knows that little hooligan is just a breath away from reform school.”

“That ‘two-wheeled contraption’ is a bicycle—a dirt bike—not some high-powered motorcycle.”

Mrs. Thackery turned to leave, but not before delivering a parting shot. “Nonetheless, I expect him to control the way he charges around the streets. Humph! It’s getting so a decent person isn’t safe walking along the sidewalk.”

Vicki went inside the store, a combination market and post office. She slammed the screen door harder than she intended.

“What’s the matter, Mom?”

Her son’s voice caught her by surprise. She whirled around and spotted him coming out of the back office with a handful of cookies. “Richie...how long have you been here?” She knew the upheaval in his life had been very difficult for her son. When her husband, Robert Bingham, had died five years ago it had been devastating for Richie. Then, two months ago, he had been uprooted once again when they moved from Dallas, Texas, to the small rural community of Sea Cliff on the northern California coast. She was thankful school had started so that at least he could make some new friends.

He popped one of the cookies into his mouth, practically inhaling it rather than eating it. “I don’t know... five minutes, I guess.” He shoved another cookie into his mouth. “Me and Tim—”

“Tim and I.” She brushed the hair back from his forehead.

“Cut it out, Mom.” A spark of irritation showed as he backed away from her motherly fussing. “Tim and I were riding on this great trail he knows back in the hills.” He took a soft drink from the refrigerator.

“You were also zipping around the sidewalks.” She started to tell him to put back the soft drink and not eat any more cookies because he would spoil his dinner, but they would have been wasted words. At fourteen-and-a-half, he had the voracious appetite of a garbage-disposal unit. He was growing so fast that he could consume what seemed like huge amounts of food and immediately burn it up. He was already as tall as she was and seemed to be all legs. He would eventually top six feet, easily.

He shot her a look of disgust. “Yeah... I saw old lady Thackery leavin’. It wasn’t like she said.”

“That’s Mrs. Thackery. And what she said was that you nearly ran her down with your bike.”

“No way! We were riding in the street, not on the sidewalk. She was standing in her yard. We weren’t even close to her!” He dropped his voice almost to a whisper and stared at the floor, talking more to himself than to his mother. “That old lady’s a menace to society.” He looked up and met her gaze. “Did you know her from when you used to live here?”

“Oh, yes.” Vicki gazed upward, as if asking for protection against some sort of recurring menace. A hint of weariness crept into her voice. “I think Mrs. Thackery has lived here forever.”

She saw the look of defiance on her son’s face. It was a look she knew so well from many years ago, a look that used to cross another handsome young man’s face... a handsome young man with the same dark hair and intense, sky-blue eyes. She reached out to smooth his hair again, but stopped when she saw the look, the one that said Don’t mess with my hair and stop treating me like a kid “Have you done your homework?”

“Yeah, it’s done.” He popped another cookie into his mouth. “When’s dinner?”

Each time a truck passed Vicki’s door on the way up the hill it signaled that the moment she dreaded had moved that much closer. The construction phase of the remodeling had been completed a couple of days earlier. The landscapers had finished on schedule. Moving vans had been delivering both new items and things from a storage company for the past two days. There did not seem to be anything left...only the arrival of Wyatt Edwards.

The local gossip mill had pegged his arrival for the next day, which meant that she had less than twentyfour hours to prepare herself. She did not have any idea what she would say to Wyatt Edwards or what to expect from him. He had walked out on her fifteen years ago, left while she was away for the weekend so that he did not have to face her with his decision. She had been devastated. She could still hear Henry Edwards telling her that she had driven his son away with her constant demands for his attention, until he had not been able to take it anymore.

She had not understood what Henry Edwards had meant at the time. In fact, she still did not understand. It was Wyatt who had been the aggressor, who had pursued her in spite of objections from both their families. She shook her head in an attempt to shove away the bad memories. It was ancient history and no longer relevant to her life. She had a son to take care of and he was more important to her than anything else.

Vicki went about her business for the rest of the day, making a valiant attempt to put the imminent arrival of Wyatt Edwards out of her mind. That evening she helped Richie with a school project for his English class.

Unfortunately, all her attempts at keeping busy did not help. Once she had climbed into bed, turned out the light and closed her eyes, her mind immediately filled with thoughts and memories from long ago. She finally drifted into an uneasy sleep, but woke up sev eral times during the night, the last time being only half an hour before her alarm was set to wake her. She stared at the glowing numerals for five minutes, then with a heavy sigh of resignation reluctantly climbed out of bed. It was a day she would rather not have to face, but she knew there was no way of avoiding it.

She fixed breakfast, and sent Richie off to the school bus. Then she sat down and stared at the clock. In thirty minutes the truck would drop off the day’s mail to be sorted and placed in the individual post-office boxes. She forced herself into action, knowing that the moment she’d dreaded would soon be at hand.

Wyatt Edwards pulled his car to the side of the road and turned off the engine. Only five more miles to the Sea Cliff turnoff. It was the first time he had been back since his father’s death ten years ago when he had inherited controlling interest in his father’s worldwide industrial holdings. He still was not sure exactly what had prompted the decision, but it was too late to turn back now. He had already spent a great deal of money on making the old house livable and preparing an office wing. He planned to conduct most of his business from there, venturing into San Francisco to the corporate headquarters only a few days a month.

He looked out over the ocean, watching as the waves crashed against the rocks just offshore, then climbed out of his car and walked to the edge of the cliff. The small sandy cove below was the place where he and Vicki Dalton had made love for the first and only time. It had been an impetuous action following a beach party. The next day they both agreed that they had acted foolishly. It had been a very profound experience for him and had solidified in his mind just how much he loved her, even though he had never told her so.

Every minute of that night remained etched in his memory and the emotions associated with it had not diminished over the ensuing years. Even though it had been fifteen years since he had seen or talked to her, he had never been able to shake Vicki from his mind... or from his heart.

He clenched his jaw. Neither could he shake the pain of returning home from a last-minute emergency business trip to South America to find she had moved away without leaving him so much as a note. Then, a month later, he had heard that she was married. It was a memory that still angered him as much as it had when he first heard about it—and also filled him with sorrow for what might have been.

He picked up a rock and threw it as far out as he could, watching as it fell to the ocean below. He picked up another rock and repeated the exercise. He kicked at a third rock, sending it over the edge of the bluff, followed by a cloud of dust. He turned his back on the ocean view, but he could not turn his back on his memories. Finally he climbed into his car and continued down the highway.

He turned onto Sea Cliff Road and was immediately struck that everything looked exactly as it had the last time he was there. Forsythe’s gas station still had the Full Service sign next to the pump, even though they had stopped giving full service almost twenty years ago. It appeared that nothing in Sea Cliff had changed. Then his gaze settled on the general store.

That store, a house a block away, and a couple of acres of land were all that Willis Dalton had left. Vicki’s father and his own father, Henry Edwards, had been bitter enemies. Their feud had started when Willis’s and Henry’s respective fathers had had a falling out over a business deal gone bad. Wyatt’s grandfather had ended up the winner and Vicki’s grandfather had lost almost everything.

Wyatt and Vicki had defied both sets of parents by dating and falling in love—at least Wyatt had thought they were in love. But obviously he had been wrong about Vicki Dalton’s feelings for him. He wrinkled his brow in irritation at the fact that it still bothered him. After all these years it was still a thorn in his side.

He pulled his car into a parking space next to the post-office entrance at the back of the general store. He needed to make arrangements for a post-office box. He entered the building and looked around. No one was there. He walked through the connecting door to the market that occupied the front of the building.

Shock hit him smack in the face. He stopped dead in his tracks. It could not be.

Vicki Dalton was standing behind the counter by the front door. It took him a few seconds to collect his wits and recover his composure. He stared at her, noting the way she bit at her lower lip. It was a nervous little habit that had always manifested itself whenever she was upset or worried about something. As he watched her, he felt a soft warmth flicker to life. She looked every bit as beautiful as the image he had carried in his mind all these years.

He quickly ducked out of sight. He certainly had not planned on this. He had been prepared for the unpleasant and awkward necessity of dealing with Willis Dalton, but not for the reality of seeing Vicki again. It was not too late; there was still time. She had not seen him yet. He could turn around and drive back to San Francisco. He drew a steadying breath. He needed to gather his wits about him. Then a surge of anger brought him back to reality.

No, he would not turn and run. She had disappeared from his life fifteen years ago and he had never known why. He clenched his jaw in renewed determination. He could not leave until he had confronted her and demanded an explanation. He wanted her to know exactly how much pain she had caused him—how much pain he had been carrying all these years. He stepped back through the door into the market.

“Well, well, well...” He took a couple of steps toward the counter, trying to keep his voice and manner as casual as possible. “If it isn’t Vicki Dalton. Only I guess it’s not Dalton anymore, is it? It’s been a long time, Vicki.”

The smooth, masculine voice resonated across the room. She did not need to look up to know its owner’s identity. The moment she dreaded had finally arrived. She bit at her lower lip as she continued to stare at the order form she had been filling out. His footsteps pounded in her ears as he drew closer and closer until finally he stood directly in front of her.

“Just how long has it been? Ten years...fifteen?” There was no mistaking the edge to his voice and the antagonism just beneath the surface. “I’m surprised to find you here. Are you just visiting your father or did you decide to move back to Sea Cliff?”

She put down her pen and finally lifted her gaze, smothering the gasp just before it escaped her mouth. His commanding presence overwhelmed her. He seemed to have grown even taller than the six-footone height she remembered, and his blue eyes immediately captured her very soul. The bright colors of his sweater enhanced his golden tan. His dark hair was tousled, probably windblown, giving him a very sexy appearance. His features had matured from the boyish good looks she had known. With the passage of time he had become even more handsome...if that was possible.

When she was an inexperienced eighteen, Wyatt Edwards had been an older man of twenty-two. But now she was thirty-three years old, a widow with the responsibility of raising her son by herself, and the proprietor of a business vital to the small community. There were days when she felt a great deal older.

She managed to find her voice, but could not find any of the words she had been rehearsing for two days. Instead, she stammered, more like an impressionable teenager than a mature woman, “Uh...my father... died two months ago. I came back here to run the store. And it’s Bingham...Vicki Bingham.”

She saw the surprise dart through his eyes, then quickly disappear. His voice softened a little, dropping a bit of its hard edge. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know about your father.”

“Well... it was sudden. A heart attack.” Nervousness churned in the pit of her stomach. She wished a customer would come in or that Noreen Dillon, her full-time employee, would show up for work early—anything to break up the awkwardness that filled the air. She went to the magazine rack and began straightening the periodicals. She felt his stare follow her every movement, but refused to turn and look at him while she spoke. “My... uh... father had mentioned something several years ago about your father passing away. It seems to me that he said your mother had moved back East somewhere.”

“Yes, Mother returned to her hometown of Boston. She still lives there.”

“What brings you to Sea Cliff?” She was not sure why she had asked such an inane question. He had to know that everyone in the small town would be talking about the renovations to the family house and would have seen the moving vans.

“I’m moving back into the house.”

“I see.” She still refused to look at him. She straightened the last magazine in the rack and returned to the counter.

“Vicki...” The edge returned to his voice, now impatient. “I’m trying to conduct some business here and I’d appreciate it if I could have your attention for a few minutes.”

She was not sure what he was talking about, but she did not like the sound of it. Her defenses went on full alert. “All you need to do is pick out your purchases and bring them here to the counter and I’ll be glad to ring them up for you.” She bit at her lower lip and twirled a strand of hair around her finger as she glanced around the market.

Wyatt did not understand her blatantly obvious nervousness. He could have understood a show of guilt on her part—she certainly had lots to feel guilty about—but this was different. She appeared almost obsessed with finding mindless little things to do and went out of her way to avoid any eye contact with him.

He took a deep breath and held it for a moment,. He would have to save the speculation for some other time, after he had an opportunity to digest all the unexpected happenings of the morning. He adopted a businesslike manner and tried to project an authoritative tone of voice. “I want to make arrangements for a post-office box.”

Her gaze flew to meet his. He noted a strange combination of surprise and... well, relief was the only word he could find that seemed to fit. It was a very odd reaction on her part, one he found strangely out of place.

“A post-office box? That’s why you’re here?”

“This,” he gestured toward the back of the building, “is the post office, isn’t it? And I assume you are the official agent for the United States Postal Service.” He fixed her with a hard stare.

Antagonistic... that was the word that immediately leapt to Vicki’s mind. Why was he being so antagonistic? If anyone had a right to exhibit hostility and anger, it certainly was not Wyatt Edwards. She drew in a calming breath, then slowly let it out. “Yes, of course.”

She led the way to the post office at the back of the building. Wyatt stepped through the customer entrance while Vicki went through the employee door. She reached below the counter and withdrew a form. “Here,” she said, shoving it through the customer window toward Wyatt. “Fill this out and sign it.”

“I’ll require one medium-size box for my personal mail and a large-size box in the corporation’s name.”

She checked the list of available boxes while he filled out the form. “Here are the two keys. Please try them before you leave to make sure they work.” She slid the keys through the window, and allowed her hand to linger on them while she looked over the form he had completed.

Wyatt reached for the keys, but halted as soon as he focused on her left hand. She wore no ring, nor was there any indication that she had recently worn one. His brow was furrowed as he slid the keys out from under her fingers.

He located the two boxes and tried both keys. “Everything seems to be okay.” He returned to the customer window where Vicki waited. “What time of day is the mail available for pickup?”

The conversation continued for a few minutes—innocuous questions about the daily mail, the hours of operation for the market, and about placing orders for specialty items from time to time. The sound of a buzzer interrupted them, indicating that someone had entered the market.

“I’ll be right there,” Vicki called out to the unknown person, then turned her attention back to Wyatt. “Is there anything else you want before I go?”

“Yes, there is.” He leveled a soul-searching gaze at her. “I want to know what happened to your wedding ring.”

“My...my wedding ring?” A hard lump formed in her throat and the nervousness churned in her stomach again. Why would he ask such a question?

“Yes. I couldn’t help but notice you’re not wearing one.”

She heard it in his voice again. Antagonism... accusation... the hint of some hidden knowledge. Did he know she had a son? Did he know about Richie? She looked down at her hand, stared at the finger where she had worn the simple gold band Robert Bingham had placed there on their wedding day. She felt the anxious trernoi and swallowed hard in an attempt to bring her feeling under control She knew she had to be very careful how she responded to his question.

“My ring...” She again stared at her hand. “I lost my husband in a plane crash. I’m a widow.”

She saw the shock cover his face. She saw something else, too—something in his eyes that she could not identify. Resentment? Smug satisfaction? She did not know.

“A widow?” Wyatt could not hide his reaction to this latest revelation. He had come back to a quiet little town where nothing ever happened and in fifteen minutes had been hit with one shock after another. He had not anticipated seeing Vicki at all, but she was there. Then he had learned about her father’s recent death, and now this—what else could there possibly be? How many more surprises were just waiting to jump out at him?

“You’ll have to excuse me, I have a customer to tend to.” Vicki quickly left the post office and hurried toward the front of the market. “Yes, may I help you with something?”

Wyatt tuned out the voices coming from the market. Her sudden and extreme nervousness had immediately grabbed his attention—the way she bit at her lower lip, how her face had seemed to pale and her hand tremble at the mention of her wedding ring. He suspected she was hiding something and he was determined to find out what it was.

His assumption had been that she was divorced, and he had intended to make some type of caustic remark to the effect that her decision to run off and get married hadn’t been a good one. But this was different. She was a widow. He did not want to delve into her personal life under these circumstances—at least not at that moment. He had started to extend the obligatory condolences, but the words caught in his throat.

He moved to the connecting door and watched as Vicki’s customer left the market. He stuck his post-office-box keys in his pocket, stepped through the door and took a steadying breath in the hopes of concealing his reaction. “I guess I’m pretty much out of touch with things around here. You said a plane crash?”

She averted her gaze, once again unable to maintain eye contact with him. “Yes. It...uh...was five years ago.” She felt very uncomfortable with the task of explaining her husband’s death to Wyatt Edwards. If Wyatt had not walked out on her, none of this ever would have happened. What if... She had played that game too many times. “It was a small private plane. Robert was the passenger. It went down in a field about ten miles from our home in Dallas.”

“Oh.” Oh... It was a dumb thing for him to say, but he did not seem to be able to come up with the right words. As much as he had hoped that she had been every bit as miserable as he had been for the past fifteen years, he had not anticipated this. He wanted to know so much, he wanted to know everything, but he could not bring himself to ask. “Well...I gucss I’d better be going. I have several things to do. I need to unpack...” His voice trailed off and he finally turned and left without saying anything else.

Vicki closed her eyes and sank back against the wall in an effort to compose herself. Her meeting with Wyatt had been a thousand times worse than she thought it would be. It almost seemed as if he had gone out of his way to be contrary and she did not understand why. He had walked out on her. not the other way around. She had been the injured party, the one with every right to be angry.

She knew there was no way they could avoid each other in the normal course of day-to-day activities in the small community, but she vowed to make sure everything stayed on an impersonal level. For the sake of her son, Wyatt Edwards could not be allowed back into her life.

The sound of the door shook her from her disturbing thoughts.

“Good morning, Vicki.” Noreen’s cheerful personality filled the store. “Looks like it’s going to be another beautiful day. I love this time of year—the last warmth of summer changing over to the crispness of autumn.”

“Good morning.” Vicki marveled at the way Noreen always managed to be in such a good mood. A woman in her early forties who had never been married, she always bubbled with good cheer. It seemed that nothing ever upset her.

As he drove up the hill to his house, Wyatt furrowed his brow in concentration. Something strange was going on. Vicki appeared far too nervous. She was hiding something. Did it have to do with him? Was the story about her husband dying in a place crash something she had made up in order to hide the truth?

Get a grip. You’re beginning to sound paranoid. This isn’t some sort of mystery novel It’s just one of those weird little quirks of life—nothing more.

He did his best to rationalize what had happened. Things were bound to be awkward between them, considering their past history and what she had done to him. He considered himself a mature adult who certainly knew how to handle an uncomfortable situation. He had brought those skills into play often enough in his business dealings. And this was no different. At least that was what he tried to tell himself, even though he knew it wasn’t true. This was not business. It was personal—very personal.