Authors: Mary Campisi
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Contemporary, #General, #Family & Relationships, #Death; Grief; Bereavement, #Parenting, #Single Parent, #Dating
The Way They Were (20 page)
“Of course you loved him. What a ridiculous statement.” She rubbed her neck and made it even redder. “What I want to know is how that damn man ever found out about our Julia.”
Because of my selfish, inexcusable stupidity.
There was no other way around it. “Julia found my journal.” There.
The glitter in Georgeanne’s eyes sparked. “You kept a journal? You wrote about you and Rourke Flannigan? That he was Julia’s
father
?”
She made it all sound so sordid.
“Answer me.”
“I only wrote in it once a year.” As though that made everything right.
“Once a year,” Georgeanne mocked. “Such restraint.” She massaged her leg, dug her fingers into the cotton material. “For how long?”
Kate had expected anger and disbelief, but the bitterness outweighed both. “Mom—”
“How long did you write about him?”
“Fourteen years.”
Georgeanne let out a strangled cry. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“I’m sorry. I know Clay deserved better—”
“Clay?” her mother snapped. “I’m not talking about Clay though God knows that man did not deserve this. I’m talking about what you’ve done to me.” She pounded a fist against her chest. “I sacrificed everything to protect you and Julia and you threw it all away, and for what? Some silly words in a journal.”
***
Kate hadn’t slept in two days. Julia was leaving for Chicago in the morning. It was unfair, and frightening, and yet Rourke had made it clear he’d fight for the right to be in his daughter’s life. The hardest part was Julia’s eagerness to go with him.
Angie glanced up from her computer and said, “Why don’t you head home? You’ve been sitting there for twenty minutes and haven’t taken a single brush stroke.”
Kate forced the brush along the railing of a mock colonial porch. “I’m just thinking about how I want it to look.”
“Kate. Go home.”
“I need to stay busy.” She bit her lower lip and concentrated on a spindle.
“If my daughter were traveling hundreds of miles with a stranger tomorrow, I wouldn’t be able to think either.”
“That stranger is her father.”
“Sperm donor’s more like it. That man doesn’t have a parental bone in his body. It’s all a power play and you know it. He’s pissed you kept it from him and he’s pissed about the lawsuit.”
Kate rubbed her left temple. “I wish I’d never pursued the case.”
“He would have come anyway. Damage control and all that.”
“I just want him to leave.”
“He will, don’t worry. Leaving is Rourke Flannigan’s specialty.”
***
“Everything is set, Mr. Flannigan. I’ve made Julia’s plane reservation and contacted the house to prepare a room for her.”
“Thank you, Maxine.”
She cleared her throat. “The girls have asked me to take them to see
Blades of Glory
this afternoon if you have nothing else for me?”
Rourke glanced up from his report. “
Blades of Glory
?”
A hint of a smile flitted across Maxine’s lips. “I’ve always been rather fond of ice skating.”
He wasn’t going to tell her the movie wasn’t really about ice-skating. She’d find out soon enough. “That’s fine. Make sure Julia’s mother knows we’ll be leaving at seven-thirty tomorrow morning.” He’d resorted to addressing Kate as ‘Julia’s mother’. How sad was that?
“Yes, sir.” She hesitated. “I’ve sent her a copy of Julia’s itinerary with the appropriate phone numbers and street address.”
“Good thinking.”
“Yes, sir.”
He thought she was about to add something else, but she nodded twice, grabbed her purse and left. There was something different about Maxine. Her gait? Her hair? Then it hit him. The tweed was gone! In its place she’d worn a light gray sweater and black slacks, a first for Maxine since he’d hired her three years ago. Rourke was contemplating Maxine’s new look when the bell above the door jangled and Angie Sorrento stormed in. He tried to ignore the instant pain that jolted his right temple and said, “Well, if it isn’t my favorite nemesis.”
She stalked to his desk and thrust both hands in her pockets—probably so she wouldn’t take a swing at him. “You really are an asshole, aren’t you?”
He leaned back in his chair and smiled, just to annoy the hell out of her. “Is that a rhetorical question or would you like an answer?”
“How can you do this to her?”
“Do what? To whom?”
Her dark eyes sliced him. “Doesn’t it bother you, even a little, that you’re tearing mother and daughter apart?”
“Cut the theatrics, Angie. She played me and you know it.”
“Just how did she do that, Mr. Brilliant? By getting pregnant?”
“By keeping it from me.”
“You’re right. I guess she should have started calling all the Flannigans in Chicago and surrounding suburbs, and maybe told them she was looking for the father of her baby?”
The woman reminded him of a terrier with fleas. “How about she didn’t run to the altar with the first guy who came along?” He did not want to have this discussion with this woman.
“You don’t know anything about it.”
“And you do?”
“I was there, buddy.” She jabbed her small chest. “You weren’t, were you? No, you were too busy having a blast at your big, fancy college.”
He wasn’t even going to qualify that with an answer. He had been at Princeton but the thought of Kate or rather trying to forget Kate had consumed him.
“And I’ll just bet you had fun with that journal didn’t you?”
“If you were a man, I’d deck you.”
“If it were legal, I’d shoot you.”
That, he believed. “What do you know about the journal?” The one he’d become obsessed with and carried in his briefcase, even if none of it were true.
Angie shrugged and narrowed her gaze on him. Someone did her wrong long ago, probably a man, and she’d lost her softness, If she ever had it. “I knew there was one. I was with her when she bought it.”
“And you read it?”
She squared her shoulders and challenged him. “Why do you ask?”
He’d be damned if he’d let her see how much the book meant to him. “Kate said none of it’s true. She said it was just a fantasy.”
“And I’m Abe Lincoln.”
“She said she was bored and lonely, so she started creating ‘what if’ scenarios.”
“Yeah, right.”
He kept his voice casual. “Are you saying that’s not true?”
Angie pulled both hands through the tangle of black mop she called hair and sighed. “Okay, I’m not going to lie. I never read the book, but I was with her when she bought it. Velvet. Blood red. She said she bought it so she could jot down events in Julia’s life, but I saw the way she looked at it and I knew she was going to write something much more private in it.”
“So you think it’s true?” Hope thumped in his chest.
“I’m only going to tell you this so you ease up on her. Kate’s fragile right now. She lost her husband and now she’s worried she’ll lose her daughter. If that weren’t enough, you just danced back into her life. We both know you live in different worlds but there’s a part of her that’s always believed you belonged together.” She spit out a laugh. “Isn’t that absurd?”
“Not really.”
“Come on, you’ve got your Barbie-on-a-stick girlfriends and your Ferrari and your paparazzi. Where would a homegrown girl from Montpelier, New York fit in? Please don’t hurt her anymore than you already have. Let Julia visit but don’t tell everyone she’s your daughter. Not yet. The reporters would barrage Kate and she can’t handle that.”
“I don’t want to hurt Kate.”
She still cared about him. Maybe loved him?
“Then prove it. Let her go to Chicago with Julia. You can make it look like she’s keeping an eye on Julia and Abbie while you work. You’ll think of something. You’re very good with the spin.”
Kate in his home?
He started to panic. She’d see the heart-shaped tub, the pond, the fireplace in the bedroom, the lavender turret—everything they’d talked about building together. She’d realize he’d never gotten over her and once she saw inside his heart, she could hurt him again. Angie could say the journal was true but how did he know Kate hadn’t set him up by sending her here to tell him just that? He didn’t know anything anymore. But he intended to find out. “Okay,” he found himself saying, “tell her she can go. I’ll have Maxine take care of the details. We’ll pick her and Julia up at seven tomorrow morning.”
“Thank you.”
She seemed almost civil as she said it and Rourke wondered again if he’d just been set up. This could all be a grand plan, with Kate behind it. And if it were, Heaven help them all.
***
This had to stop. Now. Georgeanne glanced at the clock. She’d had her last drink two hours and fifty-five minutes ago, right after lunch. Or was it one hour and fifty-five minutes ago? She rubbed her leg and tried to remember. The glass with the blue sharpie mark stared back at her with the half finished bottle of Smirnoff’s peeking from the magazine rack.
She was slipping, hour by hour, drifting back toward her earlier life. Who could blame her? To learn the person responsible for your son-in-law’s death was now honing in on your granddaughter? It was just a matter of time before they had Julia wishing she lived in Chicago. Who knew what would happen then? She could decide Montpelier wasn’t where she wanted to be. She could choose a new life. A new family, one which didn’t include Katie or Georgeanne.
How could this have happened?
Georgeanne hefted the bottle from the floor and splashed another drink in her glass, eyeballing the vodka toward the blue line. She might be a quarter inch off, but right now, she needed that quarter inch.
By the time she finished her drink—four minutes ahead of schedule—she had a plan. Life had battered her around, pitching her between choice and circumstance. She’d loved and lost, grown bitter and desperate, turned to drink, and eventually, found snippets of contentment with her daughter and her family. Now even that small pleasure was threatened.
The time to stand up and protect what was hers had come. She wouldn’t lie meekly as Rourke Flannigan and his entourage trampled what little happiness she had left in life. She’d stop him. And she’d make him pay. Maybe not in a court of law, but he and his company would pay…and if it took dredging up old secrets to get the job done, so be it.
***
Kate sat in the back seat of the Mercedes with Julia and Abbie while Rourke drove with Maxine next to him, checking off her to do list. Kate still couldn’t believe he’d agreed to let her travel to Chicago with Julia but she wasn’t about to question his decision. Other than grab her suitcases and extend a curt nod, he’d barely acknowledged her in the forty-five minutes she’d been in his company.
The airplane ride wasn’t much better. Rourke and Maxine sat in first class, which left Abbie, Julia, and Kate in coach and served as one more reminder of the difference in social and economic status separating them.
“You are so going to love Chicago,” Abbie said. She hadn’t stopped talking since they’d boarded the plane. “Wait until you see Rourke’s house.” She spread her fingers and said, “The carpeting’s so thick you can sleep on it. Surround sound. Twelve flat screens. Pool. Sub-zero fridge.” She scrunched her nose and gushed, “I am so glad you two are going to be there. I hate being by myself.”
Julia squeezed her hand. “You won’t be by yourself anymore.”
“Yeah, I’m going to love these next two weeks. And Rourke hasn’t been such a pain lately, either.” She darted a quick glance at Kate and added, “Overall.”
It was awkward having Abbie and Julia know about Kate and Rourke’s past, but at least he’d chosen to keep his parentage from the public eye. He probably figured the truth would unearth itself soon enough.
“Mrs. Maden, have you ever been to Chicago?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“She hasn’t been anywhere but Niagara Falls,” Julia said, her tone just shy of rude. She still wouldn’t discuss Rourke or what they’d talked about the other night.
“Well, Rourke does have a pretty cool house,” Abbie went on, apparently unaware of the cold war Julia was staging against her mother. “You have got to see that tub. It is so bizarre. A heart tub.” She giggled. “It’s like the kind in one of those honeymoon places.”
“I’m more interested in the pool,” Julia said.
“It’s Olympic size with a diving board and a Jacuzzi.”
I’ll build you a pool,
Rourke had told Kate years ago,
and we’ll swim naked under the stars…
Kate pushed the memories aside and closed her eyes. She’d wondered about Chicago for so long and now she’d finally get an opportunity to see it. When the plane landed, O’Hare Airport met her like a noisy, stifling monster, filled with too many people and too much activity. Rourke herded them along with a sweep of his large hand and one word commands. He hadn’t spoken directly to Kate since they got off the plane but she could tell he was aware of her by the way his gaze sliced past her in a valiant attempt
not
to notice her.
Why did she care? Why had her heart done a tiny back flip when Abbie mentioned the heart-shaped tub? Rourke might have had it built for whatever lover he had at the time, certainly not for a teenage romance gone bad. So why did that notion bother her? It wasn’t as though they could ever share anything closer than a casual acquaintance. People who lied to one another didn’t make good partners and she would do well to remember that.
