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But the fact she was stuck in it, the zipper stubborn, her hair wound painfully around the pearls, represented more the reality: relationships of the romantic variety were sticky, complicated, entrapping.
Besides, a man didn’t come from the place Houston Whitford had come from and believe in fairy tales. He believed in his own strength, his own ability to survive. He saw the cynicism with which he had regarded that dress as a gift.
In fact, the unexpected appearance of one of the Second Chances employees in full wedding regalia only confirmed what several weeks of research had already told him.
Second Chances reminded Houston, painfully, of an old-style family operated bookstore. Everyone was drawn to the warmth of it, it was always crowded and full of laughter and discussion, but when it came time to actually buy a book it could not compete with the online giants, streamlined, efficient, economical. Just how Houston liked his businesses, running like well-oiled machines. No brides, no ancient, adorable little old ladies at the helm.
He fought an urge to press the scar over the old break on the bridge of his nose. It ached unbearably lately. Had it ached ever since, in a rare moment of weakness, he had agreed to help out here? This wasn’t his kind of job. He dealt in reality, in cold, hard fact. Where did a poorly run charity, with brides in the hallways and octogenarians behind the desks, fit into his world?
“And that was our Molly,” Miss Viv said brightly. “Isn’t she lovely?”
“Lovely,” Houston managed. He recalled part two of his mission here.
Miss Viv had confessed to him she was thinking of retiring. She loved Molly and considered her her natural successor. But she was a little worried. She wanted his opinion on whether Molly was too soft-hearted for the job.
“Is she getting ready for her wedding?” On the basis of their very brief encounter, Molly Michaels seemed the kind of woman that a man who was not cynical and jaded like him—a man who believed in fairy tales, love ever after, family—would snatch up.
He didn’t even like the direction of those thoughts. The wedding dress should only be viewed in the context of the job he had to do here. What was Miss Michaels doing getting ready for her wedding at work? How did that reflect on a future for her in management?
The job he hadn’t wanted was getting less attractive by the second. A demand of complete professionalism was high on his list of fixes for the ailing companies he put back on the track to success.
“She’s not getting ready for her wedding,” Miss Viv said with a sympathetic sigh. “The exact opposite, I’m afraid. Her engagement broke off before they even set a date. A blessing, though the poor child did not see it that way at the time. She’s not been herself since it happened.”
At this point, with anyone else, he would make it clear, right now, he didn’t want to know a single thing about Molly Michaels’s personal life. But this job was different than any he’d ever taken on before. And this was Miss Viv.
Everybody was a poor child to her. His need to analyze, to have answers to puzzles, surprised him by not filing this poor child information under strictly personal, none of his business, nothing to do with the job at hand. Instead, he allowed the question to form in his mind. If a man believed in the fairy tale enough to ask someone like Molly Michaels to be his wife, why would he then be fool enough to let her get away?
Because the truth was lovely was an unfortunate understatement, and would have been even before he had made the mistake of making the bridal vision somehow real by touching the heated silk of Molly’s skin, the coiled copper of her hair.
Molly’s eyes, the set of her sensuous mouth and the corkscrewing hair, not to mention the curves of a slender figure, had not really said lovely to him. Despite the fairy tale of the dress the word that had come to mind first was sexy.
Was that what had made him get up from his chair? Not really to rescue her from her obvious discomfort, but to see what was true about her? Sexy? Or innocent?
He was no Boy Scout, after all, not given to good deeds, which was another reason he should not be here at Second Chances.
Still, was his need to know that about Molly Michaels personal or professional? He had a feeling at Second Chances those lines had always been allowed to blur. Note to self, he thought wryly, no more rescuing of damsels in distress.
Though, really that was why he was here, even if Miss Viv was obviously way too old to qualify as a damsel.
Houston Whitford was CEO of Precision Solutions, a company that specialized in rescuing ailing businesses, generally large corporations, from the brink of disaster. His position used all of his strengths, amongst which he counted a formidable ability to not be swayed be emotion.
He was driven, ambitious and on occasion, unapologetically ruthless, and he could see that was a terrible fit with Second Chances. He didn’t really even like charities, cynically feeling that for one person to receive the charity of another was usually as humiliating for the person in need as it was satisfying for the one who could give.
But the woman who sat in front of him was a reminder that no man had himself alone to thank for his circumstances.
Houston Whitford was here, at Second Chances, because he owed a debt.
And he was here for the same reason he suspected most men blamed when they found themselves in untenable situations.
His mother, Beebee, had suggested he help out. So, it had already been personal, some line blurred, even before the bride had showed up.
Beebee was Houston’s foster mother, but it was a distinction he rarely made. She had been there when his real mother—as always—had not. Beebee had been the first person he had ever felt genuinely cared about him and what happened to him. He owed his life as it was to her charity, and he knew it.
Miss Viv was Beebee’s oldest friend, part of that remarkable group of women who had circled around a tough boy from a terrible neighborhood and seen something in him—believed in something in him—that no one had ever seen or believed in before.
You didn’t say sorry, too busy in the face of that kind of a debt.
It had started a month ago, when he’d hosted a surprise birthday celebration for Beebee. The catered high tea had been held at his newly acquired “Gold Coast” condominium with its coveted Fifth Avenue address, facing Central Park.
Beebee and “the girls” had been all sparkle then, oohing over the white-gloved doorman, the luxury of the lobby, the elevators, the hallways. Inside the sleek interior of his eleven-million-dollar apartment, no detail had gone unremarked, from tiger wood hardwood to walnut moldings to the spectacular views.
But as the party had progressed, Miss Viv had brought up Second Chances, the charity she headed, and that all “the girls” supported. She confessed it was having troubles, financial and otherwise, that baffled her.
“Oh, Houston will help, won’t you, dear?” his foster mom had said.
And all eyes had been on him, and in a blink he wasn’t a successful entrepreneur who had proven himself over and over again, but that young ruffian, poor child, rescued from mean streets and a meaner life, desperately trying to live up to their expectation that he was really a good person under that tough exterior.
But after that initial weakness that had made him say yes, he’d laid down the law. If they wanted his help, they would have to accept the fact he was doing it his way: no interfering from them, no bringing him home-baked goodies to try to sway him into keeping things the very same way that had gotten the charity into trouble in the first place and especially no references to his past.
Of course, they hadn’t understood that.
“But why ever not? We’re all so proud of you, Houston!”
But Beebee and her friends weren’t just proud of him because of who he was now. No, they were the ones who held in their memories that measuring stick of who he had once been…a troubled fourteen-year-old kid from the tenements of Clinton, a neighborhood that had once been called Hell’s Kitchen.
They saw it as something to be admired that he had overcome his circumstances—his father being sent to prison, his mother abandoning him—but he just saw it as something left behind him.
Beebee and Miss Viv dispensed charity as easily as they breathed, but as well-meaning as they were, they had no idea how shaming that part of his life, when he had been so needy and so vulnerable, was to him. He did not excuse himself because he had only been fourteen.
He still felt, sometimes, that he was their poor child, an object of pity that they had rescued and nursed back to wellness like a near-drowned kitten.
Was he insecure about his past? No, he didn’t think so. But it was over and it was done. He’d always had an ability to place his life in neat compartments; his need for order did not allow for overlapping.
But suddenly, he thought of that letter that had arrived at his home last week, a cheap envelope and a prison postmark lying on a solid mahogany desk surely a sign that a man could not always keep his worlds from overlapping.
Houston had told no one about the arrival of that letter, not even the only other person who knew his complete history, Beebee.
Was that part of why he was sending her away with Miss Viv? Not just because he knew they could probably not resist sharing the titillating details of his past with anyone who would listen, including all the employees here at Second Chances, but because he didn’t want to talk to Beebee about that letter? The thought of that letter, plus being here at Second Chances, made him feel what Houston Whitford hated feeling the most: vulnerable, as if that most precious of commodities, control, was slipping away from him.
And there was something about this place—the nature of charity, Miss Viv and his history, Molly, sweetly sensual in virginal white—that made him feel, not as if his guard was being let down, but that his bastions were being stormed.
He was a proud man. That pride had carried him through times when all else had failed. He didn’t want Miss Viv’s personal information about him undermining his authority to rescue her charity, changing the way people he had to deal with looked at him.
And when people found out his story, it did change the way they looked at him.
He could tell, for instance, Molly Michaels would fall solidly in the soft-hearted category. She’d love an opportunity to treat him like a kitten who had nearly drowned! And he wasn’t having it.
“Let’s discuss Molly Michaels for a minute,” he said carefully. “I’d like to have a little talk with her about—”
“Don’t be hard on her!” Miss Viv cried. “Try not to judge Molly for the outfit. She was just being playful. It was actually good to see that side of her again,” Miss Viv said.
Playful. He liked playful. In the bedroom.
In the office? Not so much.
“Please don’t hurt her feelings,” Miss Viv warned him.
Hurt her feelings? What did feelings have to do with running an organization, with expecting the best from it, with demanding excellence?
He did give in to the little impulse, then, to press the ridge of the scar along his nose.
Miss Viv’s voice lowered into her juicy-secret tone. “The broken engagement? She’s had a heartbreak recently.”
It confirmed his wisdom in sending Miss Viv away for the duration of the Second Chances business makeover. He didn’t want to know this, at all. He pressed harder. The ache along the scar line did not diffuse.
“A cad, I’m afraid,” Miss Viv said, missing his every signal that he did not want to be any part of the office stories, the gossip, the personalities.
Despite his desire to remove himself from it, Houston felt a sudden and completely unexpected pulsing of fury.
Not for the circumstances he found himself in, certainly not at Miss Viv, who could not help herself. No, Houston felt an undisciplined desire to hurt a man he did not know for breaking the heart of a woman he also did not know—save for the exquisite tenderness of her neck beneath his fingertips.
That flash of unreasonable fury, an undisciplined reaction, was gone nearly as soon as it happened, but it still served to remind him that things did not always stay in their neat compartments. He had not overcome what he had come from as completely as everyone believed.
He came from a world where violence was the default reaction.
Houston knew if he was to let down his guard, lose his legendary sense of control for a second—one second—he could become that man his father had been, his carefully constructed world blown apart by forces—fury, passion—that could rise up in a storm that he had no hope of taming.
It was the reason Houston did not even allow himself to contemplate his life in the context of fairy tales represented by a young woman in a bridal gown. There was no room for a compartment like that in the neat, tidy box that made up his life.
There was a large compartment for work, an almost equally large one for his one and only passion, the combat sport of boxing.
There were smaller compartments for his social obligations, for Beebee, for occasional and casual relationships with the rare member of the opposite sex who shared his aversion for commitment. There were some compartments that were nailed shut.
But now the past was not staying in the neat compartment system. The compartment that held Houston’s father and his mother was being pried up, despite the nails trying to hold it firmly shut.
Houston’s father had written his only son a letter that asked nothing and expected nothing. And yet at the same time Houston was bitterly aware that how he reacted to it would prove who he really was.
After nineteen years, his father was getting out of prison.
And it felt as if all those years of Houston outdistancing his past had been a total waste of energy. Because there it was, waiting for him, right around the next bend in time.
The scar across his nose flared with sudden pain, and Houston pressed a finger into the line of the old break, aware he was entering a danger zone that the mean streets of Clinton had nothing on.
“Have a seat,” Houston invited Molly several hours later, after he had personally waved goodbye to Beebee and Miss Viv at the airport.
“Thank you.” She took a seat, folded her hands primly in her lap and looked at him expectantly.
It was his second encounter with her, and he was determined it was going to go differently than the first. It was helpful that Miss Viv was not there smiling at him as if he was her favorite of all charity cases.
And it was helpful that Molly Michaels was all business now, no remnant of the blushing bride she had been anywhere in sight. No, she was dressed in a conservative slack suit, her amazing hair pinned sternly up on her head.
Still, it was way too easy to remember how it had felt underneath his hands. He was not going to allow himself to contemplate the fact that even after untangling her from that dress several hours ago he was no closer to knowing her truth: was she sexy? Or innocent?
Not thoughts that were strictly professional. In fact, those were exactly the kind of thoughts that made a man crazy.
“I’m sorry about the dress. You must think I’m crazy.”
Damn her for using that word!
The nails holding a compartment of Houston’s past shut gave an outrageous squeak. Houston remembered the senior Whitford had been made crazy by a beautiful woman, Houston’s mother.
Who hadn’t she made crazy? Beautiful, but untouchable. Both of them had loved her desperately, a fact that had only seemed to amuse her, allowed her to toy with her power over them. The truth? Houston would have robbed a bank for her, too, if he’d thought it would allow him to finally win something from her.
The memory, unwanted, of his craving for something his mother had been unable to give made him feel annoyed with himself.
“Crazy?” he said. You can’t begin to know the meaning of the word. “Let’s settle for eccentric.”
She blushed, and his reaction was undisciplined, unprofessional, a ridiculous desire, like a juvenile boy, to find out what made her blush and then to make it happen often.
“So, you’ve been here how long?” Houston asked, even though he knew, just to get himself solidly back on the professional track.
“As an employee for several years. But I actually started here as a volunteer during high school.”
Again, unprofessional thoughts tickled at him: what had she been like during high school? The popular girl? The sweet geek? Would she have liked him?
Houston remembered an incident from his own high school years. She probably would not have liked him, at all. He shook off the memory like a pesky fly. High school? That was fifteen years ago! That was the problem with things coming out of their compartments. They could become unruly, pop up unannounced, uninvited, in moments when his concentration was challenged, when his attention drifted.
Which was rarely, thank God.
Since the memories had come, though, he exercised cool discipline over them. He reminded himself that good things could come from bad. His mother’s abandonment had ultimately opened the door to a different world for him; the high school “incident” had led to Beebee putting him in boxing classes “to channel his aggression.”
Houston was more careful than most men with the word love, but he thought he could honestly say he loved the combat sport of boxing, the absolute physical challenge of it, from the grueling cardiovascular warm-up to punching the heavy bags and the speed bags, practicing the stances, the combinations, the jabs and the hooks. He occasionally sparred, but awareness of the unexpected power of fury prevented him from taking matches.
Now he wondered if a defect in character like fury could lie dormant, spring back to life when it was least expected.
No, he snapped at himself.
Yes, another voice answered when a piece of Molly’s hair sprang free of the restraints she had pinned it down with, curled down the soft line of her temple.
She’d been engaged to a cad.
Tonight, he told himself sternly, he would punch straight left and right combinations into the heavy bag until his hands, despite punch mitts, ached from it. Until his whole body hurt and begged for release. For now he would focus, not on her hair or her past heartbreaks, but on the job he was here to do.
Houston realized Molly’s expression had turned quizzical, wondered how much of the turmoil of that memory he had just had he had let slip over his usually well-schooled features.
Did she look faintly sympathetic? Had she seen something he didn’t want her to see? Good grief, had Miss Viv managed to let something slip about him?
Whatever, he knew just how to get rid of that look on her face, the look of a woman who lived to make the world softer and better.
