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Paige thought she saw a flicker of annoyance cross Austin’s face.
Jennifer’s announcement was interesting, Paige thought, in several ways. Because the child had taken her father’s statement seriously enough to repeat. Because he’d said it in the first place. Because it so obviously indicated that he intended to avoid Paige. And most of all, because he was clearly put out at his daughter for bringing the matter up.
“Again?” Sabrina asked.
“We’ve already met,” Paige said. She tried to make it sound casual. “I was just leaving the apartment this evening when Mr. Weaver and Jennifer arrived.” She offered a hand to the child. “Will you shake hands? I wouldn’t dream of patting you on the head, you see.”
Jennifer giggled. “She tried again when we were leaving to come over here. It’s because my daddy is—”
“Very tired from a long drive,” Austin said smoothly. “And it’s time for us to go. Thank Ms. Saunders again for your room, Jennifer.”
“It’s nice,” the child said dutifully. “I didn’t want to leave my other one, you know, because my mother planned it all for me before she died.”
I don’t have a forwarding address, Austin had said. Paige had thought he was simply being irreverent. Only in retrospect did she hear pain under the flippant words.
Paige closed her eyes and heard in her brain the echo of every catty comment she’d made in that short conversation with him this afternoon. The relationship obviously wasn’t successful…. People do crazy things after a divorce…. Your bad choices aren’t my responsibility…. At least I learned my lesson….
Her head ached at the memory of every one of those statements—all unfounded, all judgmental, all wrong. Dead wrong.
Why had she never even considered the possibility that Jennifer’s mother had died? Why had she so blithely assumed that relationship, too, must have ended in divorce?
Because, Paige accused herself, he divorced you—and you wanted to believe that he couldn’t commit himself to another woman any more than he could to you.
She’d been determined to believe him incapable of forming a lasting bond with any woman. Even though she’d been faced with the fact that he’d devoted himself to his daughter—evidence that he was capable of loyalty—Paige had chosen to consider it unimportant. She’d told herself that to a man, his own little girl was a whole lot different than an adult woman.
She tried to catch his eye, but Austin had focused all his attention on Sabrina, sparing only a nod to Paige before turning toward the door.
“It’s time for me to be going, too,” Paige heard herself say.
Austin paused, a hesitation so brief and so quickly masked that she found herself wondering if she’d imagined it. But as he held the door for her, she saw a speculative glimmer in his eyes.
She didn’t know if she was more annoyed with herself for making a probably rash move, or with him for reading unwarranted meaning into it.
“I do hope I haven’t left you with a wrong impression,” she said tartly as they stepped off the concrete porch and onto the uneven gravel of the driveway. “I certainly wouldn’t want to put myself in the same category as the super at Aspen Towers, coming up with one reason after another to cling to you. I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For assuming…” She realized too late that she had an extra—and very interested—listener, and tried to be oblique for the sake of the eavesdropping child. “It never occurred to me…I mean, that it might not have been divorce. Why didn’t you bother to correct me, Austin?”
Austin shrugged. “I suppose because it didn’t matter.”
He obviously wasn’t saying that his wife’s death didn’t matter. So, since it was perfectly clear what he was thinking, Paige told herself irritably, he might as well have just come straight out and said it. Because it doesn’t matter what you think of me.
She felt awkward. “Of course not,” she said quietly.
“As long as…I mean, before it comes up again…perhaps we should talk about how to deal with the past.”
“Our shared past, you mean? Don’t you think it’s a bit late for that? You seem to have made your choice already this evening when you referred to me as Mr. Weaver.”
“Oh. I suppose so, yes.” She paused beside her van, fumbling with her keys. “Anyway, I’m sorry.”
Austin walked on toward the Jaguar parked just behind her van, then turned to face her once more. “I don’t suppose it’s any of my business,” he said finally, “but why haven’t you told them? Your partners, at least?”
Paige didn’t look at him. “Because it wasn’t important for them to know.”
“Really?” He opened the back door of the car for Jennifer and closed it behind her. “That’s very interesting.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Just this.” He took a few steps toward her and leaned against the front fender of his car, arms folded across his chest. “If the fact that we were once married isn’t important, Paige, then why on earth are you choosing to make a state secret of it?”
CHAPTER THREE
WHEN Paige came in the back door of the little bungalow, pausing to hang the minivan’s keys on the hook in the entryway, her mother was in the kitchen, stirring a saucepan of soup on the range.
The flickering light of a muted television set reflected off the chrome frame of Eileen’s wheelchair as she turned to face her daughter. “You were in such a hurry to take out the garbage this morning, Paige, that you forgot and left the milk on the top shelf of the refrigerator again. You know I can’t reach all the way up there to get it.”
Hello, darling. Did you have a good day? You look worried.
I am, Mother. Austin Weaver showed up in my life again. You remember Austin? The man I thought I loved?
Paige smothered a twinge of regret at the thought of a conversation that would probably never happen. It was hard sometimes for her to remember the woman Eileen had once been, before the debilitating effects of her illness had made her so negative, so hard to please.
“I’m sorry to have caused you the inconvenience, Mother.” Of course, Paige thought, considering the state of mind she’d been in this morning—knowing she would be spending the day among Austin’s possessions and in Austin’s new home—it was a wonder she hadn’t put the garbage in the refrigerator and the milk on the curb.
“Because of your thoughtlessness, I had to eat my cereal dry.”
“I’m sure Linda next door would have been happy to help.”
“You know how much I hate asking for favors from anyone.” Eileen cleared her throat and went on with a determined note in her voice. “At any rate, it’s done now, and there’s no point in dwelling on it. You were obviously too eager to get away from here even to notice what you were doing. I can’t help wondering, though, what you had on your mind this morning that was so important to you.”
So much more important than I am. She didn’t say it, but the hint was apparent in Eileen’s tone.
Paige picked up a stack of pink message slips from the desk in the corner of the kitchen. “I knew it was going to be a busy day, that’s all.”
“It must have been. You’re quite late.”
“I stopped to try on my dress for Sabrina’s wedding.” Eileen shook her head. “I wish you weren’t going to be part of that circus.”
“She’s one of my two best friends in the world, Mother. And despite the sheer number of guests who’ll be attending, she’s planning a simple and very tasteful wedding. There will be no elephants, no lion-tamers, no cotton candy, and no sequined top hats—I promise.”
Elaine sniffed. “I notice you didn’t bring the dress home. Does that mean you don’t want me to see it till it’s too late to object?”
“No, it just means I forgot it.” Paige flipped through the bits of paper. Most were requests from Rent-A-Wife clients for errands to be run or small jobs to be completed. There shouldn’t be anything urgent in this stack; if someone had called with a time-critical job, Eileen would have passed on the message to one of the partners immediately.
Eileen’s gaze sharpened. “Forgot it? I suppose she chose it at that lingerie place she likes so well. No doubt you’d be better covered in a swimsuit.”
Paige began sorting the messages into stacks. “Thanks for taking such good care of the phone calls today, Mom.”
Eileen shrugged. “What else do I have to occupy myself these days? That pest called again this afternoon.”
“Which pest? Do you mean we’re getting prank calls?”
“I suppose you could call it that. I’m talking about Ben Orcutt. The message he left is in there somewhere.”
“I suppose his dishes need washing again.” Paige sighed. “Sometimes I wish he hadn’t taken Sabrina seriously when she suggested that if he called us more often instead of letting the mess pile up to the ceiling, he’d have visitors on a regular basis.”
“Lately,” Eileen sniffed, “he seems to want visitors about three times a week. It would have been more useful, you know, if Sabrina had taught the man to wash his own dishes—but I don’t suppose she’s practical enough to think of that. You could certainly do without him as a client, now that you have plenty of others.”
“Even if she’d given him lessons, Mother, he’d still be a client. He would just have to come up with another excuse to call. He’s lonely, that’s all.”
Eileen sniffed. “Most men are incapable of amusing themselves. To say nothing of actually seeing and taking care of what needs to be done. Your father, for example—”
With the ease of long practice, Paige sidetracked the conversation. “I can’t quite read this sentence. The message from Carol Forbes—what kind of paper does she want me to pick up? Wallpaper?”
“No—an issue of the Denver Post that had an article about her nephew.”
“Oh, that’s right. I see the date now. If you wouldn’t mind, Mother, we could use a hand with the phones again tomorrow. Cassie’s going to try to decorate Christmas trees for four clients tomorrow, and I have to work on arrangements for the staff holiday party at Tanner.” She set the message slips aside.
Eileen shrugged. “I certainly don’t have anything better to do these days, while I’m sitting at home and waiting for you.”
Paige reminded herself that just because her mother handed her a ticket didn’t mean she had to take the guilt trip. “I thought perhaps you and I could go out this weekend to choose our tree.”
Eileen shrugged. “Not a lot point in having one. I don’t care much about Christmas, anyway, and you’re so tired of the holiday by the time it arrives that the whole thing is more effort than it’s worth.”
Paige took a long breath. “It’s still Christmas,” she said firmly. “We have to do something to celebrate.”
“Go through the motions, you mean.” Eileen stirred the soup again. “Or are you feeling a little sentimental?”
“Christmas used to be my favorite holiday.”
“I know,” Eileen said dryly. “Back in the old days. You surely aren’t thinking about trying to patch things together with Austin, are you, now that he’s in town?”
Paige spun around, and her sleeve caught the stack of message slips and sent them whirling into a blizzard of pink snow. “How did you know—” She caught herself, but it was too late.
Eileen looked pleased at the reaction. “I saw a story on the business channel about his new job. You weren’t even going to tell me he’d come back to Denver, were you?”
Paige said stiffly, “I didn’t think you’d be particularly interested.”
“How could I not be interested in the man who used my daughter and then tossed her aside? You’re not having any foolish ideas, are you?”
“About wanting him back? Of course not.”
“That’s good,” Eileen said with satisfaction. “Because, of course, it can’t be done. And if, instead of rose-colored romantic notions, you’re really cherishing any feeble ideas of taking revenge for the way he treated you—well, I don’t think you could possibly pull that off, either.”
Her mother’s blithe assumption that she would fail—that she wasn’t attractive enough, feminine enough, or smart enough to succeed—acted on Paige almost like a challenge. So she couldn’t possibly win Austin back, could she? And she couldn’t possibly figure out a way to get even with him for dumping her? Or, best of all, to accomplish both things at the same time?
Paige was half tempted to take on the dare, not to put Austin in his place but simply to prove that her mother was wrong about her.
Except, of course, she reminded herself, that it would be such a childish thing to do.
Austin had only been inside the offices of Tanner Electronics once before, and that had been just a walk-through to get the lay of the land in order to help him decide whether he wanted to take the job. On that visit Caleb Tanner had been beside him all the while. It was time, he thought, to get a real sense of the people and the business and the surroundings, with no one interpreting or interfering.
So when Austin came into the big glassed-in atrium lobby at the front of the building shortly after lunchtime, he deliberately didn’t head directly for the executive wing. He strolled up and down the halls instead, peeking into office cubicles and conference rooms, studying computer screens and listening to discussions.
Tanner was a young firm, small and intimate and suffering from growing pains. That much Austin had known before he’d ever considered associating himself with the business, and it was part of what he’d found so attractive about Caleb Tanner’s offer. The challenge of grooming a new company beyond financial success into a position of status intrigued him.
By the time he eventually arrived at Caleb Tanner’s corner office, however, Austin found himself frowning. There was no secretary in the outer room—there hadn’t been on the day he visited, either, Austin recalled—so he strolled over to the open door of the inner office and knocked softly.
Caleb’s back was to the door; he was leaning over the once-gleaming surface of his teak desk, where a no-longer-identifiable electronic device lay in a million pieces, and he was whistling softly as he studied the bits. He turned at Austin’s tap, looking startled. “I didn’t expect you till Monday,” he said, stretching out a hand in warm welcome.
“I got Jennifer enrolled in school this morning, and since she wanted to stay and get started, I thought I might as well come in for a few hours and begin to get acclimated.”
“Sabrina said you’d stopped by last night, but I thought you’d take the rest of the week to settle in.”
“I intended to,” Austin said. “But there’s not much settling left to be done. Your Rent-A-Wife team did wonders.”
“Not mine,” Caleb said. “Or, at least, not all mine. I suppose I have to take responsibility for Sabrina, terrifying as the idea is, since I’m marrying her in a couple of weeks. But the other two—”
“An interesting business,” Austin said. “Rent-A-Wife, I mean. I wonder what inspired it.”
“It was Paige’s idea, I guess. You’ve met Paige?”
Austin nodded. He wondered what Caleb would say if he told him exactly how long—and how well—he’d known Paige. But he’d closed that door behind him last night. She had made a misleading statement—not a lie, exactly, but a good long way from the whole truth—and by not correcting it then and there, he had in a sense promised that he would continue to be silent.
Besides, he told himself, perhaps that approach was the best one, anyway. Their marriage had been so brief as to be almost nonexistent, and it was so far in the past that dragging it up now would create nothing more than shock value.
“She wanted a more flexible job,” Caleb said, “to allow her to take care of her sick mother, so she started up the firm and then the other two partners signed on a few months later. So what do you think of Tanner now that you’re on board? The first thing, I guess, is to get an office set up for you. I intended to move out over the weekend so this fancy desk would be waiting for you Monday morning, but you beat me to it.”
Austin couldn’t see the whole surface because of the electronic gadgetry scattered over it, but the part he could see was covered with deep scratches. The desk, he thought, was teak, and it had once been a showpiece. Now it looked more like a workbench. “Thanks, but I wouldn’t want to put the chairman of the board out of the space you’ve grown accustomed to. There are a couple of rooms down the hall that will do fine for me. I’d rather be just a little off the beaten path, anyway—I get more work done that way.”
Caleb grinned. “My point exactly. This corner of the building is like dead center of the target, and I’ve been looking forward to getting out of it. I’ll just move out my personal stuff and leave everything else, and you can settle right in to the executive suite and get to work.”
On the contrary, Austin thought; moving Caleb out looked like a fairly big job. There were boxes, books and papers—to say nothing of electronic bits and pieces—scattered everywhere in the big room. And the physical clutter might not be the worst of the debris that Caleb had collected, Austin suspected. If the employee who was supposed to occupy the outer office was as inefficient as it appeared, he or she wasn’t likely to be a success at working for Austin. “I’d rather hire my own secretary, Caleb,” he said firmly. “Fresh start, new loyalties, all that stuff.”
Caleb frowned. “What are you talking about? Oh, you thought I was leaving mine for you? I’ve never had one.”
At least, Austin thought, that explained why the outer office was always empty. “I see. Well, even hiring a secretary isn’t the first thing on my list. Security is.”
Caleb’s eyebrows rose. “You mean things like new locks and guards around the building?”
“And some other measures, as well. If you aren’t suffering a leakage of information, it’s only a matter of time.”
“My people are loyal.”
“That’s beside the point, when a stranger can loiter in the hallway till an office is left empty and then go look at the specs still blinking on the computer screen.”
“Industrial spies, you mean? What makes you think they could get by with that kind of behavior?”
