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“Expansion without risk is like bread without butter. No flavor. Take care, Don. Let me speak to Mr. Smith again, please.”
“Okay. I’ll call him. Take care of yourself.”
“Sure.”
Minutes later, Mr. Smith was back on the line. “He’s gone,” he said curtly. “I don’t trust him, Kip. Neither should you. I think he’s up to something.”
“I’ll bet you’re the most suspicious man on earth. It must be that old CIA experience affecting your brain. Don’s all right.”
“He said Tiny should be kept outside,” he said after a minute.
She laughed. “Tiny would be miserable outside. It’s my house. As long as it is my house, Tiny lives inside. Okay?”
He relaxed. “Okay.” He made a rough sound. “Thanks.”
“I want you to come out here next week.” She gave him a list of the things she needed and set a time. “Call Blake, will you?” she added. “I hate being away from him so much. At least we can talk on the phone. I know it’s late, but I do want to say hello.”
“He’ll be glad to do that. He’s already missing you again.”
She sighed. “I do travel a lot, don’t I? Too much, sometimes.”
“Uh, about Tiny…”
“I’ll get a new plumber,” she promised. “Don’t worry.”
She could almost see him grin. “Okay.”
Seconds later her son picked up the phone. “Mama, when are you coming home?” he asked sleepily. “My rubber duck fell in the cubbymode and Mr. Smith throwed him away. He got me a new one. Did you buy me a present? I can count to twenty, and I can write my name….”
“That’s very nice. I’m proud of you, son. You’re coming to see me soon, and I’ll have a present for you.” She crossed her fingers. She would have, by then.
There was a brief pause. “Can’t you stay home then and play with me sometimes? Jerry’s mama takes him to the park to see the ducks. You never take me places, Mama.”
She had to grit her teeth not to make some sharp reply about the necessity for her work. “When I get home, we’ll talk about that,” she said.
“That’s what you always say, but you go away again,” he muttered angrily.
“Blake, this isn’t the time for an argument,” she said firmly. “Now, listen. Mr. Smith is going to bring you out here very soon. There’s a lot to see, even some real cowboys, and we’ll have time to spend together.”
“We will?” he asked with such delight that she felt guilty all over again.
“Yes,” she promised.
“All right, Mama. Can we bring Tiny? Uncle Don says we ought to eat her. I think Uncle Don’s mean.”
“Now, now. We aren’t going to eat Tiny. Mr. Smith can bring her with you when you come out here to see me. But not just yet, okay?”
“Okay.” He sighed sadly. “Can Tiny sit with me when we come?”
“Tiny’s carrier can sit with you,” she corrected, remembering vividly the last time Mr. Smith had taken Tiny in the limousine with them on a trip. A small-town garage attendant had refused to pump gas after Tiny had pressed her nose against the window to look at him. People shouldn’t carry monsters around in their cars, he’d added scornfully. Mr. Smith had gotten out of the car to answer that insult, but the attendant was already out of range. Ever since then, Tiny rode in a carrier because Meredith insisted.
“I love you, Mommy,” Blake said.
“I love you, too, darling. I’ll call you tomorrow. You mind Mr. Smith and be a good boy.”
“I will. Night-night.”
“Good night.”
She hung up, fingering the receiver tenderly. Blake was the most important thing in her world. Sometimes she regretted bitterly the time she had to spend away from him on business. He was growing up, and she was missing some of the most precious days of his life. Would he resent that when he was older? Was she being fair to him not to let Don assume more of the responsibility for the domestic operations or to designate another corporate officer to help her? Perhaps her own pride was adding to the problem, because she felt obligated to carry on the role Henry had originally carved out for her. But would Henry have given her so much responsibility if he’d realized how it would affect her relationship with Blake?
No, she thought. He’d have delegated to give her more time with her son. He would have been with her himself, too, playing with Blake, taking him places, encouraging his curiosity about the world around him. Henry had loved Blake so much.
She turned away from the phone. Sometimes life without Henry was very hard. She wondered what it would have been like if Cy Harden had ignored his mother’s accusations and believed in Meredith, if he’d married her. They’d have been together when Blake was born, and perhaps the delight of having a son would have bound Cy to her.
She laughed coldly. Oh, certainly. Blake would have warmed his cold heart, and he’d have fallen madly in love with Meredith and kicked his manipulative mother out on her ear.
All of it whirled around in her head, blinding her. The pressure of business, Blake’s indignation and resentment of her absences, Cy Harden’s renewed presence in her life. She tugged at her thick blond hair and remembered something she’d read about “primal scream therapy.” She wondered what the neighbors would say if she went out into the street and screamed at the top of her lungs. She’d be locked up, that’s what, and then who’d take care of Blake, acquire new contracts, and deal with Cy Harden and his vicious mother?
She went upstairs and took a tranquilizer. She didn’t take them often, but sometimes the pressure was so terrible that she couldn’t cope. Alcohol, thank God, had never appealed to her. Neither did pills. She only took them when she had no other option. This was one of those nights.
With a long sigh, she showered and dressed for bed. It did no good at all to agonize and theorize over problems. Henry had taught her that. The only way to deal with a situation was with action, not mental gymnastics.
She lay down and closed her eyes. The tranquilizer began to work and she left it all behind, drifting off into a twilight of semiawareness. Sometimes, they said, a good night’s sleep was all that stood between an anguished person and suicide. She wasn’t suicidal, but oblivion was sweet, just the same.
CHAPTER FOUR
AS DAWN STREAMED THROUGH the curtains in Great-Aunt Mary’s immaculate bedroom, Meredith lay drowsily between the clean white sheets of the four-poster bed. She was remembering back. Cy’s cold aloofness, Myrna’s hot accusations, Tony’s confession…She could still feel the sickness as she ran from the Harden house to her Great-Aunt Mary’s. She couldn’t even tell the worried old lady or her great-uncle the truth about what had happened. It was too shameful to share.
She’d packed her bags and gone straight to the bank to withdraw her pitiful savings from her restaurant job. With no clear idea of what she’d do when she got there, she’d bought a one-way bus ticket to Chicago and kissed her worried relatives good-bye before she boarded the Greyhound and said a silent farewell to Cy.
Even then, she’d hoped that he might come after her. Hope died hard, and she was carrying his child. She’d even hoped that Myrna might relent and tell him the truth, because Myrna knew about her pregnancy. The older woman had made that apparent just before Cy came into the room that long-ago morning. But no one came. No one rushed to the bus station to stop her.
The Chicago bus terminal had been unwelcoming, crowded and busy. Clutching her worn suitcase in her hand, Meredith had fought down the instinctive fear of being alone and without visible means of support. There was always the YWCA if everything else failed. She’d find some place. But she felt sick and afraid, and always there was the threat of Myrna pursuing her over that supposedly stolen money.
The first three nights she’d spent at the YMCA in tears, mourning Cy and the life that could have been. But then she’d been told about another place, a Christian home with only a few tenants. She’d decided to try her luck there, hoping for a little more privacy in which to spend her grief without the prying, compassionate eyes of the other downtrodden women at the Y.
She remembered leaving the YWCA, wandering aimlessly down the cracked sidewalk while the cold winter wind whipped her long hair around her thin, pale face. As a few snow flurries touched coldly against her cheeks and eyelids and lips, she wondered what to do next.
Fate took a hand when she stepped off the curb without looking and found herself flat on the pavement, beside a very expensive limousine.
A minute later, a quiet, intelligent face came into focus, a face with deep blue eyes and thin lips, high cheekbones and brownish blond hair.
“Are you all right?” asked a velvety voice. “You’re very pale.”
The voice had what sounded to Meredith like a definite New York accent. She’d heard it often enough in the café when tourists passed through. She smiled. “I’m fine,” she murmured. “I guess I fell.”
The man’s eyes lit up. “I guess you did. But we helped a little, didn’t we, Mr. Smith?”
A second man came into view. This one was a giant with thinning dark hair and big, deep-set green eyes, with an imposing nose in a chiseled face. He was wearing a chauffeur’s uniform. “I couldn’t brake quickly enough,” he said. “But I’m sorry. It was my fault.”
“No,” Meredith said weakly. “I felt faint. I’m pregnant….”
The two men exchanged a speaking glance. “Your husband?” the first man asked. “Is he with you?”
“I don’t have…a husband,” she whispered, and tears sprang to her eyes. “He doesn’t know.”
“Oh, boy.” Henry smoothed back her long, disheveled hair with a gentle hand. “Well, you’d better come with us.”
In her naive way, Meredith equated big black limousines with organized crime. This man was dressed fit to kill, and his driver looked every inch a mobster. She hadn’t run away from one dangerous situation to land herself in another.
“I can’t do that,” she blurted out, her big eyes saying more than she realized as she looked from one of them to the other.
“Will it help if we introduce ourselves?” The thin man smiled. “I’m Henry Tennison. This is Mr. Smith. I’m a legitimate businessman.” He leaned closer, his lazy eyes smiling at her. “We’re not even Italian.”
One look at the humor in his face, and all her apprehension disappeared.
“That’s better. Help me get her in the car, Smith. I think we’re becoming the center of attention.”
Belatedly, Meredith realized they were blocking traffic. Other drivers were making their irritation known with their horns. She allowed herself to be put in the back of the limousine with Henry Tennison while the formidable Mr. Smith stashed her luggage in the trunk.
She looked around her at the luxurious interior of the car. Real leather. Not to mention a bar, a television, a cellular phone, and some odd kind of computer and printer. “You must be worth a fortune,” she said without thinking.
“I am,” Henry mused. “But it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. I’m a slave to my job.”
“Everything has a price, hasn’t it?” Meredith asked sadly.
“Apparently.” He leaned back and folded his arms as Mr. Smith started the car and pulled into traffic, leaving the loud horns behind. “Tell me about the baby.”
Without knowing why she trusted him implicitly, a man she didn’t even know, she began to talk. She told him about Cy and the beginning of their love affair, her voice quiet and slow as she skipped over the passion to his mother’s interference and her speedy departure in disgrace.
“I guess I must sound like a tramp to you,” she concluded.
“Don’t be absurd,” he said gently. “I’m not an impressionable youth. Is the father going to come after you?”
She shook her head. “He believed his mother.”
“Too bad. Well, you can come home with me for the time being. Don’t worry. I’m not a lecher, even if I am a certified bachelor. I’ll look after you until you find your feet.”
“But, I can’t—”
“We’ll have to get you some clothes,” he said, thinking aloud. “And your hair needs work, too.”
“I haven’t said—”
“Delia, my secretary, can look after you while I’m away. I’ll have her move in, just to keep everything aboveboard. And you’ll need a good obstetrician. I’ll have Delia take care of that, too.”
Meredith caught her breath at the way he was arranging her life. “But—”
“How old are you?”
She swallowed. “Eighteen.”
His eyes narrowed on her thin face. “Eighteen,” he murmured. “A little young, but it will work out.”
“What will work out?”
“Never mind.” He leaned forward, his hands dangling between his knees as he stared straight into her eyes. “You’re still in love with him, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “Well, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.” He sat back again. “Do you like quiche?”
“What?”
“Quiche. It’s a kind of French egg pie—Oh, never mind. I’ll show you when we get home.”
Home was a penthouse apartment in one of the most expensive hotels in Chicago. Meredith, who’d never known anything grander than Great-Aunt Mary’s small house, was shocked and delighted at the luxury. She stood in the entrance to the living room and just stared.
“Don’t let it intimidate you,” Henry said, smiling. “You’ll get used to it in no time at all.”
Incredibly, she had. Without quite knowing how, she became Henry Tennison’s possession. She was maneuvered into marriage scant weeks later and shipped out of the country to one of Henry’s houses in the Bahamas, near Nassau. Her name became Kip Tennison. Henry undertook her advanced education in business tactics and strategy, in between natural childbirth classes with a registered nurse he hired to live in and look after Kip. During this time, he anticipated the baby with all the delight of its real father, spoiled his young wife, and seemed to lose twenty years of age as he involved himself with her pregnancy.
She sighed, remembering how it had been. Slowly, she had begun to replace Cy’s face with Henry’s, to trust her husband, to confide in him. She warmed to him. When the baby was born, he was with her at the delivery in Nassau, and as the tiny infant was placed in his arms, tears fell from his eyes.
It was only later that she discovered Henry was sterile, that he could never have a child of his own. It was why he was single at the age of thirty-eight—why he’d never asked anyone to marry him until Meredith came along. But fatherhood seemed to come naturally to him, and he treated Blake as if the infant were his own blood child.
In all the months they’d waited for Blake, he’d never touched Meredith. She wouldn’t have refused him. He was kinder to her than anyone had ever been. He worshiped her, and slowly she began to return his warm affection, to look forward to their time together.
Then, almost inevitably, he came to her one night. It was as if there had never been a woman, he told her softly while he loved her. And while it wasn’t the intense passion she’d shared with Cy, it wasn’t at all unpleasant. Because Henry loved her, she was able to indulge him. He was a tender, expert lover, and she felt no revulsion at being touched by him. And if he ever suspected that, with her eyes closed, she sometimes thought of Cy as she gave herself to him, he never said so. They were compatible. They got along well together, with mutual respect and affection, and Blake was their world.
It had all fallen apart the day Henry left on a business trip and his plane crashed into the Atlantic. Meredith had felt something with him the night before that she hadn’t experienced in their marriage. A merging, a oneness, that left her sobbing in his arms afterward. For the first time, she’d curled into his body and refused to let go. She was glad about that, when the news came. She’d finally told him that she loved him. If he’d lived…
She sat at the funeral with anguish in her eyes, and even her brother-in-law, Don, who’d been so distant with her, softened as he realized how genuine her grief was.
Henry was gone. But he’d been a good tutor, and Meredith had been an excellent student. She didn’t stop learning after he died and left her with control of the domestic operation. Possessed already of a keen, intuitive mind, she found the give and take of negotiating right up her alley. In her first month, she astounded the corporate directors with her ability to size up a potential acquisition and land it with a minimum of fuss. Despite their initial desire to kick her out, the directors became her greatest fans—to the chagrin of Henry’s brother, who was secretly nurturing a jealous resentment of Meredith’s power that grew by the day.
Unaware of that resentment, Meredith barreled through business like a velvet bulldozer. She was enjoying power for the first time in her life and loving her job as mother to Blake. All the while, as Meredith grew in strength, she never stopped thinking about Cy Harden and his venomous mother. Don had been right about one thing. Her interest in Harden Properties went far beyond mineral rights acquisitions. She wanted to back Cy into a corner and cut him to ribbons, while his arrogant mother stood by helplessly and watched. She wanted Myrna Harden to suffer along with her son. Meredith was so far gone with regard to the Hardens that revenge was the only thing that registered. Whether Don liked it or not—and of course, he didn’t—she wasn’t leaving Billings until she had the Hardens on their knees, no matter what it took to get them there.
She got up and dressed, taking time to pour herself a cup of coffee before she left the house. Mrs. Dade didn’t like her employees having breakfast on her time. She was a good boss, and a fair one, for all that.
The phone rang and Meredith yawned lazily as she answered it.
“Good, you’re home,” Mr. Smith said. “Don had me fly out with those Jordan papers for your signature. He said express mail was too slow. I’ll be with you in five minutes.”
“All right.” She hung up, surprised. It wasn’t like Don to send the corporate jet just for some routine papers. Perhaps the merger was more complicated than she’d realized.
She met Mr. Smith at the door with a cup of strong black coffee. He grinned as he took it.
