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But that shouldn’t pose a problem. He didn’t intend to date her or take her to bed. What he did intend to do was to see that his daughter got the best care available. And the woman showed a definite aptitude in that department.
“I’ve just come to a realization, Ms. Miller,” he finally said.
She turned her head, but only enough so that she was facing him straight on. And she waited some more. He found he liked that: her silence, the fact that she didn’t make some eager, hopeful little yes-person noise.
He said, “It occurred to me about a minute and a half ago that you and I want the same thing.”
He paused—mostly to see if she’d lose her nerve and warble out, “What’s that?”
She didn’t. She went on waiting, looking apprehensive, but unbowed.
So he told her, “We both want what’s best for Becky.”
She opened her mouth a fraction—then closed it over whatever words she might have said. He knew, of course, what those words would have been. Something short. And skeptical: Oh, really? or I doubt that.
“It may come as a surprise to you,” he said with ironic good humor, “but I want my daughter to have loving and devoted care every bit as much as you do.”
She was looking at him sideways again. He supposed he couldn’t blame her. Hell if he’d confess it, but he was pretty nervous about the whole idea of being a father. His own mother, Madelyn, had died when he and his twin, Rafe, were only four years old.
And his father was and always had been a coldhearted, verbally abusive SOB. It wasn’t as if Cord—or Rafe, or their older brother, Jack, or their sister, Kate, for that matter—had known much in the “love and devotion” department when they were growing up.
But Becky could have better. Cord had seen it in the look on Hannah Miller’s face when she stared down at his daughter. Becky would get all the love any child could ever want from a woman who gazed at her like that.
He swirled his ice cubes again—and made his offer. “Becky needs a nanny. And you don’t want to let her go. So my question is, why should you? I’ll pay you fifty thousand a year, plus the best benefits package Stockwell International has to offer, if you’ll give up your job at Child Protective Services and come to work for me taking care of my daughter.”
Chapter Two
Through a sheer effort of will, Hannah Waynette Miller kept her mouth from dropping wide-open.
She was stunned. Yep. That was the word for it. Stunned. Astonished. Astounded and amazed.
By Mr. Cord Stockwell, of all people.
He wanted her to be Becky’s nanny?
She’d been sure the man disliked her. And she had told herself she didn’t care. After all, she understood his kind. He was a rich man with a rich man’s ingrained belief that the rest of the world existed for his comfort and convenience.
Well, Hannah Miller cared no more for what a man like that believed than she did for what he thought of her. Since that first day she had called him to tell him about Becky, she had never once put forth the slightest effort to make things comfortable for him—let alone convenient. For Becky’s sake, she had stood her ground against him. She had been determined to make sure that Becky got a real home, a home with love and attention and patience and hope in it. Of course, she always tried to make sure of those things for all of the children assigned to her care.
But she’d tried even harder with Becky. Too hard, maybe…
She hated to admit it, but the man had been right on that one little point.
She was much too attached to Becky, all out of proportion really, and she knew that. Hannah also knew she had to let go of the adorable blue-eyed darling and get on with her life. She had planned to do just that: to make certain Cord Stockwell found a loving nanny, one who would provide the intangibles that all his money could not buy. And then Hannah Miller had meant to be on her way—to return only if the paternity test she’d insisted he take proved he wasn’t Becky’s father, after all.
Cord Stockwell was waiting for an answer, standing there so tall and commanding on the other side of the beautifully appointed room, holding his glass of fine whiskey and looking at her with an amused expression on his too-handsome face.
Hannah knew what that answer should be: Thank you, but no. As much as she might wish it to be otherwise, as much as she had longed in the past seven lonely years for another chance, Becky was not her baby girl.
On the other hand, Hannah had no doubt that Becky did need her.
Cord Stockwell might be sexy as sin itself—he stood over six feet tall and he was possessed of lean hips, shoulders that went on for days and truly arresting deep blue eyes. An aura of excitement surrounded him. Even Hannah, who certainly ought to know better, couldn’t help but feel the power of his presence every time she was forced to deal with him. And on top of the sex appeal and the charisma, he did have pots of money, money he was willing to lavish on Becky.
But did he know how to love and raise a sweet little girl? Hannah seriously doubted it.
Cord Stockwell sipped from his drink again. “Well?”
Right then, the telephone on one of the inlaid side tables buzzed.
Cord set his drink on the liquor cart. “Excuse me.”
He strode to the phone, noting before he got there that it was his father’s private line that had rung. He punched in the line and picked up. “What is it?”
“Mr. Stockwell, I’m sorry to bother you.” It was a male voice with a slight Scandinavian accent, the voice of one of the nurses who attended his father round-the-clock—the big blond one named Gunderson. “But, sir, your father is insisting…”
In the background, Cord could hear the hoarse commands. “Get him in here. Get my boy in here. Now!”
The nurse reported the obvious. “He demands to see you, sir.”
The cracked, rough voice shouted louder, “Now, I said. Are you deaf? Tell him to get in here on the double.”
“I’m so sorry, sir.” Nurse Gunderson made excuses in Cord’s ear. “But right now, our problem is that he refuses to take his medication until you—”
“Get me Cord now!” the old man shouted.
A woman’s voice—the other nurse—spoke up then.
“No. Please put that down, Mr. Stock—”
Whatever it was, Caine must have thrown it. Cord heard what sounded like breaking glass.
The nurse on the other end of the line released a sigh. “Sir, maybe you should—”
“Try to keep him from hurting himself,” Cord said. “I’ll be right there.” Cord set the phone back in its cradle and started for the door. “Something’s come up.” He said as he strode past the wing chair where the social worker sat staring at him. “I’m afraid I have to deal with it now. I won’t be long. You can think about my offer.”
The door closed behind him before Hannah could say a word.
Cord could hear his father barking orders as he entered the old man’s private sitting room.
“I don’t need you poking me with needles. I can still swallow a damn pill if I need one. And right now, I don’t need one. Not till I talk to my son, you hear me?”
One of the maids had joined Cord in the central hallway and followed him into the room. She carried a broom and a long-handled dustpan—probably under orders to clean up whatever mess Caine had created in his rage. The maid cringed when she heard the old man shouting.
“Don’t worry,” Cord said. “He’s not yelling at you.”
“Cord?” Cancer might be eating Caine Stockwell alive, but his hearing remained as acute as ever. “Cord, that you?”
Cord stepped through the wide arch that framed his father’s oppressively opulent bedchamber—a replica, Caine always claimed, of Napoleon I’s bedroom at the Château de Fontainebleau, the magnificent hunting lodge of sixteen and seventeenth century French royalty. The room, like the antechamber through which Cord had entered, boasted gilt medallions in classical motifs adorning the walls, a massive crystal and gold chandelier overhead and gilded furniture upholstered in carmine-and-green brocade. The huge velvet-draped bed, shipped from France a decade ago, was the room’s crowning glory. And it stood empty. Caine would no longer trust the body that had betrayed him not to soil the dazzling stamped velvet bed coverings.
The room, in spite of its overbearing beauty, smelled musty and strangely sweet. Like sickness. Like encroaching death. The velvet curtains had been drawn closed against the hot Texas sun outside.
“Here. Here to me.” Caine, who lay in a hospital bed in the center of the room, hit the mattress with one claw-like clenched fist, a gesture reminiscent of one summoning a dog.
Though Cord had always been his father’s favored son, there had been a time when such a gesture would have had him turning on his heel and striding from the room, Caine’s curses echoing in his ears. But that time had passed. In recent months, Cord had learned what pity was—and learning that had made it possible for him to put his considerable pride aside.
He approached the bed. Gunderson and the other nurse, a statuesque redhead, fell back to lurk near the rim of equipment—an oxygen tank, footed metal trays on wheels, an IV drip and the like—that waited several feet beyond where Caine Stockwell lay. The maid dropped to her knees and began picking up the pieces of a shattered antique vase, as well as a number of long-stemmed blood-red roses, which lay scattered across the gold-embroidered rug.
“Everyone out,” Caine commanded. “You two.” He flung out an emaciated arm at the nurses. “And you!” he shouted at the cowering maid.
Cord nodded at the others and instructed quietly, “Go ahead. I’ll buzz you in a few minutes.”
Caine’s bed had been adjusted to a semisitting position. He lurched forward, as if he intended to leap upright and chase the others from the room. But then he only fell back with a groan. “Just get them out. Get them out now.”
The three required no further encouragement. The maid jumped to her feet and scurried off, not even pausing to pick up her broom and dustpan, which lay where she’d dropped them, among the roses and broken china on the gold-embellished hand-stitched rug. The two nurses followed right behind.
Caine waited until he heard the outer door close. Then he patted the bed again, this time more gently. “Here,” he said, his voice now a low rasp. “Here.”
Cord did what his father wanted, taking a minute to lower the metal rail so there would be room for him.
“Have to tell you…” Caine coughed, a spongy, rheumy sound. “No more drugs. Until I tell you…” Caine coughed again. This time the cough brought on wheezing.
“Got to tell…” He wheezed some more. “Have to say…”
Cord got up, but only to pour a glass of water. He brought it back to the bed, sat again and helped his father to drink, sliding a hand gently behind his head, feeling the heat and the dryness, the thin, wild wisps of hair. All white now, what was left of it. Once it had been the same deep almost-black color as Cord’s hair was now. Dark, dark brown, and thick, with the same touch of gray at the temples.
But no more.
Caine’s red-rimmed blue eyes glittered, sliding out of focus, vacant suddenly, shining—but empty. Cord carefully lowered the old man’s head back to the pillow. Caine’s eyelids drifted shut over those empty eyes. A ragged sigh escaped him, and a thread of saliva gleamed at the corner of his mouth.
Cord waited. In a minute, he’d rise, set the glass aside and sit in one of the ridiculously beautiful gilded chairs to wait a little longer. Soon it would be time to ring for the nurses again.
Caine moaned. Cord sat still as a held breath, staring at the wasted specter that had once been his father. The old man had grown so weak the past few weeks. The skin of his face looked too tight, stretched thin across the bones. At his neck, though, it hung in dry wattles.
Cord glanced at his Rolex: 2:22. He’d give it five minutes and then—
His father’s skeletal hand closed over his wrist, the grip surprising in its strength. “You listening?” The blue eyes blinked open. “You hear?”
Gently Cord peeled the bony fingers away. “I’m listening. Talk.”
“More water.”
Cord helped him to drink again. This time Caine drained the glass.
“Enough?”
“That’s all.”
Cord rose once more to put the glass on one of the metal trays. He came back to the bed and sat for the third time.
Dark brows, grown long and grizzled now, drew together across the bridge of the hawklike nose. “I lie here,” Caine whispered, his voice like old paper, tearing. “Sleeping. Puking. Messing myself. I hate it. You know that?”
Cord said nothing. What was there to say?
“Sure, you know. You understand me.” Caine laughed, a crackling sound, like twigs rubbing together in a sudden harsh wind. “You and me, cut from the same piece of high-quality rawhide…” The eyes drifted shut again and Caine coughed some more.
Then he lay still—but not for long. After a moment, he began tossing his head on the pillow, like a man trying to wake from a very bad dream. “I think about that baby,” he muttered. “Lying here. Sick unto death. That baby haunts me.”
Cord frowned. He must mean Becky.
For the last five or six years, Caine had taken to accusing his children, collectively and individually, of failing to do their part to extend the family line. So Cord had mentioned Becky to Caine about a week before, thinking it might ease the mind of the old tyrant to know he had at least one grandchild, after all. At the time, his father had only shrugged.
“You sure this baby is yours?” Caine had demanded. And when Cord had nodded, Caine had said, “Then it’s a Stockwell. Bring it home. And raise it up right.” And that had been the end of that conversation.
Apparently, though, Becky had stuck in Caine’s confused mind. Maybe he wanted reassurance that Cord had done what needed doing.
“The baby’s fine,” Cord said. “She’s here, right now. In her crib in the new nursery.”
Caine sat bolt upright. “Here? She’s here. A girl. It was a girl?”
“Yes,” Cord said soothingly, guiding his father back down to the pillow. “A girl. Remember, I told you all about her? She’s three months old. Her name is—”
“Three months! Do you think I’m an idiot? You think the cancer has left me no wits at all?” Caine sputtered and coughed. “It’s almost thirty years now, since they left, that mealymouthed witch your mother and my turn-coat twin. That baby’s no baby anymore. It would be grown now. All grown up.”
Cord suppressed a weary sigh. The red-rimmed blue eyes were looking into the past now, through a very dark glass. Sometimes lately, the old man’s mind rearranged the facts. Caine would imagine that his wife, Madelyn Johnson Stockwell, hadn’t died in a boating accident on Stockwell Pond with Caine’s twin, Brandon, after all. Caine would swear the two had run off together instead.
But this about the baby was new.
Caine fisted the sheets, his bony knuckles going white as the linen they crushed. Then he struck out, wildly, hitting Cord a glancing blow. The old man wore no rings. His fingers had shrunk too much; a ring would slide right off. But his yellowed nails needed trimming. One of them sliced a thin, stinging line along Cord’s jaw. Cord pulled back sharply and touched the tiny wound. His finger came away dotted with crimson.
“It was mine,” Caine ranted, his eyes closed now, the lids quivering, his head whipping back and forth against the pillow. “I tried. Tried to take care of it. Is it my fault she never would take the money?”
None of it made any sense to Cord. His mother and his uncle were long dead. And the only baby he knew about lay in a crib in another wing of the mansion, dreaming whatever a baby might dream of.
A baby.
His daughter.
The irony struck him. Someday, would he be the one ranting in a hospital bed, while his grown daughter sat patiently at his side?
It seemed impossible, that such a tiny, helpless creature as his baby girl would ever sit upright beside her father and watch as he died.
And why? Why would she perform such a grim duty anyway?
For love?
Cord almost smiled. He did not think it was love that he felt for his father. It was something darker, something more complex. Something with anger in it, and hurt—and maybe just a touch of reluctant respect.
No, he did not love Caine. But he did feel a duty to him, and he pitied him, pitied the bitter, half-crazed shadow of himself that Caine had become.
