“You’ve lost weight since college,” he said.
“I’m surprised that someone like you would even notice,” she shot back, then bit her lip and cursed her temper. How could she have uttered such an snide remark in front of him? How could she have allowed herself to appear so touchy?
Her caustic comment had an unexpected effect on him. Rather than rallying with an equally insulting comeback, he softened. His lips curved in a hesitant smile and his eyes remained on her as he reached for his scotch glass. “You have lost weight, Daff. The fact of the matter is, you’re looking great.”
She accepted his compliment in the spirit in which it was given—a simple observation, devoid of ulterior meaning. “I was too fat in college,” she reminded him. “I was still carrying around the ʻfreshmen twenty’ when I graduated.”
“The ʻfreshmen twenty’? What’s that?”
“The twenty pounds lots of girls gain their freshman year of college.”
“Why do they do that?” Brad asked, apparently fascinated.
Daphne laughed. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe it has to do with leaving home for the first time. All of a sudden, you don’t have your mother on your back, nagging you that if you aren’t pretty you won’t get a date for the prom and your life will be ruined.”
“Did your mother do that?” Brad inquired.
Daphne tried to interpret the gentle undercurrent in his voice. He sounded a touch indignant, a touch amused that mothers would put such pressure on their daughters. “Yes, she did,” Daphne answered honestly. “And I did go to my senior prom. I can’t say whether or not it’s saved my life from ruination, but I did get a prom date.”
“Whoever he was, he was lucky,” Brad said.
Why was Brad suffering from this sudden compulsion to flatter her? Evidently he felt the need to make amends for his earlier surliness. “Whoever he was,” she responded before taking a sip of iced tea through the straw, “he’s my brother-in-law now.”
“Oh,” Brad said, then lifted his glass and drank. His gaze lingered on Daphne as he swallowed and lowered the glass back to the table. As her statement registered on him, his expression sharpened and his smile faded. “Oh,” he repeated apparently struck by the notion that something in the situation she had just described wasn’t quite kosher. “He’s your brother-in-law?”
“He married my younger sister,” Daphne explained. “Even though he and I went to the prom together, we were never that serious.” There were times for candor, but this clearly wasn’t one of them. Daphne hadn’t intended to discuss anything personal with Brad. Just because she had accidentally exposed a piece of her past, she didn’t have to compound her error by letting him know how badly her erstwhile prom date had wounded her. If she did, she might slip even further and inform Brad of precisely what she’d done in her mindless effort to console herself—and that particular subject was definitely and permanently off-limits, as far as she was concerned.
“I didn’t know you had a sister,” Brad commented. Then he rolled his eyes heavenward and swore softly. “It’s ridiculous, Daff—the last two years of school you and I traveled in the same circles, and yet we know so little about each other.”
They’d done a hell of a lot more than travel in the same circles, but she couldn’t deny his claim that they knew pitifully little about each other. She had no idea whether Brad had any siblings, either. If Phyllis and Andrea hadn’t discussed it the previous Wednesday, Daphne wouldn’t have known that Brad was a native New Yorker.
“Why don’t you want to live in the city?” she asked.
The question obviously took him by surprise, but the waitress’s timely arrival with their lunches gave him a chance to recover. He spent a long time pouring ketchup onto his hamburger, then closed the seeded bun around it and lifted it to his mouth. Instead of biting into it, he raised his eyes to Daphne’s. “My parents live there,” he said.
She didn’t consider that an adequate answer, but she thoughtfully allowed him to swallow before questioning him further. “You don’t want to live too close to your parents, is that it?”
“Of course that isn’t it,” he refuted her. He took another bite of his hamburger, set it on his plate and reached for his scotch. When the glass was halfway to his lips he changed his mind and put it back down on the table. “I love my parents,” he confessed. “I love them both very much. They’re a wonderful couple. They’re also borderline lunatics, and...yeah. I’d rather not be living too close to them at the moment.” He took a sip of scotch, then met Daphne’s gaze again. “New Jersey isn’t Seattle,” he allowed. “There’s no way I can work in Manhattan and not live near them. But I’m tired of city living. I’ve spent too much of my life surrounded by the hustle and bustle. I want peace and quiet. God, I sound like an old fart, don’t I?” He gave in to a self-deprecating laugh.
Daphne joined his laughter, although she didn’t think he sounded like an old fart at all. After college, she’d lived first in Chicago and then in Washington. The excitement of those cities had enthralled her for a while, but eventually she’d had enough. Her mother kept carping about how she’d never meet a marriage-minded bachelor if she kept herself buried in the suburbs, but Daphne hadn’t met any suitable representatives of that particular species in Chicago or Washington, either.
Besides, she’d learned a long time ago that it was fruitless to live your life waiting for Mr. Right.
“The suburbs offer a lot that the city doesn’t,” Daphne noted. “A little less congestion, a little less noise—a lot less taxes. Not far from here there’s an excellent professional theater company, and between Brendan Byrne Arena and the Garden State Arts Center you’ll find plenty of pop music concerts—”
“Skip the spiel,” Brad cut her off with a good-natured grin. “You don’t have to sell me on New Jersey. I’m here looking, aren’t I?”
“You’re here today. Tomorrow you might turn your back on New Jersey and take your business to Westchester.”
“And you’d be out a whopping commission,” Brad concluded.
“That’s not what’s important,” Daphne protested.
“Oh?” Brad’s eyebrows rose and his smile gave way to a look of bemusement. “What’s important, Daphne?”
She drew a blank. Something was important about Brad’s search for a home in New Jersey, something beyond the fact that for the first time since he’d walked into her office that morning, he’d called her “Daphne” instead of “Daffy” or “Daff.” Something was much more important than her interest in earning a commission.
She wanted to do business with Brad because she wanted to accomplish something positive with him. She wanted to make something work, to wind up with something beneficial from her association with him. She couldn’t go back and rewrite their history, but counterbalancing that history with something worthwhile and meaningful would be almost as good.
She couldn’t possibly explain her feelings to him. Dipping her spoon into her soup, she tossed around various discreet replies to his question. He was waiting for her to say something; she had to come up with a response.
“Let’s just say I want to do it for old time’s sake,” she said finally, grateful for the shield her eyeglasses provided and annoyed with herself for desiring a shield at all. “I want you to wind up with a nice home, and I want to be the one to find it for you, just for old time’s sake.”
He could have pounced on her; he could have demanded that she explain why it mattered that she and no one else found a nice home for him. He could have recoiled from her, arguing that he was in the market for a house, not a psychological adventure, and that he had no intention of letting her work out her demons on him. He would have been completely justified in announcing that the best thing either of them could do for old time’s sake was stay away from each other.
But he didn’t react negatively to her statement. He didn’t even press the issue. He only took another hefty bite of his hamburger and grinned. “It’s no wonder
you’re successful, Daphne,” he conceded. “You know how to make a client feel special.”
Daphne didn’t always succeed in making her clients feel special. But, no matter how hard she endeavored to treat Brad as she would any other client, she couldn’t change the fact that he was special. Whether that was good or bad was irrelevant. Brad Torrance was special to Daphne; there was no way around it.
***
“NEW JERSEY.” Robert Torrance sniffed. “You may as well look for a house in Outer Mongolia.”
Brad clamped his lips shut. He didn’t want to argue with his father. That Robert Torrance and his estranged wife tended to be exceedingly provincial about their beloved New York was a given. Brad would just have to ride out his father’s contempt.
They were seated at a relatively secluded table at his father’s club. Robert Torrance was a club man, and he’d made no effort to hide his enduring hope that, once Brad took up residence in New York City—there was no doubt in his mind that that was where Brad would take up residence, of course—Brad would become a member of his father’s club.
At one time, Brad might have considered that a fine idea. He’d eaten at the club with his father many times, ever since he was a child. He used to adore the dining room’s ripe ambience, the brocade wallpaper and Oriental rugs, the massive fieldstone fireplace occupying one wall, the musty photographs of club officers dating back to 1836. Brad had been no older than nine or ten the first time his father had brought him to the club for lunch, and he’d been dwarfed by the plush upholstered chair he’d been given to sit on. The waiters had considered it hilarious beyond belief that he’d ordered a Cheez-Whiz sandwich on raisin bread for lunch.
Tonight, he had ordered prime ribs. The portion was huge, the meat pink and juicy. Brad ought to have wolfed it down, but instead he kept thinking about what Daphne had told him about the “freshman twenty.” He also thought of her current figure, slim and lithe. In her case, twenty pounds made a world of difference.
Not that she’d turned miraculously into Miss America. She would never be classically pretty. But there was something intriguing about her appearance now, something that made her much harder to ignore.
“How many houses has this broker shown you?” Robert asked, pronouncing the word “broker” as if he considered it a euphemism for Satan.
“Four,” Brad told him. “And one condo. I’m going back tomorrow so she can show me a couple of other properties. And probably to take a second look at one of the houses she showed me yesterday. It’s got possibilities.”
Robert speared a chunk of his filet mignon with his fork and studied it as if it were the most significant object in the universe. Brad’s father often examined trivial objects while he sorted his thoughts. It gave him an appearance of indifference, and it pissed off Brad’s mother. “How much?” he finally asked.
“Five-sixty.”
“Five hundred sixty thousand dollars?” Robert’s eyes widened slightly. They were as striking a blue as his son’s; whenever Brad looked at his father, he felt as if he were gazing into a time-travel mirror. Thirty years ago, Robert Torrance had looked almost exactly like Brad; thirty years from now, Brad thought it safe to assume that he would look exactly like his father. “For that much money, you could buy yourself a cozy little co-op in town.”
“I don’t want a cozy little co-op in town,” Brad retorted. “I want a reasonably spacious house surrounded by grass and trees. I want to live somewhere where I don’t have to see the air I’m breathing.”
“You disappoint me, Brad,” Robert said before popping the chunk of steak into his mouth. As he chewed, he shook his head and his eyes took on a canny glow. “It’s your mother’s doing, isn’t it,” he guessed.
“What’s my mother’s doing?”
“She’s buying you a house outside the city to keep you from moving in with me.”
Brad rolled his eyes. “Number one, she isn’t buying me a house. I’m buying me a house. Number two, she doesn’t want me moving to New Jersey any more than you do. She wants me to live with her. And number three—” he accelerated, aware that his father was about to interrupt “—I’m thirty years old, and I’m not going to live with either of my parents, ever again. Unless, of course, you or Mom become incapacitated in your old age and need someone to look after you full-time.”
“I have no intention of becoming incapacitated,” Robert said. “I can’t speak for your mother on that score.” He nibbled on his potatoes au gratin, deep in thought. “This—this broker,” he remarked, once again uttering the word with great distaste, “you say she’s a woman?”
“Last time I looked, she was,” Brad muttered.
“So, you’re looking at her,” Robert said, then sighed dramatically. “You’ve never been as practical as I am; you tend to romanticize certain things. Anyone who could possibly want to live in New Jersey is obviously lacking in sensibility. My question, Brad, is: does this broker of yours have some sort of hold on you?”
“A hold on me?” Brad snorted. “Of course not.”
“She hasn’t clouded your sense of reason with her beauty, has she?”
“No, Dad.” Brad almost added that Daphne Stoltz wasn’t beautiful, but he refrained. He felt oddly protective toward her, as if he had to defend her against his father’s irrational disapproval. “She’s competent, she’s knowledgeable, and she’s very successful at what she does.”
Robert wavered. Success was something he held in high esteem. But, much as he might admire Daphne’s success, he clearly didn’t want it to extend to his own son. He sipped from his wine goblet, then sighed again. “Well, if she’s all that competent, I suppose she can’t be too beautiful,” he concluded. “I have yet to encounter a woman who boasts both beauty and competence.”
Brad suppressed a shudder. Now was hardly an appropriate time to battle his father over the old man’s sexist view of the world—especially since Brad had been trying and failing for years to convert his father to a less bigoted view of the world. Nor did Brad feel like explaining that, the older he got, the more he recognized that competence in a woman was more valuable than beauty.
That was why Daphne Stoltz looked so good these days, he acknowledged with a jolt of amazement—not because she’d lost the “freshman twenty,” not because she’d styled her hair more attractively and wore chic eyeglasses, but because she was competent, successful, ambitious, because she was no longer a mousy student with no discernible concept of herself. Quite the contrary, she was a disciplined, self-directed woman who knew what she was doing and where she was going.
If in college she’d been as well put together as she was now, Brad would never have taken advantage of her in her intoxicated state and brought her to his room. He probably would have been her friend, a genuine friend, and if she’d come to him drunk and vulnerable, he would have walked her back through the wintry night to her dorm and made sure someone there got her safely into her bed, where she could sleep it off alone. If Daphne Stoltz had been the woman she was now, Brad would never have had sex with her.
The peculiarity of that notion startled him. Now that Daphne had proven herself smart and interesting, he ought to be more willing, not less, to think of her in sexual terms. Yet he wasn’t. He wanted her friendship, but not her body, not her love. She didn’t turn him on.
He cursed beneath his breath. Damn it, but he’d inherited more than his father’s thick hair and blue eyes. He’d inherited the man’s close-mindedness. Daphne wasn’t pretty, and no matter how intriguing Brad found her intellectually, he couldn’t bring himself to think of her as a potential lover. And that seemed wrong to him, because her intellect was amazingly attractive. He really did want her to be his friend.
Over his father’s protests, Brad skipped dessert. He didn’t want to spend another hour sitting at the club with the old man, arguing over his decision to buy a home outside the city limits. Nor did he wish to listen to his father’s version of the ongoing war between his parents. “It’s late, Da
d,” he excused himself. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got a busy day planned for tomorrow.”
“Yes,” Robert Torrance said with obvious disdain. “You have to cross the river to the wilderness to look at more houses. Suit yourself, Brad. Live in the boondocks if you must. But if in my dotage I do become incapacitated, I’ll thank you to put me in a nursing home here in town rather than transport me to that barren wasteland west of the Hudson.”
Brad allowed himself a weary smile. He wasn’t going to persuade his father of New Jersey’s virtues tonight—and, in all honesty, he didn’t really care what his father thought about the state. Whether or not Robert Torrance approved of his son’s choices didn’t matter to Brad.
What mattered was that he himself had to approve of his choices. He approved of his choice regarding a place to live. But the other choice, the choice he’d made about Daphne, didn’t sit well with him. It troubled him that he’d pigeon-holed her as he had. It troubled him that he couldn’t bring himself to think of her in a romantic context. She had so much going for her, and yet...nothing clicked between them. He could gaze into her round green eyes and feel nothing but respect for who she was today and remorse for what he’d done to her long ago.
He ought to feel more, but he didn’t. And it bothered the hell out of him.
***
“HAVE YOU HEARD from Andrea about the party?” Phyllis asked.
Daphne wedged the telephone more snugly against her ear, as if she could keep Brad from listening in on the conversation. He already knew about the party Andrea and Eric were hosting in his honor Saturday night; he’d mentioned it that morning when he’d arrived at Daphne’s office. But she held her cell phone tight and averted her eyes, just as she always did when she received a personal call at work. It was an old habit dating back to her first job after she’d graduated from college, as an assistant buyer at a department store in Chicago. Her boss had been a tyrant, demanding that employees refuse all phone calls not related to business. Of course the staff had disobeyed, but they’d learned to be secretive.
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