Sheila made a grunting noise.
“Remember how Smith Construction was building an apartment complex on Elm,” Diana said, “and Logan Construction was building the office building right across the street?”
“I’ll never forget. Their concrete trucks blocked ours. Charlie kept trying to hire all my men by offering them more money. I had to match him. That job cost me big bucks.”
O-o-o-o-o-h, Dad, Diana thought You have no idea how many millions that job really did cost you. Yet.
“Remember how Charlie’s son Nick was working for him?”
“Not really. Can’t be expected to remember everyone.”
Diana didn’t believe him. No one could forget Nick, and her father probably had every one of Charlie’s kids tattooed in his brain. “Well, I remember that I was paying bills that day….”
So Diana explained everything to her father, without going into detail about how Nick made her feel, or what she had wanted to do to him, because she knew no father wanted that much personal information about his daughter’s wayward imagination.
“Somehow, the envelopes became mixed up.”
“So you fixed them, right?”
“Well, Mr. Stratford, what a nice man, he sent the electric company the check.”
“How did he get the check?”
“Because the electric company got the bid,” Diana squeaked.
Her dad stood there, his eyes bugged out, his mouth hanging open. So far, he seemed to be taking it pretty well. All things considered.
“There was no way I could know about this in advance, because the project was a closed bid.”
Harry made a strangled noise in his throat. But he hadn’t yelled. Things were still looking good.
“And that’s why Logan Construction got to build the Stratford.”
“Diana, do you know what you’ve done?”
“I thought you’d be happy to know you didn’t lose out to Charlie Logan. You weren’t even in the running. Doesn’t it make you feel better knowing that Logan didn’t beat you?”
Harry’s face had turned bright red. The words came out slowly and very precisely. “Diana, I had reluctantly agreed with Sheila before, but now I’m positive about this. You will go back to school. You will change your major to English. You will not go near another laboratory again. Do you understand?”
Sheila trilled in, “She has to go to the University of Texas. She can’t stay here.”
Diana turned on her. “This is my home. You can’t tell me how to run my life.”
“But dear,” Sheila purred. “We hold the purse strings, don’t we, Harry, darling?”
“This is what I get for being honest?” she said. “My own father turns on me?”
“You will be finished in a year, Diana,” Harry yelled.
Diana didn’t yell back. She turned to Sheila and said quietly, and with purpose, “Why are you being so mean to me? What did I ever do to you?”
“Really, dear, you just exist” Sheila whispered back, with a smile, so only Diana, and not Harry, heard her speak.
Diana hurried out of the room as fast as she could, but not before hearing Sheila consoling her father. “Don’t worry, Harry, Diana will get over her little tantrum.”
Diana found small comfort in the darkness of her bedroom, especially after the blinding light she had just left behind. The blue miniblinds were closed, blocking out the morning sun. She let her vision become accustomed to the darkness. She then opened her sock drawer, took out the first pair she touched and put them on. Her suitcases were still on the floor, still packed, and after the conversation with her father and Sheila-the-Witch, they were likely to stay that way.
Never had she felt more alone. Or lonely. Not only had her Rock of Gibraltar disintegrated, but the life she had so neatly planned since she was eighteen was falling apart, too. And this time she was not the one who had initiated the explosion.
From the moment she discovered she’d mixed up the envelopes, she knew what direction her life would take. The fact that it was taking her many more years, and many more colleges, than she had originally planned was of no significance, despite what Sheila insinuated.
Diana knew she would still graduate from a university. Eventually. She knew she would make a difference in the world. Eventually. She would make her father proud, despite his infatuation with wife number five. She’d find a way to continue. Somehow.
She wasn’t hopeless or helpless. She could get a job. She wasn’t going to blame Sheila for this setback either. That would be too easy, and hating someone took too much energy. No, she’d find a way to help herself, and she’d come out a better person for it.
Diana dug inside the massive black suitcase until she felt a pair of running shoes. She put them on, double-knotting the laces.
Her father was waiting outside her room, leaning against the wall. “You understand, don’t you?” He looked worried.
“No.” Oh, she understood, all right. She knew what it was like to be so much in love with someone all reason went out the window. That’s how she felt about Nick. That’s how she got in this mess in the first place.
But Sheila wasn’t Nick. She had watched Nick work outside for his dad. She had talked to him that one night when she had been sixteen. She knew Nick wasn’t an evil person. And therein was the difference.
“Where’re you going?”
“I thought I’d take a walk in the park.” She wished he’d take back all the angry words he’d said. She waited, hoping for a retraction. The silence between them was deafening. Finally, she had no choice but to leave him standing there. “I’m going to go, Dad. I have a lot of things to think about right now.”
“Here.” He pulled out his wallet and shoved hundreddollar bills into her palm. “Go get yourself some coffee.”
“Oh, Daddy.” She looked down at the money, took his hand and placed the bills back in his grasp. She smiled up at him, a weak smile, but it was the best she could do right now. When she started to speak, her voice caught in her throat. “I love you.”
As Diana closed the apartment door behind her, she could have sworn she heard him say that he loved her, too.
3
THE ELEVATOR STOPPED on the twentieth floor and the doors swooshed opened. When Diana saw who stood there waiting to get on, her heart almost stopped, too.
She hadn’t seen Nick Logan, except in her dreams, in six years. Yet she would have recognized him anywhere.
Nick stood outside the elevator in all his six-foot-whoknew-how-much-inch glory, looking better than any fantasy had a right to look.
There had to be something to this power of suggestion, since today, more than any other day in the past, he had been in her thoughts, as well as the topic of conversation.
There was no doubt Nick had changed, matured. Powerful virility had replaced his boyish handsomeness. There was only a faint trace of the youthful guilelessness which had so attracted her to him in the first place. Nick had grown into a rugged virile man. All muscle and radiating heat The air crackling around him was worldly and experienced, not naive.
His dark brown hair still came below the collar, and even though he had brushed it back off his face, strands fell across his forehead. His eyes, though, hadn’t changed at all. They were still the very deepest blue, and against his tanned skin, very intense.
If she ever had any doubt before why she had been so caught up in a memory, she had none now. Nick Logan radiated potent male sexuality. She had been caught in his web at sixteen, more deeply entrenched at eighteen, and now at twenty-four, had no desire to escape. She wouldn’t doubt that other women had felt the same way and were hanging off him everywhere he went Like the one hanging off his arm.
The little girl.
Little girl?
A baby?
It can’t be. Well if it isn’t, then what do you think it is? Nick’s baby. It’s a baby, a real live baby. No. Yes.
She couldn’t stop staring. While she’d been dreaming about Nick,
Nick had become an attached man. Attached to a baby, and where there was a baby, there was a mother. A quiet rage rippled through her. Why did all these terrible things have to happen to her in one day? How much more was she expected to handle?
“I know you,” he said. He also looked as if he’d seen a ghost.
Diana’s insides knotted. She wanted to press the close button, keeping him and the baby out. She didn’t want to face the fact that he was married and had a child. If she closed the door on him, maybe she could forget she’d ever seen him, and go back to her fantasies.
Not likely.
“Diana? Diana Smith. Right?”
She nodded.
He stalled outside the elevator, as if unsure whether to get in with her, which would mean occupying space with the enemy. “That really is you. How ’bout that.”
He stepped toward the elevator car.
She licked her dry lips, which made her realize she wasn’t wearing any makeup. She’d had a horrible morning, and she knew she had to look as if she’d been dragged through the ringer. All the warnings of her father’s third wife, Starr Gazer, the exotic dancer who danced with nothing on except a boa—and not the feather kind, either—had drilled into her about never going out of the house without makeup. Starr wouldn’t be caught dead stepping outside, not even to get the morning paper, without blush, turquoise eye shadow, three layers of black mascara and frosty pucker-pink lipstick.
The elevator started beeping and Diana jumped for the open-door button and flattened her back against the wall as Nick entered the car.
His smile was as tight as his jeans. The baby wore pink clothes that went with her wet pink face. The spicy-woodsy scent he wore filled the elevator and sent her senses reeling. It made her wish she could get close enough to sniff his neck, and feel the warmth from his skin as the scent he wore heated.
“Haven’t seen you in years,” he said.
She held up her right hand and wiggled all her fingers and thumb. “At least six.” She had the date imprinted in her brain. She’d never forget that day. That Monday in August. The first Monday. Maybe the second. Come to think of it, it might have been a Wednesday. Well, who cared? Dates were never her strongest point.
“Are you visiting someone in the building?” she asked, staring at the child, unable to look at him, afraid if she did, her feelings of loss and loneliness would be right there in her eyes for him to read. She didn’t want to be that vulnerable to anyone.
“I live here.”
If she had any hope before of Nick being a single dad, maybe even giving birth himself by immaculate conception, now it was dashed away forever. Only families lived in the Stratford-upon-the-Brazos condominiums. The baby he held looped through his arm, kind of lopsided, looked enough like him that she knew the worst had happened. She wanted to scream at the injustice of it all. While she’d been busy getting thrown out of schools for trying to do something good, for trying to make the world a better place for everyone, Nick had had a baby.
“How wonderful that you live here.” Just shoot me now and get it over with.
“I think so. The Stratford always held a special place in my heart.” He gave her one of those half grins that made her heart do an extra thump.
In return, Diana gave him what she hoped was an “even if you’re married and have a child, it really doesn’t matter to me” kind of smile. After all, he couldn’t know how she had felt about him all these years. And even if he had, it wasn’t as if she could have done anything about it. “Hi, baby.” She wiggled her fingers again.
“Say hi to Diana, Jessica.”
“Nooooo,” the baby screamed.
Diana’s smile faltered.
“It’s not you. No’s her favorite word,” Nick said.
“I’m relieved to know she’s not prejudiced against a Smith. It would have been horrible to pass down the hatred between our families to a third generation.”
“Pretty nasty thing, that feud.”
She nodded. The Smiths and Logans were like opposing armies of ants. Not just any ants, either, but fire ants. Each family guarding its hill, ready to attack at any moment. “I’m not allowed to talk to you, you know.”
“I’m not supposed to talk to you, either.”
The baby was sniffing through her stuffed-up nose, and singsonging, “Nononononononono.”
At this moment Diana knew how it felt to walk barefoot through fire-ant hills. “I guess we can make the elevator neutral territory.”
“Good idea.” He hoisted his daughter, who was slipping down headfirst, back to her original place. The baby had tears rolling down her face.
“Happy baby,” Diana said. Boy, could she make an impression. Why didn’t she just crawl under the sand and make like a hermit.
“Never happier.” His jaw clenched.
What an incredible face he had. Such a loss, him being married. What an awful day. “So, Nick, how’ve you been?” Could she come up with great small talk, or what?
“Fine.” He grunted when the little girl pounded his thigh with her fists. “And you?” he asked.
“Oooh, fine.” She grimaced. Such scintillating dialogue. “Fine-fine-fine-fine-fine,” she added.
“Great” His grin pinched his lips as the child screamed and beat on the backs of his legs, too.
They landed in the lobby seconds later. As they walked, side by side, toward the revolving doors, Diana said, “My father never told me you lived here.”
“Did you expect him to?”
“Not really.”
“I moved in about a year and a half ago right after I found out my sister was pregnant”
“Your sister has a baby, too. How nice for all of you.”
Diana would have had Nick’s babies. Gladly. Life wasn’t fair.
Over the years, Diana had felt many things for Nick, but nothing had prepared her for the jealousy raging through her right now. The thought of another woman, having his baby was almost more than she could bear. Knowing someone had been with him in that way. The most intimate way a man and woman could be when they wanted to express their love to one another, when they wanted to create a new life from that love.
The pain and loss of what could never be between them were immeasurable.
She glanced at the baby. The poor little girl’s face looked like a red tomato with blotches, her nose ran, and her fingers and face were covered in some slimy clear stuff that looked suspiciously like what was coming out of her nose and eyes.
“Your baby’s crying.” Oh, good, Diana. Your conversation is becoming even more brilliant, if that’s possible.
“I know.” Nick grunted as the child’s foot connected with his side again. “She doesn’t stop.”
When the baby’s body tilted downward, headfirst, arms askew, Diana forgot about crushes, fantasies and family feuds and rushed over next to Nick. Instinct made her reach out and grab the baby’s shoulders and arms, then help balance her back on Nick’s hip again.
“Can you hold Jessica for a second?” he asked. “I need to get all this stuff straight”
“Sure.” Diana had never held a baby before, but how hard could it be? Not hard at all, she realized, once Jessica settled in her arms. The baby’s tears immediately stopped as Jessica looked at her with big, wet eyes. Eyes just as beautiful as Nick’s. “Well, Jessica, you’re a cute little thing, aren’t you?”
“Nooooo,” Jessica cooed right back through a big, watery smile.
Diana laughed as they walked toward the doors, using the pad of her thumb to wipe tears away from under the baby’s eyes. Jessica gripped Diana’s thumb and stuck it in her mouth. Nick looked at her with his mouth open, his eyes filled with shock. “I use that antibacterial soap on my hands,” she said. “I don’t think she’ll get a Smith disease.”
He shook his head, his deep baritone full of admiration. “That’s not it. She’s stopped crying.”
She sure had. Diana didn’t want to feel anything special for a child that was not hers and Nic
k’s together. But little Jessica had stopped crying while in her arms. That was a special moment as far as Diana was concerned. She wanted to tell the warm and fuzzy feelings starting to stir around in her belly region to go away, even if that child was chewing on her fingertip, and making relishing smacking noises. Diana didn’t want to think that maybe she tasted good enough for a baby to chew on, but wasn’t good enough anymore for her own father to love.
That she hadn’t been a good enough memory for Nick to hold her close to his heart, as she had held him to hers.
Okay, so she knew it was unrealistic to have hoped that maybe Nick had carried a secret thing for her, too. But, well…a fantasy is a fantasy, and if she had wanted to think that, she could.
But now she had to stop thinking of Nick in fantasy terms. He was married. At this very moment, she held in her arms the product of that union.
Nick bypassed the revolving doors and held the side door open for them. Diana, with a bouncy, laughing Jessica sitting on her hip, went through. She liked the feel of the baby in her arms. “I didn’t know you’d gotten married,” she said tentatively.
“Me? Married?” he said in disbelief.
“Oh, so you’re a single father. Are you raising Jessica on your own, or is this your weekend?”
“I’m not a father. I’ll never be a father. Kids hate me. I don’t know why, but they do. Look at her.”
Diana was so relieved to hear that the baby wasn’t his, that she didn’t know what to say. “I guess, she’s having a bad afternoon.”
“She’s been having a bad year.”
“I just thought—well, you know—you’re living in a family building, and she looks like you. I couldn’t help thinking—”
“Jessica’s Cathy’s baby. My little sister’s.” He cleared his throat “She’s not really my ‘little’ sister. She’s younger than me, but she’s not a kid or anything.”
“I knew what you meant” Diana let his words, as if they were an afternoon April shower in the Sugar Land bayou, wash over her.
Kidnapped / I Got You Babe Page 20
