All a Man Can Be

by Virginia Kantra

  He expected Nicole to point that out. But she nodded. “I’ll tell Louis.”

  Fine. Good. Save him some steps.

  But instead of letting it go, instead of letting her go, he put out a hand to stop her.

  “What is it with you?” he asked.

  Her brows arched. “Excuse me?”

  “There you go again. ‘Excuse me,’” he mimicked savagely, keeping his voice low so that the suit at the end of the bar couldn’t hear. “You don’t have to be so polite all the time. This is a bar, not a damn tea party.”

  “This is a bar,” she agreed steadily. Her pulse thrummed under his hand. “It is also a workplace. My workplace. Which requires a certain level of professional behavior from me.”

  God, she was a trip. “So you’re just being…professional?”

  Color stained her cheeks, but she didn’t back down. “I think it’s best.”

  “Better than, say, hauling off and slugging me one?”

  She blinked rapidly. Aha, so she’d thought about it.

  But she had a reply. Of course she did. She was the professional. “Aggressive behavior is never appropriate.”

  “It is if somebody has it coming.”

  There. It was the closest he could come to an apology. And he thought—well, he hoped—anyway, for a minute there he thought she was going to smile.

  But she shook her head and said, like she was quoting or some damn thing, “I am responsible for my own actions.” Her shoulders squared. With painful earnestness she said, “And it occurred to me after you…after I— It’s quite possible I did something to mislead you.”

  Sure it was. Just like it was possible Little Bo Peep was head of a vast international crime syndicate and the Big Bad Wolf had gotten a bum rap.

  “Forget it,” Mark said. “You didn’t do anything.”

  “Yes, I did,” she insisted. “I—well, I touched you.”

  This was too heavy. She was too sincere. “Yeah? What did you do? Make a grab for my butt?”

  “Your arm. I touched your arm.”

  He ran his thumb over the smooth skin of her inner wrist, where the blood beat wildly. “You mean, like I’m doing right now?”

  Her brows drew together. “Is this some kind of trick?”

  “Nah. Call it a test. Maybe I’m trying to see how far this responsibility thing of yours goes. Because here I am, touching you, and so far you’re doing a real good job of not taking that to mean I think we should have sex. Although, you know, I do.”

  He watched in satisfaction as her blue eyes widened. Hey, he’d never claimed to be that nice a guy. But he couldn’t let her keep taking the blame for his fear and bad temper.

  He cleared his throat. “What I’m saying is, whether I’m making a move or not, you seem to be controlling yourself pretty well. So just because you thank me for helping you sell a sandwich doesn’t mean I’m entitled to jump your bones.”

  This time she did smile, a real one, and cracked something in his chest wide open.

  “What you’re saying is that you are as responsible for your actions as I am for mine.”

  It sounded like something Tess would say. Or their mother, after one of her A.A. meetings.

  Way too heavy.

  He didn’t “do” sincere.

  He for damn sure wasn’t sensitive.

  And the distance he’d been so careful to set between them was shrinking much too fast.

  He leered at her. “Maybe. Although, like I said, if you’re inclined that way, I’m available.”

  Only instead of getting all offended and running away, Nicole treated him to another of those melt-your-bones smiles.

  “No, you’re not,” she said. “At least, not now. Aren’t you leaving for your—appointment—soon?”

  The reminder caught him like a loose boom, smack across the chest.

  He let go of her wrist to look at his watch.

  “Twenty minutes,” he said. “Joe’s coming on at two, and then I’ll be back tonight to close.”

  “I appreciate it,” Nicole said.

  She’d insisted on it, Mark thought wryly, but it didn’t grate the way it had a week ago.

  “It’s no big deal.”

  She hesitated. “It must be fairly important. You look dressed up.”

  He’d pulled on khakis in place of his usual jeans, and a long-sleeved shirt with a collar.

  “Yeah, I’m doing my responsible citizen impersonation today.”

  No point confirming the lawyer’s worst fears right off the bat.

  “You look very nice.”

  He shrugged to hide his discomfort and his pleasure. “Hey, if it works for you, babe, I’ll go get my jacket out of the car.”

  Nicole placed a hand on her chest. “I’m not sure my heart can take the excitement.”

  He grinned. She could be pretty cute. “Too bad I don’t have a tie.”

  “Do you want one?” she asked. Like it was a real offer.

  “Do you have one?” he asked, amused.

  “Oh.” She twiddled the rings on her fingers. “Probably.”

  She had a tie. Her boyfriend’s?

  He didn’t ask. It wasn’t any of his business.

  Although married-Ted-with-children should have been enough to put her off men for life.

  He said lightly, “You thinking of requiring ties in the bar now? With loaners on hand for the slobs?”

  She shook her head. “No. I bought it for my—” Her lips closed.

  Do not ask.

  It’s none of your business.

  “Boyfriend?” he inquired.

  “My boss.” She colored, in the sudden, painful way that blondes—real blondes—could do. “Well, actually—”

  Ah, jeez, it was coming, another of those earnest revelations that made him feel like he should apologize for being male.

  “He was sort of both. At least, I thought he was. Anyway, about three months ago, he had a big meeting, with some investors, he said, and I bought him the tie as a gesture. You know, welcome to the big leagues, Mr. Executive?”

  Mark didn’t know, but he nodded.

  “Anyway, Kevin got back from this meeting, and—”

  “He flopped?”

  “No.” She smiled, without humor and without joy. “He’d sold the company. Leaving me with a nice fat payout on my stock options and no job.”

  “He didn’t need his chief financial officer to explain the books to the new boss?”

  “He didn’t need me. In any capacity,” she added with painful precision.

  What a jerk.

  “So you kept the tie.”

  “It’s in my car.” He must have showed his surprise, because she added defensively, “Well, we didn’t have any children or pets. And he took my alarm clock. It only seemed fair to keep custody of the tie.”

  Mark stiffened. If he stopped to think about it, he knew Nicole didn’t mean anything by her comment. But with the lawyer’s visit looming, any custody reference hit a little too close to the bone.

  “You drive around with it? Like some sort of—” Scalp, he thought. Trophy. “—souvenir?”

  Nicole reached for the reassurance of her rings. Mark was doing that narrow-eyed-squint thing again. Sexy. Dangerous. Effective. She wondered if he practiced it in the mirror, or if it came naturally.

  “Does it matter?” she asked. “I mean, I have a tie. You need one. Just take it.”

  He shook his head. “No. Thanks, though,” he said, and drifted away like smoke along the bar.

  Frustrated, she stared at his lean back as he cleared the businessman’s empty glass.

  He’d done it again.

  She had made an overture, an offering, and he had rejected her. What in heaven’s name had she said or done wrong this time?

  Unless…had she offended him by suggesting, perhaps, that he didn’t own a tie? Or didn’t know how to dress? Or…?

  Oh, God, she was doing it again.

  What Mark thought, what he felt, was none
of her business. How he acted was not her responsibility. He’d come right out and told her so.

  He pulled another beer, his strong, tanned hands easy on the tap.

  Resentment churned in her stomach. She was an intelligent woman, a good person, with a degree from the University of Chicago and her own business. She had recently read her way through an entire shelf of experts—educated, insightful, positive people who talked on Oprah and had strings of letters after their names, and her reactions were being questioned by Lucifer the Bartender.

  What made it worse was he was right.

  She could barely forgive him.

  Nicole was right. He should have taken the tie.

  Mark slouched deeper into one of the leather armchairs provided by the Chicago law firm of Johnson, Neil and Younger for their waiting clients. The armchair was deep and comfortable, the walls were paneled wood, the plants were stiff and glossy, and the receptionist was stiff, glossy and suspicious.

  The fourth time she stopped clicking away on her computer to glare at him—what did she think he was going to do, walk off with the lobby copies of Modern Maturity?—he deliberately caught her eye and grinned. She turned pink under her powder and dropped her gaze to her computer. She didn’t look up again.

  Which left him with nothing to do but stare at the portraits of dead white guys on the walls. All of them wore ties.

  “Mr. DeLucca? Thank you for waiting. I’m Jane Gilbert.”

  He stood. Turned.

  No tie, was his first thought. She was female, she was young—well, forty—and the look in her eye was sharp and very much alive. Nicole had the assured veneer of education, beauty and privilege. This woman was hard as oak all the way through.

  She raised her brows. “Oh, my.”

  He scowled. She wasn’t hitting on him, was she?

  And then she held out her hand and smiled. “You look just like him.”

  Him. The kid. Daniel.

  All of a sudden it was hard to breathe the refrigerated air of the lobby. If he’d been wearing a tie he would have tugged on it.

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said flatly.

  She nodded once and released his hand. “I can show you his picture.”

  So then he had to follow her, down several hallways carpeted in deep gray to her office. Her desk was cluttered. A narrow window in the corner sealed in the air and admitted a little light.

  “Do you want something to drink?” Jane Gilbert asked. “Coffee?”

  Maybe she wanted to see if he dribbled. “No, thanks.”

  She inserted herself into the narrow space behind her desk and sat. And waited…like he was going to open his mouth and hand her a topic to flog him with.

  Mark had a CO once who used the same tactic, so he sat back and kept his yap shut. Lawyers billed by the hour, didn’t they? So she’d talk soon enough.

  She did. She leaned forward and said, “Tell me why Elizabeth Wainscott would not have told you there was a possibility you had a child together.”

  His pulse jumped. That was getting to the point. But he didn’t mind. Not really. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t spent the past week and a half asking himself the same question. By now he’d even thought up some answers.

  “How much do you know about Betsy and me?”

  “Why don’t you tell me what you want me to know?”

  Right. He struggled for words that would describe what it had been like, what they had been like, without being too damning.

  “Well…we were really young.”

  Jane Gilbert nodded.

  “I was nineteen. Fresh out of high school. No idea what to do with myself except get into trouble. Which I was good at. Do you want details?”

  “Do you feel they’re necessary?”

  “Not really. Anyway, Betsy was younger than I was, just as clueless but with a lot more opportunities. Her folks rented a big house right on the Pines Golf Course for the summer. Only Betsy wasn’t into golf.”

  “What was she into?” the lawyer asked quietly.

  “That summer?” He smiled, remembering. Little blond Betsy Wainscott, so pretty and so sweet and so young. Young and dumb, both of them. “Me.”

  Jane Gilbert nodded again. “All right. That explains the pregnancy. It doesn’t explain why Elizabeth wouldn’t tell you about it.”

  Mark rolled his shoulders to relieve the tension there. “Her parents found out about me. About us. Which was not that hard, since Betsy had been sneaking out of the house for weeks. Her daddy told her I was no good, which was mostly true, and they all went back to Chicago. End of story.”

  “Except for the child.”

  His gut tightened. “Yeah. Except for that.”

  “Did you ever make any attempt to keep in contact with her?”

  “I called. Every day for the first week, a couple of times after that.” The memories now were just as sharp and much more bitter. “I even wrote her a letter.”

  “And received no response?”

  “I got the letter back. Unopened. And a visit from our local law enforcement telling me to stop hassling her or the Wainscotts would file charges. Since I wasn’t a juvie anymore, that could have been big trouble. So I rolled over.”

  “And Elizabeth never made any attempt to contact you?”

  Ah, hell. The bitch of it was, he didn’t know.

  “If she did—” He stopped.

  Jane Gilbert waited. He couldn’t tell what she wanted him to say, so he went with the truth.

  “If she tried to reach me anytime after that September, I might not have known. I was in the Marines.”

  “A patriotic choice,” the lawyer remarked.

  Mark smiled thinly. “No choice at all. It was that or jail.”

  His sister would have snapped at him to shut up. Jane Gilbert raised her penciled brows and said, “Please continue.”

  “I got arrested for liberating some old guy’s boat and taking it for a joyride. He offered to drop the charges if I enlisted.”

  Jane Gilbert glanced down at the open folder on her desk. “Because, as I understand the story, he was impressed that you were apprehended only after you went to the rescue of another boat in distress.”

  Mark shrugged. “Sunday sailors. They—” He stopped as realization struck. “You knew.”

  “I am Daniel’s court-appointed guardian, Mr. DeLucca.”

  Swell. “So you had me investigated.”

  She sat back, comfortable with her decision and confident of her power. “You should know that Robert Wainscott will do everything in his power to prevent you from getting custody of his grandson. The fact that you didn’t know about Daniel’s existence is in your favor, but if there is anything else in your past that could give Mr. Wainscott ammunition—”

  “Tell you now and you can shoot me for him?” Mark suggested tightly.

  “—it would be better to get it out in the open now,” Jane said.

  “Better for who?”

  He didn’t want—he wasn’t ready for—the responsibility of a kid. And he was no great prize as a father. Hell, he didn’t even know for sure he was the father yet.

  Jane Gilbert rested her fingertips on her desk. “What is it exactly you’re hoping for regarding Daniel, Mr. DeLucca?”

  Like he would tell her. Like he even knew.

  He held her gaze. “Why don’t we hold off on the heart-to-hearts till the lab tests come back, okay?”

  The Gilbert woman inclined her head. “That seems reasonable. Have you had a DNA sample taken yet?”

  “I’ve got an appointment at five.”

  “I won’t keep you, then.” She stood.

  He was being dismissed. Fine. Mark stood, too, wiping his sweaty palms on his thighs. He needed to leave anyway. He needed—

  What is it exactly you’re hoping for?

  “Can I see it?” The words felt dragged from his throat.

  “See…?”

  “The picture. You said you had a picture of the kid.”

  Th
e lawyer’s facade cracked into a smile. “Of course.” She flipped to the front of the file on her desk and turned it around so he could see. “That’s Daniel,” she said quietly.

  He didn’t know what he expected.

  You look just like him.

  But staring at the photograph of the boy who might be his son, Mark didn’t feel that jolt of recognition he had seen in the lawyer’s eyes. He felt…nothing, he decided, ignoring the rapid beating of his heart.

  It was just the face of a kid he didn’t know, with the soft, unused look most kids’ faces had.

  It didn’t match Mark’s memories of Betsy.

  Maybe he looked like Tess, a little: the same dark, straight hair and dark, arched brows and the sensitive pout of the mouth. Only the boy’s eyes were dark, too.

  Like Mark’s.

  Mark realized he had been staring too long at the picture and broke it off to glare at the lawyer.

  “How’s he doing? With his mother—” Dead, Mark thought. “—gone?”

  Jane Gilbert hesitated. “I believe Daniel is adjusting as well as can be expected. The Wainscotts arranged for him to see a grief counselor.”

  “How did she…?” Mark chopped the air with his hand.

  “A car accident,” Jane said gently.

  What a waste. What a fricking waste. His own mother, Dizzy DeLucca, might have done every other dumb thing she could think of to screw up her life, but at least she’d never gone and gotten herself killed.

  “How long ago?” Mark asked.

  “Two months.”

  “Took you long enough to find me,” he said.

  Jane Gilbert met his accusation coolly. “You’re the one who stipulated any ‘heart-to-heart’ discussion of the situation would be premature.”

  “Okay, cute,” he said. “Why don’t I come back after they scrape the inside of my cheek or whatever and you can convince me of the error of my ways?”

  She smiled. But she said, “Unfortunately, I’m busy for the rest of the afternoon.”

  He thought of Nicole. He’d promised to close. But—

  “Tonight, then. I’ll buy you dinner.”

  She shook her head. “Tonight I have to attend a very boring fund-raiser on behalf of my firm. Although…”

  He grinned at her, experienced enough to gauge when a woman was falling. “You reconsidering?”