Forgotten Father

by Carol Rose

  “So you made a lot of friends,” she concluded, letting her skepticism glimmer in her eyes.

  “Yes.”

  “People you’re still in contact with,” she prodded in gentle disbelief.

  “Yes,” he said after the briefest of hesitations.

  “Guys you call when you need to cry in your beer because your latest woman friend dumped you.”

  Delanie waited, curious how he’d react to her tongue-in-cheek comment. Mitchell Riese wasn’t a social misfit by any definition, but she couldn’t see him crying over a woman. It was hard enough to envision him being cast aside.

  He smiled faintly. “It’s happened.”

  “But not very often,” she said, making a guess. “You’ve probably made a career out of being the dumper rather than the dumpee.”

  He looked at her for a long moment. “We all take our lumps along the way.”

  Reaching up, she brushed her hand along the fern’s frond, smiling at him. “I’ll bet you stole your first kiss here.”

  Mitchell struggled for a long moment with the urge to cross the path and steal one now.

  Could she really have amnesia?

  And if she did, wouldn’t that make it easier for him to woo his way back into her bed? With her memory impaired, she wouldn’t recall his furious denunciation by the lake. Framed as she was by the lush vegetation, she looked arousing and elemental. True, she was still the same woman, the same sexy-as-hell redhead who’d seduced half The Cedars out of an old lonely man.

  But she was also the same woman Mitchell had made love to for hours that hot, sultry night so long ago.

  He remembered her well and if he knew her motives, he could still enjoy her in bed, still dabble in the erotic visions playing through his mind without letting down his guard again. Hadn’t he always done that? Made love to beautiful women while keeping his heart aloof and unharmed? He absolutely knew Delanie’s measure now and that knowledge enabled him to safely play with fire.

  Shifting his thoughts as he adjusted himself on the bench, he asked her, “So where’d you steal your first kiss?”

  “On the swing in my backyard,” she said promptly. “He was nine. I was ten. The world did not stop revolving.”

  Mitchell chuckled. “Not a very skillful kisser, I’m guessing.”

  “No,” she said roguishly, “but I’ve improved with practice.”

  A door slammed shut in Mitchell’s mind. He didn’t want to think about her “practice,” about the other men who’d had her before and after him. It was sobering enough to know without a doubt that there had been others.

  A woman like Delanie wouldn’t be alone often.

  “Are you married?” he asked abruptly.

  She lifted surprised eyes to his. “No. Why?”

  Mitchell immediately cursed himself for betraying interest in the subject. What the hell was the matter with him? He knew enough not to show that he had a stake in an active negotiation. And he didn’t have a stake in whether or not Delanie was married. Not unless it would effect his securing The Cedars.

  He shrugged. “Just wondering.”

  From across the three foot wide path separating them, she met his gaze with speculation on her face.

  He’d initiated this conversation for the covert purpose of checking the legitimacy of her amnesia claim. Instead, he found himself discussing his own past and blurting out questions he really didn’t want to know the answer to. After all, would he want her or trust her less if she were married?

  Hell, no.

  “So is that nine-year old boy you first kissed now just a faint and fond memory?” he asked, determined to get his agenda back on track.

  She looked surprised. “Oh, no. We’re still good friends. I saw him last year when I visited my mother in Michigan.”

  “Does he kiss any better?” Mitchell asked, his voice dry.

  Delanie laughed. “Not that I know of. He has a wife now and the cutest little baby son.”

  “Ah.” Mitchell ignored the tiny spurt of relief. What difference did it make if her childhood friend wasn’t now her lover? “So I take it that your mother and father are also divorced. You said you visited your mother?”

  “Yes,” she responded slowly, “but they aren’t divorced. My father is dead.”

  “Recently?” he asked, prompted by the sudden shadow on her face.

  “No.” Delanie brushed a hand through her hair. “He died of a heart attack when I was eleven.”

  “A heart attack?” Mitchell echoed in surprise. “Was he a young man?”

  “Yes,” her smile wavered and then firmed, notching up several levels in wattage. “Forty-three. But he died of a massive coronary, all the same. He was a wonderful, brilliant man. Very, very special.”

  “That must have been a real loss,” Mitchell offered in response to the dimmed light in her eyes and her over-bright smile. The words felt awkward and rusty in his throat, as if he were attempting to comfort an enemy’s grief.

  She was the enemy, he reminded himself. Erotic and luscious, but still on the other side.

  At least until he could get her on her back…or standing up against a wall. Still on the other side, but very, very desirable.

  He might even be able to seduce The Cedars out of her like she’d stolen it from his grandfather.

  As soon as the thought occurred to him, he dismissed it. For better or worse, he didn’t play the game the way Delanie Carlyle did. He was perfectly willing to pretend to play by her rules, but he couldn’t forget his own standards. Not even to rediscover her delectable body, would he lie. He meant to reclaim his birthright on his own terms.

  Yet, at this tenuous moment, the battle between them seemed peculiarly distant.

  From the opposite bench, Delanie smiled sadly and said, “We were driving alone in the car, my father and I,…I don’t remember why. His work kept him very busy and my mother did most of the parenting. But that day, we were alone together on a lonely stretch of road….”

  Mitchell watched her, the cloudy reminiscence in her eyes, snaring his heightened attention.

  The sad smile lingered on her face, shifting into something more rueful, but no less naked. “He suddenly fell forward over the steering wheel, just like that, and the car veered off the road into a ditch.”

  Into a ditch? Mitchell tried to identify the elusive memory those words tickled.

  Delanie speared her fingers through the hair at the nape of her neck, lifting the red-gold curtain and pressing it against the back of her head.

  “I make myself talk about it every now and then,” she confessed, the shadows still in her eyes. “Kind of a cheap therapy.”

  “It must have been very hard for you,” he said. “Did he die instantly? Couldn’t anything be done?”

  She shrugged, raking her fingers back through her hair to straighten it. “It’s hard to know. I didn’t know what to do for him and we weren’t found for several hours.”

  “You weren’t found?” he echoed in disbelief. She’d been alone with her father’s corpse for hours?

  She shrugged again. “It was kind of a rural area. Some cars drove by, but no one stopped for a long time.”

  “And you were there with him…alone while he died?” Mitchell asked in shocked tones, envisioning a child’s horror.

  “Yes,” she admitted after a pause. “It was very difficult.”

  “I can imagine,” he said, searching her face. “How did you deal with it?”

  “Not very well,” she said with a deep sigh. “You know how kids always think things that happen are their fault—“

  “How could this have been your fault?” he demanded. “You were eleven.”

  Delanie shrugged. “You said it yourself. ‘Could anything have been done?’ Yes. Maybe. If we’d had help.”

  “So?”

  “For a long time,” she said slowly, “I believed I should have been able to…move him over and…drive the car to get help. It wasn’t like I was a baby.”

  �
�You were eleven,” he said again.

  “Some kids drive at eleven,” she replied. “I recently saw an article on-line about a seven year-old who’d driven on her father’s lap before. When he collapsed in the car, she drove him to the hospital.”

  “Had you driven on your father’s lap?” Mitchell asked, hearing the faint irritation in his own voice. How could she blame herself for this?

  “No, I hadn’t driven before,” she admitted, “but how hard would it have been? Kids drive all the time.”

  “Not frightened eleven year-olds who’ve never handled a car before and, particularly not when their father is collapsed on the seat next to them,” Mitchell said with acerbity.

  “I know.” She nodded. “I really do know that. But for a long, long time it didn’t seem that way.”

  “It must have been very hard to lose your father and blame yourself for it,” he said gently, getting up from the bench to sit next to her.

  She scooted over to make room for him, a smile wavering on her face.

  “It was hard. I’m afraid I didn’t handle it well at all, which made it worse for my mother. It wasn’t enough to lose her husband like that, but then she had her only child blank out the whole event.”

  Mitchell frowned. “What do you mean ‘blank out’?”

  Delanie glanced up at him, her green gaze seeming to search his. After a moment, she said reluctantly, “I actually blocked the event out of my memory. Forgot it for a year or so. They call it a ‘disassociative episode.’ It’s apparently a thing some people’s brains do when they’re upset.”

  Searching her face with a probing gaze, he tried to read whether or not she was lying. It didn’t seem that way to him at this minute.

  Was the whole story about her father’s death a lie to bolster her claim of amnesia?

  Only she hadn’t claimed it. True, she’d told him about her father’s death, but he couldn’t imagine an easier story to disprove, if checked on. That sort of thing made the papers.

  Sitting here with her, the fresh scent from her hair tickling his senses, the luminous green of her eyes melting some of the ice in his chest, Mitchell found himself believing her. In spite of everything between them.

  Even lying, cheating goldiggers loved their fathers and grieved when they died.

  Mitchell reached an arm around her shoulders and drew her against his chest.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, resting his chin on her head. “I’m sorry you had it so tough.”

  Sitting here in this quiet corner of his grandmother’s conservatory with his arms around Delanie and her head on his shoulder, he couldn’t find a flicker of interest in doing battle with her. Not now, anyway.

  ******

  Mitchell put the report he’d been studying back on his grandfather’s desk and tilted back in the desk chair. He’d made the old man’s office his base of operations since working from The Cedars. Just being in the room brought back a wealth of warm memories.

  Even now at the end of a long day studying balance sheets and cash flow reports, being in this room left him feeling nostalgic.

  He closed the cash flow file folder and rubbed the back of his neck, noting how far the afternoon had advanced by the shadows outside the window. He’d been working steadily since noon.

  A knock sounded at his closed door.

  “Come in,” he said absently, sifting through the papers on top of the desk.

  The door opened and Delanie stepped into the room. In one hand, she carried what looked like a bottle of champagne and clutched the ribbons tethering a vivid bunch of helium balloons. Balanced in the other hand was a small cake ablaze with lit candles that cast a glow on her face.

  “What the—“

  A mischievous grin lit her eyes as she nudged the door shut with one foot. “Happy birthday!”

  Mitchell looked at her in bemusement. He’d almost forgotten the date himself. How had she known?

  Wearing a soft green pantsuit that clung deliciously to her curves, Delanie crossed the room, humming the birthday song, the blazing cake in her outstretched hand.

  “No one should celebrate their birthday alone,” she said, setting the bottle of wine on his desk before she lowered the flaming cake on top of the files and papers littering the desktop.

  With the number of candles she’d put on the thing, they were in real danger of starting a fire.

  “It’s not a big deal,” he commented, watching her tie the bunch of balloons to the arm of a chair on the opposite side of his desk.

  Glancing up, she looked at him through narrowed eyes. “I was right about you. You’re lousy at celebrating. Haven’t you ever heard of living for the moment?”

  “Yes,” he responded dryly. “It’s usually the motto of people who don’t like to work.”

  Delanie picked up the bottle of wine and handed it to him. “Spoken like a man who’s forgotten how to play. Open that.”

  He received the bottle with amusement and watched as she crossed the room to the alcove that hid a small kitchenette.

  “Aha! Cups.” She swung back to face him, triumphantly bearing two paper cups. “Open. Open!”

  Mitchell obediently peeled back the foil and wrestled with the cork till it surrendered with a soft pop.

  Splashing some of the chilled wine into the cups she’d provided, his gaze fell on the small cake, still blazing on his desk.

  “Think you got enough candles?” he asked wryly, wondering if she thought him so much older than herself.

  “Well,” Delanie said with what he recognized as mock seriousness, “I found out that you’re twenty-nine today. But I thought it might be more appropriate to celebrate your spiritual age.”

  “Thanks,” he said, crossing the room to place the open champagne bottle in the sink. “And that would be…?”

  “Fifty-seven,” she said promptly.

  Mitchell laughed. “Then your spiritual age must be—“

  “Ninety-four.”

  “More like four or five years old, from the looks of it.” Amused by her silliness, he shook his head and lifted his cup.

  Delanie reached out, her hand on his arm, stilling his movement. “Let’s toast. To many more celebrations.”

  He glanced down at her, the moment seeming a snapshot in time. In the sweep of a few minutes, she’d brought light and laughter into the room.

  Just because it was his birthday. And birthdays should be celebrated, not spent alone.

  Putting her cup on the corner of his desk after taking a sip, Delanie grabbed his arm and tugged him forward. “You have to make a wish and blow out your candles before the smoke alarm goes off.”

  Laughing, he allowed her to urge him into his chair, the still blazing cake on the desk in front of him. He felt touched and foolish, all at once. Not since his grandmother’s death when he was a teenager had he had a birthday cake with candles to blow out.

  Ignoring the sudden rush of emotion clogging his throat, Mitchell took a breath.

  “Don’t forget the wish!”

  To please her, he closed his eyes and hesitated, only one wish rising in his mind. That this moment would actually be the way life really and that his laughing, sexy redhead would keep wanting to bring him birthday celebrations.

  “Blow!” she urged when he hesitated too long for her taste. “How complicated can a wish be?”

  Mitchell opened his eyes and blew out the candles, choosing not to think about how tangled was this particular wish.

  “Here.” She flew over to the kitchenette and rummaged through the cabinets till she found a knife and two saucers. Advancing with purpose on the smoldering cake, she hacked out a wedge with a haphazard flourish.

  Mitchell frowned, remarking humorously, “You’d think a woman with an eye as good as yours could do a better job cutting a cake.”

  “Celebratory cakes are supposed to be cut with more passion than precision,” she pronounced loftily as she slid the piece of cake onto the saucer, extinguished candles and all.

&nbs
p; Lifting one of the candles, she brought it to her mouth and licked off the frosting.

  Mitchell stared at her, a bolt of heat lightening sizzling through his body.

  God, she was beautiful. Warm and funny. Smart and sexy. He wanted her right then. Here in his grandfather’s lair, on top of the desk, in the chair. Any where. He wanted to kiss the smile off her face, wanted to again hold her naked body against his.

  All because she’d brought him a silly cake and teased him into sharing her bright, particular madness.

  He couldn’t remember a moment quite like this. An instance as light and shimmering as a soap bubble. Out of some whimsical impulse, she’d splashed sunlight over him. For no ulterior reason, she’d brought him a celebration.

  Still clutching the saucer with its untidy spill of cake crumbs, he said, “Thank you for the celebration.”

  ***

  “What did you say?” Mitchell snapped, drawing Ben Norton’s attention from the papers in the resort manager’s hand.

  Ben looked up from his desk, blinking. “I…just said we’re almost ready for the Goldberg wedding. Oh, oh, yes. We’re referring to it by another name, aren’t we? Like a code name. We wouldn’t want the paparazzi camping in the woods before the big event.”

  “Not that part,” Mitchell said, irritably. “What did you say about Ms. Carlyle keeping the workmen out of the way? What workmen?”

  “Oh.” Ben’s worried frown disappeared. “Yes, I did mention that. Delanie arranged to start the renovation on the villa this week—“

  “What?” Mitchell thundered.

  “Yes,” the manager faltered. “I know it seems like bad timing what with the ‘Keiner’ wedding and all the guests that entails, but Delanie’s arranged to keep all the work equipment and trucks up at the villa. So starting the renovation now shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Biting back a searing retort, Mitchell finished his business with the manager and stalked out of the office.

  So they were starting the renovation of the villa? Without so much as a word to him, she was forging ahead with her plans. Ignoring his request to make the decision jointly, she was acting like she owned the whole damned place.

  Not if he could help it, by God. No matter how much he’d enjoyed her company the last week since they’d talked in the conservatory. No matter if she’d brought him birthday cake and sang to him. The Cedars was still half his.