She wondered if he just made habitual reservations at all the top restaurants. Knowing her dad, and the constant business meetings he had, that could well be the case.
Her father sat at the table alone, perfectly composed. Jenna let out a sigh of relief when she saw her stepmother wasn’t with him. That would have put a severe stranglehold on this dinner.
The lighting was muted and the guests reverent and quiet. Waiters unobtrusively glided here and there, offering advice and taking orders. It was elegant, modern, chic, and tasteful. The best Manhattan could boast. She’d only been here once before, but remembered the meal was out-of-this-world delicious.
Josh held Jenna’s chair as she sat, and then took his own place. Her dad, having stood when she arrived, sat as soon as she was seated. Here we go.
“Jenna. Joshua,” Bill said in greeting, looking them over with a steady gaze. If he was as nervous as her, he didn’t show it.
“Dad.” Jenna let her eyes roam the restaurant. She rather hoped she’d see a celebrity.
“I’m impressed with what you’ve done for yourself, Jenna,” her dad started. He had his hands folded in front of him with his menu set to the side. He obviously came here regularly. Expensive taste, indeed.
“Thank you. I approve of your decision to get out of the thug world. Though I wished you were on the other side of the table.”
“I make a better living where I am.”
“You never had a problem making a living.”
“I deal with more sensible people, as well.”
“True enough.”
The waiter came by for the drink order. Her dad ordered a forty-year-old scotch. Knowing he would be more comfortable if she joined him, she ordered the same. Josh chose a bourbon and got an approving nod from Bill.
“I didn’t like finding out you were in trouble from a newspaper,” Bill said, his eyes focused intently on Jenna. She didn’t miss the accusation in his voice.
Her hackles rose in indignation. If she still had been a kid, she’d roll her eyes, tell him the phone worked both ways, and then call him a bad father for talking down to her when she was the one in a crisis. As an adult, she just ignored him because she got the feeling she was being baited.
“I want to help you,” he added when he clearly realized she had no plan to answer.
Ha! It worked. How do you like me now?
“What’s in it for you?” she asked, composed.
Bill sighed and glanced at Josh uncomfortably. “Let’s clear the air, shall we? Usually I wouldn’t talk about this in front of a stranger, but I understand you need Joshua along for protection. For that reason, I allowed him to come to dinner. However, I would rather he waited at the bar for this conversation.”
“You allowed him to come,” Jenna said quietly. She stared at her dad. He was older, set in his ways, but not as daunting as he had once been. He was just a man. An older man. Like the general. As she didn’t need anything from him, he had no power here. No power over her. She was no longer twelve years old.
She had to keep reminding herself of that.
Jenna steeled herself to take the plunge. “Josh is my family.” She hesitated a moment. She meant it, but it was still weird to say out loud. More set in stone—especially with him sitting beside her. She kept herself from glancing at him, gathered her courage, and kept going. “He’s more my family than you are, Dad. More than you ever were, even. What goes on with me goes on with him. He isn’t here because someone employed him. He is here for me. He knows my sordid history, and I know his. Without him, you don’t get me. Make your choice now so we can stop wasting each other’s time.”
Bill stared at her with his slate-gray eyes. He was looking for an angle, looking for holes in her defense. She realized now why she was so hellbent on her walls. Why she was so good at fortifying her barriers to keep everyone out. It was a skill she had perfected through her childhood. Her dad had made her a pro, and now he was coming up against the roadblock of his own making.
“Okay,” her dad said grudgingly. It was testament to how much her father wanted this that he was agreeing to her terms. It was a first among many firsts. “You asked what’s in it for me. My daughter—that’s what’s in it for me. Way back when, I told your mother I would make a terrible father…”
Jenna couldn’t control her sudden intake of breath.
She was wrong: her dad did know how to poke holes in her defense.
She felt Josh put his warm hand on her thigh. It was welcomed.
“I told her I worked too much,” her father continued. “That I didn’t have a sensitive bone in my body. But…I could deny her nothing. She was never happier than when she was with you, and that happiness was multiplied tenfold when we three were together. We had a good time, while it lasted.”
The waiter came for their order. Jenna wouldn’t taste whatever it was, so she echoed everything Josh said.
When they’d all ordered and the waiter disappeared, Bill went on. “When your mother died, I knew you blamed me for remarrying, probably hated me for it, but you needed a mother. You needed someone to take care of you.”
“I wasn’t really taken care of.”
“Neither was your stepmother.” Bill’s chin rose a fraction, his eyes just stopping from flicking to Josh. “With you, I didn’t know how to bridge the gap. With her…she wasn’t your mother.”
There was a silent pause as the tide rolled out.
“She is divorcing me, you know,” Bill said as he rolled his scotch around in his snifter.
Jenna grappled with what it all meant. Her thoughts were all over the place. What she’d just heard was like looking through a lens—she had to go back over thirteen years of memories, and see what new meaning cropped up. She barely heard Bill shifting gears. When she did register what he had said, she spat out, “I hadn’t heard.”
The man could unsettle the pope.
“No, you wouldn’t have. You walked away and didn’t look back.”
“I had a crappy childhood.”
“Yes.” There was a pause for “I’m sorry,” but it remained unsaid. Meant, but not said. It wasn’t good enough. Jenna said as much.
Her father sighed, doing his best to continue to ignore Josh. Josh, in turn, was looking as uncomfortable as she felt. Jenna wondered if maybe she should have sent him away. This had been ten years in the making, and she would be a dummy to think her father wasn’t going to pursue her eventually. She was a failure to a man that abhorred failing. It was only a matter of time before he would try again. He wasn’t a man who allowed loose ends.
Her dad’s words cut through her mental marathon. “Jenna, I want us to keep in touch. You are an adult now, your own woman. I want to try again. I want to try harder.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Jenna insisted. She didn’t want it to be this easy. She wanted him to suffer like she had suffered.
“What do you want from me?” he asked, suddenly looking older and tired.
Before she realized what she was saying, it came out of her mouth. “I want you to admit you were the reason Mom died.”
Once out, it couldn’t be taken back. Time froze, heart her skipped beats, the world waited. Her dad’s eyes lost their focus, lost their edge. He crumbled from within, years of guilt eroding everything; the mention of the truth was enough to bring him crashing down. The pupil had surpassed the teacher.
In this, she wished it wasn’t so.
“Yes.” It was a word. A syllable. It was enough.
Jenna looked at Josh with tears in her eyes. She did wish she’d sent him away. This was a private conversation. A damning conversation. Some things didn’t need to be said in front of significant others.
Josh looked away, understanding. “Shall I wait at the bar?” he asked quietly.
Before she could nod, her dad said, “Let him stay. The worst is done. No sense in excluding him now. Besides, I want my willingness to grovel witnessed.”
It was amazing how fast her father
could bounce back. She had just thrown him a crushing blow and here he was, a second later, trying to lighten the mood and bring everyone back around. She should ignore him, follow through with what she was telling Josh, if only to prove he didn’t have sway over her anymore, but he was right. She cringed to admit it, but yeah, the worst was out. She would end up telling it all to him anyway, so he might as well hear it from the horse’s filthy mouth.
She turned back to her dad with resolve. “I’ve hated you since that day.”
“I know.”
“I still hate you.”
“I accept that. I still hate myself in many ways. I can’t fix what went wrong with your mother, other than to give up that line of work. And I have. As soon as I could get out, I made the switch. But I want to fix what went wrong with you, Jenna. I want to work on that. Your mother would have wanted us to have a relationship.”
“Only her?”
Her dad gave her a reproachful look. So she hadn’t completely grown up, so what?
“I just…I don’t know, you know? Why now?” Jenna asked, straightening her back.
“Sometimes it takes realizing what you’ll lose to understand what you have. I don’t want to lose you.”
“You already have.”
“I don’t believe that. There must be some way I can mend this bridge. Start to mend this bridge, Jenna. It will take years, I know that, but I want to be invited to your wedding. I want to see your kids. Maybe I don’t deserve it, but I want to try and make good, at least for the next generation. I’m getting older—you come to realize how important family is in the end. How important it is to have someone. Your kids are going to need a grandfather to spoil them. If not for me, or yourself, at least think of your kids.”
Her father was in the business of making compelling arguments. That she should be shocked at the gravity of what he was saying showed how little credit she gave him.
Jenna looked at Josh. At the man she would marry and hopefully have kids with. She saw the affirmation of their love in his eyes. His mushy devotion. The mirror of her own feelings, and the weight that settled on her heart. It squeezed until all she could feel was the need to get so close to him that she fused with him forever. She couldn’t stop her eyes from glistening with held-back tears.
Erika was right. She could be really irritating these days.
“Let’s get one thing clear,” she said, reaching for anger to hide the tender moment with Josh as she turned back to her dad. “You did fail with me.” Her father nodded at her. This was as low as she’d ever seen him. This was as close to groveling as he would ever come. Knowing her dad like she did, that meant something. “Okay, look, there is one thing I need. One way you can help me, if I make it out of this. The company is trying to deny our claim for restitution for personal damages. They will give us our agreed bonus, but other than that, it is up to legal counsel. I want to take them to the cleaners. You and your cronies are better than those I am working with. Help me—free of charge, obviously—and I will consider that a payment toward the debt you owe me.”
She saw her dad’s legal brain fire up, his eyes burning with a challenge. She hated that she recognized that look. It was the one that stared back at her from her mirror. She had to push yet another damning morsel of this night away.
Josh sat back as Jenna described the various shootings. He was proud of her for sticking up for herself, and for him, but still—this shit was uncomfortable. It wasn’t something Josh should be sitting through.
Before he could dwell on it further, Bill said, “Stop, stop.” He had his hands up in surrender. “Start over, from the beginning.”
“Will you help?” Jenna asked. She was referring to his legal counsel. Based on what Josh saw, her father was probably a damned good lawyer. He was hopscotching all over this conversation, making arguments about his salvation even as he admitted his guilt. There weren’t many men who could look completely at ease and in charge after admitting to their daughters that they were the reason their wife had been murdered.
If Josh hadn’t been hearing this in person, he would never have believed it had happened like this. He would think Jenna was fabricating on the retelling. It was pure madness.
“Of course I will help. But I’ll need to know everything. A company as large as Esher will come at me with everything they’ve got. They have manpower at their disposal. Their attorneys are probably Ivy League—”
“You are Ivy League,” Jenna interjected.
“But by the book. I have them there. I’ve been at this game a long time, but I’m usually on the defense side of things. Offense takes a bit more finesse, but I know all their tricks.” He thought for a minute, the waiter bringing them all another round of drinks. They needed it.
“I have some friends that would love to take this on,” Bill resumed after a minute. He looked around, probably looking for an assistant before realizing he wasn’t at a business lunch, and then made a few more notes.
“There’s more,” Jenna said. “Two things. First: they are just starting to sell real estate around the building. Right now they are in a hole, big time. As soon as the building starts to go up and companies buy in, they will have money at their disposal. That is the best time to strike.
“Second: I have some bartering chips. I have documents proving illegal transactions within the company by their accounting department—purchasing and funds—and their executives. In all honesty, I don’t understand the half of it, but you will. I am not trying to sink the company. I just want what’s mine. I want the architects to get what we are due.”
“How did you obtain that information?” There was a new light in Bill’s eyes. Pride.
“I’m sneaky,” she said with a smile.
Her dad smiled back. “Well, we’ll get you your payout. I don’t know time frames, but we’ll get you your payout.”
“If you give me false hope, Dad, and break that trust, I will stop at nothing to tear your world out from under you,” Jenna babbled, clearly caught in a moment of uncertainty.
“Your mother already did that, Jenna. But I admire your spunk,” her dad replied sadly as the food came. “I need to talk to Don Jeffries. I need to know what schemes he pulled to shake loose this much trouble.”
“I’m not sure he would talk to you. Another thing: I don’t want any of this touching him.”
“The only way this won’t touch him, he being your boss and responsible for most of this, is if he filed all the proper paperwork to make sure it’s shown that he tried to help you. And was denied by the company.”
“He will have. At least, he’ll have something to present, regardless of where he gets it.”
“You know, white-collar crime isn’t all that different from hard-core crime. There is a lack of blood, but the intent is usually the same. It was an easy enough transition. Besides, no one wants to put the society elite in jail—it really helps my win-to-loss ratio. Might hurt me a bit now, though.”
“We are just looking to settle in this, Dad,” Jenna said.
Bill looked at her, reining himself in. He was seeing gold bars stacked up on his notepad. “You might not get as much if you settle, but there won’t be as many fees involved, either. I will have a look at these documents you say you have to see if they would hold up in court. They might tip the scales in your favor. I think we can definitely work a case on this one, girlie. We need to talk money. The guys I work with will want a cut.”
“A cut, okay, but they’ll take less money for the prestige. This will make news. Hell, even Josh is making news, and he is the bodyguard.”
“Language,” Bill chided.
Jenna smiled with a twinkle in her eyes. The little kid making trouble was back, getting scolded by her father.
“Okay, I’ll work it over and get back to you,” Bill said. “Now…Josh. Can I call you Josh, or do you prefer Joshua?”
Josh snapped to attention. “Josh is fine.”
“You have a decorated past. I won’t ask what hap
pened—I served in Vietnam for half a year. I didn’t see much action, thank God—I shipped out when things were being wrapped up, but I saw enough to know it was no place to spend any time. What I’m curious about is what happens next?”
“Dad, you aren’t his father,” Jenna said with heat in her voice. Her defensive reflex was automatic.
“Young lady, I am your father, and these awkward conversations are supposed to happen between your boyfriends and me. I may have gotten to it a little late, but I need to make the most of it.”
“In all honesty, sir, I’m not sure what happens next. I was taking a break for a while.”
“Taking a break and my daughter rolled through, huh? She has a habit of doing that. She’d wake the dead if she had the gumption to go poking around graveyards. She gets that from her mother. Her mother would show up at the social club, all pristine and polished as a lady should be, and end up with the place in a riot. You couldn’t be cross with her for it, either. She’d look at you and bat her lashes and make some excuse, then you’d piss yourself laughing, or just take pity on her and let her get away with it.”
“Mom always used to put me in my finest clothes for some event or other, and let me go play, and when I came back muddy and scratched up, she would scold me for not having enough fun. She’d point out a piece of clean fabric.” Jenna’s eyes glistened.
“And now you get all shocked when dirt finds you,” Josh said with a smile as he wiped a tear away from her cheek. If she was embarrassed, she didn’t show it.
“So, Josh, not to get away from you…” Bill was looking at him with purpose. Josh might have family connections, but he wasn’t quite good enough for his daughter. Not without something else to fall back on. Josh agreed.
Before Josh could answer, though, Jenna said, “He’s going to go into business with me. I want to open my own architectural firm in Denver. Josh is going to handle the business end of things.”
Jenna was looking at him with anticipation and hope. She wasn’t just trying to save him here; she was legitimately asking if he wanted to do this with her. She was buying into his life, willing to move and set up shop elsewhere. With him.
Unexpected Guardian (Skyline Trilogy Book 3) Page 19
