Family Merger

by Leigh Greenwood

  Cynthia didn’t run away, but she kept her back to Kathryn.

  “No. It was an accident.”

  “An accident you didn’t try very hard to prevent?”

  “If you mean I didn’t refuse to have sex, then I guess you’re right.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of agreeing to have unprotected sex more than once.”

  Cynthia didn’t answer.

  “Was this your first time?”

  “Do you think boys line up to have sex with somebody like me?”

  “I think you liked the boy, but I don’t believe you liked him enough to want to have a baby with him. That would imply you want to marry him like Lisette wants to marry Kerry.”

  “He wouldn’t marry me even if I wanted him to. He’d probably deny he’s the father.”

  “You said he doesn’t know so you can’t know how he would react.”

  Cynthia swung around. “What do you think he’d do? He’s seventeen. This would ruin his chances of a football scholarship. And my father would probably kill him.”

  “Your father will certainly be very angry, but I doubt he’ll resort to violence. However, that’s not the issue. The issue is this is his baby—”

  “It’s my baby!”

  “—as much as it’s yours,” Kathryn said, pushing a point Cynthia obviously didn’t want to address. “You have to let him make his own decision about what to do.”

  “I won’t tell you his name.”

  “I don’t want you to. I’m just saying the baby doesn’t belong to one parent any more than the other.”

  “Mama said men weren’t interested in babies. She said babies belong to their mothers.”

  “I expect the boy will want to stay as far away as possible, but you’ve got to give him the chance to decide. Talk to your father about it when he gets back.”

  “If he gets back.”

  “If Margaret says you can swear by what he says, then I’m sure he’ll be back. If anybody knows a man better than his wife, it’s the housekeeper.”

  “Margaret says he ought to get married again. She says it’s not good for a young man to be without a wife. She says he’ll meet all kinds of women who’ll give him diseases.”

  “I’m not sure this is something Margaret should talk to you about.”

  “I know all about STDs. Everybody does. That’s another reason I think you ought to marry him. I know you haven’t been—”

  “This conversation has gotten entirely off base. Leigh is coming by this afternoon. You don’t have to see her if you don’t want to. But if you keep putting her off until she gives up, you’ll always wonder about her friendship, and that will be doing her a disservice. If you’re the kind of friend you’d like her to be, then you owe her that opportunity.”

  Cynthia looked mulish.

  “Now you have lessons to do if you’re going to keep up with your schooling. And I have bills to pay if I’m going to keep this shelter running.”

  But an hour later Kathryn gave up and pushed her checkbook aside. She couldn’t get Ron out of her mind. Or Cynthia’s crazy notion that she should marry him. There wasn’t a single reason she could think of to recommend the idea, so she didn’t understand why she couldn’t get it out of her mind. She didn’t have many friends and she barely got along with her family. That wasn’t a recommendation for becoming the wife of a man like Ron Egan. He needed someone who could understand his need to be the world’s greatest overachiever. And achieve social acceptance which she knew he would ultimately find meaningless.

  She couldn’t understand why she couldn’t stop thinking about him. She had to figure out what it was so she could get over her obsession.

  It wasn’t really an obsession. Maybe it was just fascination. But when she was with him, differences didn’t seem to matter. He was a charismatic man. She guessed that’s what made him so successful in the business.

  But she wasn’t with him now, and differences did matter. Still, they didn’t seem insuperable. Common sense told her they wouldn’t be easy to overcome. They came from different worlds and were poles apart on how they felt about it. He wanted to conquer her world. She wanted to ignore most of it.

  She’d never thought of walking into a ready-made family, husband, daughter and grandchild. A man who already had a grandchild might not want more children. And then there were the inevitable differences over how they should handle the situation. She would always be an outsider because Cynthia was his daughter, not hers. And this didn’t even begin to take into consideration the possibility that Cynthia might be jealous of any children she might have. Children might say they didn’t value money, but few things could break up a family more quickly than squabbles over who was going to inherit what.

  Kathryn closed her desk and got up. She needed something to take her mind off Ron. Her friends had been begging her to let them take her shopping. They said she never bought anything really nice for herself because she saved all her money for the shelter.

  Today she felt like buying a new dress. Maybe even shoes and a bag to go with it. She’d call two of her friends. They’d enjoy it even more if they could share being amazed she had finally broken down and agreed to go shopping. Then once she bought the dress, she’d have to think of somewhere to wear it. She’d let them help her with that, too. They’d try to match her up with some guy they thought would make a perfect husband, but she wouldn’t go out with him unless she wanted to. This was really an excuse to see her friends again.

  Chapter Six

  “We’re having a problem with Schmidt and Wasserman,” Ted was saying to Ron. “They won’t listen to anything we say.”

  “This isn’t a matter of money for them. It’s an issue of national pride.”

  “Do you think you can change their minds?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “One of the other men said they wouldn’t approve the merger if Schmidt and Wasserman were against it. What are you going to do?”

  Ron had arrived at his hotel two hours before the meeting. He’d used that time to shower, change and listen to a report on what had been happening the last two days. It wasn’t good. Ted and Ben had done everything he would have done, but two essential men—two government cabinet ministers—continued to argue against the merger. It didn’t matter how the other men voted. These two men had the power to block it.

  By the end of the day it had become very clear that the merger wouldn’t—couldn’t—go through without the approval of the government. With an election coming up that was predicted to be close, those men were afraid to do anything that might be unpopular with the voting public. Ron would have to give them something they could offer the people, or they would withhold approval.

  “We have to come up with a reason they can’t afford to vote against the merger,” Ron said. “Hire as many people as you need. Spend as much as you have to, but you’ve got to find something we can use to persuade them to change their minds.”

  “Do you think you can keep them negotiating long enough to find it?” Ben asked.

  “You have to keep them negotiating. I’m flying back to Charlotte tonight.” He stuffed the last of the papers into his briefcase. “In fact, if I don’t leave soon, I’ll be late.”

  Both assistants reacted with shocked surprise. They’d spent the evening around the conference table in his suite going over every aspect of the merger, preparing arguments to bolster their position, brainstorming where they thought the next day’s discussions would lead. Ron looked at his watch. “The chartered jet should be warming up its engines right now. I’ll call you before the meeting tomorrow.”

  “You can’t leave now,” Ted said.

  “I’ll be back again in a couple of days, but I have to go home. My daughter needs me.”

  He couldn’t afford to devote all his time to the merger. He had his daughter’s life to straighten out. Maybe his own life needed straightening out just as much. He’d never stopped working long enough to think about it. But now he
had, and he was beginning to realize something important was missing

  “But we’ve never done a negotiation without you,” Ben said.

  “They expect you to be here,” Ted added.

  Ron knew that. He’d always used that as one of his selling points. Once you had his company, you had his undivided personal attention until everything was worked out and the last paper signed. That he never tried to handle more than one job at a time was a signature of his style.

  He had sensed the resentment in Schmidt and Wasserman the minute he’d returned to the table that morning. They hadn’t displayed any emotion. They simply rejected everything he said with icy politeness. This blanket refusal to listen to anything he said had stymied him until he realized their fear of the election was at the root of their refusal to be swayed by his arguments.

  “You have to be so brilliant they won’t remember I’m not here,” Ron said as he grabbed his coat. “You’ve got to keep them coming back to the table until we can find the one piece of information that will change their minds.”

  He was at the doorway when an idea hit him. “Has anybody surveyed the workers?”

  “That’s their biggest argument,” Ted said. “The workers are afraid they’ll lose their jobs.”

  “Has anybody actually asked them? I don’t mean the managers. I mean the men who bring their lunches in a pail.”

  “They say—”

  “I could be wrong, but I smell the hand of the Arneholdts here. Maybe they don’t want anybody to know what the common man thinks.”

  “That could take weeks, even months.”

  “We don’t have weeks. We might not even have days. By tomorrow I want people at the gates of plants all over the country. Go into the countryside. Ask a cross section. I want reports every day. If we see a trend developing, we can use it.”

  “What if everybody’s against the merger?”

  “Then we have to find out why. That may be even more important.”

  “We’ll have to stay up half the night.”

  “If you want my job, you’ll have to stay up all night,” Ron said as he passed through the door and sprinted for the elevator.

  He clutched the bulging briefcase to his side as he settled into the limousine. He was uneasy about leaving the meeting. It wasn’t merely that the negotiations might fail. His reputation was at stake. It wasn’t written into the contract that he would be present at all negotiations, but that was his reputation. People expected it. And not delivering on an expectation rendered his personal integrity vulnerable. And his personal integrity had been the cornerstone of his success.

  He had to weigh that against his daughter’s happiness. He knew she could work everything out without him. She might do so more easily, but that wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted the improvement of their relationship to be part of the solution. If Kathryn was right, Cynthia’s having this baby was a cry for the love and affection he hadn’t given her. Cynthia had made the mistake, but it had been his neglect that drove her to it.

  The feeling of guilt, or responsibility, weighed heavily on him. He’d always planned everything he did in meticulous detail, worked at it with unremitting effort, had used each success to build even greater success the next time. He’d never failed.

  Now he had.

  Then there was Kathryn. He didn’t know quite what to make of her or of his reaction to her. At first he had felt simply irritated by her assuming control of a situation that was none of her business. Then he felt a need to make her prove he could trust her to take care of Cynthia, even for a short time. Finally he had surprised himself by asking her to teach him how to become more sensitive toward Cynthia and women. Had he expected her to fail? Had he feared he might? Even though any success on her part meant a past failure of his own, he wanted her to prove she had analyzed the situation correctly and knew how to fix it.

  But there was something about Kathryn that tugged strongly at him beyond the situation with Cynthia, beyond even his physical attraction to her. And while this—whatever it was—was intriguing, it was also irritating. He didn’t need something else pulling on him right now. Cynthia and the merger were already pushing him into a corner. Still, he couldn’t help thinking about Kathryn. She was tough and vulnerable, that rare combination he found most exciting in a woman. Kathryn wouldn’t back down when she thought she was right. She didn’t pull punches and she wasn’t intimidated by him in any way.

  It was obvious she was sensitive to people’s needs or she wouldn’t have made a success of the shelter. Even more telling, the girls wouldn’t have confided in her, believed she could keep them safe. Yet she was vulnerable. Beneath her list, hidden behind her toughness and competence, was a vulnerability. Partly what he suspected was a rich feminine tenderness, and partly what he was sure was very real fear. Kathryn Roper was not a happy woman. And for some reason that wasn’t okay with him. He didn’t know what he’d do when he found out what she feared, what had hurt her so badly, but he meant to find out. Then he meant to see what he could do about it.

  Kathryn was about to close her book when the phone rang. She looked at the clock. It was 12:33 a.m. Too late to take the call. She shouldn’t even have been up this late, but she was keyed up. Too keyed up to pay real attention to the romance she’d been reading.

  That’s because you haven’t stopped thinking about Ron Egan all day.

  She had tried to put him out of her mind, but it seemed everything that happened reminded her of him. There had even been a story on the news about some trouble in the trailer park where he’d grown up. She probably wouldn’t have remembered it, but she recognized Ron’s trailer as the TV camera panned for a view of the park.

  After five rings, her voice came on the answering machine. She hated the sound of her own voice on tape. It sounded too soft and feathery, as if she were some kind of helpless female. Then the message…

  “This is Ron Egan. I don’t want to wake you up, but I just got back from Geneva. I’m a little tired right now—”

  She snatched up the phone. “You didn’t wake me. I was reading.”

  “You shouldn’t be up so late. You’ll have bags under your eyes tomorrow.”

  It was probably just polite conversation, but no one had given a thought to her being up late since high school.

  “The girls won’t care.”

  “Look, it’s too late to talk about it now, but I’ve got an idea for something that might start those girls and their families talking again. I’ve got to catch a few hours’ sleep or I won’t know what I’m saying, but I’ll be there at about eight-thirty. Is that too early?”

  “No.” It was. The girls would just be starting their lessons. Their regular teacher had called in sick. If she couldn’t find a substitute in the morning, she’d have to try to supervise their studies.

  “Good. Tell Cynthia I missed her. I missed you, too.”

  Her heart fluttered. She told herself not to be foolish, that this was what she got for reading a romance late at night. “Like a thorn in you finger, I imagine,” she said. She heard Ron chuckle softly.

  “Not quite that bad. If you’re interested, maybe I’ll tell you about the two real thorns in my side. I won’t keep you up.”

  “Are you driving?” she asked.

  “No. My car is at the house. I had a limousine pick me up.”

  “Good. I don’t imagine you’ve had much sleep since you left. I wouldn’t want you to fall asleep at the wheel.”

  Why was she babbling on? It was no more than a twenty-minute drive from the airport to the section of town where he lived. Even a man suffering from severe sleep deprivation could stay awake that long.

  “I intend to fall asleep as soon as I hang up.”

  “Won’t that make it harder to get to sleep later?”

  It might, but talking on the phone with a foolish female who couldn’t tell when to hang up probably wouldn’t help, either.

  “I can sleep any time, any place. Now I’m keeping you up. Go to sl
eep. I’ll be there before you know it.”

  “You don’t have to be here so early. You need to sleep more than you need to talk to me.”

  “That’s what I told myself when I was debating whether to call you this late, but I was wrong.”

  There was no point in trying to deny it. Ron Egan was interested in her, and whether she wanted to admit it or not, she was pleased. And excited.

  “You’re tired,” she said. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “Eight-thirty.”

  “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  She fumbled the phone back into its cradle, too preoccupied to care. Ron Egan was interested in her. What was she going to do about it? More to the point, what was she going to do about the fact she liked him, too? They were wrong for each other. Not that she believed he was thinking about marriage. He was unattached at the moment and they had been thrown together by circumstances. It wasn’t surprising they would be interested in each other as long as they had a common interest. That sort of thing happened all the time.

  But that wasn’t really the way things worked for her. She’d never been interested in a man just because of proximity. In fact, being thrown together by random circumstances such as being in the same college classes or working together on a committee normally made her withdraw. She hated the phony kind of intimacy such situations created. It was like being away from reality for a few hours or days, and doing, saying or feeling things you knew you’d never do, say or feel once you went back to your real life.

  That meant she would never see Ron again. A feeling akin to panic came over her. She tried to deny the feeling. She tried to blame it on being tired, to having eaten a piece of coconut cake at eleven-thirty, but she knew she was fooling herself. She wanted him to be interested in her, and she didn’t want him to disappear when Cynthia moved back home. She didn’t know what she wanted the relationship to mean, but she did know she didn’t want to give it up just yet.

  She told herself she was being as foolish as her girls had been about the boys that had gotten them in trouble, but that didn’t change anything. She knew she would be downstairs long before eight-thirty. And whether she found a substitute teacher or not, she’d be listening for the sound of the doorbell.