Carla Neggers: Betrayals

Tonight, however, she walked regally out to the monstrous car, careful not to muss her gown made of clear, cool magenta fabric that exquisitely complemented the delicate tones of her skin. She quietly thanked the chauffeur by his first name, George, when he held the door for her, and tucked her knees together and her ankles to one side when she settled back into the leather seat.

Jared came around to the driver’s side and climbed in beside her. He hated limousines more than he did tuxedos. At sixty-five, Wesley Sloan was an internationally renowned architect and could well afford his expensive tastes. The repeated offers he’d made to Jared to join his San Francisco-based firm were enough to make most architects salivate, but Jared, the eldest of Wesley’s three children by ten years, continued to turn him down. He preferred to work solo, in the small studio behind his house, specializing in renovations, restorations and additions- “glorified carpentry,” his father called it. But Jared’s half sister Isabel had recently earned her graduate degree in architecture from UCLA and seemed ready to make the move up to San Francisco, something he hoped would take that last bit of heat off him. Wesley Sloan knew Jared wasn’t going to change his mind, but he wasn’t a man who liked to accept defeat.

If Wesley had known how much his granddaughter enjoyed riding in his limousine, he’d have tried sending it around every afternoon and never mind her father.

It was a cool, damp, foggy evening, the kind that made Jared intensely aware of his aloneness. He watched silently out the window as the car wound its way down the narrow, twisting streets of Russian Hill.

A small crowd was gathered in front of the elegant newly opened San Francisco Villa Hotel, designed by Wesley Sloan. He and his current wife were hosting their annual charity ball, a major social event on the city’s spring calendar. Wesley had issued an invitation to his granddaughter every year since her twelfth birthday. This year, Jared had relented and agreed to let her attend. As he had before her, Mai would have to learn to deal with being a Winston and a Sloan on her own terms-not theirs, not his.

But as much as he believed in her and admired her spirit and self-assurance, she was just a kid. His kid. And he couldn’t stop himself from wanting to protect her.

She tugged on his arm. “Daddy-look.”

Jared was already looking. As the limousine pulled up to the curb, eight or ten huge Harley-Davidson motorcycles materialized out of the fog and formed a menacing half circle around the car.

“George?” Jared asked.

“I don’t know what’s going on, Mr. Sloan,” the driver said. “There’s no way I can pull out-we’re stuck here.”

“Are they going to hurt us?” Mai asked, trying to hide her nervousness.

Jared shook his head. “No, they’ve got too big an audience. I think they just want to intimidate us.”

They revved their engines and made a lot of noise, glowering at their own reflections in the limousine windows. They were an ugly lot-overweight, tattooed, unkempt. Not one wore a helmet. Tough guys. Jared spotted two policemen emerging tentatively from the crowd. A newspaper photographer was clicking madly away.

“To hell with this,” Jared muttered and turned to Mai. “Stay put.”

He threw open the door as far as he could, until it touched the edge of the lead bike, and climbed out, directing his attention at the driver, a mean-eyed individual with a battered leather jacket stretched over his fat gut. Jared asked nonchalantly, “What’s up?”

“We weren’t invited to the party.”

Jared laughed. “Consider yourself lucky.”

The photographer had worked his way around the limousine behind the two policemen, who didn’t appear to be in any hurry to assert their authority.

“Hate to miss a party,” the biker said. He made a point of coughing up a huge clam and spitting so that it landed at Jared’s toes.

Jared wasn’t impressed. The guy and his pals were just getting their kicks intimidating a bunch of rich folks at a high-society gathering, only they’d picked the wrong target. Jared had dealt with scarier people than this.

“You can go in my place,” he said, almost meaning it. “Got a tux strapped to that contraption?”

The biker seemed to appreciate Jared’s humor and started to grin, but then Mai popped her head out behind her father and pulled his hand. “Daddy, please come back inside-”

“Hey-who’s the gook kid?”

Jared heard Mai’s sharp intake of breath and saw the look of amusement her obvious fear and hurt elicited from the biker.

He snapped.

Putting all his weight on the door of the limousine, he lunged toward the big motorcycle. The force of the door hitting the bike’s front tire caught the driver off guard and wrenched the handlebars out of his hands. He couldn’t clear the bike and went down with it, catching his left leg underneath it. Jared didn’t lose any time. He leaped over the fallen motorcycle and jumped on the bastard who’d insulted his daughter.

It wasn’t the other bikers coming to the aid of their trapped buddy or the police jumping into the fray that stopped Jared from beating the guy senseless.

It was Mai.

“Daddy!” she cried.

He released the man’s flabby throat and climbed back over the motorcycle, putting out his arms as Mai ran to him, near tears. He told her softly, “It’s okay. They’re just punks.”

Reluctant to prolong the confrontation, the police let the bikers shove off. Jared noticed he’d gotten grease on his tuxedo and his tie had come undone. So much for sartorial splendor.

He put out his arm for Mai. “Madame?”

She giggled and laid her small hand on his crooked elbow. “I should have helped you beat that guy up.”

“One hothead in the family’s enough.”

The photographer continued to click away, but Jared ignored him and the cheering onlookers as he escorted his daughter to her first charity ball.

Almost a week after Winston & Reed had ousted her, Rebecca found herself painting her nails red and scanning a magazine article on Phoenix. She’d never lived in Phoenix. She wasn’t sure it’d be smart to move there at the beginning of summer, but desert living had an exotically romantic appeal. And there wasn’t much to keep her in Boston. Her fledgling one-woman studio was at a lull.

Of course, painting her nails and reading magazines weren’t going to help that. She wasn’t above scrambling for work. She’d worked in enough studios to appreciate the demands of the graphic design business and knew what it took to succeed. Talent alone wasn’t enough-it also took sheer grit. When she’d first returned to Boston, she’d worked hard. Not wanting to hire anyone until she’d made the commitment to stay, she did everything herself. She was her own account executive, senior designer, office manager, receptionist and gofer.

Her studio occupied several airy rooms in a crummy building a few blocks in the wrong direction from the Boston Children’s Museum. She’d bought the building back before real estate prices in metropolitan Boston had skyrocketed. It was on the site of the original warehouse owned by Blackburn Shipping way back in 1800. Her fellow tenants-none of whom knew she was their landlady-included a grumpy printer she’d never hire to do any of her work, an office supply wholesaler, a caterer, three or four accountants and about a dozen other strange little businesses that didn’t need to rely on walk-in customers.

The telephone roused Rebecca from consideration of becoming the art director for a Scottsdale-based international resort chain. How posh. She could hit the Jacuzzi on her lunch hour and get free vacations.