Susan Crosby - Almost A Honeymoon

“Joey wasn’t business.”

He bowed his head. “Touché.”

Paige lifted her coffee cup then set it back down. “Joey Falcon is terminally cute.”

“Terminally cute.” Rye tried not to choke on the words.

“And doggedly devoted.”

“You liked that?”

“I don’t psychoanalyze myself. I guess I thought it was what I wanted, at least briefly. I don’t know. I don’t really even care anymore. I just want him out of my life for good.”

“That’s a real possibility, depending on who catches up with him first.”

Paige winced. “I don’t want him harmed. I just want him to stop being an albatross around my neck.”

She watched Rye fix a plate of food for himself and shook her head at his offer to get her something. The silence between them stretched uncomfortably.

“I was surprised when I found out your age,” he said at last. “Patrick is forty-six, right? That means he was eighteen when you were born.”

She embraced the sudden change of subject. “My mother was seventeen.”

He approached the hearth to stand beside her. “That’s what you meant when you said you grew up together. Sorry, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop...”

“My mother died when I was four. Her family had never accepted their marriage, so my parents had moved in with my dad’s father, supposedly just until Dad could finish high school. Grandad was the one who started O’Halloran Shipping. When he passed away—I was six, I think—the business was almost bankrupt. My father turned it around.”

“More than that. What kind of price did you pay?”

“Me?” Paige was startled. No one had ever questioned what she had given up through the years.

“A young father, a growing business demanding every minute of his time. Did you pass from one baby-sitter to another, one housekeeper to another?”

“I grew up at my father’s feet. The first few years, whenever I wasn’t in school, I was at the office, or following him to the docks, or traveling with him to sign deals. We made an apartment out of some office space, then as the business boomed we bought a house. I worked for the firm in various capacities until I went off to college. He came home for a few hours’ sleep each night.”

“Sounds like he didn’t have a social life.”

“He didn’t. He loved my mother beyond belief. Beyond sensibility, even. He still worships her memory.” One I will never live up to.

“Are you like your mother?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I have little memory of her, mostly things my father told me. I don’t think I look like her, not from what Dad says, anyway.”

“Don’t you know what she looked like?”

“No. In a fit of rage shortly after her death he destroyed her pictures.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you ask?”

She shook her head briefly, sharply. She was tired and on edge, uncomfortable with the emotions surfacing. If she looked at Rye right now, she’d see sympathy. She didn’t want sympathy.

“Tell me how you met my father,” she said, lifting her coffee again.

His hesitation was brief and considering. “Patrick and I met when he and a few competitors discovered consistently short shipments on certain routes. I was hired to find the source.”

“But how did my father know to call you?”

He lifted a shoulder in a brief shrug. “There is a labyrinth of information that filters among industrialists. They guard their contacts, yet they also share, especially regarding security. What affects one company often affects another.”

“Keeping a lid on the information flow also keeps your identity a secret,” Paige said. “Without anonymity you couldn’t function as well.”

Rye nodded. A jolt of awareness struck him, fascination with the way her mind worked. She cut through layers with knife-edged logic, and the revelation staggered him physically—a twist he could live without.

More in his favor, though, she wasn’t a vulnerable woman. She was strong and in control, probably not as much in need of his protection as Patrick believed. It was important that she stay strong. If she showed one bit of weakness, his own vulnerability could surface. And that he needed to avoid at all costs.

“Listen, if you want to do some work, I’ve got calls to make,” he said.

She drained her coffee cup and returned it to the lace-covered table. “How soon can Lloyd pick up a printer for me?”

“He’ll call when he wakes up. Whatever you need, just tell him.”

She picked up her computer pack and set it on the table beside the remnants of their breakfast. “What’s the story on Lloyd? Is he an employee or what?”

“Or what.”

She turned around. “Meaning?”

“I leave the telling of that story to Lloyd, if he so chooses. He’s not an employee, but he helps me out sometimes.”

“Is the limousine his or yours?”

“It’s rented. Why?”

“The windows are tinted. We would be safe inside, wouldn’t we? I can’t stand the thought of being cooped up here.”

Ending the conversation with a “We’ll see,” he picked up the telephone, leaving her to her own devices as he began a series of calls that required decoding to be fully understood. He spoke in the jargon of his business, words sprinkled with numbers, letters and abbreviations. He filled the yellow pad before him with page after page of notes. Part of her stayed tuned in to him because she admired the way he dealt with the business first then took a minute for the social niceties, remembering to ask about family members, health statuses, even special occasions.

He had never had a phone conversation like that with her. Resentment burrowed into her and built. What was she? Less than a human being to be treated as cavalierly as he had these last years? Why had she deserved less consideration than any other client?

When he made probably the tenth call in two hours, his voice changed. Softened. Took on a note of tenderness.

“Hi... I’m doin’ great. How are you?... I’ve missed you, too. Are you feeling okay?... I’d be with you if I could, you know that... How’s our little one?”

Our little one? The pencil in Paige’s hands snapped. So, he has someone special in his life. A wife? Perhaps even a child? So what? And why does that surprise me? she thought, disgusted with herself. He’s intelligent and attractive and successful, and he’s proving right now that he can be tender. A lot of women probably like a macho superstud. Not me, though.

So why are you so disappointed? she asked herself. Because a part of me—a tiny, almost insignificant part—wishes a man like that would be interested in me. There! She’d said it. A moment of honesty. She’d dealt with it; now she could relegate it to the strongbox of lost dreams she kept locked in her head.

Thoughts of her mother escaped as she tried to close the lid. A perfect woman, according to her father. The perfect woman. Soft-spoken and soothing, a paragon of femininity. Paige had tried to emulate what she knew of her. Only Rye had broken through the wall of control she’d cultivated.

If she had learned nothing else from her debacle with Joey Falcon, she had figured out that she just wasn’t herself right now. She had been feeling more than restlessness, more than a mild desire for something to happen. For the last year, she’d felt an urgent tug toward something unknown, a yearning to discover passion, not only physically but spiritually. She wanted to break out. But to what? How do you stop continually strolling down garden paths if no one ever invites you on a marathon?

You sign up, she admonished herself. She knew she had to take charge of her own destiny. She just didn’t quite know how to do it, especially when she was being reminded by her father and Rye that she was powerless at the moment. Follow orders; we’ll take care of you.