A Place Called Home (6 page)

“Mr. Strahern is here.”

“Oh. Of course.” She pushed the layout to one side. “Show him—” The door was opening before Thea could unfold her legs and make a search for her sling-back Ferragamos.

“Don’t move,” Joel commanded. “You look all soft and sleepy-eyed. Very sexy.” He shut the door behind him and leaned one shoulder against it, just taking his fill of Thea’s momentary and unexpected vulnerability here in her office. “Were you napping?”

“Hmmm. No, not really.” Thea’s smile surrendered to an abrupt yawn. Embarrassed, and not entirely certain why that was, she added, “Though I wasn’t doing anything more productive.” She found her shoes and slipped them on, coming to her feet in spite of Joel’s insistence that she do otherwise. “Come in. Can I get you something to drink?” She started in the direction of the wet bar, remembered herself, and backtracked to give Joel a kiss. What she intended as a peck on the cheek became something more than that when he turned his head and caught her mouth with his own. She returned it but her discomfort was clearly communicated. After a moment, he let her go. “It’s just that it’s my office,” she said, explaining herself for perhaps the dozenth time. “I have to work here and I don’t want—”

He laughed deeply, a pleasant chuckle that was at once knowing and indulgent. “I know,” he said, cupping the side of her face. “But you can’t blame me for trying.”

Actually she did, though she felt rather small about it. He was her fiancé, after all. One would think she’d be able to make some allowances where he was concerned. On the other side of the door Mrs. Admundson was probably thinking Joel already had her dress shoved up to her hips and was bending her over the desk. Mrs. Admundson remained thoroughly professional but Thea could see that the specter of some sexual escapade had been raised. It was there in her eyes, in the way she couldn’t quite meet Thea’s after Joel left. Thea was mortified. When she told Joel, he was amused. He rather liked the idea that the office staff at Foster and Wyndham thought he dropped in for a quickie. That was because she’d never told him about the seltzer-water-with-a-Viagra-chaser jokes that were going around. He would have screwed her in front of the entire agency just to prove medication had nothing to do with it.

“Water,” Joel said.

“Hmm?”

He smiled indulgently. “You asked me if I wanted something to drink? I’ll take water.”

“Oh.” Absurdly, Thea felt herself blushing. What in God’s name was wrong with her? She resolutely suppressed the answer that came immediately to her mind as too absurd to be true. Mitchell Baker had nothing to do with anything. Didn’t he? Stepping back, she beat a rather hasty retreat to the wet bar. “Lemon?”

“If you have it.”

Thea poured Evian into a glass for Joel, added a slice of fresh lemon, and carried it to the sofa where he was now sitting. He had the layout board on his lap and was studying it with more interest than she had shown minutes earlier. “Here.” She handed him the glass and indicated the layout with a nod. “What do you think?”

“I think you ad people are a devious and unscrupulous lot. I’d buy this.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You’ve never used a cleaning product like that in your life. But thanks for the devious and unscrupulous compliment.”

Grinning, Joel handed her the board. “I’m sure Betty would buy it,” he said, referring to his housekeeper. “Are you going after the Carver Chemical account?”

“Not with ideas like this, we’re not.” She dropped the board on a stack of layouts she had discarded earlier. Although there was room beside him on the sofa now, Thea sat in a chair opposite Joel. She crossed her legs and saw his eyes immediately follow the movement. Not for the first time Thea wished she was more comfortable with his overt interest. What was wrong with her that she didn’t feel flattered? “Whether or not we can get the account depends on our ability to make their most familiar, tried-and-true, big-yawn products exciting again. With so many competing products on the market, Carver needs to build brand loyalty with a new generation. Betty already buys Shine and Shield. Her daughter probably does, too. But her granddaughter? Not likely.”

“Maybe her granddaughter doesn’t clean.”

Thea’s arch look was only moderately playful. “Then we have to find out why, change an attitude,
and
put Shine and Shield in her hand.”

Joel regarded her as if he were completely confident in her ability to do just that. “If Satan had hired Foster and Wyndham, his temptation-of-Christ campaign would have been a success.”

“Joel!”

His smile was mischievous and youthful. “I’m Episcopalian. We live on the edge.”

Thea laughed. Sometimes he seemed so much younger than she felt. It was more than the fact that he wore his sixty-one years so very well. It didn’t hurt that his dark hair had just begun to gray and that it was a gunmetal color that perfectly matched his eyes. He kept himself fit playing golf and rowing. He walked the links and his rowing was done on the Allegheny. Machines, he’d told her, were for pussies. Give or take a few pounds, he’d kept his weight at 175 for the last thirty years and except for an occasional cigar, he had never been a smoker. He was still taut in all the right places, firm and toned and vital. At just over six feet, Joel could turn heads, and often did. He worked hard, as hard or harder than most of the people under him at Strahern Investments. He was tough, sharp, and competitive, and he had had plenty of young turks for lunch when they forgot he was ultimately a predator; but when the mood was on him, he could also be boyishly curious and playful. For all his years in business, he’d never attached himself to a cynical life view that did not allow for change or hope.

It was, perhaps, the quality that Thea found most appealing. If not precisely jaded herself, then she was certainly weary.

Joel’s eyes settled thoughtfully on Thea’s face. Now that she had shaken off her pensive, vaguely distracted mien, signs of tension were visible in the set of mouth and the crease between her brows. “Tell me about the meeting,” he said. “That’s why I came over.”

She thought it had been. “You could have called, Joel.”

“I could have. It would have been a tad impersonal, don’t you think?”

Thea’s small smile acknowledged the truth of that. He had known he couldn’t trust her to be quite so honest over the phone. It was not that he thought she would lie about what happened, but rather that she would minimize how she felt about it. “It was ...” She hesitated, searching for the right word. “Difficult. Mitchell was there with Wayne. Emilie, Case, and Grant were all in school, so I wasn’t ambushed by them in Wayne’s office.”

“You were right, then. You said he wouldn’t bring them.”

“He’s a decent man, even if some of his ideas are from another century.”

Joel had no trouble interpreting what that meant. “He expected you to take the children because you’re a woman.”

Thea nodded. The memory of that particular exchange with Mitch had the power to raise a small smile. “Because I’m a girl, I believe is how he phrased it. Just as if he thought taking Emilie and the twins for life was the equivalent of playing house.”

“He’s had them for the last month,” Joel pointed out.

“I know. But I don’t believe he ever really thought I
wouldn’t
take them; so in some ways he’s been the one playing house.” Thea propped her bent elbow on the arm of her chair and leaned slightly to one side, letting her cheek rest against her open palm. “The light he saw at the end of the tunnel turned out to be a freight train.”

“He was angry?”

Thea recalled Mitch’s words. “Disappointed, he said. And confused.” She regarded Joel frankly. “It looked a lot like anger. It was a tense confrontation at times.”

“Avery likes it tense. That’s his element.”

“Avery and Wayne were out of the room for most of my meeting with Mitch.”

One of Joel’s brows lifted. “The idea behind having an attorney is having the attorney present.”

As reprimands went, it was a mild one. Avery Childers had much stronger words for her on their way back to town. Thea simply accepted the disapproval from both men without trying to defend her decision. Even now she didn’t know if she had had a chance to do the meeting over again if she would do anything different. There was no point in explaining that to Joel, not when what she had to tell him was so much more important. “I’d like to have the children with us sometimes. Once a month, perhaps. For a long weekend.”

Joel rolled his glass between his palms, saying nothing, just staring at her. Finally he stood and walked to the wet bar. He poured out most of the water into the small sink, removed the lemon slice, then added a couple of fingers of Dewar’s to his glass. He took a long swallow before he turned to face Thea. “I thought we had an agreement.”

“We did.” She added softly, “We do.”

“I’d prefer not to rehash this, Thea. You shouldn’t have talked to Baker alone. That’s what Avery was there for. To protect you.”

She bristled a little at that. Her head came up and she dropped the hand that had been supporting it into her lap. “I didn’t require protection. I kept up my end and I never wavered once. Mitchell would be surprised if he knew I was suggesting this to you now.”

“I don’t care if he’s surprised.
I’m
surprised. We discussed this. I don’t want the children in our lives, Thea, and you said yourself that you’re not ready.”

“I’m not ready ... not now ... but someday, Joel ...” She fell silent when she saw his features go rigid and his gunmetal gray eyes frost over.

“I’ve raised my family,” he said flatly. “Three children. Seven grandchildren. I want something different. I don’t want a second go-around at this stage of my life.”

“I’m not talking about raising Emilie and the twins. I’m talking about having them on a weekend once a month. Taking them to a play or the Science Center. Going out to Oakland to the museum. Making tents out of blankets and a cardboard table and reading stories by flashlight.”

“And I’m talking about being able to fly to New York or the Vineyard at a moment’s notice. Going to the islands for a long weekend just because we want to and because we can.” He finished his drink and set the glass behind him. “What about my own grandchildren?”

“What about them? I always imagined we’d do things with them. We do now.”

“But not as a matter of structure or routine or, God forbid, a court order. I like it that way. I can have them anytime I want them.”

“On your terms.”

“Yes. And I’m not apologizing for it.” He pushed away from the wet bar and closed the distance between them. Hunkering down in front of her, he said, “You can ask my children, Thea; they’ll tell you I wasn’t an absent father. I couldn’t get to everything they were involved in—Nancy, even when her health was good, couldn’t manage that—but I knew what they were doing. I didn’t work at home at night or on weekends. I enjoyed myself with my kids. Now I want to enjoy myself separate from them.” He searched her face. “With you,” he said softly. “I want to be with you.”

Thea said nothing. There was a sense of building pressure against her chest, but when she looked down there was only her own hand over her heart and her fingers twisting the onyx stone at her neck. His declaration was meant to compliment her, or at least there was a time she would have accepted it as such. Now she saw he was only expressing his own needs. She didn’t fault him for the inherent selfishness of his position, but she was less certain that it reflected what she wanted for herself. Before she could put her thoughts into words, Joel came to his feet. He did not step back but stood his ground over her. Thea looked up at him, knowing all the while she didn’t have the defenses yet to brace herself for what was coming.

“You’re not ready, Thea. You said so yourself. If you’re having doubts then perhaps you should call someone who can help you think this through. Forget about what I want and think about what you need. Those children are precisely the sort of responsibility you shouldn’t be taking on at this time.”

“Emilie, Case, and Grant,” she said quietly.

“What?”

“The children have names. Emilie, Case, and Grant.” Tears welled in her eyes and she made no effort to blink them back. This was Joel who was with her now, not Mitchell Baker. Joel loved her. Surely it was safe to share her pain with him. “I’m afraid, Joel. I don’t know—” Thea’s vision blurred so completely for a moment that she wasn’t aware of Joel bending over her until she felt his hands under her elbows. With surprising little encouragement, he brought her to her feet and into the circle of his arms. She rested her head against his impeccably tailored suit, and to his credit he never once said that he gave a damn about the wet spots. “I feel as if I’m abandoning them,” she whispered. “I have to see them sometimes. You can’t expect that I won’t ever see them.” Thea felt him stiffen slightly. She tried to raise her face to look at him but the hand at the back of her head increased its pressure and she remained where she was.

“Is that what you told Baker?” Joel asked. “That you’d visit them?”

She nodded. “I know I said I wouldn’t, but—”

“But you made Avery leave.”

“I didn’t make him leave.”

“You told him it was all right for him to be out of the room while you talked to Baker. That’s making him leave in my book.”

Now Thea did push hard enough to free herself, first from the hand cradling her head and then from the one exerting pressure against her back. “You knew all along,” she accused him. The tears, she noticed, were gone now. She swiped at her damp cheeks and felt the heat of righteous anger flushing her face. “You spoke to Avery before you came here.”

“Thea.”

“Don’t say my name as if you’re talking to an unreasonable child. You sound like Avery now.”

Joel sighed. He took a step back, and then another. Finally, in what he knew was tantamount to entering a guilty plea, he went to the sofa where he perched on the wide curving arm. He wished they were having this out anyplace but in Thea’s office. It was more of a sanctuary to her than her own home. This was where she felt comfortable and confident, and where she could best express both. On the wall behind him was a Warhol print Thea’s father had commissioned in the early sixties for an ad campaign. Wyndham had never liked the finished piece, never used the print, and it was left to gather dust in storage even after the Pittsburgh native’s fifteen minutes of fame ran the course of three decades. Thea rescued it when Foster and Wyndham moved to their new offices on Sixth and Smithfield and gave it a place of prominence in her suite. It was not so much that she liked the silkscreen, she’d told him once, but that it served to remind her that she was not her father’s daughter.