Cover to Covers (31 page)

“You keep standing in front of that window like you’re contemplating jumping out of it,” his trusty secretary
commented behind him.

Wearing a colorful peach dress with white piping, she looked every inch the part of an executive secretary.
As she carried an armload of manila folders to his desk, he resumed his seat in his chair.  

“I was watching the clouds roll in from that cool front. Hard to believe it’s already October.” He made himself comfortable and eased
his chair against the desk.

She pl
opped the folders in front of him. “Accounting wants your approval for these budgets on the Oklahoma pipeline construction.”

He took one of the manila folders and opened it. “
Is there anything in here that can delay us further?”

“
No. Now that all the permits are in hand, Mitch Douglass is antsy to get moving. These are the final numbers on all the costs. They are going to get started as soon as they have your signature.”

Tyler
gleaned the spreadsheet in front of him. “I’ll get through them all tonight, so he can have them first thing in the morning.”

“What about your mother? I thought you were going with her to S
enator Adleman’s cocktail party tonight?”

Tyler unbuttoned his dark brown suit jacket. “No, I need to get this done.”

Lynn stood back from his desk. “Are you going to tell her or….” She winced slightly.

“Just
say something came up.” He removed the jacket from his shoulders.

“She won’t believe me. She hates me.”

Tyler felt that sharp stab in his heart as her words unlocked a memory. “Just tell her to call me if she has a problem.” He tossed his jacket to a nearby chair.  

Lynn hovered over his desk. “That’s the seventeenth invitation you’ve declined in the past three months.”

His dark eyes rose to her. “You’re keeping track?”

“You bet. You’ve backed out of every party, dinner invitation, social event, benefit, and anything else that was not related to business.” Her lovely green eyes weighed his features. “You’ve spent every night here for weeks,” she motioned around the office, “doing paperwork.”

He knew where this was going and redirected his eyes back to the spreadsheet. “That’s because there has been a lot of paperwork to do. You know how I hate social functions.”

“You never hated them before. Tolerated them, but never hated them.” She paused
and then added, “You’re sulking.”

His eyes shot to her face. “Sulking? What am I sulking about?”

“You know as well as I do, you haven’t been the same since you came back from…you know where.”

He
cast his eyes to the paperwork. “I told you never to mention that to me again.”

“I didn’t mention it. I said you know where, not New Orleans.”

He slammed his fist on the desk. “Damn it! I will not—”

“And you were never testy before, either,” she cut in. “You’ve been spitting like a rattlesnake caught in a stampede. You jump all over anyone who tells you something you don’t want to hear.”

“You’re exaggerating, Lynn.”

“Three weeks ago you yelled at Lisa Bailey in Risk Management when she was late with her quarterly report
s. You even threatened to fire her.”

“I yelled because she is always late with her reports and I’m
sick of it.”

Lynn sashayed to the office doors. “Lisa has been late with her reports every quarter for three years. You never threatened her before.”

“Maybe I should threaten to fire you,” he barked, knowing she was right.

Grabbing the brass handles on the black leather
-covered doors, Lynn turned to him. “You can’t fire me. I know all of your dark secrets, and I would write a tell-all book about you.”

Tyler cracked a smile. “You would write a book
about me?”

“
I wouldn’t write it. I’d probably hire a writer to do it for me.” She grinned. “Know any?” She quietly shut the doors.  

Rolling his head back against his chair, Tyler could feel the tension rising
in his chest. He let out a long breath and once again focused on the papers scattered about his desk. Wanting to fill his head with numbers and budget problems, he lost himself in his paperwork, thankful for a brief reprieve from his bittersweet recollections.

***

Darkness had fallen over the Dallas skyline as Tyler sat at his desk, poring over figures from the pipeline project in Oklahoma. He had removed his tie and unfastened the top buttons on his shirt after Lynn had left for the day. The carton of chicken fried rice delivered from Yen’s Chinese Restaurant sat off to the side of his desk as he rubbed his tired eyes.

Standing from his desk chair, he stretched out his back in desperate need of a break from the monotony of crunching numbers. He
swung around to his picture window and was drawn to the twinkling stars in the night sky.

“I thought I
’d find you here,” a throaty voice said from the open entrance to his office.

Tyler closed his eyes, dreading the
notion of confronting the owner of that distinctive voice. “Hello, Mother.” Slowly, he faced her.

Flaunting
a stunning light blue silk dress that showed off her sleek figure and long legs, the attractive blonde in his office doorway still had the creamy smooth skin and full curves of a forty-year-old, despite having just passed seventy. Her shoulder-length hair was coiffed around her angular features, accentuating the toned skin of her freshly lifted face. But despite the marvelous efforts of her plastic surgeon to transform her appearance, her dark brown eyes were still just as hard and soulless as Tyler remembered from his youth.

“My own son stands me up for a party,” she
fussed as her stiletto heels carried her across the fine, beige European rug she had insisted on when she redecorated his office several years back. “You have a real talent for pissing me off, Tyler Dane.”

Rolling his eyes at his mother’s use of his first and middle name—unnerving for any child—he sat back
down in his chair, feeling the tension return to every molecule of his being.

“What are you doing here?” He
peeked at his gold watch. “I thought you’d still be at Senator Adleman’s cocktail party.”

She came up to his desk, eyeing the carton of
fried rice. “Why would I do that? The only reason I accepted the invitation and came all the way to Dallas was because you said you would go with me. You know how I hate going to parties alone.” She motioned to the carton. “Must you eat such trash? You need a wife to cook for you.” Her hand waved over the scattering of papers on his desk. “Someone to get you away from all of this.”

He
ran his hand behind his neck, working out a kink. “I don’t remember Gary ever getting home before eight every night when he ran the business.”

She swiveled her disconcerting eyes to him. “Perhaps, but he still had me to come home to. Who do you have?”

Impatiently, he crossed his arms over his chest. “You didn’t have your driver come all the way downtown at this time of night to chastise me for not taking you to a cocktail party, Mother.”

S
he adjusted a diamond tennis bracelet on her slender wrist. “Guess who was at the party?”

He took in a fortifying breath.
Here it comes
, he mused.

“Hadley was on the arm of Beau Gaste
…you remember Beau. You went to UT in Austin with him before you dropped out.”

“And what did Hadley say?
That’s why you’re here, right? To report on Hadley’s bad behavior.” He pushed away from the desk. “We’re divorced, and I really don’t care what she says or who she is seen with.”

“You might care about this.” Barbara approached the side of his desk. “She was going on and on about you and that New Orleans girl.”

“I really wish you would stop calling her that.”

Barbara
flung the silver-beaded clutch in her hand on his desk. “Hadley seemed to think it was pretty serious between you two. She was telling everyone about how you were fawning all over the woman when she was in Dallas last summer.”

Tyler turned back to his desk. “I wasn’t fawning. We were catching up. Hadley was being nosy, as usual.”

“I never did understand your infatuation with that woman. I know she is a big author now, and I can see her being of some use to you, but honestly, Tyler, she was never the most socially acceptable creature.”

His temper seething, h
e snapped up his pen. “She wasn’t like all the other social deviants you tried to set me up with. Moe was original and spoke her mind.”

“Is that what you wanted?”
She gave a nonchalant shrug. “I always got the impression women were more or less a hobby with you. None of them ever held your interest for very long.”

“
No they didn’t, but Moe was different.”

Barbara paused
, analyzing the lines of his face. “So what happened when you went to New Orleans?”

“Nothing happened.
” He slammed his pen down on the desk. “We spent some time together and then I had to go to Oklahoma.”

“I always could tell when you were lying to me, you know that?” She leaned over his desk, her emerald and diamond necklace scintillating in the overhead lights. “You were the easy one to figure out. Your brother was the one
who always….” She waved a dismissive hand in the air.

“Why is that, Mother? Why did you make Peter your problem child and me your angel? He knew how you felt and resented the hell out of it.”

She stood back from his desk, her dark eyes resonating with the blow he had landed. “I never did any such thing. Peter was my first born, my baby, until he started hanging with the wrong crowd, coming home at all hours, and then when the police began showing up, I knew he was lost to me.”

“You gave up too easily. You washed your hands of him way before he left us.”

“I had to protect you.” She pointed her finger at him. “You were all I had left, and I had to make sure he didn’t turn you into the drug fiend he was becoming.”

Tyler
leapt from his chair. “Peter was never into drugs!”

She squared h
er shoulders against his furor. “Your brother was a drug dealer and a criminal.”

“What are you talking about? Peter was a great guy.”

“Oh, come on, Tyler. You never knew your brother.” Her voice grew louder. “You were just a child when he left and you only saw what you wanted to see with him. I could never let you know what was really going on. When he was arrested—”

“Peter was never arrested
,” Tyler angrily broke in.

Barbara’s chilly demeanor fizzled.
“I was never going to tell you.” She turned away from his desk. “Peter was arrested about three years after he left us. I didn’t want to say anything because you worshipped the ground he walked on, and I could not stand for you to be hurt by him anymore.”

Tyler came around the desk to her side. “When did this happen?”

“I got a phone call from a prison in Arizona, right after you left for UT in Austin. He was busted for dealing heroin and cocaine.”

Tyler’s hand went through his thick hair. “You should have told me.”

Barbara’s smirk cut through his heart. “Why? It wouldn’t have done you or your brother any good. Besides, I was married to Gary then and I could not afford the scandal of having a drug dealer for a son, so I kept my mouth shut. I never even told Gary.”

“Christ, he was your son, not some nameless criminal.” He paused and stared into her icy eyes. “What happened to him?”

She shook her head. “What difference does it make?”

He stood before her. “It matters to me, Mother. Peter has always mattered to me. I need to know where he is.”

“Why? So you can have a family reunion? Catch up on old times? He was no good, Tyler. Just like his father. I could never let him influence you. I had to protect you, make sure you never became like him. So, I cut him off.”

“That wasn’t for you to decide!” Tyler
bellowed, throwing his hands in the air.

“Of course it was. You were all I had left and you had a golden opportunity with Gary. I could never allow Peter to screw that up for you.”

Tyler’s fury burned his cheeks as he stared at the woman who bore him with all the loathing he had ever possessed. “Where is he?” he hissed.

Barbara
removed her purse from his desk. “Dead,” she casually replied. “About ten years ago there was a fight in the prison where he was being held. He was stabbed and died two days later. They buried him there.” She waved her purse in the air. “Some place outside of Little Rock, Arkansas.”

Pain ripped through his chest and for a moment it was impossible for him to breath
e. When he regained his composure, Tyler screamed, “You heartless bitch! He’s dead and you never told me.”

“Don’t you dare speak to me like that
.” Her voice trembled with rage. “Do you know what I have done for you? The shit I have had to endure so you could make it? I married a man I…you’d better be thankful I’ve done all that I have for you, Tyler. I’ve given up everything to secure your happiness.”