Flirting with Felicity (18 page)

“Hate is a strong word.”

“What else can explain why he didn’t want me with him after
my parents died? He took me in for two weeks before sending me away. I never
lived with him again after that.”

“Maybe he sent you away because he was mourning the loss of
his brother, or maybe he was regretful of the way he’d always treated your
mother, or maybe you reminded Vern of himself at that age.” She stopped talking
as a smile warmed his face. “What?”

“That’s one of the many things I love about you. You never
see a fault in anyone.” He leaned forward and kissed her. He didn’t add any additional
words to their conversation. In fact, he didn’t say another word for a very
long time. Instead, he spoke with actions in the way his hands drifted over her
body.

And while he did, one word he’d said drifted through her
thoughts:
love
.
He’d said it so casually, the way so many other people did, as a more intense
version of liking something. Yet those four letters didn’t resonate with her
that way. Was that what he’d meant, or did he mean something more?

And as she gave herself over to the pleasure he evoked, she
couldn’t forget the one thing that still stood between them—the ownership of
the Bancroft Hotel. Their physical relationship changed nothing. In fact, it
complicated matters even more, because the day was soon approaching where one
of them would have to concede. Someone would win, someone would lose, and the
casualty of that decision would be one or the other of them.

The next day, Felicity woke and slipped from the bed,
leaving Blake still asleep. Last night she’d seen the pain in his eyes when
he’d told her about his parents. And she’d seen that same look when he’d told
her about Vern sending him away. Why had Vern kept his only living relative at
a distance? He must always have been as disagreeable as he was to most of the
staff at the hotel. The bigger question was why befriend her?

Felicity showered and dressed while Blake continued to sleep.
She had to pack and get ready to return to the mainland. A part of her was sad
to leave the splendor of the island behind. Yet if they stayed any longer, she
feared what she might do when filled with emotion. Twice yesterday she’d almost
given him the Bancroft despite her fears about what would happen to the staff.

She paced the sitting area of the suite, looking out the big
picture windows at the breathtaking view of Poipu Beach below. The sun was just
coming up and casting golden rays across the palms and tropical foliage, making
the soft rain from last night look like sparkling jewels on the deep green
leaves.

Rain she understood. Rain she was used to. It was best for
her to return to Seattle and keep her wits about her until she could make a
logical decision about how they would move forward with the Bancroft and . . .

She couldn’t finish the thought. She wasn’t certain if there
was anything else for them past this trip. Blake had given her no indication of
such a thing. Besides, he lived in San Francisco. She lived in Seattle. And
while long-distance relationships weren’t impossible, it wasn’t ultimately what
she wanted. She’d liked going to sleep in Blake’s arms last night and waking up
the same way.

For the first time in her life, something had been easy and
spontaneous. But if Blake remained in her life, would anything ever be normal?
They came from such different worlds. That was one thing she hadn’t revealed to
him last night, just how impoverished she had been. Not because she was
embarrassed by her early poverty, but because she’d pushed those memories so
deep, it was hard to pull them back without experiencing the same terror she’d
gone to sleep with each night as a child.

Those memories were better off tucked deep inside.

“Morning, gorgeous.” Blake came up behind her and slipped his
arms around her waist, pulling her back against his chest. He kissed the top of
her head and handed her her cell phone. “You left this in the bedroom.”

“Thanks,” she said, turning it on and nestling back against
his chest.

“Did you sleep well?” he asked.

She turned in his arms to smile up at him. “Too good,
probably.”

His eyes filled with pleasure. “The island does that to you.”

“It was more than the island,” she said, impulsively lifting
up on her toes to kiss him. Her phone buzzed, indicating someone had left a
message while it had been turned off. It buzzed again. Another message. Then
again. And again. She pulled back out of his embrace and stared down at the
screen. “I have thirteen missed calls.” Eleven calls had been from Mary Beth
and two from the assisted living facility where her father lived. A chill slid
through her as she accessed her voice mail. Trying to be positive and not read
anything into the calls, she quickly accessed her messages.

Felicity stood stock still as she listened. A desperate cry
lodged in her throat.

Her father . . .

The words crashed through her brain and a great weight
pressed down on her lungs. Through a distant, detached part of her brain, she
heard Blake talking to her, but the words sounded far away, jumbled, until he
reached out and took her by the shoulders. “Felicity?”

“I have to go home.”

“What’s wrong?”

“My father. They released him from the hospital this morning.
Mary Beth took him back to the assisted living facility where he lives, but now
he’s gone.”

His face paled. “Gone, as in missing or dead?”

“Missing,” she said. “For the first time in sixteen years he
walked out the door, and no one knows where he is.”

Concern flashed in Blake’s eyes a moment before he palmed his
own phone.

Their time in Hawai‘i was over. She had to go home, and as
quickly as possible.

While the luxury of Blake’s plane was not completely
lost on Felicity as they took off, the six-hour flight seemed endless. She sat
in the padded leather seat in the main cabin, wishing with every mile that they
would touch down in Seattle already.

She stared out the airplane’s small oval window, seeing her
own reflection in the Plexiglas. Her eyes looked like two smudges of black on
an ashen canvas as she fought back tears.

Guilt swamped her. She never should have left her father so
soon after his procedure. Even though the doctor had said there was very little
that could go wrong and had encouraged her to take a few days for herself, she
should have known that something would happen. She’d never had the kind of luck
that others experienced.

The thought brought her up short. She couldn’t really say
that, not after what Vern had done for her. His gift of the hotel and the
restaurant had started her down a different path. If anything was to blame, it
was her own inability to afford better care for her father.

Felicity sat in her seat, unable to move, her stomach
tightening. She’d talked with Mary Beth twice before the plane had taken off,
trying to reassure her friend that she wasn’t to blame. She’d also talked with
the assisted living facility to learn her father had slipped out of his room
and out of the facility while the staff had been changing from the night to
morning shift. They’d reviewed their security tapes and had witnessed him
walking down the back stairs and out the door, heading south. Every spare
employee at the facility was out combing the streets of Seattle for her father.
Because of her father’s medical condition, the police had been alerted and the
twenty-four-hour waiting period for a missing person had been waived. They were
doing what they could to find her father, but was it enough? She squeezed her
eyes shut. Beside her, Blake talked on a satellite phone. She’d given him
permission to call in his own people to help aid in the search.

Where was her father?

Blake got off the phone, and she knew a moment of hope until
he shook his head, confirming her worst fears. “No one can find him. I’ve hired
two detectives and their teams to find where he’s gone. By the time we touch
down, we’ll know something.”

Felicity drew a deep, steadying breath. There was no time for
fear or panic. Later she could fall apart, once they’d found him and figured
out what was wrong. Her father needed her to be strong.

Blake knelt before her and drew her into his arms, holding
her close. A shudder moved through her. “We’ll get there, and everything will
be okay.”

If only that could be the truth.

When the plane’s wheels finally hit the tarmac and the door
of the cabin was pushed aside, Blake reported that the detectives had found her
father’s location. “He’s in a house in Seattle. I have the address. They say
he’s unharmed. He’s simply waiting there for something.”

“What house?”

He told her the address, and her stomach plummeted. Why would
her father go back to the one place she’d worked so hard to escape? “Hurry,
Blake, please? He’s at the trailer park where I grew up.”

Without saying anything more, Blake guided her down the air
stairs and to a waiting car. Peter sat behind the wheel. He nodded to her a
moment before he fired the engine and drove off the runway at Boeing Field. For
a moment, she wondered how the driver could be behind the wheel so quickly when
he had also been on their flight, but she gave up questioning Blake’s abilities
several days ago. He had the resources to move mountains if he wanted to.
Finding her father so quickly was proof of that.

As the car sped toward South Seattle, Felicity tried to push
away the weight of her guilt without much success. When they pulled up in front
of the dilapidated single-wide trailer, she hopped out. Only when she
approached the detectives waiting in the yard, did she slow down. She looked
past them to see her father sitting on the porch with his legs crossed, staring
into the distance.

At her approach, he turned toward her, and Felicity’s heart
faltered. Tears streamed down his cheeks. It wasn’t the tears that sent a
shudder of both fear and hope through her, it was the spark of awareness that
lit her father’s eyes.

Felicity couldn’t breathe as hope built. “Dad?”

His mouth worked, but no sound emerged. Yet it was more of a
reaction than she’d seen in him since the accident.

Answering tears leaped to her lashes. She moved to her
father’s side. Gently, she placed a hand on his cheek. “I’m here, Dad. I won’t
leave you alone again.” Other than being covered with dust, he looked as he
always did, except for the light of awareness in his eyes.

Her tears spilled onto her cheeks. “It’s me, Dad, Felicity.”

Blake knelt beside her and touched her shoulder. “Let’s get
him out of here.”

The tender look in his eyes stole her breath. “Okay.”

Blake scooped her father up in his arms. He staggered for a
moment from the weight, but made his way to the car. “To the hospital,” he said
to Peter when her father was settled in the car between them.

“No,” Felicity interrupted. “Take him to the Bancroft. I want
him with me.”

Without a word of objection, they headed to the Bancroft
Hotel in record time. They managed to get her father in the front door and into
a transport chair, then up to her suite. There, Blake once again lifted the
older man from the chair and settled him on the gold and black contemporary
sofa.

“I called the paramedics. They’re just outside the door,
waiting to check him out,” Blake said.

She nodded, then stepped back, allowing the medical
professionals to make the determination if her father was well enough to remain
at the Bancroft. When they were done checking his vitals as well as his
surgical site, they gave her the okay to keep him with her. She was reluctant
to put him back into the assisted living home he’d escaped, for fear that
painful memories lingered there as he remembered what had happened all those
years ago. Why else would he have gone back to the house if he wasn’t
remembering? His brain was starting up again.

Felicity’s heart wrenched at the coiled emotions in her
father’s eyes—pain, acceptance, fear, gratitude. Again, she placed a loving
hand to his cheek and smiled. “I’m glad you’re with me again, Dad.”

His lips quivered, then the corner of one pulled up in a half
smile. “Alligator,” he said, the word brittle and dry as he forced it out.

Unbridled joy filled her. “After a while, crocodile,” she
echoed in the phrase he’d said to her every time he left her. Yet he wasn’t
going away this time. He was here to stay, of that much she was certain.

He said nothing more. It was as if that word cost him most of
his energy. He nestled back against the sofa, spent.

Felicity sat beside her father until his eyelids grew heavy
and his breathing settled into a slow, even pattern before she moved away.

“You sure he wouldn’t be better off in the hospital?” Blake
asked.

“No. The EMTs cleared him, and something good is happening
here. I don’t want to go backward. It’s best just to keep him safe and see
where this leads. If he does need to go back there, we’re close enough for
safety’s sake.”

“You know best.”

She hoped she did. Felicity turned her head to watch her
father. His breathing was slow and easy.

“Why was he in the hospital?”

Felicity stood and motioned for Blake to follow her to the
opposite side of the room. She didn’t want anything to wake her father, or
worry him. “My father hasn’t said one word since my mother’s death, not until
today.” She’d told Blake that much, she might as well tell him the rest. “He
had a procedure I paid for with money I saved by moving into the Bancroft. An
experimental procedure that was supposed to kick-start his brain.”

“Looks like it worked,” he said softly.

“Yes,” she responded, her throat suddenly tight.

“What happens now?”

She shrugged. “We see what he remembers and get him therapy
to help pull out the rest.”

“Will it return him to normal?”

“Doubtful, but just the return of some of his speech is more
than I’d ever hoped for.”

Blake was silent for a long while before he spoke again. “What’s
next for us, Felicity? Where do we go from here?”

He couldn’t be asking her what she thought with that
statement. “You mean with the hotel?”

Again, he hesitated. “Of course, what else is there to
discuss? Did I convince you of anything in Hawai‘i?”

She looked over at the sofa, to her father sleeping there. “I
need time to think about things, Blake. This is a big decision for both of us.”

He nodded, then turned and left, shutting the door silently
behind him.

Taking a seat in the chair opposite the sofa, Felicity looked
up at the ceiling and released a soft, nervous laugh as she pondered her
options with the hotel. She played out every scenario that came to mind, trying
to determine how she and Blake could both win when it came to the Bancroft.

Could she keep the restaurant and give him the hotel? He’d
said before that he intended to tear much of the hotel apart. Did that include
the Dolce Vita? And if the hotel were under construction, would her clientele
still come to dine as they had in the past?

Plus, that solution wouldn’t solve any of the problems with
her staff. If Blake took over the hotel, they would most likely lose their
jobs. And she knew most of them didn’t have any savings to carry them through
until they found new ones. If new employment were even possible.

What if she sold the property back to him for the million
dollars he’d offered her? Could she use all that money to establish a salary
fund for her furloughed employees?

But if she kept the Bancroft and the restaurant, things would
remain exactly as they were—everything, that was, except her heart. All she’d
ever wanted for herself and her father was a normal life, job, house, and
family.

Normal did not include owning a restaurant, living in a
hotel, or having an extremely pleasant physical relationship with a
billionaire. There was nothing normal about any of that. The irony was that she
wasn’t sure she’d know what to do with normal. Or if she even wanted that
anymore.

She liked the extraordinary feeling of owning her own
restaurant and hotel. Added to that, nothing would make her happier than to see
a spark of awareness in her father’s eyes each day when he woke. Then there was
Blake. Nothing about him was normal, or easy, or as expected. And she liked him
that way.

Since she was trying to be brutally honest with herself, she
and Blake had no future together in any of the scenarios she’d thought out. How
could they? They were two very different people. They came from two different
worlds, miles apart.

Blake might have lost his parents when he was a young man,
but he’d had a safety net in his uncle Vern, even if the two of them hadn’t
gotten along. Money could buy things that she’d only dreamed about when she was
growing up.

She’d allowed herself to be vulnerable in Hawai‘i. She’d let
him sway her with his wealth and his passion for the environment, she’d even
given in to the man’s seductive pull, but there was one thing left to cling to,
and that was the promise of a future for herself, her father, and all the other
people she now employed.

The future was what mattered.

Later that night, Mary Beth knocked on the door of
Felicity’s suite. “Can I come in?”

A welcoming smile on her face, Felicity stepped back and let
her friend in.

“I’m so relieved you found your dad.”

In a hushed voice Felicity said, “Me, too.” She waved her
hand toward the man sleeping on her sofa.

“Where did you find him?”

“At our old house.”

Mary Beth narrowed her eyes on Felicity. “I shudder to think
how he went all that way alone. But he looks okay. Is he?”

Felicity nodded. “He spoke to me.”

Mary Beth drew a startled breath. “The procedure worked. Oh,
Felicity, this is so exciting. Everything you’ve ever hoped for is coming true.”

An eerie chill went up Felicity’s spine. “Don’t say that.”

“Why not?”

“Because every time someone says something like that, the
opposite comes true.”

Mary Beth arched a brow at that. “Not this time. I heard
Blake rushed you back here like a man possessed.”

“Out of a sense of obligation for taking me away. He had no
idea my father was in the hospital.”

“Are you serious?” Mary Beth shook her head. “Is that what
you think? Do you really not see the way the man looks at you?”

“He’s a businessman who is making a business agreement with
me. Nothing more.”

Mary Beth’s gaze narrowed on Felicity. “Tell me you finally
gave in to that man in Hawai‘i.”

Felicity nodded.