talked to his stepmother for another five minutes in which she deftly sidestepped his questions about her finances. She was especially evasive about the local financial planner she’d insisted on hiring instead of the one Tony had found for her in Columbus. One more thing to check up on, he thought.
He reluctantly rejoined Ellen in the living room when he hung up, not looking forward to the coming conversation.
She’d crossed one leg over the other, and her slim gold ankle bracelet glinted in the soft light of the living room. She gazed up at him through expertly made-up lashes. Even though her wineglass was half-full, her pink-tinted lipstick looked fresh.
“Can I top off your glass?” Her musical voice was as perfect as the rest of her. They’d been dating for seven months, ever since she’d approached him at the health club they both used. His initial impression of her, as a woman who went after what she wanted, had turned out to be correct.
“No, thanks. I need to make it an early night.”
Her perfectly shaped eyebrows lifted in question. She had every right to expect that this Saturday night, as countless others before it, would end in his bed. Sundays, they usually spent together.
“Has something happened? Is that why you took so long on the phone?”
He sat down next to her on the buttery-soft leather sofa in front of a fireplace that didn’t blaze and filled her in on his conversation with Sofia, ending with his plan to return to McIntosh.
“Is that really necessary, Tony?” she asked. “Sofia’s forty-one. That’s only fourteen years older than you. She can take care of herself.”
He pressed his lips together, wondering how best to explain. Ellen would understand better if she knew Sofia, but he’d somehow failed to get them together.
“You don’t know her, Ellen. She has a big heart and a trusting nature. Not a good combination for somebody who just came into millions of dollars.”
“But you were just there last month.”
“Last month she hadn’t announced on television that she was looking for her daughter,” he said.
She set her wine goblet on the glass top of his coffee table, then crossed her arms over her chest. “How long will you be gone?”
“Try to understand, Ellen.” He laid a hand on her arm, which felt cool to the touch. “I need to stay as long as Sofia needs me.”
“But I thought you hated McIntosh. Didn’t you tell me that leaving was all you could think about when you lived there?”
Now wasn’t the time to confide that even the three days he’d spent in McIntosh after Sofia won the lottery had been too long. He composed his words carefully. “How I feel about McIntosh and how I feel about my stepmother are different things.”
“So you’re going to let things here slide? What about expanding your company? And the house? At that price, it won’t stay on the market for long.”
He’d forgotten about the sprawling, contemporary house until this moment. It needed a new roof and a new heating system, but its spectacular views of the Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains made it a bargain.
“There will be other houses,” he said.
She got gracefully to her feet. Her blue eyes locked with his. “In my experience, Tony, if you don’t seize your opportunities when the moment is right, you lose them.”
After she was gone, Tony went into his bedroom, reached into the pocket of his pants and pulled out a small black velvet box. He snapped it open, removed an oval-cut, one-carat diamond ring and held it up to the light so that it sparkled.
He’d been carrying the diamond around for the better part of two weeks, the same length of time he’d kept the champagne in the refrigerator.
He shut the ring back in the box, opened his sock drawer and tossed the box inside next to a blank application for season tickets to the Seattle Supersonics pro basketball games. It would have to stay there until he returned from McIntosh.
THE BEAUTIFUL rolling countryside of McIntosh and Sofia Donatelli’s heart-tugging plea replayed in Kaylee’s mind at odd moments over the next week, but her own predicament was much more pressing.
Joey’s tummy ache had not been caused by too many hot dogs but by a lingering stomach flu the pediatrician claimed wasn’t serious. That was a matter of opinion.
The restaurant where she was a waitress provided a sorely deficient benefits package. Not only had she been forced to pay fifty percent of the doctor’s bill out of her own shallow pocket, but she’d lost tips by staying home to care for Joey.
Not that the tips had been all that great since Dawn’s departure forced her to change to an earlier shift. Even if Joey hadn’t gotten ill, she needed to face the fact that they could no longer afford to live in Fort Lauderdale.
She’d spent the last few nights agonizing over where they could go. The inescapable conclusion was her father’s house in Houston that she’d fled while still a teenager.
Kaylee had doubts over whether they’d be welcome, but last night she had swallowed her pride and telephoned, only to get the answering machine. So far, her father hadn’t called her back.
For Joey’s sake, she tried to shove aside her worries. Her forced smile strained the corners of her mouth after she and Joey got out of the serviceable ten-year-old Honda she’d bought used five years ago.
“What do you want for dinner, sport?” she asked as she opened the mailbox in front of her duplex and took out a stack of envelopes and junk mail.
She’d picked up Joey from school ten minutes ago and worried that his color still wasn’t right. Had her boss’s insistence that she not miss another day of work caused her to rush his return?
“Fish sticks,” he said.
She hid a groan. He’d eat fish sticks seven days a week if she let him. But at least they were cheap and easy to prepare.
“Yummy, yummy, yummy. Joey wants fish sticks in his tummy,” she said, ruffling his thick hair.
He groaned. “I’m not three, Mom.”
“Too bad. When you were three, you laughed at my jokes even if they were bad.”
“They’re bad,” he agreed readily.
She covered her heart with her hand. “You wound me,” she said dramatically.
Joey giggled, that high-pitched boyish noise that never failed to warm her heart.
“Got you,” she said.
He giggled again. She ushered him from the mugginess of the late afternoon into the duplex, which was only slightly cooler because she kept the thermostat on a high setting during the day to save on electricity.
Had she really been living here for six years? It seemed impossible but her rapidly growing son constituted proof of how quickly the time had passed.
Still,
