No, they were the ones who held in their memories that measuring stick of who he had once been…a troubled fourteen-year-old kid from the tenements of Clinton, a neighborhood that had once been called Hell’s Kitchen.
They saw it as something to be admired that he had overcome his circumstances—his father being sent to prison, his mother abandoning him—but he just saw it as something left behind him.
Beebee and Miss Viv dispensed charity as easily as they breathed, but as well-meaning as they were, they had no idea how shaming that part of his life, when he had been so needy and so vulnerable, was to him. He did not excuse himself because he had only been fourteen.
He still felt, sometimes, that he was their poor child, an object of pity that they had rescued and nursed back to wellness like a near-drowned kitten.
Was he insecure about his past? No, he didn’t think so. But it was over and it was done. He’d always had an ability to place his life in neat compartments; his need for order did not allow for overlapping.
But suddenly, he thought of that letter that had arrived at his home last week, a cheap envelope and a prison postmark lying on a solid mahogany desk surely a sign that a man could not always keep his worlds from overlapping.
Houston had told no one about the arrival of that letter, not even the only other person who knew his complete history, Beebee.
Was that part of why he was sending her away with Miss Viv? Not just because he knew they could probably not resist sharing the titillating details of his past with anyone who would listen, including all the employees here at Second Chances, but because he didn’t want to talk to Beebee about that letter? The thought of that letter, plus being here at Second Chances, made him feel what Houston Whitford hated feeling the most: vulnerable, as if that most precious of commodities, control, was slipping away from him.
And there was something about this place—the nature of charity, Miss Viv and his history, Molly, sweetly sensual in virginal white—that made him feel, not as if his guard was being let down, but that his bastions were being stormed.
He was a proud man. That pride had carried him through times when all else had failed. He didn’t want Miss Viv’s personal information about him undermining his authority to rescue her charity, changing the way people he had to deal with looked at him.
And when people found out his story, it did change the way they looked at him.
He could tell, for instance, Molly Michaels would fall solidly in the soft-hearted category. She’d love an opportunity to treat him like a kitten who had nearly drowned! And he wasn’t having it.
“Let’s discuss Molly Michaels for a minute,” he said carefully. “I’d like to have a little talk with her about—”
“Don’t be hard on her!” Miss Viv cried. “Try not to judge Molly for the outfit. She was just being playful. It was actually good to see that side of her again,” Miss Viv said.
Playful. He liked playful. In the bedroom.
In the office? Not so much.
“Please don’t hurt her feelings,” Miss Viv warned him.
Hurt her feelings? What did feelings have to do with running an organization, with expecting the best from it, with demanding excellence?
He did give in to the little impulse, then, to press the ridge of the scar along his nose.
Miss Viv’s voice lowered into her juicy-secret tone. “The broken engagement? She’s had a heartbreak recently.”
It confirmed his wisdom in sending Miss Viv away for the duration of the Second Chances business makeover. He didn’t want to know this, at all. He pressed harder. The ache along the scar line did not diffuse.
“A cad, I’m afraid,” Miss Viv said, missing his every signal that he did not want to be any part of the office stories, the gossip, the personalities.
Despite his desire to remove himself from it, Houston felt a sudden and completely unexpected pulsing of fury.
Not for the circumstances he found himself in, certainly not at Miss Viv, who could not help herself. No, Houston felt an undisciplined desire to hurt a man he did not know for breaking the heart of a woman he also did not know—save for the exquisite tenderness of her neck beneath his fingertips.
That flash of unreasonable fury, an undisciplined reaction, was gone nearly as soon as it happened, but it still served to remind him that things did not always stay in their neat compartments. He had not overcome what he had come from as completely as everyone believed.
He came from a world where violence was the default reaction.
Houston knew if he was to let down his guard, lose his legendary sense of control for a second—one second—he could become that man his father had been, his carefully constructed world blown apart by forces—fury, passion—that could rise up in a storm that he had no hope of taming.
It was the reason Houston did not even allow himself to contemplate his life in the context of fairy tales represented by a young woman in a bridal gown. There was no room for a compartment like that in the neat, tidy box that made up his life.
There was a large compartment for work, an almost equally large one for his one and only passion, the combat sport of boxing.
There were smaller compartments for his social obligations, for Beebee, for occasional and casual relationships with the rare member of the opposite sex who shared his aversion for commitment. There were some compartments that were nailed shut.
But now the past was not staying in the neat compartment system. The compartment that held Houston’s father and his mother was being pried up, despite the nails trying to hold it firmly shut.
Houston’s father had written his only son a letter that asked nothing and expected nothing. And yet at the same time Houston was bitterly aware that how he reacted to it would prove who he really was.
After nineteen years, his father was getting out of prison.
And it felt as if all those years of Houston outdistancing his past had been a total waste of energy. Because there it was, waiting for him, right around the next bend in time.
The scar across his nose flared with sudden pain, and Houston pressed a finger into the line of the old break, aware he was entering a danger zone that the mean streets of Clinton had nothing on.
“Have a seat,” Houston invited Molly several hours later, after he had personally waved goodbye to Beebee and Miss Viv at the airport.
“Thank you.” She took a seat, folded her hands primly in her lap and looked at him expectantly.
It was his second encounter with her, and he was determined it was going to go differently than the first. It was helpful that Miss Viv was not there smiling at him as if he was her favorite of all charity cases.
And it was helpful that Molly Michaels was all business now, no remnant of the blushing bride she had been anywhere in sight. No, she was dressed in a conservative slack suit, her amazing hair pinned sternly up on her head.
Still, it was way too easy to remember how it had felt
