merely a matter of money or paperwork. It was people and politics. You had to find a way to bring both together, and nobody could do that better than Ron Egan. It was how he’d raised himself from a kid whose parents didn’t have enough money to buy him decent shoes or a winter coat to a man whose income had reached nine figures this last year.
He turned abruptly away from a mirror that showed him a much too realistic view of himself. He had the look of a successful man—the clothes, the carriage, the confidence—but right now that left a bad taste in his mouth. His daughter had become pregnant. Worse, she had turned to a perfect stranger for support rather than to him. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know something was wrong there. He was an expert when it came to analyzing people, figuring out what made them tick, knowing what to do to make them come down on his side.
How had he managed to fail so badly with his own daughter?
Why was she afraid of him? What would he have done if she had come to him?
The door opened, and Kathryn reentered the room. Cynthia followed. Ron felt almost as though he was looking at a stranger.
She had put on jeans and a T-shirt, allowed her dark-blond hair to fall over her shoulders. She displayed none of the sullen anger he’d seen the last time he was home. She faced him with a new calmness. Only her twitching toes—she was barefooted—betrayed any uneasiness.
Ron hadn’t realized how much her facial features had grown to resemble her mother’s. It was almost like seeing Erin the way she looked the first day they met. Cynthia was tall with slim bones, though right now she carried some extra weight. He remembered how much being overweight had affected his life. It had to be worse for a girl. They were under so much more pressure to be slim.
Like Kathryn.
He cursed silently and brought his mind back to his daughter.
In his mind she’d remained his little girl. He’d been too busy to realize she’d gone ahead and grown up on her own. And now she was in trouble, and he had to figure out some way to help her.
“Why did you come?” Cynthia asked. “I don’t want you here.”
“I’m your father.”
“I’m sixteen.”
Was there a single teenager in America who didn’t think turning sixteen made him or her an adult? “I’m still your father. If you hadn’t come home soon, Margaret would have called the police. I would have had the SBI and the FBI combing the state looking for you. You should have told me you were in trouble.”
“You can’t do anything about it.”
“I could have tried to help.”
“I don’t need your help. I can do this on my own.”
Despite the twitching toes, she didn’t appear frightened or overly angry. It was almost as though he were a momentary obstacle she had to deal with before she could move on.
“When were you going to tell me about the baby?”
She didn’t answer.
“How were you going to keep it a secret?”
“I’ll stay here until after it’s born. I don’t have to go to school when I really start showing. Miss Roper has people come teach us. I can get my GED.”
He spent ten thousand dollars a year to send her to the best private school in Charlotte, and she was talking about a GED! Didn’t she have any idea how important it was to graduate from the right school? No matter what he had to do, he was determined Cynthia would do that.
“We’ll worry about that later. Are you okay? You look pale.”
“It’s because I’m pregnant.” Cynthia stumbled over the word that described her condition. “Mrs. Collias fixes meals especially for pregnant girls. She says she can make sure I have enough for the baby without getting fat.”
Ron had almost forgotten Kathryn was still in the room. She had taken a seat near the door and was leafing through a magazine. She didn’t trust him alone with his daughter, but at least she had the decency to pretend she wasn’t listening to everything they said. He wondered if she was this protective of her other girls.
“All expectant mothers are supposed to gain weight.”
His wife had gained forty pounds then lost it within a few months.
“If I get fat, I’ll never get it off.”
Ron didn’t know how the conversation had drifted onto something as trivial as weight.
“What about the boy?” Ron asked. “The baby’s father.”
“He doesn’t know.”
“You have to tell him.”
“No, I don’t. It’s my baby. Besides, I don’t want to ruin his life, too.”
“This is not going to ruin your life. I won’t let it.”
“I’m a pregnant, unwed teenager,” Cynthia said, anger now rising to the surface. “There’s nothing your money can do to change that.”
He felt as if he were being punished for working so she would never have to endure privation. “You still have to tell the father. It’s his baby as much as yours. He has a right to know.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
For the first time since seeing her, he sensed fear. “I’m sure he’ll guess when you don’t return to school.”
“I told everybody we were moving to Connecticut.”
Ron knew it would be impossible to keep her baby a secret even if they did move to Connecticut, but he would deal with that later. Right now he needed to get Cynthia home and settled into her own room. And he needed to get out of Kathryn Roper’s house.
“Get your things,” Ron said. “I’m taking you home.”
Cynthia pulled back from him. Something about her expression changed, something subtle that made her look less like a child and more like a woman.
“I’m not going home. I’m staying here.”
Ron knew his relationship with his daughter wasn’t the best in the world, but she’d never refused point-blank to do anything reasonable. “Why not?”
“I just told you,” Cynthia said, sounding impatient. “I don’t want anybody to know.”
“They’ll know soon enough.”
“Not if I stay here and you go back to Switzerland. They’ll believe we moved to Connecticut, just like I said. I told them we were keeping the house with Margaret and everybody else in case we didn’t like it. I told them I didn’t want to go but some of your Yale buddies had talked you into it because it would put you closer to New York, that it would be good for your business.”
Ron didn’t bother pointing out that such a story was so full
