Blue Clouds (31 page)

“No one can foresee the future. I'm pretty rotten at choosing men myself. Maybe we should take up astrology. From what I can tell, it can't work any worse.”

“You're avoiding the subject, Pippa,” Lillian chided.

“Natalie is having lunch with Chad, and Seth is sulking in his room. Shall we eat by the pool?”

Pippa would rather emulate Seth and nurse her wounds in her room, but she couldn't turn her back on Lillian's needs any more than she could ignore Chad's or Seth's. She was a glutton for punishment. Where was the backbone her mother had kept telling her to straighten?

Deciding that she had the spine of a jellyfish, Pippa reluctantly rose from her desk, and picking up her glass of tea, followed Lillian through the house. Had she not had her feet knocked out from under her several times lately, she'd have stormed upstairs and dragged Seth from his lair to join them. But an action like that would only confirm the relationship everyone assumed was between them. The nonexistent relationship, she repeated firmly to herself.

“My son is not an easy man to know,” Lillian said as she settled into the poolside chair at the table where Nana had set out linens and silverware.

“And you're not any good at matchmaking,” Pippa reminded her pointedly, taking the opposite chair.

“What was in that letter, anything important?” Lillian demanded, picking up her napkin.

“Nothing worth bombing an office,” Pippa acknowledged. Seth had merely scanned the contents and trashed it as if it contained no surprises. “Have you had any luck in finding contractors for the gym yet?”

“The gym may be a waste of time if Natalie wins the court suit and takes Chad.” Lillian unfolded her napkin and laid it across her lap without looking up.

Well, that was a different direction, Pippa supposed. Glaring down at the selection of silverware and wondering whatever happened to good old-fashioned plastic, she stabbed something on her plate that looked green and slimy and swallowed it rather than answer.

“I hope that man Seth hired will prove Natalie is a bad mother, but the courts really don't look favorably on fathers, you know.” Lillian sipped her tea and slyly watched Pippa over the rim of the glass. “It might help if Seth remarried.”

“I doubt it,” Pippa replied curtly. “It will only complicate matters, unless you want him to remarry Natalie. We'll simply have to continue on the assumption that Seth will win the case again. We can't let plans for the gym stand idle while we wait.”

“You're a disappointment, Pippa,” Lillian said coldly. “I'm offering you my approval and encouragement, and you're pretending you don't understand. Is my son so objectionable that you couldn't accept him in exchange for all he can do for you? Would you rather go about cleaning up other people's messes than live here in all this wealth and luxury? And what about Chad? Have you given any thought to him?”

Very carefully, Pippa laid down her fork and lifted her gaze to the conniving woman across from her. To survive in this jungle of Seth's, she needed a machete for a tongue.

“Mrs. Wyatt, you are extremely gracious in your generosity, but my life, and your son's, are not yours to give away. Haven't you learned by now that choosing spouses for wealth instead of love is not a stairway to heaven, or even to a good relationship? If you'll excuse me, I'm really not hungry, and I have a lot of work to catch up on.”

Lillian watched Pippa's chin-length hair bounce as she stalked away. Redheads always had a temper, even if they were artificial redheads. Until today, Pippa had done an excellent job of hiding it. Lillian wondered how much to attribute to Natalie's abrasive presence stripping Pippa's polite veneer, and how much was fear of her own emotions. She figured it was a little bit of both.

It probably wouldn't help if Lillian told the poor confused child that she'd married Maxim Wyatt for love and it hadn't made a whit of difference. In retrospect, buying a spouse seemed a much more logical and intelligent way of acquiring one. It hadn't worked in Natalie's case because Natalie already had money. But Pippa didn't. And from what Lillian could tell, Pippa needed the security—financial, emotional, and physical—that Seth could offer her. She couldn't see any reason why Seth couldn't buy what he wanted, and if she knew her son, he wanted Pippa.

Lillian believed in giving her son anything he wanted.

***

Seth glared at his wine cabinet and wondered if indulging wouldn't help. He took a gulp of his lukewarm coffee and grimaced.

The architect who had designed the balcony overlooking the mountains and valley probably hadn't intentionally designed the acoustic effect of the pool below. Seth doubted if anyone but him knew how well voices carried through his open balcony doors. As a kid, he'd amused himself by eavesdropping on adult conversations, until they'd become so unbearably hostile that he'd quit opening his doors at all. He shouldn't have given in to the impulse to throw them open as Pippa was so fond of doing.

At least his mother hadn't succeeded in buying Pippa as she had bought Natalie. Pippa had acquitted herself quite nobly, if a trifle naively. His mother's motives didn't hold up half so well. She was still at it, building gilded cages for him to beat his wings against. She'd never understood how her suffocating confinement had warped him.

Actually, Seth was rather surprised that his mother would stoop to enticing a glorified secretary into marrying him. Generally, she stuck to her version of wealth and sophistication. He didn't want to analyze Pippa's influence on his mother. He wasn't given to marrying his secretaries.

He wasn't given to sleeping with them either, but he had with this one. And he'd do it again, if she'd give him the chance, even knowing it was a mistake. Pippa was the kind of woman who expected marriage as the next step in a relationship. He had enough women complicating his life without adding a wife.

Sex, he could manage. Sex with Pippa might even become habit-forming. But that was all it would ever be. Circuses and sex, he amended. Pippa would teach them about circuses and laughter.

Besides, as Natalie had so lovingly pointed out, life with him was dangerous. He'd made enemies even before he'd inherited his father's wealth and power. He'd made a career of making enemies. Psychiatrists had accumulated fortunes analyzing his penchant for self-destruction. He could have explained it to them if they'd wanted to listen. They hadn't. No one had. So he'd gone on getting himself beaten up until he'd learned better ways of fighting back.

Now that he could retaliate, he didn't need psychiatrists, parents, or anyone else. Except Chad.

For Chad, he'd do anything. He just hoped it didn't involve marrying Pippa Cochran. He'd hate to see another rose wither and die in his presence.

“What this place needs is a good rainstorm,” Pippa declared, flinging open the balcony doors of Chad's room on another perfect sun-drenched day.

“Why?” Chad asked with interest. Most of the adults in his life were fairly predictable, but Pippa was more like a character in some book, always saying or doing something unexpected. He'd read the Pippi Longstocking book his father had recommended, but Pippa wasn't poor and didn't do things that she shouldn't. Or at least, Chad didn't think she did.

And the Pollyanna book had been really disgusting. Anyone who wandered around looking for the bright side of being crippled had a few knots in her plumbing and needed a good shrink. But Pippa could be like both characters sometimes. Maybe he could write a book about her. It would give him something to do with that word processing stuff on his computer. Writing all those words by hand would take forever.

Chad coughed and Pippa swung around to plump up his pillows.

“Why?” she returned his question. “Don't you like rainstorms? All that ferocious thunder and lightning shaking the sky, the clouds billowing up, the sheets of rain turning everything into a green jungle, and then afterward, when the birds sing and everything kind of sparkles, and the clouds turn blue and pink and light up like a rainbow—you don't like that?”

Chad wrinkled his nose and stared at her. “Clouds don't turn blue and pink. Clouds are black or white.” Adults said weird things sometimes. He didn't like thunder and lightning; he wasn't about to admit that. But a blue cloud, that he'd like to see.

She handed him his juice and medicine, and he swallowed them, watching to see how Pippa would wriggle out of that one. His father never lied to him. He knew Chad was too smart to buy the lies other kids believed. But his mother lied all the time. Maybe that was what women did.

His mother had said she'd take him home with her. He didn't know if he particularly wanted to go, but it might be interesting to have a mother for a change. He might be able to stay up and watch monster movies then. His dad and Pippa wouldn't let him.

But he didn't think Pippa usually lied. He hadn't caught her at it yet, anyway. Still, he knew clouds weren't blue. He had nothing better to do some days but stare out his windows and watch those white puffs change shape.

“Maybe you don't get rainstorms out here like we have back home.” Pippa took his cup and set it aside, then handed him the schoolbook he was supposed to be working on. “That would be a shame. Maybe I should take you back to Kentucky with me and show you a real thunderstorm. They're kind of scary sometimes, but afterward, with all those pretty colors lighting up the sky, it's like a movie. I've always thought those blue clouds were like a rainbow, a promise that the next day will be better for having let the rain fall. And it always is. Everything is always greener, and the flowers bloom prettier. Here, every day is the same. It's nice, but not as dramatic.”

He sort of liked it that Pippa talked to him as if he were an adult, but sometimes, she wandered a little farther than he could follow. He wrinkled his nose at the book in his hand. “Lightning burns the hills and covers everything with smoke. It stinks and looks nasty. And the clouds are always gray the next day. Clouds don't have colors.”

She finger-combed his hair and Chad thought he shouldn't like it, but he let her do it anyway. That was the kind of thing mothers were supposed to do, but his didn't.

“Clouds do so have colors,” she whispered. “Just like circuses have clowns. I'll show you someday.”

He lit up at that thought. “Can I see a circus?”

She grinned that Pippa smile he really liked because it meant they were both going to get in trouble with his father. He loved his dad, but he was so stiff sometimes he needed to be shaken up. And Pippa had a way of doing it that almost made his father smile, too. Chad liked it when his father smiled, but he hadn't been smiling much lately.

“I'm working on it, kid. Will a fair do if I can't find a circus?”

“What's a fair?” he asked suspiciously. “Have they got clowns?”

She shrugged. “Out here, who knows? But they have Ferris wheels that almost touch the clouds. Won't that do?”

“Yeah! I want to ride a Ferris wheel!”

“I kind of thought you might. Now get to work, kid. You're way too far behind.”

“Am not.”

“Am too.”

“You can't say ‘am too,'” they responded in unison.

Chad grinned and snuggled into his pillows. So, maybe his father was looking gloomy and his mother was acting strange, but he was going to a fair and Pippa liked him. The world wasn't all bad.

***

Meeting Chad's tutor on the stairs, Pippa smiled a greeting at this return to normalcy and proceeded toward her office.

Seth sat in her desk chair, scowling at the computer screen as the phone rang incessantly, all the little lights flickering at once. Behind him, in his office, workmen pounded and sawed and shouted obscenities at each other.

If she wanted thunderstorms, Pippa decided, she didn't have to look any farther than Seth's face. Any moment now, lightning would shoot from his fingertips. He'd already combed his black curls into a rat's nest, and toffee wrappers littered the rug. She couldn't imagine how he kept his trim figure and still ate candy like other people drank water. She tried not to notice the little ball of affection bouncing around inside her as she watched him at work.

He glared at her through narrowed eyes, daring her to come between him and whatever he was doing. When she merely shrugged, he pounded the keyboard some more. It didn't look as if he were obtaining any satisfaction from whatever appeared on the screen. The foolish man hadn't figured out that he was rich enough not to have to do what he didn't want to do. He seemed to have this insane urge to carry every responsibility people dropped on his shoulders.

He needed to be needed, just like her.

That was when she knew the bouncing tingle in her stomach was a good deal more than just affection. Damn, spend a night in a man's bed, and it opened a real Pandora's box of chaotic emotions.

She wanted to rumple his hair and kiss his cheek and send him out to soak up some sunshine by the pool. She'd be better off running like hell.

“You must have a hundred and ten rooms in this mansion. Wouldn't it be simpler if you just sent Doug in to buy a new computer and set it up in some other room?” Pippa inquired, with a vague hope of distracting her wayward thoughts.