Children of Dynasty (3 page)

Turning back to the stove, he took an experimental sample of his creation and added another pinch of salt. “Now, tell me about last night at Campbell’s. I expected you to call earlier.”

Mariah rummaged under the cabinet for a cutting board. “Quite a turnout, and an amazing place. I didn’t realize the Campbells lived so high.”

“Who all was there?”

She sliced tomatoes. “Well, of course I didn’t know many folks.”

Not wanting to spoil her father’s appetite after he’d gone to so much trouble, Mariah managed to entertain him with details unrelated to Davis Campbell for the time it took to get the meal ready.

John carried plates heaped with linguini and sauce to the butcher-block table. As they sat down, he beamed at her proudly. “You don’t know what it means to finally have you at Grant Development.”

“You don’t know how glad I am to be here.” This past winter when she’d finished work on the Desert Hot Springs Convention Center her father came down for a tour. In the grand ballroom beneath a crystal chandelier, he took both her hands. “It’s time.”

He twirled pasta with a spoon. “With you here, we’ll beat out Davis Campbell and be the biggest in the Bay Area.”

Suddenly, the blend of basil and sweet tomatoes wasn’t as appetizing as before.

Though she hated to break the news during dinner, she put down her fork.

“Dad.”

His face sobered.

“There’s something you should know.”

Briefly, she told him the rumors circulating about trouble within Grant Development, and that both Chatsworth and Campbell appeared to be fueling them.

John shoved back his half-eaten plate. “Davis had been against me for almost thirty years, so there’s no surprise there.” His voice was grim. “But it disturbs me that he’s got the Senator in his pocket.”

The memory of Sylvia Chatsworth’s possessive certainty of Rory made Mariah’s stomach ache. “I think maybe it has something to do with his daughter and Rory Campbell.” She couldn’t keep an acid note out of her voice.

Her father gave her a sharp look. “Did you see him at the party?”

“I saw him,” she admitted. “For the first time in eight years.”

Although John had never taken the inflexible stance against Rory that Davis Campbell had against her, he’d obviously felt relief when she was safely in Southern California and Rory married to another woman.

Now he studied her, his face troubled. “I’ve always thought you should live your life the way you wanted … but you don’t want to see him again.”

The part that stung was that Mariah did want to see Rory. Even as everything in her knew it would be a mistake. “He’s with Sylvia Chatsworth, Dad,” she protested. “You don’t have to worry.”

He ran a hand through his silver hair, a sure sign he was concerned. “You and I are the same. We’ve never moved on from our first loves.”

He glanced toward a gilt-framed photo of her mother on the counter. It could have been a picture of Mariah, with a smooth line of jaw, blond hair falling over her shoulders.

“Catharine was even more slight than you. Like a pale bisque doll near the end.” He touched a fingertip to the cool glass, as though he could reach the sweet soft corner of his wife’s mouth if he moved his hand in just the right way. When he rubbed his palm over his own face, Mariah imagined he was aware of the loose flesh and wrinkled skin.

She touched his hand and saw a sparkle of tears matching her own. Memories of her mother were hazy; golden eyes like her own, a soft touch while being tucked in, playing tag in the spring grass.

John cleared his throat. “I came home, one of those perfect sharp blue days, and saw her with you out on the lawn. She said you’d set a record at twenty steps. The two of you in the afternoon sun were the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”

Mariah had always figured he remained in this house because it held so many memories. “Why do you single out that day?”

“When we went inside, the phone rang. It was her doctor, asking us to come in again after her routine physical.”

Ovarian cancer, swift scourge of the youngest women, had stolen Catharine from them when Mariah was but three. When the loss came back to her, it was in bits and pieces; the hospital’s antiseptic smell, crying and being carried out of the memorial service, the mound of flowers turned sodden in the rain.

“After the call, I tried to kiss her and rekindle the spark, but the fine light was gone.” John’s eyes rested on that faraway day. “Light has never held that quality for me since.”

Seeing his sadness undimmed by years, Mariah tried to ignore a familiar twinge of pain. Whenever she wondered if the kind of joy her parents had shared would come to her, she was forced to admit her father was correct. No one had ever moved her like Davis Campbell’s son.

Rory had been right last night, too; she had wondered “what if” so many times she’d lost count.

And, as the rain made rivulets down the kitchen window, she did so again.

T
wo hours later, Mariah busied herself straightening the living room of the apartment she rented in a Marina District Victorian. After stacking the same magazines for the fourth time, she sank onto her new wicker sofa. Though she stared at the ivory and green swirls in the matching rug, she saw a long-ago June morning …

Eighteen-year-old Mariah discovered from the Sunday morning
Chronicle
that John’s rival Davis Campbell kept his racing boat on a Sausalito pier. A photo showed him holding aloft a silver cup, not even the newsprint blurring the sharp intensity of the man. He looked at his trophy with the same expression he’d used over the years to examine Mariah, an avarice that always made her uneasy.

Studying the photo, she caught sight of a younger man beside Davis, a fit and slimmer version of the yacht’s captain. She had never formally met Rory Campbell. Nonetheless, despite the lack of introduction, she was utterly smitten with him. Two years ago, she had watched this bronzed youth with flashing limbs destroy an opponent at a tennis party. In the milling aftermath, while she waited at courtside to attract his attention her father had announced abruptly that they were leaving.

Mariah set aside the newspaper, and, tiptoeing so as not to wake her father, left a noncommittal note. Then she drove his Pontiac across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito.

When she arrived at the marina, an unforecast squall played an eerie piping chime, beating the sailboat halyards against their masts. Fog streamed into the harbor, pleasure boats sat idle at the piers, and the houseboat community was battened down. For a moment she hesitated, but with this weather, she should be able to look over the yacht without being discovered.

Once on the pier, she had no trouble locating the knifelike vessel
Privateer.
A towering mast stretched up into the mist, and at least fifty feet of sleek hull shone bright even in the gray light. Water drops beaded the rich teak deck trim.

“Come in out of the rain,” said a male voice from aboard.

Even with her tennis shoes’ traction, Mariah nearly lost her footing on the slippery boardwalk. Steadying herself on the boat’s wet aluminum rail, she turned to see who had spoken.

A tall, narrow-faced man stood in the shadowed companionway. Dark eyes peered at her from beneath the brim of his ball cap.

Instinctively, she pulled her damp denim shirt tighter around her. Caught flat-footed on the owner’s pier, she steeled herself and hoped Davis Campbell would not recognize her since she’d grown up. “I was just admiring your boat.” She tried to smooth her wind-tangled hair.

“Privateer
is my Dad’s,” confessed a voice she now recognized as far less commanding than Davis Campbell’s.

Mariah nearly sagged with relief, but her heart began to race. Hadn’t she hoped to run into him, without daring to admit it?

“I’m Rory Campbell,” he said. A rough blue cotton shirt over loose khaki shorts complimented his taut body.

When he reached a hand to help her aboard, his skin felt callused against hers, a suggestion he knew his way around the yacht’s winches and lines. Reluctant to break the spell by telling him she was a Grant, she tempered with, “Mariah.” The rain came down harder, blowing beneath the canvas bimini over the broad cockpit.

“Come below,” he urged.

Though she compromised by taking a seat on the ladder down to the cabin, drops still splattered her. Rory reached to close the Lexan hatch, his chest only inches from her face. She caught his scent, a pleasant aroma like geranium petals warmed by the sun. Strung tight at his nearness, Mariah was nonetheless disappointed when he turned away.

In the spacious galley, he lighted a brass lantern and suspended it from a hook over the table. Thus illuminated, the teak-lined cabin was as large as her father’s living room. Rory filled a kettle and put it on the stove, ferreted out teabags, and set out mugs with
Privateer
on them in gold letters. Waiting for the water to boil, he leaned against the counter and sent her a swift appraising glance.

She shivered.

“You’re cold.” He unbuttoned his shirt, revealing a nest of crisp hair and rosy brown nipples drawn tight against the cabin’s chill.

Embarrassed by the flush that warmed her cheeks, she hugged herself to hide her breasts’ inevitable reaction to his splendid bare body.

He came toward her, a lithe animal on a stalk, and draped the shirt over hers. Once more nervous at him standing so close, she threw out the first thing she thought of. “Do you go to school?”

“Stanford. Business, that I may be worthy to wear Davis Campbell’s crown.” He gave a sardonic bow.

“You sound bitter.”

“You’d be, too, if your father expected you to follow his footsteps without a thought.”

Mariah had never considered anything other than taking over for her dad someday. The love for building came to her naturally; it didn’t make sense that, as his father’s son, Rory would want anything else. “What would you rather be?”

“An architect, an archaeologist …” He waved an impatient hand. “I only know I’ve never been given a choice.” The kettle whistled. He poured, dunked teabags, and fished them out with a spoon. “You don’t get to pick your father.”

He handed her the cup, and their hands touched.

“My father is John Grant,” she confessed.

“I thought so,” Rory said evenly. “Mariah’s not a common name.” In the rain-scattered light, his eyes held hers. She felt her pulse flutter at the base of her throat, but in the embrace of his shirt, she felt inexplicably safe.

He set his cup aside. Very carefully, as though she were a wild thing, he lifted her hair and spread it over her shoulders. She sat still and told herself she should be afraid here alone with Davis Campbell’s son. Yet, she could summon only a buoyant elation. Rory seemed different from what her dad told her of his father. Honest rather than scheming.

She wasn’t sure which of them closed that infinitesimal space, but his lips on hers had the softness of a remembered dream. The briefest graze and he drew back.

Mariah cherished the sense he was also feeling his way. With trembling fingers, she touched his smooth-shaven cheek. Its warmth, and the dear dimple in the crease beside his mouth undid her. He pressed his lips to hers again, tasting of tea and a sweetness that intensified her yearning. Though a little voice whispered she didn’t even know him, his kiss argued that he knew everything about her.

While rain streamed over his father’s boat, the Stanford man seduced a girl who wanted to believe.

Sitting on her apartment sofa, Mariah had to admit he hadn’t really seduced her. Having dreamed for years of the young man she’d seen playing tennis, she’d been half in love with him before he even spoke to her. Ready to cancel her plans for UCLA and attend a Bay Area college, prepared to defy her father and turn her life upside down … for she’d imagined them as star-crossed lovers defying their families’ enmity.

How blind she’d been not to see she was on a collision course with her destiny at Grant Development. How fortunate she had managed to learn her lesson. For the past eight years, she’d been a woman who cut to the bottom line, trusting nobody. Men had come and gone in her life while she kept her emotions in check and made sure she was the one in control … Until last night, when she learned how tenuous her rein on feeling was.

Getting slowly to her feet, she decided she needed a sounding board. While in L.A., she’d missed her best friend Charley Barrett, but on her return to the City, he’d talked her into renting the place downstairs from his.

She went up and knocked at his door, using a secret code developed during their tree-house days. Outside the rain-streaked hall window, the streetlight was shrouded in fog, far different weather than L.A.’s relentless sunshine.

Charley opened his door, blue eyes smiling into hers. “Mariah!”

Mid-twenties like her, he stood tall and skinny. A mass of freckles decorated his face below a mop of unruly red-brown hair he’d inherited from Tom Barrett, her father’s right hand man.

“You nearly missed me.” Charley’s rain parka was in his long-fingered hand.

“You’re going out?”

His grin widened, revealing a chipped tooth Mariah knew came from a tumble off his bike. “Got a poker game with the guys. High stakes.”

His boyish enthusiasm was that of someone much younger. As kids, he and she had both talked of going to college, but ADD and dyslexia had limited his options. Though he now worked as a construction laborer for Grant Development, the disparity in their positions had not diminished their friendship.

Charley checked his watch and shifted his weight from one lanky leg to the other. “With this weather, I’m gonna be late.”

His insistence on going out to play cards worried her, for his father Tom had once had a gambling problem. Though she considered asking him not to go, she kept silent, trying not to mother him.

As for herself, Mariah didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved at not being able to visit. Charley knew all about the heartbreak she’d suffered with Rory. When it had happened he’d struck the right balance between sympathy and telling her she’d been an idiot to go for the wrong guy. Now she wondered if he might think her foolish when he heard how powerfully she’d reacted to the man who’d once dumped her.