Children of Dynasty (5 page)

While Rory studied Mariah, their glances suddenly met and held. Her faced remained in placid lines, yet her eyes revealed something deeper … a stark baring of what also ate at him, and had grown sharper since the last time he saw her. He nearly got up and went to her, but managed to stay in his seat when she turned away and smiled at something Lyle said.

Rory’s reserve lasted until he applauded a speech he hadn’t heard, and in the hubbub of chatter and pushing back of chairs, Mariah rose and walked alone to the wall of windows.

“I have some business with Miss Grant,” he muttered to Sylvia and got up. A poor excuse, but it would have to do. The remembered curve of Mariah’s cheek seemed a magnet for his palm.

When he drew closer to her the rest of the room receded; the spotlights dimmed to little stars. Outside, downtown had donned its night sparkle; one of the Bay Bridge towers glimmered, and an approaching fogbank blotted out the others.

Mariah appeared to study the skyline.

Rory cleared his throat.

She turned and said, “What are you doing over here? Aren’t you squiring old ‘Larry’s’ daughter to keep him doing favors for your father?”

At her uncanny aim, he flinched. “I’m not involved in any so-called favors.”

She shook her head so vehemently that her hair brushed her velvet-clad shoulders. “You thought you were clever at the party, talking about the past to soften me up, so I’d spill company secrets.”

There, he saw it again in her eyes, a flash of intensity like a stab of sunlight reflecting off water. Despite people starting to look their way, he found himself taking her arm. The memory of her pained expression on the terrace when he had asked “what if”, made him confess, “I talked about our past because when I saw you again I could think of little else.”

Mariah jerked away. “Save your sweet talk for Sylvia.”

“It’s not talk. It’s the truth.” Emotion rising, he took a chance that their shared history still had the power to cause her pain. “Tell me you don’t feel the same … without lying through your teeth.”

Spots of color rose in her cheeks. “It doesn’t matter how I feel. It never has.” She took a half step toward him, and he imagined he could feel the force of her anger. “Tell me you haven’t been dancing to your father’s tune all your life … without lying through your teeth.”

Walk away, he thought, as they both did eight years ago. The hell of it was he didn’t want to.

Rory moved closer, and Mariah retreated until the window wall was cold against her back. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Proving I don’t always do what my father would like.” His voice sounded husky. “You should have figured that out when I invited you to the party.”

“There are plenty of reasons I could have been invited. Only one is sentimental.”

“I invited you because I wondered how it would feel to share the same room with you again. Oh, I admit I believed I wouldn’t remember the way the sunset brightened your hair.”

She cut in. “I remember a lot of things. I remember you married Elizabeth.”

“Are you accusing me of leaving you?” He sounded incredulous. “Your roommate at UCLA told me a dozen times you wouldn’t talk to me after Father …”

“Called me a slut and a whore?” Her raised voice was drawing an audience. “How fitting we each have own version of reality. The plain fact is, no matter what we once wanted, our fathers destroyed it before we were born.”

Rory stepped back as though he’d been slapped.

Letting the glass support her, she watched his rawboned figure march toward the table where Sylvia Chatsworth waited. How dare he be angry? She was the one who should be upset at him for bringing up the past when he was involved with another woman.

After months of fall semester at UCLA with an ache in her chest that wouldn’t go away, Mariah had told her roommate she’d take Rory’s next call. A week passed without him trying again. She decided to phone him, but he’d told her he planned to live off campus with fraternity brothers, and his name wasn’t in the listings. A dozen times, she picked up the receiver to dial Davis Campbell’s house. A servant would answer; she’d pretend to be someone else.

Another week went by. A look at her school calendar said the Thanksgiving holiday was next Thursday. She’d go home, find Rory. Tell him she loved him, that they could make it without their families.

The Sunday before Thanksgiving, the
San Francisco Chronicle
carried Rory’s wedding announcement. Mariah found it when she got home to Stonestown on Wednesday night, opening the kitchen trash to drop in a soft drink can. Wrapped around some vegetable peelings was a photo of Rory with a woman she recognized as his childhood friend Elizabeth, their pictured faces darkened by tomato juice. While her father watched TV in the living room, she slid down the side of the counter to land in a heap on the kitchen floor. Hugging her knees with her arms, she hoped the sounds of a late night talk show muffled her sobs.

Rory had never been worthy of her trust.

On the drive to her fashionable North Beach townhouse, Sylvia was quiet. Too quiet, Rory suspected, but he enjoyed the silence. As they approached her building, she pulled a remote from her evening bag and opened the street level garage.

Inside her place, he watched her go into her kitchen and pour two glasses of Caymus Reserve Cabernet. Rory stood near the door, determined not to stretch out on her buttery leather couch this evening.

Sylvia brought him wine and ran the daggers of her nails through her hair, a gesture he’d previously found provocative. Tonight, he thought it looked practiced.

“Now, tell me about you and Mariah Grant,” she demanded in a no-nonsense tone.

“I told you I had business with her.”

“Monkey business.” Sylvia drank without apparent appreciation for the wine. “I know you almost married her once.”

He set his glass on the counter. His long-ago interlude with Mariah had been hushed up, the only time John Grant and Davis Campbell had agreed on anything.

“Where did you hear that?”

“You remember that dinner Daddy threw last month? Where I was talking with your mom?”

“I saw the two of you together and wondered what was afoot.”

“I made the mistake of telling her I was thinking of snagging you.” Sylvia’s head was high. “She said I’d better hurry because Mariah Grant was back in town.”

He sighed. After his divorce he had thought Sylvia perfect for him, a wild spirit who didn’t want to light. That had been true awhile, but now he realized his mother was right. He took a single regretful sip of Caymus, trying to think of the best way to break this off.

“I saw the way you looked at Mariah,” Sylvia accused, “like she was some goddess.”

Her expression was of genuine hurt, but it was nothing like the mix of promise and pain in Mariah’s eyes.

“Sylvia, I’m sorry,” he said. “You and I both know this isn’t working.”

Her chest heaved, the soft-looking leather gapped to expose the rounded tops of her breasts. That the sight no longer moved him reinforced his need to get out of here.

He started toward the door, having to pass her on the way. She blocked his path, the bright sheen of her eyes beginning to burn at him. He sidestepped her and continued his retreat.

“Get out!” Sylvia shoved at his back. “Everybody in this town knows you’re best at exit scenes.”

Rory went down the stairs to the parking garage, and her door slammed. Through the panel, he heard a crash and the sound of glass breaking.

Maybe there could have been a better way to extricate himself, but it was done. His father would have to give up his dreams of matchmaking.

Out on the street, cars cruised past, the North Beach weekend nightlife heating up. He could go to a bar or club, but the thought of the meat market scene disgusted him this evening. Instead, he drove his Porsche toward the Golden Gate and across the brightly lit span. Then on darker winding roads, he let speed, precision, and focus free his mind.

An hour later, he was sitting at the brink of a cliff at Point Reyes. The headlights illuminated a rising mist, beckoning him into the infinite night. It reminded him of when he was a kid, and his father pointed a flashlight at the heavens, saying beams of light traveled forever in the void of space.

All those foolish little boys with flashlights, victims of a cosmic conspiracy that had them thinking they were signaling someone … rather than alone in the universe.

Just over a week since he’d seen Mariah at April’s end, and, despite her cool reception, he’d felt the click of connection, a sense of being no longer alone. Beside the sea cliff, Rory closed his eyes and admitted time had not healed the raw wound of their past breakup.

Nor would more time bring relief.

M
ariah drank bitter office coffee and stared at the morning sun’s reflection in the mirrored building across Market Street. On her desk lay a sheet of paper headed “Notes for Monday Meeting.” The rest of the page was blank.

Seeing Rory at the Marriott had shaken her more than she cared to admit. Lyle Thomas, with his enthusiastic penchant for gossip, had pointed out that Rory and Sylvia were “a match made in heaven, or at least somewhere over their heads.” Considering the amount of money involved in some of the deals made in the city, Mariah could understand how men might use their adult children as pawns.

So was Rory involved in his father’s machinations or was he ignorant of “favors” as he claimed? Could a man fake the emotion she’d seen in him on his father’s terrace and again last night? His declaration that he’d been trapped in remembrance was the most disturbing, for she, too, had thought of little else since they’d been reunited. At the most inopportune moments flashes of memory kept surfacing; fantasies of the two of them in a secret hideaway, a country inn where no one knew or cared that Grant was with Campbell.

Mariah trashed her empty foam cup, put on her charcoal wool suit jacket, and left her office. Down the hall, she entered the nerve center of the company, with teak paneling and table, the latest teleconferencing equipment, and big screen projection TV.

The first arrival, Arnold Benton, had already taken a seat in a leather swivel chair. The colorless man in his early thirties gave her a disapproving glare that suggested she take the next shuttle back to L.A. Then he bent deliberately to study a page full of notes, revealing the bald spot in his thinning pale brown hair.

“Morning,” Mariah said to the top of his head. She hoped that in time working for her father’s company would become less awkward.

“Hey, you,” Grant’s second-in-command Tom Barrett greeted her from the doorway. The big shaggy man with a recalcitrant shirttail and unruly reddish hair no barber could tame reminded Mariah of a well-loved teddy bear. He winked, his blue eyes as bright as his son Charley’s. “I’d have taken a bet you’d beat me here.”

Arnold made a small sound that might have been a snort of disgust.

In the next few minutes the conference table filled with Grant Development’s heads of engineering, law, public relations, human resources, and construction. Though over a hundred employees worked on the lower floors, it was up to the management team to coordinate, and they did so each Monday morning.

Mariah’s father entered last, a weekend of rest having softened the lines around his eyes. Once he sat at the head of the table, the meeting began.

As Grant’s financial officer, Arnold Benton droned at length about the status of two hundred million in construction loans with First California Bank. The gist was that he had everything under such wonderful control that it bored him. Mariah had seen the technique in L.A., the young executive in need of the further challenge of promotion.

When it was her turn, she thought of her blank sheet of notes and reported, “The Bayview Townhomes project is on budget and schedule.” She hoped to get by with that, but Arnold inquired as to some numbers that necessitated a trip to her office for them.

On her return to the conference room, she was shocked to hear him saying, “ … Mariah and Campbell at the Marriott …”