Going Back (7 page)

They’d done a hell of a lot more
than travel in the same circles, but she couldn’t deny his claim
that they knew pitifully little about each other. She had no idea
whether Brad had any siblings, either. If Phyllis and Andrea hadn’t
discussed it the previous Wednesday, Daphne wouldn’t have known
that Brad was a native New Yorker.

“Why don’t you want to live in the
city?” she asked.

The question obviously took him by
surprise, but the waitress’s timely arrival with their lunches gave
him a chance to recover. He spent a long time pouring ketchup onto
his hamburger, then closed the seeded bun around it and lifted it
to his mouth. Instead of biting into it, he raised his eyes to
Daphne’s. “My parents live there,” he said.

She didn’t consider that an
adequate answer, but she thoughtfully allowed him to swallow before
questioning him further. “You don’t want to live too close to your
parents, is that it?”

“Of course that isn’t it,” he
refuted her. He took another bite of his hamburger, set it on his
plate and reached for his scotch. When the glass was halfway to his
lips he changed his mind and put it back down on the table. “I love
my parents,” he confessed. “I love them both very much. They’re a
wonderful couple. They’re also borderline lunatics, and...yeah. I’d
rather not be living too close to them at the moment.” He took a
sip of scotch, then met Daphne’s gaze again. “New Jersey isn’t
Seattle,” he allowed. “There’s no way I can work in Manhattan and
not live near them. But I’m tired of city living. I’ve spent too
much of my life surrounded by the hustle and bustle. I want peace
and quiet. God, I sound like an old fart, don’t I?” He gave in to a
self-deprecating laugh.

Daphne joined his laughter,
although she didn’t think he sounded like an old fart at all. After
college, she’d lived first in Chicago and then in Washington. The
excitement of those cities had enthralled her for a while, but
eventually she’d had enough. Her mother kept carping about how
she’d never meet a marriage-minded bachelor if she kept herself
buried in the suburbs, but Daphne hadn’t met any suitable
representatives of that particular species in Chicago or
Washington, either.

Besides, she’d learned a long time
ago that it was fruitless to live your life waiting for Mr.
Right.

“The suburbs offer a lot that the
city doesn’t,” Daphne noted. “A little less congestion, a little
less noise—a lot less taxes. Not far from here there’s an excellent
professional theater company, and between Brendan Byrne Arena and
the Garden State Arts Center you’ll find plenty of pop music
concerts—”

“Skip the spiel,” Brad cut her off
with a good-natured grin. “You don’t have to sell me on New Jersey.
I’m here looking, aren’t I?”

“You’re here today. Tomorrow you
might turn your back on New Jersey and take your business to
Westchester.”

“And you’d be out a whopping
commission,” Brad concluded.

“That’s not what’s important,”
Daphne protested.

“Oh?” Brad’s eyebrows rose and his
smile gave way to a look of bemusement. “What’s important,
Daphne?”

She drew a
blank.
Something
was important about Brad’s search for a home in New Jersey,
something beyond the fact that for the first time since he’d walked
into her office that morning, he’d called her “Daphne” instead of
“Daffy” or “Daff.” Something was much more important than her
interest in earning a commission.

She wanted to do business with Brad
because she wanted to accomplish something positive with him. She
wanted to make something work, to wind up with something beneficial
from her association with him. She couldn’t go back and rewrite
their history, but counterbalancing that history with something
worthwhile and meaningful would be almost as good.

She couldn’t possibly explain her
feelings to him. Dipping her spoon into her soup, she tossed around
various discreet replies to his question. He was waiting for her to
say something; she had to come up with a response.

“Let’s just say I want to do it for
old time’s sake,” she said finally, grateful for the shield her
eyeglasses provided and annoyed with herself for desiring a shield
at all. “I want you to wind up with a nice home, and I want to be
the one to find it for you, just for old time’s sake.”

He could have pounced on her; he
could have demanded that she explain why it mattered that she and
no one else found a nice home for him. He could have recoiled from
her, arguing that he was in the market for a house, not a
psychological adventure, and that he had no intention of letting
her work out her demons on him. He would have been completely
justified in announcing that the best thing either of them could do
for old time’s sake was stay away from each other.

But he didn’t react negatively to
her statement. He didn’t even press the issue. He only took another
hefty bite of his hamburger and grinned. “It’s no wonder you’re
successful, Daphne,” he conceded. “You know how to make a client
feel special.”

Daphne didn’t
always succeed in making her clients feel special. But, no matter
how hard she endeavored to treat Brad as she would any other
client, she couldn’t change the fact that he
was
special. Whether that was good or
bad was irrelevant. Brad Torrance was special to Daphne; there was
no way around it.

***

“NEW JERSEY.” Robert Torrance
sniffed. “You may as well look for a house in Outer
Mongolia.”

Brad clamped his lips shut. He
didn’t want to argue with his father. That Robert Torrance and his
estranged wife tended to be exceedingly provincial about their
beloved New York was a given. Brad would just have to ride out his
father’s contempt.

They were seated at a relatively
secluded table at his father’s club. Robert Torrance was a club
man, and he’d made no effort to hide his enduring hope that, once
Brad took up residence in New York City—there was no doubt in his
mind that that was where Brad would take up residence, of
course—Brad would become a member of his father’s club.

At one time, Brad might have
considered that a fine idea. He’d eaten at the club with his father
many times, ever since he was a child. He used to adore the dining
room’s ripe ambience, the brocade wallpaper and Oriental rugs, the
massive fieldstone fireplace occupying one wall, the musty
photographs of club officers dating back to 1836. Brad had been no
older than nine or ten the first time his father had brought him to
the club for lunch, and he’d been dwarfed by the plush upholstered
chair he’d been given to sit on. The waiters had considered it
hilarious beyond belief that he’d ordered a Cheez-Whiz sandwich on
raisin bread for lunch.

Tonight, he had ordered prime ribs.
The portion was huge, the meat pink and juicy. Brad ought to have
wolfed it down, but instead he kept thinking about what Daphne had
told him about the “freshman twenty.” He also thought of her
current figure, slim and lithe. In her case, twenty pounds made a
world of difference.

Not that she’d turned miraculously
into Miss America. She would never be classically pretty. But there
was something intriguing about her appearance now, something that
made her much harder to ignore.

“How many houses has this broker
shown you?” Robert asked, pronouncing the word “broker” as if he
considered it a euphemism for Satan.

“Four,” Brad told him. “And one
condo. I’m going back tomorrow so she can show me a couple of other
properties. And probably to take a second look at one of the houses
she showed me yesterday. It’s got possibilities.”

Robert speared a chunk of his filet
mignon with his fork and studied it as if it were the most
significant object in the universe. Brad’s father often examined
trivial objects while he sorted his thoughts. It gave him an
appearance of indifference, and it pissed off Brad’s mother. “How
much?” he finally asked.

“Five-sixty.”

“Five hundred sixty thousand
dollars?” Robert’s eyes widened slightly. They were as striking a
blue as his son’s; whenever Brad looked at his father, he felt as
if he were gazing into a time-travel mirror. Thirty years ago,
Robert Torrance had looked almost exactly like Brad; thirty years
from now, Brad thought it safe to assume that he would look exactly
like his father. “For that much money, you could buy yourself a
cozy little co-op in town.”

“I don’t want a cozy little co-op
in town,” Brad retorted. “I want a reasonably spacious house
surrounded by grass and trees. I want to live somewhere where I
don’t have to see the air I’m breathing.”

“You disappoint me, Brad,” Robert
said before popping the chunk of steak into his mouth. As he
chewed, he shook his head and his eyes took on a canny glow. “It’s
your mother’s doing, isn’t it,” he guessed.

“What’s my mother’s
doing?”

“She’s buying you a house outside
the city to keep you from moving in with me.”

Brad rolled his
eyes. “Number one, she isn’t buying me a house.
I’m
buying me a house. Number two,
she doesn’t want me moving to New Jersey any more than you do. She
wants me to live with her. And number three—” he accelerated, aware
that his father was about to interrupt “—I’m thirty years old, and
I’m not going to live with either of my parents, ever again.
Unless, of course, you or Mom become incapacitated in your old age
and need someone to look after you full-time.”

“I have no intention of becoming
incapacitated,” Robert said. “I can’t speak for your mother on that
score.” He nibbled on his potatoes au gratin, deep in thought.
“This—this broker,” he remarked, once again uttering the word with
great distaste, “you say she’s a woman?”

“Last time I looked, she was,” Brad
muttered.

“So, you’re looking at her,” Robert
said, then sighed dramatically. “You’ve never been as practical as
I am; you tend to romanticize certain things. Anyone who could
possibly want to live in New Jersey is obviously lacking in
sensibility. My question, Brad, is: does this broker of yours have
some sort of hold on you?”

“A hold on me?” Brad snorted. “Of
course not.”

“She hasn’t clouded your sense of
reason with her beauty, has she?”

“No, Dad.” Brad almost added that
Daphne Stoltz wasn’t beautiful, but he refrained. He felt oddly
protective toward her, as if he had to defend her against his
father’s irrational disapproval. “She’s competent, she’s
knowledgeable, and she’s very successful at what she
does.”

Robert wavered. Success was
something he held in high esteem. But, much as he might admire
Daphne’s success, he clearly didn’t want it to extend to his own
son. He sipped from his wine goblet, then sighed again. “Well, if
she’s all that competent, I suppose she can’t be too beautiful,” he
concluded. “I have yet to encounter a woman who boasts both beauty
and competence.”

Brad suppressed a shudder. Now was
hardly an appropriate time to battle his father over the old man’s
sexist view of the world—especially since Brad had been trying and
failing for years to convert his father to a less bigoted view of
the world. Nor did Brad feel like explaining that, the older he
got, the more he recognized that competence in a woman was more
valuable than beauty.

That was why Daphne Stoltz looked
so good these days, he acknowledged with a jolt of amazement—not
because she’d lost the “freshman twenty,” not because she’d styled
her hair more attractively and wore chic eyeglasses, but because
she was competent, successful, ambitious, because she was no longer
a mousy student with no discernible concept of herself. Quite the
contrary, she was a disciplined, self-directed woman who knew what
she was doing and where she was going.

If in college she’d been as well
put together as she was now, Brad would never have taken advantage
of her in her intoxicated state and brought her to his room. He
probably would have been her friend, a genuine friend, and if she’d
come to him drunk and vulnerable, he would have walked her back
through the wintry night to her dorm and made sure someone there
got her safely into her bed, where she could sleep it off alone. If
Daphne Stoltz had been the woman she was now, Brad would never have
had sex with her.

The peculiarity of that notion
startled him. Now that Daphne had proven herself smart and
interesting, he ought to be more willing, not less, to think of her
in sexual terms. Yet he wasn’t. He wanted her friendship, but not
her body, not her love. She didn’t turn him on.

He cursed beneath his breath. Damn
it, but he’d inherited more than his father’s thick hair and blue
eyes. He’d inherited the man’s close-mindedness. Daphne wasn’t
pretty, and no matter how intriguing Brad found her intellectually,
he couldn’t bring himself to think of her as a potential lover. And
that seemed wrong to him, because her intellect was amazingly
attractive. He really did want her to be his friend.

Over his father’s protests, Brad
skipped dessert. He didn’t want to spend another hour sitting at
the club with the old man, arguing over his decision to buy a home
outside the city limits. Nor did he wish to listen to his father’s
version of the ongoing war between his parents. “It’s late, Dad,”
he excused himself. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got a busy day planned
for tomorrow.”