Sugar Daddy (24 page)

“It’s late,” I said. “I’ve got to head back.”

A frown worked across Gage’s forehead. “It’s midnight. It’s not safe for you to be out this late. Not in Houston. Especially not in that rust bucket you drive.”

“My car works fine.”

“Stay here. There’s an extra bedroom.”

I let out a surprised laugh. “You’re kidding, right?”

Gage looked annoyed. “No, I’m not kidding.”

“I appreciate your concern, but I’ve driven my rust bucket through Houston many times, much later than this. And I’ve got my cell phone.” I walked over to him and reached out to his forehead. It was cool and slightly damp. “No more fever,” I said with satisfaction. “It’s time for another dose of Tylenol. You’d better take it just to be sure.” I made a motion for him to stay on the sofa as he started to rise. “Rest,” I said. “I’ll see myself out.”

Gage ignored that and followed me to the door, reaching it at the same time I did. I saw his hand press flat against the door panel. His forearm was densely muscled and dusted with hair. It was an aggressive gesture, but as I turned to face him, I was reassured by the subtle entreaty in his eyes.

“Cowboy,” I said, “you’re in no condition to stop me from doing a damn thing. I could wrestle you to the floor in ten seconds flat.”

He continued to lean over me. His voice was very soft. “Try me.”

I let out a nervous laugh. “I wouldn’t want to hurt you. Let me go, Gage.”

A moment of electric stillness. I saw the ripple of a swallow in his throat. “You couldn’t hurt me.”

He wasn’t touching me, but I was excruciatingly aware of his body, the heat and solidity of him. And suddenly I knew how it would be if we slept together…the rise of my hips against his weight, the hardness of his back beneath my hands. I flushed as I felt a responsive twitch between my thighs, soft-secreted nerves prickling, a shot of heat to the quick.

“Please,” I whispered, and was infinitely relieved when he pushed away from the door and stood back to let me pass.

Gage waited in the doorway a little too long as I left. It might have been my imagination, but as I reached the elevator and glanced back, he seemed bereft, as if I had just taken something from him.

It was a relief to everyone, especially Jack, when Gage was able to resume his usual schedule. He showed up at the house on Monday morning, looking so well that Churchill happily accused him of faking his illness.

I hadn’t mentioned having stayed with Gage for most of Saturday evening. It was best, I had decided, to let everyone assume I had gone out with my friends as planned. I realized Gage hadn’t said anything about it either—if he had, there would have been a comment from Churchill. It made me uneasy, this small secret between Gage and me, even though nothing had happened.

But something had changed. Instead of treating me with his usual reserve, Gage went out of his way to be helpful, fixing my laptop when it froze, taking Churchill’s empty breakfast tray downstairs before I could do it. And it seemed to me that he was coming to the house more frequently, dropping by at odd times, always on the pretext of checking on Churchill.

I tried to treat his visits casually, but I couldn’t deny that time moved faster when Gage was around, and everything seemed a little more interesting. He wasn’t a man you could fit into a neat category. The family, with typically Texan distrust of highbrow pursuits, affectionately mocked him for having more of an intellectual bent than the rest of them.

But Gage had been aptly named after his mother’s family, the descendants of warlike Scotch-Irish borderers. According to Gretchen, who had made a hobby of researching the family genealogy, the Gages’ dour self-reliance and toughness had made them perfect candidates to settle the Texas frontier. Isolation, hardship, danger—they had welcomed all of it, their natures practically demanded it. At times you could see the echoes of those fiercely disciplined immigrants in Gage.

Jack and Joe were far more easygoing and charming, both possessing a boyishness that was completely absent in their older brother. And then there was Haven, the daughter, whom I met when she came home on break from school. She was a slim black-haired girl with Churchill’s dark eyes, possessing all the subtlety of a firecracker. She announced to her father and anyone else in earshot that she had become a second-wave feminist, she had changed her major to women’s studies, and she would no longer tolerate Texas’s culture of patriarchal repression. She talked so fast I had a hard time following her, especially when she pulled me aside to express sympathy for the exploitation and disenfranchisement of my people, and assured me of her passionate support for the reformation of immigration policies and guest worker programs. Before I could think of how to reply, she had bounced away and launched into an enthusiastic argument with Churchill.

“Don’t mind Haven,” Gage had said dryly, watching his sister with a faint smile. “She’s never met a cause she didn’t like. It was the biggest disappointment of her life not to be disenfranchised.”

Gage was different from his siblings. He worked too hard and challenged himself compulsively, and seemed to hold nearly everyone outside his family at arm’s length. But he had begun to treat me with a careful friendliness I couldn’t help responding to. And there was his increasing kindness to my sister. It started in small ways. He fixed the broken chain of Carrington’s pink two-wheeler, and drove her to school one morning when I was running late.

Then there was the bug project. Carrington’s class had been studying insects, and every child was required to write a report on a particular bug and make a 3D model. Carrington had decided on a lightning bug. I took Carrington to Hobby Lobby, where we spent forty dollars on paint, Styrofoam, plaster of Paris, and pipe cleaners. I didn’t say one word about the cost—my competitive sister was determined to make the best bug in the class, and I had resolved to do whatever was necessary to help.

We made the body of the bug and covered it with wet plaster strips, and painted it black, red, and yellow when it was dry. The entire kitchen had been turned into a disaster zone in the process. The bug was a handsome creation, but to Carrington’s disappointment, the glow in the dark paint we had used for the bug’s underside was not nearly as effective as we had hoped. It didn’t glow hardly at all, Carrington had said glumly, and I had promised to try to find a better quality paint so we could apply another coat.

After spending an afternoon typing a chapter of Churchill’s manuscript, I was surprised to discover Gage sitting with my sister in the kitchen, the table piled with tools, wires, small pieces of wood, batteries, glue, a ruler. Cradling the lightning bug model in one hand, he made deep cuts with an X-Acto knife.

“What are you doing?”

Two heads lifted, one dark, one platinum. “Just performing a little surgery,” Gage said, deftly extracting a rectangular chunk of foam.

Carrington’s eyes were lit with excitement. “He’s putting a
real
light inside our bug, Liberty! We’re making a ’lectrical circuit with wires and a switch, and when you flip it the lightning bug’s going to flash.”

“Oh.” Nonplussed, I sat at the table. I always appreciated help whenever it was given. But I had never expected Gage, of all people, to get involved in our project. I didn’t know whether he’d been recruited by Carrington or if he’d offered on his own, and I wasn’t certain why it made me uneasy to see them working together so companionably.

Patiently Gage showed Carrington how to make the wired circuit, how to hold the screwdriver and twist it. He held the pieces of a little switch box together as she glued it. Carrington glowed at his quiet praise, her small face animated as they worked together. Unfortunately the added weight of the bulb and wiring caused the pipe cleaner legs to collapse beneath the model. I had to bite back a sudden grin as Gage and Carrington contemplated the prostrate insect.

“It’s a lightning bug with sleep inertia,” Carrington said, and the three of us snorted with laughter.

It took Gage another half hour to reinforce the bug’s legs with clothes hanger wire. After setting the finished project in the middle of the kitchen table, he turned the kitchen lights off. “All right, Carrington,” he said. “Let’s give it a test run.”

Eagerly Carrington picked up the small wired box and flipped the switch. She crowed in triumph as the lightning bug began to flash in a steady repeated pattern. “Oh, it’s so
cool,
look, look at my bug, Liberty!”

“It’s great,” I said, grinning as I saw how elated she was.

“High five,” Gage said to Carrington, holding up his hand.

But to his astonishment, and mine, Carrington ignored the high five. Instead, she threw herself at him and wrapped her arms around his waist.

“You’re the best,” she said against his shirtfront. “Thanks, Gage.”

He didn’t move for a second, just looked down at Carrington’s small blond head. And then his arms went around her. As she grinned up at him, still hanging around his waist, he ruffled her hair gently. “You did most of the work, shorty. I just helped a little.”

I stood outside the moment, marveling at how easily the connection between them had been formed. Carrington had always gotten along with grandfatherly men like Mr. Ferguson or Churchill, but she’d been standoffish with the ones I had dated. I couldn’t fathom why she had taken to Gage.

She couldn’t become attached to him, when there was no chance of him becoming a permanent fixture in her life. It would only lead to disappointment, even heartbreak, and her heart was too precious for me to let that happen.

When Gage thought to glance at me with a quizzical smile, I couldn’t smile back. I turned away on the pretext of cleaning up the kitchen, picking up bits of wire with fingers that clenched until they whitened at the tips.

Churchill told me about strategic inflection points while we wrote the “Why Paranoia Is Good,” chapter of his book. A strategic inflection point, he explained, is a huge turning point in the life of a company, a technological advancement or opportunity that changes the way everything is done. Like the breakup of Bell in 1984, or when Apple came out with the iPod. It can boost a business into the stratosphere or sink it beyond any hope of recovery. But no matter what the results are, the rules of the game are changed forever.

The strategic inflection point in my relationship with Gage happened the weekend after Carrington had turned in the lightning bug project. It was late Sunday morning, and Carrington had gone outside to play while I took a long shower. It was a cold day with hard stinging gusts. The flatlands near Houston offered no obstructions, not even a few lonely mesquite trees to hook the hem of the sky, and the long open fetch gave the wind plenty of room to collect momentum.

I dressed in a long-sleeved tee and jeans, and a heavy wool cardigan with a hood. Although I usually flat-ironed my hair to make it shiny and straight, I didn’t bother that day, letting it curl crazily over my shoulders and back.

I crossed through the visiting room with its towering ceilings, where Gretchen was busy directing a team of professional Christmas decorators. Angels was the theme she had picked that year, obliging the decorators to perch on high ladders to hang cherubs and seraphim and swags of gold cloth. Christmas music played in the background, Dean Martin singing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” with finger-snapping panache.

My feet bounced to the music as I went outside to the back. I heard Churchill’s scuffly laugh, and Carrington squealing in glee. Pulling my hood up, I wandered toward the sounds.

Churchill’s wheelchair was at the corner of the patio, facing an incline at the north side of the garden. I stopped short as I saw my sister standing at the end of a zip line, a cable that had been mounted on the incline and hung with a pulley that slid from the higher end to the lower one.

Gage, dressed in jeans and an ancient blue sweatshirt, was tightening the end of the line while Carrington urged him to hurry. “Hold your horses,” he told her, grinning at her impatience. “Let me make sure the line will hold you.”

“I’m doing it now,” she said in determination, grasping the pulley handle.

“Wait,” Gage cautioned, giving the cable an experimental yank.

“I can’t wait!”

He started laughing. “All right, then. Don’t blame me if you fall.”

The line was too high, I saw with a jolt of terror. If the line broke, if Carrington couldn’t hold on, she would break her neck. “No,” I cried out, starting forward. “Carrington, don’t!”

She looked toward me with a grin. “Hey, Liberty, watch me! I’m going to fly.”

“Wait!”

But she ignored me, the obstinate little mule, grasping the pulley and pushing off the incline. Her slight body sped above the ground, too high, too fast, the legs of her jeans flapping. She let out a shriek of enjoyment. My vision blurred for a moment, my teeth clenching on a pained sound. I half staggered, half ran, reaching Gage almost at the same time she did.

He caught her easily, plucking her from the pulley and swinging her to the ground. The two of them laughed, whooped, neither noticing my approach.

I heard Churchill calling my name from the patio, but I didn’t answer him.

“I told you to wait,” I shouted at Carrington, dizzy with relief and rage, the remnants of fear still rattling in my throat. She fell silent and blanched, staring at me with round blue eyes.

“I didn’t hear you,” she said. It was a lie, and we both knew it. I was infuriated as I saw the way she sidled up next to Gage as if seeking his protection. From me.

“Yes you did! And don’t think you’re going to get off easy, Carrington. I’m ready to ground you for life.” I turned on Gage. “That…that stupid
thing
is too damn high off the ground! And you have no right to let her try something dangerous without asking me first.”

“It’s not dangerous,” Gage said calmly, his gaze steady on mine. “We had a zip line exactly like this when we were kids.”

“I bet you fell off it,” I shot back. “I bet you got banged up plenty.”

“Sure we did. And we lived to tell about it.”

My outrage, salt-flavored and primal, thickened with each second that passed. “You arrogant
jerk,
you don’t know anything about eight-year-old girls! She’s fragile, she could break her neck—”

“I’m not fragile!” Carrington said indignantly, huddling closer to Gage’s side until he put a hand on her shoulder.

“You’re not even wearing your helmet. You know better than to do something like this without it.”

Gage’s face was expressionless. “You want me to take the line down?”

“No!”
Carrington shouted at me, tears springing to her eyes. “You never let me have any fun. You’re not fair. I’m going to play on the zip line and you can’t tell me not to. You’re not my mom!”

“Hey, hey…shorty.” Gage’s voice had gentled. “Don’t talk to your sister like that.”

“Great,” I snapped. “Now I’m the bad guy. Screw you, Gage. I don’t need you to defend me, you—” I raised my hands in a defensive gesture, wrists stiff. A cold wind struck me in the face, needling the inner corners of my eyes, and I realized I was about to cry. I looked at the two of them standing together, and I heard Churchill call my name.

Me against the three of them.

I turned away abruptly, hardly able to see through the bitter slick of tears. Time to retreat. I walked with fast, digging strides. As I passed the man in the wheelchair, I growled, “You’re in trouble too, Churchill,” without breaking pace.

By the time I reached the warm sanctuary of the kitchen, I was cold to the bone. I sought out the darkest, most sheltered part of the kitchen, the narrow recessed niche of the butler’s pantry. The space was lined with glass-fronted china cabinets. I didn’t stop until I was hidden at the back of it. I wrapped my arms around myself, shrinking, trying to take up as little physical space as possible.

Every instinct screamed that Carrington was mine, and no one had the right to dispute my judgments. I had taken care of her, sacrificed for her.
You’re not my mom.
Ingrate! Traitor! I wanted to stomp outside and tell her how easy it would have been for me to give her away after Mama died, how much better off I might have been.
Mama
…oh, I wished I could take back all the hateful things my teenage self had said to her. Now I understood the injustice of parenting. Try to keep them healthy and safe, and you got blame instead of gratitude, rebellion instead of cooperation.

Someone came into the kitchen. I heard the door close. I held still, praying I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone. But a dark shadow moved through the unlit kitchen, too substantial to belong to anyone other than Gage.

“Liberty?”

After that I couldn’t remain hiding in silence. “I don’t want to talk,” I said sullenly.

Gage filled the narrow entrance of the butler’s pantry. Cornering me. The shadows were so thick, I couldn’t see his face.

And then he said the one thing I would never have expected him to say.

“I’m sorry.”

Anything else would have bolstered my anger. But those two words caused tears to spill over the wind-stung rims of my eyes. I ducked my head and let out a shuddery sigh. “It’s fine. Where’s Carrington?”

“Dad’s talking to her.” Gage came to me in a couple of measured strides. “You were right. About everything. I told Carrington she has to wear a helmet from now on. And I just lowered the line a couple feet.” A short pause. “I should have asked you before putting it up. It won’t happen again.”

He had an absolute gift for surprising me. I would have thought he’d be scathing, argumentative. The tightness left my throat. I lifted my head, the darkness thinning until I could see the outline of his head. The scent of outdoors clung to him, wind laced with ozone, dry grass, something sweet like freshly cut wood.

“I’m overprotective,” I said.

“Of course you are,” Gage said reasonably. “That’s your job. If you weren’t—” He broke off with a sharp indrawn breath as he saw a glitter of moisture on my cheek. “Shit. No, no, don’t do that.” He turned to a set of drawers in the pantry, fumbled until he found a pressed napkin. “Damn it, Liberty, don’t. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I put up that fucking zip line. I’ll take it down right away.” Gage, usually so deft, was unaccountably clumsy as he blotted my cheeks with the soft folded linen.

“No,” I said, sniffling, “I want the line to s-stay up.”

“Okay. Okay. Whatever you want. Anything. Just don’t cry.”

I took the napkin from him and blew my nose and sighed shakily. “I’m sorry I exploded out there. I shouldn’t have overreacted.”

He hovered, paused, shifted like a restless animal in a cage. “You spend half your life taking care of her, protecting her, and then one day some asshole is shooting her across the yard on a line five feet off the ground with no helmet. Of course you’d be pissed.”

“It’s just…she’s all I’ve got. And if anything ever happened to her—” My throat constricted but I forced myself to continue. “I’ve known for a long time that Carrington needs a man’s influence in her life, but I don’t want her to get involved with you and Churchill because this won’t last forever, us being here, and that’s why—”

“You’re afraid for Carrington to get involved,” he repeated slowly.

“Emotionally involved, yes. She’ll have a hard time when we leave. I…I think this was a mistake.”

“What was?”

“Everything. All of this. I shouldn’t have taken Churchill’s offer. We never should have moved here.”

Gage was silent. A trick of the light made his eyes gleam as if with their own illumination.

“What?” I asked defensively. “Why aren’t you saying anything?”

“We’ll talk about it later.”

“We can talk about it now. What are you thinking?”

“That you’re projecting again.”

“About what?”

I stiffened as he reached for me. My thoughts scattered as I felt his hands, the heat of male skin. His legs bracketed mine, the muscles hard beneath thin worn denim. I gasped a little as his hand slid around my neck. His thumb made a slow pass at the side of my throat, and the light stroke aroused me shamefully.

Gage spoke against my hair, the words sinking to my scalp. “Don’t pretend this is all about Carrington. You’re worried about your own damned emotional involvement.”

“Am not,” I protested through dry lips.

He eased my head back, bent over me. A mocking whisper tickled my ear. “You’re so full of it, darlin’.”

He was right. I had been so naïve to think that somehow we were going to visit the Travises’ world like a pair of tourists, participating without becoming involved. But somehow connections had been formed, my heart had found purchase in unexpected places. I was involved more than I had ever dreamed possible.

I began to tremble. There was a low tightening in my stomach as Gage’s mouth wandered to the edge of my jaw, the corner of my lips. I backed away from him until my shoulders came up hard against the cabinets, causing a delicate rattle of china and crystal. Gage’s supporting arm forced an arch at the small of my back. With every breath I took, my chest lifted against his.

“Liberty…let me. Let me…”

I couldn’t talk or move, just waited helplessly as his mouth eased over mine.

I closed my eyes, opening to the taste of him, to slow kisses that explored without demand, while his hand moved to cradle the side of my face. Disarmed by his gentleness, I let my body relax against his. He searched more deeply, nudging, caressing, still with that maddening restraint, until my heart was pumping as if I’d run a marathon.

Closing his hand in the heavy mass of my hair, he held it aside and kissed my neck, taking forever to work his way up to the hollow behind my ear. By the time he had reached it, I was twisting to get closer to him, my fingers gripping the unyielding surface of his upper arms. With a murmur, he took my wrists and drew them around his shoulders. I wobbled on my sneakered toes, straining in every muscle.

He held me firmly, anchoring me against the hard framework of his body, and took my mouth again. This time his kisses were longer, grinding, wet, deeply consuming, and I couldn’t catch my breath. I molded all my weight against him until there wasn’t a millimeter of space between us. He kissed me as if he were already inside me, greedy kisses with teeth, tongue, lips, kisses of unbearable sweetness that made me want to pass out but instead I clung to his body and moaned into his mouth. His hands slid to my bottom, cupped me snugly against a hard jutting pressure that felt like nothing else in the world, and the desire turned into madness. I wanted him to bear me down to the floor, I wanted him to do anything, everything. His mouth ate at mine, licked deep, and every thought and impulse dissolved into a hum of white noise, raw pleasure rising to the top of my skull.

His hand slipped beneath the hem of my shirt, finding the skin of my back, which was flushed and tender as if I’d been scalded. The cool brush of his fingers was an unspeakable relief. I arched in frantic welcome, while his hand spread like an unfolding fan, traveling up my spine.

The kitchen door burst open.

We sprang apart, and I lurched a few feet away from Gage, throbbing in every part of my body. I fumbled with my shirt, trying to pull it into place. Gage stayed at the back of the pantry, arms braced on the cabinets, head lowered. I saw the muscles bunch beneath his clothes. His body was rigid with frustration; it came off him in waves. I was shocked by my response to him, the pure erotic burn of it.

I heard Carrington’s uncertain voice. “Liberty, are you back there?”

I emerged hastily. “Yeah. I was just…I needed some privacy…”

I went to the far end of the kitchen where my sister was standing. Her small face was tense and anxious, her hair comically wild like a troll doll’s. She looked as if she were going to cry. “Liberty…”

When you love a child, you forgive her before she can even ask. Basically you’ve already forgiven her for things she hasn’t even done yet. “It’s okay,” I murmured, reaching for her. “It’s okay, baby.”