The Princess and the Pauper (24 page)

Really? April thought sarcastically. She couldn’t imagine Rothchild approving of anything Jesse did. “Is Sergeant Cawthorne on a case now?”

“He’s working on several.” Glancing at his watch, Rothchild pursed his lips. “I’m sorry, Miss Hollis, but I have a meeting in a few minutes. Was there something else…?”

“No.” She got to her feet, shook hands once more, and found her way to the outer hallway. Pompous ass, she thought dismissively.

The elevator doors opened and April stepped aside to let the passengers pass. A man and a woman walked out, deep in conversation. She moved forward, brushing the skirt of the other occupant before she saw who was.

“Jesse.” Her pulse leaped.

“April,” Jesse said in a flat voice that sent chills down her spine.

He regarded her dispassionately, and she had to swallow once more before finding her voice again. “I was here looking for you,” she said, flustered.

“Why?”

“I thought we should talk.” She shot him a look of challenge. How dare he be so cold? This wasn’t easy for her, either.

“It’s a little late, don’t you think?” he remarked cuttingly.

“Yes, it probably is.” April was impatient. “Don’t be so hard. Please. You must have a thousand questions, and I don’t blame you. If I could—”

“Shut up, April.” His cool tone belied the leashed fury flaring in his eyes.

She stiffened in shock and affront. How could she have miscalculated his reaction so completely? She’d expected him to be so eager to know his daughter that he would set aside his terrible pride. That had been a mistake. “Don’t you want to know about Eden?”

The virulent look he sent her tore a hole in April’s heart. “She’s my daughter. You never were married, and this husband of yours is mythical? You’ve lied and fabricated for years. Do I want to know about her? Yes. But you’re the last person I would come to for information!”

His face was as dark as his shirt. She could see the tension in the cords of his neck. She wondered if he’d blocked out their afternoon of lovemaking. “I’m… sorry,” she said, feeling the words were inadequate.

He moved a step closer until she could feel his heat. “You used to me, and now I’ve used you. That’s all there is to it. Don’t wrap this up in some nice neat word like ‘love.’ I don’t feel anything for you but contempt.”

April’s eyes widened. She couldn’t speak.

“You’ve had Eden for nine years,” he snarled in a low voice. “But it’s over now. Consider yourself forewarned,
Princess
.”

April pressed the Down button with a shaking hand as Jesse stalked away from her. She didn’t remember how she got back to the office. She was immersed in a numbing fog of terror.

When she saw the special delivery letter on her desk, she knew instantly it was Jesse’s doing. She tore it open. The firm of lawyers named at the top of the page was one of Portland’s finest.

The demands were for parental visitation rights. April realized with a sense of inevitability that this was just the beginning. Jesse was going to exact revenge, and unless she wanted a messy court battle with Eden the middle, she was going to have to pay.

Chapter Twelve

T
ouché was located in a rustic corner of Portland steeped in history. The building was nearly a hundred years old; the upper-story windows were grimy and needing paint. But the store itself was both trendy and upscale. The mannequin in the windows sported a lazy, perpetual wink, as if she were secretly amused by her faded blue jeans with holes and the glittering necklaces of semiprecious stones that wound in layers around her sculpted neck.

April pushed open the door and was greeted by the first few bars of “God save the Queen” from what sounded like a kazoo. A girl with short, spiky, gelled auburn hair smiled at her. “What can I do for you?”

“I came to see Jordan Taylor. Is he here?”

She lifted perfectly plucked brows. “Sure. Jordan!” she yelled, turning toward the door behind her. The front door opened once more, with another rendition from the kazoo, and the salesgirl said, “He’ll be here in a minute. Excuse me.”

April glanced at the newcomers: a woman in an expensive sweater suit and two high school girls. The girls looked yearningly at the rows of quality clothes, whose styles made the older woman blanch slightly.

“Mom,” one cried, enraptured. “This belt is only a hundred dollars!”

I have led a sheltered life
, April thought fatalistically.

“April!” Jordan exclaimed in surprise.

The smile nearly froze on her face. He wore a worn, leather flight jacket and black jeans. His resemblance to Jesse at that moment took her breath away. “I came to check out the competition,” she greeted him, her voice strained.

He smiled, but there was a reserve about him that wounded her to the core. “It’s quite a place, huh?”

“Successful?” April asked.

“You wouldn’t believe.” He hesitated a moment, then gestured for her to follow him into the back. “It’s no department store, of course, but its sales are phenomenal considering its size. We restock twice a day. I spend most of my time opening boxes.”

“Who’s your buyer?” April asked as Jordan pulled out a chair for her from beneath a postage-stamp-sized table wedged against a back wall.

“Her name is Teresa. She’s rarely here. She’s got the knack. As soon as I realized that, I practically gave her carte blanche. Want a Coke?” He was opening the door to a tiny refrigerator.

“Have you got Diet?” For an answer he handed her an ice-cold can. “Thanks. Are you happy here?”

“Yeah.” He answered too quickly and April brows lifted. “It’s not my forte,” he amended. “I’m more of the general manager type. But I feel we’re riding a wave that’s getting bigger. Can you keep a secret?”

The irony of that question made April choke. She coughed lightly. “Yes.”

“I’ve made an offer for Touché. I think it’s going to be accepted.”

“That’s wonderful,” April said in all sincerity.

Jordan grabbed a rickety chair and swung it around, straddling it backward. He laid his arms across the back and eyed her directly. “What’s going on with you?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Her smile twisted painfully. “I wanted to apologize for my father.”

“There’s no need.”

“You do know why he… let you go?”

“Fired me,” he corrected with the patient smile. “I guess it was because of Jesse.”

April’s head jerked in a nod. “He’s rather hysterical when it comes to Jesse.”

“Hmmm.”

“Have you talked to Jesse recently? I mean, about me?”

“If you think I know something more than you do, you’re wrong. My brother is not exactly a babbler, if you know what I mean.”

“He didn’t tell you about Eden?”

“I haven’t seen Jesse since the day your father fired me,” Jordan said pointedly. “We’ve talked on the phone maybe three times and he’ll only answer my texts with one word. What happened to Eden?”

April was beginning to think she’d embarked on a fool’s journey. But once started, she couldn’t stop. She opened her mouth to tell him the truth twice before she managed to say, “I never was married, Jordan. Eden met her father for the first time the other day.”

Jordan stared at April. She could practically see the pieces fall into place inside his head. His nostrils flared.
“Jesse?”
he asked incredulously.

“I’m afraid so.”

“Oh, God.” Jordan was on his feet, the color drained from his face. He ran his hand through his hair in a gesture painfully reminiscent of Jesse. “How did he react? What happened?”

By the time April had finished explaining, the Diet Coke had turned lukewarm and flat. Martha, Touché’s irrepressible salesgirl, had sung out that she was locking up and going home over half an hour earlier. The hands on the pink neon clock behind Jordan’s head were climbing to nine o’clock.

Jordan’s cool reserve had broken down word by word, like ice floes chipped off a glacier. April story had tumbled out hesitantly at first, then faster and faster until the last words rushed out with miserable intensity. “He hasn’t learned a damn thing, if he thinks he can bully me.” She lifted her chin defiantly. “If he tries, he’ll lose. I’ll make sure of it.”

Jordan’s mouth twisted. “Spoken like a true Windsor Estates girl.”

“Don’t patronize me.” Furious, she pointed a finger at him. “You’re the one seeing Tasha Bennington.”

“Past tense, April. Tasha and I split.”

“You did?”

Jordan stretched his shoulders. “Yep. Tasha’s interest in me went into serious decline after I lost my job at Hollis’s. I hear she’s hooked up with a successful stockbroker.”

“Oh, Jordan.” April could hear the regret in her words.

“It was the best thing that could have happened. Being with Tasha made me realize how faulty my memories were. I had built her up in my mind. And she let me down.”

“I know this is going to sound trite, but you’ve always been too good for her.”

Jordan snorted. “I know
this
is going to sound trite, that Tasha and I are from two different backgrounds. It doesn’t matter how much either of us possesses: we’re not the same. We never will be. And that’s the crux of it.” He eyed her speculatively. “It isn’t any different for you.”

April smoothed her skirt with swift, tense strokes. She hadn’t come to see Jordan for a lecture. “If you mean Jesse and me—”

“Of course I mean Jesse and you. Get real, April. Jesse is on this planet to cause turmoil. You’re the establishment. Those philosophies are never going to mix.”

“Did I say I wanted to be with Jesse?” April demanded.

“I think so,” he answered, maddeningly.

“All I want to do is keep my daughter!”

“Yours
and
Jesse’s daughter. And what you just said is a lie, April Hollis. You want Jesse, too.”

April was so infuriated that she leapt to her feet. “What the hell do you know about it?”

Calmly Jordan said, “You’re mad at the wrong guy.”

April snapped her jaw shut on a gasp. She sank back, deflated, and covered her face with her hands. “I don’t know what I want to do.”

“There’s only one thing you can do,” he remarked sympathetically. “Let Jesse have visitation rights and be done with it. If you give, he’ll give. He won’t beat you down.”

She shook her head.

“April, what you shared with him was a long time ago. It’s meaningless today. If you’re hanging onto that, let it go.”

He didn’t understand. Jordan didn’t know about the day she and Jesse had made love with such fervency that the memory still had power to squeeze the breath from her lungs. She wanted to tell him, to prove to him that he was wrong. But was he? What had been a monumental moment to her could have been an afternoon’s pleasure to Jesse. It might’ve been an ending rather than a beginning – the period at the end of a sentence, the moral at the end of the story.

“I’ll try,” April said unsteadily, and wondered how long it took to stop loving someone.

Ten days later April returned from work late, apologized madly to Jennifer and paid her extra, then mounted the stairs to the second floor in search of her daughter. She felt weary beyond description. Since the discovery of Roger’s crimes, the employees at Hollis’s seemed to be in a state of extended shock. Some even believed Roger had been wronged. There had been a mass exodus of disgruntled and angry salespeople and one or two managers.

April had been glad of the extra problems the first; they helped her bury her own problems. But the last few days she’d felt completely drained.

Call Jesse.

Sighing, she ignored the temptation. Why should she call him, anyway? She should count herself lucky he hadn’t bothered her again. The letter from his lawyers was the last word.

“Eden?” April called, rapping lightly on her daughter’s door.

“Come on in, Mom,” she sang out.

The sight that met April eyes made her forget how tired she was. Eden was standing on a chair in the center of her room, turning her head from side to side. Her blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail, so stiffly gelled that it looked brittle enough to break. Her bangs had been sprayed with some kind of pink hair spray. She was wearing April’s white silk blouse like a dress, belted at the waist. Bracelets dangled from her wrists and she had to keep pushing them up her arms because they threatened to fall off.