“Why?”
“You haven’t called me Ron.”
“I don’t need to.”
“I want to hear it.”
He was leaning on the railing, his weight on his left arm, looking up at her with the ingenuousness of a teenager trying to wheedle his way out of trouble. Only he was trying to wheedle her into it.
“Ron. There, I said it.”
“Don’t make it sound like a dose of bad medicine. Make it sound like you might even like me a little.”
“Look, I don’t—”
“Are you always this resistant with men?”
She didn’t understand why she’d let their conversation become so personal. “I don’t mix business with pleasure.”
“I do my most effective work that way. When we do get down to business, it’s usually just working out the details of something we’ve already decided.”
“I’m not a businessperson. I’m a people person, and I find it easier to keep the two separate.”
“That’s a very interesting concept. Why don’t we have lunch and discuss it?”
Chapter Four
“Okay,” Ron said, lobster juice dripping from his elbows onto the tablecloth-size napkin tucked into his collar, “we’ve decided I’m a true pirate of high finance. I give no quarter and expect none. I think everyone should take responsibility for their own actions and not expect outside help. You blame my career, my pursuit of money and power, even my failure to marry again, for my abysmal failure as a father. I think we’ve covered me. Now I want to hear about you. What did you want from your father that you didn’t get?”
She’d known from the moment she agreed to have lunch with him she had to answer his question. She’d ordered lobster salad. He ordered a lobster in the shell. He’d surprised her by taking off his coat and rolling up his sleeves. She understood why when he let the juice run down his arms to his elbows.
“Do you always eat lobster like that?” she asked.
“No. I can ease the little sucker out of his shell without getting a single drop on a linen tablecloth that costs more than some cars. But you’re not going to distract me any longer. You have me at your mercy. I want to become a better father. Tell me about yourself.”
She had tried, without success, to convince him that her experiences had nothing to do with his success or failure as a father, but it appeared the only way to convince him was to tell him what he wanted to know.
“My father was away from home much of the time. When he was home, he was always meeting someone or bringing them to the house. There never seemed to be any time when he belonged to just us, when nobody else could interrupt or call him away. The few times he did find himself alone with us—on a family vacation or for an evening at home—I think he was bored and restless. I don’t think he was interested in us.”
“I take it he never played with you as a kid, read you stories, or kissed you good-night.”
“Never.” She hoped she didn’t sound as if she were whining. It was a fact she’d accepted. She didn’t think too much about it until he kicked her sister Elizabeth out of the house. She had never forgiven him for that.
“How did you rebuild your relationship? Maybe I can do the same thing with Cynthia.”
“It’s not the same. I’m an adult. I don’t live at home.”
His gaze seemed to become more intense. “Are you trying not to tell me that you and your father don’t have a good relationship?”
She might as well get it over with. Ron Egan seemed to have a genius for finding the weak spots. “My father I and had a serious disagreement about ten years ago. We don’t see each other much.”
“How much is that?”
She stopped playing with the remains of her salad and looked him square in the face. “Usually once a month.”
“Since when?”
“Since he threw my sister out of the house.”
He took his napkin out of his collar, and carefully wiped his mouth and his hands. Then he sat back. “Tell me about it.”
She couldn’t believe she was getting ready to tell a man she’d known less than twenty-four hours about one of the most difficult episodes of her life, but for some reason she felt she could share it with him.
“My sister got pregnant when she was in high school. She was seventeen and wildly in love with the boy. My father wouldn’t let her marry him. And after she did anyway, he said they couldn’t live in his house.”
“Why?”
“He said the boy was a shiftless bloodsucker. He said my sister had been stealing stuff from his office. Elizabeth was a little wild, but she wouldn’t have done anything like that.”
“Did you do anything to help?”
“I wasn’t there. I was the good daughter who did everything Mom and Dad wanted. I was at boarding school. Elizabeth got herself kicked out of Country Day so she could go to public school. I dated boys from approved families. Elizabeth chose half her dates just because she knew they’d make my father furious.”
“So you dedicated yourself to pregnant teenage girls because you think your sister got a raw deal.”
“What would you have done?”
“Locked them in the same room until they came to some solution.”
“That may work in business, though I wouldn’t have thought so, but it doesn’t work with personal relationships. You each have to try to understand where the other is coming from.”
“Coddle them and make them think being stupid is an acceptable way to behave.”
She folded her napkin. It was time to leave. “That’s not what I said.”
He put a fifty-dollar bill on the table and rose. “You said your father and sister should be allowed to stay at odds with each other because you have to honor their feelings. Yet you said I ought to take a leave of absence to repair my relationship with my daughter. Your logic is inconsistent. Either you have a set of principles that work in all situations, or you don’t have a workable theory.”
She had preceded him out of the restaurant and she waited to answer him until they were in the car.
“I told you I don’t pretend to be a professional, so I don’t give advice.”
“You’re giving me advice.”
“Only because you insisted.”
Kathryn didn’t know how she’d let herself get drawn into helping Ron. All the other parents had been more than willing to meet with the specialists she recommended. Why couldn’t she keep her distance from the Egans?
Something had been different about them from the first. Cynthia wasn’t like the other girls. Or maybe she had reacted differently to her because Cynthia wasn’t panicked or hysterical or even silent and moody. Kathryn felt almost as though they were equals even though Cynthia was only half her age.
She didn’t kid herself when it came to Ron Egan. Everything was different because her physical response to him had been immediate and undeniable. It didn’t matter that she might disagree with him in every way. As a man, she found him powerfully attractive. She wanted to be around him even though she knew it was a foolish thing to do.
He seemed to be truly interested in learning to communicate with his daughter, but he had no idea how to begin. If she didn’t help him, he was liable to treat Cynthia as a hostile takeover. They could end up like her own