“A corporation?” she said, horrified. “This is a family!”
“And like most families, it’s dysfunctional.” That was the Houston Whitford he knew and loved.
“What a terribly cynical thing to say!”
Precisely. And every bit of that cynicism had been earned in the school of hard knocks. “If you want Walt Disney, you go to the theater or rent Old Yeller from the video store. I deal in reality.”
“You don’t think the love and support of a family is possible in the business environment?”
The brief hope he’d felt about Molly’s suitability to have Miss Viv turn over the reins to her was waning.
“That would assume that the love and support of family is a reality, not a myth. Miss Michaels, there is no place for sentiment in the corporate world.”
“You’re missing all that is important about Second Chances!”
“Maybe, for the first time, someone is seeing exactly what is important about Second Chances. Survival. That would speak to the bottom line. Which at the moment is a most unbecoming shade of red.”
She eyed him, and for a moment anger and that other thing—that soft knowing—warred in her beautiful face. He pleaded with the anger to win. Naturally, the way his day was going, it didn’t.
“Let me show you my Second Chances before you make any decisions about the programs,” she implored. “You’ve seen them in black and white, on paper, but there’s more to it than that. I want to show you the soul of this organization.”
He sighed. “The soul of it? And you’re not romantic? Organizations don’t have souls.”
“The best ones do. Second Chances does,” she said with determination. “And you need to see that.”
Don’t do it, he ordered himself.
But suddenly it seemed like a life where a man was offered a glimpse at soul and refused it was a bereft place, indeed. Not that he was convinced she could produce such a glimpse. Romantics had a tendency to see things that weren’t there. But realists didn’t. Why not give her a chance to defend her vision? Really, could there be a better way to see if she had what it took to run Second Chances?
Still, he would have to spend time with her. More time than he had expected. And he didn’t want to. And yet he did.
But if he did go along with her, once he had seen she was wrong, he could move forward, guilt-free. Make his recommendations about her future leadership, begin the job of cutting what needed to be cut. Possibly he wouldn’t even feel like a cad when he axed Prom Dreams.
Besides, if there was one lesson he had carried forward when he’d left his old life behind him, it was to never show fear. Or uncertainty. The mean streets fed on fear.
No, you set your shoulders and walked straight toward what you feared, unflinching, ready to battle it.
He feared the knowing that had flashed in her eyes, the place that had called to him like a cool, green pond to a man who had unknowingly been living on the searing hot sands of the desert. If he went there could he ever go back to where—to what—he had been before?
That was his fear and he walked toward it.
He shrugged, not an ounce of his struggle in his controlled voice. He said, “Okay. I’ll give you a day to convince me.”
“Two.”
He leaned back in his chair, studied her, thought it was probably very unwise to push this thing by spending two days in close proximity to her. And he realized, with sudden unease, the kind of neighborhoods her projects would be in. He’d rather hoped never to return to them.
On the other hand the past he had been so certain he had left behind was reemerging, and he regarded his unease with some distaste. Houston Whitford was not a man who shirked. Not from knowing eyes, not from the demons in his past.
He would face the pull of her and the desire to push away his past in the very same way—head-on. He was not running away from anything. There was nothing he could not handle for two short days.
“Okay,” he said again. “Two days.”
Maybe it was because it felt as if he’d made a concession and was giving her false hope—maybe it was to fight the light in her face—that he added, “But Prom Dreams is already gone. And in two days all my other decisions are final.”
MOLLY was glad to be home. Today easily qualified as one of the worst of her life.
Right up there with the day her father had announced her parents’ plan to divorce, right up there with the day she had come home from work to find her message machine blinking, Chuck’s voice on the other end.
“Sorry, sweetheart, moving on. A great opportunity in Costa Rica.”
Not even the courtesy of a face-to-face breakup. Of course, if he’d taken the time to do that, he might have jeopardized his chances of getting away with the contents, meager as they had been, of her bank account.
A note had arrived, postmarked from Costa Rica, promising to pay her back, and also telling her not to totally blame him. Sweetheart, you’re a pushover. Don’t let the next guy get away with pushing you around. To prove she was not a pushover, she had taken the note directly to the police and it had been added to her complaint against Chuck.
A kindly desk sergeant had told her not to hold her breath about them ever finding him or him ever sending a check. And he’d been right. So far, no checks, but the advice had probably been worth it, even if so far, there had been no next guy.
Besides, the emptied bank account had really been a small price to pay to be rid of Chuck, she thought, and then felt startled. It was the first time she had seen his defection in that light.
Was it Houston, with his hard-headed pragmatism, that was making her see things differently? Surely not! For all that he was a powerful presence, there was no way she could be evaluating Chuck through his eyes!
And finding the former coming up so lacking.
Perhaps change in general forced one to evaluate one’s life in a different light?
For instance, she was suddenly glad she had never given in to Chuck’s pressure to move in with her, that she had clung to her traditional values, that it was marriage or nothing.
She had actually allowed Chuck access to her bank account to take the sting out of that decision, one she’d been unusually firm about even in the face of Chuck’s irritation.
Because of that decision today she could feel grateful that her apartment remained a tiny, cozy space, all hers, no residue of Chuck here.
Usually her living room welcomed her, white slipcovers over two worn love seats that faced each other, fresh flowers in a vase on the coffee table between the sofas. The throw cushions were new to pick up the colors from her most prized possession, acquired since Chuck’s defection from her life.
It was a large, expensively framed art poster of a flamboyantly colored hot air balloon rising at dawn over the golden mists of the Napa Valley.
There were two people standing at the side of the basket of the rising balloon, sharing the experience and each other at a deep level that the photographer had managed to capture. Tonight, Molly Michaels looked at it with the fresh eyes of one who had been judged, and felt defensive.
She told herself she hadn’t bought it because she was a romantic, as a subliminal nod to all she still wanted to believe in. No, Molly had purchased the piece