“And what do you plan to do with us now?”
Jason looked bewildered. “I want to marry you.”
“Of course. What was I thinking? You didn’t by any chance buy me a great big diamond ring, did you?”
Based on her tone of voice, Jason started to lie but decided against it. “Yes,” he said simply. “A huge diamond.”
“That makes sense. That fits. I guess you’ve planned our futures too, haven’t you?”
Jason didn’t answer, just looked at her across a table covered with reprints of everything that had ever been published about him. His mind was racing as he tried to figure out who had sent these to her, but he had a suspicion. At the ball he’d seen the sister of a woman he used to date. After going out for a few weeks they had parted ways amicably. Then she had approached him several months later and wanted to begin things again. When he’d turned her down, as gently as he could, she’d flown into a rage and sworn she’d get even with him. So now, Jason wondered if the sister he’d seen last night across the room, her eyes staring at him coldly, had had these pages faxed here and had made sure Amy received them.
When Jason didn’t reply to Amy’s question, she continued. “Let me guess. You plan to buy Max and me a huge house within commuting distance of New York City and you plan to visit us on weekends. Maybe you’d helicopter in, right? And you’d open accounts for us everywhere so I could buy Dior any time I wanted. And Max could have all the finest toys and clothes. Nothing but the best for your family, right?”
For the life of him Jason could see nothing wrong with the picture she was painting.
Slowly Amy began to smile. “Sounds good to me,” she said at last. “How about some tea to celebrate?”
“Yes. Please. I’d like that.”
Slowly, Amy got up from the table, with her back to him, filled the kettle, and opened a few tins as she looked for the tea bags.
But Jason was so relieved he didn’t pay any attention to what she was doing. “How about a summer home in Vermont?” he was saying. “We’ll get some place with stone walls and acres of . . . of fruit trees.”
“Sounds great,” Amy said, her voice flat. But she knew he wasn’t listening to her. He was in his own little daydream of a happy, idyllic life in which he had a loving wife and child to come home to. Whenever he could find the time, that is.
“Here you are,” she said, smiling.
Jason tried to take her hand and kiss it, but she pulled away to sit down at the opposite side of the table.
“Did you see the movie Pretty Woman?”
“Can’t say as I did.” He was smiling at her sweetly.
“It’s about a businessman, a billionaire, who falls in love with a prostitute.”
“Amy, if you’re implying that I think of you as a—”
“No, let me finish. The movie was a great success, and everyone I know loved it, but—”
“You didn’t.”
“No, I did, but I was worried about what happened later. What would happen five years down the road when they had an argument and he threw it in her face that she’d turned a trick or two? And what about his education versus hers? His money against her lack of it?”
“Go on,” Jason said cautiously. “What’s your point?”
“Drink your tea before it gets cold. You and I are like the couple in that movie. You’ve done everything, proven everything to yourself.”
“I hardly think—”
“No, it’s true. You have.”
“Amy, you’re a lovely woman, and—”
“And women don’t need to prove anything, is that right?”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“Look,” she said, leaning toward him. “If I left here with you, you’d swallow me up like the Richard Gere character would have swallowed the young woman played by Julia Roberts.”
“What?” Jason asked, rubbing his hand over his eyes. Now that the crisis had passed, he found that he was quite sleepy. Why did women always want to discuss things in the middle of the night? “Could we talk about this in the morning?”
Amy didn’t seem to hear him. “Why do you think I’ve refused to take charity?” she asked. “Everyone knows me as the drunk’s widow, but I needed to prove that I was worth more than that. I don’t want Max known as the drunk’s kid.” She leaned toward him. “And I most certainly don’t want him known as the billionaire’s kid.”
“I’m not a billionaire.” Jason could barely keep his eyes open. The clock over the stove said five A.M. “Amy, sweetheart,” he said. “Let’s discuss this in the morning.” Rising, he took her hand and led her back to the bedroom, where he removed her robe then held the covers back from the bed. When she was under the covers, he slipped in beside her and snuggled her in his arms. “Tomorrow we’ll go over all of this, I promise. I’ll explain everything, and we can talk about all the movies you want. But right now I—” He broke off to give a jaw cracking yawn. “Now I . . . love you . . .” He was asleep.
Beside him, Amy took a deep breath. “I love you too,” she whispered. “At least I think I do, but right now I have an obligation that is more important than my love for a man. I’m Max’s mother, and I have to think of him first before my own needs.”
But there was no reply from Jason.
When Amy saw that he was asleep, she angrily threw back the covers and stood, glaring down at him. “It takes more than a private helicopter to be a father,” she said quietly, then turned on her heel and went to the hall closet, where she pulled out an old duffel bag; then, without realizing what she was doing, she began to throw clothes into it. “To be a father, Jason Wilding, you need to be a teacher as well as a money provider,” she said under her breath. “And what would you teach him? To buy whatever he wants? To lie his way into a woman’s heart? Would you teach him that he can do any devious, underhanded, sly thing he wants to a woman, then all he has to do is say ‘I love you,’ and those three words erase all the lies?” She leaned very close to his sleeping face. “Jason Wilding, I don’t like you. I don’t like the way you use your money to trick people, to connive behind their backs. You have treated me, Max, and, actually, this whole town with contempt.”
The only reply she received was that he rolled to his other side and kept on sleeping.
Drawing back, she looked down at him, and suddenly, she was calm and she knew what she had to do. “Max and I aren’t for sale. Unless the currency used is good deeds,” she said as she almost smiled. “I’m going to leave now, but please don’t look for me, because even if you find me, you still won’t be able to buy me.”
With that she turned away and went into her son’s room.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ONE YEAR LATER
“MR. EVANS TO SEE YOU, SIR,” MRS. HUCKNALL SAID TO Jason’s back.
Jason didn’t bother to turn around, but gave a nod as he continued staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows. Manhattan lay thirty stories below, the people and cars looking like toys. He didn’t know why he still bothered hiring the private detectives. Twelve months ago his whole life revolved around the reports of the first one he’d hired. The reports were called in daily, and Jason took the calls wherever he was. But when the detective could find no trace of Mrs. Amy Thompkins and her baby son, Jason had fired the man and hired someone else.
In the last year he’d hired and fired more detectives than he could count. He’d tried everyone from sleazy guys whose ads promised to catch any cheating husband to men retired from Scotland Yard. But no one could find the single woman and her little boy.
“You have nothing to go on,” he’d been told again and again—and it was true. First of all, there were no photos of Amy past the age of twelve. Mildred, her mother-in-law, had taken pictures of her grandson, but Amy wasn’t in them. The people in Amy’s hometown said that the house Amy had grown up in burned down the week after Amy’s mother’s death, so maybe all the pictures of her had been destroyed then. Maddeningly, Amy seemed to have been absent ever
y time photos were taken for the high school yearbook.
The detectives said that all she had to do was go to some two-bit lawyer in some one-horse town and change her name. The lawyer would run the announcement in some local rag sheet and, “Not even God would read it,” one detective said. And with a new name, Amy could be anywhere. America was full of single women with kids and no fathers.
One by one, Jason fired each man; the truth was too painful to hear. So now he’d spent a whole year paying people to look for one woman and one child and they’d come up with nothing.
Jason heard the current detective enter the room, but he didn’t bother to turn around. It wasn’t until the man cleared his throat that Jason whirled about. “What are you doing here?” he snapped, for David stood there.
“Wait!” David said as Jason was about to press the button that called his secretary into the office. “Please, five minutes; that’s all I ask.”
Jason moved his finger off the buzzer, but by his stance, he wasn’t softening. “Five minutes, no more. Say it, then get out.”
Instead of opening his mouth to speak, David thrust his hands in his trousers’ pockets and walked about the room. “I always hate your offices,” he said conversationally. “They’re always so cold, all that glass and these pictures! Who chooses them for you?” When he looked back at his brother, Jason was scowling.
“Four minutes,” Jason said.
“Want to see pictures of my wedding?”
Jason didn’t answer, just glared at his brother. A year before on that horrible morning when Jason woke up to find Amy and Max gone, he and David had had a fight in which they’d nearly killed each other. David blamed Jason for everything, saying he drove Amy and Max out into the snow, with no means of support, no friends or family, no help of any kind.
And Jason blamed his brother for having started it all in the first place. But in spite of the argument, Jason had a search party looking for Amy within an hour of waking up. But by then the trail was already cold. A woman traveling alone with a baby was too common a sight and an unremarkable one; no one had noticed either of them.
It was after the disappearance that the real rift between the brothers came, because Parker took David’s side. Jason’s loyal secretary, a woman who had been Jason’s right arm for years, was suddenly his enemy. For the first time since he’d known her, she’d stood against her employer and told him what she thought of him.
“No wonder she left you,” Parker had said, quietly at first, but her voice came from deep within her and carried more volume than the loudest siren. ”You have no heart, Jason Wilding. You look at people as goods to be bought and sold. You think that because you pay me a high salary, you can treat me as though I’m not human. You thought because you bought Amy’s baby a roomful of furniture that she would fall down at your feet in everlasting gratitude. But the only thing men like you foster is greed. You made me want more and more money from you until I was beginning to despise myself.
“But I need my self-respect back, so I’m leaving your employment.”
Nothing in the world could have stunned Jason more than Parker’s defection. When he turned away, he expected never to hear from her again, but that was far from what actually happened, for three months later he received an invitation to the wedding of Dr. David Wilding and Miss Cherry Parker.
To Jason, still trying his best to find Amy and Max, the marriage seemed the ultimate betrayal. Now, he could hardly bear the sight of his brother. If David hadn’t called him and made up that lie that their father was dying . . . If David hadn’t thought he was in love with a widow with a baby . . . If Jason hadn’t fallen for David’s hard-luck story . . .
“What do you want?” Jason demanded, glaring at his brother.
“Family, that’s all. Getting married, settling down, changes a man. I want you to come to Christmas dinner. Cherry’s a fine cook.”
“She has a nice kitchen to do it in,” Jason said, remembering the bill he’d received for the addition of a fabulous kitchen to his father’s house. And that was another thing: his chef had left him to try to start his own business in gourmet baby food. Jason had tried to be pleased when he heard that Charles wasn’t doing very well, but instead he felt bad for his former cook. Charles’s cocky arrogance didn’t go over too well with bankers, and he’d had no luck in finding the funds to back his business.
“Is that still bothering you?” David snapped. “Damnation, but I’ll pay you back for the bloody kitchen. I don’t know how, but I’ll do it.”
Suddenly, David sat down on a chair across from Jason, who was standing rigid behind his desk. “What do you want from all of us? What do you want from life? Do you think that if you find Amy, she’s going to come back to you and live inside your golden cage? She didn’t want to be a prisoner, no matter how beautiful the surroundings. Can’t you understand that? Can’t you forgive her? Forgive me?”
Jason didn’t move, but stood still as he stared at his brother. How could he explain that for a few short days he had been happy? Plain, old-fashioned happy. During his time with Amy and Max, it had given him pleasure to buy things for other people, to do things, to listen, to laugh. Amy had a way about her—
He had to cut himself off from thinking about her or he’d go crazy. There wasn’t a day that went by that he didn’t think about how old Max was now. He was walking by now, maybe even talking.
Or maybe he wasn’t. For all he knew, Amy and Max were dead. There were some awful people out there in the world and—
“I can see that you won’t give up,” David said as he stood. “But then, that’s what makes you strong. And makes you weak. Look, it’s Christmas Eve and I need to fly home. I want you to come with me, and—”
“I have plans,” Jason said, glaring at his brother. Tonight his apartment would be full of people, for tonight was the anniversary of the last time he’d seen Amy and Max. Tonight he was going to drink champagne until he was drunk, and tomorrow he was not going to wake up alone.
“All right, I tried,” David said as he started for the door. “If you need us you know where we are.” He started to say more, but at the stony look on his brother’s face, he shrugged, then walked to the door. But he paused with his hand on the knob. “I know you’re still grieving for Amy and Max, but there are other people in this world. There are even other children.” When Jason made no reply, David sighed and left the office.
Jason buzzed his secretary. “Call Harry Winston’s and have them send me a selection of engagement rings.”
“Engagement?” Mrs. Hucknall said.
“Yes!” he snapped, then punched the button to cut her off.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“OH, JASON, DARLING,” DAWNE PURRED AS SHE RUBBED her perfectly toned body against his. “The party is perfect.” Somehow, she made the word sound like “Purrrrrfect.” “I have never seen so many famous people in one room before.”
Jason sat on the chair in silence as he sipped what had to be his fifth glass of champagne and looked at all the people. They were indeed famous and rich, he thought, as well as beautiful. The women had that glossy sheen that came from many hours spent in beauty salons the world over. Their skin and hair glowed with health and cosmetics that cost more than the resources of several small countries combined.
“What’s wrong with you?” Dawne asked, a slight frown marring her perfect forehead, although Jason knew that it hadn’t been perfect when she was born. It had been “lifted,” as most of her had been lifted and augmented. She looked about twenty-seven, but Jason chuckled as he realized that it wouldn’t surprise him to find out that Dawne was seventy-five years old.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked. She was perched on the arm of his chair, her long, lean, well-muscled thigh within reaching distance.
“I was wondering how old you are.”
Dawne almost choked on her drink, and he could see spots of anger growing on her perfectly made-up cheeks. “You’re in a mood tonight, a
ren’t you?” she said, her lips tight. “Why don’t you get up and talk to your guests?”
Suddenly her face brightened, as though she wouldn’t allow herself to get angry with him. “I know what would cheer you up. How about if I give you your Christmas gift now?”
“I have enough ties,” he said.
“No, silly, it’s not a tie; it’s . . .” Leaning over so her breasts were against his shoulder, she whispered her plans for seduction.
Drawing back, Jason gave her a small smile. “Don’t you think I should stay out here with my guests?”
At that, he could see a look of hurt in her eyes. She got up and walked away, leaving him alone.
When she was gone, Jason didn’t know whether to be glad or to feel even more alone than he usually did. Damn his brother, he thought yet again. He’d been doing fine until David showed up with his talk of marriage and a family. That visit, combined with its being Christmas Eve and the anniversary of Amy’s disappearance, was about to unhinge him.
Jason had anticipated that tonight would be difficult, so he’d hired a well-known interior designer to put on a party in his apartment that would take his mind off his troubles. And Jason had to admit that the designer had done a bang-up job, as the party was exquisite. The decorations were magnificent, with crystals sparkling in candlelight in the designer’s theme of silver and white.
The food was wonderful, each mouthful a delight. Or at least that’s what Jason had been told; personally, he hadn’t touched anything but the champagne.
So if everything in his life was wonderful, why was he so miserable? Sure he’d lost a woman he thought he loved, but didn’t other people break up every day? And did they go into a decline that a year later still haunted them?
Jason knew that if he had any sense, he’d do what he had been advised by everyone from the detectives to his own brother and forget about finding one woman and a little boy. As one of the detectives had said, “If I had your money, I wouldn’t be worried about any woman; I’d buy myself all of them.” Jason had fired the man on the spot and had tried to clear the words from his head.