As You Wish (10 page)

“Hurting?” Ryan snapped. “But she looks so happy.”

“You’ll know she’s devastated when she decides to give a ball,” Rita snapped back. Then she slouched. The guy outweighed her by about double and out-stubborned her by at least twice that. She could be fighting with him all night and get nowhere, and in the meantime, Trisha was alone in a room full of her nearest and dearest, about to blow like Vesuvius. “Look, she’s more stressed out than I’ve ever seen her, and we were in med school together. She’s got that slimeball David Hoess bugging her to get engaged, and I’m matching her up with every eligible bachelor in the tristate area to avoid that disaster, and who knows what else is cooking in her head. She’s high strung under optimal circumstances, and optimal this ain’t. She’s all alone here, and she’s got nobody to take care of her. Can you just keep an eye on her? If anything happens, just call me, and I’ll take care of the gooshy girl emotions, okay?”

Ryan nodded. She thought she saw a glimmer of concern in his eyes, but she doubted that. Like most men, he just didn’t want to be anywhere near gooshy girl emotions. She scribbled her number on the bandage instructions. “This is my home, and this is my cell. Cell is more reliable. And keep that bandage dry if you can. Okay?”

Rita walked out of the bathroom ahead of him and headed back to the party. Maybe she could call off tomorrow. Claim illness and demand that Bruce dote on her every desire. But she might be too busy setting up a nice rubber room for Patricia, depending on how the rest of the night went.

* * * *

“Patricia!” David held out his arms, forcing her to lean in for his greeting kiss before the hostess could escort them to their table. “I hear I missed quite a get-together the other night. It’s too bad you couldn’t wait until I was settled in before you had your party.”

“It was just a few friends over for dinner,” Patricia murmured, taking her seat at the table.

She’d had too much to drink at her dinner party and spent yesterday suffering for it. After going to bed early and sleeping late, she’d woken to the realization that the entire point of the party was to make Ryan kneel at her feet while a room full of her friends, including three would-be suitors, watched. She’d gotten that much.

Unfortunately, she’d also gotten the opportunity to see all three of the would-bes fade when Ryan walked in the room. Rita refused to admit she’d talked to Ryan at all. David assumed the whole event was set up to annoy him. “Nothing special.”

“Everything is special where you’re concerned.” David reached across the table to cover her hands with his. “Who were you playing tennis with?”

“Katherine Benedict.”

David’s hands slid away as he sat back.

This wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have now. There were no conversations she wanted to have now. She still didn’t feel well, and she hadn’t bothered to look in her mailbox for two days.

“From the mayor’s office,” David supplied.

“We went to school together.”

“Really? How nice. How did you do?”

“She beat me. I’m a little off my game.” I’m a little out of my mind, she thought.

“Good evening, Mr. Hoess, Dr. Whitmer. What can I get you this evening?”

Patricia looked up at the waitress and kept her frown off her face. It was the same girl as last time, the one David had terrorized. Was it her imagination or did the girl sound almost warm toward David tonight? His apology must have been good. Patricia decided she didn’t want to think about that either.

“Hello, Elise. I’ll have a Manhattan, and Dr. Whitmer will have a Long Island Iced Tea.”

“Just water for me,” Patricia corrected. Her stomach rebelled at the thought of alcohol. Legacy of the half bottle of rum she’d drunk Thursday night, watching her fire burn out after everyone left.

“Of course, you’ve just had a workout,” David said. “Water for Dr. Whitmer, Elise. With a twist of lemon.”

Her desire to drive herself to the restaurant and meet him was also part of the plot to annoy him. It had nothing to do with the fact that the restaurant lay between her house and the tennis club. Patricia smoothed her damp hair off her face.

“Grace and charm are the hallmarks of a Whitmer lady,”
she recalled her grandmother saying from the time she was three until Grandma died when Patricia was twelve. Just because she’d had little sleep aggravated by the lingering effects of her hangover didn’t give her the right to become a petty tyrant. “Thank you, David. You’ve always had an eye for detail. Have you begun settling into your new home?”

“I have. My parents and my sister came over today to help me unpack. I was just happy the movers managed to get the furniture into the right rooms. I think they purposely misplaced all the boxes.”

Patricia nodded and frowned through a lecture on the stupidity of movers and then made appropriate horrified noises about the state of David’s belongings upon arrival. She didn’t try to point out that better packing would have saved some of his delicate items. Their dinner plates were cleared, and he was launching into the horrors that might await him at the office when another shadow fell across the table. He glanced up, irritated, but the expression melted. Obviously someone he had to schmooze. Patricia looked up and had to think for a minute.

“Is that you, little Patricia?”

Patricia smiled and paged through her mental Rolodex. The older lady had to be a friend of her family, but she was too old to be from her parents’ generation and too young to be from her grandparents’. She was someone impressive enough for David to want to suck up to.

“It’s me,” she said, giving up. Her brain wasn’t capable of anything as complex as remembering a person from her childhood tonight.

“I’ve been meaning to call on you since you moved back home, but I just haven’t had the time with all the work we’ve been doing at the museum.”

Patricia’s smile never faltered. The Whitmer Art Museum. That place her family had stopped donating to when the new curator took over and started filling it with garbage. At least that was what her grandfather had called it when he was being polite. When he wasn’t being polite, someone had usually been trying to cover her ears.

That meant this woman was Judith Haddix, arts cheerleader and general woman about town. Someone who could get David in the paper. And someone who would prefer to be on Patricia’s good side. “I’m sorry, I’ve been a little out of touch. What are you doing at the museum, Mrs. Haddix?”

“You may not have heard, our last curator retired three years ago, and the new lady is just a ball of fire.” Judith snagged a chair from the next table and settled in. “She’s been staging retrospectives and bringing out all those beautiful pieces the last curator wouldn’t show. She’s also sold off a number of our modern pieces in an effort to raise capital to buy a Sargent.
Board Inclined
sold for ten thousand dollars.”

Patricia nodded. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would pay more than three dollars for a board leaning against a wall, but she remembered her grandfather’s choice words about it. Grandmother had been too busy covering her own ears to cover Patricia’s on that particular day. She sipped her water to quell the hysterical laughter that threatened.

“I know your grandfather had some very strong feelings about the way the museum was handled in the past—”

Patricia did laugh this time. “He wrote a letter to the paper, threatening to personally bulldoze the building.”

Judith blushed. “Yes, that was a very bad time. I had misgivings myself. But now we have a new curator who I think your grandfather would have approved of, and it would help our cause immensely if your family were to back us again.”

My family? Patricia thought. All of me? She glanced at David’s hopeful eyes. Good political wives did things like this. They did fundraising for worthy community causes and backed important programs. They made sure their husband’s names were in the paper as often as possible in a positive light.

“We’re having an Orientalist show right now,” Judith continued. “You should stop by and see it. Most of them were donated by your family.”

Patricia remembered trips to the museum when she was a very little girl learning to read, holding Grandfather’s hand as he took her through the collection. He loved pointing out the tiny, perfect worlds the Orientalist painters had created while Patricia read the many cards noting which paintings her family had donated. Her grandfather had adored those paintings. One still hung above the bed in the room he’d shared with Grandmother. He would sit on the end of his bed looking at the picture while he made up a story for it, different every time.

“Maybe we could have a fundraising ball on Halloween. Is it too late to arrange something like that?”

Judith stopped breathing.

“Mrs. Haddix?” Patricia leaned forward. She hoped she wouldn’t have to do mouth-to-mouth in the middle of Firenzi’s tonight.

“A fundraising ball at Well Spring Manor?” Judith whispered.

“The ballroom will have to be thoroughly cleaned.” Patricia studied the woman’s eyes, half expecting to have to treat her for shock. She had the inappropriate desire to giggle at the idea of Judith Haddix going into shock over a fundraising ball. “It hasn’t been opened since my parents died. But if there’s time, it would be nice to have a masquerade ball.”

“Patricia, you have no idea what this would mean to the museum steering committee.” Judith’s wide eyes wavered, unable to focus.

Judging by Judith’s orgasmic response, Patricia guessed she did.

“We could announce our engagement at the ball,” David put in.

Patricia stopped cold. Distantly she heard Judith’s gasp and then sputtered congratulations. She glared across the table at David grinning over his little coup.

“We’re not engaged yet,” Patricia said. “We’re just discussing it.”

Judith said something about leaving love birds alone and jumped up to go before Patricia could change her mind about the ball.

“How could you say that in front of her?” Patricia asked.

“I thought it was settled.” David smiled. “Come now, dearest. This engagement was decided years ago by our parents. You wouldn’t want to disappoint them, would you? I thought that when we married, I would change my name to Whitmer instead of you changing yours. Out of respect for your family.”

Elise the waitress appeared, bearing a dessert Patricia vaguely remembered ordering. Patricia seethed in silence until the girl had gone. “David, I appreciate the sentiment, but we hadn’t agreed to marry.” The chocolate torte with warm raspberry sauce served at Firenzi’s was legendary. When she was ten, she’d had chicken pox. Her grandfather had had a slice delivered to the house for her every day of her confinement. Fourteen perfect slices of torte with warm, sweet sauce brought special all the way from downtown. She couldn’t imagine herself eating the piece sitting on her plate now. The raspberry sauce looked like bad horror-movie blood.

David sighed. “I’m sorry, Patricia. I didn’t know you felt that way. Is it something I’ve done? Something I’ve said? I love you.” His voice hitched. It sounded sincere.

Folding her hands in her lap, Patricia studied her dessert. The whipped cream was melting into the warm sauce.
“Aren’t they just adorable together?”
she remembered Mrs. Hoess saying.
“They would give us the most adorable grandchildren
.” Her mother had always murmured in agreement.

“Please say something,” David pleaded. “I only wanted what was best for us. I thought you would be pleased by the idea.”

“It is a nice thought.” Patricia bit her lip. At some point, her life had careened out of control. She thought it might have happened the day she graduated. The day her very rigid course of study had ended and all the decisions had become her own to make. “I’m sorry, David. I think I need to think about this some more.”

He reached for her hand. “Please tell me I haven’t done something irrevocable.”

“You haven’t.” She couldn’t raise her eyes to meet his. All the decisions she’d made so far had been very bad. Mrs. Magyar could have died, and Ryan was furious with her. Would it be so terrible to let this decision be made for her? “I think I need to go home.”

“Can I come by later?”

She shook her head. “I’ll call you Monday.”

“Do you want your dessert wrapped up?”

Standing, she shook her head again. She’d have been just as happy to sit down to a nice dessert of old brick with cement sauce. “Thank you for dinner.”

Patricia walked to her car numbly. Behind her, a roar of the crowd in the city stadium told her that the locals were winning and that David had scheduled another dinner to coincide with a game. The streets were otherwise empty, allowing her to move unaccosted for the entire two blocks to the parking deck. At the opening of the deck, she glanced back to make sure David hadn’t followed her. A police car glided past, but there was no one on the street.

David hadn’t meant any harm in blurting their intention to get engaged. He probably thought it would be wonderful to announce it at what would be the social event of the year. Anything that happened at Well Spring Manor would be the social event of the year. The upper crust of three counties would be genteelly fighting for invitations to the ball. And then they’d be tripping over their designer-shod feet to give money to the museum.

Hadn’t she thought of having a ball to help David’s political career? Hadn’t she, for just an instant, seen a future of many such events hosted in her own home and in the governor’s mansion in Columbus and eventually in the White House? Hadn’t she been planning the marriage before she committed to the engagement? What right did she have to be upset with David when he was doing the initial stage setting for the life he’d already planned for them?

Patricia unlocked her car door. She felt exposed. David might as well have ripped off her clothes in the middle of the restaurant. At least she’d had the foresight to tell him Monday and not tomorrow. That gave her an entire day to think. She put the key into the ignition and turned it.

Nothing happened.

She frowned at the key and tried again.