Father Of The Brat (17 page)

“We are for the night. Unless you want to sleep down here on the lobby sofa.”

Maddy dropped her gaze to the floor. “Being a gentleman, I thought you might offer to do that.”

Carver chuckled and reached for the card the desk clerk had pushed toward him. Hastily, he filled it out, then scrawled his signature across the bottom. “You forget who you’re talking to, Maddy. I’m no gentleman. Yeah, you can keep it on my card,” he added for the desk clerk as he took the key the other man dangled from his fingers. “Where’s room seventeen?”

“Up the stairs, to your right. About four doors down.”

“Thanks. Maddy? You coming?”

Without awaiting her reply, Carver made his way toward the sweeping stairway at the lobby’s center. Maddy watched him go, wondering how on earth she’d allowed herself to get roped into this. Her gaze skittered to the sofa near the stairs and lingered there for a moment. It was small and lumpylooking and in no way private. She looked at Carver again, at the way the taut muscles of his thighs and calves were molded so lovingly by his wet blue jeans. When he reached the stairs, he took them two at a time, as if he couldn’t wait to get comfortable in front of a nice, hot fire with a nice, mellow glass of wine.

A hot fire really did sound good, she thought. Not to mention a nice glass of wine. And a bath, she mused further, noting absently that she, too, had started to approach the stairs. A hot bath was exactly what she needed right now.

Tomorrow she could confront Rachel Stillman and demand to know what tonight’s escapades were all about. Then Maddy, too, took the stairs two at a time as she ascended. She chose not to think yet about the confrontation she would have to face tonight.

I
t was just the fire, that was all. The fire and the wine. The fire and the wine and the candlelight. The fire, the wine, the candlelight…and maybe the little chocolates on the pillows. Okay, the romantic furnishings in general. But that was all it was. That was the only reason Maddy was sitting on the divan staring at Carver on the other side of the room, wondering what it would be like to go over there, untie the loosely bound sash of his robe and run her hands all over his naked body. It had nothing to do with him.

She belted the sash of her own robe more tightly and studied the floral pattern of the sofa.
Luggage,
she repeated to herself with a sneer as she did so. Their luggage had consisted of one overnight bag Rachel had packed herself with all the necessary accoutrements for one romantic evening. A twelve-year-old’s idea of what constituted the necessary accoutrements for one romantic evening, anyway. Maddy glanced down at her robe again. It was too short, too thin, too frilly and too pink. She couldn’t remember
the last time she’d worn pink. It must have been almost twenty years ago.

The only reason she had put the robe on was because her clothes were so wet and clammy from the rain. That and because the nightie beneath it, which Rachel had also so graciously provided, was even worse than the robe itself. Oh, well. At least the girl had gotten the size right. The pink mules with the marabou trim, however, were a bit too big. For that reason, along with the fact that Maddy found the shoes simply too ridiculous to even consider wearing them, she remained barefoot.

Carver, too, was shoeless, and his bare legs extended from beneath the hem of his paisley robe as he lounged on the floor in front of the fireplace. The two of them had spoken scarcely a word to each other since entering the room, and had looked at each other even less. What a bizarre scenario, Maddy thought. A beautiful, romantic inn, a softly crackling fire, a dark and stormy night, a gorgeous, sexy man…mellow red wine, candlelight…And all she could do was sit there in a state of confusion.

“You know, I always wondered what it would be like to stay in a place like this,” Carver said softly from the other side of the room, as if it were just dawning on him, too, where they were.

Maddy twirled her glass by the stem and watched the ruby contents sheet on the side. “I would think a man like you would have stayed in places like this a dozen times at least.”

He expelled a sound of resolution. “A man like me, huh? And just what kind of man am I, Maddy?”

She sipped her wine and thought to herself that there was no way to answer his question. Carver Venner defied both description and definition. It was as simple as that.

He must have taken her silence to mean that she was still angry, because when he continued, his voice was even softer and more cajoling than it had been before. “The kinds of places I stay in are usually pretty sparse on the furnishings. If I’m lucky, sometimes they have a shower. More often,
they don’t. A lot of times, they’re under fire. One was even
on
fire,” he added with a chuckle. He sobered when he turned to look at her. “And none of them has ever come complete with a beautiful woman.”

This time Maddy was the one to chuckle. “Yeah, right. You must think I’m pretty gullible if you think I’ll believe that.”

She still refused to look directly at him, and only noticed from the corner of her eye when he rose from his seat and crossed the room toward her. When he stood beside the sofa, she continued to gaze elsewhere, at everything in the room except him. He was close enough that she imagined she could feel the heat of the fire radiating from him, and he smelled of wood smoke and bath soap and man. Her eyelids fluttered downward, and helplessly, she inhaled a great breath of him and held it as long as she dared.

“I’ve never thought you were gullible,” he told her. “I’ve always thought you were…”

She opened her eyes again and glanced up at him, completely forgetting that she had meant to spend the evening ignoring him. “What?” she asked. “You’ve always thought I was what?”

In the soft light of the fire and candles, she could make out every line, every angle in his face. A lock of hair fell across his forehead like a dark shadow, and the hollows of his cheeks compounded what was already a menacinglooking gaze. His blue eyes glistened as they caught the flickering flame of the candle and seemed to fuel it. She had never seen a more beautiful man. And she wished more than anything that she could go back in time. Back twenty years, when the world had been such a perfect place. How differently things might have turned out.

She continued to watch him as he lifted one shoulder in a halfhearted shrug. “Extraordinary,” he finally said quietly. “I always thought you were extraordinary.”

Maddy let her gaze fall back to her glass. “You never thought that about me.”

Carver dropped to his knees at her side. “What else would you call someone who continued to see the best in people when there were almost no examples of goodness to be found? What else would you call someone who kept on working to fulfill a dream and achieve a goal in spite of a million obstacles? Who got worn down to a shadow of a human being by the very society she was trying to fix, but who kept trying to improve it anyway?”

“Stupid, that’s what I’d call her,” Maddy said before sipping her wine again. She held the warm fluid in her mouth for a long time, savoring the sharp flavor because she had so little else to savor in life. When she finally swallowed, she added, “I’d call her stupid and naive.”

He ignored her conclusion and said instead, “It’s cold over here. Why don’t we go sit closer to the fire?”

“You go. I’m fine.”

“Liar.” He stroked his finger up the length of her arm, beneath the sleeve of her robe. “You have goose bumps.”

Maddy was about to tell him that her goose bumps had nothing to do with the cool air in the room, that she’d been plenty warm ever since Carver had stepped out of the bathroom in nothing but silk boxer shorts a half hour ago. Even when he’d thankfully tossed his robe on over his intriguing underwear, her body temperature had continued to rise. She didn’t need to get closer to the fire to warm up. She was plenty close to Carver’s fire now. If she got any warmer, she was going to spontaneously combust.

He continued to run his fingers along the length of her arm, up and down, back and forth, circling her wrist and cradling her hand in his. “Your hands are freezing,” he said as he stood. “Come on over by the fire.”

She allowed him to tug her up behind him and lead her across the room. Then, when she sat on the floor in front of the fireplace, she reached behind herself to pull down a cushion from a nearby chair and clutched it to her chest. She wanted to hold on to something—namely Carver, she had to confess—and a chair cushion seemed a likely enough
substitute. Until she held it close and realized it was malleable and infirm, its fabric cool and rough to the touch. It was nothing at all like Carver. She set the cushion aside.

“I did always think you were extraordinary, you know.”

When she looked at him, he was staring into the fire, talking to it instead of her, even though his words were clearly intended for her to hear.

“I always admired you,” he continued in a quiet voice, still not looking at her. “Your optimism in the face of so much adversity was probably the only thing that kept me from getting completely mired down in my own bleak outlook on life. Without you, I probably would have just kissed off everyone and everything and hitched a ride to wherever I could make myself numb for the rest of my life. Instead, I went to college. You’re responsible for that, Maddy. You made me think change was possible. You made me go about trying to affect a little myself.”

Finally he turned toward her, studying her with a grave intensity when he spoke. “That was probably why I kissed you that time backstage. Because, even back then, I loved you for being the kind of person you were.”

When Maddy felt something warm and wet on her face, she lifted a hand to her cheek. She was stunned to discover she was crying. She hadn’t cried for…God, it had been years since she’d shed a tear. Except for once, she recalled now. That night when Carver came to her house to ask for her help in finding his daughter. She’d cried that night, she remembered. Something about Carver just made her feel things again, she supposed.

Quickly she brushed the dampness from her face, removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes hard.

“That’s a nice thing to say,” she told him quietly. “I don’t believe you for a minute, but it’s a nice thing to say.”

“I don’t care if you believe me or not. I loved you back then, Maddy. It’s just taken me twenty years to realize it.”

She sniffled and met his gaze levelly. “Well, if it’s true, then I’m sorry. Because I’m not the person you loved anymore.
And I’ll never be that girl again. If you loved Maddy Saunders, Carver, then you’re out of luck. She just doesn’t exist anymore.”

“I’m not convinced of that. If the Maddy I’m sitting here with now is so different from the Maddy I knew in high school, then how come you’re still trying to make a difference in the world as a social worker after all this time?”

“Who says I’m making a difference? I don’t make a difference. There’s still poverty and crime and viciousness everywhere you look. It gets worse every year. Kids still get lost, they still get hurt and they still get killed. It will always be that way. Nothing I can do will change that.”

“If you really believe that, then why don’t you just quit your job and do something else? Something that will bring you happiness and fulfillment? Why don’t you teach or write or plant flowers, for God’s sake? Why don’t you just chuck the Child Welfare Office and look for something at F.A.O. Schwarz instead?”

His question was one Maddy had asked herself hundreds of times. And she was no closer to having an answer now than she had been years ago when the thought had first entered her brain. She didn’t know why she kept putting herself through the motions every day when those motions never seemed to make a difference. She didn’t know why she kept getting out of bed and performing the requirements of a job that got her nowhere. She didn’t know what kept her going. But it wasn’t optimism; of that she was quite confident. And it certainly wasn’t hope.

“I’ll grant you that the world can be a truly ugly place,” Carver continued when she said nothing to contradict him. “And it’s populated in places by a lot of horrible people. And, unfortunately, it will probably always be that way.”

He rose to his knees and moved to sit beside her, taking her hands in his. “But there are also some safe little pockets of goodness out there, Maddy, the occasional places where decency and honor sometimes win out.”

“Maybe,” she conceded. She watched idly as he threaded his fingers through hers, and she tried to ignore the warm tingle of satisfaction that wound up her arm as a result. Unfortunately, his gesture only made her want to draw closer to him. So she tried verbally to push him away. “But what good are those places when—”

“What good are they?” he interrupted, tightening his fingers with hers. “I’ll tell you what good they are. They’re havens for people like you and me.” He dipped his head to hers and nuzzled her ear as he whispered, “People who are too stupid and naive to realize they can’t possibly make a difference, yet manage to affect change because of that very ignorance.”

He traced a line of delicate kisses from her ear to her jaw, from her jaw to her mouth. “People like us need a place to retreat to every now and then so we can regroup,” he told her before pressing his lips to hers again. When he pulled away after a chaste brush of his mouth over hers, he added, “Thank God you and I found each other after all this time. Because who else have we had to turn to in the last twenty years?”

No one, Maddy realized. No one at all. And maybe that was the problem. Maybe that was why she had lost hope.

Without questioning what she was doing, she turned until she faced him, until she could look fully upon the man who had once caused her to feel so much frustration, anger, resentment, fascination, affection and more. Carver Venner had probably made her feel more things, more intensely, than any other human being ever had. Without him in her life, she had gradually ceased to feel at all. Bit by bit, she had been whittled down to a shell of a human being. A human being who cared little for anything. Who cared even less about herself.

A burst of recognition lit the dark corners of her mind, and she laughed a little uncertainly. “That’s it, isn’t it?” she said quietly. “That’s been it all along.”

He seemed puzzled, but encouraged. “What’s it?”

“You. You and Rachel. Ever since her file landed on my desk, ever since I saw your name on her birth certificate, I’ve had this hope that things would work out between the two of you. That you’d succeed. I cared about what happened to you. I hoped for the best.”

“Don’t you always feel that way about a case?”

She shook her head and said softly, “No. I don’t. I know that sounds terrible, but I never have any hope that a case is going to turn out for the best, because they so seldom do. I learned a long time ago to stop caring about the outcome, because I just kept feeling more and more crushed every time a case went sour.”

She held up his hand to stop his objection and assured him quickly, “Oh, sure, sometimes they work out fine. But when that happens, I don’t feel vindicated—I feel surprised. With you and Rachel, for the first time in a long, long time, I hoped for the best. And the best is how it turned out.”

She laughed again, feeling a little bubble of delight ripple through her. “You’re right. I guess I do still have hope. I do still have a streak of optimism in me. I guess deep down, I haven’t changed that much in twenty years. I’ve just managed to shut myself off for a while.”

She felt her eyes filling again, but this time the tears were anything but sad. “And it’s weird,” she continued, “but I’m just beginning to realize something else. Back in high school, the two of us were a lot alike. In your own way, you thought you could make the world a better place, too. You just went about it a little more radically than I did.”