No Place Like Home (2 page)

“
Wouldn’t you think,” he said finally, “that the cosmic forces would at least let me make the last payment on it before it gets smashed?”

Kaye blinked. Whatever she had expected, it hadn’t been that. Profanity would not have surprised her; she would have stood there meekly and listened while he lambasted her character, feeling that she deserved every word of it. But this mildness... Somehow, it was even scarier than threats would have been.

“
I’m very sorry,” she ventured. “I was in a hurry, you see.”

“
Yes, I gathered that you must have been.” He didn’t sound interested. His eyes flicked over the back of her car, assessing its age. “Might I be allowed to ask if you carry insurance on that thing?”

“
Of course I do!” Shock was catching up with her. “And you don’t need to be sarcastic about it!” she added irrationally.

He had bent over his car again; he looked up when her voice cracked, and said, “Surely you aren’t suggesting that
I’m
the one who caused this accident?” Huge snowflakes were dusting his bare head, lying starkly white against his dark hair.

Kaye fought back tears and said huskily, “I’m sorry for yelling at you. Of course you’re not to blame.”

“
Good. I’m glad we agree on that much. If I may have your name and the necessary insurance information, I’ll let you be on your way to whatever was so important.”

She recited it woodenly, and he unbuttoned his dark wool overcoat and reached for a small notebook from an inside pocket. The leather gloves he wore made it hard to write, and he dropped his pen once. She braced herself for an outburst then, but he only stooped to pick it up from the snow and said, “Kaye Reardon,” spelling it back to her.

She nodded. “I work at Gulliver’s.”

“
I see. I’ll get estimates of the cost to repair the damage, and I’ll call your insurance company. You’d better do the same.”

She looked at her own car. “I think it only scratched the bumper.”

“
These big cars are built like tanks,” he agreed. She looked at him suspiciously, but he didn’t sound sarcastic. “Nevertheless, it might be wise to have it checked out. Here’s my card, in case you need to reach me.”

She took it in fingers that felt numb from the cold. “I’m awfully sorry,” she mumbled. “I’ll make sure it’s fixed as good as new.”

He shrugged and looked down at the crumpled fender. “I doubt that’s going to be possible.”

“
If it was mine,” she said honestly, “I’d be furious.”

“
What good would that do me? Apart from keeping me warm, perhaps. And speaking of warmth, why don’t you get back in your car and pull it forwards a couple of feet? We’re blocking traffic – what little there is of it.”

She looked up at him for a long instant. The snow had formed a solid crust over his dark hair and was falling in swirls against the glaring headlights of his car. She wondered what color his eyes were; it was impossible to tell with the light coming from behind him.

“
Kaye Reardon,” he said, and for the first time there was a trace of impatience in his voice, “until you move your car, I can’t move mine. Now I’d love to be a gentleman and stand here in the snow all evening with you, but I do have a date to keep.”

She jumped a little, and thought,
What an idiot you are, Kaye! You’ve got a date, too.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m—”

“
I know,” he said. “You’re sorry.” He ushered her to her car and opened the driver’s door.

She let the car creep forward a couple of feet to clear the path for him, and then climbed out again with her ice scraper. No matter how long it took, she vowed, or how late she was, she wasn’t driving anywhere until she could see through every square inch of glass.

His little car had stopped a few feet away, and the door slammed. “Here,” he said, taking the scraper out of her hand. “Let me do that.”

“
Thanks,” she muttered.

“
I’m not really doing you a favor,” he said, “as much as I’m trying to do a good deed for every other driver on the road.” He smiled down at her. “They can use all the help they can get.”

*****

“
And you didn’t even get his name?” Graham looked worried, and that was unusual.

“
He gave me his business card,” Kaye said. “But I didn’t even glance at it at the time, and when I got home and looked for it, I couldn’t find it anywhere. I must have dropped it in the parking lot.”

“
Careless, Kaye. That was very careless. You don’t even know how to reach him, and you have no idea what kind of person he is.”

“
He seemed a pretty restrained sort to me,” she said mildly. “I had just put a huge crease in his car, and he didn’t even yell at me.”

Graham frowned, but he didn’t say any more. Kaye was glad. She hadn’t intended to tell him about the accident, but he’d been waiting outside her apartment when she had finally got home, and she had had to explain why she was so late. She had changed her clothes in less than five minutes, run a brush through her long blonde hair, thanking heaven for natural curls, and reflected that she wasn’t nervous any more about meeting his mother— at least, not much.

The security guard in the lobby of the apartment complex waved them through with a cheerful greeting, and the glass lift whisked them through the five-story atrium lobby up to the penthouse floor.

“
It’s beautiful,” Kaye said, with a catch in her voice. “I never would have dreamed all this could come out of an old warehouse.”

“
I know,” Graham said cynically. “No one else did, either, except for my mother.”

“
It was her idea?” Kaye didn’t know why that should have startled her.

A man in severe formal garb opened the door. “Good evening, Mr. Graham,” he said. He took Kaye’s coat, seeming to pretend that it was mink instead of mere wool, and ushered them into a long living room with a grand piano at one end and the curtains pulled back to reveal a stunning view of the city below, spread out along the frozen shores of Lake Henderson.

“
How lovely!” Kaye exclaimed. “I had no idea this city could look so wonderful!”

“
You don’t like living in Henderson?” It was a woman’s gentle voice, and Kaye turned to face Claudia Forrest as the older woman rose from a chair beside the windows. She was tiny, all blue and white, with enormous sapphire eyes and soft silver hair.

“
Oh, of course I do, but...” Kaye stumbled to a halt.

Claudia laughed, a tinkling trill. “The city does look prettier from up here, doesn’t it? Graham will get you whatever you like to drink, and then you’ll come and sit by me, dear, and we’ll chat. I’m so glad you could come tonight.”

There was no one else in the room; Kaye realized belatedly that Graham had not said this was to be a party.
I really am on trial,
she thought, and swallowed hard.

But Claudia was chatting gently. “I never thought I’d end my days living in a warehouse,” she said. “Graham’s father would have been horrified, I’m sure, but I think it’s something of a joke. After all, I heard about baby food morning, noon, and night all the years we were married. What is so strange about living where the tons of oatmeal boxes were stored?”

Kaye giggled. “Do you mean—here?” She gestured at the elegant room with its cream-colored carpeting, pastel furniture and striking art.

“
Right here. It nearly broke my heart when Graham built the new warehouse out on the edge of town. This building held such memories.”

“
It was the only practical thing to do, Mother.” He put a delicate crystal wineglass into Kaye’s hand.

“
Practical,” Claudia said. “Sometimes I wonder, Graham, if you will ever realize that being impractical is sometimes much more fun.”

“
Also, much less profitable. You’ll never get back the money you spent on this place, Mother. You simply can’t charge enough rent in a city like Henderson to recover your investment.”

Claudia shrugged. “If it amuses me, what does the money matter? But let’s not quarrel in front of our guest.” Claudia’s voice was crisp. In the next hour, she drew Kaye out, asking about her job, her family.

“
I haven’t any family left,” Kaye said. “My mother died when I was a baby, and my father several years ago.”

“
You’re very young to be all alone,” Claudia murmured. The sapphire eyes were almost hypnotic.

Kaye fought down the sudden, irrational desire to say,
I’ve always been alone.
But she couldn’t say things like that to a woman she scarcely knew. She couldn’t confide those details to Graham’s mother, who would probably forbid her son to ever see this young woman again.

It was all in the past, anyway. The fact that Kaye’s father had been a less than reliable parent and provider, that they had lived on the thin edge of poverty, didn’t matter in the least. It wasn’t as if he’d been a criminal, after all, Kaye told herself stoutly. A black sheep, perhaps, but from a good enough family nevertheless – one even Claudia Forrest couldn’t object to. And so she smiled and talked of ordinary things.

On the way to Pompagno’s, Graham looked across at Kaye, cleared his throat, and said, “My mother likes you very much.”

“
I’m glad,” Kaye said. “I like her, too.”

He gave a self-conscious little cough. “I intended to wait a while to ask this—perhaps order a bottle of champagne at Pompagno’s—but that’s rather public, don’t you think?”

“
Public for what?” Kaye asked. Her heart was beating a little faster than usual. She was afraid to look at him; instead, she looked straight ahead to where the highway turned away from the frozen shore of Lake Henderson.

“
Will you become my wife, Kaye?”

She closed her eyes tightly. A strange little pain rocketed through her, tingling clear to her fingertips, followed by a tidal wave of relief that threatened to drown her. This, then, was what love really felt like, she thought. She’d simply been terrified to let herself feel it before, afraid that Graham might not want to marry her at all.

I hadn’t realized,
she thought,
just what rigid controls I was putting on my feelings.

“
Kaye?” he asked quietly. “I’m sorry if it sounds as if I needed my mother’s approval before I proposed to you. But you do understand why I waited, don’t you?”

“
Of course,” she said quietly. “It wouldn’t be very pleasant for any of us if your mother and I couldn’t stand each other. It was only sensible to wait till she got home. Graham, thank you. Of course I’ll marry you.”

There,
she thought.
It’s all decided. And I am thrilled.

He smiled at her and patted her gloved hand where it lay on the leather upholstery. “Thank you, my dear,” he said gently. “We will be quite happy together, I’m sure.” He laughed a little. “And Mother will be delighted. She’s thought for a long time that a man in my position shouldn’t be single. The baby-food business, I mean. She keeps hinting that it’s time to put a picture of a new Forrest baby on the labels.”

He was blushing, Kaye thought in astonishment. Graham was actually embarrassed.

“
All in due time, of course,” he added hastily. “There is no hurry about it—no hurry at all.” He hesitated, and added warily, “I should have asked about your views on the subject, of course.”

She wondered idly what would happen if she said indignantly that she absolutely refused to ever have a child, and then scolded herself for letting the relief of the moment make her get silly and half-hysterical. How could such a crazy thought ever have come into her head, anyway?

“
I haven’t ever given it much thought,” Kaye said. “But I’ve always hoped to have children some day. I’d like several, I think. I was an only child, and it was very lonely.”

He laughed again, with a little relief. “Well, at least there’s no fighting when there’s only one,” he said.

He turned the car over to the doorman outside Pompagno’s, and took Kaye’s arm to usher her inside. “Kaye, my dear,” he said. “I’m honored that you’ve put your trust in me. I promise you will never want for anything.”

It was only then that she realized it. Neither of them had said anything about love.

CHAPTER TWO

MONDAY morning at the travel agency was not often busy, but it seemed to Kaye that everyone in town had cabin fever after the snowy weekend at home and immediately started planning to leave. She and Emily were both occupied for most of the morning, and it was nearly noon before Emily pushed her chair back, picked up her coffee mug, and said, “How did you get along with Graham’s mama Saturday night?”

“
Just wonderfully, thank you.” Kaye addressed an envelope, rolled it out of the typewriter, put in a cruise-ship brochure, and dropped it into the outgoing mail. She couldn’t resist giving Emily a jolt. “The wedding will be next summer some time.”

Emily choked and sputtered. “Don’t do that to me,” she begged. “I can’t take practical jokes of that sort.”

“
It isn’t a practical joke. Graham proposed, I accepted, and we’ll set a date as soon as I find a house for us to buy.” Kaye propped her elbows on her desk and smiled happily across at her co-worker. “It’s real. I’m engaged.”

Emily put the cup down. “I don’t see a ring.”

“
Graham hasn’t had a chance to get one yet.”