“That fiancé of yours. Was he a member of the Society or a sensitive?”
“No.”
“He ever figure out that there was something a little different about you?”
“I don’t think so,” Clare said. “At least not in the way you mean.”
“You’re better off without him, then. Anyone as strong as you would have been miserable with a nonsensitive.”
She said nothing. Given that it was unlikely she would ever find a sensitive who was willing to risk marriage with her, there didn’t seem to be much to say.
“What makes you so damn sure we couldn’t work together on my foundation?” Archer asked after a while.
“Intuition.” She paused a beat. “Archer, if you’re making the offer because you feel guilty about the past, forget it. It’s not your fault you didn’t know I existed.”
“Yes,” he said. “It is.”
Startled, she looked at him. “Why do you say that? Mom told me that she quit her job and left Arizona forty-eight hours after the two of you had your one-night stand. She said she never contacted you again.”
“I should have checked up on her,” Archer said. “Made sure she was all right. But the truth was, her quitting like that made my life a whole hell of a lot simpler. I had enough problems on my plate at the time. I concentrated on dealing with them.”
“What kind of problems?”
“The company was going through a bad patch. Myra and I were having trouble. By the time I had my head above water again a year or so had gone by.”
“So you concentrated on the future, not the past.”
“I don’t look back too often,” Archer said. “Not my way. I told myself that it was highly unlikely your mother got pregnant that one time and that if she did, I sure as hell would have heard from her. Most women in her situation would have come looking for the kid’s inheritance. And she’d have had every right to do just that.”
“Mom’s a very proud and independent woman.”
“I remember.” Archer smiled wryly. “Probably why I was attracted to her. That and the fact that she was a hell of an accountant. At any rate, she never got in touch after she left so I figured that was the end of it.”
“What’s done is done. I understand and accept that you feel some responsibility to take care of me financially. I respect that. I appreciate it. But it’s not necessary. I can take care of myself.”
“I never said you couldn’t. But what the hell is wrong with taking a job from me?”
She heard a car in the drive. “That will be the guy from the rental car company.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
She collected her purse and stood. “It wouldn’t work.”
He got up and faced her. “Before you run off, give me your word that you’ll at least think about taking the position I’m offering.”
“It’s not a good idea. Trust me.”
“I hit you with it cold today. You haven’t had a chance to give it serious consideration.”
“I don’t think—”
“Forty-eight hours,” he said, cutting in swiftly. “And stay here in Phoenix while you’re thinking about it. Is that too much to ask?”
“Why do I have to stay here while I’m mulling over your offer?”
“Because if you go back to San Francisco you’ll find it easier to say no,” he said. “Besides, like it or not, I’m your father. You owe me some consideration.”
She smiled in spite of herself. “Never let the client walk away on a no, right? Congratulations. You get an A in Business Psychology one-oh-one.”
For the first time Archer’s eyes gleamed with amusement. He grinned. “Honey, I’ve been doing deals since before you were born.”
She realized she had just caught a glimpse of the Archer Glazebrook her mother had known. Three decades ago he would have been hard for any young woman to resist.
She hesitated. It was a mistake.
“Forty-eight hours,” Archer urged softly. “That’s all I’m asking. As long as you’ve come all the way down here, you’ll want to spend some time with Elizabeth, anyway. Just give me a couple of days to show you some of my ideas for the foundation.”
“You’re serious about establishing one, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“All right,” Clare said. “I’ll stay a couple of days. You can show me some of your plans. But I am making no commitments. Is that understood?”
“Understood.”
“Good-bye, Archer.”
A few minutes later she was behind the wheel of the replacement compact. On the way down the drive she glanced in the rearview mirror a couple times, contemplating the sight of the big house where her sister and brother had grown up.
Archer watched the little compact turn onto the main road. All his life he’d known exactly where he was going, he thought. His goals had been clear: money, success, power, the woman he loved and heirs to whom he could leave what he had built. He had acquired everything he set out to get, never questioning any of the decisions he had made along the way.
He was not proud of some of the things he had done in the past but what the hell. He wasn’t a saint. Saints didn’t put together financial empires. Saints usually came to bad ends.
He went back inside and stood looking out at the pool. As he had told Clare, it was not his habit to contemplate the past. He got through life by staying focused on the future. But he could no longer pretend that what he had come to think of as his Lost Year had never taken place.
He had been married to Myra for two years when the company he and Owen had worked so hard to get off the ground started to implode. The economy went south. Business was almost nonexistent. Bankruptcy loomed. Myra’s father, the senator, who had been dubious about the marriage from the start, was dropping heavy hints to his daughter about the wisdom of divorce.
To make matters worse, Myra had been upset when he told her he wanted to wait until the company was on its feet before they started a family. She became cold and withdrawn in bed. He was pretty sure she had begun to turn to Owen for sympathy and understanding.
Myra had dated Owen before he succeeded in sweeping her off her feet. When things turned bad, he wondered if she regretted her decision.
Somewhere in the midst of that jumble of impending disasters, he had found himself on a business trip with his young, attractive head of accounting, Gwen Lancaster. Gwen was a strong parasensitive with a talent for finding the patterns in financial data that eluded most people. She was the reason he was on the business trip. Gwen had located a possible contract opportunity. If they moved fast and if Archer could convince the client to go with Glazebrook, Inc., it might be possible to avoid going off a financial cliff.