An Act of Persuasion - By Stephanie Doyle Page 0,47
but then he must have remembered Anna would return shortly. No doubt she wouldn’t like the idea of her former boss strangling her current boss. Ben settled into the chair.
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he snarled.
“It doesn’t matter. Now that I know her better, I think she’ll see right through you. She’s smart, but beyond that, she knows you, too. She’ll see through your high-handed seduction methods if they are simply a means to an end and not born from real sincerity.”
Ben snorted.
“Fine. You go ahead and think you’ve got it all figured out. But I’m here to tell you if you screw this up, if you piss her off beyond forgiveness, then you’ll be a stranger to the child you say you want to know.”
“What would you know about it?”
“I have a child. A child I’m a stranger to.”
Mark watched Ben’s forehead crease as he tried to access the information he had on Mark. Maybe at one time he knew Mark had a child but that information had been deemed unnecessary and long buried back in his brain.
“I forgot. I’m sorry.”
“Well, it was pretty easy to forget considering I didn’t talk about her much.”
Or at all. There were no pictures in his wallet, not that an operative at that level would have carried any personal information anyway. Still, he didn’t have a picture of her anywhere period. The last time he’d even seen her was a year ago on her birthday. They’d had a Skype chat for a few minutes. She’d seemed bored with him. And the picture hadn’t been all that clear.
His daughter.
“What happened?”
Mark startled a little. A personal question from Ben? A question that had nothing do with gaining useful information for a specific purpose, but rather was a subject he was curious about? That was a first. Mark supposed the least he could do for this old colleague was to paint a picture of what not to do with Anna.
“Her mother was my college girlfriend. We dated most of my senior year. She was a junior. She expected to get married after I graduated. I expected to work abroad for the CIA. I guess she thought she was losing me. She told me... It’s so stupid when you think about it, what a man will be willing to believe to get his uncovered dick inside a woman. She told me she started taking the pill. She lied about it and got pregnant instead.”
Helen. He never once thought of her as devious or manipulating. He’d never really given her that much credit. He could only imagine she’d been scared out of her mind for lying. If he’d been listening to her, really listening to her, he was certain he would have known what she was trying to do. Hold him. Keep him. But back then half of all his thoughts were firmly locked in the future. Not enough of him had been in the present to know he was being set up by a really bad liar. A setup that had major consequences.
“What did you do?”
“I proposed,” Mark snapped. “What the hell do you think I did? Helen was a nice girl. She came from a good family. She wasn’t...sneaky. She was just desperate. I mean, it’s hard to get all righteous on a woman who got pregnant because she loves you that much.”
“But you didn’t marry her.”
Mark shook his head. “No. A couple of months into the engagement, she could see that while I was making all the right motions—I applied for the FBI instead of the CIA, filled out a few applications for law school—I wasn’t happy. She told me she screwed up and that she knew she didn’t want to live with a man who would always want to be somewhere else. She promised she would raise our daughter with love and never let her know how she was conceived. Then she returned my ring accompanied by an application for the agency. I never looked back.”
“Until now.”
“Yep.” Until now. Now, he was here and Helen was dead and his daughter didn’t want to see him.
“Do you regret it?” The question wasn’t judgmental. Ben was merely curious.
“No.” He had to hack the word out of his throat, but it was the truth. “No, despite how it ended, I never would have given up those years. Makes me a son of a bitch, doesn’t it.”
Ben shrugged.
“Anyway, that’s what I’m doing here. In Philadelphia.”
“Really? Not here to steal all my employees, then?”