you had to call me long-distance.”
He shook his head and chuckled at her. “You don’t have to be defensive about being divorced. It’s a big club.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” she retorted, wishing she weren’t defensive—or at least that it didn’t show so much. But when Bill had walked out on her, it had only served to reinforce her feelings of failure, as well as her aversion for the selfishly upwardly mobile. “What would you know about it, anyway?” she challenged.
“A little.” He smiled without humor, a rather melancholy effort. “I’ve been a card-carrying member of the club for fifteen years.
She blinked, startled. She’d never heard that he’d been married. “Oh—I—I—You must have married young…” she stuttered.
He shrugged his hands into his pants pockets, glancing away. “I’ll check with my chauffeur.”
She squinted at him, baffled. “You have to ask your chauffeur if you married young?”
His brilliant black eyes fixed on her for a split second before he turned away. “Hardly,” he muttered. “But my chauffeur’s been known to wear jeans. Maybe I could borrow a pair.”
4
Lucas sat beneath an autumn-flushed oak on the grassy bank of the lake. The mouthwatering aroma of charcoaled turkey mingled with the crisp tang of the late-November afternoon. Kids wearing bright parkas were scattered about the grounds in bunches, like fallen leaves. Giggling groups lounged at the water’s edge laughing and joking on blankets as they finished the dinner they’d helped prepare.
Sitting alone, Lucas viewed the noisy turmoil with bitter melancholy. As far as work went, the day had been an utter waste. Fletch and Sol were at the office, and had called him a half dozen times to confer. Jess had eyed him darkly each time he’d grabbed up his cell to discuss the latest Takahashi problem.
If that hadn’t been enough, memories of the Mr. Niceguy Thanksgiving Dinner he’d attended long ago resurfaced to plague him. It was a part of his life he’d tried to forget, but Mr. Roxbury and his bothersome assistant were dredging it up again, and remembering was painful.
Both as a boy and a young man, he’d felt deeply—maybe too deeply for his own good. He’d suffered several traumatic losses—first his parents, then his grandmother and finally his wife. Over the past fifteen years he’d programmed himself, like one of his computers, to feel nothing, to need no one, and he didn’t like this tug of long-buried emotions he was feeling today.
A shout drew his attention to the makeshift game of touch football that was going on not far away. Jess was playing quarterback, and not for the first time that day, he eyed her thoughtfully. She seemed more secure than he’d ever seen her, obviously in her element with the kids. She was also the worst quarterback he’d ever seen. Strange. The boys and girls on her team didn’t seem to mind her fumbles and wild throws. They laughed, having a good time, even knowing they were losing.
Lucas had never been able to abide losing. Not even a simple game. He watched her fumble another toss, feeling an odd envy for people who could let themselves go the way she did around these kids. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d relaxed and laughed out loud. Over the years, he’d trained himself to be self-contained, and to concentrate on work, and he was proud of his rationality and sense of purpose.
He supposed he was too much like the ant and not enough like the grasshopper for some people’s tastes. Mrs. Jess Glen’s, for instance. He grunted with resentment. Who was she to find fault, being the world’s worst football player?
Glancing around, he spotted Jack, the boy whose essay he’d chosen as the best. The teenager was slouched under another oak not far away, his features glum. He’d acted exactly like Jack at that long-ago Thanksgiving dinner—aloof and unfriendly, feeling out of place and angry, with no control over his life.
His grandmother had been dead two years when he’d come to the Mr. Niceguy dinner. Grandma Jane had been the only stability he could remember in his young life, his parents having deserted him when he was five. After his grandmother’s death, he’d been shuffled around from one dismal foster home to another, where nobody cared if he stayed or ran away. So, he invariably ran.
He hadn’t known why he’d bothered to write his essay that day so long ago. Maybe deep inside him there’d been a dim glimmer of hope that things could get better. He’d figured out