“I guess so,” she said, pensive. “My father bought back the family mansion when he married my mother and gave it to her as a wedding gift.”
“Wow! Generous man!” Ross was intrigued by her family history. He knew her father could buy many mansions if he chose to, and yachts, and planes.
“Very generous!” Kendall confirmed proudly.
“And how do you fit into all that?” Ross asked her, searching her eyes for clues. She was outwardly cool, but he sensed someone warmer inside, or hoped there was. He wasn’t sure.
“I want to be like my father and be a genius like him and blow everyone’s minds,” she said and he smiled at her honesty.
“And live happily ever after in a cottage with the man you love and two adorable children, or maybe three or four?” That was what he wanted one day, Kendall made a face the minute he said it.
“Definitely not.” She laughed at him. “No kids, and I don’t think ‘happily ever after’ matters all that much.”
“No? How so?” She was becoming more intriguing by the minute.
“My parents don’t get along and never have. I think they stayed together for us, or whatever reason. My mother probably likes being married to a legend like my dad but doesn’t admit it. And I’m not sure traditional families are all that important. My mother’s mother died right after she was born. She was kind of the bad seed of the family, or black sheep or whatever. And my mother’s grandparents raised her, and were wonderful to her.”
“The ones with the antique shop?”
“Exactly.” He was bright and fun to talk to and interesting, and very good looking, and she couldn’t understand why he had such meager ambitions. “What about you?”
“Son of an artist and a building contractor. Put them together and you get an architect.” They both laughed at that.
“Your father was the contractor and your mother the artist?”
“Nope, which is why I don’t believe in traditional roles. My mother is the contractor. She inherited the business from her father, and she runs a tight ship. I use her occasionally for my clients.” He smiled at Kendall. “And my father is the artist. Stuart McLaughlin.” He was a well-known contemporary artist and she was impressed. “And both families were pissed when they got married. My mother’s family thought my dad wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans. And my father’s fancy East Coast family thought that my mother’s family were a bunch of redneck construction workers. And they did live happily ever after and had me. They got it right on the first try, so I’m an only child. And I’m looking for the woman of my dreams and I’m thirty-three. It’s a shame your mother’s not single. She sounds like just my type with the gardening and the orchids.” He laughed. And Kendall very definitely wasn’t, with her fierce ambitions and determination to outdo her father. He had picked up on that immediately. She behaved like a shark, and he wondered if there was something meeker under the armor. If not, he wasn’t interested.
They were intrigued by each other, dated for six months and had fun together, and then the man of Kendall’s precious dreams really did come along. Cullen Roberts worked for her father and was exactly the kind of man she had always wanted to be with. Ross had finally admitted to her that he was falling in love with her, and a month later she dumped him for Mr. Ambitious. Princeton undergraduate, Harvard Business School. He had impressed her father who had hired him in New York and lured him to San Francisco. He was as tough as nails and a computer genius like her father, and Kendall fell head over heels in love with him and they lived together for three years. He had as little interest in marriage as she did, and neither wanted kids. A match made in heaven, with their careers as their first priority. Then she figured out that dating the boss’s daughter was part of his scheme for success, when he bragged to his coworkers that he had his future sewn up and how little she meant to him, but it was a small sacrifice to make to get ahead with her father. It got back to her when someone anonymously sent her a string of his text messages for her perusal. She was twenty-six years old and it was her first serious emotional beating. She was still licking her wounds and