Careful What You Kiss For (25 page)

“I know where it is.”

“I had nothing to do with this, though. You got it?”

Tensley nodded. “And you’re not going to tell anyone about my mother, right?”

Jen slanted her gaze toward the door. “Of course not,” she said before she turned on her heel and walked away.

So much for sympathy. Tensley knew two things about Jen. Not only was she born without the tact gene, she couldn’t keep a secret to save her life.

Just wait until Esme Tanner found out that her employees thought she was taking her last breaths. This time her shiver went from head to toe.

Tensley hoped, really hoped, that the ends justified the means. It could be that her mother would be relieved to see her only child, the daughter she’d smothered with hopes, dreams and expectations.

Or not.

It took Jen twenty-five minutes, but she finally made it to the back entrance to open the door. Tensley could tell, by the other woman’s flushed cheeks and bright eyes, that she’d already begun spreading the word about Esme Tanner.

“You didn’t say anything about my mother, did you?”

Jen looked away. “I don’t even know why you would ask me that.”

“Because you told Bobby Warner I liked him.”
Talk about your third grade drama.

Jen’s mouth opened and closed, her eyes narrowing. “He had to get you out of his system.”

Tensley’s mind had already gone to the meeting with her mother. It took her a few seconds to return to the subject of Bobby. “He was eight years old. I would have been out of his system by recess.” Her mother’s office was on the tenth floor. Would it be better to climb all those flights of stairs or follow Jen down the hallway and risk the elevator?

Jen’s hand suddenly flashed in front of her face, a ring on her third finger catching the light. “Maybe you don’t know my last name now,” she said, a note of triumph in her voice. “It’s Warner.”

“Bobby’s your husband?”

“He is.”

So there had been a method to Jen’s madness. Even at the age of eight. “Do you have little Bobbys?”

That seemed to ruffle Jen’s calm, at least for a minute. “Not yet, but we will.”

“Congratulations,” Tensley said, because she couldn’t think of anything else.

Jen nodded, folding her arms across her chest. “We’re very happy.”

“Great.” Tensley wondered how this had never come up when they’d passed in the halls. In Tensley’s real life. She motioned toward the stairs. “You don’t have to worry about me, now. I’ll just go up this way.”

Jen’s laugh echoed against the concrete. “Oh, believe me. I haven’t worried about you for a long time.”

Tensley didn’t have time to figure out what that might mean. She had to get to her mother’s office and make things right. Or at least not as bad as they apparently were. “Okay. Thanks, then.” She grabbed the metal railing to begin the climb to the tenth floor.

Jen speed-walked toward the door, presumably to spread more gossip.

So far, not good.

By the time she scaled the sixth flight of stairs, Tensley was pleasantly surprised to find she wasn’t even breathing hard. By the tenth floor, she was congratulating herself on being in such good shape. Who would have thought?

She wrapped her fingers around the door handle and pulled. Hard. And with defiance. Esme Tanner had issued orders to keep her daughter out of her own family’s workplace. That was wrong on so many levels, Tensley couldn’t even begin to count them.

The door opened so easily, she stumbled backward and had to catch herself. Not the most graceful way to make an entrance. She tugged her jacket down and pressed Kate’s handbag in front of it. This meeting wasn’t going to begin with a raised eyebrow, unless it was Tensley’s.

Chin raised, she walked into the hushed reverence of the tenth floor, her shoes sinking into the carpet with each step. Her office was on the opposite side of the floor from her mother’s, but she couldn’t resist going by it first to see who had her position.

She kept a sharp watch for anyone who might spot her and alert security, but she didn’t see anyone. Most people were likely at lunch. Chances were good her mother would be in her office, she knew. Esme Tanner preferred to spend the lunch hour alone.

Tensley tiptoed up and down the row, looking at the nameplate inscriptions. All of the same senior executives she knew, only one of them in his office, but with his eyes locked on his PC, he didn’t see her. Just as well. She’d never liked Mark Dorlan. Maybe it was because of the way he looked at her, with that half-smirk that said he knew she only had a job because her last name was Tanner. Or maybe it was because her mother listened to every word he said.

Didn’t matter. She was just sorry he hadn’t been sucked into Madame Claire’s psychic vacuum and ended up at some other company, smirking at someone else.

Then she came to her office. Except that it wasn’t. Through the open door, she could see a clean, uncluttered desk and framed photos on the walls. Photos of exotic places, with the same brown-haired woman smiling front and center in each. In one, she held a fishing rod and a huge fish; in another, she smiled from the driver’s seat of a sand-colored jeep, her arm draped across the steering wheel. In still another, she waved from the pilot’s window of a small airplane.

Tensley peered at the nameplate next to the door. Keira Knudsen, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives.

Tensley’s job.

The woman looked
way
too confident and competent. The only saving grace was that Mark Dorlan probably despised her. Unfortunately, that thought didn’t help much right now. What the hell was some pilot slash fisherwoman slash jeep driver doing in
her
job?

Tensley’s breathing came so fast and her heart beat so hard, she could feel it thumping in her ears. With every step she took toward her mother’s office, the pounding increased, until by the time she passed the desk of her mother’s assistant, every part of her was trembling. But if she had to crawl in, she would.

“Hey!” she heard the assistant call. But the woman was no match for Tensley, who had already reached the door to Esme Tanner’s office and turned the handle.

Tensley launched through the doorway, pulling up short at the sight of her mother, a smoldering volcano in a Marc Jacobs suit, rumbling to life at the center of the expansive desk. Their eyes caught and held as Esme Tanner shot to her feet.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Tanner,” the assistant said from behind Tensley. “I tried to stop her.”

“Leave us, Christine,” Tensley’s mother ordered.

The assistant did exactly that, meekly closing the door behind her.

Esme moved from behind the desk, holding a pen that she tapped against the top of her free hand. “Sit.”

“I’ll stand.”
For as long as I can.

“As you wish.” Her mother drew up a chair and sat down.

Tensley hesitated, and then dropped into the chair opposite her.

Esme crossed her legs, evaluating her daughter with a gaze on low boil. “I was given to understand you had left.”

“I was given to understand you had ordered me to.”

There went the eyebrow. A perfect arch, reaching toward the sky.

Tensley stood her ground. “Is that not correct?”

“You’ve lost weight.”

“Must be the drugs.”

At the look of shock that crossed her mother’s face, Tensley backpedaled. “I’m kidding.” She also crossed her legs, finding a new sense of freedom in saying whatever she liked to her mother.

Esme rose from her seat, gripping the back of her chair until her fingertips turned white. “I’m not so sure about that.” Her words were coated in hot, rolling lava. “Which is why I said our relationship could resume only when you had put your life back together.”

Tensley tipped her head. “What exactly is the criteria for that? Because I’m working, paying taxes. Earning my own way.
Not
on drugs.”

“You take your clothes off for a living. I’d hardly call that an occupation a Tanner would be proud of.”

Tensley splayed her fingers across her borrowed skirt, to keep them from making a fist. “At least I have a job. More than you would apparently give me.”

“I do not give anything. People earn their way.”

“People need a chance to show what they can do.”

“They show that with the choices they make.”

Her fingers clenched despite her best efforts. Tensley hid them by digging her fists into the upholstered chair. “You don’t know anything about my choices or what I’m capable of. You don’t know anything about me.”

Her mother’s smile was brittle. “Ah, but I do. You were bright enough, you could have gone to college, Tensley. You could have joined me here. To help carry on the family business I’ve worked so hard to build.”

I did.
Tensley swallowed a lump in her throat and tried to force out words that would redeem her. “I’m still bright.”

“I think not or you wouldn’t be here.”

A slap of cold water across the face. Tensley put her fingers to her cheek. “I’m here because I want to talk to you. Like it or not, you are my mother.”

“I cannot condone such a lifestyle. I raised you to use your brain, not your body.” She gave a shiver of what looked like disgust.

This was not going at all as Tensley had planned. Her stomach squeezed into a knot of hurt and confusion.
Don’t say it
, she told herself.
Don’t go there
. And yet she did. “I’m your daughter. Your only child. You can throw me aside that easily?”

Esme Tanner turned her head, staring through her office window.

Silence. Pressing on her heart until it she thought it would burst. “You can’t even love me?” she rasped.

After a long minute Esme spun around, meeting Tensley’s eyes. “I loved you far too much to lower my expectations of you or compromise my principles.”

Past tense. Tears stabbed at the backs of Tensley’s eyes. She wished her mother would take her in her arms for one of those stiff hugs, with that hard pat on the back, to let her daughter know that it would all be okay, that she hadn’t meant the things she’d just said, that of course she loved her. How could she not?

She wished — She wished she could make her understand what had happened, that this wasn’t the life she lived, that she hadn’t really grown up to disappoint her mother. Most of the time, anyway.

But a woman who couldn’t understand how her daughter had fallen into the line of work she had would never understand about a psychic with too much power for her own screwed-up good.

The wail inside her was silent, only for Tensley’s ears, just as it always had been. And it came from a baffled, wounded little girl. She struggled for control, for the mask that was effortless for Esme Tanner, but elusive for her daughter.

A knock at the door. Tensley took advantage of the interruption to turn away, pinching her leg to give herself another kind of pain to concentrate on.

Esme Tanner lifted her voice to say, “Come in.”

Her assistant opened the door and took a nervous step inside. “Is everything all right, Ms. Tanner? Security is here.” Arthur hovered behind her. Both of them cast wary glances at Tensley.

“No cause for alarm, Christine,” Esme said smoothly, as though she and her daughter had been discussing nothing more than the weather. She turned to Tensley. “Arthur will see you out.”

Clearly dismissed, Tensley rose from her chair, even less certain of herself than she had been when she’d come in. Christine backed out of the office, but Arthur stood waiting.

“One more thing,” Esme said when Tensley reached the door.

Tensley stopped and then turned slowly. Carefully.

Her mother made a small circle with her finger, near the chest area. “A pin, my dear, would be a very good idea.”

Tensley looked down and saw the gap where the fabric couldn’t quite close over her boobs. Her pink bra winked up at her, matched, she was sure, by the pink flaming in her cheeks.

Without another word, on legs that felt as though they were made of rubber, she walked out of Esme Tanner’s office. As she and Arthur neared the elevators, she thought she might have heard her mother call her name. But she kept going, the mirrored elevator doors taking less than a second to open and hasten her exit.

She kept her head down so that her hair would cover her face and pressed the small of her back against the elevator wall.

Arthur muttered, “It’s not right.”

Tensley couldn’t trust her voice enough to reply.

“Kids take detours. Mine sure have.”

She wondered why she hadn’t ever thought about Arthur having a family. Tensley risked a sidelong look through her hair.

The older man shook his head. “You don’t throw them out of your life when they need you the most.”

Tensley lifted her head and swept her hair back, fingers brushing her still-warm cheeks. “She has standards.”

Arthur made a sound of derision. “Maybe she should try following them herself.”

Tensley couldn’t remember anyone who knew Esme Tanner, even in passing, daring to suggest anything negative about her character. The woman was the standard everyone else was measured by. Anyone who worked for, associated with, or was related to her, anyway. She turned to Arthur. “I don’t understand.”

He opened his mouth to say something, but appeared to change his mind. “Forget it.”

The doors opened to the lobby with a ping. “How many children do you have?” Tensley asked.

“Six. Four boys, two girls.”

“Do they all live here?” They passed the receptionist, walking toward the front doors.

“Two of them do. The others are in Chicago, Toronto, San Francisco. With my grandchildren.”

“Must be hard for you not to see them.” She’d bet Arthur was a good dad. And grandpa.

They stopped in front of the doors. “Not as hard as it would have been on my wife.”

Tensley glanced down to see a gold ring on the security guard’s left hand. “Is she — Aren’t you married?”

Pain crossed his face. “She passed on last year.”

“I’m sorry.” She laid her fingers on the crisp sleeve of his shirt. “Was she sick?”

“Cancer got her.”