Fathers and Sons (Harlequin Super Romance)

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Authors: Carolyn McSparren

BOOK: Fathers and Sons (Harlequin Super Romance)
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Please God, let him be bald and fat.
 
Kate held her breath as her ex-husband walked down the hall behind her. She recognized David’s step, but more than that, after twenty years, she’d know that scent in the dark. Without turning, she said in what she hoped was a conversational tone, “Hello, David.”
 
“Hello, Kate.” That voice definitely hadn’t grown fat and bald. David’s full baritone still eddied around her like warm clover honey.
 
She knew she had to turn around and face this man who had betrayed her in the most devastating way a man could betray a woman. She was glad she’d changed from her jeans to her Chanel. Her suit screamed success. She wished she had sweated off the ten pounds she’d gained in the past couple of years, but she was still twenty pounds lighter than she’d been when he’d last seen her.
 
She could do this. She shoved away from the wall, took a deep breath and turned around.
 
Despite her good intentions she had to close her eyes a moment against the impact of him. Not fat and bald.
 
Not fair.
 
 
Dear Reader,
 
I remember watching my friends fall in love, and wondering whether lightning would ever strike me. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize love if it jumped up and bit me. When it did, it was like an earthquake—you may not have been through one before, but when it hits, nobody has to tell you what’s happening.
 
Many of us leave our first loves for some reason, and lose track of them. In our secret hearts, we hope they are miserable without us, no matter who dumped whom. No matter how happy we are now, every once in a while we all wonder whatever happened to the guy who...If we met, would the sparks still fly? Could I bear to have him see I’ve put on forty pounds? Do I really want to know whether he’s kept his hair and his waistline? Am I proud of the woman I’ve become in the intervening years?
 
Well, this is a story of a woman who finds herself face-to-face with the man who loved her and betrayed her, the man she longs to roast over a slow fire. The man who suddenly needs her desperately. She can have her revenge simply by walking away But can she live with herself if she does?
 
Carolyn McSparren
Books by Carolyn McSparren
 
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FATHERS AND SONS
 
Carolyn McSparren
 
 
TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON
AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG
STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID
PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND
For Beverly Williams and Lottie Garner, who advised me on Mississippi jurisprudence; for Phyllis Appleby, who can always spot the holes in my plots; for Patricia Potter, a true romantic, a great writer and a dear friend. For Sidney Eckerly, who gave me the name for the plantation. Finally, for my flamboyant actress mother, who never saw my first book. She used to say that being happy took an effort of will—and a lot of hard work.
CHAPTER ONE
 
A
TELEPHONE CALL at thirty thousand feet over Oklahoma meant only one thing—disaster.
“You can take it up there, Mrs. Mulholland,” the flight attendant whispered and pointed toward the cubby at the front of the first-class seating. The sleeping man across the aisle grunted and turned his back on her.
Kate Mulholland laid the blue legal folders on the seat beside her and walked forward to pick up the telephone. “Mulholland,” she said. She could hear the pounding of her heart over the grumble of the 747.
“Kate!” the voice on the other end of the phone sounded elated. “I just—”
“Arnold? Oh, God, who died?”
“Hold on a minute. You worry too much. You did good. I thought you deserved to be congratulated.”
“At—” she glanced at her watch “—seven-thirty in the morning and halfway up into the ionosphere? You couldn’t wait until I got to Atlanta?”
“I’m not in Atlanta.”
“Where are you? And why?”
“Besides, you definitely deserve congratulations,” he said, ignoring the question. “You played against the big boys and won.”
“Yeah, I did, didn’t I?” Kate rubbed her eyes and wished she’d waited for a morning flight out of LAX. “At least Sunny Borland will be able to raise her kids decently on the judgment we got her, but I know she’d rather have Pete Borland alive.” Her eyes felt like hot lava rocks, but her heart had settled.
“A five-mil settlement is five mil. Nice chunk of change for the firm as well.”
“Pete Borland died from a lousy gallbladder operation because his anesthesiologist was high on coke. That doctor should have gone to jail for murder.”
“Hey, Kate, we do what we can do.” There was a moment’s hesitation.
“All right, Arnold. You’re not calling just to make nice. What do you want?”
“Kate, I need your help.”
“No you do not. I’m going home to Atlanta, spend six hours in the whirlpool and sleep for a week.”
“Now, Kate, this is important. A Mississippi planter has just hired us to defend his nineteen-year-old son against a murder charge. Hired
you
, that is.”
“Me? You keep trying to con me back into doing criminal stuff. Won’t work. I like civil litigation. My clients deserve to win.”
Arnold laughed. “
All
our clients are innocent, you know that. This one is accused, however, of raping and murdering his girlfriend, one Waneath Talley, a former homecoming queen and third runner-up to Miss Mississippi last year. Small southern town, prominent families, explosive situation.” He hesitated. “Humongous retainer.”
“Why does he want me?”
“Because you’re old enough to be the kid’s mother? Because you’re a woman? Because juries love you? Because you have a rep for only defending people you believe in? Maybe because if you believe he’s innocent, the jury will too.”
“I have never been a mother. Do I look motherly to you? Besides, what if I don’t believe him?”
“Make certain you do. Listen, this is costing a fortune. Don’t go on to Atlanta. Get off the plane in Memphis and make ’em get your luggage off the plane. I’ll have a car waiting to drive you down here...”
“Where’s here?”
Her answer came in garbled words and static. “Arnold? Arnold, you’re breaking up.”
More static. If Arnold Selig were not her dearest friend as well as the best lawyer she knew, she would have called him a few unprintable names. But what was the use? She’d save her guns for a face-to-face encounter. He owed her big for this, and she’d make darned sure he knew it.
 
FOUR HOURS LATER she kissed the air to the right of Arnold Selig’s thin cheek and dropped her briefcase onto the table in the center of the dingy jail interview room. “I will get you for this.”
He spread his hands with an apologetic grin. “So what else have you got to do?”
“Arnold, I have just spent a month living in a hotel room in California fighting the biggest malpractice suit of my career. My Thanksgiving turkey came from room service. I ate it alone. The jury got the holiday off, but I sure as heck didn’t.”
“They brought in a guilty verdict the minute they got back, didn’t they? You won.”
“What I won was the seat on the red-eye you dragged me off. What I deserve is my own bed in my own apartment and about three days’ uninterrupted sleep. Definitely not this.”
She wrinkled her nose. She had tried to forget the odor of human sweat and urine that pervaded every jail in which she’d ever interviewed a client. In the last six months she’d been meeting her civil-case clients around palatial conference tables with plenty of fresh coffee and the occasional pastry. “Place smells like a sewer.”
She moved her foot and heard a pop. “This floor has something repellently sticky on it.” She checked the seat of the plain wooden chair. It seemed clean. She sat and eased her feet under the table. “So, where’s my client and how soon can we get him out of this hellhole?”
“The D.A.’s opposing bail. Says the kid’s grandfather is perfectly capable of spiriting the boy off to Brazil on a private jet.”
“Is he?”
“You bet, but we don’t want the judge to believe that. Ah, the client arrives.” He made a grand gesture toward the heavy wooden door at the far side of the room.
It opened, and a uniformed guard the size of at least two Alabama point guards stood aside. Kate turned for her first look at her client. Her heart stopped. She gulped and grabbed at her briefcase. Anything to keep her hands from shaking.
“Kate, this is...”
“David Canfield,” Kate whispered.
The young man narrowed his eyes and said truculently, “I’m Jason. David’s my daddy.”
Kate shoved her chair back and bolted for the hall. A moment later she heard Arnold’s apologetic murmur to the men in the room, then he came out to stand beside her. She knew it was Arnold because she recognized his shoes—all of him she could see from her position with her fists clenched into her stomach and her head bent halfway to her knees.
“The smell wasn’t that bad. You gonna throw up?” Arnold asked solicitously.
He kneaded her shoulder gently.
Her voice sounded to her as though it came from the bottom of a well. “I can’t do this. Even if I could, you don’t want me to.”
“The kid’s father knows you haven’t been doing criminal cases lately. He’s okay with that.”
She shook her head violently, and waves of nausea coursed through her. She rose, leaned her head against the bilious yellow painted wall and closed her eyes.
“Kate? Katherine?”
He never called her Katherine. She heard the panic in his voice. He must think she was having a heart attack. In a sense, she was.
She waved a hand toward the room from which Arnold had just come. “I’m not that boy’s mother, but I could have been. A lifetime ago I spent a year married to his father.”
“You what?”
“No way you could know, Arnold. I was married once before I married Alec Mulholland. Christmas vacation my senior year in college, I married David Canfield, that boy’s father.”
“Damn!” Arnold whispered. He pulled her around to face him.
She kept the shoulder he didn’t have his hand on against the wall so that she wouldn’t slide down to sprawl on that nasty floor like a rag doll. She felt a giggle start somewhere deep within her at the thought of what the grunge on that wall was probably doing to her sky blue Chanel suit.
“Open your eyes, look at me,” Arnold said.
She saw Arnold through a mist of unshed tears that threatened to spill over to run down her cheeks. She blinked them back. No way would she cry now. Not visibly, at any rate. She’d long since learned to shed her tears inside.
“It was not, I take it, an amicable divorce?” Arnold asked. “Your first marriage did not die a natural death?”
“It was murdered.” She chopped her hand down hard. “Guillotined, stabbed, shot, bludgeoned to death with a blunt instrument, strangled, poisoned, drawn and quartered and sawed in half.”
She began to shake as the laughter she’d held at bay got out of hand. Arnold stared at her in alarm. He did not deal well with emotion of any kind. Hysterics in a law partner would terrify him.
“Surely this guy couldn’t have hired you without knowing who you are, could he? I mean, you have a different name now.”
“How on earth should I know? I didn’t even know David had a son, much less that he was growing up in some godforsaken wide place in the road in the middle of the Mississippi delta where he was learning the fine art of murder.”
 
DAVID HAD NEVER MANAGED to convince Kate she was beautiful. Not in two years as his live-in girlfriend at college, nor in a year as his wife in New York. He had, however, managed to convince her—and himself—of his talent and discipline and desire to be a great star. But she’d thought she was big and awkward, that her hair was too thin and her thighs too fat. She’d believed in her fierce intellect, but could never see the fire in her soul that gave her an even more fierce beauty.
Maybe Alec Mulholland had convinced her of that beauty. David felt his stomach churn. The man had been dead nearly a year now. A man David had never met. From all reports, a great lawyer. Possibly a great human being. But every time David thought of Mulholland in bed with Kate he got heartburn. His Kate.
He wondered what she looked like after twenty years. He had a drawer full of clippings and letters about her, but no photos. He prayed she was the size of a truck and as bald as an egg.
Who was he kidding? To him she’d be the most beautiful bald-headed eighteen-wheeler in the universe.
He had sweated bullets before he decided to call her. One part of him longed to see her again. The other part wished she was in Siberia buried under a glacier.
Dub had made up his mind for him. Jason’s grandfather was treating the boy’s arrest as though it were at best a huge joke, at worst a minor misunderstanding. The old man agreed Jason should have a lawyer, all right, but he’d wanted to use his own attorney, Jack Slaydon, whose closest involvement with a criminal case had been a DUI he’d defended Dub against twenty years ago. And lost.
The man wrote wills, for God’s sake. Handled real-estate closings.
Jason’s arrest was no joke. Even if the boy and Dub didn’t understand the seriousness of Jason’s position, David did. And the best criminal-defense attorney he knew was Kate Mulholland.
Hell, she was the only criminal-defense lawyer he knew.
And he did know her, even if he hadn’t seen her for twenty years. He knew when she passed the bar, moved to Atlanta, become a partner, married Alec Mulholland.
He had followed her career—the civil and criminal cases she won against battering husbands and for abused children, against employers who harassed and hospitals that killed or maimed. He knew about the innocent clients who were walking around free because she’d defended them. She fought for underdogs. And more often than not she won.
He’d had a conduit straight into her life ever since she kicked him out.
If she ever discovered how he’d managed to stay aware of everything going on in her life, Kate would be mad enough to commit murder.
He caught his breath. How casually everybody spoke of murder! After this, he’d never be able to watch one of those crime shows on television again. This was real, and it was damn scary.
David pulled into a parking slot that had miraculously opened up within a block of the county courthouse, turned off the ignition, but made no attempt to get out of the car. He dropped his head onto the steering wheel.
He must have been crazy to mortgage his house to hire her firm to save Jason’s butt. At three hundred bucks an hour, that fat retainer would be eaten up in a heartbeat. Dub was still mad that David had pulled an end run on him by hiring Kate. But these days he and Dub seldom agreed about anything. In his present frame of mind, the old man wouldn’t offer one thin dime to help pay the lawyer’s bills.
David climbed out of the car and locked it, then started to walk the block to the yellow brick building in the center of the square.
“’Afternoon, Canfield,” a man spoke in passing.
David looked up and nodded. The man walked on without stopping to chat. In Athena, Mississippi, most meetings gave an excuse to stop and chat. David felt a cold breath on his neck, and not from the November wind.
A good many people had already taken sides—the pro-Jason side and the anti-Jason side. Apparently, the rest were keeping their heads down and trying to appear neutral until they saw which way the wind blew.
Of course, Dub had made many enemies through the years with his wealth and power. For many of Athena’s townspeople, Jason’s trouble meant payback time. People like Big Bill Talley, Waneath’s father, resented Dub’s old-money wealth and life-style. No matter how much money men like Big Bill made, the size of the mansions they built, the clubs they ran, they never attained the comfortable acceptance Dub took for granted. As a result, justice for Jason might be very hard to come by in Athena.

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