Harlequin Desire September 2015 - Box Set 1 of 2: Claimed\Maid for a Magnate\Only on His Terms (39 page)

Harrison had never known that side of his father. Maybe if they went to Cincinnati, he'd see that Harry wasn't the cold, rapacious man he remembered. And maybe, between the two of them, they could figure Harry out, once and for all.

“Harrison,” she said decisively, “we need to go to Cincinnati.”

His expression would have been the same if she had just smacked him with a big, wet fish. “Why do we need to go to Cincinnati?”

“So you can meet Harry.”

“You've already told me all about him.”

“And you don't seem to believe any of it.”

He said nothing in response to that. What could he say? He
didn't
believe anything she'd told him about Harry. Not really. He was the kind of person who needed to see stuff with his own eyes to be convinced.

“I have to go back to work next week,” he said, lamely enough that Gracie knew that wasn't the reason he was balking.

“You can give yourself a couple more days off,” she said. “You're the boss.”

He said nothing again, but that only encouraged her. “Look, you took me on the Harrison Sage, Jr. tour of New York City. So now let me take you on the Harry Sagalowsky tour of Cincinnati.”

“And did the Harrison Sage, Jr. tour change your mind about your friend Harry?” he asked.

Gracie hesitated before replying. “Not really,” she admitted. But she quickly declared, “But it's given me a lot to think about. It's added a lot to my picture of Harry, and even if the things I learned don't paint him in the greatest light, I'm still glad to have learned them. I want to do the same for your picture of Harrison, Jr.,” she added more gently. “So you'll have more to think about, too.”

This time, Harrison was the one to hesitate. Finally, he told her, “It won't make any difference in the way I feel. About my father or you.”

Something in the way he said it, though, made Gracie think he was at least willing to give it a chance. Where his father was concerned, anyway. Although maybe he meant—

“It doesn't matter how you feel about me,” she said before her thoughts could go any further, wishing that were true. Wondering why it wasn't. She really shouldn't care about how Harrison felt about her. Her only goal at the moment was to help him move past his resentment toward his father. But she couldn't quite forget those few moments the night before when things had seemed...different between them. And she couldn't forget the way he'd looked when she told him all the things he hadn't known about his father's past. Like a hurt little kid who was just trying to make sense of things and couldn't.

Let me help you make sense of it
, Gracie silently bid him.
Of your father and of me. And let me try to make sense of you, too.
Because somehow, it was beginning to feel just as important for her and Harrison to understand each other as it was for them to understand Harry.

Harrison hesitated again. Long enough this time that Gracie feared he would decline once and for all. Finally, reluctantly, he told her, “Okay. I'll go.”

She expelled a breath she hadn't been aware of holding. “Great. How long will it take you to pack?”

Seven

G
racie couldn't have ordered a better day for a baseball game. June was the kindest of the summer months in the Ohio Valley, the skies blue and perfect and the breezes warm and playful. The park where Harry's Little League team, the Woodhaven Rockets, played had four baseball diamonds and every one of them was filled. She and Harrison had arrived early enough to find a bleacher seat in the shade, up on the very top bench, where they could see all the action. She'd instructed him to wear the team colors, so he'd complied with gray cargo shorts and a pale blue polo that made his blue, blue eyes even bluer. She'd opted for white capris and a powder-blue sleeveless shirt for herself.

They'd arrived in Cincinnati the evening before, late enough that there hadn't been time to do much more than say good-night and turn in. Harrison had wanted to have lunch before the game today, but Gracie told him that until she presented the league with a check from Harry's estate, concessions were where they made most of their money for uniforms and equipment, so the least she and Harrison could do was plunk down a few bucks for a couple of hot dogs and sodas. Not to mention if Dylan Mendelson was still on the team, there might be some of his mom's red velvet cupcakes.

The Rockets were leading in the seventh inning four to zip, their pitcher barreling ball after ball over home plate without a single crack of the bat. If this kept up, it was going to be a no-hitter.

“Way to go, Roxanne!” Gracie shouted to the pitcher at the end of the inning as the teams were switching places. “Keep it up, girlfriend!”

When she sat back down, Harrison said, “That's a
girl
pitching?”

“Damn straight. Don't sound so surprised. Girls are great ballplayers.”

“No, it's not that. It's that she must not have been on the team when my father coached it.”

“Your father was the first one to recognize what a good arm she has. Making her the Rockets' pitcher was one of the last things he did before he died.” She brightened. “Now there's a legacy for you. Thanks to Harry, Roxanne Bailey might be the first woman to play in the Majors.”

Judging by his expression, Harrison was doubtful. Or maybe it was his father's actions he was doubting.

“What?” she asked.

He hesitated, as if he were looking for the right words. “My father never...cared much...for women.” He seemed to realize Gracie was about to object, so he held up a hand and hurried on. “Oh, he liked women. A lot. My mother would tell you he liked them too much. But he only hired them for clerical positions and never promoted any to executive. He just didn't think women could do anything more than be pretty and type.”

“Wow,” Gracie said. “That is so
not
the Harry I knew. He put up with a lot of crap from some of the dads for making Roxanne the pitcher, but he didn't back down. And I never saw him speak to a woman any differently than he spoke to a man.”

Harrison looked out at the field, but his expression suggested he was seeing something other than a bunch of kids playing baseball.

“Gracie?” a woman called out from behind the bleachers. “Gracie Sumner, is that you?”

She turned to see Sarah Denham, the mother of the Rockets' catcher, standing below them. She, too, was dressed in the team colors, a Rockets ball cap perched backward on her head, hot dogs in each hand.

“Hi, Sarah!” Gracie greeted her, happy to see a familiar face.

“I thought that was you,” Sarah said. With a smile, she added, “It's strange to see you without Harry. What are you doing back in town?”

At the mention of Harry's name, Harrison turned around, too, clearly interested in meeting someone else who knew his father in this world. So Gracie introduced the two of them.

“I am so sorry for your loss,” Sarah told him. “Your father was one of the nicest men I ever met. He was so great with these kids.”

Harrison was clearly surprised by the statement, in spite of Gracie having already told him the same thing.

Sarah continued with a smile, “And his jokes! He kept these kids in stitches.”

“My father told jokes?” Harrison asked, startled.

“Oh, my gosh, yes,” Sarah said. “What did one mushroom say to the other mushroom?”

Harrison smiled. “I don't know.”

Sarah smiled back. “You're a fun guy. Get it? Fungi?”

Harrison groaned. “That's a terrible joke.”

“I know,” Sarah agreed with a laugh. “They were all like that. The kids loved them.” She turned to Gracie. “So where are you living now?”

Gracie's back went up almost literally at the question. Her own past in Cincinnati was the last thing she wanted to revisit, especially in front of Harrison. “Seattle,” she said, hoping Sarah left it at that.

But of course, she didn't. “So far away? I mean, I knew things with Devon got bad—”

At this, Harrison snapped his attention to Gracie.

“—but I didn't know you went all the way across the country,” Sarah said.

“That's all in the past,” Gracie said. Then she rushed to change the subject. “Hey, did Trudy bring any of her red velvet cupcakes?”

“She did,” Sarah said. “But they're going fast.”

The perfect excuse to escape. “You want a cupcake?” she asked Harrison as she stood. “My treat. I'll be right back.”

Before he could reply, she was trundling down the bleachers toward the concession stand. And just as she tried to do whenever Devon Braun intruded into her life, she didn't look back once.

* * *

Gracie hadn't visited the self-storage unit with Harry's things since snapping on the padlock two years ago, so she braced herself for the discovery that everything might be a little musty. And dusty. And rusty. Fortunately, both she and Harrison were dressed for such a development: he in a pair of khaki cargo shorts and a black, V-neck T-shirt, she in a pair of baggy plaid shorts and an even baggier white T-shirt. Each was armed with a box cutter, and they'd brought additional boxes in which to pack anything Harrison might want to ship back to New York right away.

She had deliberately saved the storage shed for the last day of their trip, because it held what was left of the heart and soul of Harry Sagalowsky. After yesterday's game, they'd visited the shelter and hospital where Harry had volunteered, and where many of the people remembered both him and Gracie. Then she and Harrison had had dinner at her and Harry's favorite hole-in-the-wall barbecue joint, where the owner-chef had come out to regale Harrison with stories about how he and Harry had always argued good-naturedly over whose sauce was best. The chef had finally admitted—but only to the two of them—that there was something about Harry's chili he had never been able to duplicate and he was pretty sure it had something to do with the cumin.

Gracie and Harrison had ended the day by retiring to his hotel room with a rented DVD of
The African Queen
, Harry's favorite movie, something that also surprised Harrison because, even though it was kind of a war movie, it had a romance in it, too, and his father had thought the idea of romance was foolish.

Gracie wondered if Harrison thought that, too. For the most part, he didn't seem any more of a romantic than he claimed his father had been, but there had been times over the last couple of days—and times when they'd been in New York, too—when she'd caught him looking at her in a way that was... Or else he'd said something in a way that was... Or the air around the two of them had just seemed kind of... Well. Gracie wasn't sure if the right word for those occasions was
romantic
. Then again, she wasn't sure it was the wrong word, either. Because something about those occasions, especially over the last couple of days, sure had felt kind of...romantic.

That wasn't likely to change tonight, since the last leg of their tour would be at the Moondrop Ballroom, the epitome of old Hollywood romance, where Gracie would try to teach Harrison to dance the way Harry had once taught her.

If, after all that, Harrison still saw his father as a coldhearted, cold-blooded cold fish who hadn't cared about anything but money, then he was a lost cause, and Gracie didn't know what to do. Of course, she still hadn't accepted the coldhearted, cold-blooded cold fish who'd only cared about money that Harrison kept insisting Harry was, so maybe she was a lost cause, too. At least they could be lost causes together.

She had to wrestle with the storage-unit padlock for a few seconds until it finally gave. Then it took both Harrison and her to haul up the big, garage-type metal door. It groaned like a dying mammoth when they did, and the storage unit belched an odor that was a mix of old books, old socks and old man. Gracie gazed into the belly of the beast, a cinderblock room about twenty feet wide by twenty feet deep, wondering where to begin.

“I probably should have tried to find Harry's family as soon as he passed away,” she said when she realized how musty, dusty and rusty everything was. “But I truly didn't think he had anyone.”

“Was no one at his funeral?” Harrison asked, the question touched with something almost melancholy.

Maybe there was part of him that still had the capacity to forgive, and even love, his father—or, at least, think fondly of him from time to time. Although he might never fully grieve the loss of a man he hadn't seen in half a lifetime, and hadn't really ever known, maybe he was beginning to entertain the possibility that his father wasn't the villain he'd thought him to be.

In spite of his somber tone, Gracie couldn't help but smile at the question. “There were lots of people. His visitation was three days long so that everyone could have a chance to pay their respects. Even after that, there were still hundreds of people who attended the funeral.”

“But no one from his family,” Harrison said, still sounding pensive. “Not from any of his families.”

“In a way, he had family here,” Gracie said, hoping Harrison wouldn't take it the wrong way. She didn't want to diminish his and Vivian's ties to Harry. She just wanted to comfort him, and make him realize his father hadn't been without loved ones when he died.

But Harrison didn't seem to take offense. “That's not the same,” he said. “Someone from his real family should have been here.”

Gracie extended a hand to touch him, waffled for a moment and then placed her palm gently against his shoulder. Harrison looked over at the contact, his gaze falling first on her hand, then on her face, but he didn't move away.

“Your father touched a lot of lives, Harrison,” she said softly. “He made a difference for a lot of people when he lived here. And he'll make a difference for a lot more when his fortune is given away.”

Harrison inhaled a breath and released it. Then, not even seeming to realize he was doing it, he covered her hand with his. “I just don't understand why he felt like he could only do that for strangers.”

Gracie didn't understand that, either. There had to be a reason. But they might never know what it was. She looked into the storage unit again. Maybe they could start looking for an explanation here.

She had taken care to organize Harry's things when she stowed them. Furniture on the left, boxes on the right, clothes and miscellaneous in the middle, with two narrow aisles separating everything to enable access. Nearly half the boxes held books and his record collection, mostly jazz and big band. Many of the rest held his accumulation of Cincinnati Reds memorabilia. It was the boxes in front, though, that Gracie wanted to open first. They were the ones that contained Harry's personal items, including the photographs Harrison needed to see.

She strode to the one closest to the front, pressed her blade to the packing tape seam and slid it along the length of the box with a quick
z-z-zip
. Harrison took a few steps into the unit as Gracie finished opening the box and removed a couple of layers of cedar-scented tissue paper. The first thing she encountered underneath was a beer stein from the last Oktoberfest she and Harry attended. She smiled as she lifted it up for Harrison to see.

“Zee?”
she said, affecting her best German accent—which, okay, wasn't all that good. “Your papa luffed hiss
Schwarzbier
und
leberwurst
. He
vas
a real
Feinschmecker
.”

Harrison chuckled at that. He even took a few more steps toward her. But all he said was, “Um,
Feinschmecker
?”

“Ja,”
Gracie replied. Then, returning to her normal voice, she said, “I wanted to slap him the first time he called me that. German isn't the easiest language to figure out.”

“So what's a
Feinschmecker
?”

“A connoisseur of fine foods. Okay, maybe beer and liverwurst don't qualify as such. Suffice to say he enjoyed good
Hausmannskost
.”

Harrison nodded. And came a few steps closer. “I never knew my father spoke German.”

“Very well, in fact,” she said. “He grew up in one of the German neighborhoods here.”

Gracie held out the beer stein for Harrison to take. It was stoneware and decorated with a dachshund wearing lederhosen and playing an accordion. Gingerly, he closed the last few feet between them and took it from her.

“Harry was good at the chicken dance, too,” she said as she released it.

“No,” Harrison said adamantly, finally meeting her gaze. He set the beer stein on top of another still-closed box. “You will never convince me my father did the chicken dance.”

Gracie picked through some of the other items in the box. “If you're ever in Seattle, look me up. I have photographic evidence. Oh, look!” she cried as she picked up something else, cutting Harrison off from commenting on the “if you're ever in Seattle” thing. What was she thinking to say something like that? “I gave Harry this for Christmas!”