Retribution (14 page)

As she approached with Jagger, the lead installer made a motion with his hand, and the hand trucks carrying the massive rolls halted. He made another motion, and his crew removed a roll and unwrapped it carefully, laying a good twenty feet out on the pristine sidewalk for her to see. Though she had already viewed the product at the factory, the sight of the carpetlike wall covering took her breath.

"Oh, the dye lots are spectacular. Look at that color!"

Grant Kensington, slightly behind her, gave a low whistle of appreciation.

The foreman, Harry Ramirez, let a swift look of unadulterated pleasure pass over his seamed face before signing with his hand again, his crewmen scrambling to rewrap the roll and get it back on the trucks. With one eye watching the delivery, the foreman unrolled his diagram of the office suites, with her installation instructions, and ran his blunt finger over the areas. "This right, ma'am?"

"You've got it down pat." She smiled at the foreman.

"It's always a pleasure workin' with you, ma'am." Two twists of his wrists and he had the plans re-rolled and tucked in his back pocket. "We should be out of here by three."

She had calculated two days for installation, but it looked like WindRiver had sent a crew of triple the size she'd contracted for. That meant that work was slow at the mill itself, and though she would not have to pay for the extra manpower, it was temporarily available. She smiled at Ramirez. "Tell Papa George that I should have another nice run to order soon."

Ramirez nodded, already swinging about, hands and arms in motion, setting up the delivery and installation crews.

Grant tossed back the last of his coffee as he held the lobby door open for her, crunched his cup and made a basketball crosscourt toss into the wastebasket by the lobby reception area. "Charlie, you know you're paying for those extra men."

"No, I'm not."

"Of course you are. It's built into the cost. There's no such thing as a free lunch, anywhere, anyway." Kensington shrugged into his Armani jacket. "You need to work with vendors who can give you volume prices."

"Grant, I don't order enough to get that kind of price break, and you know that everything I do is one of a kind. They have to program their looms, everything, just for me. WindRiver is not only willing to do it, they do it beautifully. Their textiles are quality, commercial grade, and they deliver when they say they 're going to. What more can I ask?"

"An extra ten percent discount per roll," he returned, as he put his wide palm over the elevator sensor.

"Are you unhappy with my pricing?"

"Of course not. I don't see how you stay in business."

Charlie smiled slightly. "And if you're happy, and I'm happy, why change things? If it ain't broke, don't fix it." She sipped down the last of her coffee, letting him take the empty from her hand, watching as he crunched it and gave it another long toss across the lobby, unerringly hitting the wastebasket and dropping in.

Shaking his head, he said, "Wasted potential," checking his watch as the elevator doors shut them in. "I've got calls until your mother gets here at eleven. We should be ready for lunch by eleven-thirty."

"Fine. I should be free by then. Harry's men know what they're doing, I don't have to watch them like a hawk."

"Good! I want Mary to see the office space I'm holding for you." Grant's mouth quirked slightly, and Charlie knew she'd been sandbagged. With her mother on his side, his persuasive power more than doubled.

"Dirty dog," she said.

Grant grinned even as Jagger threw his head up and wriggled slightly at the humor in her voice.

"Not you!" She ran her hand across the golden's head. He sighed and leaned against her, content. She looked up to find Grant watching her seriously and she found herself blushing. He flexed his shoulders and eased his neck in his business collar, looking away nonchalantly.

It was that game, she thought, of looking at one another, trying to determine if there were possibilities, if there should be possibilities, if there was an interest, a bond, a commonality. In their case, it was business, in most cases, sexual attraction. She'd spent a fair amount of time with Grant Kensington over the last six months, but he had been fairly aloof until recently. And, although the knowledge he was looking at her differently now pleased her because of Kensington's financial acumen, the pleasure was not nearly as intense as the personal attraction she had felt with John Rubidoux at the art show and when he'd brought Jagger back. It was one thing to have her career validated, and another to have her— would she call it soul?— validated.

Mere moments could hardly compare to weeks, and yet they did.

Charlie found herself clearing her throat as the elevator gently bumped to a stop on the main corporate floor.

The bare walls of the office building floor stared at her. She saw that they had been prepared for the installation of the textiles she had designed. Grant gave her a pleased look. He ushered her out of the elevator with a wave of his hand. He let Jagger take her forward into the corridor.

The dog bounded ahead, pulling against his harness, almost dragging her into the open hallway. Grant quickly grabbed her elbow and righted her.

"This will make the building come alive," Grant said.

"Yes," she answered. "That is the intention of the design." Charlie smiled slightly, and looked at Grant. "But then," she added, "you knew that. That's why you hired me."

Jagger barked sharply as the freight elevator at the other end of the corridor began to open. The installing crew came out with a clatter of ladders and tools, followed by the massive hand truck with the wall covering. As soon as the dog saw Ramirez, he settled down, being very familiar with the foreman.

Charlie dropped her hand to the dog's head and patted him gently in reward. Even though Grant knew she would not be parted from her dog, she did not trust that he would be accepted in the office building if she moved her business there. Jagger would not be happy confined in a dog run. She had no intention of letting him pine away behind a chainlink fence without company or the chance to do work that he so clearly loved to do.

Kensington looked at her and said, "I think that we should go upstairs and see what I have put aside for your office and let the crew work in peace."

Charlie gave the command for Jagger to jog along beside her as they returned to the elevator to go upstairs. Grant leaned casually against the far wall of the enclosure, his face carefully neutral. Charlie did not know what he was thinking and that bothered her slightly. However, he knew that her mother would be at the offices soon to go over the charity functions Mary had planned with Grant and the elder Kensington. The dog shivered a little as the elevator lurched back into motion. No matter how much Charlie worked with Jagger, he seemed unable to accept elevator movement. She understood and did not scold him, not liking to be shut in close spaces herself.

As the doors opened once more, they stepped out onto the top floor of the building. It was not an extremely tall building, for Grant had planned expansion later in wings rather than height. He felt that this design was better suited to the oceanside community. Charlie thought that he was more than right, that this was part of Grant's genius: to determine what was right, what was beautiful, and what was efficient. The Kensington building would be a stunning showplace without the need for height to make it stand out.

As she looked along the flight of the building, Charlie realized just what an elaborate floor space had been saved for her. The bank of windows faced the ocean. She could see the blue-and-gray waves as they crashed onto the beach far below. Jagger looked toward the windows as if he could also see the Laguna Beach cove below, his tail flagging. Grant smiled widely.

Her mother came out of a doorway cut into the crude open space. She wore blue again, as she frequently did, an elegant pantsuit which her body filled well and made look much less pretentious. Mary beamed.

"Grant, this is incredible. Surely you don't mean all this space for Charlie."

"I do. This entire wing, if she needs it." He braced a shoulder against the white wall— a vast, empty space which was so much like a canvas awaiting creation.

Jagger whined a bit and bumped her knee. Charlie blinked and glanced down at the dog, her thought chain broken, feeling a little lost… what had she been thinking? And what bothered Jagger?

Mary turned around and took in the ocean vista. "The view is breathtaking. The building brings it all in, yet from the highway below, this sets into the hillside very naturally. I think you have more than a bit of Frank Lloyd Wright in you, Grant."

The builder-architect chuckled, but his eyes were on Charlie. She could feel them as she began to pass across the expanse, mentally measuring the current room in her house to the footage here. It was like comparing her bedroom closet to the Grand Canyon, a drop in the bucket. Of course, the open space would not stay open, there would be additional interior walls added. There would be a showroom, an office, filing and storage area, workroom. The potential for having her own loom set up crossed her mind. Charlie stopped her careful heel-toe walk to look up and see the one permanent wall looming before her.

It was as though she were the miniature and the wall a normal sized canvas. Or perhaps she was not the artist at all, but the brush, soft and supple, ready to deal out color and structure at the whim of the holder….

From a very long way away, she could hear Jagger whine again, but it did not seem significant, barely audible, unimportant. Something rubbed at her knee again, she scarcely felt the touch.

Something else tremored through her being, a great, deep, dark quake rumbling toward her, vibrations so low on the sound register she felt more than heard it, knew it was shivering toward her, even the very marrow in her bones pulsed to its drumming voice. She stared at the empty wall, her face small and insignificant, the area not flat but concave, like a maelstrom getting ready to inhale her, a canvas insisting, demanding that she fill it, an urge more important than even breath itself.

* * *

Mary watched her daughter with no small pride and pleasure… and pain. It was still difficult to see the slight halt in her step, the tiny sway in her walk, the unconscious dependence she had on the large dog to steady herself, the nearly imperceptible weakness of her right arm and hand. She could remember the time— it seemed like yesterday— when that had not been the case, when Charlie had been a normal, healthy young girl, growing in leaps and bounds.

Charlie had never walked when she could run, had never known a moment of stillness except when perched on a stool in front of her easel, and then her young face had transformed into something beyond childhood and even adulthood. As Charlie stood now, looking at the walls and office spacing, not seeing what was there but what might be there someday, constructing it all in her head, in that wide and explored territory of the mind and imagination. Mary crossed her arms over her chest lightly, hugging herself, pleased that Charlie seemed to be so intensely drawn in.

Grant Kensington had been leaning against the opposite wall; now he drew near, frowning.

Voice pitched for Mary's ears only, he said, "She doesn't like it."

"Oh, no, quite the opposite. She's thinking. She's just sketching through the possibilities."

He rumbled in satisfaction. Then, Grant added, "Good. I'd like to have her here."

Mary looked at him and saw what she'd hoped to see, that Kensington's interest was not totally business and, though shrewd, self-serving. She smiled encouragingly. "Charlie is a wonderful girl, and I'm not saying that because she's my daughter."

Jagger whined slightly. Mary ignored the dog, continuing to smile. "She's made me very proud." She wondered why Kensington did not respond and felt for a moment like she was picking at a scab, trying to elicit a reluctant response.

"She's very talented, even now."

"Without the painting, you mean?"

Grant flushed slightly as if he had compromised himself and nodded brusquely.

Mary tilted her head. "I agree. Very, very talented. I think she enjoys her life more now than… before."

He lifted an eyebrow.

She chose her next words carefully. "She never liked the controversy over her age, her style, her training or lack of it, the speculation that her paintings were critiqued because of who she was rather than what they were. The ones who cheered her artwork embarrassed her and the ones who criticized it hurt her. She was, I think, a little relieved after."

Jagger complained again, louder, sharper, the noise cutting into her. Mary pivoted back around to see what bothered the animal.

The golden retriever stood against Charlie's knee as if bracing her, his ears pricked, his tail down and steady, unhappy, his jaws agape as if he might be ready to pant in distress.

A coldness shot through Mary. "What is it, Charlie?" she asked sharply.

* * *

She heard her mother's voice as if from very far away or perhaps even under water, blurred and bubbling so much that she could not make sense of the words, even if she tried to focus, which she gave up, because other words filled her hearing and color flooded her eyes….

Two male faces, up against the wall. Both flushed, sweating, their expressions twisting with intensity. For a half second, Charlie felt embarrassment as though she had caught them in a sexual act, for one of them was Grant Kensington, but then she caught the emotions which steamed off them and it was hatred, pure and jolting, and she realized they were fighting, struggling, and one had pinned the other against the wall she stared at dumbly. An argument of words, escalating into action, the air shimmered with the heat of the fight and she could almost hear what they were saying, almost paint the impact of their actions. She blinked, losing the vision but not before she finally recognized the second man's face, Michaeljohn, Grant's partner— and she thought then that the sexual overtones she had perceived and then dismissed were not that incorrect after all… and she realized that this space had been kept aside, planned, for Grant's partner Michaeljohn, and the fight had destroyed those plans. Grant's invitation to her was meant only to fill a gaping void in his life, in his building. Her vision blurred as violence erupted, two massive men wrestling with one another, crimson drops falling like sweat from Michael-John's face, their throats erupting with vile, angry shouts of recrimination, fists swinging….