A Ceo In Her Stocking

Hank looked at Clara for approval.

“Go ahead, sweetie,” she told him. “I’d like to see your dad’s room, too.” To Francesca, she added, “If you don’t mind me tagging along.”

“Of course not. Maybe your uncle Grant will come with us. You can, too, Mr. Fiver, if you want to.”

Clara turned to the two men, expecting them to excuse themselves due to other obligations, and was surprised to find Grant looking not at his mother, but at her, intently enough that she got the impression he’d been looking at her for some time. A ball of heat somersaulted through her midsection a few times and came to rest in a place just below her heart. Because the way he was looking at her was the same way Brent had looked at her, whenever he was thinking about...well... Whenever he was feeling frisky. And, wow, suddenly, out of nowhere, Clara started feeling a little frisky, too.

He isn’t Brent, she reminded herself firmly. He might look like Brent and sound like Brent and move like Brent, but Grant Dunbarton wasn’t the sexy charmer who had taught her to laugh and play and frolic one summer, then given her the greatest gift she would ever receive, in the form of his son. As nice as Grant was trying to be, he would never, could never, be his brother. Of that, Clara was certain. That didn’t make him bad. It just made him someone else. Someone who should not—would not, could not, she told herself sternly—make her feel frisky. Even a little.

“Thank you, Mrs. Dunbarton,” Gus said, pulling her thoughts back to the matter at hand—and not a moment too soon. “But I should get back to the office. Unless Clara needs me for anything else.”

She shook her head. He’d only come this morning to be a buffer between her and the Dunbartons, should one be necessary. But Francesca was being so warm and welcoming, and Grant was trying to be warm and welcoming, so... No, Grant was warm and welcoming, she told herself. He just wasn’t quite as good at it as his mother was. As his brother had been, once upon a time.

“Go ahead, Gus, it’s fine,” she said. “Thank you for everything you’ve done. We appreciate it.”

He said his goodbyes and told the Dunbartons he could find his own way out. Clara waited for Grant to leave, too, but he only continued to gaze at her in that heated way, looking as if he didn’t intend to go anywhere. Not unless she was going with him.

He’s not Brent, she told herself again. He’s not.

Now if only she could convince herself he wouldn’t be the temptation his brother had been, too.

Two (#ulink_a4e40372-87bd-55f1-8abd-a52bee326a50)

Unfortunately, as Francesca led them back the way they’d all come, Grant matched his stride to Clara’s and stayed close enough that she could fairly feel the heat of his body mingling with hers and inhale the faint scent of him—something spicy and masculine and nothing like Brent’s, which had been a mix of sun and surf and salt. It was just too bad that Grant’s fragrance was a lot more appealing. Thankfully, their walk didn’t last long. Francesca turned almost immediately down a hallway that ended in a spiral staircase, something that enchanted Hank, because he’d never seen anything like it.

“Are we going up or down?” he asked Francesca.

“Down,” she said. “But it can be kind of tricky, and sometimes I get a little wonky. Do you mind if I hold your hand, so I don’t fall?”

Hank took his grandmother’s hand and promised to keep her safe.

“Oh, thank you, Hank,” she gushed. “I can already tell you’re going to be a big help around here.”

Something in the comment and Francesca’s tone gave Clara pause. Both sounded just a tad...proprietary. As if Francesca planned for Hank to be around here for a long time. She told herself Francesca was just trying to make things more comfortable between herself and her grandson. And, anyway, what grandmother wouldn’t want her grandson to be around? Clara had made clear through Gus that she and Hank would only be in New York for a week. Everything was fine.

Francesca halted by the first closed door Clara had seen in the penthouse. When the other woman curled her fingers over the doorknob, Clara felt like Dorothy Gale, about to go from her black-and-white farmhouse to a Technicolor Oz. And what lay on the other side was nearly as fantastic: a bedroom that was easily five times the size of Hank’s at home and crammed with boyish things. Brent must have been clinging to his childhood with both fists when he left home.

One entire wall was nothing but shelves, half of them blanketed by books, the other half teeming with toys. From the ceiling in one corner hung a papier-mâché solar system, low enough that a child could reach up and, with a flick of his wrist, send its planets into orbit. On the far side of the room was a triple bunk bed with both a ladder and a sliding board for access. The walls were covered with maps of far-off places and photos of exotic beasts. The room was full of everything a little boy’s heart could ever desire—building blocks, musical instruments, game systems, stuffed animals... They might as well have been in a toy store, so limitless were the choices.

Hank seemed to think so, too. Although he entered behind Francesca, the minute he got a glimpse of his surroundings, he bulleted past his grandmother in a blur. He spun around in a circle in the middle of the room, taking it all in, then fairly dove headfirst into a bin full of Legos. It could be days before he came up for air.

Clara thought of his bedroom back home. She’d bought his bed at a yard sale and repainted it herself. His toy box was a plastic storage bin—not even the biggest size available—and she’d built his shelves out of wood salvaged from a demolished pier. At home, he had enough train track to make a figure eight. Here, he could re-create the Trans-Siberian Railway. At home, he had enough stuffed animals for Old McDonald’s farm. Here, he could repopulate the Earth after the Great Flood.

This was not going to end well when Clara told him it was time for the two of them to go home.

Francesca knelt beside the Lego bin with Hank, plucking out bricks and snapping them together with a joy that gave his own a run for its money. She must have done the same thing with Brent when he was Hank’s age. Clara’s heart hurt seeing them. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to lose a child. This meeting with her grandson had to be both comforting and heartbreaking for Francesca.

Clara sensed more than saw Grant move to stand beside her. He, too, was watching the scene play out, but Clara could no more guess his thoughts than she could stop the sun from rising. She couldn’t imagine losing a sibling, either. Although she’d had “brothers” and “sisters” in a couple of her foster homes, sometimes sharing a situation with them for years, all of them had maintained a distance. No one ever knew when they would be jerked up and moved someplace new, so it was always best not to get too attached to anyone. And none of the kids ever shared the same memories or histories as the others. Everyone came with his or her own—and left with them, too. Sometimes that was all a kid left with. There was certainly never anything like this.

“I can’t believe y’all still have this much of Brent’s stuff,” she said.

Grant shrugged. “My mother was always sure Brent would eventually get tired of his wandering and come home, and she didn’t want to get rid of anything he might want to keep. And Brent never threw away anything. Well, no material possessions, anyway,” he hastened to clarify.

When his gaze met hers, Clara knew he was backtracking in an effort to not hurt her feelings by suggesting that Brent had thrown away whatever he shared with her.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Brent and I were never... I mean, there was nothing between us that was...” She stopped, gathered her thoughts and tried again, lowering her voice this time so that Francesca and Hank couldn’t hear. “Neither of us wanted or expected anything permanent. There was an immediate attraction, and we could talk for hours, right off the bat, about anything and everything—as long as it didn’t go any deeper than the surface. It was one of those things that happens sometimes, where two people just feel comfortable around each other as soon as they meet. Like they were old friends in a previous life or something, picking up where they left off, you know?”

He studied her in silence for a moment, and then shook his head. “No. Nothing like that has ever happened to me.”

Clara sobered. “Oh. Well. It was like that for me and Brent. He really was a wonderful person when I knew him. We had a lot of fun together for a few weeks. But neither of us wanted anything more than that. It could have just as easily been me who walked away. He just finished first.”

She tried not to chuckle at her wording. Brent finishing first was pretty much par for the course. Not just with their time together, but with their meals together. With their walks together. With their sex together. Yes, that part had been great, too. But he was never able to quite...satisfy her.

“He was always in a hurry,” Grant said.

Clara smiled. “Yes, he was.”

“He was like a hummingbird when we were kids. The minute his feet hit the ground in the morning, he was unstoppable. There were so many things he wanted to do. Every day, there were so many things. And he never knew where to start, so he just...went. Everywhere. Constantly.”

Brent hadn’t been as hyper as that when she met him, but he’d never quite seemed satisfied with anything, either, as if there was something else, something better, somewhere else. He told her he left home at eighteen and had been tracing the coastline of North America ever since, starting in Nome, Alaska, heading south, and then skipping from San Diego to Corpus Christi for the Gulf of Mexico. When she asked him where he would go next, he said he figured he’d keep going as far north into Newfoundland as he could, and then hop over to Scandinavia and start following Europe’s shoreline. Then he’d do Asia’s. Then Africa’s. Then South America’s. Then, who knew?

“He was still restless when I met him,” she told Grant. “But I always thought his restlessness was like mine.”

He eyed her curiously, and her heart very nearly stopped beating. His expression was again identical to Brent’s, whenever he puzzled over something. She wondered if she would ever be able to look at Grant and not see Hank’s father. Then again, it wasn’t as if she’d be looking at him forever. Yes, she was sure to see Grant again after she and Hank left New York, since Francesca would want regular visits, but Clara’s interaction with him would be minimal. Still, she hoped at some point her heart would stop skipping a beat whenever she looked at him. Odd, since she couldn’t remember it skipping this much when she looked at Brent.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I thought his restlessness was because he came from the same kind of situation I did, where he never stayed in one place for very long so couldn’t get rooted for any length of time. Like maybe he was an army brat or his parents were itinerant farmers or something.”

Now Grant’s expression turned to one of surprise. And damned if it didn’t look just like Brent’s would have, too. “He never told you anything about his past? About his family?”

“Neither of us talked about anything like that. There was some unspoken rule where we both recognized that it was off-limits to talk about anything too personal. I knew why I didn’t want to talk about my past. I figured his reasons must have been the same.”

“Because of the foster homes and children’s institutions,” Grant said. “That couldn’t have been a happy experience for you.”

She told herself she shouldn’t be surprised he knew about that, too. Of course his background check would have been thorough. In spite of that, she said, “You really did do your homework.”

He said nothing, only treated her to an unapologetic shrug.

“What else did you find out?” she asked.

He started to say something, then hesitated. But somehow, the look on his face told Clara he knew a lot more than she wanted him to know. And since he had the finances and, doubtless, contacts to uncover everything he could, he’d probably uncovered the one thing she’d never told anyone about herself.

Still keeping her voice low, so that Francesca and Hank couldn’t hear, she asked, “You know where I was born, don’t you? And the circumstances of why I was born in that particular location.”

He nodded. “Yeah. I do.”

Which meant he knew she was born in the Bibb County jail to a nineteen-year-old girl who was awaiting trial for her involvement in an armed robbery she had committed with Clara’s father. He might even know—