If the Slipper Fits, page 22
Connor’s face was ashen. “It wasn’t like that? Are you trying to tell me that you actually—that you cared about my father? That you weren’t just after the money?”
“No!” She couldn’t have been more shocked if he’d hit her. “Connor, I was in love with you. I still…” She stopped, and swallowed over the lump in her throat. “Your father just—he just—it was nothing. Not really.”
He laughed skeptically. “It was nothing? A whim? An impulse? A bad joke?”
She heard how it sounded. Blood rushed to her face. “I mean, it wasn’t an affair. It wasn’t even—nothing happened. It was like an accident. God, I can’t even believe I’m having to tell you this. I never wanted to. I knew how hurt you’d be. But not because there was anything to it. Just because…because of the misunderstanding.”
His expression was skeptical.
“He was your father, Connor. I didn’t want to have to tell you what he’d done, the kind of thing he was capable of.”
“So you’re saying you kept it from me to spare me?”
“Yes! You were trying so hard with him, to get closer, to be the son he wanted. How could I tell you—this? How could I tell you that he wasn’t the father you wanted?”
“You couldn’t have. Not without also telling me you weren’t the girl I wanted.”
She closed her eyes briefly. “It wasn’t me. I swear to you. How could you think I’d do anything with him? He came after me one day. He caught me alone in the conservatory and—and just—latched on.”
She looked away, feeling the same panic she’d felt the day it had happened. She hadn’t known what to do. Mr. Emory had been her employer. He’d been her boyfriend’s father. He’d been belligerent and stubborn and a little bit drunk, she remembered, and she’d been only nineteen years old. She hadn’t known she could be indignant, hadn’t known she could throw him off, hit him if she had to, and he wouldn’t be able to fire her or whatever else it was she’d feared he’d do.
She’d known his reputation, just like the rest of the girls on the staff, so she should have been prepared for something like that to happen. She should have known what to do.
But she had been his son’s girlfriend. She’d thought she was protected, immune. She’d been astonished when he’d approached her.
And stupid.
She’d frozen. Like the proverbial deer in the headlights. She’d stood stock-still for several minutes as he’d kissed her and told her how beautiful he thought she was. She’d been repulsed, but she’d thought that if she did nothing to encourage him he would stop. She’d told herself she should push him away, but it had seemed—rude somehow, and disrespectful.
She flushed even now to think how stupid she’d been.
Then he’d tried to open her shirt, and her reflexes had taken over. She’d shoved him away. His hand had caught in her blouse, and the shirt had ripped. She’d been so horrified and ashamed that she’d fled from the room, near tears, and had run smack into Patsy.
Anne regulated her breathing, wondering just what and how much to tell Connor about that day. The man had died not six months ago. How could she tell Connor what a despicable sort he’d been? Even at the time she hadn’t wanted to ruin Connor’s relationship with his father. His stepmother showed so much favoritism to her own children, Connor’s half sisters, Astrid and Deborah, that Anne hadn’t wanted to destroy the respect he’d had for his father.
Besides, he’d needed his father’s love, she’d thought then. And if she’d told Connor what had happened, he’d have confronted his father, perhaps even fought with him. Nothing good would have come of that.
Just as nothing good would come of sullying the man’s memory any further now.
“Connor, it was a misunderstanding. He, I guess, didn’t know I wasn’t…interested. I’m sure it was my fault.” The words tasted bad on her tongue. She had a hard time getting them out, but she had to tell him something. And she couldn’t tell him that his father—an otherwise distantly nice man—was a frighteningly persistent lecher when he’d been drinking.
“Patsy said she watched you for some time before coming in.” Connor’s gaze was steady. She could feel it upon her like a weight. “She said you weren’t resisting. I asked, Anne.”
She raised her eyes to his, aware that she was crimson with shame. “And are you asking me now, Connor? Are you asking me for the truth, or are you simply telling me what you already believe?”
“I think I can tell by your face that the truth I’ve been told isn’t so very different from yours.”
She laughed, a strangled sound. It was true, in a twisted way. “So your mind is made up. You believe her story and not mine. Who’d have thought you’d end up trusting Patsy over me, huh, Connor? How we would have laughed at that idea back when we were together.”
Connor shook his head. “I didn’t believe her, Anne. I believed the check. When I saw that, her story got a great deal more…credible.”
Anne’s glare shot back to his face. “What check?”
His expression turned angry, and he took a step toward her. “The fifty-thousand-dollar check, Anne. Or is it just one of so many that you can’t remember it?”
She instinctively drew back. “I don’t have any fifty-thousand-dollar check!”
He nearly rolled his eyes. “No, not now you don’t. Patsy’s got it, and believe me, she’s keeping it.”
“Connor—”
“Do you think I’m an idiot?” One hand clenched into a fist at his side, the other, white-knuckled, held the strap of his bag. “It was made out to you. Endorsed, cancelled—you took the money, Anne. You cashed the goddamn check. Why don’t you just admit it?”
Anne’s heart pumped frantically, fury and fear surging through her veins like fire. “Connor, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t take any money. Are you saying I stole from you?”
“I never said you stole anything,” he said impatiently. “In fact, it sounds to me as if you earned it.”
Anne put her hands to her head. “Jesus, Connor, just tell me what the hell you’re talking about. What check?”
“The check my father gave to you as a kiss-off so you wouldn’t sue him for sexual harassment.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“You think your father gave me fifty thousand dollars?” Her voice rose an octave or two with the question. It was ludicrous. “When?”
Connor sighed. “I don’t remember. Seems like it was dated a few months after you dumped me. Eleven years ago, Anne, but I can’t believe it was so long ago you can’t remember. You seem to remember everything else pretty vividly.”
Alarm made her limbs go weak. Her mind spun wildly. It had to be something Patsy had cooked up. Something false. Something convincing.
“Connor, you have to believe me. I never took a check from your father. I never had fifty thousand dollars. For god’s sake, if I had, what do you think I did with it?”
Connor shrugged elaborately. “Oh, I don’t know. Bought a car? Paid off your house? Went to college?”
She felt breathless. All of that was true. Her life was a minefield of things like that, but none of it had been funded by Bradford Emory.
“Connor, I did those things. You obviously know I did. But I paid for the house and the car from my own salary. And college—my grandmother saved and paid for that.”
His face took on a frighteningly satisfied expression, and he stretched his hands out to his sides. “And that brings us to your grandmother.”
Anne crossed her arms in front of her stomach. Her skin felt cold to the touch. “What about my grandmother?”
“The very one whom you sent to threaten my father with a lawsuit.” He cocked his head. “Just too shy to do your own dirty work, weren’t you?”
She laughed again, a desperate, hysterical laugh. “I threatened your father? Try it the other way around, Connor. They threatened me. He and Patsy together. They said they’d tell you everything—”
“I can understand why you’d be afraid of that.”
“But it wouldn’t have been the real story. Don’t you see? Not the one I’m telling you now. Your mother—stepmother—Patsy—I’m sure she believed what she told you. But your father!” She stopped, swallowed hard, and shook her head, gritting her teeth against the awful things she could have said about him.
“I have no illusions about my father’s character. But I do know he wouldn’t attack anyone.”
“I never said he did! He just didn’t know when to stop. And I didn’t know how to stop him.” She felt tears gathering behind her eyes. “You knew me, Connor. You knew how shy I was, how…how deferential. How unassertive. Surely you can see how he might have intimidated me.”
Connor laughed once. “Sure. But there’s one thing more. The most convincing thing of all. If I know anything about you at all, Anne, it’s that you wouldn’t take money for nothing.”
Anne stood in stunned silence a moment, then started to laugh. “How flattering. Your faith in my integrity is touching, even in the face of your colossal misunderstanding of my character. Think about it, Connor. Who do you really think is lying here? And why? And if you think it’s me, then you go ahead and get on that helicopter. We obviously never knew each other at all.”
Before the angry tears could drop, she turned on her heel and left.
Anne stalked back down the garden path and slammed into the kitchen. Above the house, the helicopter whirled away into a postcard blue sky.
He’d gotten on the copter. She’d seen him in it as it had lifted over the trees.
“Have you seen Mrs. Emory?” she demanded of a wide-eyed Prin.
“She was in the sunroom, last I looked.” Prin turned fully toward her, a shrewd expression on her face. “What’s going on, Anne? This have something to do with Connor leaving?”
But Anne was too upset to talk. She gritted her teeth, held her hands up, and kept walking, up the back corridor into the front hall. She turned to look in the sunroom, walked through to the dining room, looped around to the front parlor, then the back parlor and the grand salon.
Nicola walked past the library door as Anne was coming out.
“Excuse me, Nicola,” Anne said, enunciating each word clearly for the girl. “Have you seen Mrs. Emory?”
But Nicola, wearing her headphones, didn’t hear her. She just smiled when she noticed Anne standing there and kept on walking, nodding her head in time to the tinny rhythm Anne could hear emerging from the headphones.
She took a deep breath and started up the staircase. Her heart thundered in her chest. Years ago she had made this very same trip. Up the stairs, down the long hallway, to the master suite. She’d been summoned there by Mrs. Emory. One of the maids had told Anne in a trembling voice that Mrs. Emory had demanded to see her without delay, she didn’t care what Anne was doing.
The maid had looked frightened, Anne remembered thinking. Apparently Mrs. Emory had impressed upon her that if Anne wasn’t found immediately heads would roll.
Anne had felt powerless then, as she’d knocked on the door to the master suite sitting room. She’d been certain the summons had had to do with Mr. Emory’s moral lapse in the conservatory. And it hadn’t taken a great deal of intuition to know that she was about to be blamed for it.
For a moment, Anne found herself reliving the scene that had changed the course of her life.
“Enter.” The word was issued with senatorial solemnity by Mrs. Emory.
Anne slowly opened the door.
The two of them were sitting there—Mr. and Mrs. Emory—in identical armchairs, facing the door like an angry parole board.
“Close the door behind you.” Mrs. Emory’s face was a thundercloud, radiating hostility with an ugliness that shocked Anne.
She closed the door, feeling sweat break out of every pore on her body. If she’d been unsure of what this meeting was going to be about, she would have figured it out quickly by the way Mr. Emory wouldn’t look at her.
Anne thought first of her grandmother, of how angry she would be. She’d warned Anne something like this would happen. She’d told her to be careful around the rich folks, that they took what they wanted and didn’t care who paid for it, as long as it wasn’t themselves.
But Anne had thought she’d been referring to Connor. And she’d been young, in love, and naïve enough to think her grandmother was too old to know what she was talking about.
Connor. What if he were to find out what his father had done? How would he ever look at her the same way again? His father had kissed her! How disgusting was that? How perverse. Surely he would blame her a little, just as she blamed herself. And even if he didn’t—even if she explained everything and somehow managed to believe herself that she wasn’t at least a little responsible for not heading off the situation—he would never be able to forget what had happened. Would he?
She wanted to cry when she thought of hurting him that way. He was trying so hard to get closer to his father. They’d even gone fishing last week, though Mr. Emory had shown up for the trip in pressed slacks and Italian leather loafers. There’d always been a distance between them, Connor had told her, that he hoped they could overcome that summer, before he began working for Emory Enterprises.
“I’m sure you know what this meeting is about,” Mrs. Emory began, eyeing Anne as if she were a convict caught trying to escape.
“I—I suppose.” Anne felt Mr. Emory’s eyes upon her and glanced at him, but he looked away.
Neither of them said anything for a long time. They just sat there, Mrs. Emory looking at her with dagger-filled eyes, Mr. Emory sitting stoically, as if required by law to be in attendance.
“I want to know,” Mrs. Emory said, “what you think we should do about this?”
Anne started. “What I think?”
“Yes, dear,” Mrs. Emory said slowly, “I imagine you do think every once in a while, don’t you?”
Anne’s spine straightened. “I—I’m not sure what you mean. I…” She looked at Mr. Emory, who had picked up a book from the small table between the chairs and was leafing through it. “I don’t think anything should be done. It was just a mistake.”
“A mistake, you say?” Mrs. Emory’s chin lowered, her eyes still on Anne.
“Yes. Nothing happened, really. I—I’m…all right. I’ve nearly forgotten about it.” She laughed lightly, threw her hands out to the side.
Mrs. Emory looked at her as if she were even more stupid than previously imagined.
Anne knew the Emorys weren’t worried about her—they were worried about her telling someone, exposing Mr. Emory. They’d want to be sure she’d be discreet, and she was ready to tell them she would.
“Forgotten!” Mrs. Emory managed to laugh without even a bitter semblance of a smile. “You throw yourself at my husband and now you claim to have forgotten about it?”
“No! That’s not what I meant. I didn’t—”
“That’s what you just said.” Mrs. Emory glanced at her husband. “We both heard it. Didn’t we, dear?”
Mr. Emory cleared his throat and answered without looking up from his book. “That’s right.” His tone was bored. Not ashamed. Not upset. Bored.
Anne gaped at him.
“Anne.” Mrs. Emory’s curt tone drew Anne’s attention back to her. “You know we could fire you for this.”
Anne had trouble breathing. How would she support her grandmother? How would she ever save enough to go to school?
“God knows, that’s what I wanted to do. But my husband is more forgiving.” She took his hand from where it lay on the arm of the chair. Anne wondered just how tight her grip was. “He says we should let you stay.”
Mrs. Emory looked at her expectantly.
Anne clasped her hands together. They were damp with sweat. “Th-thank you.” The words emerged as a question.
“However,” Mrs. Emory drew the word out, seeming to relish it. “We have conditions.”
Another silence.
“Conditions?” Anne asked. If they wanted her participation, repetition was the best she was going to be able to do.
“You must—and there is no negotiation on this. None. You must give up Connor. Let him go.”
Anne exhaled. “What?”
Mrs. Emory sat forward in her chair, speaking with bared teeth. “Break things off with him. Tell him it’s over. Break his heart if you must, but end it. Today.”
Anne looked desperately from one to the other of them. “But you’re leaving tomorrow. There’s no need. You’ll be gone, and I’ll be here. I promise I won’t write to him. I won’t call.” She stopped and tried to swallow, but her mouth was parched. “Surely you don’t want me to hurt him.”
Anne’s chest ached at the very thought.
“Anne, listen to me,” Patsy said sternly. “You know as well as I do that you don’t belong with a boy like Connor. He’s a blue blood, in the truest sense of the word. His ancestry goes straight back to the Mayflower. He is an American aristocrat, a cut above everyone else, now, isn’t he?”
Anne blinked rapidly. “Yes.”
And he was. More than a cut. He was head and shoulders above anyone else she had ever known.
“And you…” Patsy looked almost sadly at Anne, shaking her head. “Well, you’re a working girl, aren’t you? Who were your parents? Working people. There’s nobility in that, Anne. Nobility in knowing and sticking to your place in the world. Surely you didn’t think that anything would ever come of your relationship with Connor.” Mrs. Emory’s brows rose.
Anne blushed. “Come of it?”
“I mean, you couldn’t honestly believe that Connor would ever, for example, marry you.” Mrs. Emory laughed at the idea.
Anne shook her head. “No,” she answered honestly. “No, I’ve never believed that.”
But oh, how she’d wanted to. How she’d dreamed of it.
Mrs. Emory sat back, apparently satisfied. “All I’m asking you to do, then, is give him up now. Before he breaks your heart. Because you know he will. He’ll be going out into the world this fall, working for Emory Enterprises. He has a very prestigious future ahead of him. A future that you would never fit into.” She laughed again lightly and looked at Anne as if she might join in. “My goodness, can you imagine yourself at a charity ball, Anne? Having a closet full of cocktail dresses and drawers full of diamond jewelry? Can you imagine chatting with senators and congressmen? Ambassadors from other countries? Can you imagine representing Connor to other captains of industry at society events?”
