“Good.”
“What I mean is, I’m not going to argue with you about the decline of American civilization, the value of marriage, or the desirability of having children—”
“Good!” Cal interrupted, heaving himself out of the threadbare rocker-recliner. “Then get married and get your wife pregnant, so I can give you the other half of your company. Marry that Broadway dancer you brought home two years ago—the one who had red fingernails two inches long—or marry the schoolteacher you liked in the seventh grade, but marry somebody. And you’d better do it quick, because we’re both running out of time!”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means we’ve been having this discussion for two years and you’re still single, and I’m still without a baby to dandle on my knee, so I’m settin’ a time limit. I’ll give you three months to get engaged and three more months to get married. If you haven’t brought me a wife home by then, I’m going to put my fifty-percent share of your company into an irrevocable trust in the names of young Ted and Donna Jean. I’ll name Travis as administrator of the trust, which will make him your unofficial business partner, then when Ted and Donna Jean come of age, they can help you run the company themselves. That’s assuming you still have a company left after Travis tries to help you run it.” Cal tossed the Enquirer on the table and another warning into the charged atmosphere. “I wouldn’t take all six months to get the thing done if I were you, Cole. My heart could give out at any time, and I’m changing my will next week so that if I die before you’re married, my fifty-percent share of the company goes to Ted and Donna Jean.”
Cole was so incensed that he actually considered trying to have the old man declared incompetent. Failing that, he decided he could try to have the will overturned . . . but that would take years after Cal’s death and the outcome wouldn’t be certain.
His thoughts were interrupted by Letty, his uncle’s cook-housekeeper, who appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Supper’s ready,” she said.
Both men heard her, but neither acknowledged her presence. Cole had risen to face his uncle, and the two men stood in the center of the room, their gazes clashing—two tall, rugged, unyielding men separated by three feet, one generation, and a decision that one couldn’t fight and the other wouldn’t retract. “Are you capable of understanding that I may not be able to find a woman and marry her in six months?” Cole said between his teeth.
In reply, Cal jerked his thumb toward the stacks of magazines beside his chair. “According to the surveys in those magazines, you have five of the seven most important qualities that women want in a husband. You’re rich,” he said, listing the qualities in the order he remembered them, “you’re intelligent, you’re well-educated, you have a bright future, and Donna Jean says you’re a ‘hunk,’ which I guess qualifies you as handsome.”
Satisfied that he’d won the battle, Cal endured Cole’s icy silence for a moment, then made an effort to discharge some of the animosity that he’d created. “Aren’t you just a little bit curious about the two qualities you lack?”
“No,” Cole snapped, so furious that he almost couldn’t trust himself to speak.
Cal supplied the information anyway: “You lack a desire for children, and I’m afraid that even I would have trouble describing you as ‘tender and understanding.’?” When his half-hearted attempt at humor failed to evoke any reaction from his enraged nephew, Cal turned toward the kitchen and his shoulders slumped a little. “Letty has supper on the table,” he said quietly.
With a feeling of utter unreality, Cole stared after him, so filled with bitterness and a sense of betrayal that he was actually able to observe his uncle’s thinner frame and bent shoulders without feeling the shocked alarm that such a sight would normally have evoked. Cal looked far less frail a minute later when Cole strode into the kitchen, carrying a tablet and a gold fountain pen from his briefcase. Cole sat down across from him and slapped the tablet on the table in front of his uncle. “Write it down,” he ordered icily while Letty stood at the stove, looking apprehensively from one to the other, a ladle full of chili forgotten in her hand.
Calvin automatically took the pen that was thrust toward him, but his brow wrinkled in confusion. “Write what down?”
“Write down the terms of the agreement and include any specific ‘requirements’ you may have for the woman I marry. I don’t want any surprises if I bring someone home—no last-minute rejections because she doesn’t meet some criterion you’re forgetting to mention at the moment.”
His uncle looked genuinely hurt. “I’m not tryin’ to choose a wife for you, Cole. I’ll leave all that to you.”
“That’s damned big of you.”
“I want you to be happy.”
“And does it look to you like all this is making me happy?”
“Not now. Not right now, but that’s because you’re riled.”
“I’m not riled,” Cole retorted with scathing contempt. “I’m disgusted!”
His uncle winced as the verbal thrust found its mark, but it didn’t sway the stubborn old man from the course he’d set. He tried to shove the tablet back to Cole, but Cole slapped his flattened palm on it. “I want it in writing,” he stated.
In a desperate attempt to soothe the situation before it erupted again into a battle, Letty rushed to the table with a steaming bowl of chili in each hand and plunked them down in front of the men. “Eat while it is hot!” she urged.
“You want what in writing?” Cal demanded, looking stunned and furious.
“Eat now,” Letty interjected. “Write later.”
“I want you to write down that you will turn over your fifty percent of the company to me if I bring home a wife within six months.”
“Since when isn’t my word good enough for you?”
“Since you stooped to extortion.”
“Now, see here!” Cal exploded, but he looked a little guilty. “I have the right to decide who gets my fifty-percent share in the company. I have the right to want to know that someday your son will benefit from my money and my holdings.”
“A son?” Cole countered in a dangerously low voice. “Is that part of the deal? A new condition? I’ll tell you what, why don’t I marry a woman who already has a little boy so you won’t have to wait and you won’t have to worry?”
Calvin glowered at him, then hastily scribbled out what Cole wanted written and shoved the tablet across the table with an indignant grunt. “There it is, in writing. No stipulations.”
Cole would have left at that point, but he was held back by lack of knowledge of his pilots’ whereabouts and by his own inability to believe Cal would actually betray him by carrying out his threat. Cole’s mind easily provided him with dozens of examples of Cal’s temperamental intractability that indicated he might indeed do the unforgivable, but Cole’s heart rejected them just as swiftly.
They ate in uneasy silence, finishing quickly; then Cole returned to the living room, turned on the television set, and opened his briefcase. Working, he reasoned, was safer and far more rewarding than getting embroiled in another argument, and the television set made the silence between them seem less ominous.
Despite the agreement he’d made his uncle write out, Cole was still far from willing to yield to his uncle’s bizarre demands as a way of regaining permanent control of his own damned businesses. At the moment he had no idea what he was going to do. All he knew was that his temper was still simmering and that thus far his options where Cal was concerned ranged from civil court battles to mental competency hearings to a hasty marriage he didn’t want to some woman he didn’t know. All of them were distasteful in the extreme, not to mention grotesque and even painful.
Across from him, his uncle lowered the newspaper he was reading and regarded Cole over the top of the Houston Chronicle’s, front page, his expression innocently thoughtful, as if everything were happily settled to both their satisfaction. “According to what I’ve been reading, a lot of young women are d
eciding not to have children nowadays. They’d rather raise ‘designer pigs’ and chase after careers. Be careful you don’t pick a woman like that.”
Cole pointedly ignored him and continued writing notes.
“And watch out that you don’t pick some gold digger who pretends she wants you and only wants your money.”
Cole’s simmering temper rolled to a full boil. “How the hell do you expect me to find out what a woman’s true motives are in six months?”
“I figured you must be an expert on women by now. Wasn’t there some sort of princess who traipsed after you all over Europe a couple of years ago?”
Cole stared at him in frigid silence, and Calvin finally shrugged. “You don’t have to know a woman inside and out to be sure she’s not interested in marrying your money instead of you.”
“Really?” Cole drawled with deliberate insolence. “And based on your own vast experience with women and matrimony, how do you propose I find out what motives some future wife may have?”