Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The hostess at the Aviary seated him at a table by the window, which he hadn’t asked for and figured Reginald had.
He got there before the man did and sat with his hat on the empty chair beside him and his hands flat on the cloth.
White tablecloth. Two forks. Water that came with a slice of cucumber in it.
He’d eaten here once, for Tate and Rylee, and he’d been more comfortable in a round pen with a horse that wanted him dead.
He didn’t check his phone. Cece had texted while he was parking. Go get ’em. Then, a second later, He’ll order the trout. Don’t ask.
Reginald Williams came in without a coat, in a charcoal suit that made the hostess stand up straighter. He stopped at the table and looked at Jason. Jason looked back at him, and neither of them said a word for as long as it took the hostess to find a reason to be elsewhere.
Then the older man sat.
He’d aged since the wedding. The silver in his hair had taken over. He set his phone face down on the cloth and left his hand on it a moment before he let it go.
“Mr. Dennison. Thank you for coming.”
“Of course, sir.”
Reginald opened the menu. He didn’t read it. “You’ve eaten here.”
“Once.”
“Then you know what’s good.”
“I know what’s expensive.”
The waitress came, and Reginald turned into somebody else for her, easy and warm. He asked about the special and laughed at her answer and ordered the trout. Jason ordered the steak, medium, and nothing else. The girl left. The warmth went with her.
“I’ve had a man asking about you,” Reginald said.
“Around town. It’s an inexact science when everyone I ask is a neighbor of yours, but I’ve done it in enough towns to allow for the bias.
” He turned his water glass a quarter turn on the cloth.
“Quiet. Loyal. Good with animals. Nobody has a bad word.”
“That’s kind of them.”
“It’s useless to me. It tells me what people see. It doesn’t tell me what you are when the door’s shut.”
“Nothing different,” Jason said.
Reginald’s mouth moved at one corner and went flat again. He turned the glass another quarter. “There are two things in this world I would set fire to the rest of it for. My company is the second one.”
Jason waited.
“Before she met you, my daughter had never once defied me. Not once in her life. Then she stands up in front of a town council with a reporter in the room and hands them the one thing my attorneys swore could never be proven. Torches her position, her salary, and her relationship with me in about four minutes.” Another quarter turn.
“Forgive me if I notice that the only new element in her life is you.”
“What she did at the council was hers. I didn’t ask for it and I didn’t know it was coming.”
“So you say.”
“So she’d say. Ask her.”
“I’m asking you.” Reginald leaned in, and there was heat under it now. “Decisions like that get made on feeling. No thought for consequence. That is not the daughter I raised. That’s a woman who stopped thinking, and I’m sitting across from the reason.”
Jason didn’t move. He’d learned a long time ago that in a conversation like this one, the man who moved was the man asking. He didn’t want anything from Reginald Williams. That made it easy to keep his hands where they were.
“She didn’t stop thinking, sir. She started. You’re just not used to what it looks like when it isn’t pointed at your problems.”
The glass stopped turning.
“You think she doesn’t need looking after.”
“I think she’s had a lifetime of it, and it nearly cost her a town.”
“And your plans? Your business.”
“What about it.”
“One business is hard. Two, in a town this size, with a new relationship on top of both.” Reginald sat back. “That’s a recipe. And when one of you fails, and one of you will, what does the other one do with the resentment?”
“Then I’ll wait on mine.”
It landed. Jason didn’t need to be told it had. “You’d give it up.”
“I’d wait. It isn’t the same. Horses aren’t going anywhere.”
“And resent Cecelia for it every day she succeeds.” He said it gently, which was worse. “I know that marriage, Mr. Dennison. I was in that very marriage.”
That was Cecelia’s mother. Jason set it aside and left it where it was.
“Her mother left when Cecelia was six,” Reginald said, to the glass. “Do you know what I did the next morning? I went to work. I went to work and I built her a company to grow up in, and I held every door she needed to walk through.” He looked up. “It was the only life I knew how to build.”
“Then it’s built,” Jason said. “Let go of the door.”
Reginald’s hand came off the glass. For a second there was nothing on his face at all, and then there was a great deal, and then there was the man who’d walked in.
Reginald reached inside his jacket and took out an envelope, thick and plain, and laid it on the tablecloth. He didn’t push it. He let it sit there.
“What’s that.”
“Capital. Enough to start properly. Licensing, a location, stock, whatever a man in your line needs to do it right the first time.” He said it as easily as he’d ordered dinner.
“What’s the catch.”
“Walk away from her. Tell her your feelings have changed. Tell her whatever a man tells a woman. She comes home with me, and you have a business by spring.”
The food came. The waitress set the plates down and asked if they needed anything. Reginald smiled at her and said no, thank you. Neither of them picked up a fork.
“Does she know you’re doing this?” Jason asked.
“She knows I’m having dinner.”
“She knows you’re having it with me. I told her.” It went in. Reginald’s hand stopped on the glass. “She’ll know why before breakfast.”
“You’d tell her.” Not a question, and what moved behind it wasn’t anger.
“I said I would. On the phone. You didn’t believe me.”
“No man tells a woman everything.”
“Then you’ve been meeting the wrong men.”
Reginald’s hand flattened on the cloth beside the envelope. For a moment he looked every one of his years and a few he hadn’t gotten to yet. “Mr. Dennison. Take the money. Build something. And if, in a few years, she’s done playing at independence and wants to come find you, that’s her business.”
“That money’s hers.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“It’s her trust, or it’s her salary, or it’s whatever you’ve been holding over her head since she was nineteen.
It’s hers. You should be sliding it across a table at her and asking what she wants to build with it.
” Jason’s hands hadn’t moved. “Instead you’re sliding it at me and asking me to break her heart for it.
I don’t know what to call that, sir. But it isn’t looking after. ”
Silence. The kind that reached the next table over.
Reginald stood. He picked up the envelope, folded it in half, and held it out. When Jason didn’t take it, he set it down beside Jason’s plate, between the steak and the water glass, and rested two fingers on it.
“Think about it. Make a list. I’ll know your answer when it clears.”
He put bills on the table and walked out, and the hostess stood up straighter as he passed.
Jason sat there.
The waitress came back by and stopped short at the empty chair. “Is everything all right?”
“Fine,” Jason said. “He had somewhere to be.”
She looked at the two full plates and the bills on the table and had the good sense not to ask anything else.
Both plates sat untouched. The envelope lay beside his plate with the crease Reginald had put in it, and he didn’t have to open it to know what was inside.
He thought about the rooms over the Bloom Shop.
About the number in his phone he hadn’t called yet.
About what it would be to put a key in her hand and let her turn it.
And about the day, because there’d be one, when she asked him where the money had come from, and he’d have to look her in the eye and say her father’s name.
He didn’t have to open it at all.
He took out his wallet and counted what the steak cost and set it under the water glass with a generous tip. Then he moved Reginald’s money to the other side of the table, under the edge of the far plate, and laid the envelope on top of it, crease up.
He picked up his hat.
Tate’s truck was at the far end of the lot with the engine running and everything else dark, and Jason had known it would be since the phone call yesterday. He got in the passenger side. Tate looked at the restaurant door, then at him.
“Well?”
“He tried to buy me.”
Tate’s hands closed on the wheel. “What’d you do?”
“Left it on the table. Paid for my own steak.” Jason set his hat on the dash. “Drive me up to the lodge.”
“She’s got a room full of women tonight.”
“Then I’ll sit in the lobby till they leave. She hears this from me before she hears it from him.”