Wedding Vows: With This Ring. Barbara Hannay
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that was why he was here, even if Miss Viv was obviously way too old to qualify as a damsel.
Houston Whitford was CEO of Precision Solutions, a company that specialized in rescuing ailing businesses, generally large corporations, from the brink of disaster. His position used all of his strengths, amongst which he counted a formidable ability to not be swayed be emotion.
He was driven, ambitious and on occasion, unapologetically ruthless, and he could see that was a terrible fit with Second Chances. He didn’t really even like charities, cynically feeling that for one person to receive the charity of another was usually as humiliating for the person in need as it was satisfying for the one who could give.
But the woman who sat in front of him was a reminder that no man had himself alone to thank for his circumstances.
Houston Whitford was here, at Second Chances, because he owed a debt.
And he was here for the same reason he suspected most men blamed when they found themselves in untenable situations.
His mother, Beebee, had suggested he help out. So, it had already been personal, some line blurred, even before the bride had showed up.
Beebee was Houston’s foster mother, but it was a distinction he rarely made. She had been there when his real mother—as always—had not. Beebee had been the first person he had ever felt genuinely cared about him and what happened to him. He owed his life as it was to her charity, and he knew it.
Miss Viv was Beebee’s oldest friend, part of that remarkable group of women who had circled around a tough boy from a terrible neighborhood and seen something in him—believed in something in him—that no one had ever seen or believed in before.
You didn’t say sorry, too busy in the face of that kind of a debt.
It had started a month ago, when he’d hosted a surprise birthday celebration for Beebee. The catered high tea had been held at his newly acquired “Gold Coast” condominium with its coveted Fifth Avenue address, facing Central Park.
Beebee and “the girls” had been all sparkle then, oohing over the white-gloved doorman, the luxury of the lobby, the elevators, the hallways. Inside the sleek interior of his eleven-million-dollar apartment, no detail had gone unremarked, from tiger wood hardwood to walnut moldings to the spectacular views.
But as the party had progressed, Miss Viv had brought up Second Chances, the charity she headed, and that all “the girls” supported. She confessed it was having troubles, financial and otherwise, that baffled her.
“Oh, Houston will help, won’t you, dear?” his foster mom had said.
And all eyes had been on him, and in a blink he wasn’t a successful entrepreneur who had proven himself over and over again, but that young ruffian, poor child, rescued from mean streets and a meaner life, desperately trying to live up to their expectation that he was really a good person under that tough exterior.
But after that initial weakness that had made him say yes, he’d laid down the law. If they wanted his help, they would have to accept the fact he was doing it his way: no interfering from them, no bringing him home-baked goodies to try to sway him into keeping things the very same way that had gotten the charity into trouble in the first place and especially no references to his past.
Of course, they hadn’t understood that.
“But why ever not? We’re all so proud of you, Houston!”
But Beebee and her friends weren’t just proud of him because of who he was now. No, they were the ones who held in their memories that measuring stick of who he had once been…a troubled fourteen-year-old kid from the tenements of Clinton, a neighborhood that had once been called Hell’s Kitchen.
They saw it as something to be admired that he had overcome his circumstances—his father being sent to prison, his mother abandoning him—but he just saw it as something left behind him.
Beebee and Miss Viv dispensed charity as easily as they breathed, but as well-meaning as they were, they had no idea how shaming that part of his life, when he had been so needy and so vulnerable, was to him. He did not excuse himself because he had only been fourteen.
He still felt, sometimes, that he was their poor child, an object of pity that they had rescued and nursed back to wellness like a near-drowned kitten.
Was he insecure about his past? No, he didn’t think so. But it was over and it was done. He’d always had an ability to place his life in neat compartments; his need for order did not allow for overlapping.
But suddenly, he thought of that letter that had arrived at his home last week, a cheap envelope and a prison postmark lying on a solid mahogany desk surely a sign that a man could not always keep his worlds from overlapping.
Houston had told no one about the arrival of that letter, not even the only other person who knew his complete history, Beebee.
Was that part of why he was sending her away with Miss Viv? Not just because he knew they could probably not resist sharing the titillating details of his past with anyone who would listen, including all the employees here at Second Chances, but because he didn’t want to talk to Beebee about that letter? The thought of that letter, plus being here at Second Chances, made him feel what Houston Whitford hated feeling the most: vulnerable, as if that most precious of commodities, control, was slipping away from him.
And there was something about this place—the nature of charity, Miss Viv and his history, Molly, sweetly sensual in virginal white—that made him feel, not as if his guard was being let down, but that his bastions were being stormed.
He was a proud man. That pride had carried him through times when all else had failed. He didn’t want Miss Viv’s personal information about him undermining his authority to rescue her charity, changing the way people he had to deal with looked at him.
And when people found out his story, it did change the way they looked at him.
He could tell, for instance, Molly Michaels would fall solidly in the soft-hearted category. She’d love an opportunity to treat him like a kitten who had nearly drowned! And he wasn’t having it.
“Let’s discuss Molly Michaels for a minute,” he said carefully. “I’d like to have a little talk with her about—”
“Don’t be hard on her!” Miss Viv cried. “Try not to judge Molly for the outfit. She was just being playful. It was actually good to see that side of her again,” Miss Viv said.
Playful. He liked playful. In the bedroom.
In the office? Not so much.
“Please don’t hurt her feelings,” Miss Viv warned him.
Hurt her feelings? What did feelings have to do with running an organization, with expecting the best from it, with demanding excellence?
He did give in to the little impulse, then, to press the ridge of the scar along his nose.
Miss Viv’s voice lowered into her juicy-secret tone. “The broken engagement? She’s had a heartbreak recently.”
It confirmed his wisdom in sending Miss Viv away for the duration of the Second Chances business makeover. He didn’t want to know this, at all. He pressed harder. The ache along the scar line did not diffuse.
“A cad, I’m afraid,” Miss Viv said, missing his every signal that he did not want to be any part of the office stories, the gossip, the personalities.
Despite his desire to remove himself from it, Houston felt a sudden and completely unexpected pulsing of fury.
Not for the circumstances he found himself in, certainly not at Miss Viv, who could not help herself. No, Houston felt an undisciplined desire to hurt a man he did not know for breaking the heart of a woman he also did not know—save for the exquisite tenderness of her neck beneath his fingertips.
That flash of unreasonable