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James smiled. “Perhaps because she loved you.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. His smile twisted. “I tried telling myself that, but then she started snapping at me about how I’d been out nights and she’d never known where I was or what I’d been doing.”
“Typically female, hmm?”
“Yes, dammit to hell. Typically!” Ryan slammed his fist onto the mantel. “And the hell of it is, I’d have sold my soul if I’d thought it would have made her really give a damn about where I’d been spending my time. Why couldn’t she understand that no one mattered to me after I’d met her?”
“Women profess themselves to be the intuitive sex, my boy,” James said gently, “but I have found that they need to be told certain things.”
“If I’d thought for a minute that Devon wanted me near her, I’d have been home every night. She was everything to me, Grandfather, everything I ever wanted...”
Ryan’s words drifted to silence. After a moment his grandfather cleared his throat.
“Life is short,” he said. “Before you know it, you look around and it’s all behind you. Find her, Ryan. Tell her what’s in your heart.”
Ryan nodded. He wanted to say something but his throat felt tight. He cleared it, hard.
“Thank you, sir. For everything.”
“Nonsense. I’m an interfering old man. We both know that.”
A smile eased across Ryan’s lips. “You’re right,” he said. “Which reminds me... I’ve been meaning to ask you about that diagnosis your doctors supposedly gave you all those months ago.”
“Are you questioning my veracity, Ryan?”
“Yes, sir,” Ryan said politely, “I most certainly am.”
His grandfather’s eyes twinkled. “Everything I told you was the truth. They said my time was limited and that it would be wise to put my affairs in order.” James chuckled. “But then, that’s the advice any intelligent physician gives a man who’s staring ninety in the face, wouldn’t you agree?”
Ryan tried to look stern but it was impossible. After a moment, he began to grin.
“I’m counting on you to look one hundred in the face, old man. What would my children do without you around to make their lives miserable?”
The two men looked at each other and smiled. Then Ryan put his arms around his grandfather and hugged him.
“I love you,” he said gruffly, and then he was gone.
Chicago was caught in the grip of an Indian summer heat wave.
The hot breath of the prairie had blown in over the city five days before and showed no signs of retreating. Each day, the temperature hit new highs and dispositions hit new lows.
Devon was definitely not in the best of moods.
During the night, the wheezing electric fan in the tiny bedroom of her all-but-airless apartment had given its last gasp and died, breathing out a wisp of acrid electrical smoke.
And now the air-conditioning system in Holdridge’s Department Store had decided to do the very same thing. The store was rapidly turning into a sauna.
The customers were not fools. They fled. But the sales staff was trapped, and trapped in uniform.
And a stupid uniform it was, Devon thought irritably as she tried to straighten the sweaters that were piled on the men’s boutique sales counter. A black suit, the pocket emblazoned with the Holdridge crest, a white blouse, stockings and medium-heeled leather pumps might make sense in midwinter.
On a day like this, with the AC only a memory, the outfit was simple torture.
The blouse—polyester, so it didn’t breathe at all—was stuck to her skin. The suit—also polyester—was so wet it was clammy. And the miserable heat had made her feet swell so that every step in the pumps was agony.
No, Devon thought grimly as she folded sweater after sweater, her mood was not good. But then, it hadn’t been good for a long time now, if the succession of roommates she’d gone through in the last three months was to be believed.
“Honestly, Devon,” the last one had said just a few days ago, “if I were you, I’d go back and confront the guy that put me through the mill, and I’d either tell him I still love him or I’d sock him in the jaw. Maybe then you’d be fit for human company again.”
