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He frowned. “No.” It hadn’t occurred to him that the older man would find out eventually. But bringing Jane to Chaleur had all but guaranteed their photos would hit the society pages in coming days.
“I’m sorry that you don’t get on well with your father,” she surprised him by saying quietly. “He struck me as a kind of tragic figure. Perhaps a better person than he shows himself to be.”
Carter was very quiet. “Usually, I would be annoyed at someone presuming to know my own father better than me. But you’re right, Jane. You’re very perceptive. He’s got a goodness, somewhere in him. He just keeps screwing his life up.”
“Another reason you rescued him from me?” She asked with raised brows.
His laugh was quiet. “Yes. His taste in women is legendarily bad.”
“And this time?”
“It would have been the worst. I could not have lived with seeing you with him.”
She shook her head. “It was never like that.”
“I am certain he would have wanted it to be.”
Her cheeks flushed, and she looked at the table. The less Carter knew of the things Hank had said to her, the better. She suspected his anger would be stoked to incendiary levels if he knew that Hank had also thought her to be a prostitute and hinted at propositioning her for more than she was willing to provide.
“What about your mother?” She changed the subject slightly. “Are you close to her?”
He picked up his fork and speared one of the greasy looking snails. “Mother is a real dame of the south. Imagine a cross between Dolly Parton and Nancy Pelosi.” It was such an absurd hybrid that Jane burst out laughing, and Carter smiled. “Are you picturing it?”
“Just.” She nodded, still laughing.
“She’s tough and she has made being glamorous a full time hobby. But she’s almost totally mad from loneliness and Hank’s betrayal. Her anger, at being cheated on by a man who was never good enough for her, is tough to bear.”
“That’s hard for you,” she said quietly. “It must have been difficult to grow up with such enmity between your folks.”
“You could say that,” he said with a shrug. “But, at the same time, I was used to it. It was just the way it was. Hank was busy with his new family – Eliot is a far better son to him than I am – and so I hardly saw him.”
“Yet you somehow ended up running Silverlight?”
“My grandfather…”
“Carter Senior?” She interjected.
He nodded. “He took me under his wing. I suspect he has the same dim view of Hank as the rest of the world. He put up with Hank as CEO until I graduated, then installed me at the first possible opportunity. That board meeting was one of the best, and worst, moments of my life.”
She nodded. “Your father must have been devastated.”
“Livid. He was puce with his fury.”
“I feel sorry for him.”
“Don’t. Whatever goodness he might have is so deeply buried it’s probably irretrievable now. He’s lived his life as a selfish bastard and he got what was coming to him.”
Jane didn’t say what she was thinking. But Carter’s ability to rationalise such emotional cruelty scared the hell out of her. Would that same sentimental pragmatism extend to her, when the time came? Would he simply decide their relationship no longer held value and end things with her? She shivered a little.
“Are you cold?”
“No,” she shook her head.
“I’m upsetting you?”
“No.” She bit down on her lip. “Are you going to eat that?”
He looked at the snail he’d speared, and shook his head. “You are.”
