Fancy Pants (Wynette, Texas #1)(113)

Despite her exhaustion, the thought of Teddy made Francesca smile. She missed him so much. It was awful being separated from her child, so awful that she had been seriously thinking about cutting down on her work schedule when her contract came up for renewal in the spring. What good was it to have a child if she couldn't spend time with him? The veil of depression that had been hanging over her for months settled lower. She had been so short-tempered lately, a sure sign that she was working too hard. But she hated to slow down when everything was going so well.

Stepping out of the elevator, she glanced at her watch and made a quick calculation. Yesterday Holly Grace had taken Teddy to Naomi's house, and today they were supposed to go to the South Street Seaport Museum. Maybe she could catch him before he left. She frowned as she remembered that Holly Grace had told her Dallas Beaudine was coming to New York. After all these years, the idea of Teddy and Dallie in the same town still made her nervous. It wasn't that she feared recognition; God knew there wasn't anything about Teddy that would remind Dallie of himself. It was simply that she disliked the thought of Dallie having anything to do with her son.

She slipped her sable over a satin-covered hanger and hung it in the closet. Then she placed a call to New York. To her delight, Teddy answered the phone.

“Day residence. Theodore speaking.”

Just the sound of his voice made Francesca's eyes mist. “Hello, baby.”

“Mom! Guess what, Mom? I went to Naomi's yesterday and Gerry showed up, and him and Holly Grace had another fight. Today she's taking me to the South Street Seaport, and then we're going to her apartment and order Chinese. And you know my friend Jason...”

Francesca smiled as she listened to Teddy rattle on. When he finally paused for breath, she said, “I miss you, honey. Remember, I'll be home in a few days, and then we'll have two whole weeks of vacation together in Mexico. We're going to have such a good time.” It was to be her first real vacation since she had signed her contract with the network, and the two of them had been looking forward to it for months.

“Will you swim in the ocean this time?”

“I'll wade,” she conceded.

He gave a scornful masculine snort. “At least go up to your waist.”

“I'll compromise on my knees, but no farther.”

“You're really a chicken, Mom,” he said solemnly. “A lot more chicken than me.”

“You're absolutely right about that.”

“Are you studying for your citizenship exam?” he said. “The last time I asked you the test questions, you messed up the whole part about bills getting passed into law.”

“I'll study on the plane,” she promised. Applying for American citizenship was something she had postponed far too long. She had always been too busy, too tightly scheduled, until one day she realized that she had lived in the country for ten years and had never cast a ballot. She had been ashamed of herself and, with Teddy helping her, had begun the lengthy application process that same week.

“I love you big heaps, honey,” she said.

“Me, too.”

“And will you be especially nice to Holly Grace tonight? I don't expect you to understand, but it upsets her when she sees Gerry.”

“I don't know why. Gerry's cool.”

Francesca was too wise to try to explain the subtleties of male-female relationships to a nine-year-old boy, especially one who thought all girls were jerks. “Just be extra nice to her, sweetie,” she said.

When she had finished her phone call, she undressed and began getting ready for her evening with Prince Stefan Marko Brancuzi. Wrapping herself in a silk robe, she walked into the tiled bathroom where plump cakes of her favorite soap sat by the roomy tub, along with her customary brand of American shampoo. The Connaught made it their business to know their guests' grooming preferences, along with the papers they read, how they wanted their coffee in the morning, and, in Francesca's case, the fact that Teddy collected bottle caps. A supply of unusual European beer caps always awaited her in a neatly tied parcel when she checked out. She'd never quite had the heart to tell them that Teddy's idea of collecting bottle caps was based more on quantity than on quality, with Pepsi currently beating out Coke by 394.

She eased herself into the hot bathwater and when her skin had adjusted to the temperature, settled back and shut her eyes. God, she was tired. She needed a vacation so badly. A small voice nagged at her, asking how much longer she was going to go on like this—leaving her child to fly all over the world at the drop of a hat, attending endless production meetings, skimming stacks of books every night before she went to sleep? Lately Holly Grace and Naomi had been with Teddy more than she had.

Thoughts of Holly Grace pushed her mind in a slow circle back to Dallas Beaudine.

Her encounter with him had taken place so long ago that it no longer seemed anything more than an accident of biology that he'd fathered Teddy. He wasn't the one who had given birth, or gone without nylons in those early years to pay for corrective baby shoes, or lost sleep worrying about raising a child whose I.Q. was a good forty points higher than her own. Francesca, not Dallie Beaudine, was responsible for the person Teddy had become. No matter how hard Holly Grace pushed, Francesca refused to let him back into even the smallest corner of her life.

“Aw, come on, Francie, it's been ten years,” Holly Grace had complained the last time they'd talked about it. They had been lunching at the newly opened Aurora on East Forty-ninth, sitting on a leather banquette off to one side of the granite horseshoe bar. “In a few weeks Dallie's going to be in the city talking to the network about doing color commentary for their golf tournaments this spring. How about you relax your rules for a change and let me take Teddy to meet him? Teddy's heard stories about Dallie for years, and Dallie's curious about Teddy after listening to me ramble on about him so much.”