Executive Protection(25)

He’d had to work a whole day and now it was around dinnertime. He’d called his mother to check on her and she’d told him he could talk to Lucy over dinner. While he was leery of her motive, he’d been eager to tell Lucy about his conversation with Darcy. And it wasn’t a conversation that should be conducted over the phone.

As he stepped into the dining room, he spotted Lucy already there, sitting in skinny jeans and a silky green-and-blue blouse. This was her third day at the estate, and she was sleeping in the room right next to his. His mother again. He was going to have to have a talk with her.

“Mother told me you’d be here.” He looked around the formal dining room. Four floor-to-ceiling windows brightened the room during the day. The table was long, with two floral displays on the polished wood surface. Lucy sat beside him rather than at the other end where four chairs on each side would have separated her from him. “Did she arrange for us to sit in here?”

“Yes.”

She looked as uncomfortable as he felt, and his mother’s meddling annoyed him. “Sorry.”

He didn’t sit down. One of the waiters appeared.

“We’ll eat in the media room,” he told the man, who nodded once and turned to tell the other servants.

“They’re serving fish Pontchartrain and some other fancy dishes,” Lucy said.

“There’s a buffet table down there. And a television. A big one.” He extended his hand, looking down at the scoop of her blouse, which was casual enough but could pass for tonight’s occasion. Had she dressed up for him or the formal dinner?

Keeping her hand and ignoring her questioning eyes, he took her through the house.

“Why did Kate arrange this dinner?” she asked when they reached the basement and walked down a wide hall lined with paintings.

“I told her I needed to talk to you, and she...used the opportunity.”

Passing a large wine cellar visible through glass, he entered the media room. Leather chairs faced the television. There were two pool tables, a shuffleboard and dartboards. His favorite room.

The only drawback was that the staff was setting up a table down here. They must have moved it from storage. His mother kept things like that on hand for parties.

While the servants set the table, much more casually than upstairs, Thad turned on the TV and found a college basketball game.

Lucy eyed him strangely. “Background music?”

He chuckled. “Just trying to tone it down a little.”

She smiled, a white-toothed, radiant smile. “What do you need to talk to me about?” She went over to the table that the servants had finished setting.

He went to sit across from her. A servant showed him a bottle of wine and Thad indicated it was fine.

“I did some checking into Sophie’s foster mother, Rosanna Bridger,” he said.

He had to wait out her reaction, first surprise, then curiosity before she asked, “Why did you do that?”

Taken aback over why she’d asked him that question, expecting her to be eager to learn about Rosanna, Thad realized her intention. She wasn’t being confrontational. She was trying to get him to admit he might be making a mistake deciding to forego a life with kids and the marriage that came with that.

“She’s an innocent child,” he said neutrally.

“So you’d do it for any child?”

“Yes.”

Lucy looked skeptical.

Thad couldn’t tell her he’d done it for her, too. Because he’d seen how much she cared about those kids and how that reflected in the way she gave everything she had to teaching them to read.

“I thought you were antifamily,” she said, again without confrontation. Was she teasing him?

She sipped some of the red wine.

“Other families, no. Just my own.” He didn’t want kids and he didn’t want to get married. He’d seen a few couples get lucky and find that rare love that lasted a lifetime. So many thought they had it, only to end up in a failed marriage that ended in painful, court-complicated divorce. He didn’t believe in forever love. He didn’t believe he’d find the kind of love that would last a lifetime, either. And he wasn’t a gambler.

“I might understand why you won’t marry, but why no kids?” Lucy asked.

After he marveled how closely her thoughts mirrored his, he said, “Bringing kids into a relationship that in all likelihood won’t last doesn’t seem right to me. There’s enough dysfunction in the world—why add to it?”

“Why follow everyone else into doom and gloom?”

As in marriage and love. Doom and gloom. He ignored her teasing. “Yes.”

“What if you love the woman you’re with?”

“Then I’ll stay with her and be faithful to her. I just won’t do it legally.”

“Because you’re that sure it won’t last?”

“I don’t know how long it will last. I don’t want to risk it not lasting. I’d be glad if it lasted. But I won’t risk having kids in case it doesn’t.”

“People know when they’re in love,” she said.

“My parents were in love. Every married couple I know who divorced were in love when they married.”

“They thought they were,” she contradicted him. “They didn’t really know.”