life miserable.
His defenses already up, Matt ignored the anxiety in her tone. All he heard was the phrasing that seemed to suggest he hadn’t belonged in the socially and politically prominent circle she ran with.
Two seconds ago, he’d struggled with guilt and a fair amount of self-reproach for letting her get the better of him. Now, any guilt he felt about what his actions had committed her to disappeared like water drops on a hot griddle. Any desire for further discussion evaporated right along with it. Although he might have pointed out that she hadn’t seemed to mind his lack of pedigree the other night had his basic sense of decency—and his friend—not stopped him.
“Hey, there you are. Dad’s secretary said I’d find you here.”
Ashley’s glance jerked to her brother Cord as he stopped in the doorway. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him in a tie. His nod to family convention today had been to throw a sports jacket on over his collarless shirt and slacks. It didn’t matter that the black shirt was imported silk, the slack’s cashmere and the jacket a beautiful hand-tailored Italian cut that were hardly the uniform of a rebel. She suspected he refused to wear a tie simply because their father and their older brother did.
His rakish smile died as his glance bounced from her to the side of Matt’s head. “What’s going on?”
A muscle in Matt’s jaw bunched as he pulled his hands from his pockets. “I needed to hand over a check. I thought I’d do it before our meeting.”
“Dad’s on his way to the conference room now. If we get ourselves up there, we can be out of here in an hour.
“Hey, Sis,” he said to her, oblivious to the strain snaking through the room. “I’m sorry I missed you with those papers. Edna just cornered me with them.”
Edna was their dad’s personal secretary, had been for nearly thirty years. Knowing the amazingly efficient, no-nonsense woman as she did, Ashley could almost picture the sixty-something matron taking Cord by the ear, sitting him down in his office and insisting that he wasn’t leaving until the document was read and signed.
As much as Ashley had hated being pulled off her own job to chase down her brother, she’d hated even more that she hadn’t been able to accomplish what her father had sent her to do.
It had been a day of system failures all the way around.
“Come on, Callaway.” Cord’s voice cut through the strain. “As soon as we get through this proposal, I’m heading home. Sheryl has a friend in town. Want to go for a sail?”
It sounded as if the two of them had put together another project for the real-estate development arm of the Kendrick companies. Despite his penchant for play, Cord had proven himself a bit of a genius at spotting potential business properties and buying them for a song—which was undoubtedly why their father hadn’t disinherited him over some of the messes he’d gotten himself into. Flings with models, female rock stars and incidents with race cars and gambling establishments raised their socially and politically conservative father’s blood pressure enough. But a paternity suit last year had nearly put him over the edge.
“I’ll pass,” she heard Matt mutter. “I need to get back to Atlanta.”
“You just came from Atlanta.”
“That’s because I’ve got another project going there.”
“You need a break,” Cord grumbled.
“Call it my own form of risk management. Work keeps me out of trouble.”
Standing the same impressive height as Matt and with his blue eyes and sun-streaked hair, Cord could have more easily passed for the brother of the big man radiating tension beside him than the one he actually had. Gabe was dark like their father. So was their little sister, Tess. Ashley and Cord had both inherited their mother’s fair coloring.
Any other similarities between her and her next oldest sibling, however, ended there. As much as Cord tended to distance himself from family, other than for business, she felt she barely knew him at all. There were only three years separating them, but with their difference in interests and attitude, those years could be measured at the speed of light. From the time he’d been a teenager, it seemed he’d gone out of his way to break the rules.
Matt’s influence back then hadn’t helped at all.
If she remembered correctly, it had been Matt who’d shown him how to hot-wire a car.
“You’re turning into a bad example,” Cord informed his friend. “If I hang around with you much longer, I might almost turn respectable myself. Are you through here?”
She could practically feel Matt’s finely honed tension when he glanced toward her.
“Your sister and I have nothing else to discuss,” he said, speaking to Cord, looking at her.
“Then, let’s get out of here.” Cord slapped him on the back. Without another word to her, they both turned to the door.
“What was the check for?”
“That auction.”
“Oh, yeah,” she heard her brother muse. “I can’t believe you got her to agree to that. Are you really going to let her do it?”
Matt was already out the door. Cord was right behind.
She had no idea why her brother thought Matt had any say in whether or not she worked on a house. They gave her no clue, either. With their voices fading with their footsteps, she couldn’t hear another thing they said.
She could, however, still feel the tension Matt had left in his wake. It rubbed her nerves like sandpaper, making it impossible to stay still.
Crossing her office, she closed the door before Elisa could arrive and walk in as she always did, eager to share whatever it was her precious six-month-old daughter had accomplished the night before and launch into her usual lecture about what Ashley really needed was a husband and babies. She would adore having a family of her own. Now just wasn’t the time to think about how useful it would be to first meet the right guy.
With her hand still on the knob, she rested her forehead against the smooth wood. All she could think about now was what had happened with the wrong one.
It seemed that the Fates weren’t satisfied with letting her stew in her own disappointment in herself. To make up for her lapse in judgement with Matt, she must now suffer a situation she truly did not want to be in.
She knew nothing about building a building. Her interests were in her family and in her charities, in the scholarship program for single moms and in the impoverished women and children she tried to help by finding out where their needs were and raising funds to meet them. Her talents lay in organization and an eye for detail. That was why her mother had entrusted her with the Shelter Project fund-raiser. But just because she could raise the money to buy bricks or boards, didn’t mean she knew how to put them together.
Worse than that, the press would be around whether she wanted them there or not.
She lifted her head, slowly turned back to the papers on her desk. Only months ago, the press had had a field day with Gabe before he’d married their head housekeeper’s daughter. Cord’s name hadn’t shown up in at least six weeks, so he was due to fall off the good-behavior wagon any day now. Their little sister, Tess, had settled into domesticity with her husband of barely a year in Boston and rumors were rumbling that her marriage was already in trouble. Tess staunchly denied it. But her smile had seemed awfully strained to Ashley when they’d met a few weeks ago for lunch.
Staying out of the limelight seemed impossible for Ashley, too. Just trying to avoid it had caused her problems enough. She’d tried lying low a few years ago and speculation had ranged from her being ill to her being a recluse. She’d had no problem overlooking the tabloid’s claims that she’d been abducted by aliens, but her mother had finally made her face the fact that their family would never have the privacy others had. Unless