LITMIR.BIZ

      One

      He felt old. Old, dammit, old! Where had it all gone—the dreams, the raw, idealistic ambition, the joyous excitement of being a rutting male animal in his prime? The trouble was, a man’s prime was over almost before he realized he was in it. After that, it was all downhill.

      By the time he left the office, Alex Hightower was hot and tired. Thinking of the woman he’d be seeing in a couple of hours, he tried to drum up a moderate degree of lust. He was only thirty-eight, for God’s sake—there had to be a viable hormone somewhere in his six-foot-two, one-hundred-seventy-three-pound carcass!

       Think lust, man. Think long, silken limbs, sweet, pouting lips, soft, full breasts. Think tangled sheets, twisting bodies, explosions of passion that leave a man weak and trembling and hungry for a return engagement.

      “Think sex, dammit,” he muttered, pulling into his driveway. “Forget the damned furniture market!”

      He let himself in the front door of the whitewashed brick house he shared with his fourteen-year-old daughter, Sandy, his thoughts focused on a cool shower, a tall drink, and a good excuse that would get him out of his dinner date. He was on his way to securing the first of those when he heard his daughter on the phone.

      “—said I couldn’t, but he always changes his mind. Oh, sure, I mean, just because Daddy is straight out of the Crustacean period, that doesn’t mean—what? Okay. Huh? Oh, sure, don’t worry, I can twist him around my little finger.”

      Feeling an ache in his midsection that was one part irritation, one part indigestion, and three parts love, he passed the half-open door of his daughter’s bedroom without calling out a greeting.

      Fifteen minutes under a pounding shower did little to ease his tension, nor did the drink he sipped as he got dressed to go out again. Morosely Alex adjusted his gray-striped tie in front of his bureau mirror, wondering if somewhere among the more obscure laws of nature there was one that decreed that fourteen-going-on-twenty-five-year-old daughters and thirty-eight-going-on-a-hundred-year-old fathers couldn’t speak the same language.

      No wonder he couldn’t drum up the strength to do something about his dismal social life. Being a single father sapped all his energies.

      “No,” he’d said just that morning to her request—more like a demand—to be allowed to go to some camp-out, rock concert affair.

      “But Daddy, everyone in the whole wide world is going,” Sandy had wailed. “I’ll be laughed out of school if I’m the only one whose parent won’t let her go—and besides, I promised!”

      “And I said no. No is a complete sentence, Alexandra. It requires neither modifiers nor explanations.”

      “Oh, God, I hate you!” she’d cried, rushing from the breakfast table in tears. Which was a more or less natural state these days.

      After that had come the earring thing. Alex would be the first to admit he knew very little about the female of the species—which was quite an admission from a man who’d been sought after by women from the time he turned fifteen. He did know, however, that girls of fourteen had no business wearing half a pound of hardware dangling from one ear. It wasn’t even balanced, for Pete’s sake!

      “But Daddy, everybody does it! I’ll look naked without my jewelry!”

      “A fourteen-year-old girl—”

      “Fourteen and a half, which is practically fifteen, and that’s almost sixteen, which is old enough to drive and get married and do almost everything! I know three girls my age who’re already pregnant!”

      He’d aged ten years right then.

      “Just because you’re too old to remember what it’s like to have any fun, that’s no reason why I have to live like a five-year-old in a convent.”

      “I’m not sure, but I don’t think they accept five-year-olds in convents, Sandy. Now, go wash your face.” She’d been experimenting with makeup lately. “Quickly, please—I’m already late for an appointment.”

      He’d inspected her face, refrained from further comment on her earrings, one of which was a stud that didn’t bear close examination, the other a barbaric arrangement of jangling spare parts that grazed her bony little shoulder.

      Was he being too judgmental? She accused him of it on the average of three times a week, but at least she’d stopped calling him a WASP. Now she called him a DWEM, something she’d picked up at school. It meant Dead White European Male. Which was hardly reassuring. Especially the dead part.

      From the mirror, Alex’s gaze fell to the silver-framed photograph of Sandy on her eleventh birthday. They shared the pale blond hair and the clear gray eyes, but there the resemblance ended. Sandy had inherited Dina’s oval face and flawless features instead of his own bony, angular face, his high-bridged nose and aggressive jaw. Thank God. While he’d never had any problem finding women, he had never deluded himself that his looks were the great attraction. Money was a powerful aphrodisiac.

      Devil take it, he was running late again! Mrs. Halsey had been late getting here, and then he’d had the usual dustup with Sandy over having a baby-sitter in for the evening whenever he went out. She’d flounced off to her room and turned up what she referred to as her music until he could practically see the prisms on the chandelier in the dining room below jumping off their hooks.

      Before heading downstairs, Alex rapped on his daughter’s door. “Sandy? I’ll be in before midnight.” Time for drinks, dinner, a dance or two, the drive back and perhaps a nightcap if he didn’t linger over it. “If you need anything, I’ll be at the club.” Long pause. “With Carol.” Silence. If one could call the death throes of a flock of electric guitars plus the collision of two freight trains silence. She knew better than to assault her ears that way, but neither he nor the doctor could convince her. “Sandy? I’ll see you in the morning, sweetheart. And by the way...the word is cretaceous, not crustacean.”

      With a defeated sigh, he descended the elegant curving staircase, glanced into the study, where Mrs. Halsey was engrossed in watching a lineup of bare-chested male cover models on TV. She didn’t even look his way. Shrugging, he set off for his dinner date.

      Maybe he should ask Carol to have a little talk with Sandy. Maybe she could get through.

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