She turned to face him. “Paul, I want the absolute truth from you.”
“You’re getting it.”
“Is this the first time you’ve done this?”
Instantly he replied, “I haven’t slept with another woman since we first went to bed together, Joanna. Until last night.”
“You had an affair with Melissa before, hadn’t you?”
“We were together when I met you. I left her for you.”
“And now you’ve gone back to her.”
He stepped around the bed, then sat on its edge, on her side, close enough to Joanna to reach out and touch her. Yet he kept his hands on his knees.
“Joanna, it wasn’t her. It could’ve been anybody. I was alone. We haven’t made love since we went to the space station. It—”
“So it’s my fault?”
“No,” he said quickly. “Nobody’s fault but mine. Not even Melissa’s, really. I should’ve kept my wick in my pants.”
“Your wick?” Despite herself Joanna smiled a little. “I’ve never heard it called that before.”
“It was a rotten thing to do,” he said. “It won’t happen again. I promise you.”
She sighed wearily. “So did Gregory.”
Paul gritted his teeth. You knew that was going to come up, he said to himself.
“I’m not Gregory,” he said tightly.
Joanna’s shoulders slumped. “Maybe it’s me,” she murmured. “Maybe I do something to cause this sort of thing to happen. Maybe I pick out men who’ll betray me.”
Paul reached out and took both her hands in his. “Christ, Jo, it’s not your fault! I’m the guilty party here.”
She wouldn’t look into his eyes.
“You knew about it, didn’t you?” Paul asked. “You knew about it before I landed.”
“Greg told me that you and Melissa were travelling together.”
“Greg.”
“I told him I didn’t believe it, but he said I could check with the travel office. So I did.”
“She was in several of the same cities I was. I only saw her in the offices, though. We weren’t travelling together. We— weren’t shacking up.”
“Until last night.”
“That was a mistake that won’t be repeated.”
Joanna said nothing. She still would not meet his eyes.
“I think Greg sent her to nail me,” Paul said. “The bitch did this just to cause trouble between us.” With a weary shake of her head, Joanna replied, “Greg is finished with her. They broke up. He can’t stand the mention of her name.”
“That’s an act he puts on.”
“No,” she said. “I know my son better than that. He hates the sound of her name.”
“Then it had to be Brad who set me up.”
“Why does it have to be a trap?” Joanna asked. “Why can’t you accept the fact that you’ve made a mess of our marriage?”
“Don’t say that! I don’t want our marriage to be hurt.”
“It’s been hurt, Paul. You’ve hurt it.”
“Okay. I know that. But—”
“I’m pregnant.”
It hit him like a physical blow. Paul sat there, hunched forward, holding both Joanna’s hands tightly in his. He blinked several times.
“Pregnant?” In his own ears his voice sounded a full octave higher than normal.
Joanna nodded. “It wasn’t just the weightlessness that was making me sick on the space station. I’ve been sick every morning for—”
“We’re going to have a baby?” Suddenly everything was swept away. A baby! Paul had never even considered the possibility. At his age, at Joanna’s age…
“Will you be okay? Can you do it without endangering your health?”
Joanna smiled patiently at him. “It’s not an illness, Paul.”
“Yeah, I know. Put I mean, isn’t it kind of late in the game for you?”
“The obstetrician says I’m in fine condition and there reason why I can’t bring the baby to term.”
“A baby.” Paul glowed with the wonder of it. “I never thought I’d be a father.”
Her smile widened. “It does happen, you know.”
He pulled her to him, sat her beside him on the edge of the bed and kissed her on the lips. “We’ve got to take extra-special good care of you.”
But Joanna had not forgotten anything. “Paul — about this thing with Melissa.”
“That was finished this morning,” he said quickly. “And nothing like it is going to happen again. Ever.”
“I want to believe you.”
“Believe it.”
“It’s just that — Gregory started womanizing when I was pregnant with Greg.”
“I’m not Gregory,” he said firmly. “I told you that and I meant it”
For several moments Joanna did not reply. Then, “All right, Paul. I’ll believe you.”
For now, she added silently. I’ll trust you as far as I can watch you. Maybe it will all work out all right, but I’m not going to sit by and watch my second husband humiliate me the way my first one did.
And Paul was thinking, This changes everything. I’ll have a kid to take care of. A son, maybe. I can’t let Greg gets his hands on the corporation. Not now. It’s going to be my child’s inheritance. A son. I want it to be a son.
Ed McPherson was a chubby, moonfaced, baldheaded make-believe Texan who dressed like a cowboy instead of the head of a major corporation’s extensive legal department. Bom in New Jersey, educated at Princeton and Harvard Law, he cultivated a handlebar moustache and made a fetish of wearing cowboy boots, suede jackets and bolo ties. Word was around the office that the only time he wore a business suit was when he appeared before the Supreme Court of the United States.
Which was never. McPherson rarely strayed farther from the headquarters of Masterson Corporation than the corporation’s Wall Street offices in New York.
Paul was in his office in Savannah when McPherson’s call came through. He put the lawyer’s image on the display screen of his desktop computer.
“Gregory had prostate cancer,” McPherson said, with no preliminary. “Terminal.”
Paul sank back in his swivel chair. “You’re certain?” McPherson hardly ever smiled. He tried to keep a stony, hard-bitten look on his face. It was difficult for him, despite the luxurious moustache he sported; his round cheeks and bald dome did not lend themselves to a gunslinger’s beady-eyed glare.
“The agency I hired tracked down the doctor who diagnosed him. It was so advanced that no treatment was possible.”
“Christ,” Paul muttered.
“He’d been seeing half a dozen different doctors over the previous five years or so,” McPherson went on. “He knew about the cancer, looks like, but refused to do anything about it until it was too late.”
“But there are treatments for prostate cancer,” Paul objected. McPherson made a sour face. “You run the risk of incontinence. And impotence. I doubt that Gregory worried much about peeing his pants, but impotence would have been a big problem to him.”
“So he just let the cancer go.”
“And it killed him. Or rather, he killed himself when he found out it was terminal. Must have been giving him a lot of pain.”
Paul thought for a moment. “You’re certain about all this? You’ve got documentary evidence?”
McPherson brushed an index finger across his moustache. “I can get written statements from each of the doctors, plus all of Gregory’s medical records, if Joanna will sign a form demanding them.”
I’ll talk to her about it. Thanks. That was good work.”
“Wait’ll you see the bill,” McPherson said, cracking one of his infrequent smiles.
Paul blanked the screen, then sat thinking, Will Joanna be willing to sign such a form? Should I bother her with this? She’s got enough on her mind, and I shouldn’t be upsetting her with old stories about Gregory.
It’ll come up in the board meeting, Paul told himself. There’s no way I can shield her from Greg’s showing that damned videodisk to the board.
But now I know what Gregory was muttering about in the video. It wasn’t us. It wasn’t our fault. It was the cancer that was killing him, and the gun was going to protect him from the pain. He was pissed off with the doctors, not us. He knew he was a dead man anyway; he just stopped the pain for himself.