Do-Over Read Free Page A

other, if you had the mind to.”
    “Just don’t give me reason to do it,” Jerome said in his best threatening voice.
    Mark tried for the guileless expression he’d used when he was a teenager in hopes of bailing himself out of trouble. “Me?”
    “Yes, you. I didn’t buy that innocent routine back when you’d sneak girls into the boathouse, and I’m not buying it now.” He scrutinized Mark in the wayonly a parent—or nearly parent—can. He must have been satisfied with what he saw because he said, “You look ready to see your mother. She’s in the yellow salon. She likes the sunshine there.”
    He nodded.
    “Kid,” Jerome said, “she’s going through a rough patch. Be patient.”
    Mark hid a smile at being called a kid. He supposed he’d always be one in Jerome’s mind. “I will. Promise.”
    As Mark walked down the broad hallway to the yellow salon, he steeled himself for the changes he might find in the always crisp and elegant Frances Parker Morgan. Funny thing… Change in his own life, he could handle, albeit grudgingly. Change in his mother’s made his jaw clench.
    Mark stepped through the French doors and into the yellow room. What he saw was a portrait of reassuring normalcy. His mother was seated at her fussy little appointment desk in the lee of the bay windows. She wore one of those suits too feminine to really be considered a suit, and looked, as always, wonderful.
    “Mom,” he said, his throat tight with emotion.
    She rose gracefully and walked toward him, the sunlight making the threads of gray in her pale blond hair shine like polished silver. He could see little impact from her stroke. Maybe a slight relaxation of the muscles on the left side of her face. He folded her in his arms and said, “You look beautiful.”
    Smiling, she returned his hug, then stepped from his grasp.
    “Wel—wel—” She frowned, drew an aggravated breath and tried again. “Wel—”
    Mark’s heart sank. He hated seeing her struggle like this.
    “Shit!”
    He blinked. In his thirty years, he’d never heard even a “damn” escape his mother’s mouth. He couldn’t hold back a laugh before he said, “Well, you’ve got that word down.”
    Humor shone in her brown eyes, and she laughed with him.
    “Don’t make light of this, Mark.” His father had always had a way of sneaking up on him. Mark watched as his dad rose from a wing chair at the opposite end of the room and made a show of folding his newspaper and putting it on a low table nearby. “Frances, I’ve already spoken to you about that crass language. No more of it.”
    Mark got the feeling that if she could have gotten “screw you” from brain to mouth, that—or something even more blunt—would have been the response delivered to her husband.
    Jerome had been right: It was about time Mark got himself home. All was clearly not well at Lakewind.

2
    Cara’s Rule for Success 2:
    Never tell your boss he’s stupid…even if he really
    should have
    already figured that out for himself.
    A S IT TURNED OUT , Howard’s dictum of “See me as soon as you get in” really meant, “Just so you know who’s top-dog now, see me after I’ve made you cool your heels for forty minutes. Then watch me take four phone calls before I stoop to acknowledge your presence.”
    Through it all, Cara kept a pleasant smile on her face and mourned Howard’s premature baldness. Otherwise, she’d have scoured his office for a hair to use as a personal effect on a voodoo doll. According to her calendar of retribution, he was overdue for a freak sinkhole to open beneath his desk and swallow him whole.
    When Howard finished his last phone call, he took off his glasses, held them up to the light and inspected for stray dust motes that might have had the gall to land on his lenses. Satisfied that he remained pristine, he slipped the titanium-rimmed, itty-bitty-to-the-point-of-ludicrous frames back on his face and finally focused on Cara.
    “We have found Rory’s