“Is Henry okay?” he asked again.
“He’s just fine,” she lied. Dad’s brother, Henry, had died during a small plane crash. That wasn’t a memory she wanted to invoke. “Are you hungry?”
“Henry,” Dad said, staring off.
She flattened her lips into a thin smile, pressed a kiss to his forehead, and stood. “Let’s get you some lunch, Dad.”
Rosabel kicked off her heels and relished the pulsing in her feet at being liberated. She helped Dad to the table and attempted to keep conversation with him as she steamed broccoli and seared a few steaks. She blasted the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, anything that might jar Dad’s memory and bring him joy. They were some of his favorite artists.
“Steaks are smelling good,” she called over her shoulder. She knew Dad didn’t comprehend, but the doctors had encouraged her to treat him the way she would if he were his normal self.
Despair stung her chest. What was she going to do? Medical bills were climbing higher than ever. Could medicine really cost that much? And the in-home care. Pair that with the debt her dad had accrued before all of this happened, and she was barely keeping her head above water trying to manage his finances and hers.
And now she’d gone and quit her job.
If only her mom was around. Mom would know what to do. She’d passed away over a year ago.
Her parents had struggled with conceiving and didn’t have her until her mom was much older. Neither of them had seemed to care in the slightest about the age difference between themselves and the other parents. They’d called Rosabel their miracle baby, and she’d been raised with the perfect combination of love, kindness, affection, and firmness.
Rosabel had never thought anything of their age, not until Dad’s Alzheimer’s had struck in his sixties. Gradually, he’d lost interest in woodworking, in seeing friends. He’d become confused, had difficulty telling one color from another. Little by little, she’d watched the disease take its toll. He was closer to seventy now, and it broke Rosabel’s heart to see his empty eyes.
She’d considered putting him in a care facility, but not only had the cost been too much; she wanted to help him as much as she personally could.
She retrieved plates from the cupboard and dished her dad and herself each a helping. As she retrieved forks from the drawer, Dad stood and wandered into the living room. Rosabel guided him from his recliner back to the table once more. It took some coercion to get him to sit and stay there. Finally, he did, and she offered a quiet prayer of supplication to God—not only for the food, but for help to get her through what she felt sure was turning out to be an impossible situation.
Duncan had been charming once upon a time, when she’d first started working for him, but that had only lasted for a millisecond before his true personality reared its ugly head. He used his good looks to command a room, and she’d seen more than one woman swoon under the heat of his stare. But good looks were no excuse for bad behavior, and she could never let herself become another mindless victim. To think he’d asked her to date him?
Rosabel relived the moment, feeling it spike the speed of her pulse all over again. His dark hair styled away from his forehead, probably to better display the dissatisfaction resting on those steel brows and in his petulant hazel eyes. In his black pin-striped suit, black shirt, and tie, he’d been like a moving shadow. Granted, a gorgeous shadow, but who wanted lurking darkness everywhere they went?
Regardless, in his office, her breath had quickened the way it always did whenever they were face-to-face. He was probably unaware of the effect he had on her, of the fluttering in the center of her chest or the shift beneath her sternum. With the cleverness in his piercing gaze, the definition of his clean-shaven jaw, and the curve in his lip, Duncan Hawthorne was handsome. Far too handsome.
That was okay; his personality cured any real affection she would ever feel for him.
Even with her job working for Duncan, things had been tight. She needed to find something new, and fast. Duncan’s complimentary words earlier floated into her mind, unwanted. He’d called her strong and capable. For that one moment, Duncan had been a decent human being.
She couldn’t deny that she’d wanted more of that side of him, but then he’d brandished his old self once more. His presumptuous, entitled, selfish self. She tore into the mail, staring at the bills, feeling the weight of her situation pressing harder on her with every new envelope.
What was she going to do?
Duncan didn’t ordinarily have this hard of a time getting a woman off his mind, but Rosabel had gripped tightly with both hands and wasn’t about to let him go. He’d never been quite so transparently rejected before. In a recent conversation, Maddox had accused Duncan of falling for his assistant. Duncan had denied it, but maybe Maddox was right.
Maddox had read his feelings better than Duncan read them himself; Duncan had really—really—come to care about Rosabel.
She’d accused him of taking her for granted. Maybe he had. That much was clear when her replacement came that morning and offered him a Styrofoam cup—a cup! —of bitter coffee. He’d snapped at her to get him some cream, and she’d stalked out.
It was just as well. Not everyone could banter like Rosie.
New rumors spread around the office. Rumors about why Rosabel had left. Unlike the other gossip that made the rounds, this was anything but quiet. There were glances. There were oddly stilling conversations at his approach and the unmistakable sense he’d interrupted something that had nothing to do with their jobs and everything to do with him.
“He barked at her one too many times, if you ask me,” Gale muttered to Holly from within their shared cubicle. “Rose always insisted nothing was going on between them.”
Duncan rested an arm on the cubicle’s ledge and peered down at the blond and brunette heads clustered together. The sight was almost laughable. Almost. “Anyone I know?” he growled.
Gale leapt in her chair. Holly released a squeak, her face bright red as her eyes cast a culpable glance in his direction. Guiltily, the two women swiveled back to their screens without a word.
“Ridiculous,” Duncan grumbled, not caring if they heard him. Heat flushed through him, and he stormed to his office, closed the door, and whipped out his phone. He called the only person he could trust with this torrent of stupidity, emotional and otherwise. Rosabel had thrown his world upside down, and he didn’t have a clue what to do about it.
“She finally got sick of you,” Maddox said when Duncan told him she’d quit.
Duncan paced from the spider plant in the corner to the bookshelf near his bathroom and back again. “May I remind you how you ended up finding the love of your life? You and Adelie would never have done that photo shoot in the first place if I hadn’t talked you into it, and now you’re happily married. And you had an incredible honeymoon that Rosabel arranged for you … at my request.”
“All right,” Maddox said with a laugh. Duncan could picture him lifting his hand in surrender. “You miss her, don’t you?”
Pulse in his throat, Duncan paused before the window, but he refused to peer out at the golden spread of grass in the afternoon sunlight outside. Instead, he looked at the discarded Styrofoam cup in the garbage and relived the coffee’s acrid taste. “She knew how to make coffee the right way,” he gritted out with reluctance.