"Not like a Harte to be playing the field at your age."
"I do not play the field."
"What do you call it when you have relationships with several different women?"
"I call it a social life. And for the record, I did not have those relationships simultaneously. Hell, I've only dated maybe a half dozen different women in the past three years. I don't think that's excessive."
"Your mother and your grandmother and your sisters do."
"They're all obsessed with the idea of getting me married again."
"They think you've got some kind of psychological block. They've all decided that you've got a problem with getting serious about another woman because you're afraid of losing her the way you lost Amelia."
Nick watched Carson poke at a hole in the sand with a long stick while he tried to decide how to respond to that. "What do you think?" he said at last.
"Me?" Sullivan seemed surprised to be asked for his opinion. He halted beside a rock. "I think you just haven't found the right woman."
Nick realized he had been braced for a lecture. He allowed himself to relax slightly. "Yeah, that's sort of how I see it, too."
"But Octavia is different, isn't she?"
So much for letting down his guard. "Mitchell sent for you, didn't he? That's why you're here."
"Mitch feels protective toward Octavia Brightwell."
"Octavia can take care of herself."
"What about you?" Sullivan asked quietly.
It took Nick a beat or two to grasp that. "Don't tell me that you're afraid that I'm the one who might be in trouble here."
Sullivan's gaze rested on Carson and Winston, who had moved on to explore the entrance of a shallow cave. "Got one question for you."
"What?"
"Did you give Octavia The Talk?"
"Damn. I'm starting to think that everyone in the Northwest knows all the details of my social life. A guy could get paranoid."
"You didn't answer my question. Did you give Octavia your patented lecture on the subject of keeping things light?"
"You know what? I'm not going to answer that question."
Sullivan nodded. "Things went wrong this time around, didn't they? Mitch was right."
"I think we'd better change the subject, Granddad."
"Probably a good idea. Relationship counseling isn't exactly my forte. But for what it's worth, I came here to see what was going on, not to put pressure on you. I figure you can handle your own love life without my interference."
Nick raised his brows. "I'm stunned. Since when did anyone in our family ever hesitate to apply pressure whenever the opportunity arose?"
Sullivan exhaled heavily. "I put enough pressure on you when you were growing up. Always figured you'd take over Harte Investments, you know."
"I know."
"I didn't handle it well that day when you came to me and told me that you were leaving the company. Lost my temper. Said some things I shouldn't have said."
"We both did," Nick said quietly.
"Hamilton cornered me in my office that same afternoon. He was mad as hell. Angrier than I'd ever seen him. Told me to back off and leave you alone. Told me that you and Lillian and Hannah all had the right to make your own choices in life the same way I'd made mine and that he wasn't going to stand by and let me pressure any of you into doing what I wanted you to do. He really let me have it that day."
"Dad said all that?" Nick was surprised. He had known that he'd had his father's support when he made the decision to leave the company but he hadn't realized that Hamilton had gone toe-to-toe with Sullivan over the issue.
"Yes. Looking back, I can see that he was trying to protect you and your sisters from the kind of pressure I'd put him under when he was growing up. I didn't mean to force anyone into a mold, you know. It's just that I had always had this vision of H.I. descending down through the family. I couldn't believe that my grandson didn't want what I had spent so much of my life creating."
"The thing is," Nick said, groping for the words he needed, "Harte was your creation. I needed something that was all mine."
"And you found it in your writing. I understand that now." Sullivan's jaw tightened. "Something I've always wondered, though."
Nick glanced at him warily. "What?"
"Was it your leaving Harte after your first book was published that put the strain on your marriage?"
Nick sucked in a deep breath. "How did you know?"
"I didn't. It was your grandmother who guessed that things weren't going so well between you and Amelia there at the end. She had a hunch that the problems started when you decided to quit Harte. She always felt that, for Amelia, the company was part of the deal."
He did not know what to say, Nick thought. He had never realized that anyone had known about the fault line in his marriage.
"Grandmother is right," he said after a moment. "Amelia was having an affair with the man who was flying the plane that day. I think that, if she had lived, there would have been a divorce. She wanted out."
"And you wouldn't have been able to handle her cheating. You're a Harte."
"Yeah."
"Figured it was something like that." Sullivan kept his attention on Carson and Winston. "That's the real reason why you've been so cautious about getting serious with another woman. Got burned once and you're a mite nervous about sticking your finger back in the fire."
"Shit. Seems like everyone is trying to psychoanalyze me these days."
Sullivan's brows bristled into a sharp frown. "Who's everyone? Far as I know, only Rachel figured out the problems between you and Amelia. We never mentioned them to anyone else in the family or outside, for that matter."
"I told Octavia about how it was between Amelia and me. She leaped to the same conclusion that Grandma did."
"Huh. Women. Always trying to analyze what makes a man tick."
"Yeah."
"If only they knew how simple we really are."
"Better to keep 'em guessing," Nick said. "Probably makes us appear more interesting."
"True." Sullivan dug the tip of his cane into the coarse sand and started walking again. "Well, I think we've exhausted that subject. Tell me about this missing painting. You really trying to play private eye like that guy, John True, in your books?"
"I got into it because Virgil, A.Z., and Octavia asked me to look around a bit." Nick fell into step beside him. "They didn't think Valentine was looking in the right places, and they may have had a point. He suspects one of the Heralds probably took it and arranged to unload it in Seattle or Portland. He figures it's long gone."
