CHAPTER THREE
San Francisco
Jared Sloan cursed the sadist who had invented the tuxedo and had another go at his bow tie. It’d been years since he’d tied one. He’d managed all the other parts of the tux with relative ease and probably would have handled the bow tie all right, but he was running late. At least, except for cleaning, his tuxedo hadn’t cost him a dime. His mother—proper Boston Winston that she was—had insisted on buying it for him years ago, and all he’d had to do was resurrect it from the back of his closet. Another failure with the tie, though, and back under his baseball cards it went. He’d wear jeans. Which would embarrass his father and his daughter. He’d never hear the end of what an insensitive lout he was and sparing himself that was worth another try at his tie, and maybe even the six or seven hours he was doomed to spend in his tuxedo. It was a close call.
He smiled at the sound of Mai’s undignified squeal from the entry. “Daddy!” Then she caught herself and calmed her voice to that of a fourteen-year-old would-be sophisticate. “Dad, are you almost done? The limousine’s here.”
Only for you, babe. Jared successfully completed his third try at what was, in fact, a simple knot. He quickly appraised himself in the mirror. The tux’s classic style helped conceal its age; both the Boston Winstons and San Francisco Sloans would be willing to claim him tonight. He had the strong Sloan cheekbones, dark hair, teal eyes and their general rakish, devil-may-care look. His height—he was six-two—and his more powerful build came from his mother, the second of Wesley Sloan’s four wives, who’d exited from Boston society years ago and now lived on the east coast of Canada in what she called self-imposed exile. She’d never been so content.
“Wow,” Mai said when he joined her in the entry. “Don’t you look handsome.”
He laughed. “You’re no dog yourself.”
Mai wrinkled up her pretty face. She was a small, slim girl, wiry and strong, with almond eyes and high cheekbones, a squarish jaw and a reddish cast to her fine, dark hair. From the time she was a tot, Jared had tried to get her to concentrate just on being herself. But lately he’d begun to realize that Mai wasn’t entirely sure who that was. He tried to understand. Her mother, whom Mai had never known, had been Vietnamese. In Vietnam, Amerasians were known as bui doi. The dust of life. The expression broke his heart, for Mai was, in a very real way, the light of his life.
“That’s not much of a compliment,” she told her father.
“Wouldn’t want you to get a swelled head. You’re going to be swimming in compliments by the end of the evening. Ready?”
The glint in her eyes and the way she kneaded her hands together told Jared his only child was champing at the bit, anxious to zip ahead of him to the elegant black limousine waiting incongruously outside their small redwood-and-stucco house on Russian Hill. But she restrained herself. A bright ninth-grader, she had lost none of the energy and exuberance of her early childhood, but was channeling it in new directions. Still, Jared found himself half expecting she’d run out and kick the limousine’s tires, check under the hood, demand to try out every seat and see how every gadget worked, what every button did. A year ago she would have—in fact, her grandfather had told him, had.
Tonight, however, she walked regally out to the monstrous car, careful not to muss her gown made of clear, cool magenta fabric that exquisitely complemented the delicate tones of her skin. She quietly thanked the chauffeur by his first name, George, when he held the door for her, and tucked her knees together and her ankles to one side when she settled back into the leather seat.
Jared came around to the driver’s side and climbed in beside her. He hated limousines more than he did tuxedos. At sixty-five, Wesley Sloan was an internationally renowned architect and could well afford his expensive tastes. The repeated offers he’d made to Jared to join his San Francisco–based firm were enough to make most architects salivate, but Jared, the eldest of Wesley’s three children by ten years, continued to turn him down. He preferred to work solo, in the small studio behind his house, specializing in renovations, restorations and additions—“glorified carpentry,” his father called it. But Jared’s half sister Isabel had recently earned her graduate degree in architecture from UCLA and seemed ready to make the move up to San Francisco, something he hoped would take that last bit of heat off him. Wesley Sloan knew Jared wasn’t going to change his mind, but he wasn’t a man who liked to accept defeat.
If Wesley had known how much his granddaughter enjoyed riding in his limousine, he’d have tried sending it around every afternoon and never mind her father.
It was a cool, damp, foggy evening, the kind that made Jared intensely aware of his aloneness. He watched silently out the window as the car wound its way down the narrow, twisting streets of Russian Hill.
A small crowd was gathered in front of the elegant newly opened San Francisco Villa Hotel, designed by Wesley Sloan. He and his current wife were hosting their annual charity ball, a major social event on the city’s spring calendar. Wesley had issued an invitation to his granddaughter every year since her twelfth birthday. This year, Jared had relented and agreed to let her attend. As he had before her, Mai would have to learn to deal with being a Winston and a Sloan on her own terms—not theirs, not his.
But as much as he believed in her and admired her spirit and self-assurance, she was just a kid. His kid. And he couldn’t stop himself from wanting to protect her.
She tugged on his arm. “Daddy—look.”
Jared was already looking. As the limousine pulled up to the curb, eight or ten huge Harley-Davidson motorcycles materialized out of the fog and formed a menacing half circle around the car.
“George?” Jared asked.
“I don’t know what’s going on, Mr. Sloan,” the driver said. “There’s no way I can pull out—we’re stuck here.”
“Are they going to hurt us?” Mai asked, trying to hide her nervousness.
Jared shook his head. “No, they’ve got too big an audience. I think they just want to intimidate us.”
They revved their engines and made a lot of noise, glowering at their own reflections in the limousine windows. They were an ugly lot—overweight, tattooed, unkempt. Not one wore a helmet. Tough guys. Jared spotted two policemen emerging tentatively from the crowd. A newspaper photographer was clicking madly away.
“To hell with this,” Jared muttered and turned to Mai. “Stay put.”
He threw open the door as far as he could, until it touched the edge of the lead bike, and climbed out, directing his attention at the driver, a mean-eyed individual with a battered leather jacket stretched over his fat gut. Jared asked nonchalantly, “What’s up?”
“We weren’t invited to the party.”
Jared laughed. “Consider yourself lucky.”
The photographer had worked his way around the limousine behind the two policemen, who didn’t appear to be in any hurry to assert their authority.
“Hate to miss a party,” the biker said. He made a point of coughing up a huge clam and spitting so that it landed at Jared’s toes.
Jared wasn’t impressed. The guy and his pals were just getting their kicks intimidating a bunch of rich folks at a high-society gathering, only they’d picked the wrong target. Jared had dealt with scarier people than this.
“You can go in my place,” he said, almost meaning it. “Got a tux strapped to that contraption?”
The biker seemed to appreciate Jared’s humor and started to grin, but then Mai popped her head out behind her father and pulled his hand. “Daddy, please come back inside—”
“Hey—who’s the gook kid?”
Jared heard Mai’s sharp intake of breath and saw the look of amusement her obvious fear and hurt elicited from the biker.
He snapped.
Putting all his weight on the door of the limousine, he lunged toward the big motorcycle. The force of the door hitting the bike’s front tire caught the driver off guard and wrenched the handlebars out of his hands. He couldn’t clear the bike and went down with it, catching his left leg underneath it. Jared didn’t lose any time. He leaped over the fallen motorcycle and jumped on the bastard who’d insulted his daughter.
It wasn’t the other bikers coming to the aid of their trapped buddy or the police jumping into the fray that stopped Jared from beating the guy senseless.
It was Mai.
“Daddy!” she cried.
He released the man’s flabby throat and climbed back over the motorcycle, putting out his arms as Mai ran to him, near tears. He told her softly, “It’s okay. They’re just punks.”
Reluctant to prolong the confrontation, the police let the bikers shove off. Jared noticed he’d gotten grease on his tuxedo and his tie had come undone. So much for sartorial splendor.
He put out his arm for Mai. “Madame?”
She giggled and laid her small hand on his crooked elbow. “I should have helped you beat that guy up.”
“One hothead in the family’s enough.”
The photographer continued to click away, but Jared ignored him and the cheering onlookers as he escorted his daughter to her first charity ball.