When she met Elise and Olivia, Kathy had been married for six years, and she was as involved in her father’s advertising firm as any of his employees.
But Kathy wasn’t paid. Or acknowledged.
Ray thanked her. Praised her. But he didn’t offer to try to get her a job in the company.
When she mentioned it, he said, “Baby, you know that what is mine is yours. Go buy yourself something nice. Something sparkly.”
As she stood in front of her father, his desk stacked high with papers and boards and tapes of recordings, it hit her that everything with Ray hadn’t happened yet. There was no reason for the rage Kathy had just shown. Sure, her father had dismissed her, but then to him, she was a girl who only planned office parties and entertained clients.
And to the men sitting in her father’s office, she was just the boss’s pretty, plump daughter who sometimes brought them homemade muffins.
The face Kathy wanted to see was Andy’s. He was the man who got away. Her father had just offered her a job so maybe she and Andy could work together. Had he been impressed with her?
Kathy turned around slowly to look at the men in the chairs behind her. A couple of them seemed to be admiring. Impressed. But Andy, he was disgusted. Repulsed. His upper lip was curled into a sneer and he wouldn’t meet her eyes.
She thought of the woman Andy would eventually marry. Yeah, Cheryl was built like Kathy, but she was so gentle and sweet that the whole office took advantage of her.
Kathy didn’t pick up any of the papers she’d slammed on her father’s desk, didn’t look at another person, just went to the door and opened it. None of the men held it for her, not after the unfeminine display she’d just made.
The distance to Ray’s office seemed long, but she made it and was even able to close the door behind her. But she was standing there shaking—and she didn’t know if it was from fear of having at last stood up to her father or from having seen the disgust on Andy’s face.
Okay, she thought, as she walked to Ray’s desk. She’d achieved one of the things she wanted, which was to get herself into her father’s company. She was not going to think about what happened when the three weeks were up and she no longer knew about the future. How was she going to live up to what she’d just done? Maybe she shouldn’t have—
“Don’t turn coward now.”
She turned to see Cal Nordhoff standing in front of the closed door. She hadn’t heard him enter. Kathy dropped down into Ray’s chair. “Go away.”
“And miss the aftermath of that display? Never!” He went to a cabinet, opened it, and poured vodka and tonic water into a glass and held it out to her.
“No thanks,” she said, but when he didn’t put it down, she took it and drank half of it in one gulp. “Shades of Mad Men,” she muttered, not knowing if the show was on the air or not.
Cal smiled. “Are you Peggy, but you look like Joan?”
Kathy almost smiled at his allusion, but she didn’t. “Why are you here? To tell me I’ll never make it in a man’s world? That my father and the other men will eat me alive?”
Cal’s handsome face lost its smug look and he seemed genuinely puzzled by what she’d said.
“No, not at all. I was glad of what you did, and I think it’s about time. You’ve been helping your dad for free for too long.”
It was Kathy’s turn to be puzzled. “I’ve never done anything.” Since this was before she’d married Ray, that was true.
“You’re kidding, aren’t you?” Cal sat down on Ray’s black leather Chesterfield sofa and looked at her. “You aren’t aware that Bert Cormac owes you for his own personal market research?”
“I know he asks Mom and me what we think of products, but I’ve certainly never made a presentation to him.”
“Not that you know of, but ole Bert tells me. ‘Kathy likes this one,’ he says. ‘She thinks the blue they used in the package is off. Let’s present it in a darker shade.’”
She knew exactly which campaign he was talking about. Her father—thankfully—stayed in his apartment in the city most of the time, but when he came home he talked only of advertising. And he always brought home cartons of products and asked what they thought of them. When he left, she and her mother sighed in relief.
“Kathy, pretty girl,” Cal said, “you’ve been part of your dad’s advertising business since you were on a bottle. He told me he experimented in formulas with you. One of them made you throw up.”
She was leaning back in Ray’s big leather chair, the one that had been custom-made to fit him, and thinking about what Cal had said. “Why do you always sneer at me?”
He couldn’t hide the shock on his face. “I didn’t know you saw that.”
It was true that before she married Ray, she hadn’t noticed Cal at all. Between Larry and Andy and her fear of her father, she hadn’t seen much else in her life. But she had an idea that it was only after her marriage that Cal had really begun his looks of contempt. And with Ray’s boundless energy around her, she didn’t have time to dwell on why one of her father’s employees didn’t like her.
In fact, if it hadn’t been for Olivia asking about Cal, she probably wouldn’t have been so angered at the way he’d smirked at her in her father’s office today. And if she hadn’t been enraged, she might have slunk out without presenting the ads.