She wasn’t the only victim of Tyler’s desertion. Faith called her that afternoon. “Daddy said I could call you if I had a problem, but he told me not to bother you too much. Am I bothering you?”
The loneliness in the soft voice tugged at Hailey’s conscience. She couldn’t take out her anger with the father on the child. “Of course not. Do you have a problem?”
“Well, sort of,” Faith hedged, and Hailey got the distinct impression that she was stalling, searching for an excuse to have called. “Do you think I should perm my hair? You know, kinda like Stevie Nicks.”
Hailey bit her lip to keep from laughing. “I think we should talk it over during dinner.”
“You mean it, Hailey? Gee, that would be terrific.” The whining had disappeared and exuberance had taken its place.
“Why don’t we drive over to Pigeon Forge and eat there?”
“Okay! What should we wear?” Faith asked with a grown-up inflection, and Hailey wondered if she were imitating her late mother.
“We’ll go sloppy in jeans and T-shirts. Let’s go to a place where they have a huge salad bar and then well have two desserts.”
Faith was giggling. “We’ll both get fat and then when Daddy comes back, he won’t know either of us.”
Hailey thought that Tyler certainly wouldn’t know her. She wouldn’t be cooperative and eager the way she’d been the night before, telling him with actions, if not with words, how much she craved his touch, his kiss. “I’ll pick you up at seven. I’m taking off early tonight.” If she were going to be rebellious, she was going all the way. “Tell the manager—”
“Harry.”
“Tell Harry I’ll have you back by ten.”
“Okay, see ya.” Just before she hung up, Faith added, “Daddy said you’d think up neat things for us to do.”
So, Hailey thought as she sat in her office tight-lipped and fuming, he had expected her to follow his wishes. He had foreseen no problems with her granting him this favor.
She had calmed down by the time she picked up Faith at the hotel. They had a fun evening, competing in a game of miniature golf after enjoying a huge country dinner. They spent each evening after that together. Hailey enjoyed the girl, who was beginning to talk about some of the heartaches she had suffered. Hailey listened and knew instinctively that no one had given the child such undivided attention before. Once the floodgate had been let down, Faith’s innermost anxieties spilled out.
The only fly in the ointment, for Hailey at least, was Faith’s constant references to her father. To her, Tyler was a paragon of the male sex—physically, intellectually, morally. Hailey pretended for the girl’s sake that she found him equally wonderful.
She had heard the word “Daddy” so often that when Faith shrieked it from across the indoor pool at Glenstone Lodge late one evening, Hailey didn’t at first realize that he was actually there, standing before her, looking down at her as she lounged on one of the pool-side chaises.
From the page of her novel, her eyes flew up to his with the same suicidal determination of a moth flying into a flame. For breathless seconds they stared at each other before he broke the eye contact to turn around and call to Faith. “Who is that graceful mermaid I see swimming out there?”
“Oh, Daddy,” Faith said, blushing. Then she called, “Watch me. Watch now.” With that she plunged beneath the surface and her two spindly legs pushed out of the water. They swayed like a pair of unsteady flagpoles as she did her handstand on the bottom of the pool.
When she was once again standing in the waist-deep water, beaming over her accomplishment, Tyler grinned broadly and applauded. “You’ve been practicing.” While Faith was swimming to
the side of the pool, he turned back to Hailey. “How long have you been lying here, in that indecent swimsuit, providing the ogling yokels the kind of visions that dreams are made of?”
She didn’t want him to tease her with clever words, she didn’t want him to look thoroughly masculine, and sexy enough to turn the head of every woman who chanced to pass by. When he looked at her the way he did now and spoke with that soft, low, seductive purr, she couldn’t think. Her memory blurred and she had a hard time remembering why she despised him so.
Before she once again made a monumental fool of herself, she sat up, swung her legs over the edge of the chair and asked, “Did you have a nice trip?”
“Boring business meetings,” he said, tugging on Faith’s pigtails as she ran up to him. Playfully, he shook the water he squeezed out of them off his hands.
Hailey dumped her book into her large shoulder bag and stood up, pulling on her terry-cloth wrapper.
“Where are you going, Hailey?” Faith asked. Her chin was dripping water onto her bony chest. Her skin and lips were turning slightly blue as she shivered. Her eyes looked myopic without her glasses.
“I’d better go on home.”
“But we were—”
“What were your plans?” Tyler addressed the question to Faith rather than to Hailey.
“Hailey brought her clothes over and after we swam, we were going out to dinner.”