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Mother got total custody, of course. Not that she gives a shit about me, but Daddy does, and she knew it would hurt him even more if he couldn’t even send me a birthday card. So that’s the way she had her lawyers set it up. So he can’t even write to me.” She looked at her hands again. “They sent him to the penitentiary. The one in Connecticut.”
    “Somers Penitentiary?”
    “Yes, I think that’s it.”
    “But he’s out now.”
    “Yes. On parole.”
    “So he’s still in Connecticut?”
    She chewed on her lip. “I—think so. I mean, he likes it there and all, and…I mean where else would he go?”
    “If he’s still on parole, he probably has to stay in Connecticut. And you would like to find him?”
    “Yes. I would.”
    He gave her a hard look. “Why haven’t you tried to see him before this?”
    She looked away. A tear glittered in the corner of her eye. “I know,” she said. “I feel like a total—” She shrugged, letting him fill in the blank. “But I was just a kid, and I was in L.A. He was three thousand miles away, and in prison. You don’t know what Mother c an be like.”
    “Yes, I do,” R.J. said with a snort.
    “I couldn’t even leave the house. Let alone come all the way across the country, and—” She shook her head and kept looking away.
    “All right, I get the picture.” R.J. sighed. He was actually thinking about it, actually considering helping this kid. But hell, why not? If it had half a chance of infuriating Janine Wright, he’d pay for the privilege.
    He gave the kid a grin. “All right, Mary. I’ll take a look.”

CHAPTER 10
    That night, Casey’s last night in town, R.J. tried one more time. He dressed up in his suit, the same one he had worn to his mother’s funeral. Hell, it was his only suit. He braved the crosstown traffic at rush hour and picked Casey up at her office. He took her to a quiet place in the Village and fed her grouper with raspberry sauce, a $100 bottle of wine, hothouse asparagus with hollandaise sauce and peach cobbler.
    Then he took her uptown to Belle’s apartment, which he hadn’t sold yet. It had a fireplace, and R.J. wanted a fireplace for what he had in mind.
    R.J. led Casey into the apartment and sat her in front of the fire on one of Belle’s elegant settees. He’d paid Tony, the doorman, forty bucks to light the fire and have the place ready. Tony, an ex-cop with a strong sense of romantic whimsy, had even put a spray of fresh roses on the table. They must have set him back at least forty bucks.
    R.J. looked at Casey. She was watching the flames flicker. Her profile looked so perfect in the firelight it was almost like he could hear it shouting his name. She looked up and smiled and he sat beside her.
    He’d gone to a lot of trouble to set the mood just right, and he’d thought for several days about the right thing to say and the way to say it, but when he sat down and took Casey’s hand it all flew out of his head and what he said was, “I wish you didn’t have to go.”
    And Casey looked at him, amusement showing in those cool blue eyes, and she said, “Well, I do have to go.”
    “Well, but I wish you didn’t have to.”
    She patted his knee and let her hand rest there on his thigh.
    “Are you going to give me your address out there?” he asked her and she pretended to look surprised.
    “Do you want it?” she asked.
    He nodded and put a hand on top of hers. “Yeah,” he said. “I do.”
    She looked back at the fire and gave a very small shrug. “All right,” she said. “I’ll let you know. When I get settled.”
    “Thanks.”
    She began to move her hand on his thigh, just a slight, warm caress. “Now that you’re rich, maybe you’ll fly out and see me sometime. When I’m not too busy.”
    “Yeah. I could do that.”
    “Well,” she said softly, “that might be nice.”
    It was the closest she had ever come to saying how she felt about him and R.J. melted. He leaned over and kissed her.
    Afterward,