Family Man

going to call you Katy.” He smiled mockingly. “Zeke and I tend to be casual about that kind of thing.”
    Katy arched a brow and glanced meaningfully around the decrepit living room. “You're not big on formality, I take it.”
    “Unlike my grandmother,” he agreed.
    “What would you know about Justine Gilchrist's attitudes toward such matters?” Katy retorted. “You don't even know her.”
    “I met her once. She showed up at the funeral. That was enough. I have no interest in getting to know her any better.”
    Katy winced inwardly. The last thing she wanted to do was bring up old and painful memories for Luke. She knew his parents and his beautiful wife, Ariel, had all been killed in a plane crash three years before. They had been on their way to Los Angeles to rendezvous with Luke for the opening of the newest in the successful group of upscale restaurants Luke and his father had established in California.
    The restaurants Luke and his father had created on the Gold Coast had been even more successful than the group owned by Luke's grandmother, Justine, in Seattle. There had never been direct competition between the two corporations because they had never gone toe-to-toe in the same cities. But the implicit rivalry had been there, and everyone in the family knew it. Thornton Gilchrist had set out to show Justine he did not need her company or her backing to be successful, and he had proved it. Luke had followed in his father's footsteps.
    Luke had sold all of the restaurants he and his father had owned within months after the funeral, however. Rumor had it that he had made a fortune on the sales, even though he had literally dumped the restaurants onto a glutted market. No matter what he did, Luke made money.
    He had never built another restaurant. These days he used his remarkable monetary skills to arrange financing for companies in all areas of the food and beverage business. He made it possible for new restaurants to open, chains to expand, companies to merge. From what Katy had been able to glean, Luke orchestrated the deals, took a sizable commission, and vanished from the scene. He had apparently lost all personal interest in the restaurant business, which had been in his family's blood for three generations.
    Katy took a deep breath and forced herself to sound conciliatory. It was not easy. She was extremely annoyed with Luke Gilchrist. “You must know by now that your grandmother wishes to end the feud that has existed between herself and your side of the family all these years.”
    Luke's gaze was expressionless. “There is no feud.”
    “How can you say that?”
    He shrugged. “We don't have what you might call a close relationship, but there is no feud. A feud implies active, ongoing hostilities. I don't care enough about her or the rest of the family to bother doing battle with any of them.”
    Katy shivered again. It occurred to her that the Gilchrist clan should consider itself fortunate under the circumstances. If the Bastard had gone to war with them, they would have been in even worse shape today than they were already.
    “Luke, I'm here to ask you to put the past aside,” Katy said quietly. “Your family needs you.”
    Pain, cold and dark, flashed for an instant in Luke's eyes. Then it disappeared, sinking back into the pit where it had originated. “My family is dead.”
    Katy looked across the room at Zeke, who was asleep. “I understand your loss. My parents were both killed in a boating accident when I was nineteen. My brother and I are the only ones left in our family.”
    There was a short, taut silence.
    “I'm sorry,” Luke said finally. Some of the cold had evaporated from his voice. Again, there was silence. Then Luke said, “How the hell did you wind up working for my grandmother?”
    “She was kind enough to give me a decent job when I needed one desperately.”
    “Is that so?” Luke eyed her with curiosity. “How desperate were you?”
    Katy hesitated, sorting through her words. “When my parents were killed there was very little left except a small trust fund that had been set aside for my brother's college education. My father, we discovered, had been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for two years before his death. After he died everything feel apart financially.”
    “So you were flat broke?”
    “For all intents and purposes, yes. Matt was only eight, and I needed work fast in order to be able to keep him with me. I was only a sophomore in college