Wild Heart Read Online Free Page B

anything.
    "Harley, I've come to speak to you about your son."
    "Hm?" He looked back and forth between Philip and Sam, smiling benignly. "Which one?"
    Aunt Estelle scowled in irritation. She was four years younger than her brother, hatchet-thin and pale like him, with a graying chignon from which stray hairs never escaped. All the passionate energy Papa put into his work, Aunt Estelle put into a different kind of obsession: social climbing. The Winters weren't among the city's richest families, not by any means. And yet, due in large part to Aunt Estelle's diligence (the other part to Sydney's marriage to Spencer Winslow Darrow, III), they were beginning to join the ranks of the most influential, that privileged elite who decided who was and wasn't allowed into the highest circles of its own closed society. Her ambition was to become a human gate, in imitation of the Armours, Pullmans, Swifts, and McCormicks, established gatekeepers whose company she coveted. Calling Aunt Estelle a snob was like calling her brother a little forgetful: an understatement.
    "Do you have any idea what your son was doing last night?" She had a piece of Philip's coat sleeve pinched between her fingers; a few years ago it would've been his ear. "Rather than studying the mathematics and geometry he came so close to failing last term at his expensive East Coast college? Well, Harley? What do you think he was up to?"
    "Haven't a clue, Estie. What."
    Had anyone but Papa ever called Aunt Estelle "Estie"? It was hard to imagine. She'd never been married, never even been rumored to have a beau. Old photographs showed a younger version of her present self, stiff-necked and narrow-eyed, rarely smiling. Her conversation was either instructive or censorious—which made her the reverse of an ideal traveling companion, Sydney had discovered. Her temperament was disapproving and unforgiving, and duty was her passion. Most people were afraid of her. She was easy to respect, a lot harder to love.
    She had good qualities, too, of course. She loved her cat Wanda, really loved her. She did superb needlework, and she had a spectacular green thumb; indeed, she was the first female vice president of the Chicago Rose Society. It was people she had no facility with—and if that was a failing caused by shyness, she'd learned long ago and very well how to disguise it as a flinty heart.
    "He left the house sometime in the night and did not return until dawn. Reeking of tobacco and—and worse," she finished ominously, choosing not to name, out of deference to Sam, what could possibly be worse than tobacco.
    Philip slipped out of her pincer grip and slouched over to the window. During the second his back was turned to her, he made a wild, moronic face at Sydney and Sam. This, of course, caused Sam to bark out a loud guffaw. He pressed his face into Sydney's skirts, hiding, and she automatically covered the back of his head with her hand.
    Papa blinked noncommittally behind his lenses. Finally he roused himself to say, "Tsk. That won't do, I suppose."
    "What do you propose for a punishment?"
    "Hm?"
    "You're his father. Philip is twenty years old, not a boy any longer."
    "No, indeed. Not a boy any longer."
    "He is heading down a path toward total self-destruction."
    "Is he? Hm! Can't have that."
    "After two years at Dartmouth College, his academic record is undistinguished, to say the least. His deportment is worse than Samuel's. He's insolent, lazy, and disobedient. A lax hand at this point is not a kindness to the boy, Harley: it's a dereliction of your duty as a parent."
    Poor Papa. He made more humming noises, pushing the papers around on his desk, taking off his glasses and cleaning them, sticking them back on his nose and looking curiously at Philip, no doubt trying to reconcile his sister's portrait of profligacy with the handsome, mild-eyed son smiling facetiously back at him.
    It was, Sydney realized, a perfect Winter family moment, everyone waiting for Papa to make up