Free Lone Eagle by Danielle Steel

Thanksgiving. She wasn't even sure why herself, but she had. And now she had to find some plausible reason to explain it.
    “Has he called you before?”
    “No, he hasn't,” she was able to say honestly. Her mother didn't ask if he'd ever written to her. “I think he just likes Dad, and maybe he's lonely. I don't think he has any family. I don't know why he called, Mom, but when he said he had no plans for Thanksgiving, I felt sorry for him. I didn't think you and Dad would mind. It's kind of the spirit of Thanksgiving,” she said blithely, and helped herself to a carrot from the icebox. But her mother wasn't entirely taken in, she knew her better, although she'd never seen her daughter look quite like that. But at fifty-eight, she hadn't entirely forgotten what it felt like to be wooed by an older man when you were young, or to be smitten. But something about Joe Allbright worried her. He was so remote and so aloof, and at the same time so intense. He was the kind of man who, if he turned his full attention on you, could be overwhelming. And even if Kate didn't understand that, because she had no experience with it, her motherdid, and that was precisely why she was worried about him.
    “I don't mind if he comes to dinner,” Elizabeth Jamison said honestly, “but I mind very much if he's pursuing you, Kate. He's a lot older than you are, and not the sort of person I think you should fall in love with.” How did one decide those things, who to fall in love with, and who not? And how could one control it? But Kate only nodded at her mother.
    “I'm not in love with him, Mom. He's just coming to eat turkey.”
    “Sometimes that's how those things start, by being friends and becoming too familiar,” her mother warned her.
    “He lives in California,” Kate said blandly.
    “I'll admit, that makes me feel better. All right, I'll tell your father. And I hate to say it, but he'll be delighted. But I swear, if he offers to take your father up in some dangerous plane with him, I'll put arsenic in his stuffing. And you can tell him I said so.”
    “Thanks, Mom,” she beamed at her mother, and wandered nonchalantly out of the kitchen.
    “I thought you were going to help me!” her mother called after her just before the kitchen door closed.
    “I have a paper due on Monday, I'd better get started on it!” she shouted back, but her mother wasn't fooled. The look in Kate's eyes after her mother had said Joe could come to dinner absolutely terrified her. She had had that look in her own eyes only once, when a friend of her father's had secretly courted her and broken her heart, but fortunately her parents had discovered it and intervened before anything too awful had happened.And she had met Kate's father only weeks later. But now she was worried about Kate and Joe Allbright. She spoke to Clarke about it quietly in their bedroom later that evening. She told him about Joe coming to Thanksgiving dinner, but he didn't share her fears about him.
    “He's just coming to dinner, Elizabeth. He's an interesting man. He's not foolish enough to run after a girl of eighteen. He's a handsome guy, he could have any woman he wanted.”
    “I think you're being naive,” she said wisely. “She's a beautiful girl, and I think she's fascinated by him. He's a very romantic figure. Half the women in this country would be happy to run after Charles Lindbergh, and I'm sure some of them have tried. Joe has the same kind of mystique and charm. All that aloofness and his being a pilot make him seem like a romantic figure to a young girl.”
    “Are you afraid that Kate is running after him?” Her father looked startled. She had a good head on her shoulders, and her mother wasn't giving her credit for it.
    “Possibly. Actually, I'm far more concerned that he may be running after her. Why did he call her at school, and not you at the office?”
    “All right, I'll grant you, she's a lot prettier than I am. But she's a sensible girl, and he appears