Paradise (61 page)

She sat down beside him on the bed. "You have to eat in order to keep your strength up," she explained, then she reached out and picked up the glass of white liquid from the tray, holding it out to him.

He took it, turning it in his hand, eyeing it warily. "What is this?"

"I found a can of it in the cupboard. It's warm milk."

He grimaced, but obediently raised it to his lips and swallowed.

"With butter in it," Meredith added when he choked.

Matt thrust the glass into her hand, leaned his head back against the pillows, and closed his eyes. "Why?" he whispered hoarsely.

"I don't know—because it's what my governess used to give me when I got sick."

His lids opened, and humor flickered briefly in his gray gaze. "To think I used to envy rich kids—"

Meredith sent him a laughing look and started slowly to lift the cover off the plate of toast.

"What's under there?" he demanded warily.

She swept off the cover then, revealing two slices of cold toast, and Matt sighed with a mixture of relief and weariness; he didn't think he could possibly stay awake long enough to chew it. "I'll eat it later, I promise," he said, making a superhuman effort to keep his eyelids from slamming shut. "Right now I just want to sleep."

He looked so tired and drained that Meredith reluctantly agreed. "All right, but at least take these aspirin. If you take them with milk, they're less likely to bother your stomach." She handed them to him along with the glass of buttered milk. Matt grimaced at the warm white liquid, but he obediently took the aspirin and chased the tablets down with it.

Satisfied, Meredith stood up. "Can I get you anything else?"

He shuddered convulsively. "A priest," he gasped.

She laughed. And the musical sound lingered in the room after she left, drifting through his sleep-drugged mind like a soft melody.

By
noon
the pills had worn off, and Matt felt vastly better, although he was surprised to discover how weak he was after doing nothing more strenuous than take a shower and put on a pair of jeans. Behind him the bed beckoned invitingly, and he ignored it. Downstairs, Meredith was evidently making lunch, and he could hear her moving about in the kitchen. He took the tiny electric travel shaver he'd bought in
Germany out of its case, plugged it into the current converter, looked in the mirror, and forgot the shaver was running quietly in his hand. Meredith was downstairs ...

Impossible. Inconceivable. But true nonetheless. Fully awake now, her motives for being here and her calm acceptance of his verdict about
Houston seemed improbable at best. Matt knew it, but as he began to shave, his mind skated away from reexamining her behavior too closely. No doubt the reason was that it was far more pleasant not
to do that right now. Outside, it was snowing again, and cold as the
Arctic, judging from the icicles clinging to the tree limbs. But inside there was warmth, and unexpected companionship, and the simple truth was he wasn't fit to resume his packing tasks and he wasn't sick enough to be contented lying in bed staring at the walls. Meredith's company, although not restful by any wild stretch of the imagination, was going to be a pleasant diversion.

In the kitchen, Meredith heard him moving above her head, and she smiled as she put the canned soup she'd prepared into a bowl and the sandwich she'd made for him onto a plate. From the moment Matt's hand had closed around hers, a strange peace had swept over her, a peace that had now burst into bloom like roses in springtime. She had never really known Matt Farrell, she realized, and she wondered if anyone truly did. According to everything she had read and heard about him, his business foes feared and hated him; his executives admired and were awed by him. Bankers courted him, CEOs asked his advice, and the Securities & Exchange Commission that presided over the stock exchange watched him like a hawk.

With few exceptions, she realized as she considered the stories she'd read, even people who admired him subtly gave the impression that Matthew Farrell was a dangerous predator to be handled gently and never angered.

And yet, Meredith thought with another soft smile, he had lain upstairs in that bed, still believing that she had coldly aborted his child and divorced him as if he were some insignificant beggar... and he had still
taken her hand in his. He had been willing to forgive her. The memory of that moment, the sweetness of it, was incredibly poignant.

Obviously, Meredith decided, all those people who talked of him with fear and awe didn't know Matt well at all! If they did, they'd realize that he was capable of enormous understanding and great compassion. She picked up the tray and headed upstairs. Tonight, or in the morning, she would tell him about what had happened to their baby, but not right now. On the one hand, she was desperately eager to have it done with, to eradicate completely and forever the hurt, the anger, the confusion that they had both felt. Then the slate would be wiped clean; they could find real peace with
each other, perhaps even real friendship, and they could put a graceful, congenial end to this ill-fated, tumultuous marriage of theirs. But as much as Meredith wanted to have it all out in the open, she was dreading the actual confrontation as she'd never dreaded anything before. This morning Matt had been willing to let bygones be bygones, but she did not like to think about his probable reaction when he discovered the extent of her father's treachery and duplicity.

For now she was content to let him exist in blissful ignorance of what was coming, and to give herself a short respite from what had been a wildly stressful and draining twenty-four hours ... and what was bound to be a painful and wrenching discussion for her as well as for him. It occurred to her that she was inordinately satisfied at the prospect of spending a quiet evening in his company, if he was well enough, but she didn't think that was in the least significant or alarming. After all, they were old friends in a way. And they deserved this chance to renew their friendship.

Pausing outside his door, she knocked and called, "Are you decent?"

With amused dread, Matt sensed instinctively that she was bringing him another tray. "Yes. Come in."

Meredith opened the door and saw him standing in front of the mirror with his shirt off, shaving. Stunned by the odd intimacy of seeing him like that again, she jerked her gaze from the sight of his bronze back and rippling muscles. In the mirror his brows rose when he noted her reaction. "It's nothing you haven't seen before," he remarked dryly.

Chastising herself for acting like an inexperienced, unsophisticated virgin, she tried to say something suitably flippant and blurted out the first banal thing that came to mind. "True, but I'm an engaged woman now."

His hand stilled. "You've got yourself a problem," he said lightly after a
pulsebeat
of silence. "A husband
and
a
fiancé."

"I was homely and unpopular with boys when I was young," she joked, putting down the tray. "Now I'm trying to collect men to make up for lost time." Turning toward him she added on a more sober note, "From something your father said, I gather I'm not the only one who has a problem with a spouse as well as a fiancé. Evidently you're thinking of marrying the girl whose picture is on your desk."

With an outward appearance of nonchalance, Matt tipped his head back and ran the shaver up his neck to his jaw. "Is that what my father said?"

"Yep. Is it true?"

"Does it matter?"

She hesitated, oddly unhappy with the direction the conversation was taking, but she answered honestly. "No."

Matt unplugged the razor, feeling physically weak and loath to deal with the future right now. "Could I ask a favor?"

"Yes, of course."

"I've had an exhausting two weeks, and I was actually looking forward to coming out here to find some peace and quiet—"

Meredith felt as if he'd slapped her. "I'm sorry I've interrupted your peace."

Warm amusement sent a wry smile to his lips. "You've
always
cut up my peace, Meredith. Every time we come within sight of each other, all cosmic hell breaks loose. I didn't mean that I'm sorry you're here, I only meant that I'd like to spend a pleasant, restful afternoon with you, and not have to deal with anything heavy right now."

"I feel the same way, actually."

In complete accord, they stood silently contemplating each other, and then Meredith turned away and picked up the heavy navy-blue bathrobe with a Neiman-Marcus label that was lying over the back of the chair. "Why don't you put this on, and then you can sit here and eat your lunch."

He shrugged obligingly into the robe, knotted it at the waist, and sat down, but Meredith saw the uneasy way he was looking at the covered plates. "What's under that bowl?" he asked warily.

"A string of garlic," she lied with sham solemnity, "to hang around your neck." He was still laughing when she swept off the cover. "Even I can manage to cook a can of soup and slap sandwich meat between two slices of bread," she informed him, smiling back at him.

"Thank you," he said sincerely. "This is very nice of you."

After he finished eating, they went downstairs and sat in front of the fire he insisted on building. For a while they talked pleasantly about nothing more controversial than the weather, his sister, and finally the book he'd been reading. Obviously, Matt had amazing recuperative powers, she thought, but even so, she could see that he was getting tired. "Wouldn't you like to go back up to bed?" she asked.

"No, I like it better down here," he answered, but he was already stretching out on the sofa, leaning his head against a throw pillow. When Matt awoke an hour later, he had the same thought he'd had that morning when he first opened his eyes—that he'd only dreamed Meredith was there. But when he turned his head slightly and looked over at the chair she'd been sitting in earlier, he saw that it was no dream. She was there—jotting notes on a yellow writing tablet propped on her lap, her legs curled beneath her. Firelight gilded her hair, brushed her smooth cheeks with a faint rosy glow, and cast shadows off her long curly lashes. He watched her as she worked, smiling inwardly because she looked more like a schoolgirl doing her homework than the interim president of a national retail chain. In fact, the longer he watched her, the more impossible the truth seemed. That misconception was immediately disproved when he quietly asked, "What are you working on?"

Instead of "algebra" or "geometry," the woman in the chair smiled and said, "I'm writing a market trend summary to present at the next board of directors meeting—one that I hope will convince them to let me expand our private label merchandise. Department stores," she explained when he looked genuinely interested, "particularly stores like Bancroft's, make a large profit from selling merchandise with their own labels on it, but we're not taking full advantage of it the way Neiman's and Bloomingdale's and some of the others have."

As he had been last week at lunch, Matt was instantly intrigued by this business persona of hers, partially because it was in such contrast to the other images he'd had of her in the past. "Why haven't they taken advantage of it?" he asked. Several hours later, when their discussion had ranged from Bancroft's merchandising to its financial operations, to its problems with product liability and expansion plans, Matt was no longer merely intrigued, he was impressed as hell with her ... and, in a crazy way, extremely proud of her.

Sitting across from him, Meredith was vaguely aware of having somehow earned his approval, but she was so wrapped up in their discussion, so awed by his instantaneous grasp of complicated concepts, she'd lost all track of time. The page she'd been writing on was now filled with notes she'd made about his suggestions, suggestions that she was eager to think about further. His last suggestion, however, was out of the question. "We'd never be able to pull that off," she explained when he urged her to look into buying their own clothing production facilities in
Taiwan or
Korea.

"Why not? Owning your own facilities would eliminate all your problems with quality control and loss of consumer confidence."

"You're right, but I couldn't possibly afford it. Not now and not in the near future."

His brow furrowed at her apparent lack of understanding. "I'm not suggesting you use your own money! Borrow it from the bank—that's what bankers are for," he added, forgetting for the moment that her fiancé was a banker. "Bankers lend you your own money when they're certain that what you're borrowing it for is a sure thing, then they charge you interest for borrowing it back from them—and when the loans are paid off, they tell you how lucky you are to have them taking risks on you. You surely know how that works by now."

Meredith burst out laughing. "You remind me of my friend Lisa—she's not very impressed with my
fianc
é
's profession. She thinks Parker ought to just give me the money whenever I need it without insisting on the usual collateral."

Matt's smile faded a little at the reminder of her
fiance's
existence, and then it turned to shock when she added lightly, "Believe me, I'm becoming an expert on commercial borrowing. Bancroft's is borrowed out, and so am I, to be honest."