Paradise (72 page)

Suddenly everyone was in motion. Matt jumped out of his chair and headed around the table, Levinson grabbed for his sleeve and missed, Stuart shoved his chair back and tried to thrust Meredith behind him, but Meredith flung him off. "Stay away from me!" she warned Stuart before whirling on Matt, her hands clenched into fists at her sides. "Bastard!" she hissed. "Start dictating your terms. How
often
do you want it—how—" Matt reached for her at the same moment Meredith swung, her palm crashing against his face with a force that snapped his head sideways.

"Stop it!" he ordered, grabbing her upper arms, but his gaze was on Stuart, who was heading forward, reaching for him.

"Bastard!" she sobbed, glaring at Matt. "You bastard, I trusted you!"

Matt yanked her against his chest, shrugging Stuart off. "Listen to me!" he said tautly, turning Meredith aside. "I am not asking you to sleep with me! Do you understand me? I'm asking for a chance,
dammit
! Just a chance for eleven weeks!"

Everyone was standing; everyone froze, even Meredith stopped struggling, but her whole body was trembling and she covered her face with her hands. Glancing at their spectators, Matt ordered sharply, "Get the hell out of here."

Levinson and Pearson gathered up their papers to leave, but Stuart stayed where he was, watching Meredith, who was neither returning nor resisting Matt's embrace. "I'm not going anywhere until you take your hands off her and she tells me she wants me to leave."

Matt knew he meant it, and since Meredith had stopped resisting, he dropped his arms, reaching into his pocket for a handkerchief to give her.

"Meredith?" Stuart said uncertainly to the back of her head. "Do you want me to wait outside or stay here? Tell me what you want me to do."

Humiliated past all endurance at the realization she'd jumped to erroneous conclusions and made such a scene, and furious because she'd been prodded into doing both, Meredith ungraciously snatched Matt's handkerchief.

"What she wants to do right now," Matt told Stuart with a grim effort at humor, "is throw another punch at me—"

"I can speak for myself!" Meredith gritted out, dabbing at her eyes and nose and stepping back a pace. "Stay here, Stuart." She raised liquid, angry, mistrustful eyes to Matt, and said, "You wanted this all legal and formal. Tell my attorney what you mean by wanting a chance, because I obviously don't understand."

"I'd rather do it in private."

Well, she said with a haughty glance that was spoiled by the tears still sparkling on her lashes, "that's just too bad! You're the one who insisted on doing this today, and in front of your lawyers! You couldn't possibly have spared me this and discussed it with me in private some other time—"

"I called you yesterday to try to do exactly that," he told her. "You instructed your secretary to tell me to deal with you only through your attorney."

"Well, you could have tried again!"

"When? After you flew to
Mexico or
Reno or wherever you intended to go on your sudden trip this week to divorce me?"

"And I was
right
to try," she said ferociously, and Matt bit back a smile of pride. She was splendid—already recovering her composure, her chin up, her shoulders square. She wasn't able to look the lawyers in the face yet, though, so he glanced over her shoulder at them. His own lawyers were heading out with their coats and briefcases, but Meredith's lawyer stubbornly remained where he stood, arms crossed over his chest, watching Matt with a mixture of antagonism, suspicion, and blunt curiosity. "Meredith," Matt said. "Would you at least ask your attorney to wait in my office. He can see everything from there, but he doesn't need to hear any more than he has."

"
I
have nothing else to hide," she said wrathfully. "Now, let's get this over with.
What exactly do you want from me?"

"Fine," Matt said, deciding he didn't give a damn what Whitmore heard. Sitting down on the edge of the conference table, he crossed his arms over his chest. "I want a chance for us to get to know each other for the next eleven weeks."

"And just how do you intend for us to do that?" she demanded.

"The usual ways—we'll have dinner together, go to plays—"

"How often?" she interrupted, looking angrier than ever.

"I hadn't thought about it."

"I'm sure you were too busy refining your blackmail and thinking up ways to ruin my life!"

"Four times a week!" Matt snapped out the answer to her question about how often. "And I am not trying to ruin your life!"

"What
days
of the week?" she fired back.

His anger died, and he fought back another smile. "Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and—Wednesday," he said after a moment's thought.

"Has it occurred to you that I have a career and a
fiance
?"

"I don't want to interfere with your career. Your
fiance
will have to back off for eleven weeks."

"This isn't fair to him—" Meredith cried.

"Tough!"

The harsh word, his cold tone and implacable features, were so eloquent of his entire ruthless personality, Meredith finally realized nothing she said or did would dissuade him from accomplishing his goal. She was his latest target for a hostile takeover. "Every rotten thing they say about you—it's all true, isn't it?"

"Most of it," he bit out, looking like she'd slapped him again.

"It doesn't matter who you hurt or what you have to do to get what you want, does it?"

His face tightened, "Not in this case."

Her shoulders sagged, her bravado fleeing. "Why are you doing this to me? What have I done to you— deliberately, I mean—to make you try to tear my life to pieces like this?"

Matt couldn't think of an answer he could give her now that she'd accept without either laughing in his face or getting furious. "Let's just say that I think there's something between us—an attraction—and I want to see how deep it goes."

"God, I cannot believe this!" she cried, wrapping her arms around her stomach. "There is
nothing
between us! Nothing but a horrible past."

"And last weekend," he pointed out bluntly.

Meredith hid her chagrin in anger. "That was—that was
sex!"

"Was it?"

"You ought to know!" she shot back, remembering something she'd overlooked of late. "If half of what I've read about you is true, you hold the world's record for cheap affairs and meaningless flings. God, how could you sleep with that rock star with the pink hair?"

"Marianna
Tighbell
?"

"Yes! Don't bother denying it! It was all over the front page of the
National Tattler."

Matt swallowed a shout of laughter, watching her pace slowly back and forth, loving the way she moved, the way she clipped her words when she was angry, the way she clutched him when she was close to a climax—as if she weren't certain she could count on one. Maybe she wasn't always able to count on one with her other lovers.. .. She was gorgeous and innately passionate; he knew better than to hope she hadn't been to bed with dozens of men. He settled for hoping they'd all been selfish, inept, or dull. Preferably, all three. And impotent.

"Well?" she said, rounding on him. "How could you sleep with that—that woman?"

"I've been to a party in her home. I have never slept with her."

"Am I supposed to believe that?"

"Apparently not."

"It doesn't matter," Meredith said, giving herself a mental shake. "Matt, please," she implored him, trying for one last time to make him abandon his insane plan. "I'm in love with someone else."

"You weren't on Sunday when you and I were in bed—"

"Stop talking about that! I'm in love with Parker Reynolds, I swear to you I am. I've been in love with him since I was a girl. I was in love with him before I met you!"

Matt was about to brush that off as highly unlikely for the same reason he thought it was unlikely now, when she added, "Only he had just gotten engaged to someone else, and I'd given up."

That information cut him deeply enough to make him stand and brusquely say, "You heard my offer, Meredith, take it or leave it."

Meredith stared at him, aware that he'd suddenly turned aloof and hard. He meant it—the discussion was over. Stuart realized it too, and he was already putting on his coat and walking toward Matt's office, pausing in the doorway to wait for her. Deliberately turning her back on Matt, she walked over to get her purse, taking vengeful pleasure in making him think she was scorning his bargain, but her mind was whirling in panic. She picked up her purse from the conference table, feeling his eyes boring holes through her back, then she walked purposefully to the sofa to get her coat.

Behind her, Matt spoke in an icy, ominous voice. "Is this your answer, Meredith?"

Meredith refused to reply. She swallowed, trying for one last moment to think of some way to reach him, to touch his heart. But he had no heart. Passion was all he was capable of; passion and ego and revenge were what he was made of. She picked up her coat from the sofa and draped it over her arm, leaving Matt in the conference room without so much as glancing over her shoulder at him. "Let's go," she told Stuart, wanting Matthew Farrell to think, at least for a minute or two, that she'd thrown his ultimatum in his face .. . hoping against hope that he would call out to her that he'd only been bluffing, that he wouldn't do this to her father or her.

But the silence behind her was unbroken.

Matt's secretary had evidently gone home for the day, and when Stuart had closed the connecting door behind the two offices, Meredith stopped and spoke for the first time. In a suffocated voice, she said, "Can he do what he's threatening to do to my father?"

Angry about several different things, including Meredith's being put under this unreasonable pressure to make a decision, Stuart sighed. "We can't prevent him from filing the lawsuits, or bringing your father to trial; I don't think he stands much chance of gaining anything except revenge, if he does it. Win or lose, though, the day he files those lawsuits, your father's name will be all over the headlines. How is your father's health?"

"Not good enough to risk being put to the strain of that kind of publicity." Her eyes dropped to the documents he was holding, then lifted beseechingly to his. "Are there any loopholes in there we could use?"

"Not one. No traps either, if that's any reassurance. They're fairly simple and forthright, they say exactly what Levinson and Pearson said aloud." He put them on the secretary's desk for Meredith to read, but she shook her head, avoiding the sight of the words, and, picking up a pen from the desk, she scribbled her name on the bottom.

"Give them to him and make him sign them," she said, tossing the pen aside as if it were dirty. "And make that—that maniac write down the days of the week that he named and initial the changes. And make it read so that if he misses a day, he can't make it up with another!"

Stuart almost smiled at that, but he shook his head when she handed the papers back to him. "Unless you want the five million dollars or the
Houston land more than you seemed to in there, I don't think you need to go through with this. He's bluffing about your father."

Her face lit up with eagerness and hope. "Why do you think so?"

"It's a hunch. A strong hunch."

"A hunch, based on what?"

Stuart thought of the solemn tenderness on Farrell's face when he was holding Meredith's hand. He thought of the way he'd looked when she slapped him and the lack of roughness in the way he'd restrained her afterward. And, although Stuart had originally thought that Farrell had some sort of eleven-week orgy in mind, the man had seemed genuinely taken aback by that accusation. Rather than tell her such nebulous things, Stuart said
something more concrete: "If he's ruthless enough to do this to your father, then why is he being so generous in his offers to you? Why not simply threaten you with suing your father to make you give in?"

"I suppose he thinks he'll have more fun if I'm less resistant. I also think he likes my knowing—and my father knowing—that he can throw that kind of money around and not even miss it. Stuart, my father humiliated him terribly when he was twenty-six, and he's still trying! I can imagine the kind of malice Matt must feel for him, even if you can't."

"I am still willing to bet you that man won't lift a legal hand against your father whether you agree to this or not."

"I want to believe you," she said, calmer now. "Give me a sound reason to, and we'll walk out of here and throw those papers in the wastebasket."

"This is going to sound . .. odd . . . given what I've seen of Farrell today and the reputation he has, but I don't think he'd do anything to hurt you."

She laughed—a short, bitter laugh. "How do you explain intimidation and humiliation, not to mention blackmail? What do you call what he put me through in there?"

Stuart shrugged helplessly. "Not blackmail—he's paying you the money, not the reverse. I would call it pulling out all the stops, using every single means you have to get what you want because you want it so badly. I also think it got out of hand in there, thanks to Pearson's strong-arm tactics and flair for drama. I was watching Farrell most of the time, and every time Pearson got tough with you, Farrell looked angry. I think he picked the wrong attorneys for a gentle finesse attempt like this was supposed to be. Levinson and Pearson play the game only one way—they go for the throat and they play to win."