Paradise (76 page)

She had the satisfaction of finally seeing Matthew Farrell at a complete loss. "He's in love with your what?"

"Joel is my step-grandmother's son, but he's close to my age, so we agreed years ago to call each other stepbrother and sister. Her other son's name is Jason."

Matt's lips twitched. "I gather," he said dryly, "that Joel is gay?"

Meredith's satisfied smile vanished and her eyes narrowed at his tone. "Yes, but don't you dare say anything ugly about Joel! He's the kindest, dearest man I've ever known! Jason is straight and he's an utter pig!"

His expression softened at her militant defense of the one brother, and he lifted his hand, unable to restrain the urge to touch her. "Who would have guessed," he said, smiling into her stormy eyes as he brushed his knuckles over her arm, "that the prim and proper debutante I met long ago would actually have so many skeletons in her closet?"

Oblivious to Patrick Farrell, who was arrested on the bottom step, listening to their altercation with fascinated interest, Meredith jerked her arm away. "At least I haven't
slept
with all of mine," she retorted hotly, "and not one of them," she added, "has pink hair!"

"Who," Patrick asked in a choked, laughing voice as he finally made his presence known, "has pink hair?"

Matt glanced up distractedly and saw the cook carrying in a tray and placing it on the dining room table. "It's too early for dinner," he said, frowning.

"That's my fault," Patrick said. "I thought my plane left at
midnight
tonight, but just after you went to get Meredith, I realized it leaves at
eleven o'clock
. I asked Mrs. Wilson to set dinner forward an hour."

Meredith, who was eager to get the evening over with, was delighted with an early dinner, and immediately decided to ask Patrick to drop her off at home when he left. Buoyed up by that, she managed to make it through the entire meal with relative equanimity, and Patrick made that easier
by
keeping up a stream of impersonal conversation in which she participated only when and if Matt didn't. In fact, though Matt was seated at the head of the table and she was on his immediate right, Meredith managed to avoid not only speaking to him, but looking at him—until dessert was cleared away. The end of the meal seemed to chart an entirely new course for the evening.

Before that, she'd believed that Patrick had no idea of the unethical extremes his son had gone to, but as he arose from the table, she discovered his apparent lack of knowledge, and even his neutrality, was an illusion. "Meredith," he said in a censorious tone, "you haven't spoken a word to Matt since we sat down at this table. Silence isn't going to get you anywhere. What you two need is a nice big fight to get everything out in the open and clear the air." He glanced at Matt with a meaningful smile. "You can start just as soon as I kiss Meredith good-bye. Joe will be waiting out in front."

Meredith stood up quickly. "We're not going to have a fight. In fact, I have to leave. Could you drop me off at home on your way to the airport?"

Patrick's tone was as implacable as it was paternal and kind. "Don't be foolish, Meredith. You'll stay here with Matt and he'll take you home later."

"I'm not being foolish! Mr. Farrell—"

"Dad."

"I'm sorry—Dad," she corrected herself, and then because she realized this was going to be her only chance to enlist his support, she said, "I don't think you realize why I'm here right now. I'm here because your son has blackmailed and coerced me into seeing him for an eleven-week period."

She expected him to be surprised, to demand an explanation from Matt. She did not expect him to look at her unflinchingly, and then side with his son against her. "He did what was necessary to stop you from doing something you might both regret for the rest of your lives."

Meredith stepped back as if he had slapped her, and she struck back verbally with quiet force. "I never should have told either one of you the truth about what happened years ago. Tonight, all night, I've thought you didn't realize why I'm here now—" Her voice dropped and she shook her head at her own
naivete
. "I was planning to explain it to you, and to ask you to intercede."

Patrick lifted his hand in a gesture of helpless appeal to be understood, then he looked worriedly to Matt, who stood there, unmoved by the little tableau. "I have to go," he said, and lamely added, "Do you want me to give a message to Julie for you?"

"You can give her my sympathy," she quietly replied, turning around and looking for her purse and coat, "for being raised in a family of heartless men." She missed the tensing of Matt's jaw, but she felt Patrick's hand on her shoulder, and though she stopped, she refused to turn back. His hand dropped away and then he left.

The moment the door closed behind him, silence fell over the apartment ... heavy, waiting, stifling. Meredith took one step, intending to get her things, but Matt caught her arm and drew her back. "I'm getting my coat and purse and I'm leaving," she said.

"We're going to talk, Meredith," he said in the cool, authoritative tone she particularly hated.

"You'll have to physically restrain me to make me stay here," she warned him, "and if you try, I'll swear out a warrant for your arrest in the morning, so help me God!"

Torn between frustration and amusement, Matt reminded her, "You said you wanted our meetings to be private."

"I said
secret!"

Matt realized he was getting nowhere, that her animosity was building by the moment, and so he did the last thing he wanted to do; he issued a threat. "We had a bargain! Or do you no longer care what happens to your father?" The look she gave him was so filled with contempt that for the first time, he wondered if he'd been wrong about her ability to hate. "We're going to talk tonight," he said, gentling his tone, "either here or at your place. You decide where."

"My place," she said bitterly.

They made the fifteen-minute trip in complete silence. By the time she opened her apartment door, the atmosphere was vibrating with tension.

Meredith went directly to a lamp, turned it on, then she walked over to the fireplace because it was as far as she could possibly get from him. "You said you wanted to talk," she reminded him ungraciously. Crossing her arms over her chest, she leaned her shoulders against the mantel, waiting for him to start trying to bully and coerce her, which she was positive he meant to do. For that reason, she was slightly disconcerted when he made no effort to do either, and instead shoved his hands into his pockets and stood in the center of the living room, slowly looking around at the cozy room as if he were fascinated by every piece of furniture and each knick-knack.

Baffled, she watched as he took one hand out of his pocket and picked up a photograph of Parker in an ornate antique frame from the end table near his hip. He put the picture back, and then let his gaze drift from the antique secretary she used as a desk to the dining room table with its silver candlesticks, to the chintz-covered Queen Anne chairs before the fire. "What are you doing?" Meredith demanded warily.

He looked around at her then, and the quiet amusement in his eyes was almost as startling as what he said. "I'm satisfying years of curiosity."

"About what?"

"About you," he said, and if Meredith hadn't known better, she'd have believed there was tenderness in his expression. "About how you live."

Wishing she'd stayed out in the open instead of backing herself into a wall, she watched him walk forward, finally stopping in front of her, both hands in his pockets again. "You like chintz," he said with a boyish half smile. "Somehow I never imagined you with chintz. It suits you though—the antiques and bright flowers; it's warm and inviting. I like it very much."

"Good, then I can die happy," Meredith said, increasingly wary of the warmth in his eyes and his smile. "Now, what did you want to talk about?"

"For one thing, I'd like to know why you're even angrier tonight than you were yesterday."

"I'll tell you why," she said, her voice shaking with suppressed resentment. "Yesterday I yielded to your blackmail and agreed to see you for eleven weeks, but I will not—
will not
—participate in this farce you apparently want to enact!"

"What farce?"

"The farce of pretending you want a reconciliation, which is what you did in front of the lawyers on Tuesday and your father tonight! What you want is revenge, and you found a subtler, cheaper way of getting it than suing my father!"

"In the first place," he pointed out, "I could have staged a public massacre in a courtroom for the five million dollars I'm giving you if this doesn't work out. Meredith," he said forcefully, "this is not about revenge! I told you at that meeting exactly why I was asking for this time with you. There's something between us— there has
always
been something between us—and not even eleven years could kill it! I want it to have a chance."

Meredith's mouth fell open, and she gaped at him, torn between ire at his outrageous lie and mirth that he actually expected her to believe it. "Am I supposed to think"—she had to stop to swallow back an angry, hysterical laugh—"that you've been carrying some sort of torch for me for all these years?"

"Would you believe it if I said it's true?"

"I'd have to be an idiot to believe it! I told you tonight that I and everybody who subscribes to a magazine or reads a newspaper knows about hundreds of your affairs!"

"That statement is an outrageous exaggeration, and you damned well know it!" In skeptical silence she raised her brows. "
Dammit
!" Matt swore, angrily shoving a hand through the side of his hair. "I didn't expect this. Not this." He walked away from her, then he turned on his heel, his voice ringing with harsh irony. "Will it help convince you if I admit that you haunted me for years after our divorce? Well, you did! Would you like to know why I worked myself into the ground and took insane gambles, trying to double and triple every cent I made? Would you like to know what I did the day my net worth actually reached one million dollars?"

Dazed, incredulous, and unwillingly enthralled, Meredith stared at him, and without meaning to she nodded slightly.

"I did it," he snapped, "out of some obsessive, demented determination to prove to you I could do it! The night an investment paid off and put me over the one-million-dollar mark, I opened a bottle of champagne, and I toasted you with it. It wasn't a friendly toast, but it was eloquent in its way. I said, To you, my mercenary wife—may you long regret the day you turned your back on me."

"Shall I tell you," he continued bitterly, "how I felt when I finally realized that every woman I took to bed was blond, like you, with
blue eyes, like yours, and
that I was unconsciously making love to you?"

"That's disgusting," Meredith whispered, her eyes wide with shock.

"That's exactly how
I
felt!" He walked back to stand in front of her, and he softened his voice, but not much. "And since we're having confession time here, it's your turn."

"What do you mean?" Meredith said, unable to believe everything he'd said, and yet
half
convinced that somehow he was telling her what he believed was true.

"Let's start with your incredulous reaction when I said I think there's been something between us all this time."

"There is nothing between us!"

"You don't find it odd that neither of us remarried during all these years?"

"No."

"And, at the farm, when you asked for a truce, you weren't feeling anything for me then?"

"No!" Meredith said, but she was lying and she knew it.

"Or in my office," he demanded, firing questions at her like an inquisitor, "when I asked you for a truce?"

"I didn't feel anything, either of those times, except ... except a casual sort of friendship," she said a little desperately.

"And you're in love with Reynolds?"

"Yes!"

"Then what the hell were you doing in bed with me last weekend?"

Meredith drew a shaky breath. "Well, it was something that just happened. It didn't mean anything. We were trying to comfort each other, that's all. It was... pleasant enough, but no more than that."

"Don't lie to me! We couldn't get enough of each other in that bed, and you damned well know it!" When she remained stubbornly,
resistantly
silent, he pushed her harder. "And you have absolutely no desire to make love with me again, is that it?"

"That's it!"

"How would you like to give me five minutes to prove you're wrong?"

"I wouldn't," Meredith flung back.

"Do you honestly think," he said more quietly, "I'm naive enough not to know you wanted me as badly as I wanted you, that day in bed?"

"I'm sure you're experienced enough to gauge how a woman feels to within a fraction of a sigh!" she shot back, too angry to realize what she was admitting as she added, "But at the risk of wounding your damnable confidence, I'll tell you
exactly
how I felt that day! I felt like I've always felt in bed with you—naive, clumsy, and gauche!"

He looked ready to explode. "You
what?"

"You heard me," she said, but her satisfaction at his stunned reaction was short-lived, because instead of being enraged at his overestimation of her feelings, he put his hand against the mantel for support and started to laugh. He laughed until Meredith got so angry that she tried to move away, and then he sobered abruptly.