Paradise (82 page)

A lady on Matt's right thrust her shopping bag at him. "Could I have your autograph?" she pleaded, searching in her purse for a pen in the apparent hope he would sign the bag. Matt reached for Meredith's arm, shouldering past the woman. Behind him, she announced in offended anger to everyone else, "Who wants his autograph anyway? I just remembered that he also dated a porn queen!"

Matt could feel the tension radiating from Meredith even after they dashed through the revolving doors and were outside in the frigid night air. "Despite what you're thinking," he said
defensively, knowing how much she hated notoriety, "people don't ask me for autographs. It's only happening now because our faces are plastered all over the local news."

She flashed him a dubious look and said nothing.

The situation in the restaurant across the street was worse than her store. The place was packed with Christmas shoppers having early dinners, and they were waiting in double lines in the vestibule. "Do you think we should wait?" Meredith asked him. And before the words were out or her mouth, the buzzing started around them. Opposite them, a woman leaned across the three-foot space that separated her line from the one Matt and Meredith were in. "Excuse me," she said, speaking to Meredith with her eyes on Matt. "Aren't you Meredith Bancroft?" Without waiting for Meredith to answer, she said to Matt, "And that makes
you
Matthew Farrell!"

"Not really," Matt said shortly, and it didn't take the pressure he was exerting on Meredith's arm to make her agree to get out of there.

"Let's go to my apartment and order a pizza," she said when they reached her car in its reserved spot in the parking garage.

Furious with fate for doing this to him, Matt waited while she unlocked the car and got into it, but he stopped her from closing the door. "Meredith," he said firmly, "I have
never
dated a porn queen."

"That's a load off my mind," she said with a sidelong smile, and Matt was surprised and relieved that she'd evidently regained much of her humor and equilibrium. "And I will admit," she added, turning on the ignition and waiting for the old BMW to catch, "Meg Ryan and Michelle Pfeiffer
are
both blondes."

"I know Michelle Pfeiffer very casually," he said, helpless not to defend himself, "and I've never met Meg Ryan."

"Really?" Meredith dryly replied, her hand on the door handle to close it. "Mrs. Millicent was all excited because she was supposedly on your yacht for a cruise."

"She was. I wasn't!"

Chapter 46

They had pizza and wine at her place—picnic-style, on the floor in front of the fire. They'd finished eating and were having the last of the wine before they tackled the work they'd brought in. Matt leaned forward and reached for his wineglass, surreptitiously watching her gazing into the fire, her arms wrapped around her
updrawn
knees. She was, he thought, an utterly captivating bundle of contradictions. A few weeks ago he'd watched her walk down the grand staircase at the opera, looking like a regal socialite. At her office today, in a business suit, surrounded by her staff, she was every inch an executive. Tonight, sitting before the fire in jeans that hugged her shapely bottom and a bulky cable-knit sweater that came almost to her knees, she was ... the girl he had known long ago. Maybe that change from executive to artless girl was why he couldn't gauge her mood or guess her thoughts. Earlier, he'd thought she was upset over the mention of the women allegedly in his life, but all during their meal she'd been delightful company.

Now, as he watched her staring into the fire, he wondered about the faint smile at her lips that had appeared at odd times throughout their meal.

"What's so funny?" he asked idly, and his question unexpectedly made her eyes widen and shoulders start to shake with laughter. "Well?" he prodded, frowning, when she shook her head, folded her arms on her knees, and hid her laughing face in them. "Meredith?" he said a little curtly, and she laughed harder.

"It's you," she managed, giggling. "You, with those stockings clinging to you—" Matt started to grin even before she added merrily, "If you could have seen the look on your face!" She got herself under control, and with her head still in her arms, she turned her laughing face toward him and stole a peek. What she saw made her roll her eyes and dissolve with laughter again. "Cary Grant!" she chortled, her shoulders shaking. "Mrs. Millicent must be getting senile! You no more resemble Cary Grant than a p-panther resembles a p-pussy cat!"

"Which one am I?" he chuckled, but he already knew she likened him to the panther. Lying back, he folded his arms beneath his head and smiled up at the ceiling, utterly contented with his lot in life—for the first time in his life.

"I suppose we'd better get to work," she said finally. "It's
eight forty-five
already."

Matt rolled reluctantly to his feet, helped her clear away the few remnants of their meal, then walked over to the sofa, unlatched his briefcase, and took out a thirty-page contract he needed to read.

Across from him, Meredith sat down in a chintz-covered chair and took out her own work. Despite her earlier merriment, she'd been vibrantly and uneasily aware of his nearness throughout their meal. Having Matt there, behaving as tamely as the kitten she'd laughed about, was anything but amusing or soothing to her nerves. For unlike Mrs. Millicent, she didn't underestimate the threat he posed—he was that panther, patiently stalking his prey. Unhurried, graceful, predatory, and dangerous. She understood the threat he posed— and even so, she was more hopelessly attracted to him with each
hour he was near.

She glanced covertly at him. He was sitting across from her on the sofa, his shirt-sleeves folded back on his forearms, his ankle propped on the opposite knee. As she watched, he put on a pair of gold wire-rimmed glasses that looked incredibly sexy on him, opened a file folder on his lap, and started to read the documents inside it.

He felt her watching him, and he glanced up and saw her staring at the glasses in surprise. "Eyestrain," he explained mildly, then he bent his head and returned his attention to the documents.

Meredith admired his ability to reach a state of instant, intense concentration, but she couldn't come near matching it. She stared into the fire, thinking about what Sam Green had told her. From there her thoughts drifted to the bomb scare in the New Orleans store, the problem with Gordon Mitchell, and the phone call from Parker yesterday, telling her that he'd have to find her another lender to make her the loan for the Houston land. All of it revolved around and around in her mind as fifteen minutes became twenty and then thirty.

Across from her, Matt said quietly, "Want to talk about it?"

Her head jerked around and she saw him watching her, the contract he'd been reading lying discarded in his lap. "No," she said automatically. "It's probably nothing. Nothing you'd be interested in at least."

"Why don't you try me?" he offered in that same calmly reassuring voice.

He looked so competent, so decisive and invincible, sitting there, that Meredith decided to take advantage of what he was offering. She leaned her head against the back of her chair and briefly closed her eyes, but her voice was a ragged sigh. "I have the strangest—the
uneasiest
—feeling," she admitted, lifting her head and looking at him with unguarded candor, "that something is happening, or going to happen, and it's terrible. Whatever it is, it's terrible."

"Can you isolate the source of your uneasiness?"

"I thought you'd laugh at what I just said," she admitted.

"It's not a laughing matter if you're actually sensing something you're unconsciously aware of. That's instinct, and you should pay close attention to it. On the other hand, your feeling could be coming from stress, or even from my reentry into your life. The last time I was in your life, all hell broke loose for you. You could be superstitiously fearing the same thing will happen again."

She flinched at his accurate summary of her feelings, but she shook her head at the idea that this was the source of her uneasiness. "I don't think it's coming from stress or you. I can't seem to put my finger on what's bothering me."

"Start with remembering as closely as you can—to the hour, if possible—when you first felt it. I don't mean when you stopped to notice it and think it out, but before that. Think back to a sudden feeling of restlessness, or mild confusion, or—"

She gave him a weary, laughing look. "I feel that way most of the time lately."

Matt returned her grin. "That's my fault, I hope." She caught his meaning, drew a shaky breath, obviously to warn him that he'd promised not to get personal tonight, so he returned to the subject at hand. "I meant more a feeling that something is odd—even if it seemed very good, very fortunate at the time."

His last words led her effortlessly to the way she felt when her father told her the presidency was hers, but only because Gordon Mitchell had turned it down. She told Matt about that and he considered it, and said, "Okay, good. That was your instinct warning you that Mitchell wasn't acting predictably or sensibly. Your instincts were right. Look what's happened since then: He's become an executive you can't trust—one who you suspect is taking bribes. Furthermore, he's violating established standards for your store's merchandise and openly opposing you in meetings."

"You put a lot of faith in your instincts, don't you?" she asked with surprise.

He thought of how much he was already gambling on his instinctive belief that the feelings she'd had for him before were still there—faint embers that he was trying to fan into a blaze again. He was letting himself dream of their heat, letting the need for it grow within him with every additional moment he spent with her. If he failed, his defeat would be even more devastating because he was counting so desperately on success. And knowing all that, he was still taking the full risk. "You have no idea," he said with feeling, "how
much
faith I place in them."

Meredith considered all that, and finally said, "The source of my feeling of impending disaster is probably easier to locate than I made it seem. For one thing, we had a bomb scare at our
New Orleans store on Monday that cost us a great deal in lost revenue. That's our newest store, and it's barely breaking even. I'm personally guaranteed on its loans. If it starts running at a loss, the income from our other stores will make up the difference, of course."

"Then why are you worried about it?"

"Because," she said with a sigh, "we've expanded so quickly that our debt level is very high. We didn't have much choice—Bancroft's either had to go forward and get into the mainstream of competition or face becoming obsolete. The problem is, we don't have much money on hand to cover us now if something should happen to cause several of our stores to suddenly start losing money."

"Couldn't you borrow it if that happens?"

"Not too easily. We're borrowed up to the teeth right now for all our expansion costs. I'm worried about more than just that though." When he continued to regard her in waiting silence, she admitted, "There's a record number of shares of our stock being traded on the stock market every day. I'd noticed it in the newspapers for the past couple of months, but I assumed investors were reading about us and realizing we're a good long-term investment for their money, and we are. But," she said, drawing a steadying breath before she could make herself say the words, "Sam Green, our attorney, thinks all those shares may be going because someone is getting ready to try to take us over. Sam has contacts on Wall Street, and evidently there are whispers about a takeover attempt on us. Parker caught wind of a similar rumor in October, but we ignored it. It may be true after all. It'll be weeks before we know the names of those who've bought our stock lately. Even when we do, it may not tell us anything significant. If a company wants to keep their intention of taking us over a secret, they won't be buying our stock in their own names. They'll have other people buy it for them as well. They may even be illegally parking the stock in accounts with fake names." She caught herself and gave him a wry look. "You already know all about how it's done, don't you?"

He quirked an amused brow at her. "No comment."

"One company you started to take over a few months ago paid you fifty million just to go away and leave them alone. We couldn't do that, and we don't have the kind of money right now that it would take to try to fight a takeover. God," she finished miserably, "if Bancroft's were to become nothing but a division of some big corporate conglomerate, I couldn't bear it."

"There are steps you can take to protect yourself in advance."

"I know, and the board of directors has been discussing them for two years, but they haven't
done
anything really effective yet." Restlessly, she got up and poked at the fire.

Behind her, Matt said, "Is that the extent of your worries or is there more?"

"More?" she said on a choked laugh, straightening. "There's more, but what it all boils down to, I guess, is that things that never happened before are happening now, and it's giving me a generalized feeling of" doom. There's the fear of being a takeover target, and bomb scares, and now Parker can't lend us the money for
Houston, so we'll have to deal with a new lender."

"Why can't he?"

"Because Reynolds Mercantile is looking for money right now, not lending big sums of it to
overborrowed
customers like us. I wouldn't be surprised if poor Parker isn't worried about Bancroft's being able to keep making payments on the loans we already have with him."