Matt gave Meredith two seconds to decline, and when she hesitated, he looked at Parker and stated flatly, "I'm afraid you won't."

"Now, look, Farrell! Saturdays may be yours for the next eleven weeks, but this one is mine. It happens to be Meredith's thirtieth birthday, and our plans were made weeks ago. We're going to Antonio's."

Turning to Lisa, Matt said shortly, "Do you have plans for Saturday?"

"Nothing I can't change, actually," Lisa said, startled.

"Fine, we'll make it a foursome," he decreed. "But not at Antonio's. It's too public and too bright in there. We'll be recognized in seconds. I'll pick the place." Irrationally annoyed because Meredith hadn't told Parker no, he nodded curtly and left.

Parker followed on his heels, but Lisa lingered, a dazed expression on her face as she sank down on the arm of a chair. "My God, Mer," she said, laughing, "no wonder you agreed to his bargain. That is the most amazing man I've ever met—"

"There's nothing funny about any of this," Meredith replied, refusing to comment on Matt's personal qualities. "My father isn't supposed to read or watch anything on his cruise that isn't completely frivolous. If he decides to break the doctor's rules and watch the news, I'll be lucky if we don't have to send a medical evacuation plane for him."

"If I were you," Lisa said in disgust, "I'd be sending fighter jets out to get him, after what he did eleven years ago!"

"Don't make me think about that now, it only drives me insane with frustration. When he comes home, he and I will have it out. I've thought about all this for days, though, and in fairness to my father, I think he probably believed he was protecting me from a fortune hunter who would break my heart in the end."

"So he broke it instead!"

Meredith hesitated then quietly admitted, "Something like that." Then she forced her personal life out of her mind for now, because that was the only way she could cope. "I'll see you Saturday," she told Lisa.

Chapter 45

At 4:30 the following afternoon Matt glanced up from the conference table where he was meeting with three of his executives and reached for the telephone. "If it's not an emergency," he told Eleanor before she could give a reason for interrupting him, "I don't want to hear about it until I'm done here."

"Miss Bancroft is on the line," she said with a smug smile in her voice. "Does that constitute an emergency?"

"Yes, it does," he said wryly, but as he answered Meredith's call, he wasn't feeling especially pleasant. He'd phoned her late the previous afternoon to tell her Spyzhalski was under control and in a place reporters couldn't get to him. Her secretary had said Meredith was going to be in meetings for several hours, so rather than let her stay in suspense, Matt dictated a carefully worded message to the secretary and asked her to take it to Meredith. When she didn't bother to call him back last night, he'd wondered if she was too busy celebrating the news in bed with Reynolds to bother. All week the possibility that she was still sleeping with her fiance had been haunting him. Last night it had kept him awake until dawn. Flicking a curt glance of apology at the men seated around the conference table, Matt picked up the phone.

"Matt," she said, sounding harassed, "I know this is your night, but I have a meeting at five o'clock, and I'm swamped with work."

"At the risk of sounding inflexible," he said in a cool, implacable voice, "a deal's a deal."

"I know," she replied with an exasperated sigh, "but besides having to be here late, I also have to bring some work home with me, and come in again tomorrow morning. I'm really not up to a big night out or a big confrontation with you either," she added with a trace of wry humor.

In a tone that conveyed his unwillingness to cooperate, he said, "What are you suggesting?"

"I was hoping you'd be willing to meet me here, and we could have an early dinner, somewhere casual and close by."

Matt's annoyance evaporated, but on the off chance she was trying to taper him off by setting a precedent for quick public dates, he added in a polite but firm voice, "That's fine. I have a briefcase full of my own work. I'll bring it along and after dinner we can spend a quiet, productive evening at—your place or mine?"

She hesitated. "Will you promise we'll work? I mean, I don't want to have to ... to have to ..."

His lips twitched with a smile as her voice trailed off. Obviously she did have pressing work, and equally obviously she was worried that he would try to maneuver her into bed. "We'll work," he promised.

Her relief came out in a laughing sigh. "Okay. Why don't you meet me here about six o'clock? There's a good restaurant just across the street. We can go to my apartment afterward."

"Good enough," he said, completely willing to adapt his schedule to hers as long as she didn't try to avoid him. "Are the reporters leaving you alone?"

"I've had a few calls, but we gave them such a show yesterday, I think it's all going to die a natural death now. I talked to Parker last night and again this morning, and he's being left alone too."

Matt didn't give a damn if reporters devoured Parker alive, and he wasn't thrilled by the discovery that she'd talked to him twice since the press conference when she'd not bothered to call Matt until then. Conversely, he was vastly relieved that she apparently hadn't been with him last night, so he said that was good news, and that he'd come up to her office around six o'clock.

After shouldering his way through the crowds of Christmas shoppers on the main floor at six o'clock, the relative silence on Meredith's floor when Matt stepped off the elevator was a welcome relief. Off to his right, two secretaries were working late, but the receptionist and all the others had already left. At the opposite end of the carpeted corridor, Meredith's office door was open and he could see a group of men and one woman seated in there. Her secretary's desk was cleared, her computer covered for the night, so rather than sitting down in the reception area, Matt took off his coat and perched his hip on the secretary's desk, pleased with this unexpected opportunity to see how Meredith worked and what sorts of things occupied her days. Everything about her intrigued him. It always had.

Unaware of Matt's presence outside her office, Meredith looked at the invoice Gordon Mitchell, the general merchandise manager in charge of women's dresses and accessories, had just handed her. "You bought three hundred dollars worth of gold metal buttons?" she said with a puzzled smile. "Why are you showing me this? It's certainly within your budget."