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  Peter, realizing he was dismissed, had no choice but to pick up the signed contract on the desk and do as he was instructed. “Mr. Farrell,” he said hesitantly, “I’ve been wondering why you’re sending me to Houston to handle these negotiations. It’s out of my line—”

  “It shouldn’t be a difficult deal to close,” Matt said with a tentative, reassuring smile. “And it will broaden your experience. As I recall, that was part of the reason you gave for wanting to join Intercorp.”

  “Yes, sir, it was,” Peter replied, but the burst of pride he felt at Farrell’s obvious confidence in him to handle things took an awful blow when Farrell added, as Peter headed for the door, “Don’t bungle it, Peter.”

  “I won’t,” Peter assured him, but he was shaken by the unspoken warning he’d heard in Farrell’s voice.

  Tom Anderson, who’d been quietly standing near the windows throughout Vanderwild’s dissertation, spoke up as soon as he left. “Matt,” he said with a chuckle as he returned to the chair he’d vacated in front of Matt’s desk, “You scare the hell out of that kid.”

  “That kid,” Matt pointed out dryly, “has an I.Q. of one sixty-five, and he’s already made Intercorp several million dollars. He’s proving to be an excellent investment.”

  “And is that land in Houston an excellent investment too?”

  “I think it is.”

  “Good,” Tom replied, sitting down and stretching his long legs out in front of him. “Because I’d hate to think you were spending a fortune just to retaliate against some society dame who insulted you in front of a reporter.”

  “Why would you leap to a conclusion like that?” Matt asked, but there was a gleam of sardonic amusement in his eye.

  “I dunno. Sunday, I just happened to read in the paper that a chick named Bancroft gave you the cold shoulder at the opera. And tonight, here you are, signing a contract to buy something she wants for herself. Tell me something—how much is that land going to cost Intercorp?”

  “Twenty million, probably.”

  “And how much is it going to cost Ms. Bancroft to buy it from us?”

  “A hell of a lot more.”

  “Matt,” he drawled with deceptive casualness, “d’you remember the night eight years ago, when my divorce from Marilyn was final?”

  Matt was surprised by the question, but he remembered the time well enough. A few months after Tom started working for him, Tom’s wife suddenly announced that she’d been having an affair and wanted a divorce. Too proud to plead and too crushed to fight, Tom had moved his things out of their house, but he’d believed until the day the divorce went through that she’d change her mind. On that day Tom hadn’t come into work or telephoned, and at six o’clock that night, Matt understood why—Tom called from the police station, where he’d been taken that afternoon after being arrested for being drunk and disorderly.

  “I don’t remember much about that night,” Matt admitted, “except that we got drunk together.”

  “I’d already gotten drunk,” Tom corrected wryly, “then you bailed me out of jail, and we both got drunk together.” Watching Matt closely, he continued. “I have a hazy recollection that you commiserated with my misfortune that night, by ranting about some dame named Meredith who’d jilted you, or something. Except you didn’t call her a dame, you called her a spoiled little bitch. At some point before I passed out, you and I drunkenly agreed that women whose names start with the letter M are no good for anyone.”

  “Your memory is obviously better than mine,” Matt said evasively, but Tom had noticed the imperceptible tightening in Matt’s jaw at the mention of her name, and he leapt to the instant and correct conclusion.

  “So,” he continued with a grin, “now that we’ve established that the Meredith that night is actually Meredith Bancroft, would you care to tell me what happened between you two to make you still hate each other?”

  “No,” Matt said. “I wouldn’t.” He stood up and walked over to the coffee table, where he’d laid out the engineering drawings for the Southville facility. “Let’s finish our discussion about Southville.”

  21

  Traffic was backed up for blocks near Bancroft’s corner. Crowds of shoppers huddled tightly in their coats rushed across the intersection, ignoring the DON’T WALK signal, their heads bent against the bitter wind that blasted across Lake Michigan and whirled through the downtown streets. Car horns blared and drivers cursed the pedestrians, who were causing them to miss their green light. In her black BMW, Meredith watched as droves of shoppers paused at Bancroft’s windows and then went into the store. The weather had turned cold, and that always brought out the early shoppers who preferred to beat the Christmas rush. Today, however, her mind wasn’t on the numbers of shoppers entering the store.

  In twenty minutes she had to make a formal presentation to the board of directors on the Houston store, and although they’d already given a tentative nod to the project, she couldn’t proceed any further and finalize arrangements without their formal approval this morning.

  Four other women were gathered around Meredith’s secretary’s desk when Meredith got off the elevator on the fourteenth floor. Stopping at Phyllis’s desk, she peered over their shoulders, half expecting to see another issue of Playgirl magazine like the one they’d huddled over last month. “What’s up?” she asked. “Another male centerfold?”

  “No, not that,” Phyllis said as the other secretaries hastily disbanded and she followed Meredith into her office. Rolling her eyes in amusement, she explained, “Pam ordered another printout of her astrological forecast for next month. This one says true love is coming her way, along with fortune and fame.”

  Lifting her brows in shared amusement, Meredith said, “I thought that’s what the last one said.”

  “It did. I told her for fifteen dollars, I’d do her next one.” The two women regarded each other in laughing harmony, and then they switched to business. “You have a board of directors meeting in five minutes,” Phyllis reminded her.

  Meredith nodded and picked up the folder with her notes in it. “Is the architect’s model in the boardroom?”

  “Yes. And I got the projector set up for the slides.”

  “You’re a complete jewel,” Meredith said, and she meant it. With the folder in hand, she started for the door, then she turned and added, “Call Sam Green and ask him to be available to meet with me as soon as I finish with the board of directors. Tell him I’d like to go over the preliminary purchase contract he’s drawn up for the Houston land. I want to get it to Thorp Development by the end of the week. With a little luck,” Meredith added, “I’ll have the board’s approval on the Houston project by this afternoon.”

  Phyllis picked up the telephone on Meredith’s desk to call the chief counsel and gave a thumbs-up sign. “Knock ’em dead,” she said.

  The boardroom was very much as it had been fifty years earlier; only now, in the age of glass and brass and chrome, there was a nostalgic grandeur about the immense room with its Oriental carpeting, the intricate molding on dark-paneled walls, and the English landscapes hanging in their baroque frames. Stretching down the center of the huge room was a massive carved mahogany table, thirty feet in length, with twenty ornately carved chairs upholstered in scarlet velvet arranged around it at precise intervals. In the center of the table was an enormous and elaborate antique sterling silver bowl filled with red and white roses. Beside it was a matching tea and coffee service with delicate Sèvres porcelain coffee cups rimmed in gold and hand-painted with tiny roses and vines. Silver pitchers, frosted from the ice water within them, had also been placed at intervals down the table.

  The room, with its oversize, heavily carved furniture, had the atmosphere of a throne room, which Meredith often suspected was exactly what her grandfather had wanted when he commissioned the furnishings to be made a half century before. There were times when she couldn’t decide whether the room was impressive or ugly, but either way, every time she entered it, she felt a