Paradise Read online

  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.

  “I’m sorry,” he said contritely, a strange, tender light in his eyes. Lifting his hand, Matt laid it against her smooth cheek, amazed and shamelessly delighted that for all her innate sensuality, she obviously hadn’t slept around very much. If she had, instead of feeling gauche in bed with him, she’d surely know she turned his body into an inferno with a simple touch. “God, you are lovely,” he whispered. “Inside and out.” He bent his head, intending to kiss her, but she turned her face away, so he kissed her ear.

  “If you’ll kiss me back,” he whispered huskily, brushing his lips along the curve of her jaw, “I’ll make it six million. If you’ll go to bed with me tonight,” he continued, losing himself in the scent of her perfume and the softness of her skin, “I’ll give you the world. But if you’ll move in with me,” he continued, dragging his mouth across her cheek to the corner of her lips, “I’ll do much better than that.”

  Unable to turn her face farther because his arm was in the way, and unable to turn her body because his body was in the way, Meredith tried to infuse disdain in her voice and simultaneously ignore the arousing touch of his tongue against her ear. “Six million dollars and the whole world!” she said in a slightly shaky voice. “What else could you possibly give me if I move in with you?”

  “Paradise.” Lifting his head, Matt took her chin between his thumb and forefinger and forced her to meet his gaze. In an aching, solemn voice he said, “I’ll give you paradise on a gold platter. Anything you want—everything you