Paradise Read online

  Keeping his impatience under control for Meredith’s sake, Matt said flatly, “It’s not what I’d have picked either, but if we wanted to eat in peace, it had to be somewhere relatively dark and out of the way.”

  “Parker, it’s going to be fun,” Meredith promised, and she really did like it—the English atmosphere and the upbeat music being played by a live band.

  “The band is good,” Lisa agreed, leaning forward in her chair and watching the musicians. A moment later her eyes widened as Matt’s chauffeur sauntered into the lounge and sat down on a stool at the far end of the bar. “Matt,” she said with laughing incredulity, “I think your chauffeur just decided to come in out of the cold and have a beer.”

  Without looking in that direction, Matt replied, “Joe drinks Coke not beer, when he’s on duty.”

  A waiter appeared to take their drinks order, and Meredith decided there was no need to inform Lisa that Joe was also a bodyguard, especially not when she preferred to forget that herself.

  “Will that be all, folks?” the waiter asked, and when they told him it was, he walked over to the end of the bar. He was starting to hand the order over to the bartender, when a short man wearing an unusually bulky overcoat walked up beside him and said, “How’d you like to make a quick hundred bucks, buddy?”

  The waiter swung around. “How?”

  “Just let me stand over there behind that trellis for a while.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ve got yourself some important guests at one of those tables, and I’ve got myself a camera under this coat.” He held out his hand, and in it was a press pass showing that he was employed by a well-known tabloid, and a neatly folded $100 bill.

  “Stay out of sight,” the waiter said, palming the money.

  At the maître d’s desk in the front foyer, the owner of the restaurant picked up the phone and dialed the home phone number of Noel Jaffe, who rated restaurants in his newspaper column. “Noel,” he said, turning his shoulder a little to avoid being overheard by the new crowd of customers coming in the doors, “this is Alex over at the Manchester House. You remember I told you someday I’d repay you for the nice write-up you gave my place in your column? Well, guess who’s sitting in my restaurant right now.”

  “No kidding.” Jaffe laughed when Alex told him who they were. “Maybe they are the happy little family they seemed like at that press conference.”

  “Not tonight, they aren’t,” Alex said, his whisper rising a little. “The fiancé has a face on him like a storm cloud, and he’s had plenty to drink.”

  There was a brief, thoughtful pause, and then Jaffe chuckled and said, “I’ll be right there with a photographer. Find us a table where we can see without being seen.”

  “No problem. Just remember—when you write about this, spell the name of my place right and put in the address.”

  Alex hung up the phone, so delighted with the prospect of free publicity about Chicago’s rich and famous eating in his restaurant, he called several radio and television stations too.

  By the time the waiter brought the second round of drinks—and the third for Parker—Meredith was well aware that Parker was drinking too much, too fast. That in itself wouldn’t have been quite so alarming if he wasn’t also determined to infuse the conversation with a steady stream of little vignettes about things he and Meredith had done, most of them beginning with “Remember when . . .”

  Meredith didn’t always remember, and she was, moreover, becoming increasingly aware that Matt was getting angry.

  Matt wasn’t getting angry, he was already coldly furious. For three quarters of an hour he’d been forced to listen to Reynolds relating cute tales about himself and Meredith, designed to point out to Matt that he was, hopelessly and irrevocably, Meredith’s and Reynolds’s social inferior, no matter how much money he had. Included among them was a story about the time Meredith broke her tennis racquet in a doubles tournament she played with him at the country club when she was a teenager . . . another about some damned dance given by some ritzy private school where she’d dropped her necklace . . . and yet another about a polo game he’d recently taken her to.

  When he started talking about a charity auction they’d worked on together, Meredith stood up quickly. “I’m going to the ladies’ room,” she said, deliberately interrupting Parker. Lisa stood up too. “I’ll go with you.”

  As soon as they reached the ladies’ room, Meredith walked over to the sink, bracing her hands on the tiled counter in a posture of complete misery. “I can’t stand much more of this,” she told Lisa. “I never imagined tonight would be as bad as this.”

  “Should I pretend I’m sick and make them take us home?” Lisa said, grinning as she leaned forward to reapply her lipstick. “Remember when you did that for me that time we double-dated when we were at Bensonhurst?”

  “Parker wouldn’t care if we both passed out at his feet tonight,” Meredith said irritably. “He’s too busy doing everything he can to provoke Matt into an argument.”

  The tube of lipstick in Lisa’s hand stilled, and she shot Meredith an irate sideways glance. “Matt is goading him!”

  “He isn’t saying a word!”

  “That is how he’s goading him. Matt is leaning back in his chair, watching Parker like he’s a performing clown! Parker isn’t used to losing, and he’s lost you. And Matt is sitting there, silently gloating because he knows he’s going to win.”

  “I cannot believe you!” Meredith burst out in a low, angry voice. “For years you’ve criticized Parker when he was right. Now he’s wrong and he’s drunk, and you’re taking his side! Furthermore, Matt hasn’t won anything. And he is not gloating. He may be trying to look bored and amused by Parker’s antics, but he isn’t! Believe me, he’s angry—really angry because Parker is making him look like a—a social outcast.”

  “That’s the way you see it,” Lisa said with such fierce indignation that Meredith stepped back in astonishment. It turned to guilt as Lisa added, “I don’t know how you could have considered marrying a man for whom you haven’t the least bit of sympathy!”

  The waiter had just told Matt that his table was ready, and over his shoulder Matt saw Lisa and Meredith emerge from the ladies’ room and wend their way through the crowded lounge.

  Parker had stopped talking about the things he and Meredith had done and was now thoroughly antagonizing Matt by questioning him about his background and sneering at Matt’s answers. “Tell me, Farrell,” he said in a loud, slurred voice that made several people at neighboring tables turn around, “where did you go to college? I’ve forgotten.”

  “Indiana State,” Matt bit out, watching Lisa and Meredith.

  “I went to Princeton.”

  “So what!”

  “I was just curious. What about sports? Did you play any?”

  “No,” he clipped, sliding back his chair and standing up so that the four of them could go to their table in the dining room as soon as the women arrived.

  “What did you do with your free time?” Parker persisted, sliding back his chair and standing up, too, a little unsteadily.

  “I worked.”

  “Where?”

  “In the steel mills and as a mechanic.”

  “I played some polo, boxed a little bit. And,” he added with a disdainful look down Matt’s entire length, “I gave Meredith her first kiss.”

  “I took her virginity,” Matt snapped back, baited past endurance, but his eyes were on Meredith and Lisa, who were less than ten feet away.

  “You son of a bitch!” Parker hissed, and, drawing back his arm, he aimed a punch at Matt.

  Matt barely saw it coming in time to avoid it. Reacting instinctively, he threw up his left arm and swung hard with his right. Pandemonium erupted; women screamed, men jumped out of their chairs, Parker crashed to the floor, and white lights exploded in the background. Lisa called him a bastard, Matt looked toward her, and a small fist connected with his eye at the same instant Meredith bent down t