Paradise Read online

  She waited for him to argue or agree. Instead, he leaned a hip against the table behind him, his face impassive, and remained silent. Meredith realized that his own disregard for public opinion was probably making him view her concerns as trivial, so she brought up another, larger problem. “Matt, I haven’t wanted to think about the ramifications of that fight last night, but I can tell you right now, there’s a ninety-percent chance I’ll be called before the board of directors to give an explanation. don’t you understand the compromising predicament I’m in? Bancroft and Company is an old and dignified operation; the board of directors is rigid, and they didn’t want me in the president’s office in the first place. A few days ago I stood up in a news conference held at Bancroft and Company and said we hardly know each other and there was no chance of a reconciliation. If I move in with you right away, my credibility as an officer of Bancroft’s will suffer just as much as my honesty as a person. And that isn’t all. Last night I was part of, and the cause of, a public brawl—a fiasco that could have gotten us all arrested if the police had been called. I’ll be lucky if the board doesn’t threaten to invoke the morals clause in my contract and ask me to step down.”

  “They wouldn’t dare invoke the morals clause over a thing like that!” Matt said, looking more contemptuous of the notion than alarmed by it.

  “They could and they might.”

  “I’d get myself a new board of directors,” he said.

  “I wish I could,” Meredith said with a wry smile. “I take it your board pretty much does what you want done?” When he nodded curtly, she sighed. “Unfortunately, neither my father nor I control our board. The point is, I’m a woman, and I’m young, and they weren’t any too crazy about my becoming interim president in the first place. can’t you see why I’m worried about what they’re going to think of all this?”

  “You’re a competent executive, that’s all in the hell they need to be concerned with. If they call a meeting and demand an explanation, or threaten to invoke the morals clause if you don’t step down, then take the offensive, not the defensive. You weren’t pushing drugs or running a house of prostitution; you were present during a fight.”

  “Is that what you’d tell them—that you weren’t running drugs or anything?” she asked, fascinated with his business methods.

  “No,” he said brusquely. “I’d tell them to fuck off.”

  Meredith swallowed a giggle at the ludicrous prospect of standing up in front of twelve conservative businessmen and doing such a thing. “You aren’t seriously suggesting I say that?” she said when he didn’t seem to share her humor.

  “That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. You can alter the words slightly if you think you should, but the point is that you can’t live your life to suit other people. The harder you try, the more restrictions they’ll put on you just for the fun of seeing you jump through their hoops.”

  Meredith knew he was right, but not in this instance or in her specific circumstances. For one thing, she wasn’t willing to incur the board’s wrath; for another, she was using her predicament as an excuse to stall before making the commitment Matt wanted. She loved him, but in many ways he was still a complete stranger to her. She wasn’t ready to promise herself completely to him. Not yet. Not until she was absolutely certain the paradise he promised her—the part about the life they would have together—really existed. And from the expression on Matt’s face, she had an awful feeling he suspected she was stalling. His next words confirmed that he knew exactly what she was doing and that he didn’t like it.

  “Sooner or later, Meredith, you’re going to have to take a risk and trust me completely. Until you do, you’re cheating me and you’re cheating yourself. You can’t outwit fate by trying to stand on the sidelines and place little side bets about the outcome of life. Either you wade in and risk everything to play the game, or you don’t play at all. And if you don’t play, you can’t win.”

  It was, she thought, a beautiful philosophy on the one hand and a terrifying one on the other—a philosophy, moreover, that was far better suited to him than her.

  “How about a compromise,” she suggested with a winsome smile that Matt reluctantly found irresistible. “Why don’t I wade in—but stay in the shallow end for a while until I get accustomed to it?”

  After a tense moment he nodded. “How long?”

  “A little while.”

  “And while you’re debating about how deep you dare to go, what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to wait and pace and wonder if your father will be able to convince you not to live with me or to go through with the divorce?”

  “I have plenty of courage to withstand my father regardless of whether he comes around and sees things our way or not,” she said so forcefully that he smiled a little. “What I’m worried about is whether or not you’ll try to meet him halfway if he does—for my sake?”

  She rather expected him to agree, for her sake, but she’d misjudged the depth of Matt’s hatred, because he shook his head. “He and I have an old score to settle first, and it’s going to be settled my way.”

  “He’s ill, Matt,” she warned, an awful feeling of foreboding shaking through her. “He can’t take a lot of stress anymore.”

  “I’ll try to remember that,” Matt replied unanswerably. His expression softened a little, and he changed the subject. “Now, who is sleeping where tonight?”

  “Do you suppose any of the reporters who saw you come up here this morning are still out there, watching?”

  “Probably one or two of the tenacious ones.”

  She bit her lip, hating to have him leave, but knowing he shouldn’t stay. “Then you can’t really stay all night, can you?”

  “Evidently not,” he said in a tone that made her feel like a coward.

  Matt saw her eyes darken with consternation, and he relented. “All right, I’ll go home and sleep alone. It’s nothing less than I deserve for participating in that adolescent fight last night. While I’m on that subject,” he added more gently, “I’d like you to know that while I was guilty of saying something that undoubtedly caused your drunken fiancé to take a swing at me, I didn’t realize what was happening until after it was over. One second I was looking at you, and the next I saw a fist coming at me from the corner of my eye. For all I knew, it was some drunk at the bar who’d decided to pick a fight, and I reacted instinctively.”

  Meredith suppressed a shudder, a delayed reaction to the lethal swiftness, the easy brutality, with which Matt had leveled Parker . . . the savage look on his face in that split second when he realized he was being attacked. Then she firmly shoved the thought aside. Matt was not now, and was never going to be, like the fastidious, urbane men she’d known. He had grown up tough, and he was tough. But not with her, she thought with a tender smile, and she reached out and smoothed his dark hair back from his temple.

  “If you think,” he said wryly, “that you can smile at me like that and make me agree to almost anything, you’re right.” And then he abruptly reverted to his usual, more indomitable self by adding, “However, while I’m willing to practice extreme discretion in our relationship—read that as sneaking—I’m determined that you’re going to spend as much time with me as possible, and that includes some nights together. I’ll arrange for a pass so that you can get into the parking garage in my building. If I have to, I’ll stand out in front and talk to the damned reporters to divert them every time you drive in.”

  He looked so irked at the prospect of having to pander to public opinion that she said in a voice of exaggerated gratitude, “You’d do that? Just for me?”

  Instead of laughing, he took the question seriously and pulled her tightly to him. “You have no idea,” he said fiercely, “how much I’d do—just for you!” His mouth opened over hers in a rough, consuming kiss that stole her breath and robbed her of all ability to think. When he was finished, she was clinging to him. “Now that you’re almost as unhappy with tonight’s sleeping arrangement as I am,” he