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  “Three!” he roared. “Three bombs? What are you talking about?”

  “What were you talking about?” she asked, but too late.

  “I was talking about the fake scare in New Orleans,” he said, and she could feel him striving for control. “There were three bombs found? When? Where?”

  “Today. In New Orleans, Dallas, and here.”

  “What’s happened to our sales?”

  “The inevitable happened,” she said, trying to sound both matter-of-fact and encouraging. “We had to close down for the day, but we’ll make it up later. I’m already working on some sort of special sale—Advertising wants to call it a bomb sale in lieu of a fire sale,” she tried to joke.

  “What happened to our stock?”

  “It was down three points at closing today.”

  “And Farrell?” he demanded with renewed fury. “What’s happening with him? You stay the hell away from him. No more press conferences—nothing!”

  He was talking so loud that Matt could hear him, and Meredith looked at him in helpless consternation, but instead of giving her an encouraging smile, or any form of moral support, Matt waited for her to refuse her father’s orders, and when she didn’t do it immediately, he turned on his heel and walked over to the windows, standing with his back to her.

  “Now, listen to me,” Meredith pleaded with her father in a shaky, calming voice, “there is no point in working yourself up and having another attack over any of this.”

  “Don’t speak to me like an idiot invalid!” he warned, but his voice was straining and she was certain she heard him pause to swallow a pill. “I’m waiting for an answer about Farrell.”

  “I don’t think we should discuss this on the phone.”

  “Stop stalling, dammit!” he raged, and Meredith realized that it was probably better to deal with the issue now instead of trying to delay it, since he seemed to be getting more worked up over her evasiveness.

  “All right, fine,” she said quietly, “we’ll deal with it now, if that’s what you want.” She paused, thinking madly for the best way to go about it. It seemed wisest to first try to relieve him of the anxiety he’d undoubtedly have over whether or not she’d discovered his duplicity eleven years before, so she started there. “I realize you love me and you did what you believed was best eleven years ago . . .” Taut silence followed that, so she cautiously added, “I’m talking about the telegram you sent Matt telling him I’d had an abortion. I know about it—”

  “Where the hell are you right now?” he demanded suspiciously.

  “I’m at Matt’s apartment.”

  His voice shook with rage and something that sounded to Meredith like fear. Panic. “I’m coming home. My plane leaves in three hours. Stay away from him! Don’t trust him. You don’t know that man, I tell you!” Reverting to blazing sarcasm, he added, “See if you can manage to keep us out of bankruptcy until I get there.”

  He slammed the phone down, and Meredith slowly hung up, then she looked at Matt, whose back was still turned on her, as if accusing her of not taking a stronger stand. “This has been quite a day,” she said bitterly. “I suppose you’re angry because I didn’t come right out and tell him more about us.”

  Without turning, Matt lifted his hand and wearily rubbed the tense muscles at the base of his neck. “I’m not angry, Meredith,” he said in a flat, emotionless voice. “I’m trying to convince myself you won’t back down when he gets here, that you won’t start doubting me and yourself, or, worse—start weighing what you have to gain by staying with me against what you have to lose if you do.”

  “What are you talking about?” she said, walking over to him.

  He gave her a grim sideways look. “For days I’ve been trying to second-guess what he’ll do when he gets back here and finds out you want to stay with me. I’ve just figured it out.”

  “I repeat,” she said softly. “What are you talking about?”

  “Your father’s going to play his trump card. He’s going to make you choose: him or me; Bancroft and Company, along with the president’s office—or nothing if you choose me. And I’m not sure,” he added on a ragged sigh, “which way you’ll go.”

  Meredith was too worn out, too spent, to take on a problem she didn’t have yet. “It won’t come to that,” she said, because she honestly believed she could, with time, persuade her father to accept Matt. “I’m all he has, and he loves me in his own way,” she said, her eyes pleading with him not to make things harder on her now than they already were. “And because he does, he’ll rant and rave, and he may threaten me with that, but he’ll relent. I’ve thought a lot about what he did to us. Matt, please, just put yourself in his place,” she urged. “Suppose you had an eighteen-year-old daughter whom you’d sheltered from every reality and ugly thing in life. And suppose she met a much older man who you honestly believed was a—a gold digger. And that man took her virginity and got her pregnant. How would you feel about him?”

  After a moment of silence Matt said tersely, “I’d hate his guts,” and just when Meredith thought she’d scored her point, he added, “but I’d find some way to accept him for her sake. And I sure as hell wouldn’t crush her by making her think he’d walked out on her. Nor would I try to bribe him into doing exactly that,” he added.

  Meredith swallowed. “Did he try to do that?”

  “Yes. The day I took you home to him.”

  “What did you say?”

  Matt gazed into her wide, troubled blue eyes, smiled reassuringly, and put his arm around her. “I told him,” he whispered as his mouth came down on hers for a long, drugging kiss, “that I didn’t think he ought to interfere in our lives. But,” he murmured thickly, kissing her ear as she melted against him, “not quite in those words.”

  It was midnight when he walked her down to her car. Exhausted from the trials of the day and deliciously limp from his lovemaking, Meredith sank into the driver’s seat of the Jaguar. “Are you certain you’re awake enough to drive?” he asked, his hand on the open door.

  “Just barely,” she said with a languorous smile, turning the key in the ignition. The heater and radio came on as the engine throbbed to life.

  “I’m giving a party for the cast of Phantom of the Opera on Friday night,” he said. “A lot of people you know are coming to it. My sister will be here too, and I thought I’d invite your lawyer. I think the two of them would hit it off.”

  When he hesitated, as if afraid to voice the question, Meredith said teasingly, “If that was an invitation, my answer is yes.”

  “I wasn’t going to ask you to come as a guest.”

  Embarrassed and confused, Meredith glanced at the steering wheel. “Oh.”

  “I’d like you to act as my hostess, Meredith.”

  She realized then the reason for his hesitation. He was asking her for what constituted a semi-public declaration that they were a couple. She looked into those compelling gray eyes of his and smiled helplessly. “Is it black tie?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Because,” she said with a jaunty glance, “it’s very important for a hostess to be dressed just right.”

  With a half-laugh, half-groan, Matt pulled her out of the car and into his arms, seizing her lips in a long kiss of gratitude and relief.

  He was still kissing her when the newsman on the radio announced that the body of Stanislaus Spyzhalski, who’d been arrested for falsely representing himself as an attorney to clients including Matthew Farrell and Meredith Bancroft, had been found in a ditch on a county road outside of Belleville, Illinois.

  Meredith jerked back and she stared at Matt in shock. “Did you hear that?”

  “I heard it earlier today.”

  His complete indifference and his failure to mention it to her struck Meredith as a little odd, but exhaustion had rendered her incapable of rational thought, and Matt’s mouth was already opening on hers again.

  52

  Inquest, the investigative agency owned by Intercorp, was