Paradise by Judith McNaught
He saw it then—the note propped on the nightstand, written on the same pad of yellow paper she’d used to make her notes for the board of directors meeting. He snatched it up, hope flaring in his chest that she’d merely gone to find a grocery store or something.
“Matt,” she’d written, “what happened this afternoon should never have happened. It was wrong for both of us—understandable, I suppose—but terribly wrong. We both have our own lives and plans for the future, and we have people in our lives who love and trust us. We betrayed them by doing what we did. I’m ashamed of that. And even so, I will always remember this weekend as something beautiful and special. Thank you for it.”
Matt stood staring in furious disbelief at the words, feeling absurdly—stupidly—as if he’d been raped! No, not raped, used, like some paid stud who she could take to her bed when she wanted a “special” time, and then dismiss afterward like an insignificant peon whom she was ashamed to have been with.
She hadn’t changed one damned bit in all these years! She was still spoiled and self-centered and so convinced of her own superiority that it wouldn’t occur to her that maybe, just maybe, someone from a less privileged class than her own might be worth consideration. No, she hadn’t changed at all, she was still a coward, still—
Matt checked himself in mid-thought, amazed that his anger could actually obliterate his memory of everything that he’d discovered. For the last few minutes he’d been judging her based on all the erroneous things he’d believed of her for eleven years. That was habit; it was not reality. Reality was what he’d learned of her in this room; truths so painful, and so beautiful—that they’d made him ache. Meredith was no coward, she had never run away from him, from motherhood, or even her tyrannical father who she’d had to deal with at the store all these years. She had been eighteen, and she had thought she loved Matt—a slight smile touched his eyes at the memory of her astounding admission—but it vanished when he thought of her lying in the hospital waiting for him. She had sent flowers for their baby, and named her Elizabeth for his mother. . . . And when he never came back, she had picked up the pieces of her life, gone back to college, and faced whatever else the future handed her. Even now it made him cringe to remember the things he’d said and done to her in the last few weeks. Jesus, how she must have hated him!
He had threatened her and bullied her . . . and yet, when she discovered the facts from Matt’s father, she had braved a snowstorm to come and tell him the truth, and she had done it knowing that when she arrived, she was going to find brutal hostility.
Leaning a shoulder against the bedpost, he gazed at the bed. His wife, Matt decided with mounting pride, didn’t run away from things that would make most people take to their heels.
But tonight she had run from him.
What, he wondered, would make Meredith flee like a frightened rabbit, when, for the first time all weekend, there could have been total harmony between them?
In his mind he quickly reviewed the past two days, looking for answers. He saw her reaching for his hand, asking for a truce, and he remembered the way she’d watched their hands joining—as if the moment was profoundly meaningful to her. Her fingers had trembled when he touched them. He saw her smiling up at him with those glowing blue-green eyes of hers—I’ve decided to be just like you when I grow up. But most of all he remembered the way she had cried in his arms when she was telling him about their baby . . . the way she had put her own arms around him too, holding him to her as naturally as she had in this bed . . . the way she had moaned beneath him, her nails biting into his back, her body welcoming his with the same exquisite, shattering ardor she had shown him when she was eighteen.
Matt slowly straightened, struck by the most obvious answer. Meredith had very likely run away tonight because what had happened between them was as shattering to her as it was to him. If it was, then all her plans for her future with Parker and the rest of her life were jeopardized by what had happened in this house and especially in this bed.
She was no coward, but she was cautious. He’d noticed that when they’d talked about the department store. She took calculated risks, but only when the rewards were great and the likelihood for failure was comparatively small. She’d admitted that herself downstairs.
Given that, she sure as hell wasn’t going to want to risk her heart or her future on Matthew Farrell again if she could possibly avoid it. The ramifications of making love with him, of getting involved with him again, were too overwhelming for her to face. The last time she’d done it, her life had become a living hell. He realized that to Meredith, the likelihood for failure with him was enormous, and the rewards were . . .
Matt laughed softly—the rewards were beyond her wildest imaginings. Now all he had to do was convince her of it. To do that, he was going to need time, and she wasn’t going to want to give it to him. In fact, considering the way she’d fled tonight, he half expected her to fly to Reno or somewhere else immediately in order to sever all ties with him at the first possible moment. The longer he thought, the more convinced he became that she’d do exactly that.
In fact, there were only two things he was more sure of, and that was that Meredith still felt something for him, and that she was going to be his wife in every way. To accomplish that, Matt was now prepared to move heavenand earth; in fact, he was even prepared to permanently forgo the gratification of finding her lousy father and making her an orphan. In the midst of those thoughts, he suddenly realized something that made him stiffen in alarm: The roads that Meredith was driving on were bound to be treacherous in places, and she was not likely to be concentrating very well right now.
Turning, he headed swiftly down the hall to his room.
Walking over to his briefcase, he took out the phone and made three calls. The first call was to Edmunton’s new chief of police. Matt instructed him to have a patrolman watch for a black BMW on the overpass and to discreetly escort the car back to Chicago to make certain the driver got home safely. The police chief was perfectly willing to comply with the extraordinary request; Matthew Farrell had contributed a very large sum to his election campaign.
His next phone call was to the home of David Levinson, senior partner in Pearson & Levinson. Matt instructed Levinson to appear, with Pearson in tow, in Matt’s office at eight sharp the next morning. Levinson was perfectly willing to comply. Matthew Farrell paid them an annual retainer of $250,000 to do their legal utmost—whenever and wherever he wanted it done.
The last call was to Joe O’Hara. Matt instructed him to get out to the farm and pick him up immediately. Joe O’Hara balked. Matt Farrell paid him a lot of money to be at his beck and call, but Joe also regarded himself as Matt’s protector, and his friend. He didn’t figure it was in Matt’s best interests to have a means of escape from the farm if Meredith wanted him to stay. Instead of agreeing to leave at once, Joe said, “Is everything all patched up between you and your wife?”
Matt scowled at this unprecedented failure to follow instructions at once. “Not exactly,” he said impatiently.
“Is your wife still there?”
“She’s already left.”
The sadness in O’Hara’s voice banished Matt’s annoyance with his prying and made him again realize the depth of his driver’s loyalty. “So you let her go, huh, Matt?”
Matt’s smile was in his voice. “I’m going after her. Now, get your tail out here, O’Hara.”
“I’m on my way!”
When he hung up the phone, Matt stared out the window, planning his strategy for tomorrow.
39
Good morning,” Phyllis said, her forehead creasing in a worried frown as Meredith walked past her Monday morning without her usual greeting, two hours late for work. “Is anything wrong?” she asked, getting up from her new desk outside the president’s office and following Meredith inside. Miss Pauley, who’d been Philip Bancroft’s secretary for twenty years, had decided to take a long-overdue vacation while her employer was on leave.
Meredith sat down at her desk, leaned her elbows on it, and massaged her temples. Everything was wrong. “Nothing, really. I have a slight headache. Do I have any phone messages?”
“A pile of them,” Phyllis said. “I’ll get them, and I’ll bring you some coffee too. You look like you could use some.”
Meredith watched Phyllis leave, and she leaned back in her chair, feeling like she’d aged a hundred years since she’d left this office on Friday. Besides having lived through the most cataclysmic weekend of her life, she’d also managed to demolish her pride by going to bed with Matt, betraying her fiancé, and then compounding her wrongs by running away and leaving Matt a note. Guilt and shame had haunted her throughout the drive home, and to finish it all off nicely, she’d actually thought she was being followed by some demented Indiana patrolman who slowed down whenever she did, stopped for gasoline when she did, and then stayed behind her until she lost sight of him a few blocks from her apartment. By the time she got home she was a mass of guilt and shame and fear—and that was before she played back the messages on her answering machine and listened to the ones from Parker.
He’d called Friday night to say that he missed her and needed to hear the sound of her voice. His Saturday morning message had been mildly confused at her lack of reply. Saturday night he’d been worried by her silence, and he’d asked if her father had gotten ill on his cruise. Sunday morning he said he was alarmed and that he was going to call Lisa. Unfortunately, Lisa had evidently explained that Meredith had gone to see Matt on Friday to tell him the truth and get things straightened out. Parker’s Sunday night message was furious and hurt: “Call me, dammit!” he’d said. “I want to believe you have a legitimate reason for spending the weekend with Farrell, if that’s what you’ve done, but I’m running out of excuses.” Meredith sustained that part better than his next words, which were filled with confusion and tenderness. “Darling, where are you, really? I know you aren’t with Farrell. I’m sorry I said that, my imagination is running wild. Did he agree to a divorce? Has he murdered you? I’m terribly worried about you.”
Meredith closed her eyes, trying to banish the sensation of impending doom so that she could attempt to get on with her day. The note she’d left Matt had been cowardly and childish, and she couldn’t understand why she’d been unable to stay there until he woke up and then say good-bye to him like a mature adult. Every time she went near Matt Farrell, she said and did things that she’d never do under ordinary circumstances—foolish, wrong, dangerous things! In less than forty-eight hours with him, she’d thrown away her scruples and forgotten about things that mattered to her, like decency and principles. Instead, she’d gone to bed with a man she didn’t love, and she had betrayed Parker. Her conscience was on a rampage.
She thought of the way she’d responded to him in bed, and bright color ran up her pale cheeks. At eighteen she’d been awed by the fact that Matt seemed to know all the right places to touch her, all the right things to whisper to her, in order to drive her into a frenzy of defenseless desire. To discover, when she was twenty-nine, that he could still do it—only much more so—filled her with despondent shame. Yesterday she’d practically begged him for a climax—she, who was helplessly modest in bed with her own fiancé.
Meredith drew herself up short. These sorts of recriminations, these thoughts, weren’t fair to either Matt or her. The things she’d told him yesterday had shaken him deeply. They’d gone to bed together as a way to . . . to console each other. He had not merely used that as an excuse to get her into bed. At least, she thought a little wildly, it hadn’t seemed like it at the time.
She was doing it again, she realized in frustrated alarm—losing focus, concentrating on all the wrong things. It was counterproductive to sit, on the verge of tears, filled with remorse and obsessed with anything as silly as his sexual expertise. She needed to take action, to do something to banish this strange, nameless panic that had been growing inside her from the moment she’d left Matt’s bed. At four o’clock that morning she’d arrived at certain conclusions, and she’d made a decision. Now she needed to stop going over the problems and follow through with that decision.
“I had to wait for a fresh pot of coffee to brew,” Phyllis said, heading toward Meredith’s desk with a steaming mug in one hand and a fistful of pink message slips in the other. “Here are your messages. don’t forget, you rescheduled the executive committee meeting for today at eleven.”
Meredith managed not to look as harassed and miserable as she felt. “Okay, thanks. Will you get Stuart Whitmore on the phone for me? And will you see if you can reach Parker at his hotel in Geneva? If he isn’t in his suite, leave a message.”
“Who do you want first?” Phyllis asked with her usual cheerful efficiency.
“Stuart Whitmore,” Meredith said. First she would tell Stuart of her decision. Next she would talk to Parker, and try to explain. Explain? she thought miserably.
Trying to think of something less daunting, she picked up the phone messages and leafed disinterestedly through them. The fifth one brought her halfway to her feet, her heart beginning to hammer. The message said that Mr. Matthew Farrell had called at 9:10 A.M.
The harsh buzz of her intercom jerked Meredith’s attention to the phone, and she saw that both her lines were lit up, their hold buttons flashing.
“I have Mr. Whitmore on line one,” Phyllis said when Meredith answered the intercom, “and Matthew Farrell is on line two. He says it’s urgent.”
Meredith’s pulse rate doubled. “Phyllis,” she said shakily, “I don’t want to speak to Matt Farrell. Would you tell him that I want us to communicate with each other through our attorneys from now on? And also tell him I’m going out of town for a week or two. Be polite to him,” she added nervously, “but very firm.”
“I understand.”
Meredith put down the phone, her hand shaking, watching the flashing light on line two become constant. Phyllis was giving Matt the message. She started to reach for the phone; she should at least talk to him and find out what he wanted, she thought, then she jerked her hand back. No, she shouldn’t! It didn’t matter. As soon as Stuart told her where to go to get a quick, legal divorce, whatever Matt wanted would be irrelevant. She’d arrived at the obvious solution of a Reno divorce—or something like it—in the small hours of the morning, and it made perfect sense. Now that there was no more enmity between them, she knew Matt wouldn’t consider carrying out the threats he’d made in the car that day after lunch. All that was in the past.
The light on Matt’s call went out, and she couldn’t stand the suspense. She buzzed Phyllis and asked her to come in. “What did he say?” Meredith asked her.
Phyllis bit back a puzzled smile at Meredith’s complete loss of serenity. “He said he understood perfectly.”
“Was that all?”
“Then he asked if your trip was a sudden, unscheduled one, and I told him it was. Is that okay?”
“I don’t know,” Meredith said helplessly. “Did he say anything when you told him my trip was sudden?”
“Not exactly.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“What he did was laugh, but not loud. I guess you’d call it a chuckle—sort of low and deep. Then he thanked me and said good-bye.”
For some reason, Matt’s entire reaction made Meredith feel acutely uneasy. “Was there anything else?” she asked when Phyllis continued to hover in the doorway.
“I was just wondering,” the secretary replied a little sheepishly. “I mean, do you think he has really dated Michelle Pfeiffer and Meg Ryan, or do you think the movie magazines just make that stuff up?”
“I’m sure he has,” Meredith said, struggling to keep her voice and face completely blank.
Nodding, Phyllis glanced at the phone. “Did you forget Stuart Whitmore is still on your line?”
Horrified, Meredith snatched up the phone and asked Phyllis to close her door. “Stuart, I’m sorry for making you wait,” she
Stuart’s reply was amused. “I’m having a fascinating morning, thanks to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that Farrell’s attorneys suddenly want a parlay. David Levinson called me at nine-thirty this morning so filled with goodwill that you’d almost think the arrogant bastard had had a profound religious experience over the weekend.”
“What exactly did he say?” Meredith asked, her trepidation mounting.
“Well, first Levinson treated me to a lecture on the sanctity of marriage, particularly among Catholics, which he delivered in his most pious voice. Meredith,” Stuart pointed out on a suffocated laugh, “Levinson is an orthodox Jew on his fourth marriage and sixth mistress! Jesus, I couldn’t believe his nerve!”
“What did you say?”
“I told him I couldn’t believe his nerve,” Stuart said, then he stopped trying to make her see the humor of it all because he sensed she couldn’t. “All right, never mind all that. According to Levinson, his client is suddenly willing to let the divorce go through, which strikes me as odd, and odd always makes me nervous.”
“It isn’t that odd,” Meredith said quietly, ignoring the painful and irrational thought that Matt was dumping her with embarrassing abruptness after she’d gone to bed with him. He was only doing the decent thing by calling an end to hostilities immediately. “I saw Matt this weekend, and we talked.”
“About what?” When she hesitated, he said, “Don’t keep secrets from your lawyer. Levinson’s sudden eagerness for a meeting is setting off all kinds of alarm bells in my head. I smell an ambush.”
Because Meredith knew it wasn’t fair or wise to keep the events of the weekend from Stuart, she told him what had happened—from her discovery that Matt had purchased the Houston land to her stormy confrontation with Matt’s father. “Matt was too sick to listen to me when I first got to the farm,” she continued, “but yesterday I told him the truth about what my father had done, and he believed me.” She didn’t tell Stuart she’d gone to bed with Matt; that was something no one had a right to know except, perhaps, Parker.