Loved Me Once (Love, Romance and Business)

by Gail Hewitt

  She was surprised at the anger in her voice. None of this mattered to her anymore. Why did she care what he thought? It must have to do with what she'd gone through getting over him. That had, after all, been the signal event of her early adulthood, the bad thing against which she measured other bad things for years. Now he was trying to pretend it had been something entirely different and expected her to acquiesce? She didn't think so.

  Still, she tried to sound uninvolved as she asked him, "What made you think I abandoned you?"

  Tom leaned forward, obviously perturbed. "I'm sorry you were in the apartment and heard us. That must have been a shock, but she was just some girl I met at a party I went to in the complex after I saw you with that blonde kid at The Country Place. I saw how you looked at each other. I saw him kiss you. You'd said you might not be able to come that night. I guessed it was because you planned to be with him. Who was he anyway?"

  "Scotty Williams. Our parents were close friends. He was back from Harvard for the holidays, and our mothers had been after us to go out. So we did. And if you want to know what we were doing, I was arranging with him to help me cover so I could spend extra time with you."

  "You seemed very friendly," Tom protested.

  "We were. We'd known each other since I was in kindergarten. I was crazy about Scotty, who was gay by the way. That's why he was so willing to help me cover. It was a cover for him too, so he could spend time with his friends. He hadn't come out, and his parents wouldn't leave him alone. They kept setting him up with suitable girls."

  "He was gay? I'll be damned." He grimaced. "O.K., I got that wrong, but you can't blame me for being suspicious. He was good-looking. You seemed to be enjoying being with him. You were from the same kind of background, which I wasn't. And you were obviously ashamed of me . . . "

  "Ashamed of you? I was so proud of you I couldn't stand it."

  "But you hid us – our relationship – from everybody."

  "Just because I knew my mother would find some way to separate us. I wasn't going to let anything separate us. Even after I heard you with that girl, I would have forgiven you. I'd have forgiven you just about anything. I was crazy about you."

  "And I was crazy about you," he said helplessly.

  "Then why didn't you call me the next day?"

  "My mother died."

  "I'm sorry," she said. "I had no idea . . ."

  "It was unexpected, and I had to take a leave of absence from school and go to Florida to help my aunt get ready to settle her affairs. I tried to call you from Florida, but there was no answer. When I came back to Atlanta a couple of weeks later, I kept calling the carriage house, but all your roommate would say was that that you no longer lived there. I thought you were just dodging me."

  "If you remember, my mother had returned to Atlanta by then and insisted I come home. Anyway," she admitted, "I got sick, and that settled it. She actually came and collected me herself. Carolyn's mother made her give up the carriage house about the same time."

  "What was wrong with you?" he asked, disbelief in his voice.

  "I guess the situation had been too much for me. I had a kind of nervous breakdown."

  "Over me?" he asked, perplexed.

  "Well, I was fine until you ditched me, then I had the breakdown, so I guess that, yes, it had something to do with you. Even after I returned home, I lay there in my room in my four-poster bed and thought about you." She smiled ruefully and shook her head. "God, how I thought about you. Girls can be so silly. I kept mooning about you and thinking you'd come for me. Every time the doorbell rang, I jumped out of bed, tiptoed into the hall, and looked over the railing into the downstairs entry."

  "I did come for you," he protested. "It was about a month later, when I got the phone-disconnect message on the carriage house number. I guessed you might have gone home, so I drove out to West Paces and into that circular drive and rang the doorbell."

  "The next month?" Maggie asked. "My mother had sent me to a private clinic by then, in Italy. I wasn't in the West Paces Ferry house anymore. I wasn't even in the country."

  "A maid answered," Tom continued, "but when I asked for you, your mother showed up and told me that you'd told her you didn't want to see me again and that if I didn't stop bothering you, she'd call the cops."

  "You're kidding," Maggie exclaimed. "I never told my mother anything about you. Not one word."

  "Then how did she know about us?"

  "She may have guessed, and your behavior confirmed it. I never said she was stupid, just not very nice."

  "So you never told her to tell me to get lost," Tom said thoughtfully.

  "And you did try to find me," Maggie responded.

  They sat and looked at each other.

  "I thought you were the most awful person in the world," Tom said at last. "But I couldn't stop thinking about you and the things we'd done together, the talks we'd had. I missed you for years, when I wasn't angry with you. God, I was angry at you."

  "I felt the same about you," Maggie confessed. "At least for a while."

  "I used to get out your picture and stare at it every night before I went to bed," Tom confessed. "It felt as if someone I loved more than anything in the world had died."

  "Me too," Maggie admitted. "Part of the time I hated you and part of the time I loved you, but mostly I just missed you. I couldn't stand the thought that you had just walked away from me without even looking back."

  They looked at each other, wide-eyed.

  "So you didn't abandon me," Tom concluded.

  "And you didn't ditch me," Maggie concluded.

  "We still loved each other," Tom continued the line of thought.

  "It seems so," Maggie agreed.

  "My God, all those years we could have had," Tom said, looking genuinely alarmed.

  "Well, it's a shame," Maggie told him, "but water under the bridge and all that. You got married, didn't you?"

  "Married and divorced," he told her. "You never married?"

  She shook her head. "No. I just couldn't seem to get interested enough to think about it, at least until now." She held out her hand instinctively and looked down at the sparkling solitaire.

  "He's a lightweight," Tom told her. "You need a heavyweight. You need a man, not a boy."

  "He's no boy," she told Tom. "He is most definitely a man. Take it from the horse's mouth."

  "So that's how it is, huh?"

  "That's how it is."

  He looked at her appraisingly for what seemed like a long time, and then shrugged and returned to the original point of their conversation.

  "So we're good with each other?" He asked. "We each just made a mistake . . . "

  "But it wasn't the mistake we thought we'd made at the time," Maggie finished. "Which is a shame, but you haven't exactly had an uninteresting life. Who knows? If we'd stayed together, you might not have done so well."

  "Maybe," Tom agreed, "but still . . . Don't you wonder what life would have been like if we had . . ."

  "Long ago and far away," Maggie reminded him, then impulsively reached out and patted his hand, which was now lying on his knee. "It's great what you've accomplished, Tom. I'm very proud of you."

  They stood up.

  "It's been good seeing you," she told him, "which is something I never thought I'd say."

  "Same here," Tom told her. "If there's ever anything I can do for you . . . I mean . . . Hell, you know what I mean."

  "Same here," Maggie agreed. "I'd say we're good to go. Tell Halbrooks he may be onto something with this getting-rid-of-regrets thing."

  Tom smiled and leaned over to kiss her lightly on the cheek, not using the moment as an excuse for an embrace, just barely touching her shoulder with the tips of his fingers.

  Before she was back in the little hallway to retrieve her down cape, Tom had already returned to the glass-fronted conference room where the others still waited for him. She supposed that was the beauty of being a billionaire. Everyone always waited for you, however long
it took. She glanced back and saw that the unpleasant Miss Broad was staring at her, glaring.

  Maggie grinned.

  Raoul Manuelo walked her back to the hotel, their way lit by bright flood lamps that lined the path. As soon as they reached the porch that led into the hotel's rear entrance, she dismissed him with thanks. Upstairs, she found Miles waiting in her half-darkened room, sprawled on the bed, asleep. She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. He sat up, rubbing his eyes.

  "Where have you been? I was about to send out a search party."

  "It took longer than I thought it would," she told him, beginning to remove the down coat.

  "Okay, give. What was 'it' – the full story."

  "You aren't going to believe this," she began, and then she gave him a quick rundown on what had taken place, well most of it. She left out Tom's comment about Miles being a boy and her rejoinder.

  "So Merriman Scott was the old boy friend," he said when she'd finished. "After I thought about it, I kind of wondered. So what happens now?"

  "About what?" She asked. "The guy spilled his guts about what he thought happened then. I did the same. We each agreed we'd been silly. Then we shook hands and said goodbye. I don't expect anything else to happen."

  "I don't know," Miles said thoughtfully. "There was something about the way Scott looked at you . . . And it seems awfully coincidental that he and his entourage would just show up where you are."

  "I don't think it was coincidental. I think that Halbrooks persuaded Tom to track me down to finish whatever therapy it is that he's putting Tom through, which I gather is in aid of the 'big enterprise' that Halbrooks hinted at a couple of times, which I gather is something in which Halbrooks himself is involved. I expect I'm just a cog in Halbrooks' plan." Maggie thought about the day's interview. "I've seen these executive coaches get their hands on someone who's susceptible for some reason. They can make them jump through hoops – and put others through hoops. Now that I think about it, Tom seemed uncomfortable with the whole thing. But he did it, so Halbrooks must really have his number, or this new deal must really matter to him, or both."

  "So did anybody ever say what this 'big enterprise' is?" Miles asked.

  "Nope. I don't have a clue," Maggie said. "Halbrooks never said. Tom never said. I guess I'll read about it in the papers, like everyone else."

  "Yeah, probably," Miles said.

  "Where's the mini-bar?" Maggie asked suddenly, looking around.

  "I don't think Lake View Lodge runs to mini-bars," Miles said. "Why do you want a mini-bar?"

  "I'm starving," Maggie told him. "I missed lunch, and it's been a long time since breakfast, what there was of it."

  Miles jumped up to retrieve a paper bag bearing the Lake View Lodge logo, which he'd tossed on the chair in the corner. She laughed as he dumped the contents onto the bed's faded paisley coverlet.

  "I went to the Soda Shop before I came up," he explained. "I can offer you Payday, Snickers, Three Musketeers, Avalanche, M&Ms, Kit Kat, Lindt, Hershey's, Chocolate Orange Toblerone, Nestle Crunch, Skittles, Reeses, Starburst, Twix, Almond Joy, Baby Ruth, Butterfinger, Twizzlers, Dove Dark Chocolate, Goobers, Milky Way, Raisinettes, Rolo, Skor, Goo Goo Cluster, Tootsie Roll, Golean Chocolate Almond Toffee, York Mint, Junior Mint, and something called Cela's Cherry Milk, whatever that is." He looked at her and grinned. "I thought we'd skip dinner."

  "Works for me," she said, beginning to undo the buttons of his shirt. "But I get the Payday."

  An Old Keepsake, A New Opportunity

  Maggie awoke Thursday morning to the sound of her cell. Still groggy, she reached out to the bedside table and managed to grab it before the call rolled over to voice mail. "Maggie McLaurin," she said, sounding as brisk as possible, blinking her eyes against the pale sunlight trying to come through the wooden shutters of the bedroom window. Miles was nowhere in sight, but a small fire flickered on the sitting room's hearth, almost certainly his handiwork.

  "Hi Maggie, it's Ann Worthington Longstreet. Glad I caught you before you started your day."

  "Ann?" Maggie was briefly puzzled, but then she remembered. "You were showing the dreadful Mybawr woman your old house. Did you know she came over that Sunday and started harassing my mother?"

  "No, I didn't. I'm sorry, but you know how people like that are. Even in this economic climate, they're still acting as if they own the world. Anyway, that 'dreadful woman' and her husband have made a very generous offer on our old house, but it's contingent on the inclusion of an adjacent property, for a price to be negotiated. If you're at all interested, the price is genuinely open to negotiation and I think it might be higher than you could get otherwise. The Mybawrs seem to be of the 'if I want it, I must have it now' sort, if you know what I mean."

  "I know what you mean, Ann."

  "Well," the other woman said with a touch of impatience, "are you interested? Even vaguely?"

  "Maybe vaguely," Maggie admitted. "In fact, I was thinking about calling you. But the situation is complicated. As you've probably gathered, my mother has health issues and the doctor thinks she should remain in her own home, so that's what I've been trying to do."

  "Does the doctor pay the property taxes?" Ann asked with acerbity.

  "How much money do you think they're talking about?" Ann named a figure, and Maggie was shocked. "Wow, I thought it'd be higher."

  "It would have been a year or two ago. Everything's changed almost overnight. There are very few buyers out there."

  "Do you think they'd be willing to put off possession, to give her a right to remain in the house during her lifetime?"

  "Not likely," Ann said. "They've practically got Hudgins waiting at the gates."

  "So they've decided they want to demolish both houses? That's kind of sad."

  "That's real estate," Ann said. "Well, look, do you at least want me to talk with them and try to float the idea of delayed possession?"

  "I guess there's no harm in it," Maggie said. "But I have to tell you that the sum you named isn't enough after taxes to make it possible for me to relocate Mother and keep her indefinitely in the facility that the doctor recommends if she does have to be moved, so if you think that's the amount the place will realize in this market and you don't think delayed possession is possible, it may be a waste of your time."

  "I'll give them a call and see what I can do. I'll be in touch as soon as I know anything."

  There was a note on the rumpled pillow on the side of the bed where Miles had slept the night before: "Ordering breakfast in my room for 9 a.m. Call me when you read this." She looked at the clock. It was 8:10.

  When had Miles awakened and slipped out? When she reached him to confirm she'd join him, he sounded almost giddy. She couldn't blame him, she thought, as she showered. She felt giddy herself. Last night had been a repeat of the night before, which made it pretty amazing. She hadn't enjoyed sex like that with anyone ever, except of course for . . .

  She thought of what Tom had said the day before. That was a totally weird interview, but at least now she knew she hadn't been betrayed by her first love. That felt good in one way, but in another it was disorienting, probably because the knowledge removed something that she now realized she'd used as a rationale for holding men at a distance so they'd never be able to hurt her in the same way that Tom had. Now it turned out that Tom, shock of shocks, hadn't been a villain, in spite of what she'd thought all these years. Far from being a heartless jerk, he'd suffered, just as she had. Strange, very strange. And, she admitted, more than slightly gratifying.

  The room phone was ringing as she stepped out of the shower. Grabbing a towel, she dried herself as she hurried toward it. To her surprise, it was Tom, and she instinctively pulled the towel close around her still-damp body, holding it tightly under her arms.

  "Maggie? It's Merriman Scott. Tom. I realized this morning that I forgot to return something of yours that I think you might want. Can you meet me for a few minutes?"

  "I don't have time before
the seminar. We break at 12:30 for lunch, and I'll have a few minutes then if you want to come by the Lakeside Room, where you came yesterday."

  There was a pause so slight that she almost missed it, then Tom agreed. "I'll see you at 12:35 then." He asked for her cell number "in case something comes up," and Maggie hung up, frowning. What could Tom have that was hers? She'd given him gifts in their four months together, but surely he hadn't bothered to hang onto . . .

  Then she remembered, and wondered further how she could have forgotten. Before she could pursue the line of thought, her cell rang. It was Miles, checking to make sure she was about to leave to come upstairs.

  "I thought you'd be here by now," he said. "Coffee's right at lukewarm, and the food is forming icicles."

  "I'm sorry," she told him. "I had an unexpected phone call. The real estate agent who's handling the sale of the house next door on West Paces Ferry tracked me down to tell me that she has a sale. It's contingent, however, on her being able to negotiate a price for our place."

  "So, are you considering it?"

  "Well, given everything, I at least have to consider it, but I don't think it's going to work out. She gave me a price range, and the market's so bad right now that it isn't high enough to cover the cost of keeping my mother indefinitely in the kind of facility that her doctor says is necessary. Anyway, he thinks she should stay in her own home for now."

  "Maybe she could negotiate lifetime possession for your mother."

  "I suggested that," Maggie said, "but she said these buyers want to take possession of both places at once and demolish them, so it's probably a no go."

  "You're sure you can trust this agent? Do you know her?"

  "She's Ann Longstreet; her parents lived next door to mine while we were growing up. I've known her forever. I'm sure she'll do the best she can. Anyway, there's nothing to be done about that right now. I'll be up in a few minutes."

  In Miles' suite, a fire burned brightly on the sitting room hearth. Before windows that overlooked the ice-clouded lake, barely visible through the fog, were two chairs and a table set with two places. Next to the table, a linen-covered rolling cart held a variety of covered dishes.