Paradise

by Judith McNaught

  The thought struck her that Matt might have sent himself that telegram so that he could acquit himself to his father for abandoning Meredith, and, just as quickly, she discarded it. Matthew Farrell did as he damned well pleased and offered excuses to no one. He had gotten her pregnant, married her, and then confronted her father’s wrath without concern or apology. He had built a business empire with nothing but sheer daring and strength of will. He wouldn’t have cowered before his own father and sent himself a telegram. The telegram she’d received, telling her to get a divorce, had obviously been sent in bitter response to the obscene one he’d received. And even so, he’d flown home to try to see her before sending it. . . .

  Tears stung her eyes, and she accelerated without realizing it. She had to get to him, to talk to him, to make him understand. She needed his forgiveness and he needed hers, and she didn’t think it was the least bit odd or in any way threatening to her future with Parker that she felt such piercing regret and aching tenderness for Matt now. Visions of how the future would be paraded across her mind: Next time, when Matt extended his hand, as he had at the opera, and smiled at her and said, “Hello, Meredith,” she would smile at him and put her hand in his. Their friendship wouldn’t have to be limited to chance social encounters either; they could be business friends too. Matt was a brilliant tactician and negotiator; in the future, she decided warmly, perhaps she might call him for advice occasionally. They’d meet for lunch and smile at each other; she’d tell him her problem, and he’d offer advice. Old friends were like that. The warmth within her built to a rosy glow.

  The country roads were treacherous, but Meredith scarcely noticed. Her delightful imaginings of future friendly meetings with Matt had been obliterated by the reality that she had absolutely no proof to offer him that what she was going to tell him was the truth. He already knew how badly she wanted a quiet divorce. If she walked into the house and went straight to the point about the miscarriage, he’d undoubtedly think she’d invented the entire tale to play on his sympathy and get him to agree to the divorce. Worse, he’d bought the Houston land she wanted for twenty million dollars, and he was holding Bancroft & Company in a ten-million-dollar financial vise by demanding thirty million for it. No doubt he’d assume her tale about the miscarriage was nothing but a desperate, transparent ploy to trick him into loosening the screws on that vise. Therefore, her only choice was to first smooth things over with him by telling him that his rezoning request would now go through. Once he understood that her father had agreed never to interfere with Matt again, then Matt would surely be as reasonable about the divorce as he’d tried to be at lunch—before he got that phone call. Then and only then—when he would know she had nothing more to gain—she could explain what really happened to their baby. He’d surely believe her at that point, because there’d be no reason to doubt her.

  The wooden bridge across the creek on his property was covered in snow several inches deep. Meredith accelerated to prevent herself from bogging down, and held her breath. The BMW plowed across it, tires skidding, rear end slipping sideways, then it plunged ahead toward the front yard of the farmhouse. In the reflected light from the snow-covered fields and the moon overhead, the barren trees in the yard were eerie, distorted versions of what they had been that long-ago summer. Like forbidding skeletons, they cast twisted shadows on the white frame house, warning her away, and Meredith felt a shiver of foreboding as she cut the headlights and turned off the engine. A light shone dimly through a curtain in an upper window; Matt was here, and he was still awake. And he was going to be infuriated when he saw her.

  Leaning her head back against the seat, she closed her eyes, trying to gather the courage she needed to get through whatever was going to happen in the next few minutes. And at that moment, alone in the car, facing an impossibly difficult and desperately important task, Meredith asked for help for the first time in eleven years. “Please,” she whispered to God, “make him believe me.”

  Opening her eyes, she sat up, pulled her keys out of the ignition, and picked up her purse. Eleven years ago her prayers that Matt would come to her at the hospital had been answered, only she hadn’t known it, and she’d stopped praying after that. No doubt God was now thoroughly hacked off at her for that. It was amazing, she thought with a bubble of hysterical laughter as she got out of the car, that she’d managed to make everyone angry with her, when she’d tried so hard to be a nice person.

  The light on the porch suddenly snapped on, and her laughter vanished; her heart leapt into her throat, and she looked up to see the front door opening. In her preoccupied alarm, she lost her footing in the deep snow, grabbed the car fender for balance and dropped her keys into the snow beside her right tire. She bent down to reach for them, but she realized she had another set in her purse, and didn’t see the point of digging around in the snow. Not at a time like this, when she was facing the most important confrontation of her life.

  The porch light spilled into the yard, and Matt stood in the doorway, staring in disbelief at the disconcerting scene before him: A woman had just gotten out of her car, a woman who looked impossibly like Meredith, and then she had ducked down and disappeared. She reappeared again, walking around the front of her car through the swirling snow. Groping for the door frame, he clutched it, trying to keep the weakness and dizziness at bay. He stared at her, half convinced that his fever was causing him to hallucinate, but when the woman reached up and pushed her heavy mane of snow-dusted hair off her forehead, the gesture was so achingly familiar to him that his heart contracted almost painfully.

  She walked up the porch steps and lifted her face to his. “Hello, Matt.”

  Matt decided he was definitely hallucinating. Or else he was dreaming. Possibly, he was dying upstairs in his bed. He didn’t know which of the three it was, but he did know that the chills that had racked his body in the house were coming with alarming frequency now. The apparition before him smiled—a sweetly tentative smile. “May I come in?” she asked. She looked and sounded like an angelic version of Meredith.

  A furious blast of arctic wind threw snow into his face and snapped him out of his daze. This was no damned apparition, this was Meredith, and the realization belatedly sent adrenaline pumping furiously through his veins. Too ill to march her back to her car or freeze to death arguing with her about leaving, he straightened, stepped back from the doorway, and rudely turned his back, leaving her to follow him inside. Grateful that the shock of finding her on his doorstep was giving him a burst of strength, he walked into the darkened living room. “You must have the instincts of a bloodhound and the tenacity of a bulldog to come all the way out here after me,” he informed her as he reached out in the dark and switched on the overhead light. His voice sounded hoarse and strange to his own ears.

  Meredith had braced herself for a far worse, far more explosive reception than this one. “I had some help finding you,” she said, searching his haggard face, shaken by a stab of poignant tenderness for him. Suppressing the urge to reach up and take his face in her hands and say “I’m sorry,” she contented herself for the time being with shrugging out of her coat and handing it to him.

  “It’s the butler’s night off,” Matt mocked, ignoring her coat. “Hang it up yourself.” Instead of retorting as he expected, she turned and draped the coat over a chair. His eyes narrowed with anger and confusion as he compared her quiet humility with his last encounter with her. “Well?” he snapped. “Let’s hear it. What do you want?”

  To his surprise, she laughed—a funny, breathless laugh. “I think I want a drink. Yes, I definitely want a drink.”

  “We’re out of Dom Pérignon,” he informed her. “You have your choice of scotch or vodka. Take it or leave it.”

  “Vodka is fine,” she said quietly.

  Matt’s knees felt like water as he walked into the kitchen, poured some vodka into a glass, and returned to the living room. She took the glass he thrust at her and glanced around at the room. “It—it seems odd t
o see you here again after all these years—” she began haltingly.

  “Why? This is where I come from—and where you think I still belong. I’m nothing but a dirty steelworker, remember?”

  To Matt’s dumbfounded disbelief, her color heightened with embarrassment and she started apologizing. “I’m very sorry I said that. I wanted to hurt you and I said that because I knew it would. I didn’t mean it, and there’s nothing wrong with being a steelworker—they’re hardworking, decent men who—”

  “What the hell are you trying to pull?” Matt exploded, then almost keeled over from the stabbing pain in his head. The room reeled, and he put his hand against the wall, trying to steady himself.

  “What’s wrong?” Meredith cried. “Are you ill?”

  Matt had a sudden premonition that he was either going to collapse like a damned baby or throw up in front of her. “Get out of here, Meredith.” His head swam and his stomach churned as he turned on his heel and started toward the stairs. “I’m going to bed.”

  “You are ill,” she burst out, running toward him when he grabbed the banister and swayed on the second step. She reached for his arm to help him, and he jerked it away, but not before she felt the fiery heat of his skin.

  “My God, you’re burning up!”

  “Go away!”

  “Shut up, and lean on me,” she commanded, and he didn’t have the strength to stop her from picking up his arm and draping it over her shoulders.

  When Meredith got him up to his bedroom, he staggered forward and collapsed on the bed, his eyes closed. Still as . . . death. Terrified, she picked up his limp arm, felt for a pulse, and in her panic she couldn’t find any. “Matt!” she cried, grabbing his shoulders and shaking him. “Matt, don’t you dare die!” she warned hysterically. “I’ve come all this way to tell you things you have to know, to ask for your forgiveness and—”

  The raw fear in her voice, the frantic way she was shaking him, finally penetrated Matt’s befuddled senses, and in his dazed state he was incapable of nourishing any further animosity for her at all. All that seemed to matter was that she was there and that he felt terribly sick. “Stop—” he whispered, “shaking me! Dammit.”

  Meredith let go of him and almost cried with relief, then she got a grip on herself and tried to gather her wits. The last time she’d seen someone collapse like this, it had been her father and he had nearly died, but Matt was young and strong. He had a fever, he did not have a bad heart. Not certain what to do to help him, she looked around the room and saw the two prescription bottles on the table beside the bed. Both labels said he was to take one every three hours. “Matt,” she said urgently, thinking it might be time for him to take more medicine, “when did you take these pills?”

  Matt heard her and tried to force his eyes open, but before he could, she was clutching his hand, leaning close to his ear, and imploring him. “Matt, can you hear me?”

  “I am not deaf,” he rasped hoarsely, “and I am not dying. I have the flu and bronchitis. I just took more pills.”

  He felt the bed sink as she sat down beside him, and he actually imagined her fingertips gently smoothing the hair off his forehead. He was obviously very close to delirium, and the whole scene that he saw behind his eyes was taking on the quality of a comic dream: Meredith hovering frantically over him, touching his forehead, smoothing his hair back. Quite hilariously, impossibly funny.

  “Are you certain that’s all it is—the flu and bronchitis?” she asked from the other side of his closed eyelids.

  His mouth quirked in a fevered smile. “How much worse do you want it?”

  “I think I should call a doctor.”

  “I need a woman’s touch.”

  She answered with a shaky, worried laugh. “Will I do?”

  “Very funny,” he whispered.

  Meredith felt her heart lurch because he’d almost sounded as if she would more than suffice. “I’ll leave you alone to rest.”

  “Thank you,” he murmured, turning his face away from the overhead light, already drifting into sleep.

  Meredith pulled the blankets over him, noticing for the first time that he’d been barefoot. He’d fallen asleep in the clothes he’d been wearing when he let her in, and she supposed they’d keep him warmer than pajamas. Walking over to the door, she put her hand on the light switch, then she turned back, watching his chest rise and fall in the steady rhythm of sleep. His breathing was ragged, his face was pale beneath his tan, but even sick and fast asleep he looked like a very large and formidable adversary. “Why is it,” she wryly asked the sleeping man, “that every time I come near you, nothing happens the way it should?”

  Her smile faded, and she turned out the light. She really hated chaos and uncertainty in her personal life; hated the helpless, endangered feeling it gave her. At work, chaos was fine—challenging, stimulating, exciting. Because at work, when she took risks or played hunches, they almost always paid off. If they didn’t, the result was failure, not disaster. In her entire adult life she’d taken only two major personal risks, and they’d both proven to be catastrophic mistakes: She’d slept with Matthew Farrell and she’d married him. Even now, after eleven years, she was still trying to disentangle herself from the second one. Lisa was forever criticizing Parker’s predictable, reliable nature, but Lisa couldn’t understand that predictability and reliability were two things Meredith treasured, craved in her personal life. The ramifications of spontaneous personal risk, in her case, were more than she was willing to endure. In business she had a knack for gambling on the right things; in her personal life she just didn’t!

  Stopping to pick up her coat from the chair, Meredith went out to the car and got her overnight bag, then she brought it back inside. She started toward the stairs, then she paused to look around the room with a mixture of nostalgia and vague sadness. It was the same; the old sofa facing a pair of wing chairs in front of the fireplace, the books on the shelves, the lamps. The same, only smaller, and forlorn in a way with the packing boxes open on the floor, some of them already filled with books and knickknacks wrapped in newspaper.

  35

  It was still snowing in the morning when Meredith crept into Matt’s room to check on him. He was a little feverish, but his forehead felt much cooler.

  In the gray light of day, after a night’s sleep and a hot shower, her unexpected reception at the farmhouse last night seemed more comic than unsettling.

  Putting on a pair of pleated navy slacks and a bright yellow and navy V-neck sweater, she walked over to the mirror to brush her hair—and she started grinning. She couldn’t help it. The more she thought about last night, the funnier it seemed in retrospect. After all her nervousness and determination, after her harrowing drive through a blizzard, they’d said only a half-dozen sentences to each other before Matt had practically collapsed at her feet, and they’d both gone to bed for the night! Obviously, she decided with a suppressed giggle, there was some perverse supernatural influence at work whenever she went near Matt.

  Actually, the fact that he was too ill to forcibly eject her was something of a boon. Although she couldn’t very well unload all her news on him when he was so sick, by this afternoon he should be feeling well enough to discuss the whole thing rationally, and yet too weak to refuse to listen. If he still tried to make her leave, she’d buy time by telling him a half truth—that she’d lost her keys in the snow and couldn’t go.

  Content with her plan, she brushed her hair and fluffed it with her fingers until it fell in casual waves and curls over her shoulders. Satisfied, she put on lipstick and mascara, then backed up and checked her appearance in the mirror. Her hair was getting too long, she thought, but apart from that, she looked fine.

  Intent on rounding up some sick-room things like a thermometer and aspirin, she headed down the hall and into the bathroom. The cabinet behind the bathroom mirror yielded up a thermometer and several bottles, most of them with labels yellowed with age. Meredith surveyed them, her brow furrowed with
uncertainty. Illness, other than an occasional bout of menstrual cramps or a rare headache, was practically unknown to her; she’d had two colds in her entire life, and the last time she’d had the flu she was twelve years old!

  What did one do for someone with the flu and bronchitis, she wondered. The flu was rampant among employees at the store, and Meredith tried to remember what Phyllis had told her about her own symptoms. She’d had a splitting headache, Meredith recalled, and nausea and aching muscles. Bronchitis was something else again—that caused congestion and coughing.

  Reaching up, Meredith took out a bottle of aspirin and the thermometer, which were the only things she was actually familiar with, then she selected a bottle with an oily orange label: merthiolate. The label said it was for cuts, so she put it back and picked up a tube of stuff that said it was for muscular aches. She opened it, squeezed a little onto her finger, and the smell of it made her eyes water.

  In stupefaction she scanned the shelves. The problem, she realized, was that the contents of the medicine cabinet were so old and outdated that the brand names meant nothing to her.

  A large brown bottle said SMITH’S CASTOR OIL, and her shoulders started to rock with laughter. It would serve him right, she decided, it really would. She had no idea what castor oil was supposed to cure, but she knew it was purported to taste utterly vile. So she added that to the things in the crook of her arm, intending to put it on his tray as a joke. It dawned on her that she was in remarkably high spirits for someone who was marooned on a farm with a sick man who hated her, but she attributed that to the fact that she was going to be able to put an end to that hatred. That, and the fact that she very much wanted to help him feel better. She owed him that much after everything she’d inadvertently put him through in the past. Added to all that, there was a youthful nostalgia associated with being there that made her feel eighteen again.