Paradise

by Judith McNaught

  “I watched you the day I came to your office. I’ve always known there was a better way to deal with executives than what I’ve seen my father do, but I wasn’t certain if I’d be mistaken for being weak and feminine if I tried for a more open dialogue when I became president.”

  “And?” he prodded, grinning slightly.

  “And you were doing exactly that with your staff that day—yet no one would ever accuse you of being weak or feminine. And so,” she finished with a breathless, self-conscious laugh as she turned back to the silverware drawer, “I decided to be just like you when I grow up!”

  Silence hung in the room like a living, breathing thing—Meredith uneasily self-conscious, and Matt far more pleased by her praise than he wanted to admit. “That’s very flattering,” he said formally. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Now, why don’t you sit down and I’ll fix dinner.”

  After dinner they went back to the living room, and Meredith wandered over to the bookcase, surveying the old books and games there. She’d had a beautiful, unforgettable day, and that fact was making her feel guilty about Parker and vaguely uneasy about . . . about something she couldn’t quite name. Yes, she could, she thought with brutal honesty, she could name it easily, though she couldn’t understand why it was affecting her. There was too much overpowering masculinity in this house for her peace of mind, too much male charm, too many memories starting to stir. She hadn’t anticipated any of that when she came here. She hadn’t expected a close-up view of Matt’s bare chest to set off a chain of memories of other times when she’d seen it—times when she was lying on her back with Matt above her, inside her.

  She ran her finger slowly along dusty spines of novels without actually seeing their titles, and she wondered idly how many other women shared those same intimate memories of Matt’s body joined with theirs. Dozens, she decided, no hundreds, probably. And in a funny, purely impartial way, she no longer condemned Matt for all his well-publicized sexual exploits any more than she could find it in her heart to continue looking down her nose at the women who offered him their bodies. Now, as a grown woman herself, she fully recognized what she had only partially understood as a girl, and that was that Matt Farrell positively exuded bold sex appeal and potent masculinity. In itself, that was a lethal attraction, but when one added in the enormous wealth he’d accumulated and the power he now wielded, she could see why the combination would be absolutely irresistible to most women.

  She herself wasn’t endangered by it. Not a bit! The last thing she wanted in her life was an unpredictable sexual athlete who had women panting for him. She vastly preferred dependable, morally upright men. Like Parker. But she enjoyed Matt’s company, she admitted that much to herself. Possibly, she was enjoying it too much.

  On the sofa, Matt watched her, hoping she wouldn’t find a book and lose herself in it for the rest of the evening. When she remained in front of the shelf with the old games on it for a rather long time, he thought maybe she was looking at the Monopoly game . . . and remembering the last time they’d played it. “Would you like to play?” he asked.

  Her head jerked around, her expression inexplicably wary. “Play what?”

  “I thought you were looking at one of the games—the one on top.”

  Meredith saw it then, the Monopoly game, and all her preoccupation and worries vanished in the anticipation of spending the next few hours doing something as completely frivolous and silly as playing Monopoly with him. She smiled at him over her shoulder, reaching for it. “Do you want to?”

  Matt suddenly wanted to as much as she apparently did. “I suppose we could,” he said, already pulling the quilt off the sofa so they could sit there with the game board between them.

  Two hours later, Matt owned Boardwalk, Park Place, the set of green properties, the set of red properties, the set of yellow properties, all four railroads, and both utilities; and the board was literally covered with his houses and hotels, which Meredith had to pay rent for every time her token landed on one of his properties. “You owe me two thousand dollars for that last move,” he pointed out, utterly contented with his evening—and utterly enchanted with the woman who could turn a Monopoly game into one of the most enjoyable nights he’d had in years. “Hand it over.”

  Meredith gave him a limpid look that made him chuckle even before she said, “I have only five hundred left. Would you consider a loan?”

  “Not a chance. I’ve won. Hand it over.”

  “Slumlords have no heart,” she said, and she plopped the money into his open palm. She tried to scowl and ended up smiling at him. “I should have known from the last time we played this game—when you bought up everything in sight and took everyone’s money—that you were going to turn out to be a famous, rich tycoon.”

  Instead of smiling, he looked at her for a moment and then asked quietly, “Would it have mattered if you had known?”

  Meredith’s heart skipped a beat at the sheer unexpectedness of such a momentous question. Trying desperately to pass the matter off lightly and restore their former mood, she gave him a comic look of a woman who has been grievously maligned and began to clear the game board. “I’ll thank you not to imply that I might have been mercenary in my youth, Mr. Farrell. You’ve humiliated me enough for one night by winning away all my money.”

  “You’re right, I have.” Matt matched her light tone, but he was amazed that he’d asked the question out loud and furious with himself for suddenly starting to wonder what he might have done to make her want to stay married to him. Getting up, he made certain the fire wouldn’t flare up while they slept. By the time he finished, he’d gotten himself under firm control. “Speaking of money,” he said as she put the game back on the shelf, “if you ever personally guarantee a loan for your company again, at least insist that your fiancé’s bank agree to release you from that guarantee after two or three years. That’s long enough for them to have proof that the loan is solid.”

  Relieved by the change of topic, Meredith turned around. “Do banks do that?”

  “Ask your fiancé.” Matt heard the sarcasm in his voice, and he hated the absurd stab of jealousy that was causing it. And while he was still berating himself for what he’d already said, he said even more. “And if he won’t agree, get yourself another banker.”

  Meredith knew she was suddenly on shaky ground, but she couldn’t understand how she got there. “Reynolds Mercantile,” she explained patiently, “has been Bancroft’s bank for nearly a century. I’m certain, if you knew all the details of our finances, you’d agree that Parker has been more than accommodating.”

  Irrationally annoyed by her persistent defense of Parker, he purposely said something he’d wanted to say all night. “Is he responsible for that ring you’re wearing on your left hand?”

  She nodded, watching him warily.

  “He has lousy taste. It’s ugly as hell.”

  He said it with such magnificent disdain, and what he said was so true about the ring, Meredith felt uncontrollable laughter welling up inside her. He stood still, brows raised in challenge, daring her to deny it, and she bit down on her lip, trying not to giggle. “It’s an heirloom.”

  “It’s ugly.”

  “Well, an heirloom is a—”

  “It is any object,” Matt said bluntly, “with deep sentimental value that is too ugly to sell and too valuable to throw out.”

  Instead of being irate, as he half expected her to be, Meredith burst out laughing, slumping against the wall. “You’re right,” she laughed.

  Watching her, Matt struggled to remember that she meant nothing to him anymore, then he tore his gaze from that flushed, intoxicating face of hers and glanced at the clock on the mantel. “It’s after eleven o’clock,” he said. “We may as well call it a night.”

  Startled by his curt tone, Meredith quickly turned off the lamp beside the sofa. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have kept you up so late. I didn’t realize what time it is.”

  Like Cin
derella’s magic coach that turned into a pumpkin at the end of the night, the mood of pleasant conviviality had completely disintegrated when they walked up the stairs together to go to bed. Meredith sensed it, but she didn’t know why it was happening. Matt sensed it, and he knew exactly why it was happening. With cool courtesy he escorted her to Julie’s room and said good night.

  37

  At midnight Matt was still awake, his eyes shut, his mind obsessed with the fact that Meredith was sleeping down the hall. At 12:30 he rolled over onto his back and, in sheer frustration, he opened the prescription bottle and took one of the pills that the label warned would cause drowsiness. At 1:15 he yanked the cap off the bottle and took another one.

  They put him to sleep, but in that drug-induced state, he dreamed of her . . . endless, heated dreams, where Meredith turned into his arms, naked and eager, running her hands over him, making him groan with pleasure. He made love to her over and over again until he finally scared her because he couldn’t stop. . . . “Matt, stop this, you’re scaring me!”

  He drove into her deeper and deeper, while she begged him to stop. . . . “Matt, please stop!”

  While she told him he was dreaming . . . “Stop it, you’re dreaming!”

  And threatened to call the doctor . . . “If you don’t wake up, I’m going to call a doctor!”

  He didn’t want a doctor, he wanted her. He tried to roll on top of her again, but she held him down, and put her hand on his forehead . . . And offered him coffee . . .

  “Please wake up! I’ve brought you coffee.”

  Coffee?

  And whispered gently in his ear . . . “Dammit, you are dreaming! You’re smiling in your sleep! Now, wake up!”

  It was the curse that got through to him. Meredith never swore, therefore something was wrong with his dream. Something was wrong. . . .

  He forced his eyes open and gazed at her beautiful face, struggling to reorient himself. She was bending over him, her hands grasping his shoulders, and she looked worried. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  Meredith relaxed her hold and sank down beside him on the bed with a sigh of relief. “You were thrashing around and talking in your sleep so much that I heard you out in the hall. When I couldn’t wake you up, I started to panic, but your head felt cool. Here, I brought you some coffee,” she added, nodding at the mug on the nightstand.

  Matt obediently forced himself to a sitting position. Leaning back against the headboard, he raked his hand through his hair, trying to shake off the lingering vestiges of sleep. “It’s those pills,” he explained. “Two of them must pack the wallop of a nuclear warhead.”

  She picked up the bottle and read the label. “This says you’re only supposed to take one.”

  Without replying, Matt reached for the mug and drank most of the coffee, then he leaned his head back and closed his eyes for several minutes, letting the heat and caffeine work their magic, blissfully unaware and unconcerned with the things that had plagued him the night before.

  Meredith, who remembered his waking-up ritual and his lack of conversation for the first few minutes after he awakened, stood up and idly straightened the things on the nightstand, then she absently picked up his robe and laid it across the foot of the bed. When she turned back, his eyes were more alert, his face relaxed and almost boyish. And very handsome. “Feel better?” she asked, smiling.

  “Much better. You make very good coffee.”

  “Every woman is supposed to have one major culinary accomplishment to her credit—something she can show off whenever the occasion calls for it.”

  He caught the gleam of amusement in her eye and grinned lazily. “Who said that?”

  “A magazine I read in the dentist’s office,” she replied, chuckling. “My major culinary achievement is coffee. Now, do you feel like breakfast?”

  “That depends on whether or not you plan to serve it from bottles and jars like yesterday,” he joked.

  “I’d be more careful if I were you about insulting the cook. There’s some powdered cleanser under the kitchen sink that would look just like sugar if I were to put it on your cereal.”

  His shoulders shook with laughter, and he drained the last of his coffee.

  “Seriously,” she said, smiling back at him from the foot of his bed, a golden goddess in blue jeans; an angel with devilment in her eyes. “What would you like for breakfast?”

  You, he thought, and desire began to roar through his entire body. He wanted her for breakfast. He wanted to reach out and drag her into his bed, to shove his hands into the rumpled silk of her hair and join his famished body with hers. He wanted to feel her hands on him, he wanted to bury himself inside her and make her moan for him. “Whatever you fix will be fine,” he said tightly, shifting the blankets to hide his arousal. “I’ll have it downstairs after I shower.”

  When she left the room, Matt closed his eyes and clenched his teeth, caught between fury and disbelief. Despite everything that had happened in the past, she could still do this to him! If all he felt for her was lust, he could have forgiven himself, but he couldn’t forgive himself for this sudden hopeless yearning to be a part of her again . . . to be loved by her.

  Eleven years ago he had fallen in love with her almost the moment he laid eyes on her, and for years afterward, his life had been haunted by a laughing, haughty, prim eighteen-year-old.

  In the last decade he had gone to bed with dozens of women, all of them more experienced sexually than Meredith had been. With them, the sexual act was an act of mutual gratification. With Meredith, it had been an act of profound beauty. Exquisite. Tormenting. Magic . . . At least, that’s how he’d felt at the time—very probably, he decided now, because he’d been so insane about her he didn’t know the difference between imagination and reality. She had captivated him at eighteen, but at twenty-nine she was far more dangerous to his peace of mind because she had changed, and the changes intrigued and beckoned to him. Her youthful sophistication had acquired the added gloss of elegance, yet that same soft vulnerability still glowed in her eyes, and her smile still changed from provocative to sunny, according to her moods. At eighteen she possessed an unaffected candor that had charmed and surprised him; at twenty-nine she was a successful businesswoman, and yet she seemed as natural and unaffected as she had before. Equally surprising, she seemed completely indifferent to, or unaware of, her own beauty. Not once yesterday had she stopped to primp at the mirror in the dining room, nor had she glanced at it in passing. Unlike other beautiful women he’d known, she didn’t pose or posture or run her fingers through that gorgeous hair of hers to draw attention to it. Her beauty had matured and her figure had acquired a lush ripeness that enabled her to look as alluring in jeans and a sweater as she did in the mink coat and black dress she’d worn to lunch the other day.

  Matt’s blood stirred hotly, and his hands itched to explore and caress those new curves she’d acquired. Suddenly his treacherous mind presented him with a tantalizing solution: Perhaps if he had her just one more time, he could quench this thirst for her and get her completely out of his system. . . . Swearing under his breath, Matt got out of bed and pulled on his robe. He was insane to even consider being intimate with her again.

  Again? He stopped cold. For the first time since she’d arrived, he was able to think without being weakened by the aftereffects of illness or those damned pills. Why in the hell had she come to the farm in the first place?

  She’d answered that question herself: I want a truce . . .

  Fine, he’d agreed to her truce. So why was she still there? Meredith hadn’t come to play house with him, that was for damned sure—so why was she hanging around, bringing him coffee in bed, and doing her very effective utmost to charm and disarm him?

  The answer hit him like a bucket of icewater, leaving him dumbstruck by his own stupidity: I wanted that Houston property for Bancroft’s, she’d said, but we can’t afford to pay thirty million.

  Christ, she was like a narcotic! She completely
drugged his mind. Meredith wanted that Houston land for the original price, and she was obviously willing to do anything to get it, including pandering to him. Her abject apology, her alleged desire for a truce, her wifely vigilance this weekend—it was all a sham designed to lull him into capitulating! Thoroughly revolted by her duplicity and his gullibility, Matt walked over to the window and shoved the curtain aside, looking out at the snow that had piled up in the drive, while in his mind he saw her standing meekly beside his bed: I’ll accept that as a sort of penance . . .

  Penance? he thought furiously. Meekness? Meredith didn’t have a meek bone in her body; she and her father ran roughshod over anyone who got in their way, and they did it as if it were their divine right! The only thing that had changed in Meredith was that she’d learned tenacity. No doubt, she’d climb into that bed with him if she thought it would get her that land, he thought with revulsion, not lust.

  Turning on his heel, Matt picked up his briefcase from the floor, opened it, and yanked out the cellular phone he always kept in it. When Sue O’Donnell answered his call at the neighboring farm, Matt impatiently replied to her inquiries about his family, then he said, “I’m snowed in over here. Would you ask Dale to plow the drive right away?”

  “You bet I will,” she agreed at once. “He’s due home this afternoon, and I’ll have him come right over.”

  Angry with the delay, but unable to come up with an alternative, Matt hung up and headed into the bathroom for a shower. Before his lust drove him to do something that would cost him what little pride and self-respect he had left, he was going to get Meredith out of there! All he had to do now to accomplish that was find her keys. He had a dim recollection of seeing her get out of her car the night she arrived, and then bend down near the car’s front tire on the driver’s side. He’d find her keys near there. The prospect of groping around in the snow was far less distasteful than having her under his roof for another day. Or another night. If he couldn’t find them, he’d hot-wire her car to start without the damned keys. Reaching into the tub, he turned on the water, wondering if she had an electronic alarm on the car that would disable the vehicle if he tried that. If she did, he’d think of something else, but one way or another, he was getting her out of there. As soon as the drive was plowed, he was going to give her five minutes to pack up and get out.