She waited for him to argue or agree. Instead, he leaned a hip against the table behind him, his face impassive, and remained silent. Meredith realized that his own disregard for public opinion was probably making him view her concerns as trivial, so she brought up another, larger problem. “Matt, I haven’t wanted to think about the ramifications of that fight last night, but I can tell you right now, there’s a ninety-percent chance I’ll be called before the board of directors to give an explanation. don’t you understand the compromising predicament I’m in? Bancroft and Company is an old and dignified operation; the board of directors is rigid, and they didn’t want me in the president’s office in the first place. A few days ago I stood up in a news conference held at Bancroft and Company and said we hardly know each other and there was no chance of a reconciliation. If I move in with you right away, my credibility as an officer of Bancroft’s will suffer just as much as my honesty as a person. And that isn’t all. Last night I was part of, and the cause of, a public brawl—a fiasco that could have gotten us all arrested if the police had been called. I’ll be lucky if the board doesn’t threaten to invoke the morals clause in my contract and ask me to step down.”
“They wouldn’t dare invoke the morals clause over a thing like that!” Matt said, looking more contemptuous of the notion than alarmed by it.
“They could and they might.”
“I’d get myself a new board of directors,” he said.
“I wish I could,” Meredith said with a wry smile. “I take it your board pretty much does what you want done?” When he nodded curtly, she sighed. “Unfortunately, neither my father nor I control our board. The point is, I’m a woman, and I’m young, and they weren’t any too crazy about my becoming interim president in the first place. can’t you see why I’m worried about what they’re going to think of all this?”
“You’re a competent executive, that’s all in the hell they need to be concerned with. If they call a meeting and demand an explanation, or threaten to invoke the morals clause if you don’t step down, then take the offensive, not the defensive. You weren’t pushing drugs or running a house of prostitution; you were present during a fight.”
“Is that what you’d tell them—that you weren’t running drugs or anything?” she asked, fascinated with his business methods.
“No,” he said brusquely. “I’d tell them to fuck off.”
Meredith swallowed a giggle at the ludicrous prospect of standing up in front of twelve conservative businessmen and doing such a thing. “You aren’t seriously suggesting I say that?” she said when he didn’t seem to share her humor.
“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. You can alter the words slightly if you think you should, but the point is that you can’t live your life to suit other people. The harder you try, the more restrictions they’ll put on you just for the fun of seeing you jump through their hoops.”
Meredith knew he was right, but not in this instance or in her specific circumstances. For one thing, she wasn’t willing to incur the board’s wrath; for another, she was using her predicament as an excuse to stall before making the commitment Matt wanted. She loved him, but in many ways he was still a complete stranger to her. She wasn’t ready to promise herself completely to him. Not yet. Not until she was absolutely certain the paradise he promised her—the part about the life they would have together—really existed. And from the expression on Matt’s face, she had an awful feeling he suspected she was stalling. His next words confirmed that he knew exactly what she was doing and that he didn’t like it.
“Sooner or later, Meredith, you’re going to have to take a risk and trust me completely. Until you do, you’re cheating me and you’re cheating yourself. You can’t outwit fate by trying to stand on the sidelines and place little side bets about the outcome of life. Either you wade in and risk everything to play the game, or you don’t play at all. And if you don’t play, you can’t win.”
It was, she thought, a beautiful philosophy on the one hand and a terrifying one on the other—a philosophy, moreover, that was far better suited to him than her.
“How about a compromise,” she suggested with a winsome smile that Matt reluctantly found irresistible. “Why don’t I wade in—but stay in the shallow end for a while until I get accustomed to it?”
After a tense moment he nodded. “How long?”
“A little while.”
“And while you’re debating about how deep you dare to go, what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to wait and pace and wonder if your father will be able to convince you not to live with me or to go through with the divorce?”
“I have plenty of courage to withstand my father regardless of whether he comes around and sees things our way or not,” she said so forcefully that he smiled a little. “What I’m worried about is whether or not you’ll try to meet him halfway if he does—for my sake?”
She rather expected him to agree, for her sake, but she’d misjudged the depth of Matt’s hatred, because he shook his head. “He and I have an old score to settle first, and it’s going to be settled my way.”
“He’s ill, Matt,” she warned, an awful feeling of foreboding shaking through her. “He can’t take a lot of stress anymore.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” Matt replied unanswerably. His expression softened a little, and he changed the subject. “Now, who is sleeping where tonight?”
“Do you suppose any of the reporters who saw you come up here this morning are still out there, watching?”
“Probably one or two of the tenacious ones.”
She bit her lip, hating to have him leave, but knowing he shouldn’t stay. “Then you can’t really stay all night, can you?”
“Evidently not,” he said in a tone that made her feel like a coward.
Matt saw her eyes darken with consternation, and he relented. “All right, I’ll go home and sleep alone. It’s nothing less than I deserve for participating in that adolescent fight last night. While I’m on that subject,” he added more gently, “I’d like you to know that while I was guilty of saying something that undoubtedly caused your drunken fiancé to take a swing at me, I didn’t realize what was happening until after it was over. One second I was looking at you, and the next I saw a fist coming at me from the corner of my eye. For all I knew, it was some drunk at the bar who’d decided to pick a fight, and I reacted instinctively.”
Meredith suppressed a shudder, a delayed reaction to the lethal swiftness, the easy brutality, with which Matt had leveled Parker . . . the savage look on his face in that split second when he realized he was being attacked. Then she firmly shoved the thought aside. Matt was not now, and was never going to be, like the fastidious, urbane men she’d known. He had grown up tough, and he was tough. But not with her, she thought with a tender smile, and she reached out and smoothed his dark hair back from his temple.
“If you think,” he said wryly, “that you can smile at me like that and make me agree to almost anything, you’re right.” And then he abruptly reverted to his usual, more indomitable self by adding, “However, while I’m willing to practice extreme discretion in our relationship—read that as sneaking—I’m determined that you’re going to spend as much time with me as possible, and that includes some nights together. I’ll arrange for a pass so that you can get into the parking garage in my building. If I have to, I’ll stand out in front and talk to the damned reporters to divert them every time you drive in.”
He looked so irked at the prospect of having to pander to public opinion that she said in a voice of exaggerated gratitude, “You’d do that? Just for me?”
Instead of laughing, he took the question seriously and pulled her tightly to him. “You have no idea,” he said fiercely, “how much I’d do—just for you!” His mouth opened over hers in a rough, consuming kiss that stole her breath and robbed her of all ability to think. When he was finished, she was clinging to him. “Now that you’re almost as unhappy with tonight’s sleeping arrangement as I am,” he
said with grim humor, “I’ll get out of here before the reporters out in front decide to go home and say we spent the night together anyway.”
Meredith walked him to the door, exasperated because he was right—after that kiss she wanted to spend the night in his arms so badly that she ached. She stood while he shrugged into his jacket and put on his tie. When he was finished, he looked at her for a moment and quirked a knowing brow at her. “Something on your mind?” he teased.
There was—she wanted to be kissed. The memory of the stormy, uninhibited hours she’d just spent in bed with him washed over her then, and with a deliberately provocative smile Meredith Bancroft reached out and caught her husband’s tie. Slowly and forcefully she pulled on it, smiling daringly into his smoky gray eyes, and then, when he was close enough, she leaned up on her toes, wrapped her arms around him, and gave him a kiss that left him breathless.
When he left, Meredith shut the door and leaned against it, smiling dreamily, her eyes closed. Her lips were tender from his last stormy kiss; her hair was tousled because he’d shoved his hands into it while he kissed her, and her cheeks were glowing. She felt like a woman who had been made love to very thoroughly and who had enjoyed it tremendously. And it was all true.
Her smile deepened as she thought of the sexy, tender things he had said to her, and she could almost hear his deep voice saying them. . . .
I love you, he had whispered . . .
I’ll never let anyone hurt you . . .
You have no idea how much I’d do for you!
Forty miles northeast of Belleville, Illinois, another squad car screeched to a halt behind those already parked beside a wooded stretch of lonely county road, their red and blue lights revolving with frantic eeriness in the night. Overhead, the blinding searchlight of a police helicopter moved restlessly over the pines, lighting the way for the teams of searchers and dog handlers who were combing in the dark for clues. In a shallow ditch beside the road, the coroner crouched beside the body of a middle-aged man. Raising his voice to be heard over the whistling roar of the helicopter blades, he called out to the local sheriff, “You’re wasting your time with that search party, Emmett. Even in the daylight you won’t find any clues in those woods. This guy was dumped out of a moving vehicle and he rolled down here.”
“You’re wrong!” Emmett shouted triumphantly. Beaming his flashlight at something in the ditch, he bent down and picked it up.
“The hell I am! I’m telling you somebody beat the hell out of this guy and then dumped him out of a moving vehicle.”
“Not about that,” the sheriff replied, walking forward. “I did find somethin’. I found a wallet.”
The coroner tipped his head toward the body. “His?”
“Let’s have a look,” the sheriff replied, and after beaming his flashlight at the picture on the driver’s license, he bent down and pulled the blanket off the victim’s face, studying it for comparison. “His!” he pronounced emphatically. Holding the license up to his light, he said, “He’s got one of them foreign names you can’t hardly pronounce. Stanislaus . . . Spyzhalski.”
“Stanis—” the coroner uttered. “Isn’t he that fake lawyer they busted down in Belleville?”
“By God, you’re right!”
49
With his briefcase in one hand and his coat over his arm, Matt stopped at the desk of the secretary who’d helped him prepare the conference room the day Meredith came. “Good morning, Mr. Farrell,” she said.
Displeased by the sulky hostility in her tone and face, Matt made a mental note to transfer her to another floor and instead of pleasantly asking her if she’d had a nice weekend, which he’d been about to do, he said coolly, “Eleanor Stern called me at home this morning to say she isn’t feeling well. Fill in for her, will you?” It was an order, not a request, and they both knew it.
“Yes, of course,” Joanna Simons replied, and she gave him a smile that was so genuine, so gleeful, Matt almost wondered if he’d misjudged her.
Joanna waited until Haskell’s new—and unwanted—president had disappeared into his office, then she rushed over to the receptionist’s desk. She’d been hoping to take it easy while her new boss was out of town. This opportunity to work for Farrell, however, offered her an unexpected and exciting opportunity. “Val,” she whispered to the receptionist, “did you keep the name and phone number of that reporter from the Tattler who called you to get some info on Farrell?”
“Yes, why?”
“Because,” she said triumphantly, “Farrell just told me I’m supposed to fill in for hatchet-face today. That means I’ll have the keys to her desk.” She glanced up to make certain the other secretaries whose desks fanned around the reception area in a broad circle were all busy and preoccupied. Most of them didn’t share her animosity for Matthew Farrell, they hadn’t been here as long, and their loyalties had been more easily transferred from the old team to the new owner. “Tell me again what that reporter wanted to know.”
“He asked how we felt about Farrell and I told him some of us couldn’t stand him,” Valerie said. “He asked if I ever put calls through to him from Meredith Bancroft or if she came here. He was especially interested in whether or not they’re really as friendly as they acted in their news conference. I told him I didn’t take Farrell’s calls and that Meredith Bancroft had been here only once, for a meeting with Farrell and his attorneys. He wanted to know if anyone else had been in on the meeting, and I told him I knew hatchet-face had been in there, because I had to take her calls out here. He asked if I thought she sat in on it to take notes. I told him she takes notes on almost every meeting he has, and he asked if I could get my hands on those notes from the Bancroft meeting. He said they’d pay for any info on that meeting that we could get for him. He didn’t say how much he’d pay though.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’d do this for free!” Joanna said bitterly. “He’ll have to unlock the old bat’s desk for me to use today. Maybe he’ll unlock the file cabinets too. Those meeting notes should be in one of those two places.”
“Let me know if I can help,” Valerie said.
When Joanna walked into Eleanor Stern’s office, she found that Farrell had already unlocked his secretary’s desk and left it open for her to use, but that the file cabinets were still locked. A brief sketchy search of the desk revealed nothing but supplies and a drawer full of nonconfidential files on Haskell’s operation. There was nothing about Bancroft. “Damn,” she said under her breath, swinging around in her chair and glancing through the door that connected this office with Farrell’s. He was standing, looking at the computer on the credenza behind his desk. No doubt he was checking on Haskell’s production reports from its factories over the weekend—or some massive stock portfolio he owned, she thought with growing hatred for the man who couldn’t be bothered remembering her name . . . who had fired their bosses and changed their benefit packages and salary structures.
Leaning farther back in her chair, Joanna could see the front of his desk. His desk keys were protruding from the lock in the center drawer. The keys to the files would either be on that ring or in one of his desk drawers.
“Good morning,” Phyllis said, following Meredith into her office. “How was your weekend?” she asked, then she bit her lip and looked mortified by her question. She had obviously heard about the fistfight Saturday, Meredith realized, and at that moment she didn’t care. She was so happy, she felt buoyant. Pausing in the act of unlatching her briefcase, Meredith sent her a wry, laughing look. “How do you think it was?”
“Would exciting be the right word?” Phyllis ventured, smiling back.
Meredith thought of Matt’s lovemaking, the things he’d said and done to her, and her whole body felt deliciously warm. “I’d say that’s a pretty apt word,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound as dreamy as she felt. With an effort she pulled her thoughts from the weekend and made herself think about the work she had to do before she could see Matt again tonight. “Any phone calls this
morning?”
“Just one—Nolan Wilder. He wants you to call him back as soon as you get in.”
Meredith froze. Nolan Wilder was the chairman of Bancroft’s board of directors, and she had little doubt he was calling to demand an explanation of Saturday night’s debacle. Which, in the clear light of morning, struck her as being an act of monumental gall, given that Wilder’s own divorce had been so ugly and bitter that it had taken two years to get through the courts. “Get him on the phone for me, will you?” she asked.
A minute later, Phyllis buzzed her. “Wilder’s on the line.”
Pausing a few seconds to compose herself, Meredith picked up the phone and said in a bright, firm voice, “Good morning, Nolan. What’s up?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you,” he said in the cool, ironic tone he used during board meetings and which Meredith particularly loathed. “I’ve had calls from board members all weekend demanding explanations for that business Saturday night. I shouldn’t have to remind you, Meredith, that Bancroft’s image, the dignity of its name, is the foundation of its success.”
“I hardly think I need to be told that,” Meredith said, forcing herself to sound more amused than angry. “It’s—” She broke off as Phyllis rushed in, her face stricken.
“You have an emergency call from MacIntire in New Orleans on line two.”
“Hold on, Nolan,” Meredith said, “I have an urgent call.” Alarm was screaming through every fiber of her body as Meredith answered the phone. MacIntire’s voice was taut. “We’ve had another bomb threat here, Meredith. It was phoned to the police department a few minutes ago. The caller said the bomb is set to go off in six hours. I’ve ordered the store cleared and the bomb squad is on the way. We’re following the usual procedure for evacuation, just as we did last time. I think the call’s from the same crank who made the last one.”
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