Paradise

by Judith McNaught

  Matt nodded, hesitated, and then made himself bring up Meredith for her mother’s sake. “Stuart Whitmore is an old friend of your daughter’s, and also her lawyer,” he told Caroline. “If you can find a way to lead the conversation around to her, he’s bound to talk about her. Assuming you’re interested.”

  “Thank you,” she said with a catch in her voice. “I’m very interested.”

  By the time Meredith walked into the lobby of Matt’s building, she wasn’t certain if it was clever or crazy to try to confront him in the middle of his party—particularly when he was so angry with her that he was insisting on an immediate divorce. She wasn’t completely sure he wouldn’t have her thrown out with everyone watching, and she wasn’t completely sure that she didn’t deserve it.

  In desperate hopes of weakening his resistance, she was wearing her most provocative cocktail dress—a backless black chiffon confection with narrow straps and a deep V at the bodice that was encrusted with tiny black beads sewn tightly into intricate leaves and flowers. They covered her breasts, then dipped below her arms to frame the low back of the dress. Obsessed with the need to look her absolute best, she’d spent almost an hour trying different hairstyles. In the end she’d brushed her hair out and let it fall against her shoulders. The sophistication of the dress required a sophisticated hairstyle, but on the other hand, wearing her hair down gave her a naive, youthful look that she hoped might soften Matt when she tried to talk to him. To accomplish that, she’d have worn braids if she’d thought they’d help!

  The uniformed guard at the security desk checked his list and Meredith breathed a ragged sigh of profound relief when she saw that Matt hadn’t removed her name. With her knees trembling and her pulse pounding, she took the elevator to the penthouse, and there she encountered an obstacle in the last place she’d anticipated it: When she pressed the buzzer at Matt’s door, Joe O’Hara opened it, took one look at her, and stepped forward, blocking her way. “You shouldn’t have come, Miss Bancroft,” he said coldly, and the fact that he hadn’t called her Mrs. Farrell for the first time in their acquaintance made her heart ache a little. “Matt doesn’t want anything to do with you. I heard him say so. He wants a divorce.”

  “Well, I don’t,” Meredith said emphatically. “Please, Joe, let me in so I can convince him he doesn’t want one either.”

  The big man hesitated, torn between loyalty to Matt and the pleading sincerity in her aqua eyes while the roar of laughter and conversation from inside the penthouse surrounded both of them. “I don’t think you can do it, and I don’t think this is the place you should try. There’s a crowd in there, and there’s reporters.”

  “Good,” she said with more assurance than she felt. “Then they can all leave here and tell the world that Mr. and Mrs. Farrell were together tonight.”

  “There’s a better chance they’ll be telling the world that Mr. Farrell threw you out on your ear and fired my ass for letting you in,” he muttered grimly, but he stepped back, and Meredith impulsively threw her arms around him. “Thank you, Joe.” She pulled away, too nervous to notice his face had reddened with embarrassed pleasure. “How do I look?” she asked, suddenly filled with quaking doubts. She spread the chiffon skirt of her dress as if she were about to curtsy and waited for his opinion.

  “You look beautiful,” he replied gruffly, “but it ain’t going to matter a damn to Matt.”

  On that alarming and depressing prediction, Meredith stepped into the noisy gaiety of the penthouse. The moment she started down the foyer steps, heads started to turn and conversations dropped off, then started again with renewed force, and she heard her name being repeated. Ignoring all of that, she scanned the crowded living room, the dining room, and then the raised dais that created a glass-enclosed conversation area at the far corner of the penthouse. Her heart began to hammer as she saw Matt standing there, several inches taller than the people around him, and she started forward on legs that quaked.

  As she walked up the steps toward him, she could see faces of the group around him. The star of the musical play was standing beside him, talking animatedly to him, while he gazed indifferently at her stunning face. Meredith was just a few feet away when Stanton Avery, who was standing on Matt’s other side, looked up and saw her. He said something to Matt—obviously warning him that she was there—because Matt turned abruptly toward her. He stared at her, his glass arrested halfway to his lips, his eyes like shards of ice as they leveled on her, his expression so forbidding that Meredith hesitated in midstep, then she made herself walk up to him.

  Taking some unspoken cue, or perhaps out of courtesy, the people who’d been talking to him disbanded, leaving the two of them alone on the dais. Meredith waited, hoping he’d say something, do something. When he finally did, he acknowledged her with a curt inclination of his head, and said only one word—her name—in a chilling tone. “Meredith.”

  Follow your instincts, he’d advised her a week ago, and Meredith tried to do that. “Hi,” she said inanely, pleading with her eyes for some help, but Matt wasn’t interested in helping her now. “You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here.”

  “Not particularly.”

  That hurt, but at least he was waiting for her to speak, and her instincts told her he wasn’t completely indifferent to her. She smiled a little, dying to surrender, not certain how to do it. “I came here to tell you about my day.” Her voice shook with nerves and she knew he heard it, but he didn’t say a word, encouraging or otherwise. Summoning her courage, Meredith drew a deep breath and forged ahead. “This afternoon I got called into an emergency board meeting. The board was very upset. Furious, actually. They accused me of having a conflict of interest where you’re concerned.”

  “How foolish of them,” he said with acid contempt. “Didn’t you tell them Bancroft and Company is your only interest?”

  “Not exactly,” she said, biting back a queasy smile. “They also wanted me to sign some affidavits and formal complaints—accusations that blamed you for Spyzhalski’s death, and for illegally using your contact with me to get control of us, and for having bombs placed in our stores.”

  “Is that all?” he asked sarcastically.

  “Not exactly,” Meredith said again. “But that’s the gist of it.” She searched for some sign, some warmth—anything at all in his face to tell her he still cared about all this. And she couldn’t see it. What she did see was people turning everywhere to watch them. “I—I told the directors . . .” She trailed off, her voice strangled with tension and fear that he truly didn’t want her anymore.

  “What did you tell them?” he asked impassively, and Meredith grasped at his question as a tiny bit of encouragement to continue.

  “I told them,” she said with a proud tilt of her chin, “what you said they should be told!”

  His expression didn’t change. “You told them to fuck off?”

  “No, not exactly,” she said a little contritely. “I told them to go to hell.”

  He didn’t say a word, and her heart was sinking when she suddenly saw it—the amused gleam in his beautiful eyes, the faint quirk of a smile dawning at his lips. “And then,” she continued as hope burst in her like sunshine, “Your attorney called to tell me that if I didn’t file for a divorce within six days, he was going to file in your behalf on the seventh day. And I told him . . .”

  She trailed off, and with warm humor in his voice, Matt asked helpfully, “And you told him to go to hell too?”

  “No, I told him to fuck off!”

  “You did?”

  “Yes.”

  He waited for her to say more, his eyes looking deeply into hers. “And?” he prodded quietly.

  “And I’m thinking of taking a trip,” she said. “I—I’m going to have a lot of time on my hands now.”

  “You took a leave of absence?”

  “No, I resigned.”

  “I see,” he said, but his voice had suddenly softened to a caress, and she wanted to drown herself in
the look in his eyes. “What kind of trip did you have in mind, Meredith?”

  “If you’re still willing to take me there,” she said, swallowing almost painfully, “I thought I’d like to see paradise.”

  He didn’t move or speak, and for a horrible moment Meredith thought she’d been wrong, that she’d only imagined he still cared.

  And then she realized he was holding out his hand for hers.

  Tears of joy and relief sprang to her eyes as she laid her hand in his palm, feeling his fingers engulf hers in their warm strength, closing tightly on her hand, and then abruptly yanking her forward into arms that wrapped around her like steel bands.

  Shielding her from view with his shoulders, he turned her face up to his. “I love you!” he whispered fiercely an instant before he seized her mouth in a smoldering kiss. A flash exploded somewhere as a photographer raised his camera, followed by another, and another. Someone started to clap, and the clapping became bursting applause, and the applause was joined with laughter, and still the kiss went on.

  Meredith didn’t notice. She was kissing him back, melting against him, utterly oblivious to all of it . . . the cheering, the clapping, the laughter, the white flashes from raised cameras. She was already halfway to her destination.

  57

  With her eyes closed and a smile on her lips, Meredith awakened slowly in Matt’s bed, letting memories of the previous night drift lazily through her mind like soft music. Together they had mingled with their guests, enduring the good-natured jibes about their prolonged kiss and obvious reconciliation, and she had loved playing the part of his hostess. After the party, in bed with him, she’d loved playing the part of his wife a thousand times more. Trust and commitment, she sleepily decided, evidently had a very profound effect on lovemaking, because last night’s stormy lovemaking had completely eclipsed everything else that had gone before.

  Sunlight filtered through the draperies across the room, and she rolled over onto her back, opening her eyes. Matt had kissed her good-bye a while ago, and said he was going out to get some sweet rolls for their breakfast. He’d left a cup of coffee on the table beside the bed for her, and she eased up onto the pillows.

  She’d just taken a sip when he walked into the room with a white bakery bag in his hand, a folded newspaper under his arm, and an odd, tense expression on his handsome face. “Good morning,” she said, smiling as he bent over to kiss her. “What’s that?” she added, noting the tabloid-size paper.

  Matt had promised her last night never to keep things from her, but at that moment he’d have preferred a public flogging to showing her that newspaper. “It’s the Tattler,” he said. “I saw it when I was paying for the sweet rolls. Somehow,” he added as he reluctantly held it toward her, “they discovered the terms of our eleven-week agreement, and they’ve interpreted them in their own inimitable fashion.” He watched her reach for it, remembering her disgust at the kind of sensational publicity he’d gotten over the years, knowing that this sort of treatment was going to continue to plague her in the future, partly because she was married to him, and partly because of the public fascination with their aborted divorce. Bracing himself for some sort of condemnation, or an explosion of justifiable outrage, he watched her unfold it and look at it.

  Meredith’s gaze riveted on the lurid headline:

  HEIRESS CHARGES HUSBAND $113,000 A NIGHT FOR SEX

  “I couldn’t figure at first how they came up with that figure,” Matt said. “Then it hit me. They multiplied four dates a week times eleven weeks and divided that into the five million I promised you. I’m sorry,” he said. “If I could control it, I—”

  Suddenly she pulled the newspaper against her face and let out a shriek of laughter that drowned out his apology. She laughed so hard that she slid limply down the pillows while the room filled with her musical hilarity. “One hundred and th-thirteen th-thousand dollars,” she choked, her shoulders lifting off the bed, and Matt broke into a grin of profound relief that turned to tenderness, because he knew what she was doing: She was confronting something she hated and finding a way to deal with it so it couldn’t harm them.

  “Have I ever told you,” he whispered huskily, leaning down and bracing his hands on either side of her heaving shoulders, “how proud I am of you?”

  She shook her head hard, still laughing, and he pulled the paper away from her face and kissed her flushed cheeks, silencing her giggles with his mouth.

  “Are y-you sure,” she whispered, overcome with a fresh surge of hilarity even while she put her arms around his shoulders and pulled him down to her, knowing he wanted to make love again, “that you can a-afford to do this again?”

  “I think it’s within my budget,” he tried to tease, but his hand trembled as he reverently smoothed a strand of golden hair off her cheek.

  “Yes, but now that I’ve accepted this as a permanent job, do I get periodic wage increases too—over and above the one hundred thirteen thousand?” she joked, her hands cradling his face, her swimming eyes looking into his, “and a benefits package, with medical insurance and guaranteed bonuses?”

  “Absolutely,” he promised, turning his face into her hand and kissing her palm.

  “Oh, no!” she moaned. “You’ll send me soaring straight into a higher tax bracket.”

  Her husband muffled a laugh against her throat, and Meredith turned into his arms. They spent the next hour sending each other soaring straight into the clouds instead.

  58

  On Sunday night the feature story on the six o’clock news was the arrest of Ellis Ray Sampson who’d been charged with the murder of Stanislaus Spyzhalski. According to St. Clair County officials, Spyzhalski had not been killed by one of his duped clients, as they’d originally believed, but by the outraged husband of a Belleville woman with whom Spyzhalski had been having a fling. Mr. Sampson, who had turned himself in and confessed to having beaten up Spyzhalski, swore that the bogus attorney had been alive when he dumped him in the ditch. Since the coroner’s report indicated that Spyzhalski had also had a heart attack that same night, there was a possibility that the legal charges against Sampson might be reduced from murder to manslaughter.

  Matt and Meredith watched the newscast together. Matt sarcastically remarked that Sampson should be given a medal for ridding the world of a human parasite. Meredith, who knew how it felt to be victimized by Spyzhalski, said she hoped the charges against Sampson would be reduced.

  Matt sent Pearson and Levinson down to Belleville to make sure of it.

  On Tuesday of the following week, Charlotte Bancroft president of Seaboard Industries, and her son Jason were officially questioned in Palm Beach, Florida, regarding a series of bomb threats and stock manipulations against Bancroft & Company. Both of them heatedly denied any connection to either as well as any desire to take over Bancroft & Company. On Wednesday, Caroline Edwards Bancroft voluntarily appeared before a Florida grand jury and testified that Charlotte Bancroft had indeed been planning to take over Bancroft & Company, and that Charlotte had further hinted at having planned something that would force B & C’s stock to drop.

  In the Cayman Islands, where he was vacationing with his lover, Joel Bancroft, former treasurer of Seaboard Industries, read about the suspicions being cast upon his mother and brother. He had resigned six months earlier, when they had both instructed him to open dummy accounts under false names with a particular stockbroker who was willing to collaborate, and to begin buying up blocks of B & C stock, which was to then be “parked” in the bogus accounts.

  Lying on the beach, looking out at the water, Joel thought about his mother, whose thirty-year plan to avenge herself against Philip Bancroft had been a demented, driving obsession, and about his brother, who—like his mother—had despised Joel for being gay. After several hours he reached a decision and made a phone call.

  The following day Charlotte and Jason Bancroft were arrested and charged with several counts of illegal activities on a tip from an anonymous caller who’d
told police the names of the fraudulent stock accounts. Charlotte denied any knowledge of those accounts. Jason, who’d opened the accounts and paid off the maker of the bombs at his mother’s instructions, soon began to fear that he was about to become his mother’s sacrificial lamb. He beat her to the punch by offering to testify against her in return for immunity from prosecution.

  The board of directors of Seaboard, seeing an immediate need to salvage their corporate image, and acting on Charlotte’s instructions, named Joel Bancroft president and chief operating officer.

  In Chicago, Meredith watched it all happening on the television news, and the ache of longing she felt every time someone mentioned Bancroft & Company almost outweighed the shock she had felt at discovering that Charlotte and Jason were responsible for the things she’d believed Matt had done.

  Sitting beside her on the sofa, Matt saw the sadness that darkened her eyes whenever her company’s name was mentioned, and he reached out for her hand, threading his fingers through hers. “Have you thought about what you want to do next, now that you have so much free time?”

  Meredith knew he was referring to a new career to substitute for the one she’d given up when she sided with him, but she had a feeling her answer would upset and alarm him. Deliberately choosing to misunderstand his question about her free time, she looked down at their joined hands and smiled at the 14-carat emerald-cut diamond he’d slid onto her ring finger along with a platinum wedding band. “I might have considered making a career out of going shopping every day,” she teased, “but you’ve already bought me jewels and a luxury car. Anything else I could buy would be an awful anticlimax, don’t you think? I mean, what’s left?”

  “How about a small jet,” he said, kissing her nose, “or a large yacht?”

  “Don’t you dare—” she warned him, but he only laughed at her horrified look.

  “There must be something else you want,” he said.