Paradise

  “What makes you think steelworkers are ordinary and people with M.B.A.’s are special?”

  Meredith heard the mild reprimand in those words and she flinched inwardly. Leaning her shoulders against the tree trunk behind her, she said, “Did I sound like a snob?”

  “Are you one?” he asked, shoving his hands into his pockets, studying her.

  “I—” She hesitated, searching his shadowy features, strangely tempted to say whatever she thought he wanted to hear, and, just as firmly, she resisted the temptation. “I probably am.”

  She didn’t hear the disgust in her voice, but Matt did and the glamour of his sudden, lazy grin made her pulse leap. “I doubt it.”

  The three words made her feel inordinately pleased. “Why?”

  “Because snobs don’t worry about whether they are or not. However, to answer your question, part of the reason I didn’t say anything about the degree is that it doesn’t mean anything unless, and until, I can put it to use. Right now all I have are a bunch of ideas and plans that may not work out the way I think they should.”

  Julie had said most people found him difficult to get to know, and Meredith could easily believe that. And yet, there were many times, like now, when she felt an odd sense of being so attuned to him that she could almost read his mind. Quietly she said, “I think the other reason you let me go on thinking you’re a steelworker was that you wanted to see if it would matter to me. It was a—a test, wasn’t it?”

  That startled a chuckle from him. “I suppose it was. Who knows—that’s all I may ever be.”

  “And now you’ve switched from steel mills to oil rigs,” she teased, her eyes laughing, “because you wanted a job with more glamour, is that it?”

  With an effort, Matt resisted the temptation to snatch her into his arms and muffle his laughter against her lips. She was young and pampered and he was going to a foreign country where many common necessities would be luxuries. This sudden, insane impulse to take her with him that kept prodding at him was just that—insane. On the other hand, she was also brave, sweet, and pregnant with his child. His child. Their child. Perhaps the idea wasn’t so insane. Tipping his head back, he looked up at the moon, trying to ignore the notion, and even while he was doing it, he found himself suggesting something that would help him decide. “Meredith,” he said, “most couples take months learning about each other before they get married. You and I have only a few days before we get married, and less than a week before I have to leave for South America. Do you think we could try to cram a few months into a few days?”

  “I guess so,” she said, puzzled by the sudden intensity in his voice.

  “Okay, fine,” Matt said, strangely at a loss as to how to begin now that she’d agreed. “What would you like to know about me?”

  Gulping back a surge of startled, self-conscious laughter, Meredith looked at him, stupefied, and then she wondered if he was referring to genetic questions she might have about him as the father of her baby. Peering at him, she asked hesitantly, “Do you mean that I should ask you things like—like is there any history of insanity in your family, and do you have a police record?”

  Matt bit back a shout of laughter at her choice of questions, and said with sham gravity, “No—to both those things. How about you?”

  Solemnly, she shook her head. “No insanity, no police record either.”

  He saw it then—the answering laughter glowing in her yes, and for the second time in moments he had to restrain the urge to clasp her to him.

  “Now it’s your turn to ask me something,” she offered lamely. “What do you want to know?”

  “Just one thing,” he said with blunt honesty as he placed his hand high on the tree trunk behind her. “Are you half as sweet as I think you are?”

  “Probably not.”

  He straightened and smiled because he was almost certain she was wrong. “Let’s walk, before I forget what we’re supposed to be doing out here. In the interest of complete honesty,” he added as they turned and strolled down the lane that curved toward the main road, “I’ve just remembered that I do have a police record.” Meredith stopped short, and he turned and said, “I was busted twice when I was nineteen.”

  “What were you doing at the time?”

  “Fighting. Brawling would be a better word. Before my mother died, I’d managed to convince myself that if she had the best doctors and stayed in the best hospitals—only the best—then she wouldn’t die. We got her the best, my father and I. When the insurance ran out, we sold the farm equipment and everything else we could liquidate to keep paying the medical bills. She died anyway,” Matt said in a carefully unemotional voice. “My father hit the bottle, and I went looking for something of my own to hit. For months afterward I was spoiling for a fight, and since I couldn’t get my hands on the God my mother had such faith in, I settled for any mortal who wanted to take me on. In Edmunton it’s not hard to find a fight,” he added with a wry smile, and not until that moment did Matt realize he was confiding things to an eighteen-year-old girl that he’d never admitted to anyone else, even himself. And the eighteen-year-old girl was looking at him with a quiet understanding that completely belied her years. “The cops broke up two of the fights,” he finished, “and they busted all of us. It’s no big deal. There’s no record of it anywhere except Edmunton.”

  Touched by his confidence, Meredith said softly, “You must have loved her very much.” Aware that she was treading on shaky ground, she said, “I never knew my own mother. She went to Italy after my parents’ divorce. I guess I was lucky, don’t you, not to have known her and loved her all those years, and then lost her?”

  Matt realized exactly what point she was trying to make, and he didn’t deride her efforts. “Very nice,” he said with quiet gravity, then he shook off the mood and wryly announced, “I have amazingly excellent taste in women.”

  Meredith burst out laughing, then felt a jolt of delight when his hand slid across her back, curving around her waist to draw her tightly against his side as they walked. A few steps later, she thought of something that brought her up short. “Have you ever been married before?”

  “No. Have you?” he added, teasing.

  “You know perfectly well I haven’t—hadn’t done—” She stopped, uneasy with the topic.

  “Yes, I do know,” he confirmed. “What I can’t understand is how anyone who looks like you could have reached the age of eighteen without losing your virginity to some rich, smooth-talking preppy boy along the way.”

  “I don’t like preppy boys,” Meredith replied, then she glanced at him, bemused. “I never actually realized that before.”

  That pleased Matt immensely because she sure as hell wasn’t marrying one. He waited for her to say more. When she didn’t, he prompted her disbelievingly. “That’s it? That’s the answer?”

  “That’s part of it. The whole truth is that I was so homely until I was sixteen that boys stayed completely away from me. By the time I wasn’t homely anymore, I was so mad at them for ignoring me all those years that I didn’t have a very high opinion of them on the whole.”

  Matt looked at her beautiful face, her tempting mouth, and radiant eyes, and he grinned. “Were you really homely?”

  “Let me put it this way,” she said dryly, “if we have a little girl, she’ll be better off if she looks like you when she’s young!”

  Matt’s sharp crack of laughter exploded into the soft night silence and he yanked her into his arms. Laughing, he buried his face in her fragrant hair, surprised by his feelings of tenderness because she’d apparently been homely, touched that she had confided it to him, and elated because . . . because . . . He refused to think of why. All that mattered was that she was laughing too, and that her arms had slid around his waist. With a solemn smile, he rubbed his jaw against her head and whispered, “I have exquisite taste in women.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t have thought that a couple of years ago,” she said, laughing and leaning back in his a
rms.

  “I’m a man of vision,” he assured her quietly. “I would have thought it even then.”

  An hour later they were sitting on the porch steps facing each other, their backs propped against the railing. Matt was one step higher, his long legs stretched out in front of him. A step below him, Meredith was sitting with her knees drawn up against her chest, her arms wrapped around them. They were no longer making a conscious effort to get to know each other because Meredith was pregnant and they were getting married. They were simply a couple sitting outside on a late summer night, enjoying one another’s company.

  Leaning her head back, Meredith listened to a cricket chirping, her eyes half closed.

  “What are you thinking about?” he asked quietly.

  “I’m thinking that it will be autumn soon,” she said, lifting her gaze to his. “Autumn is my absolute favorite season. Spring is overrated. It’s soggy and the trees are still bare from winter. Winter drags on and on, and summer is nice, but it’s all the same. Autumn is different. I mean, is there any perfume in the world that can compare with the smell of burning leaves?” she asked with an engaging smile. Matt thought she smelled a hell of a lot better than burning leaves, but he let her continue. “Autumn is exciting—things are changing. It’s like dusk.”

  “Dusk?”

  “Dusk is my favorite time of day, for the same reason. When I was young, I used to walk down our driveway at dusk in the summer and stand at the fence, watching all the cars going by with their headlights on. Everyone had a place to go, something to do. The night was just beginning . . .” She trailed off in embarrassment. “That must sound incredibly silly.”

  “It sounds incredibly lonely.”

  “I wasn’t lonely, not really. Just daydreaming. I know you got an awful impression of my father at Glenmoor that night, but he’s not the ogre you imagine. He loves me, and all he’s ever tried to do is to protect me and give me the best.” Without warning, Meredith’s lovely mood dissolved, and reality came crashing over her with sickening force. “And in return I’m going to go home in a few days, pregnant and—”

  “We agreed not to worry about any of that tonight,” he interrupted.

  Meredith nodded and tried to smile, but she couldn’t control her thoughts as easily as he apparently could. Suddenly she saw her child standing at the end of some driveway in Chicago, alone, watching the cars going by on the road. No family, no brothers and sisters, no father. Just her. And she wasn’t sure she could be enough.

  “If autumn is your favorite thing, what’s your least favorite?” Matt asked, trying to divert her.

  She thought a moment. “Christmas tree lots on the day after Christmas. There’s something sad about those beautiful trees that no one picked out. They’re like orphans no one want—” She broke off, realizing what she was saying and quickly looked away.

  “It’s after midnight,” Matt said, rolling to his feet, knowing her mood was beyond salvaging. “Why don’t we go to bed?”

  It sounded as if he was taking it for granted they would, or should, go to bed together, and Meredith suddenly felt a sick lurch of panic at that. She was pregnant and he was going to marry her because he had to; the whole situation was already so sordid, it made her feel cheap and humiliated as it was.

  In silence they turned off the living room lights and walked up the stairs. The door to Matt’s room was immediately off the landing, while Julie’s was to the left, at the end of the hall, with a bathroom in between. When they approached his door, Meredith took matters into her own hands. “Good night, Matt,” she said shakily. Stepping around him, she tossed a fixed smile over her shoulder, and left him standing in his doorway. When he made no attempt to stop her, her emotions veered crazily from relief to chagrin. Apparently, she decided as she stepped into Julie’s room, pregnant women had no sex appeal whatsoever, not even to the same man who’d gone crazy in bed with you a few weeks prior. She opened the door and walked into Julie’s room.

  Behind her, Matt spoke in a flat, calm voice. “Meredith?”

  She turned and saw him still standing in the doorway of his room, his shoulder propped against the door frame, his arms crossed loosely over his chest. “Yes?”

  “Do you know what my least favorite thing is?”

  His implacable tone told her the question wasn’t casual, and she shook her head, wary at whatever he was getting at. He didn’t keep her in doubt. “It’s sleeping alone when there’s someone down the hall who I know damned well should be sleeping with me.” Matt had meant that to be more an invitation than a curt observation, and his lack of tact with her surprised him. A dozen expressions chased themselves across her lovely face—embarrassment, unease, doubt, uncertainty—and then she gave him a small smile, hesitated, and said firmly, “Good night.”

  Matt watched her walk into Julie’s room and close the door behind her, and he stood for a long moment, knowing perfectly well that if he went after her and tried tender persuasion he could very likely convince her to come to bed with him. And yet, for some reason, he was suddenly, adamantly, unwilling to do it. Turning, he went into his room, but he left his door open, still convinced that she wanted to be with him, and that if she did, she’d come back here when she had gotten ready for bed.

  Clad in pajama bottoms that he’d had to search through his drawers to find, he stood at the window, looking out at the moonlit lawn. He heard Meredith leave the bathroom after her shower, and he tensed, listening to her footsteps. They retreated down the hall into Julie’s room and then a door closed. She’d made her decision, he realized with equal parts of surprise, annoyance, and disappointment. And yet, none of those three emotions had as much to do with unrequited sexual desire as they did with something deeper and more general. He had wanted some sign from her that she was ready for an actual relationship with him; as much as he hoped for that, he wasn’t willing to do anything to try to persuade her that she was. It had to be her decision, her choice, freely made. She’d made that choice when she walked away from him and down the hall. If she’d had any doubts about what he wanted her to do, what he’d said to her in the hall would have removed them.

  Turning away from the window, he breathed a sigh of frustrated irritation, and faced the fact that he was probably expecting far too much from an eighteen-year-old. The thing was, it was damned hard to remember how young Meredith actually was. Pulling back the sheet, he got into bed and linked his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling, thinking about her. Tonight she’d told him about Lisa Pontini and how they’d become friends, and he’d realized from what she said that Meredith was not only at ease in country clubs and mansions, she was also totally at home with the Pontini family as well. She was utterly without artifice or affectation, Matt thought, and yet there was an unmistakable gentility in her, an inherent elegance that was as appealing to him as her intoxicating face and entrancing smile.

  Weariness finally nudged him and he closed his eyes. Unfortunately, none of those attributes were going to help her or make the idea of going off to South America with him seem the slightest bit enticing, unless she felt something for him. And she obviously didn’t, or she’d have been with him now. The idea of trying to persuade a reluctant, pampered eighteen-year-old to go to Venezuela with him when she didn’t have the courage or the conviction to walk down a hall to him was not only repugnant, it was futile.

  With her head bent, Meredith stood beside Julie’s bed, torn apart with yearnings and misgivings she couldn’t seem to control or predict. Her pregnancy wasn’t having any physical effects yet, but it was evidently playing havoc with her emotions. Less than an hour ago she hadn’t wanted to be in bed with Matt, and now she did. Common sense warned her that her future was already terrifyingly uncertain, and that giving in to her growing attraction to him would only make things more complicated. At twenty-six he was much older than she and far more experienced in every facet of life—a life that was completely alien to her. Six weeks ago, when he was wearing a tuxedo and she was
in familiar surroundings, he’d seemed almost like other men she’d known. But here, clad in jeans and a shirt, there was an earthiness about him that both attracted her and alarmed her. He’d wanted her to come to bed tonight, and he’d made that emphatically clear. When it pertained to women and sex, Matt was obviously so sure of himself that he could stand there and baldly tell her what he wanted her to do. Not ask her or try to persuade her, but tell her! No doubt he was considered quite a stud around Edmunton, and why not—the night she’d met him, he’d been able to make her writhe with passion even though she was scared sick. He knew just where to touch and how to move to make her lose her mind, and all that sexual expertise hadn’t been gotten from books! He’d probably made love hundreds of times in hundreds of ways with hundreds of women.

  And even while she thought it, her mind rebelled at believing Matt had no feeling for her other than sexual. True, he hadn’t called her in the six weeks since he’d left Chicago; equally true, she’d been so upset that night, she couldn’t have given him the idea she wanted him to call her. His claim that he’d intended to call her when he got back from South America in two years had seemed ludicrous when he said it. Now, in the silent darkness, after listening to him talk tonight about his plans for the future, she had the feeling he’d wanted to be somebody when he called her the next time. She thought of what he’d told her about his mother’s death; surely that boy who’d grieved and raged couldn’t have grown into a shallow, irresponsible man whose only real interest in women was—Meredith brought herself up short. Matt was far from being irresponsible. Not once since she’d gotten there had he tried to evade any responsibility for the baby. Furthermore, based on things he’d said and some remarks of Julie’s, Matt had been shouldering much of the responsibility for the entire family for years.