Paradise

  “Oh, my God!” he groaned, and he yanked her into his arms. “Oh, God!”

  Meredith clung to him, her wet cheek pressed against his shirt, unable to stop the outpouring of grief and sorrow, now that she was in his arms. “I—I named her Elizabeth for your mother.”

  Matt scarcely heard her; his entire being was tormented with the image of Meredith, lying alone in a hospital room, waiting in vain for him. “Please, no,” he pleaded with fate, clasping her tighter to him, rubbing his jaw against her hair. “Please no.”

  “I couldn’t go to her funeral,” she whispered hoarsely, “because I was so sick. My father said he went . . . you d-don’t think he lied about that too, do you?”

  The agony Matt felt when she mentioned a funeral and being sick almost doubled him over. “Oh, Christ!” he groaned, holding her tighter, running his hands over her back and shoulders, helplessly trying to heal the hurt he had unwittingly caused her years before. She lifted her tear-drenched face to his and begged him for reassurance: “I told him to be sure Elizabeth had dozens of flowers at her funeral. I told him they had to be pink roses. You . . . you don’t think he lied to me when he said he sent them?”

  “He sent them!” Matt promised her fiercely. “I’m sure he did.”

  “I couldn’t—couldn’t bear it if she didn’t have any flowers . . .”

  “Oh, please, darling,” Matt whispered brokenly. “Please don’t. No more.”

  Through the haze of her own sorrow and relief, Meredith heard the anguish clogging his voice, saw the ravaged sorrow on his face, and tenderness poured through her, its sweetness filling her heart until she ached with it. “Don’t cry,” she whispered, her own tears falling unchecked as she reached up and laid her fingers on his hard cheek. “It’s all over now. Your father told me the truth. That’s why I came here, you see . . . I had to tell you what really happened. I had to ask you to forgive me—”

  Leaning his head back, Matt closed his eyes and swallowed, trying to clear the painful lump of emotion that was clogging his throat. “Forgive you?” he repeated in a ragged whisper. “For what?”

  “For hating you all these years.”

  He forced his eyes to open and he looked down at her beautiful face. “You couldn’t possibly have hated me as much as I hate myself at this moment.”

  Meredith’s heart lurched at the naked remorse in his eyes; he’d always seemed so completely invulnerable that she’d thought him incapable of deep feeling. Or perhaps her judgment had been clouded by her youth and inexperience. But whatever the case, she thought nothing of trying to comfort him now. “It’s over. don’t think about it,” she said softly, leaning her face against the hard wall of his chest, but it was a hopeless suggestion because in the silence before he spoke again, that was all either of them could think about. “Were you in much pain when it happened?” he said finally.

  Meredith started to ask him again not to think of it, but she realized in some part of her mind that he was asking her to share with him now the things that would have been his right to share with her long ago. At the same time, he was offering her the belated chance to turn to him for the comfort that she’d needed from him. And Meredith slowly realized that she wanted that, even now. Standing in the circle of his arms, she felt the slow, soothing strokes of his hand against her nape and shoulders, and suddenly she wasn’t twenty-nine anymore; she was eighteen, and he was twenty-six, and she was in love with him. He was strength and security and hope. “I was sleeping when it started,” she began. “Something woke me up—I felt strange, and I turned on the lamp. When I looked down, the blankets were soaked with my blood. I screamed.” She stopped, and then made herself continue. “Mrs. Ellis had just come back from Florida that day. She heard me and woke up my father and someone called an ambulance. The pains started coming, and I begged my father to try to call you, and the paramedics arrived. I remember them carrying me out of the house on a stretcher, and they were running. And I remember the sound of the siren screaming and screaming and screaming in the night. I tried to cover my ears to block out the sound, but they were giving me an injection and the paramedic held my arms down.” Meredith drew a shuddering breath, not sure she could go on without starting to cry, but Matt’s hand was drifting down her spine, holding her pressed against the solid strength of his body, and she found the courage to finish. “The next thing I remember was the sound of a machine beeping, and when I opened my eyes, I was lying in a hospital bed with all sorts of plastic tubes attached to me and a machine monitoring my heartbeats. It was daylight, and a nurse was there, but when I tried to ask her about our baby, she patted my hand and told me not to worry. I asked her if I could see you, and she said you weren’t there yet. When I opened my eyes again, it was night and there were doctors and nurses all around the bed. I asked them about the baby too, and they said my doctor was on his way and everything was going to be just fine. I knew they were lying to me. So I asked—no,” she amended with a sad smile as she tipped her head back and looked at him, “I ordered them to let you come in because I knew they wouldn’t dare lie to you.”

  He tried to smile back at her but it didn’t reach his tormented gray eyes, and she laid her cheek against his chest. “They told me you weren’t there, but that my father was, and then my doctor arrived, and my father came in, and everyone else left the room. . . .”

  Meredith stopped, cringing from the memory of what came next. As if Matt sensed what she was feeling, he laid his hand against her cheek, pressing her face to the rhythmic beating of his heart. “Tell me,” he whispered, his deep voice ragged with tenderness and sorrow. “I’m here, and it can’t hurt as much this time.”

  Meredith took his word for it, her hands sliding up his chest to his shoulders, instinctively clutching them for support, but fresh tears were flooding her eyes and clogging her voice. “Dr. Arledge told me that we’d had a baby girl, and that everything humanly possible had been done to save her, but they couldn’t because—because she was too little.” Tears raced down her cheeks. “Too little!” she repeated on a heartbroken sob. “I thought baby girls were supposed to be little. Little is such a—a pretty word . . . so feminine . . .”

  She felt Matt’s fingers digging into her back, and somehow the suppressed force of his reaction gave her strength. Drawing a long breath, she finished, “Because she was so little, she couldn’t breathe properly. Dr. Arledge asked me what I wanted to do, and when I realized he was asking me if I wanted her to have a name and a—a funeral, I started begging him to let me see you. My father was furious at him for upsetting me, and he told me he’d sent you a telegram, but that you weren’t there. Dr. Arledge said I couldn’t wait for days to make these decisions. And so I—I decided,” Meredith concluded brokenly. “I named her Elizabeth because I thought you would like that, and I told my father I wanted her to have dozens and dozens of pink roses. And I said I wanted all the cards to be from us and to say ‘We loved you.’ ”

  Matt’s voice was raw. “Thank you,” he whispered, and she suddenly realized the wetness on her cheek was not only from her tears, but also his.

  “And then I waited,” she told him with a ragged sigh. “I waited for you to come, because I thought that somehow, if you were there, everything would start to be better.” Within moments after she finished, Meredith felt a sense of relief, of calm sweeping over her.

  When Matt finally spoke, he, too, had gotten control of his emotions. “Your father’s telegram reached me three days after he sent it. It said that you’d had an abortion, and that you wanted nothing more from me except a divorce, which you were already instituting. I flew home anyway, and one of your maids told me where you were, but when I got to the hospital, they informed me you’d specifically said you didn’t want me allowed up to see you. I went back the next day with some half-formed plan of getting past the security guards at the desk of the Bancroft Wing, but I never got that far. A cop was waiting at the doors to serve me with a signed court injunction that made it a criminal
act for me to go near you.”

  “And all that time,” she whispered, “I was in there, waiting for you.”

  “I promise you,” he said tightly, “that if I’d thought there was a chance you wanted to see me, no court order, no force on this earth, would have stopped me from getting to you!”

  She tried to reassure him with a simple truth: “You couldn’t have helped me.”

  His body seemed to stiffen. “I couldn’t?”

  She shook her head. “Everything medically possible was already being done for me, just as it had been for Elizabeth. There wasn’t anything you could have done to help.” Meredith was so relieved to have the truth out in the open at last that she abandoned her pride and took it one step further. “You see, despite what I had put on the cards with the roses, I knew in my heart how you really felt about the baby—and about me.”

  “Tell me,” he said gruffly, “how did I really feel?”

  Surprised by the sudden terseness in his tone, Meredith tipped her head back. With a soft smile to prove she meant no criticism, she said, “The answer to that is as obvious now as it was then: You were stuck with both of us. You slept one time with a silly eighteen-year-old virgin who did her best to seduce you, and who didn’t have sense enough to use birth control, and look what happened.”

  “What happened, Meredith?” he demanded.

  “What happened? You know what happened. I came looking for you to give you the glad news, and you did the noble thing—you married a girl you didn’t want.”

  “Didn’t want?” he exploded, his harsh voice in complete opposition to the poignancy of his words. “I’ve wanted you every day of my godforsaken life.”

  Meredith stared at him, mesmerized, doubtful, joyous, shattered.

  “And you were wrong about something else too,” he said, his expression gentling as he framed her tear-streaked face between his palms, his fingers brushing the wetness away. “If I’d been able to see you in the hospital, I could have helped.”

  Her voice dropped to a shaken whisper. “How?”

  “Like this,” he said, and still cradling her face, he bent his head and brushed his lips over hers. The exquisite tenderness of his kiss, the caressing way his fingers slid over her face, destroyed Meredith’s defenses completely, and fresh tears welled up just when she thought she had cried them all. “And like this—” His mouth slid to the corners of her eyes, and she felt the touch of his tongue on her tears. “I’d have taken you home from the hospital with me, and held you in my arms—like this—” he promised achingly, drawing her against his full length, his breath against her ear sending shivers down her spine. “When you were well enough, we’d have made love, and later, when you wanted me to, I’d have given you another baby—” He didn’t say “like this,” but when he shifted her backward onto the bed and followed her down, Meredith knew that was what he meant. She knew it as surely as she knew it was wrong to let him take off her sweater and unfasten her jeans, as surely as she knew it was impossible for her to have another baby. But, oh, the sweetness of pretending, just this once, that all of this was reality and the past was only a dream that could be altered.

  Her heart wanted desperately to try, but some tiny voice of reason warned that it was a mistake. “This is wrong—” she whispered when he leaned over her, his chest and arms bare and bronze.

  “This is right,” he said fiercely, and his lips covered hers, parting them with familiar, insistent skill.

  Meredith closed her eyes and let the dream begin.

  Only in this dream she wasn’t merely an observer; she was a participant—hesitant at first; as shy and awkward as she’d always been when confronted with his bold sexuality and unerring expertise. His mouth tormented and enticed hers, his tongue sliding on her lips, flicking at the crease, while his hands shifted endlessly down her sides, her legs, sliding with tantalizing languor upward toward her breasts. Meredith moaned inwardly with a combination of awakening delight and recurring inhibition, and slid her hands uncertainly into the crisp, curly hairs on his muscular chest, touching. His mouth became more demanding, his hands so near her aching breasts, but not touching, thumbs playing over her ribs. Just when she thought she would die from the need, he drove his tongue into her mouth, and his hands took hard possession of her breasts, kneading, teasing, instinctively rubbing hardened nipples, and the cry that Meredith had been suppressing erupted at the same moment her restraint broke. Her body arched toward his, and she ran her hands feverishly down the bunched muscles of his arms, welcoming the invasion of his tongue, giving him hers, rolling with him onto her side. He tore his mouth from hers, and she moaned in protest at the loss, then shivered in delight as he kissed her ear, sliding his lips down her neck, then over her breasts, until they closed hard on her nipples. Lost in the dark, silent wanting, she felt his hand slide to the triangle between her legs, seeking and finding every hot, damp place, touching and caressing, until she writhed against him.

  Matt knew the exact moment that she relinquished her body entirely to him; he felt the tension leave her, her legs relaxing, then opening for him, and the poignant sweetness of her well-remembered surrender sent desire raging uncontrollably through him. It made his heart thunder and his body throb until even his limbs began to tremble as he shifted on top of her. Gone was his hazy hope of prolonging this unbelievable, momentous joining; all that mattered was being a part of her again. The veins in his arms stood out as he held himself above her, his eyes clenched shut, easing himself into her an inch at a time, fighting the overpowering need to bury himself full-length in her incredible warmth, to devour her with his hands and mouth.

  His control began to slip when she arched her hips, and again when she slid her hands over his shoulders and whispered his name, but when he opened his eyes and looked down at her Matt was lost: This wasn’t a figment of his fevered imagination—the girl he had loved was the woman in his arms; the beautiful face that had haunted his dreams was inches from his, flushed with desire, her shining hair spilling over his pillow. She’d been waiting for him in that hospital; she had never tried to rid herself of his baby or him. She had come to him here, endured his hatred and braved his anger—and then she had asked for his forgiveness. The realization was overpoweringly poignant, and even then Matt might have been able to continue moving slowly and steadily inside her—if Meredith hadn’t chosen that moment to run her fingers through the hair at his nape, and lift her hips, and whisper, “Please, Matt.” The exquisite sweetness of his name on her lips and the arousing shift of her body reaching for his tore a silent groan from him, and he drove into her, plunging again and again, until they were both wild with wanting, reaching together for it . . . finding it in the same moment, exploding together and then shattering. Limbs entwined, hearts thundering, he wrapped her in his arms, and still he kept thrusting, wanting to spill eleven years of yearning into her, and Meredith held him to her, her body beginning to convulse again, until her rhythmic spasms had finally drained him of everything except a feeling of overwhelming joy and peace.

  He collapsed against her, his skin fiery, his breathing labored, and then he moved onto his side to keep himself from crushing her, taking her with him, his arm around her back, his fingers buried in the bunched satin of her hair. Silent, floating, still intimately joined to her, he let his hand drift up and down her spine, reveling in the sensation of being held inside her wet warmth and the brush of her lips against his collarbone.

  He closed his eyes, savoring it, filled with reverence for all the things she was and for all the things she made him want to be. Eleven years ago he’d been cheated of heaven; he’d found it again this weekend, and there was nothing that he wouldn’t do to avoid losing it again. Then he’d had nothing to offer her except himself; now he could give her the world—and himself. He felt her breathing even out and realized she was falling asleep. He smiled to himself, a little embarrassed by his lack of restraint that had worn them both out so completely and so quickly. . . . He’d let her sl
eep for an hour, he decided, and himself too. Then he would wake her up and make love to her more properly and thoroughly. After that they would talk. They were going to have to make plans. Even though he expected that she might be hesitant to break off her engagement on the strength of one afternoon in bed with him, Matt knew he could persuade her of the simple truth: They were meant to be together. They had always been meant to be together. . . .

  Nudged from his sleep by a sound somewhere in the house, Matt opened his eyes and stared in mild confusion at the empty pillow beside him. The room was dark, and he rolled onto his side, squinting at his watch. It was almost six o’clock, and he leaned up on his elbow, surprised that he’d slept for almost three hours. For a moment or two, he was perfectly still, listening, trying to decide where Meredith was, but the first sound he heard was the last one he expected: It came from outdoors—a car engine firing, motor revving.

  For a moment of ignorant bliss he decided she must have been worried about her battery running down in the cold, and he tossed off the quilts and rolled out of bed. Combing his hand through his hair, he walked over to the window and pushed the curtain aside, intending to open the window and call to her to let him take care of that. What he saw was a pair of red taillights glowing brightly as the BMW sped down the long drive toward the main road.

  He was so stunned that his first reaction was to worry that she was driving too damned fast—and then reality hit him. She had left! For a split second his mind couldn’t seem to absorb the shock. She had crawled out of bed and crept off in the night! Swearing savagely under his breath, he turned on the lamp and yanked on his pants, then he stood, hands on his hips, glaring at the empty bed in a state of near paralysis. He could not believe she’d run away as if they’d done something she was ashamed of and couldn’t bear to face in daylight.