‘I told you,’ she said, ‘women like me get exactly what they deserve.’
There was a long silence, and then Conor’s lips curled back from his teeth in a smile she knew she would never forget.
‘Remember what I told you about the legal juggernaut?’ He stepped closer to her, drew her towards him, until his mouth was a whisper from hers. ‘Take my advice, sweetheart. Look for someplace to hide, because you’re about to get rolled over.’ His hand fell from her throat and he strode to the door. ‘I’d ask Pablo to drive you to the airport, but you’re liable to corrupt him. Take the Bronco and leave it there. I’ll have it picked up and disinfected after you’re gone.’
The door opened, then slammed shut, and Arden was alone.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ARDEN eased her keys from her pocket, unlocked the door to her Manhattan apartment, and edged it open with her hip. She stepped inside, bumped the door shut, and dropped the dresses she’d picked up at the dry cleaners on a chair. Then she made her way to the kitchen, dumped her bag and the grocery sack on the countertop, and flicked on the overhead fluorescent light.
Light bathed the little room, chasing away the unexpected gloom of the midsummer evening, but then this hadn’t been anything like a usual summer so far, Arden thought as she took a quart of milk, a small loaf of bread and two oranges from the bag. She’d returned from Costa Rica almost five months ago to what should have been a gentle New York spring. Instead, a chill April had given way to a wet May, which had been followed by record-breaking heat in June. Now, with August hard on the heels of an even hotter July, the skies had all but ripped open, sending down torrents of rain that had eventually thinned to an on again, off again drizzle.
City dwellers had been grateful at first.
‘It’s cooling things off, thank heavens,’ Irene, the secretary in the office down the hall at work had said when the rain began.
But as umbrella sales soared, spirits began to sag.
‘Awful stuff, this weather,’ Irene had said glumly this morning at coffee-break time. ‘But just imagine if you’d stayed in Costa Rica! It’s the rainy season there, isn’t it? You’d have
shrivelled up like a prune by now!’
Arden had laughed politely and said yes, she probably would have, and then she’d discreetly steered the conversation elsewhere, just as she’d done every time someone mentioned Costa Rica since she’d returned home. The amazing thing was that no one had so much as suggested she’d been trying to avoid the topic. People had their own agendas, even the most astute. So long as you nodded in the right places and offered an occasional ‘yes’ our ’uh huh’ to the conversation, you really didn’t have to say much of anything. The personnel director who’d hired her for this new job had said, Oh, Costa Rica, wasn’t that exciting? And then she’d launched into a five-minute description of the two weeks she’d spent in Venezuela, years before, at the end of which she’d smiled, extended her hand, and said Arden was hired.
Even Arden’s mother hadn’t asked many questions.
‘You’re back sooner than you thought you’d be, aren’t you?’ Evelyn had said, and Arden—who’d had her mail forwarded to El Corazon from San José but had never told her mother the ugly story of how she’d lost one job and taken on another—had shrugged and mumbled something about the job being finished quicker than anticipated.
‘And how was Costa Rica?’ Evelyn had asked, and before Arden could offer more than a cautious, ‘OK,’ her mother had asked if she’d had the chance to see any of the beautiful mansions she’d heard existed in some parts of Central America. Arden had hesitated, then said yes, she had, and she’d described El Corazon to an enthralled Evelyn until the older woman had interrupted.
‘How magnificent,’ she’d sighed. ‘But who owns it?’
Arden had stared at her mother. I do, she’d thought with a sudden start—but before she could answer, an unbidden image of Conor had risen up before her as clearly as if he were in the room with them, Conor, tall and handsome and dangerously masculine. To her horror, her throat had constricted and she’d dragged a handkerchief from her pocket and pressed it to her mouth.
‘Sorry,’ she’d said, clearing her throat briskly. ‘I must have picked up a bug.’
Evelyn had tut-tutted in sympathy. ‘Who knows what’s floating around in the jungle?’ she’d said, and Arden had skilfully led the discussion elsewhere, before her mother could bring it back to dangerous waters.
Arden folded the empty grocery sack neatly, put it away in the broom cupboard, and turned to the refrigerator. What would tonight’s gourmet treat be? she thought wryly as she peered into the freezer. Chicken Alfredo? Filet of sole? Boeuf aux champignons? She made a face and plucked out a package at random.
‘Garden lasagna,’ she read aloud as she tore off the paper covering, then set the plastic dish in the microwave oven.
Not that it mattered, she thought, unzipping her dress as she made her way down the hall to the bedroom. Frozen dinners all tasted exactly the same, no matter what the label promised. But they were quick and required no planning, something she wasn’t too good at lately. Perhaps when the weekend came round, she’d take the time to cook for herself...
And then again, she thought, sighing as she stepped from her dress and kicked off her shoes, perhaps she wouldn’t. It seemed an awful lot of trouble to go through for one person, shopping for meat and vegetables and such, measuring and tasting and timing, when in truth it didn’t much matter if she sat down to the finest meal cooked by a cordon bleu chef or to the least distinguishable blob to come off a food packager’s assembly line. Everything tasted like straw, ever since she’d come back from Costa Rica.
Arden sighed again as slipped on a pair of cotton trousers and an oversized washed silk T-shirt. The simple truth was that she couldn’t seem to get excited about anything since she’d come home, not even about her new job, which was crazy because it was really a terrific job, much better paying than the last, with lots more responsibilities and opportunities for advancement.
‘It’s the weather,’ she mumbled aloud as she took the plastic dish from the microwave oven. Of course it was. The heat, the rain—it was enough to make anybody feel depressed.
She tore back the top seal and sniffed at the greyish stuff inside the dish, grimacing with distaste before setting the dish on the table and taking a fork and napkin from the drawer. She sat down, put the napkin in her lap, and stabbed at the mess.
What did she mean, depressed? She wasn’t ‘depressed’. Why should she be? she thought, holding her breath as she chewed a mouthful of tonight’s dinnertime treat and then swallowed it down. She had a great new job, her apartment—paid for all the months she’d been gone by McCann, Flint, Emerson—seemed none the worse for having stood empty, and autumn would be coming on soon, which meant the city would roll into high gear and opera, ballet, the symphony orchestra and new Broadway productions would offer themselves up like a smorgasbord of cultural delights. The man Irene worked for, a nice enough sort whose mid-western accent and easy manner confirmed Irene’s whispered tale of his having worked his way up from office boy, had been suggesting lately that it would be nice to attend some of those events together.
‘You ought to take the guy up on it,’ Irene kept saying. ‘He’s really awfully nice.’
And he was, Arden thought, putting down her fork and shoving the horrible little plastic dish away. But she wasn’t any more interested in getting involved with anybody now than she’d been before she’d gone to Costa Rica, not even someone who was unpretentious and self-made, who tried very hard to make her smile—who was tall and dark-haired and, at a distance, a very great distance, might almost be mistaken for Conor. But he wasn’t Conor, he never would be; he hadn’t Conor’s charm not his swift temper, he couldn’t make her heart stop with just a smile or a softly whispered word...