Paradise (Second Opportunities 1)

"Who's that?"

Meredith was already wishing for a way to divert the conversation to another track, and he'd just handed her the opportunity. "My mother."

"Your mother?"

"I did have one of those, you know," she reminded him dryly. "She was given a large block of stock as part of the divorce settlement."

"Why doesn't your mother put her stock up for the bank? It's not unreasonable, since she's going to reap the profits. The value of her stock is going up every day that B and C continues to expand and prosper."

Laying aside the notepad, Meredith looked at him. "She hasn't done it because she hasn't been asked to do it."

"Would you feel comfortable telling me why not?" Matt asked, hoping she wouldn't think he was prying instead of trying to help.

"She wasn't asked because she lives in Italy somewhere, and neither my father nor I have had anything to do with her since I was a year old." When he heard that without any outward sign of emotion, Meredith suddenly decided to tell him something she normally chose to forget. Watching him for reaction, she said with a smile, "My mother was—is—Caroline Edwards."

His dark brows drew together into a baffled frown, and she prodded, "Think about an old Cary Grant movie, where he was on the Riviera, and the princess of a mythical kingdom was running away—"

She knew from his smile exactly when he identified the movie—and its female star. Leaning against the back of the sofa, he regarded her with smiling surprise. "She is your mother?"

Meredith nodded.

In thoughtful silence, Matt compared the elegant perfection of Meredith's features to the memory he had of the star of the movie. Meredith's mother had been beautiful, but Meredith was more so. She had a glow that lit her from within and illuminated her expressive eyes; a natural elegance that she hadn't acquired in some acting school. She had a dainty nose that sculptors would envy, delicate cheekbones, and a romantic mouth that invited a man to kiss it at the same time everything else about her warned a man to keep his distance.

Even if that man was her husband ...

Matt pushed that thought out of his mind the moment he had it. They were married to each other only by a technicality; in reality, they were strangers. Intimate strangers, the demon in his mind reminded him, and Matt suddenly had to force himself not to look below the bright yellow V at the throat of her sweater. He didn't need to look. Once he had explored and kissed every inch of the breasts that were now filling out that sweater so provocatively. He still remembered exactly the way they filled his hands, the softness of her skin, the tautness of her nipples, the scent... Annoyed with the persistent sexual direction his thoughts were suddenly taking, he tried to tell himself it was merely the natural, appreciative reaction of any male who was confronted by a female who had the alluring ability to look both innocent and seductive in a simple sweater and slacks. Realizing that he'd been looking at her without speaking, he returned to the discussion at hand. "I always wondered where you got that beautiful face of yours—God knows your looks couldn't have come from your father."

Shocked by his unprecedented compliment and inordinately pleased that he evidently thought her face beautiful even now, when she was crowding thirty, Meredith acknowledged the compliment with a smile and a slight shrug, because she honestly didn't know what to say.

"How is it I never knew who your mother is until now?"

"There wasn't much time to talk before."

Because we were too busy making love, his mind replied, forcibly reminding him of those hot, endless nights he'd held her in his arms, joining his body to hers, trying to satisfy the need he'd felt to please her and be close to her.

Meredith was finding it surprisingly pleasant to confide in him, and so she told him something else: "Have you ever heard of Seaboard Consolidated Industries?"

Matt mentally sifted through the disjointed names and facts he'd accumulated over the years. "There's a Seaboard Consolidated somewhere in the southeast— Florida, I think. It's a holding company that originally owned a couple of large chemical companies and later diversified into mining, aerospace, computer component manufacturing, and chains of drugstores."

"Supermarkets," Meredith corrected him with that jaunty sideways smile of hers that used to make him yearn to drag her into his arms and kiss it off her lips. "Seaboard was founded by my grandfather."

"And now it's yours?" Matt said, abruptly recalling that a woman supposedly headed Seaboard.

"No, it's owned by my stepgrandmother and her two sons. My grandfather married his secretary seven years before he died. Later he adopted her two sons, and when he died he left Seaboard to them."

Matt was impressed. "She must be quite a businesswoman—she's built Seaboard into a large and very profitable conglomerate."

Meredith's dislike of her stepgrandmother prompted her to deny the woman any such undue praise, and in doing so she revealed more than she intended. "Charlotte has expanded it, but the corporation was always very diversified. In fact, Seaboard owned everything the family had acquired for generations, and Bancroft and Company—the department store, I mean—was less than one quarter of its total assets. So you see, it's not as if she built Seaboard up from nothing."

Meredith saw Matt's surprised expression and realized he'd already noted that the division of her grandfather's estate seemed very off balance. At any other time, she wouldn't have confided as much as she already had, but there was something special about today. There was the pleasure of sitting across from Matt in quiet friendship after all these years; the warmth of knowing that she was mending a relationship that never should have ended with enmity in the first place; the flattering realization that he seemed to be very interested in whatever she said. All of that, combined with the coziness of a fire crackling in the grate while snow piled up on the windows, created an atmosphere that positively encouraged confidences. Since he'd courteously refrained from prying any further into the matter they'd been discussing, Meredith voluntarily provided the answers. "Charlotte and my father detested each other, and when my grandfather married her, it caused a breach between the two men that never truly healed. Later on—perhaps in retaliation because my father was shunning him, my grandfather legally adopted Charlotte's sons. We didn't even know he'd done it until his will was read. He divided his estate into four equal parts, and left one to my father and the rest to Charlotte and her sons, with Charlotte in control of their share, of course."