Paradise (Second Opportunities 1)

Meredith stood up quickly. "We're not going to have a fight. In fact, I have to leave. Could you drop me off at home on your way to the airport?"

Patrick's tone was as implacable as it was paternal and kind. "Don't be foolish, Meredith. You'll stay here with Matt and he'll take you home later."

"I'm not being foolish! Mr. Farrell—"

"Dad."

"I'm sorry—Dad," she corrected herself, and then because she realized this was going to be her only chance to enlist his support, she said, "I don't think you realize why I'm here right now. I'm here because your son has blackmailed and coerced me into seeing him for an eleven-week period."

She expected him to be surprised, to demand an explanation from Matt. She did not expect him to look at her unflinchingly, and then side with his son against her. "He did what was necessary to stop you from doing something you might both regret for the rest of your lives."

Meredith stepped back as if he had slapped her, and she struck back verbally with quiet force. "I never should have told either one of you the truth about what happened years ago. Tonight, all night, I've thought you didn't realize why I'm here now—" Her voice dropped and she shook her head at her own naivete. "I was planning to explain it to you, and to ask you to intercede."

Patrick lifted his hand in a gesture of helpless appeal to be understood, then he looked worriedly to Matt, who stood there, unmoved by the little tableau. "I have to go," he said, and lamely added, "Do you want me to give a message to Julie for you?"

"You can give her my sympathy," she quietly replied, turning around and looking for her purse and coat, "for being raised in a family of heartless men." She missed the tensing of Matt's jaw, but she felt Patrick's hand on her shoulder, and though she stopped, she refused to turn back. His hand dropped away and then he left.

The moment the door closed behind him, silence fell over the apartment ... heavy, waiting, stifling. Meredith took one step, intending to get her things, but Matt caught her arm and drew her back. "I'm getting my coat and purse and I'm leaving," she said.

"We're going to talk, Meredith," he said in the cool, authoritative tone she particularly hated.

"You'll have to physically restrain me to make me stay here," she warned him, "and if you try, I'll swear out a warrant for your arrest in the morning, so help me God!"

Torn between frustration and amusement, Matt reminded her, "You said you wanted our meetings to be private."

"I said secret!"

Matt realized he was getting nowhere, that her animosity was building by the moment, and so he did the last thing he wanted to do; he issued a threat. "We had a bargain! Or do you no longer care what happens to your father?" The look she gave him was so filled with contempt that for the first time, he wondered if he'd been wrong about her ability to hate. "We're going to talk tonight," he said, gentling his tone, "either here or at your place. You decide where."

"My place," she said bitterly.

They made the fifteen-minute trip in complete silence. By the time she opened her apartment door, the atmosphere was vibrating with tension.

Meredith went directly to a lamp, turned it on, then she walked over to the fireplace because it was as far as she could possibly get from him. "You said you wanted to talk," she reminded him ungraciously. Crossing her arms over her chest, she leaned her shoulders against the mantel, waiting for him to start trying to bully and coerce her, which she was positive he meant to do. For that reason, she was slightly disconcerted when he made no effort to do either, and instead shoved his hands into his pockets and stood in the center of the living room, slowly looking around at the cozy room as if he were fascinated by every piece of furniture and each knick-knack.

Baffled, she watched as he took one hand out of his pocket and picked up a photograph of Parker in an ornate antique frame from the end table near his hip. He put the picture back, and then let his gaze drift from the antique secretary she used as a desk to the dining room table with its silver candlesticks, to the chintz-covered Queen Anne chairs before the fire. "What are you doing?" Meredith demanded warily.

He looked around at her then, and the quiet amusement in his eyes was almost as startling as what he said. "I'm satisfying years of curiosity."

"About what?"

"About you," he said, and if Meredith hadn't known better, she'd have believed there was tenderness in his expression. "About how you live."

Wishing she'd stayed out in the open instead of backing herself into a wall, she watched him walk forward, finally stopping in front of her, both hands in his pockets again. "You like chintz," he said with a boyish half smile. "Somehow I never imagined you with chintz. It suits you though—the antiques and bright flowers; it's warm and inviting. I like it very much."

"Good, then I can die happy," Meredith said, increasingly wary of the warmth in his eyes and his smile. "Now, what did you want to talk about?"

"For one thing, I'd like to know why you're even angrier tonight than you were yesterday."

"I'll tell you why," she said, her voice shaking with suppressed resentment. "Yesterday I yielded to your blackmail and agreed to see you for eleven weeks, but I will not—will not—participate in this farce you apparently want to enact!"

"What farce?"

"The farce of pretending you want a reconciliation, which is what you did in front of the lawyers on Tuesday and your father tonight! What you want is revenge, and you found a subtler, cheaper way of getting it than suing my father!"

"In the first place," he pointed out, "I could have staged a public massacre in a courtroom for the five million dollars I'm giving you if this doesn't work out. Meredith," he said forcefully, "this is not about revenge! I told you at that meeting exactly why I was asking for this time with you. There's something between us— there has always been something between us—and not even eleven years could kill it! I want it to have a chance."

Meredith's mouth fell open, and she gaped at him, torn between ire at his outrageous lie and mirth that he actually expected her to believe it. "Am I supposed to think"—she had to stop to swallow back an angry, hysterical laugh—"that you've been carrying some sort of torch for me for all these years?"

"Would you believe it if I said it's true?"

"I'd have to be an idiot to believe it! I told you tonight that I and everybody who subscribes to a magazine or reads a newspaper knows about hundreds of your affairs!"