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“Just seems like a really competitive business. I’ve heard sometimes it gets ugly, one paper accusing another of publishing lies and whatnot. It’s hard for a newspaper to come back after that kind of accusation.”
She’d laughed—laughed!—seeing no significance in what he was saying at all.
“Oh, come on, Evan, no one takes that stuff that seriously. Look at all the tabloids at the grocery store that say aliens are walking among us. Everyone knows they’re full of lies, but they’re still in business.”
“It’s different, Meredith. I wouldn’t want to be in the news business for anything. I’d hate to see a nice guy like your dad get into trouble in business.”
“As long as he keeps the aliens off the front page, he’ll be fine.” She could remember saying that, because then she’d looked up and seen a shooting star.
She’d wished for a long, happy future with Evan.
Maybe the star had been an alien.
She started up the stairs with his warm clothes now, playing and replaying his words in her head. How on earth had she forgotten that hugely significant conversation until now?
Or, on the other hand, how had she remembered it at all? Given how little thought she’d put into it at the time, and how many other things had happened that night that were a lot more interesting to the mind of a teenage girl, she was amazed that it was still in her head at all.
She wondered if Evan remembered.
She stopped at the door to the guest room she’d directed him to and knocked softly.
No answer.
Slowly she opened the door and peeked in. Light from the bathroom spilled in and she could see he was on his side, breathing softly and rhythmically.
She set his clothes down on the dresser and started to leave but then she turned back.
As if watching someone else, and completely incapable of stopping them, she walked back over to the side of the bed and looked down at him. She told herself she just wanted to make sure he seemed all right, in case he had a concussion, but the truth was she wanted to be closer to him, to see him without his knowing it.
It might have been ten minutes that she stood there, looking at that handsome face half hidden by the shadows of the night. It was a face she’d thought about many times over the years. At first with love, then later with pain and confusion, then finally with anger.
Now she wasn’t sure how she felt.
And that scared her more than anything.
She turned to leave and stepped on a creaky floorboard that protested loudly.
She froze, listening for the even breath of his sleep.
Instead she heard his voice. “Meredith?”
She turned back to him. “I just brought your clothes back. They’re on the dresser.”
He looked through sleepy eyes at the dresser across the room, then back at her by the bed and clearly not anywhere near the clothes.
“Then I came to check on you and make sure you were breathing normally,” she explained in answer to his unasked question. “You know, all the typical concussion checks. Steady breathing, ability to wake up. Congratulations, you passed.”
He sat up in bed and the sheets fell away from him, revealing a bare torso.
So much for the T-shirts she’d offered him.
And so much for her resolve to keep a professional distance from him. This was a sight that would easily fuel the romantic fantasies of any red-blooded American woman, and it was right here in her own house.
“Thanks,” he said. “Am I okay?”
“I think you’ll live.”
“Can’t ask for more than that, I guess.”
This was hard, all this small talk in a room filled with such big tension.
“If there’s nothing you need, I’ll be going to sleep now,” she said to him. She swallowed. “Do you need anything?”
Three heartbeats passed.
“There is one thing …”
“What is it?”
“I—” He stopped. “Never mind. It’s nothing.”
“Oh. Okay. If you’re sure …”
He nodded.
“Good night, then.”
“Good night.”
She started to go, then stopped and turned back. She had to ask him this. If she didn’t, it would drive her crazy. “Evan?”
“Hmm?” He sat up again.
“Can we talk for a minute?”
“Sure.” He scooted back in the bed. “Have a seat.”
She went over and sat on the edge of the bed, facing him. “I want you to be absolutely honest, okay?”
He frowned. “Okay.”
“Did you know what your father was planning to do to my father’s business?”
He blew air into his cheeks, then let it out in a long, tense stream. “I guess we were going to get to this someday.”
“So you did.”
“I had an idea, yeah.”
“An idea? Or you knew?” The possibilities mounted in her mind. “Did he tell you?”
He raked his hand through his hair and looked at her. “You sure you want to do this?”
Her stomach began to feel shaky and upset. It was like getting a phone call and knowing it was bad news before even picking up the receiver. “Tell me,” she said.
“I knew my father wanted to buy your father’s paper. Everyone knew that. He even made an offer, but your dad refused.”
“He loved his work.”
“I know,” Evan said softly. “It wasn’t his fault.”
“Obviously not,” she said, a tad too defensively. “So your father told you he was going to plant lies about my father’s paper to cast doubt on the credibility?”
“No, he didn’t tell me.” He was choosing his words carefully, talking slowly.
Meredith wanted answers now. “Then how did you know?”
“I heard him talking to someone on the phone one night. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together and figure out what he was planning to do.” He shook his head. “I tried to warn you one night—”
“At the beach?”
“That’s right.” He nodded. “You remember that?”
“It only just occurred to me.” She shifted her weight, and the mattress squeaked. “But if you knew, why didn’t you tell me directly? You were so vague…. I had no idea you were trying to make me aware of something so important.” Her eyes burned but she wouldn’t cry. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”
There was a long moment where Evan said nothing. Then at last he said, “Because I was a kid, Meredith. I didn’t have firsthand information about the plan, and even if I did, we’re talking about betraying my father.” He shook his head again, the slow movement showing his regret. “I thought I needed to be loyal to my family. To my father.”
A terrible thought occurred to her. “Did our relationship. did it have anything to do with helping your father take over my father’s company?”
“Of course not,” Evan said, clearly offended at the suggestion.
Relief coursed through Meredith, calming her tight stomach.
But it was short-lived.
“I would never have dated you in order to help my father get access to the newspaper,” Evan went on. “In fact, when he suggested our relationship could be of use to him, I ended it.”
She felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. Had she heard that correctly? “Wait a minute. You’re saying you left because your father wanted to use us to gain access to my father’s business?”
Evan nodded slowly. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
Chapter Twelve
It was the first time in her life Meredith had ever even thought about quitting a job halfway through. Her job description of corporate researcher had a lot of mutations, and while she wasn’t usually a corporate spy—or, as some put it, competitive intelligence agent—it wasn’t unheard of for her.
As long as she felt comfortable with the reasons for her research and believed she wasn’t breaching her own personal morals and standards she was able to do a good job.
This time, though, things were getting foggy.
She’d told her employer she might have a conflict of interest, and her employer had guessed right off that it might have something to do with her relationship with Evan.
It was hard for Meredith to explain that it did because of something that had happened a long, long time ago. How could she say that she’d just learned he’d once had the chance to do almost the same thing to her that she was doing to him and he’d opted not to?
It sounded so. unprofessional.
So she’d had to settle for explaining that she’d never before taken this kind of job with a company she had any personal relationship with—even a relationship as tangential and outdated as the one she had with the Hansons—and that she was finding it more difficult than she’d anticipated to completely fulfill her obligations to everyone involved.
Especially when the end result would be the hostile takeover of Evan’s company.
To Meredith’s surprise her employer had assured her that there was no hostile takeover in the works. That they were seeking a merger—a way to take two strong companies and put them together to make them both even more powerful.
Hanson Media Group wasn’t going to lose in this deal, Meredith was told—they were going to win.
That was believable, Meredith supposed. Hanson could accept an offer to share partnership instead of being subject to a hostile takeover and thereby having no choice.
“So are you prepared to stay on and finish the job you began?” her employer had asked.
The sixty-four-thousand—only in this case it was more like million—dollar question.
Meredith thought about it for a moment. Her instincts told her she could believe what she was being told, and in the past few years her instincts had become pretty good.
“Yes,” she said at last. “I am. You can depend on me.”
Evan was starting to have a hard time getting his thoughts straight.
Being at Meredith’s parents’ house the other night was just too strange. How many hours had he spent there in his lifetime, enjoying the company of the girl he had once been absolutely sure he’d marry?
It was weird to come back, now that she was a grown woman—a woman who had spent more than a decade growing away from him—and see her in that same environment.
It gave him a strange feeling, a combination of unease and melancholy.
Not to mention the all-new desire he felt for Meredith as she fit right into his life and his mind now. The way she’d handled Lenny Doss was amazing. More to the point, the way she handled everything at work was amazing. She was a perfect professional, always conservative but always right.
It was ironic that the very quality that had driven him crazy when they were dating—her unwillingness to take a risk—was the very thing he appreciated in her now.
After he’d spent the night in her guest room, he’d gotten up early, written a note of thanks and called a cab to take him back to his car at Navy Pier. It was better that way, he figured: no awkward morning talk, no uncomfortable silences.
He’d been at work for three and a half hours, with no sign of Meredith, when he finally decided to take a casual look around for her.
But she wasn’t in the PR offices, and David said he hadn’t seen her all day. So when Evan found her at a lone computer at the far end of the accounting department, he was puzzled.
He watched her for a few minutes from a distance, clicking on the computer keyboard, squinting and looking closer, then jotting notes down on a pad in front of her.
Now what was that all about?
He moved closer, hoping to catch a better glimpse of her work without making his presence so obvious that, if caught, he couldn’t say he’d just wandered in.
So very carefully he walked up behind her and tried to see what was on the computer screen.
