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She was finished ten minutes after she’d started. She pushed her plate away. “Thank you, Mack. That was excellent.”
“I’m so glad you enjoyed it,” he muttered, finishing off his glass of wine and reaching for the bottle again.
She granted him a sour smile. “You’ve hardly eaten.” He’d taken one mushroom and a single breadstick.
“For some reason, I feel rushed. It’s ruined my appetite.” He poured more wine, set the bottle down.
Jenna smoothed her napkin in at the side of her plate. “Well, then. If you don’t feel like eating, then maybe we can proceed to the main order of business here.”
He was staring at her engagement diamond. “Nice ring,” he muttered.
“Thank you. I like it, too—and can we talk about what you supposedly came here to talk about?”
He gestured with his wineglass. “By all means.”
She straightened her shoulders and inched her chin up a notch. “As I told you on the phone, I want to get married again.”
“Congratulations.” Mack took a minute to sip from his glass. Then he lowered the glass and looked at her straight on. “But don’t you think you ought to get rid of your first husband before you start talking about taking on another one?”
“I am rid of my first husband,” she replied in a carefully controlled tone. “Or I was supposed to be. Everything was settled.”
“For you, maybe.”
She glared at him. “It was settled, Mack.”
He grunted. “Whatever you say.”
“Well, all right. I say that everything was over—except that, for some reason, you never got around to signing the papers that my lawyer sent your lawyer.”
Mack studied the depths of his wineglass for a moment, then looked at her once more. “It was a busy time for me. I had a lot on my mind.”
She decided to let his lame excuses pass. “The point is, it’s over, Mack. Long over. And you know it. I don’t know why you’re here, after all these years. I don’t care why you’re here.”
He sat up a little straighter. “I don’t believe that.”
“Believe what you want. Just—” Give me those papers and get out of my life! she wanted to shout. But she didn’t. She paused. She gathered her composure, then asked quite civilly, “Do you have the papers?”
He brought his wineglass to his lips again and regarded her broodingly over the rim. “Not with me.”
Jenna could quite easily have picked up the crystal bowl of floating candles from the center of the table and heaved it at his head. To keep herself from doing that, she folded her hands in her lap and spoke with measured care. “You said you had the papers.”
“And I do. I just didn’t bring them with me tonight.”
“You lied.”
“I didn’t lie. You heard what you wanted to hear.”
Another lie, she thought, but held her tongue this time. She’d lived with Mack McGarrity long enough to recognize a verbal trap when he laid one. If she kept insisting that he’d lied, they’d only end up going around and around, her accusing and him denying, getting nowhere.
Let it go, she thought. Move on. She said, “You told me you wanted to talk to me. In private. Well, here we are. Just the way you wanted it. You’d better start talking, Mack. You’d better tell me what is going on.”
He set his glass on the table. “Jenna, I—” He cut himself off. Something across the room had caught his eye. She followed his glance to the black cat peeking around the edge of the arch that led to the formal dining room. “My God. Is that…?”
“Byron,” she provided reluctantly, at the same time as he whispered, “Bub?”
The cat’s lean body slid around the arch. Then, his long tail high, Byron strutted over, jumped lightly onto Mack’s lap, lay down and began to purr in obvious contentment. Mack petted the black fur in long, slow strokes. Jenna looked away, furious with him for this game he was playing—and moved in spite of her fury at the sight of him with Byron again after all these years.
She stared out the front window at the Boston fern hanging from the eaves of the porch as the sound of Byron’s happy purring rumbled in her ears. When she looked back, Mack was watching her. His eyes were soft now, full of memories, of dangerous tenderness. “He has some gray, around his neck.”
Jenna’s throat felt uncomfortably tight. “He’s not a young cat. He was full-grown when we found him.”
She thought of their first meeting again, though she shouldn’t have allowed herself such a foolish indulgence.
Nine years ago. It seemed like forever.
And also, like yesterday…
She’d been in her junior year, majoring in business administration at UCLA. And he’d been twenty-five, just finishing law school.
Once he’d led her into his apartment, he’d informed her that the cat had adopted him.
“No,” she had argued, “That cat adopted me, the first day I moved in, three weeks ago.”
They were in his living room, which had a shortage of furniture and an excess of books—they were everywhere, overflowing the board-and-block bookcases, in piles on the floor. He petted Byron and he looked at her, a look that made her feel warm and weak and absolutely wonderful. He introduced himself. And he said that he’d named the cat Bub.
She had demanded, “You named my cat Bub?”
“It’s my cat.”
“No, he’s mine. And Bub. What kind of a name is that?”
“A better name than Byron—which is just the kind of name a woman would give a black cat.”
“Byron fits my cat perfectly.”
“No. This cat is no Byron. This cat is a Bub.”
“No, his name is Byron. And he’s mine.”
“No, he’s mine.”
“I beg your pardon. He is mine.”
And about then, Mack suggested, “We could share….” He said the words quietly, looking deep in her eyes, stroking Byron’s silky fur and smiling a smile that made her want to find something sturdy to lean against.
“Share…?”
He nodded.
Further discussion had followed. She could no longer remember all that had been said. The words hadn’t really mattered anyway. There was his voice asking and her voice answering, his eyes looking into hers, the feeling that she’d knocked on a door—his door—and found a different world waiting beyond the threshold. A magical, shimmering, golden world. A world with Mack McGarrity in it.
In the end, it was agreed. They would share Byron—Bub, as Mack called him. Mack suggested they have dinner together to celebrate. It sounded like a lovely idea to Jenna.
They ate at an inexpensive Italian restaurant not far from their apartment building. And when they returned to his place, he’d asked her in for a last cup of coffee.
She’d stayed, after the coffee. She’d spent the night in his bed—well, actually, on his mattress on the floor. At that time, Mack McGarrity couldn’t afford things like beds.
It had been her first time. And it had been beautiful. And after that night, she had moved in with him. Two months later, on November 10, they were married. Jenna had thought herself the luckiest, happiest woman on earth….
“Jenna.” Mack was looking at her now, over the shimmering flames of those candles afloat in that cut-crystal bowl. The cat went on purring, and the past seemed a living thing, as real as the cat and the glowing candle flames, a presence in her mother’s front parlor with them.
He said, “Since you called, I’ve been thinking….”
No, she thought. Don’t say it. Please don’t.
But he did. “You can’t marry the med student, Jenna. Not yet.”
The med student.
Logan.
Oh, God. What was the matter with her? Taking this dangerous little mental detour down memory lane? Letting herself forget Logan, who loved her and treated her with respect and understanding. Who wanted exactly the same things that she wanted: a partner for life, an equal partner. And a big family. Lots of children. Three or four at the very least.
“Logan is not a med student anymore,” she informed the infuriating man across the table from her. “Years have passed, Mack, just in case you didn’t notice.”
He had stopped petting Byron. Those blue-gray eyes bored into hers. “I have noticed, as a matter of fact.”
“Logan’s finished med school.” Her throat felt so tight, it hurt. She swallowed, made herself go on. “He’s…done his internship and his residency. He’s a full-fledged M.D. in family practice right here in Meadow Valley.”
“I don’t care if he’s Jonas Salk. You can’t marry him right now.”
She couldn’t sit still for that. And she didn’t. She shot to her feet. “This is just like you,” she accused through clenched teeth. “You appear out of nowhere after all these years and you immediately start telling me how I’m going to run my life. Well, I’m not going to do what you tell me to do anymore. I want those papers you promised you’d sign, Mack. And I want them now.”
“I didn’t promise.”
“That is a lie. You told me on the phone that you would—”
“I know what I said.”
“Good. Because what you said was that you’d sign the papers and send them right to me.”
“You caught me off guard.”
“It doesn’t matter how I caught you. You said—”
He waved a hand, then used it to resume stroking her cat. “You’ll get what you want. But not right this minute.”
I will not start yelling, she silently vowed. No matter how tempting the prospect may be, I will not begin screaming at him.
She asked, “What does that mean—not right this minute?”
“It means I want a little time with you first.”
“Time?” It came out as a croak.
“Yes. Time.”
Oh, sweet Lord, she did not like the sound of this. She did not like it in the least. She strove mightily for calm—and did somehow manage to keep her voice even. “Time for what?”
Byron chose that moment to leave Mack’s lap. The tag on his collar jingled as he jumped to the floor. Landing neatly on the balls of his dainty feet, he strutted across the room, then sat down beneath a marble-topped mahogany side table, where he began bathing himself. Mack watched him.
“Mack,” Jenna demanded, to get his attention. He looked at her again. She repeated, “Time for what?”
He studied her before he spoke, his expression arranged into what she always used to think of as his lawyer’s face. Composed. Aloof. All-knowing. His eyes looked out from beneath the golden shelf of his brow, seeing everything, revealing nothing.
He said, “We had something good once. And I admit it was mostly my fault that we lost it. I want some time to try to understand what went wrong.”
Conflicting emotions swirled inside her. Confusion. Rage. A strange and rather frightening giddiness.
She longed to sit down again, to let her knees crumple and drop to her chair. But she remained upright. “Mack. I just want the signed papers. Please.”
And he just sat there, looking out at her through those totally unrevealing lawyer’s eyes. “As I said, you’ll have them. After you spend two weeks with me.”
She gulped. “Two weeks?”
“That’s right. Two weeks. Alone with me.”
She did sit down then. And once seated, she closed her eyes and raked her hair back from her face. “Mack. You cannot do this. I’ll…divorce you all over again.”
His lips curved, just slightly, as if he found that remark amusing, but only vaguely so. “You’re not serious.”
She forced total conviction into her reply. “I certainly am.”
He reached out and picked up his wineglass again. “Divorcing me all over again will take time.” He sipped, settling back in his chair. “It took over a year before, from the date that your lawyer first contacted mine until we reached a settlement. And then we were only fighting over Bub.”
Ridiculous, she thought, remembering. Ridiculous and petty. She’d been back home in Meadow Valley when she’d filed, and he was still in New York with that high-powered law firm. He’d hired one of the lawyers from his own firm and instructed him to demand “custody” of Byron. For months, his lawyer and hers had corresponded. And then, out of nowhere, Mack had decided to be reasonable. He’d let her have Byron. Everything had been settled.
All he’d had to do was sign the blasted papers, and everything would have been fine.
He sipped some more. “This time I could fix it so it takes forever. I hope the good doctor will wait for you. But then, I suppose he will. I remember him, how he hung around that one Christmas we spent here. He was waiting for you even way back then—when there was no doubt at all you were another man’s wife.”
Desperate, Jenna tried another threat—anything, she thought, to make him back down. “I’ll get a big chunk of your money if I divorce you now.”
He grunted in disbelief and sipped more wine. “Oh, come on. I know you, Jenna. Except for Bub, you wouldn’t take anything six years ago. And you won’t take anything now.”
She gave him her best level-eyed stare. “Don’t bet on it. I’m a lot meaner than I used to be. And besides, you weren’t a multimillionaire when I divorced you. You were just a lawyer in a big firm, killing yourself and ignoring your wife, spending every waking minute clawing your way to the top. Now you’re so rich, I might not be able to resist making a bid for half of all you’ve got.”
“So.” He was smiling again. “You know how much money I’ve got.”
