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“She said she was going to lunch.”
“Yeah?” He opened his eyes wide, looking appalled. “And she didn’t invite you?”
The receptionist giggled, blushing peaches and cream. “No.”
He leaned forward again. What he wouldn’t give to be twenty-two again and free to charm this one into a date. “What’s your name?”
“Charlisse.”
“Well, let me ask you this, Charlisse. You know where she was heading? I’d kinda like to surprise her, you know? We’ve known each other, whoa—” he shook his head as if he couldn’t believe how many years had gone by “—long time. I’m in town, thought I’d look her up and surprise her, but I keep just missing her. What’s up with that?”
Charlisse giggled, clearly warming to him. “I don’t know. Bad karma maybe.”
“Exactly.” He let the silence go a beat too long. “So Charlisse, can you do something for me?”
“What?” She tilted her head and looked at him coyly.
“Well…” He turned right and left, as if checking for eavesdroppers, then leaned on her desk again. “Can you turn that bad karma around and tell me where she went?”
“Um…” Charlisse frowned and her pink, edible mouth twisted.
“I’m not a creep. I swear.” He stood up and crossed himself. “I’m a good Catholic boy, schooled by nuns.”
Charlisse giggled, reminding him of Aimee. “Well, if I was going to tell you, I think I’d tell you she has a lunch date with her sister at Thai Banquet around the corner from Symphony Hall.”
“Fabulous. You are beautiful, Charlisse, thanks.” He backed away a few steps, then stopped and spread out his hands. “If I had roses, I’d give you some.”
“You’re welcome.” She giggled again and reached for the ringing phone.
He waved, strode back down the hall and stepped out into the chill, breath frosting, adrenaline pumping. That was serious fun. He’d found some information about Marlow this morning on the Internet, including that she’d gone to Framingham High School. He got the name Bobby Darwin from one of those online find-your-classmate sites. Who knew what Bobby Darwin looked like now or where he was or whether she knew him in high school. It didn’t matter. Even if she was still best friends with him and figured out Seth was an imposter when Charlisse mentioned him, he’d be long gone, back into his Prada and paperwork, back inhabiting his father’s office.
Around the corner from the Sentinel, Frank, his driver, pulled the car up to the curb. Seth wasn’t wild about the idea of a chauffeur, even less about being driven in a 1988 Lincoln Town Car, but Frank had been in his father’s employ for twenty years and would be able to retire in three. Seth didn’t have the heart to fire him. Frank loved the car, and with the traffic in downtown Boston, a vehicle Seth didn’t have to find a parking space for was a godsend.
From the backseat he directed Frank to Thai Banquet, took off the hat, sweatshirt and earring and changed into wool suit pants, perfectly polished shoes and his lightly starched white shirt, feeling his giddy excitement shutting down further with each button. A respectable businessman once again. Damned depressing.
The car pulled up opposite the Thai restaurant, known for inventive curries and fabulous noodle dishes. One thing he could say about Krista, she knew her Thai food. The place was one of his favorites.
He thanked Frank and emerged into the street, stepped up on the sidewalk and strode to the restaurant front door, decorated with green and red blinking lights for the season. What new information could he discover about Ms. Marlow beyond the basic résumé stuff? Ohio Wesleyan University as a journalism major. Links to articles she’d written. But nothing that explained why she was targeting his stepsister.
If she was eating with her sister, chances were he’d hit the jackpot. Women close to each other couldn’t help spilling every bit of their souls at every meeting. Exhausting to his way of thinking. His local friendships were pretty basic “guy” friendships, not that he’d been in touch with many of them since he’d been back in town. How ’bout them Red Sox? and How’s the golf game? and Angelina Jolie…whoa. He liked them that way. His soul belonged to himself—he saw no reason to empty it onto other people at regular intervals.
Inside the restaurant, inhaling the blissful scents of curry and galangal and lemongrass, he discovered another stroke of luck—Ms. Marlow was eating late and the regular lunch crowd had thinned, leaving him a better shot at sitting close by. He kept on his sunglasses and smiled at Panjai, the hostess, while scanning the diners. Now if Krista would just do him the favor of looking exactly like the fairly plain, gawky high school photo he’d found online….
Uh…no.
Blond and blue-eyed hadn’t changed, but plain and gawky had fled. She now sported one of those wispy, flippy hairstyles that made her look elfin and very, very appealing.
Krista Marlow was not what he’d expected. She was sexy as hell.
She laughed at something her sister said and her face came even more alive with energy and radiance.
Wow.
She was tiny, slender, and dressed fashionably in a black-and-white sweater with pink accents. He’d expected a butch Amazon with a dour expression, dragging on a cigarette and pontificating in a growly voice about how no one deserved to live but her and those select few who could make her life easier.
He requested the booth next to the sisters, keeping his face averted as he passed. From his seat directly behind Krista he’d be able to eavesdrop shamelessly. A peek before he sat told him they’d just been served their entreés, so he’d have some time to listen, though he needed to be back in his office by three for a conference call with the new head buyer he’d hired. Which sounded a lot less fun than what he was doing right now.
Because it was.
Marasri came by to take his order, a round, matronly woman he particularly liked who got her job done with remarkable efficiency for someone who seemed never to move quickly. She filled his water glass and winked. “You ready? You don’t need to look at the menu, I know.”
“I’ll have the chef special soup and green curry chicken, please.”
“No Singha?”
He grinned and shook his head. “No beer today. I have to get back to work.”
“Ah, you work too hard.” She shook her head disapprovingly. “You need to play more.”
He shrugged. If she only knew. “Who has time?”
Marasri gave him a you’ll-never-learn look and ambled off to put in his order. Seth leaned back, ready to listen to whatever his stepsister’s thorn chose to say. With any luck, the conversation would turn to Aimee, and he’d get some idea where the extra dose of bitterness and sarcasm Krista reserved for her came from.
But even if the conversation stayed on other topics, he had to admit he was just plain curious about her. After reading her blogs and some of her articles, this Krista Marlow person intrigued him.
Probably more than he wanted her to.
“SO.” LUCY FORKED UP a pineapple chunk from her yellow curry shrimp and tasted it gingerly. “What’s next for you workwise?”
“Oh, let’s see…” Krista glanced up as a thirty-something man in a business suit walked past and took a seat in the booth behind her. Unfortunately she didn’t get much of a look, but he gave the impression of being attractive.
She turned her attention back to Lucy’s question, digging into her pad thai noodles, wondering when she could safely change the subject to Link and the need, in her opinion, for him to be extracted from Lucy’s life. “Travel, actually. I’m doing a story about affordable off-the-beaten-track romantic getaways for couples wanting to escape holiday pressures. Maybe you and Link…”
Lucy was already shaking her head. “He’d say it sounded remote and chilly.”
Krista shrugged, thinking she could say the same about Link lately. “People shouldn’t have to suffer through all this holiday stress. Christmas should be about love—family love, romantic love, religious love. Love and traditions, like our family’s, caroling and candelabra lighting and making Christmas Eve dinner together. Anything but buy, buy, buy and then buy more and, while you’re at it, buy again…”
She stopped when Lucy’s eyes glazed over. Okay, so she preached her version of the gospel too often. “Anyway, I leave tomorrow for Maine. A place called Pine Tree Inn, way past Skowhegan.”
“Which is…?”
“On the road to nowhere. That’s the point. Get this—forty-five dollars a night.”
“And all the moose you can eat?”
Krista laughed and fluttered her eyelashes. “It sounds sooo romantic, no?”
“Alone?”
“Yeah, there is that.” She sighed. Unfortunately alone was more familiar to her than involved. “I’ve decided to think of it as research for my next fling.”
“The word is re-la-tion-ship.” Lucy enunciated as if she was teaching a two-year-old something new. “Can you say that?”
“Ree-lay-shin…something.” She shrugged helplessly. “I got the ‘lay’ part.”
Lucy rolled her eyes, barely suppressing a smile. “Ha. Ha.”
Krista grinned. She enjoyed playing the role of the great sexual predator. They both knew better, and it made Lucy smile, which Krista desperately wanted her to do more often. “And so, Ms. Lucy, speaking of ree-lay-mumble-mumbles…”
“Oh no.”
“Come on, you knew I was going to ask. What’s up with Lincoln?”
Lucy’s beautiful face shut down and Krista wanted to put down her fork, reach across the table and shake some sense into her could-have-been-a-model, should-be-a-star sister. Fact one: Lucy was miserable with Link. Fact two: Lucy was miserable with Link. And it’s…fact three! He’s outta there! The relationship is retired!
“Things are bad. I don’t know what to do.”
“Get out?”
Her eyes grew defensive. “Krista…”
“Lucy…”
Lucy sighed and chewed a tiny bite of shrimp as if it was enough for a whole meal.
“I know, I know.” Krista waved her sister off. “You hate me saying that. But it seems obvious to me that—”
“Of course it seems obvious to you.” She gestured with her shrimp-impaled fork. “Everything seems obvious to you. The fact is, I love this man.”
“And…?” Krista looked at her blankly. “To quote Tina Turner, what’s love got to do with it? He makes you unhappy. You aren’t enjoying your day job, your performing career is stalled, you look tired and defeated…. Hello? What’s wrong with this picture?”
“You don’t understand.”
Krista leaned forward on her elbows. “Try me.”
“He is The One.”
“The one what? The one guy you’ve ever dated seriously?”
“The One. The love of my life.”
Krista let out a growl of exasperation. “Lucy, the issue is not whether you love him or not. The issue is that you’re not good for each other anymore.”
“We are.” She tightened her lips, looking exactly as stubborn and scared as she had at ten when Krista had talked her out of a ladder-climbing dare she’d accepted from a neighbor kid. “We’ve just lost our way right now.”
“Can I be totally brutally honest here?”
Lucy’s expression turned incredulous. “Like you’re ever not?”
“Point taken.” She lifted her hands in surrender. “You’re clinging to the past, to this ideal of Link that no longer exists, to this dream of marrying him and having babies and—”
“It’s not a dream.” Lucy’s voice broke. “I am going to marry him and I am—”
“When?”
“When he’s—when we’re ready.” She folded her arms across her chest and sank against the back of the booth.
“Think you’ll get a ring at Christmas this year?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you’re hoping?”
Lucy gave a small sad shrug. “It’s all I want.”
“Jeez, Lucy.” Krista stared miserably at her sister. Didn’t she hear what she sounded like? Was the person being stifled by a crappy relationship always the last to know? Or at least to admit it? “I’m watching the Titanic head for the iceberg here. You marry this guy, your shot at a lifeboat is gone. You think a ceremony is going to fix your problems?”
“No.” Lucy lifted her chin and met Krista’s eye defiantly. “But what we have is forever.”
“That’s a line from some sappy movie on the Lifetime Channel.” She forced herself to lower and gentle her voice. “This is reality we’re dealing with here. Or trying to.”
“You don’t understand. You’ve never been in love.”
“I—” She snapped her mouth shut. Kaboom. There it was. The horrible, tremendous truth. Lust, oh yes, infatuation, sure, sometimes pretty strong. But love? Nope. Emphatically not. When her relationships ended, she was over it in a week, sometimes two. And she wasn’t quite sure why.
She took a deep breath. “Okay, you’re right. I haven’t been. Not for real.”
“Because you always fall for creeps.”
Another deep breath. “But, I—”
“Bad boys who excite you for about twenty minutes until they ejaculate and run.”
“Lucy…”
“Am I wrong?”
Krista wrinkled her nose. “Exaggerating maybe. But how about we get back to you?”
“I’d rather stay on this subject.”
“Of my miserable failings? No way. We’re talking about you and how it’s not happening with you guys anymore.”
“Relationships are work.” Lucy stared at Krista pointedly. “If you’d had one that lasted more than the first thrilling months, you’d know.”
Ouch. Okay, fair enough. But none of that took away from the fact that Lucy was unhappy and Krista hated seeing her that way. Working on relationships was one thing. Staying when there was nothing left to stay for was another.
She reached across the table to touch her sister’s hand. “Answer this. Deep down, don’t you really think it’s over?”
