Halfway to Paradise

by Neesa Hart

  He hugged her once before setting her away from him. “Maybe it was for the best. Maybe you knew I was getting to the point of no return.”

  “So was I,” she whispered.

  He tucked his tee shirt into his pants, then started to button his shirt. “So maybe you knew that would do the trick. God. You probably think every time I get you on that sofa I’m going to attack you or something.”

  Maggie wrapped her arms around her waist and rocked back and forth a few times. “Scott, I—”

  He shook his head. He leaned over to kiss her lightly. “Forget it, Maggie. I’ve got plans to submit and a plane to catch. You’ve got to get Ryan off to school, and, well, whatever else you normally do in the mornings. We’ll just talk about it when I get back from Dallas. Okay?”

  She hesitated. “Scott—”

  “Not now. I can’t right now.”

  “Are you angry?”

  “No.”

  “Then what—”

  He moved quickly to cover her mouth with his hand. “It’s been a rocky night. I need some time. All right?” Her eyes searched his. He gave her a gentle shake. “Say yes.”

  She nodded. Scott dropped his hand, “OK. Now, I need to use your phone to call a cab.”

  Maggie shook her head. “That’s ridiculous. I’m going to take Ryan to school at eight, then go by Carl’s and drop off my proposal. Why don’t we just swing by your hotel then, and we’ll go over to Carl’s office together?”

  He paused, not sure he was ready to experience something as normal as a morning routine with Maggie and Ryan. He saw the uncertain look in her eyes, and it swayed him. She was still insecure about what had happened. “All right,” he said with a slight shrug. He dropped back onto the couch. “What do you think we should do until Ryan wakes up?”

  Maggie smiled. “If we start looking for my car keys now, we won’t be late when it’s time to leave.”

  Mark gritted his teeth. He resumed his pacing of the living room. Annie laughed. “You look like a lion stalking your prey,” she said.

  He glared at her, jabbing an angry finger in Scott’s direction. “He deliberately took advantage of her. Maggie’s always disoriented when she wakes up.”

  “He didn’t know that,” Annie pointed out.

  “Oh, he knew. Believe me, he knew.”

  “Mark, you’re overreacting.”

  “I am not overreacting. Will you stop saying that?”

  “They’re going to sleep together, you know.”

  “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

  “You don’t. So quit acting like a child.”

  Mark dropped down into his chair with a huff. “Doesn’t this bother you at all? My God!” He jerked a hand in the direction of the sofa. “How can you sit there and glibly inform me that they’re going to end up in bed together!”

  “Of course it bothers me,” she snapped, her patience wearing thin. Despite what Mark seemed to think, it wasn’t any easier on her to see Maggie and Scott together. When Scott had told Maggie during the previous night that he’d never felt with Annie the way he felt with her, Annie had wanted to curl up in a corner and weep. The fact that she couldn’t—could no longer even weep normally—had only made the situation worse. “It hurts more than you can possibly imagine.”

  Mark’s head snapped up. He stared at her. “Damn,” he swore softly. “I’m a first-class idiot.”

  “Pretty close,” she said, miserable.

  Mark got out of his chair and crossed to her. “I should have paid more attention. I’ve been so busy wanting to tear his throat out, I never even thought about what this was doing to you.”

  “Well, it hurts. It hurts me just as much as it hurts you.” She knew she sounded petulant and frankly didn’t care.

  Mark exhaled a long breath. “I’m sorry, Annie. I’m really sorry.”

  “Forget it.”

  He shook his head. “No. I won’t forget it. I think we should just get out of here for a while.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Leave them alone.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to leave them alone.”

  “I don’t,” he confessed with a half smile. “But I don’t want to watch either.” He tugged on her hand. “Come on. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Ryan get up in the morning.”

  Annie reluctantly agreed, and was forced to admit five minutes later that there was something rather amazing about the experience of watching Ryan Connell wake up. They found him, turned bottom to top in his bed, his feet resting against the headboard. His mouth was open and his blond hair stood up in unruly tufts. Annie smiled at Mark. “Which side of the family did he get this from?”

  Mark grinned. “Mine. Maggie used to complain that as soon as we got in bed, I’d put my elbows and feet on her side and kept all the good stuff on my side.”

  Annie laughed. “Some fun you were.”

  His expression turned to mock outrage. “I’ll have you know, Miss-Know-It-All, that I was a lot of fun. Ask Maggie.”

  She snorted. “No thanks.”

  Mark flashed her a smile before leaning over Ryan. “Ryan,” he said, “buddy. It’s time to get up.”

  Ryan grumbled beneath his breath as he rolled over. His arm sprawled out and smacked the bedpost. Mark winced. “He’ll have a bruise for that one.”

  “He can add it to his black eye and that enormous scrape on his shin.”

  Mark ignored her. “Come on, Ryan. Wake up, son.”

  Ryan rubbed a fisted hand in his eyes. “Don’t want to.”

  ‘Too bad,” Mark said. “Mom’ll be up here soon banging on your door.”

  Ryan opened his eyes. The morning light made him squint. He stared at Mark for a few seconds. “Dad?”

  “Were you expecting someone else, maybe?”

  Ryan sat up in bed. “Dad! Where were you last night?”

  Mark glanced briefly at Annie. “I had some stuff I had to do. Did you miss me?”

  Ryan nodded. The cowlick in his hair bobbed back and forth. “I thought you were gone.”

  “I wasn’t gone. I promised I’d tell you if I’m leaving for good.”

  “Do you promise?” Ryan looked at Annie. “You have to make him promise.”

  Ryan clutched his pillow to his chest as he watched her. His Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pajamas were bunched up around his knees. Annie had to swallow a bitter longing to straighten them, to run a comb through his hair, to smooth the sheets and fluff the pillows. She noticed the odd way Mark was looking at her, so she flashed Ryan an overly bright smile. “Of course I promise. Why would we want to go off and leave you anyway?”

  Ryan dropped back against his pillow with a relieved sigh. “I want you to sing to me, Dad.”

  Mark shook his head. “No singing this morning. You’ve got to get ready for school.”

  “Uh-uh.” Ryan shook his head. “Sing first.”

  “Sing first, huh? If I sing, are you going to get moving?”

  “Deal.”

  “What do you want to hear?”

  Ryan seemed to consider his choices for a long minute before looking at Annie. “You pick one, Annie.”

  She looked at Mark in surprise. “Me?”

  “Sure,” Ryan said. “You’re the guest. You pick.”

  “What nice manners,” Mark drawled. “Too bad you can’t remember please and thank-you.”

  Ryan giggled. “Pick one, Annie. He can sing anything you want.”

  Amused, Annie watched Mark’s growing embarrassment. “I had no idea you were such a virtuoso.”

  “I’m not.”

  Ryan’s face scrunched up into a confused knot. “What’s a—a vir . . .”

  “Virtuoso,” Mark helpfully supplied. “It’s a person who knows more about music than they should.”

  Annie laughed. “No it isn’t.” She looked at Ryan. “It’s a person who knows a lot of songs.”

  “That’s Dad.” Ryan stood up and started jumping on his bed. “He knows everything. Even Elvis.�
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  The last was delivered with such awe, Annie was forced to laugh again. “Elvis,” she said, doing her best to sound suitably impressed. “Really?”

  Mark groaned. Ryan ignored him. “Yeah. Even the hard stuff, where you can’t understand the words. Right, Dad?”

  Mark rolled his eyes with a reluctant laugh. “I guess.”

  “I didn’t know you had such a passion for singing,” Annie remarked.

  “Once, a long time ago, I thought I wanted to sing. It didn’t take long to put that out of my mind.”

  “Well,” she said, sitting down on the side of Ryan’s bed, “I think I have a hankering to hear ‘Wake Up, Little Susie.’ It is morning, after all.”

  Ryan clapped his hands and continued bouncing on the bed. “Yeah, Dad. Do ‘Wake Up.’ Do ‘Wake Up.’”

  Mark hesitated only briefly before conceding with a wry smile. “All right, Ry. Put the music on.”

  Scott stopped his search of the hall table, where Maggie was certain she’d left her keys, and looked up at the ceiling as the first bars of “Wake Up Little Susie” wafted down the stairs. Ryan’s voice chimed in on every “oo la la.” “I didn’t know Ryan did a whole selection of oldies.”

  Maggie laughed. “You haven’t lived until you’ve heard ‘Jailhouse Rock.’” She looked over his shoulder into the drawer. “Any luck?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I don’t think they’re here, Maggie. Where did you have them last?”

  “If I knew that, we wouldn’t be looking for them.”

  Scott picked up a catchall basket and began rummaging through the contents. “Did you check your briefcase?”

  “Yes.” She started up the stairs. “I need to start getting Ryan ready for school. Why don’t you try the living room?”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  Maggie paused, her foot on the top stair. “Scott?”

  He looked at her. “Yes?”

  “Thank you.”

  “I haven’t found them yet.”

  Maggie shook her head. “Not for finding the keys. Thank you for understanding. For being you. For everything.”

  He held her gaze a long moment. “We have a lot to talk about, Maggie.”

  “I know. When you get back from Dallas. OK?”

  He nodded. “OK.”

  “You remember Scott Bishop, Carl?” Maggie asked, walking into Carl Fortwell’s office two hours later. After she’d dropped Ryan at school, she and Scott had picked up his plans from his hotel and spent a productive, if tense, morning inspecting the site of the Cape Hope Resort. Scott had given Maggie significant insight into the layout and structural restraints of the property, making her feel more confident than ever that his plans represented the best possible development of Maxwell Wedgins’s investment.

  Scott had seemed detached, distracted, but Maggie had been unwilling to tempt the fates by upsetting the mutual truce between them. “I’m taking Scott to the airport,” she continued by way of explanation to Carl, “and we wanted to stop off and deliver our proposals.”

  “Excellent,” Carl said, rising from behind his massive cherry desk. He circled it and stopped to kiss Maggie’s cheek. “It’s always good to see you.” He extended his hand to Scott. “Bishop. I hope all this shuttling back and forth from Dallas isn’t getting to you. You look a little tired.”

  Maggie wondered if Carl could see her blush. “I’ve got my proposal for you,” she said, handing Carl the folder. “I hope it’s what you were expecting.”

  Carl smiled at her. “I’m sure it is, Maggie.” He indicated the two chairs across from his desk. “Sit down. I’d like to look this over if you don’t mind.”

  She shook her head as she dropped into one of the chairs. “What do you think of this project, Bishop?” Carl asked, flipping through Maggie’s proposal. He leaned back against his desk, still facing them.

  Scott shrugged. “Creatively it’s great. There are no parameters, a designer’s dream. Technically, I’m not sure. I hope the building process will be more centralized once the bid is awarded.”

  Carl set Maggie’s proposal down on his desk before he met Scott’s gaze. “It will be. Max Wedgins is, well, different. He’s different from anyone I’ve ever worked with. He knows what he wants, but likes the power of making all of us guess. He’s eccentric, but levelheaded. A good decision maker, with enough goof-off in him to drive his investors nuts. I think you’re going to like working with him.”

  “Provided that I get the bid,” Scott said.

  Carl nodded. “Provided.”

  “Is there something you’re not telling me?” Scott asked.

  Carl shook his head. “Max is unpredictable even on his best days. He’s playing everything close to his chest. Besides, he talks mostly to Pete. I’ve never even met the guy.”

  A brief picture of Irene Fussman hanging on Pete Sherban’s arm popped into Maggie’s head. She frowned. Scott seemed to be following her train of thought. “How much does he talk to Pete?” Scott asked.

  “I don’t know, twice, maybe three times a week. This is a multibillion-dollar investment. It’s only natural he would.”

  Maggie took a deep breath. “Carl,” she said, “do you know any reason why Pete would have been lunching with Irene Fussman yesterday afternoon?”

  “No. That would put the entire bid process in jeopardy. There are all kinds of government restrictions on how we do these things, you know. It’s not just some haphazard thing.”

  “I know,” Maggie said. “But Scott and I saw Pete and Irene yesterday afternoon at the White Rooster.”

  Carl shook his head. “That can’t be right.”

  Scott leaned forward in his chair. “It is.”

  Carl frowned. “Are you sure it was Pete and Irene? The White Rooster is awfully dark.” He shot Maggie a knowing look. “Kind of a romantic spot for two business associates.”

  “We’re not talking about Maggie and me,” Scott said, his voice sharp.

  Maggie felt her skin blush a heated red. “That’s not what he meant, Scott.”

  Carl slanted Maggie a telling look. “No. I just meant that it might be tough to identify someone in there.”

  “It was definitely Pete and Irene,” Maggie said. “I’m sure of it.”

  Carl exhaled a harsh sigh. “I just can’t believe that. Pete and I have been in business together for thirty years. I just can’t believe he’d jeopardize a deal like this.”

  Maggie fingered the carved arm rest of her chair. “Maybe there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.”

  Scott snorted. “Yeah, sure.”

  Carl steepled his fingers under his chin, tapping them together in thought. “I don’t know. I’ll have to look into this.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d look before Max Wedgins awards the bid,” Scott said. “I know Challow’s got a lot riding on this. So do I. If Pete Sherban is screwing around, no pun intended, I think Wedgins has a right to know.”

  Maggie stood up and extended her hand to Carl. “I’m sure it’s nothing, Carl. If you trust Pete, then there must be a good reason.”

  Carl nodded. “Yeah.”

  Scott frowned. “All the same, you’ll check it out?”

  “I’ll check it out.”

  Mark paced back and forth in the foyer of Ryan’s school. He rubbed at the tense muscles on the back of his neck. Scott’s plane had left at noon, and Annie had returned to Dallas with him. Left alone, Mark’s thoughts had been plagued by unpleasant memories of Pete and Irene, and even worse memories of Scott and Maggie. His stomach was tied up in knots, and his head hurt like hell.

  To make matters worse, he still hadn’t come up with an effective way to communicate what he knew about Pete Sherban and Irene Fussman. There was no way he would tell Ryan, but still, Maggie needed to know. What’s more, Max Wedgins needed to know.

  Mark dropped down on a concrete bench. He buried his head in his hands. Maggie had worked so hard to make it on her own. He knew she was struggling to make
By Design a successful venture, but more than that, he knew she was struggling to be her own person. She had been twenty-one when they’d married. Fresh out of college, Maggie hadn’t been entirely sure what she wanted from life.

  When she’d married him, she’d married his career. Being a military wife was no easy task, and Mark had often thought that as long as the Corps was handing out medals, they ought to give them to people like Maggie. The divorce rate among his fellow Marines was astronomically high, but Maggie had made their marriage work through sheer determination and commitment. In the weeks following his death, Mark had watched as Maggie struggled with the new reality of her life. He had never been more impressed than when she’d bundled Ryan into the car and headed for Massachusetts. That had taken more courage than he’d known she possessed.

  Every time he watched her lay out a design, or make a proposal, or do something truly ingenius with a room, he felt a twinge of regret that her natural talent had been wasted during the years of their marriage. They had never stayed in one place long enough for Maggie to do more than dabble at her craft. Even then, Mark was forced to admit in hindsight, he hadn’t taken her seriously. It hadn’t been until he’d seen her on her own that he’d really recognized what a gift she had. Maggie had a way of making a room into a work of art.

  And for the first time, Mark was beginning to understand that it wasn’t just a hobby for her, or a way to earn a living. For Maggie, it was central to her understanding of herself. If she lost the Cape Hope project, she might be forced to close By Design. If there was one person on the face of the earth whom Mark knew well, it was Maggie. And in the pit of his stomach lurked the knowledge that Maggie would never be able to let go of the past if she didn’t prove to herself that she was ready to face the future.

  The clanging class bell interrupted his thoughts. Mark leaned against the wall as he watched children fill the corridors. He searched the crowd for a glimpse of Ryan. When he saw him, Ryan was edging his way through his classmates. He smiled brightly at Mark, and stopped to adjust the Batman backpack that was slung casually over his shoulder.

  Mark watched his progress through the hallway with something akin to dread. Annie had been right. Maggie and Ryan weren’t the only ones refusing to let go. He’d have to give up a lot to give Maggie and Ryan a chance for a future. He didn’t know if he could make that choice.