“You mean he doesn’t challenge you,” Tess said.
“Of course he does. We challenge each other. That’s why we make such a good team. We both work hard, we’re both career oriented. We don’t have to make excuses to each other if one of us is stressed out or working late.”
“In other words, neither one of you has to carve out time for a relationship. He’s convenient.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Meg asked. “Why should I sacrifice my job or compromise who I am to be with someone?”
“You shouldn’t,” Tess said. “Unless . . .”
“Unless what?” Meg demanded.
“Unless compromising who you think you are actually helps you become the person you were meant to be.”
Thirteen
“YOU,” MEG SAID when she opened the back door the next morning.
Sam stood in the yellow glow of the porch light in jeans and a blue work shirt with the sleeves pushed back. For one second, before her brain engaged and started flashing little red warning signs, her heart skipped. You. Her eyes drank him in, rangy and relaxed and looking way better than anybody had a right to at five twenty-seven in the morning.
Automatically, her hand went to her diamond studs, her Pucci scarf, the line of her skirt, checking, smoothing, taking silent, reassuring inventory. She looked fine, all traces of nerves and her sleepless night carefully concealed with makeup and the right clothes.
Sam leveled that gotta-love-me Grady grin at her, all teeth and charm. “Me,” he confirmed. “Heard you needed a lift.”
“But . . . But . . .” She was sputtering. She pressed her lips together. She wouldn’t have such a hard time controlling her emotional response to Sam if she didn’t find him so physically attractive. Or maybe she wouldn’t find him so attractive physically if they didn’t have this emotional history. Either way was no excuse for letting him tie her tongue into knots. “Matt said he would drive me to pick up my rental car this morning.”
“No, Matt said he’d take care of it. And he did.”
“By asking you.” She kept her voice down, aware of her parents still asleep in the master suite off the kitchen.
“I asked him, but yeah. Basically.” He reached for Meg’s red Tumi carry-on. “We should roll. Is this all you’ve got?”
She resented the casual way he took charge of her schedule and her luggage, friendly, insistent, too used to getting his own way. But what good would it do to object? She needed her car. He was doing her a favor. She could be civil in return. “Thank you. Do you want some coffee before we go?”
“That would be great.”
She had already brewed a pot, figuring she would need the caffeine for the long drive to Raleigh. Now she poured coffee into two of the paper travel cups stocked by the inn and offered him one. “Black, one sugar.”
Their eyes met. Her stomach did a slow roll as he took the cup, his long fingers brushing hers. “Thanks.”
She cleared her throat and grabbed her own cup, her bag, her trench, reaching desperately for a neutral topic of conversation. “When did you see Matt?”
“Yesterday.” Sam opened the kitchen door and gestured for her to precede him onto the porch. She locked up and then followed him down the flagstone walk, hurrying to keep pace with his long-limbed, confident stride.
He opened her door, always the gentleman. “I wanted to get his opinion on who to approach about forming a watermen’s association.” He held her coffee as she settled into her seat, conscious of his eyes on her legs, his warmth, temptingly close. “And I wanted the chance to see you before you go.”
She swallowed, wrapping her hands around her cup as he stowed her rollaway in back. She had too little sleep, too much at stake, to deal with him right now. When he slid in beside her, she said, “Look, I appreciate you taking me to pick up my car. But frankly, I said everything I had to say the other night. I have a really long, full day today. I don’t need the distraction.”
“You don’t have to say anything. Just listen.”
“Sam . . .”
“Meggie, let me say this. I kept quiet before. We never talked, I never told you how I felt.” He met her gaze, his face set in the glow of the dashboard. “I won’t make that mistake again.”
Her heart hammered. The conversation was going places she had left behind eighteen years ago. She was afraid to go back, reluctant to revisit the girl she’d been back then.
The girl who had loved Sam.
Or been infatuated with him anyway.
“Sam, we don’t need to have this discussion. We were kids.”
“Yeah, that’s what I told myself back then,” he said. “I thought if I pretended hard enough, if I ignored what happened long enough, it would be like it never happened.”
She ignored the pang his words caused. “It was ages ago. Why drag up the past?”
“Because it’s not past. We can’t go forward until we go back. I hurt you, Meggie, and I’m sorry.”
His words touched a long-healed scar, soothed an almost forgotten ache. But she had spent too many tears on Sam when she was sixteen. She wasn’t wasting any more regrets on something that had happened back in high school. “You don’t have to apologize because you didn’t like me, Sam. It’s okay.”
He scowled in obvious frustration. “I did like you. That was the damn problem. I liked you all too much. You meant . . . God, your family meant everything to me. And because I was drunk, because you were . . .”
“Available,” she said dryly.
He turned his head. Met her eyes. “Irresistible.”
Oh, God. Her body flushed. She could feel herself tightening, softening, inside.
“I fucked up,” he continued.
She’d blamed him then. She was older now. Old enough to understand and forgive. “We both did. Face it, Sam, I threw myself at you.”
His smile gleamed. “And I was grateful. But I put everything that mattered at risk, your parents’ trust, Matt’s friendship. You. I didn’t know how to face them afterward. I didn’t have the balls to face you. Christ, you were still in high school.”
“And you were a freshman in college. Only a couple years older than Josh.” Wow, she was old. And they had both been so very young. “Neither one of us knew what we were doing. Us, together? It was a stupid mistake.”
“Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it didn’t have to be.” His voice was low, urgent. It was absurd how much she loved his voice, the baritone drawl as smooth and seductive as Irish coffee with whipped cream. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you, Meggie. About us. I thought, maybe when I came home for the summer, I’d give you a call. Or I’d come over and you’d, you know, just be there.”
She remembered that summer, the summer before her senior year. She’d been working two jobs, saving every dime for college, tackling the AP English reading list, determined to apply early decision to Harvard and UNC. Not Duke. She wouldn’t have followed Sam to Duke if they’d offered her a full scholarship and courtside seats to every basketball game. What would it have meant, what would she have done, if Sam had come home, if he’d called her then?
“Why didn’t you?” she whispered.
“Matt called me.”
Her head whipped around. “Oh, God. What did he say?”
“He told me,” Sam said with grim deliberation, “that Kimberly was pregnant. Scared the hell out of me. What if it had been me? What if it had been you?”
“But . . . You used a condom.” Something else she hadn’t fully appreciated at the time.
“So did Matt. Most of the time anyway. I watched him trying to hold it all together after that. I saw what he gave up. I wasn’t ready for that. I wasn’t ready for you.” Another of those sideways looks, dark and intent. “Then.”
Her mouth was dry. She sipped her cooling coffee, welcoming the jolt of reality, the acrid flavor. “Don’t tell me you’ve been nursing a crush on me for eighteen years. Because that’s a load of crap.”
He laughed. “You know that�
��s the guy fantasy, right? The one that got away. Most times the reality doesn’t come close. You see her again, ten, twenty years later, and you think, Thank God. Dodged that bullet. But when I heard you were coming back to the island, I wanted to see you again. I wanted to find out if you were still the girl I remembered.”
“So, now you know. I can’t be that girl anymore, Sam. I’m grown up. I have places to go, things to do. I have a life.”
“You always did. That’s part of what attracted me. And intimidated me.”
She snorted. “Please. You were never intimidated.”
“Was, too. Why do you think I didn’t make the first move?”
It was ridiculous how much she wanted to believe him. “Well, it doesn’t make any difference now.”
“It makes all the difference. The timing was wrong for us. But we . . .” He reached out, taking her hand for emphasis. “We were right.”
She looked at his hand covering hers on her lap and felt her breath go. “The timing isn’t any better now.”
“Because of the interview.”
She was grateful for his understanding. This opportunity was important to her. But he still didn’t get it. “Because I’m in a relationship.”
“So end it.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
She glared at him. “You don’t just break off a six-year relationship without talking things over. At least, I don’t. I have too much respect for Derek, too much respect for myself, to treat him that way.”
“What about the way he treats you?”
“There’s nothing wrong with the way Derek treats me. Maybe things haven’t been perfect lately, but—”
“Does he make you happy?”
She stared at him, stricken. “That’s a stupid question.”
“So, no,” Sam said.
A sound, half laugh, half groan, broke from her throat. “I cannot believe we are having this discussion on my way to the airport.”
His gaze fixed on her face before he nodded slowly. “Bad timing.”
His words ran through her head. The timing was wrong for us. But we . . .we were right.
Her breath backed up in her lungs. “The worst.”
She saw his white grin flash, reflected in the dark windshield. “Later for us, then.”
Well, that was easy, she thought. She breathed out, torn between relief and regret that he was letting it go. Letting her go.
Again.
* * *
TWELVE HOURS LATER, Meg emerged from the subway into the bustle of rush hour, barely refraining from breaking into a victory boogie right there on the sidewalk.
Her firing had shaken her confidence more than she wanted to admit. All her experience was in financial services, almost all of it on the corporate side. Her long professional friendship with Bruce didn’t mean that his partners would like her. She had been concerned about how she would be perceived, how she would fit in.
Meg grinned like a fool as her red rollaway bumped over the curb. She had nailed the meetings with the PR management team and the author client. Meg had focused on the need for niche marketing, for appealing to a new audience of readers who might not otherwise think of picking up the book. Over lunch, they’d discussed angles and tangible take-aways, with the result that the writer was now sharpening her talking points . . . and Meg had a job.
She was back, baby.
She was back. The smell of sweat, cement, sewers, and dying leaves rose from the gritty sidewalk. Energy swirled from the street. Meg pressed forward against the blinking light, part of a stream of swarming schoolchildren, office workers rushing home, joggers and pedestrians racing to get in their daily allotment of exercise. She’d always enjoyed the walk home along the railings of Central Park, the elegant architecture on one side of the street, the bright pushcarts and horse-drawn carriages on the other. The city was noisier, dirtier, more frenzied than she remembered, even in the shadow of the fading trees. Taxis blared. Busses billowed exhaust. Snatches of conversation punctuated the air.
“. . . had a urinary tract infection . . .”
“Your face is ridiculous.”
“. . . hammer out a restructuring plan.”
“So I told her . . .”
“Don’t lick your brother.”
The rollaway wheels rattled on pavement. The tall limestone façade of Meg’s building rose like a refuge across the street, the green awning extending a welcome. The doorman, Luis, was the first person to make eye contact with her in blocks.
A smile broke his broad face. “Miss Fletcher. It’s good to have you back.”
“Thanks, Luis.” She smiled as he opened the door for her, his jacket parting over his barrel-like torso. “Anything exciting happen while I was away?”
“We’ve been very quiet.” Smoothly, Luis relieved her of the rollaway and pressed the button for the elevator. “Except for a little visit from Mr. Chapman’s sister.”
Sister?
Meg stopped, grasping the handle of her suitcase. “Derek doesn’t have a sister.”
Luis’s face assumed the impervious stone stare common to Aztec gods and New York doormen. “I must have been mistaken,” he said.
The elevator dinged. The doors slid open.
“You have a nice evening, Miss Fletcher,” Luis said.
“You, too,” she said and wondered why his good wishes didn’t produce a greater sense of anticipation.
She expected to feel better—she expected to feel more—as she unlocked the door to the condo. Relief. Welcome. Homecoming. The mushroom carpet was spotless, the granite and wood surfaces gleamed, but the air smelled faintly stale as if housekeeping hadn’t been by in days. Derek must have let things slide in her absence. Well, he was working hard, she thought, struggling to be fair. He was barely home enough to mess the place up anyway. She wasn’t expecting to see him tonight until seven at least.
Leaving her bags at the door, she slipped out of her shoes and padded to the kitchen. A glass of wine would help her feel at home. She smiled as she tugged open the refrigerator. And didn’t she deserve to toast her own success?
She reached for the open bottle in the fridge. Paused and frowned at the label. White Zin? Poor Derek. His standards really had slipped while she was out of town. Shrugging, she poured herself a glass. When he got home, they would go out to celebrate. Maybe she would order champagne.
The thought made her oddly uncomfortable. She needed more than wine. She needed . . .
Her phone chirped from her purse by the door, signaling a new text message. She sipped the wine—awful—and checked the display.
No salutation. Just an unfamiliar number with a North Carolina area code on the caller ID and below that, Thinking of you. Sure you did great. Talk to you when you get back.
Sam.
Heat sizzled in the pit of her stomach like the cascading shoots of a Fourth of July sparkler. Her fingers itched for the Connect button. She curled them tightly around her wineglass. She couldn’t call. It wouldn’t be fair. Not to Sam and not to Derek. She couldn’t hear Sam’s voice, couldn’t confide her hopes and plans, couldn’t hear the details of his day and share the excitement of hers, and then throw herself in Derek’s arms when he walked in the door.
Maybe that was what Sam was counting on, the rat.
Restless, she wandered back into the living room. Later for us, then. Actually, he had demonstrated a certain consideration, she acknowledged. He hadn’t called in the middle of her day. He hadn’t put any pressure on her to respond in any way.
Thinking of you.
She took another unsatisfactory gulp of wine. Sneaky bastard.
As she set the wineglass on an end table, she heard a key in the lock.
She turned, a flush of wine or guilt climbing her cheeks. “You’re here early.”
Derek came forward, smiling. “I wanted to welcome you home.”
He looked the same, blond and well tailored. He smelled the same, of starch and colo
gne. He moved in to kiss her, the way he had a thousand times, the standard punctuation at the end of the day or the beginning of sex. But instead of leaning into him, she flinched. It felt weird. Wrong on some basic, instinctive, molecular level, like French-kissing her brother or swallowing a bug.
Derek didn’t notice her involuntary recoil. Or if he did, it didn’t stop him. Meg forced herself to stand still, ignoring the aversion tightening her chest like panic as his moist, warm mouth covered hers. But when he pulled her closer, stabbing at her lips with his tongue, she turned her head.
He noticed that. He raised his head, lifting an eyebrow. “What’s up?”
They had been together six years. How could she explain her prickling repugnance now?
She stepped back, clearing her throat. “Nothing. I . . . It’s been a long day.”
“How did the interview go?”
She felt a spasm of irritation. “My flight was fine. My mom is doing much better. Thanks for asking.”
His well-bred face shuttered. “I was only trying to express some interest in the purpose of your trip.”
She flushed. “Sorry.” She regrouped. “I met all the partners. And I really liked the client. I’ve never done book promotion, but—”
“Marketing’s marketing, right?” Derek interrupted.
“Well,” Meg said cautiously, “in terms of identifying a target audience . . .”
He crossed to the dry bar. “Did they offer you a contract?”
She smothered a spark of resentment. It was natural for Derek to focus on the bottom line. He was in finance. “Yes. Yes, they did. I won’t be making what I did at Franklin, obviously, but I’m excited about—”
“I’m not surprised. Bruce always was a fan of yours.” Derek poured himself a Scotch. Laphroaig, two fingers.
“I like him, too,” Meg said. “But I wouldn’t have gotten the job if I hadn’t demonstrated I could do it.”
Derek looked surprised. “I wasn’t questioning your competence, Meg.”
“Sorry,” she muttered. Even to her own ears, she sounded testy.
“In fact, several people lately have pointed out what a good job you did for us at Franklin.”
Dare Island [2] Carolina Girl Page 17