First Loves: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance

by Stone, Jean

  Meg grabbed Danny’s arm. “What are you talking about? What about Senator Riley?”

  He brushed her hand from his arm. “Jesus, Meg, take it easy. Didn’t you hear about it? Have you been out of the country all weekend?”

  Meg’s head started to pound. Her senses flew from neutral into overdrive. “Just tell me, Danny.” She tried to sound in control. It wasn’t working.

  The door to room 8 opened. A bailiff stepped out. “There you are, Ms. Cooper,” he said. “The judge is ready for you.”

  Meg snapped her head around. “I’ll be right in.” She turned back to Danny. “Tell me, Danny. Please.”

  Danny shrugged. “Happened Thursday or Friday. Thursday, I guess. Thursday night.”

  “Never mind when. What happened?”

  His wife was driving somewhere at night. In her shiny new XJS. Anyway, some guy had the rotten luck to be coming the other way. He was on his side of the road. So was she. It was a head-on collision.”

  Her heart pounded along with her head.

  “The guy was killed.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

  “Was she hurt?”

  “The senator’s wife?” Danny laughed. “You could say that. She ran up an embankment, hit a tree, and a limb came crashing through the windshield.”

  Meg started to see black.

  “I believe the word is ‘impaled.’ The branch went right through her shoulder. Stuck her to the seat like plaster to a wall.”

  Meg leaned against the wall. “Is she …?” She was afraid of the question, afraid of the answer.

  “Dead? Nah. Not yet. Not the last I heard. She probably would have been except for that one little condition that saves so many lives.”

  Meg scowled.

  “She was drunk. As a skunk.”

  The door opened again. “Ms. Cooper?” The bailiff’s tone was harsh.

  “Yes. Yes. Coming.”

  “I’ll stop back and see if you’re free in time for lunch, right?”

  “Sure, Danny,” she said as she headed numbly into the courtroom. “Sure.”

  She stood at the defense table, her knees weak, her head sick. All she could picture was the way she had tucked the white orchid behind her ear, the way she had waited for Steven. The way she had waited for Steven while he waited in a hospital emergency room, knowing that his wife had just killed a man, wondering if his wife was going to die.

  If she died, our problems would be over. She gripped the edge of the table and squeezed her eyes shut. My God, Meg thought, I can’t believe I would even think such a thing. What’s happening to me?

  The first candidate from the jury panel was seated in the witness box. Meg stared at him—a man perhaps in his early fifties. She had no idea what to ask him. She thought about asking the judge for a continuance, but that was hardly warranted, especially when she’d requested as early a date as possible.

  Arnold Banks sat at her right, looking smug. Meg wished she had warned him to change his expression. The last thing the judge would want to see was the defendant looking as though he’d already won.

  She envisioned the expression Candace Riley must have worn, while stuck to the seat like plaster to a wall, the limb of a tree going in one side, out the other. Her stomach turned. She quickly put a hand to her mouth.

  “Ms. Cooper? We’re waiting.” The judge was in a snarly mood this morning.

  She shuffled through her papers, trying to find some notes. Any notes. Something to buy her some time until she could collect her thoughts. Her mind raced.

  She coughed a little and looked at the potential juror. “Mr.…” Her mind went blank.

  The man leaned into the microphone. “Donaldson,” he said “Harry Donaldson.”

  Meg coughed again. The way Steven always did. A tremor ran from her heart to her head. She tried to catch her breath. Suddenly a picture of Avery sprung to her mind. If he were looking down on her now, he would be frowning. A client sat next to her. He deserved her best effort. She took a deep breath and spoke quickly.

  “Yes. Mr. Donaldson. Tell me, Mr. Donaldson. Are your parents still living?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Oh,” Meg said. She looked down at her notes, then back to the witness box. “I’m sorry to hear that. How old were they when they died?”

  “My father was killed in World War Two. I never knew him. My mother last year, God rest her soul. She was seventy-eight.”

  “How did your mother die?”

  Donaldson shrugged. “Heart failure. She was in a nursing home in upstate. Linda and I—Linda’s my wife—we couldn’t have her come live with us. We only have three bedrooms—”

  “Thank you, Mr. Donaldson,” Meg interrupted. “Your Honor, the defense rejects this candidate.” She slumped into her chair. She was limp, drained, as though she had just tried the entire case. And lost.

  While the judge called for the next person from the pool, Arnold Banks jabbed Meg with his elbow. “Wake up, honey,” he whispered hoarsely. “You almost blew it.” Meg turned away.

  Next came a woman. Fortyish. Well dressed. Well preserved. Meg stared at her, wondering if Candace Riley looked anything like this.

  She blinked.

  “Ms. Cooper?” the judge demanded.

  Meg glanced at him. For a moment she again forgot why she was there, what she was supposed to do. She looked back at the woman. The woman leaned to one side.

  She was drunk. As a skunk. Maybe Candace had found out where Steven was going. Maybe she’d found out about them. Maybe this was all Meg’s fault.

  “Ms. Cooper. Please,” the judge said sternly.

  Beside her Arnold Banks sighed loudly.

  Meg stood. Then, mechanically, she began to ask questions, all too aware that she was barely listening to the answers. In a dark corner of her mind Meg was, instead, trying to determine if Steven’s compassion, guilt, or politics would stop him from divorcing Candace if she went to jail. If she survived.

  One by one jury candidates filed into the courtroom, answered questions, were accepted or dismissed. By noon only two jurors had been selected. The judge called for a lunch recess. As Meg stood to leave, Arnold Banks grabbed her arm. “You’d better be sharper this afternoon, honey,” he warned. “We both have a lot riding on this, right?”

  Meg shook off his hand. “Go to hell,” she said, and stalked from the courtroom, not knowing if she or Banks had been more stunned by her answer.

  Danny was waiting in the hall.

  “How’d it go, counselor?”

  Meg waved him off. “Let’s not talk about it, okay?”

  “No problem. As long as we’re still on for lunch.”

  She pushed a lock of hair from her face. God, she must really be a mess today. “I’m not hungry, Danny.”

  He shook his head. “Tough. You’re going to lunch with me.”

  “I should go to the office. I haven’t been in since Thursday.” I should muster up my courage and see if Steven has called, she wanted to add. But now she was more afraid than before that he hadn’t.

  “You really have been out of the country, then.”

  She looked at him. “Danny …”

  “None of my business, okay? But I’m taking you to lunch. Like I said this morning, you look like shit.”

  They went to Schneider’s Deli on East Fifty-third, Danny’s favorite downtown haunt. Meg got a bagel with jelly. Danny ordered a Reuben with the works.

  The restaurant was crowded and noisy, but they found a small table in the rear. He bit into his sandwich with gusto. “Tell me what happened,” he said.

  She couldn’t tell him. She couldn’t tell him about Bermuda, about Steven. She just couldn’t. She picked up half her bagel, then set it down, untouched. “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  “Come on, Meg. How bad could it be? It was only jury selection.”

  Oh. He was referring to court. He wasn’t referring to Steven.

  She picked at her bagel again. “I had a bad m
orning,” she said. “It happens to everyone. Even on the best of days.” She toyed with her napkin but felt Danny’s eyes bore into her.

  “My experience tells me that this isn’t exactly one of your best days.”

  She picked up her bagel again. “I couldn’t concentrate. That’s all.”

  He chewed for a while, then took a long drink of iced tea. “Talk to me, Meg.”

  “I can’t, Danny.” She was too confused. She was too tired. And she couldn’t erase the image from her mind of Candace Riley stuck to her seat, “like plaster to a wall.”

  “Hey,” Danny said, so suddenly that she jumped. “I have good news. It’s about your friend Alissa. That guy she’s been looking for? I found him. He lives in Los Angeles.”

  A shock of pain tore through her heart and raced through her body. The room started spinning. The voices around her echoed against one another; the smells of pastrami and garlic and pickled cabbage made her reel. Meg jumped up and bolted, banging into other tables, chairs, people, as she escaped to the front door. Once on the street, she collapsed against the brick building, shaking, panting, sobbing.

  “Jesus, Meg. What’s wrong?” It was Danny. He put his arm around her. He pulled her close to him. She wept into his chest.

  The next thing she knew, he was helping her into a cab. He told the driver her home address.

  “I have to be back in court,” she protested.

  “I’ll go,” Danny said. “I’ll tell the judge you collapsed. But please, Meg. Talk to me.”

  In the back of the cab she stared at the plastic divider that separated them from the driver. It was scratched and cloudy. And it was closed. And so she told him. She told Danny about the scheme they had planned at the spa—she, Alissa, and their other friend, Zoe. Then she told him about looking for her “lost love,” about finding him, meeting him again, after all those years. She quietly told him he was Senator Steven Riley. She did not tell him about the abortion.

  “Jesus,” was all Danny managed to say.

  And then she told him about the weekend. Bermuda. How Steven had never arrived.

  “Jesus,” he said again.

  “What do I do now, Danny?”

  “Jesus,” he said. “I’m afraid you’re the only one who can answer that, babe.”

  Meg covered her eyes with her arm. She was weary. So very weary.

  “Do you want me to check on his wife?” he asked. “I could contact the hospital.…”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t want to know. I have to believe that sooner or later Steven will get in touch with me.”

  Danny said nothing.

  Meg closed her eyes and drifted into a semisleep. A sleep of the unsettled, the pain riddled.

  “You were really in love with the guy, weren’t you?”

  She pulled herself from her dreamlike state. “Yes.”

  “Are you still?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “That would answer a lot of questions,” Danny said. “About you. About why you’ve never stayed with any one man …”

  She turned sideways and looked at him. “Please, Danny, you must promise me one thing.”

  “Sure, babe. Anything.”

  “You must promise never to tell anyone about this. No one. Not now. Not ever.”

  “Does your friend Alissa know?”

  “Oh, God, Danny, No. They know there’s someone—they don’t know who. Please, Danny. Promise me.”

  He held up two fingers. “Scout’s honor,” he said. “But I am going to do one thing.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to find out what hospital his wife is in, and I’m going to check it out for myself. That way, if and when you want to know, I can tell you myself. Unless, of course, you read it in the papers first.”

  “I try not to read the newspaper.”

  The cab pulled up at Meg’s front door.

  “I’ll go plead to the judge,” Danny said. “Then I’ll be back later. With dinner.”

  “You’re a pal, Danny,” she said, and meant it.

  He winked as she got out. And as she slowly walked up the stairs of her lonely brownstone, Meg wondered why Danny had not yet found the right woman—one who was deserving of his kindness, open to his love.

  13

  She hadn’t ordered a glass of chardonnay. She’d ordered a bottle. Alissa had escaped to the same dark bar in the Underground where she’d met with Danny. But that had been over a week ago, and there had been no word from him since. Nor had there been word from Betty Wentworth or Sue Ellen Jamison. But Alissa was holding her ground. The problem was, so were they. She wondered who would be the first to cry uncle.

  At least she had Jay to think about, and the dim hope that life may be worth living after all. Unless, of course, Danny Gordon took much longer, in which case she would probably go out of her mind first.

  Somewhere between the third and fourth glass of wine, Alissa started talking to a young guy on the next stool. Thirty, maybe. Tall, long-haired, skinny-assed in torn jeans. She didn’t catch his name. Somewhere between the fourth glass and the end of the bottle, she agreed to accompany him to his loft.

  It seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Half an hour later Alissa lay on the rumpled sheets, aware by the damp ooze from her crotch that they had had sex, though she hardly remembered the act. The mattress was a thin futon, and she could feel the slats of the frame push at her spine. There was a musky odor in the room. Maybe it was the brick walls, maybe it was the old paint cans strewn in the corner, maybe it was the dirty sheets.

  “Wine?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Alissa replied, and took a thick-rimmed glass from his hand. He unscrewed the cap from a nondescript bottle and poured. Alissa put it to her lips and immediately wished she hadn’t. The wine was bitter, cheap. Her esophagus burned, her stomach turned. She set the glass on the floor. He crawled back into bed and stretched out beside her.

  She lit a cigarette and looked around the room. It wasn’t the first time she’d been in bed in an artist’s studio, but the others had been real artists, whose works sported six-figure price tags and were shown in the finest galleries all over the world.

  He painted sailboats and sunsets and sold his wares from a cart in the mall of the Underground. She wondered if he’d been among the group who raised money for the homeless.

  He rolled over and encircled her waist with his arm. She threaded her fingers through his large, overpowering ones. Such strong, confident fingers. But even in the dim light Alissa cold see paint residue beneath the nails.

  “You’re quite a lady, you know that?” he asked.

  “Mmm,” she replied.

  He moved his hand between her legs and rested it there. Then he began to snore.

  Alissa thought about leaving. But to do what? Go home? She had thought she needed a change. She’d read about women reaching their forties and suddenly coming out of their shell, taking charge. But Alissa had spent the last twenty-plus years taking charge. Is this what was left? Meaningless sex and one-night stands? And galas that no one wanted you to be part of?

  Soon things would get even worse. No matter how hard Alissa tried to talk her out of it, Michele was insistent on getting married, complete with a huge wedding, southern-belle style. It was not going to be easy to explain that there could be no such wedding, that Alissa could no longer bring herself to pretend that she and Robert were the happy couple, the toast of Atlanta, or that every time she had to look at him now, all she could see was his thin white ass, pumping up and down on top of, inside of, that man. No, there couldn’t be a huge wedding.

  But it would have been magnificent. There would have been fountains on every table, champagne—probably, she thought with a wince, Cristal champagne—a flock of white doves to sail over the bride and groom when they were introduced at the reception. It would have been a fairy-tale wedding, certain to be covered by Town & Country. It would have been magnificent if Robert hadn’t fucked everything up.
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  Alissa took a deep drag on her cigarette. She wished she had another glass of wine. Real wine.

  She closed her eyes and tried to deny the small lump in her throat, the welling need to cry. Her family was interested only in themselves. Michele. Robert. Natalie. Selfish, selfish, selfish. Didn’t they care about her life, about her feelings? The answer, she knew, was no. They didn’t care, any more than the women of the WFFA cared.

  The snoring beside Alissa stopped. His hand began to move. As though unconnected to her brain, unmindful of her thoughts, her legs parted. She raised her arm and covered her eyes. He moved on top of her, into her. She arched her hips in response, ready to perform again—the way she had performed all her life—ready to do what was expected of her.

  She tuned out his gasps; she denied his hot breath on her neck. She thought about Robert. She thought of how she had been doing exactly what he expected of her. She had been handling the problems with him in her usual manner: caustic behind the scenes, smiling and steady among their friends.

  She knew that Michele expected the same pattern from her mother, that she expected Alissa would bitch about the wedding, then turn it into the most glamorous affair that had ever been witnessed east of the Mississippi. She knew that the women of the WFFA would expect her to withdraw her resignation, once she was out of her “mood.”

  She also knew that Natalie expected Alissa to ignore her antics.

  They expected her to do these things, because she always had. She had been, if nothing else, predictable. It was, after all, the way she’d been trained by her aunt and uncle: trained to perform, trained to live on the surface and to disavow those time-wasting fantasies of things like feelings and love.

  Even when she’d run away to San Francisco with Jay, Alissa had done what was expected of her. She’d come home.

  An animal moan came from the man on top of her. He collapsed against her chest. His wet hair clung to her face.

  “God, you’re beautiful,” he groaned.

  Alissa started to cry.

  She padded down the hall toward her room, enveloped with the disgust of having been used, of having let herself be used. Alissa clutched her stomach as she walked, trying to quiet the pain deep within.