by Tory Cates
“As you can see,” Archer said, taking the pitcher and setting it down on a kitchen counter, “I’m not a serious contender for Better Homes and Gardens.”
“Which is exactly why I like it so much,” Meredith replied without hesitation.
“Now, let’s see. Theresa said she’d leave something edible for us in the stove.” He pulled on an oven mitt and stuck his hand into the oven, where a cheesy casserole bubbled. “We’re in luck,” he exulted. “Theresa makes the world’s best chicken enchiladas. Stand back.” He hauled the steaming dish from the oven, then retrieved a crisp salad from the refrigerator. Like everything else about Archer Hanson, the meal was simple, unpretentious, and exactly what Meredith yearned for. They took their plates to the dining room table, which had been set with silverware that gleamed in candlelight. At the center of the table was a bunch of garden flowers—purple asters and chrysanthemums.
“On top of all her other talents, Theresa arranges flowers,” Meredith joked.
“Actually, that was my little accomplishment,” Archer confessed.
The vision of this nationally renowned entrepreneur, who had millions of dollars riding on his every decision, picking flowers for a centerpiece struck Meredith as unbearably poignant.
“I was going to claim the enchiladas too, but . . .” Here his voice lowered and the teasing impishness vanished from his eyes. “I thought you would want to know me as I really am. Just as I want to know you.”
Meredith shied away from Archer’s intense stare. She felt as if he could look into her. It was clear he already suspected that she was hiding things about herself from him.
Her discomfort confirmed Archer’s suspicions, suspicions he had wanted erased, not borne out. He quickly changed the subject. “Where are all these tough questions you promised me?” he asked, pretending that he hadn’t noticed her uneasiness, that it hadn’t upset him.
Meredith put aside her fork and fumbled in her bag for the miniature recorder she always took with her on assignments. The enchiladas, so appetizing a minute before, now held no appeal. She prayed that her appetite had been stolen by nervousness, that being with Archer hadn’t triggered the feelings of inadequacy that had started it all before. Started the nightmare phase of her life she wanted to forget and for Archer to never know about.
“Let me check out the basics,” Meredith said, controlling the quavery note that unsteadied her voice. She drew a notebook out of her purse. “Your name is Archer L. Hanson. Correct?”
“Correct, indeed. You are a penetrating interviewer.”
“They’ll get tougher, don’t worry. What does the L stand for?”
“I was afraid you’d ask. Here’s your first scoop. I can’t think of another living soul I’ve ever revealed this to, but it stands for Little.”
“Little?”
“Little,” Archer confirmed with a nod. “As in Little Hanson, me, and Big Hanson, my father. Fortunately, it never caught on.”
Meredith envied his ease in accepting his father’s foibles, even one as quirky as intimating his own son was merely a miniature version of himself. She quickly ran over the rest of the background information she’d accumulated, making notes where Archer elaborated and correcting previous reporters’ mistakes. Then she switched on her recorder and dived in.
“I imagine that your father helped you get your start,” she said. “Is that what you attribute your early success to?”
Unexpectedly, Archer’s eyes flared hot as the blue base of a gas flame. It reminded Meredith that behind the easygoing joviality she had been enjoying was a hard-driving man of unequaled intensity.
“You mean, did my father bankroll me and cushion all my mistakes? Did he pave the way for me with cash and connections?” Archer’s anger was raw and he didn’t bother to disguise it. “The answer to your question is no, though it would shock anyone who knows that my last name is Hanson. Yes, my father was rich. He was powerful. But he did it all himself. He was one of eleven children in a family of sharecroppers. My father grew up dirt poor and uneducated in a backwater town in Mississippi. The only things life ever handed people like him free, he used to tell me, were hookworms and rickets.”
The crimson flush of color receded from Archer’s high, wide cheeks. He paused a minute, then went on. “I’ll tell you something, Meredith, but it’s only for you. I don’t ever want it repeated. Do you understand?”
Meredith nodded, feeling as if her recorder were an intruder that she no longer even wanted. She switched it off. Something far more important than any magazine interview was happening.
“I didn’t always love my father. A lot of the time I didn’t even like him. Sometimes I hated him.” The words came out with a deceptive ease. “He made my life too hard in too many unnecessary ways. But I always respected him. He was afraid that if I were raised as a rich man’s son, I’d never make anything of myself. So he created a kind of artificial poverty for me to grow up in. It seems almost funny now.”
He smiled briefly, then added in a tight voice, “Almost. Because he only had one pair a year, I only had one pair of shoes a year. I collected empty bottles for spending money. My room was unheated in the winter and uncooled in the summer.” A dry laugh escaped Archer’s throat. “I think if he could have managed it, old Gunther would have seen to it that I had to walk six miles to school every day, just like he did.”
Meredith longed to put her arms around Archer, to hold him and soothe away all the ancient hurts. The hurts that never really go away no matter how old any of us gets. She felt honored in a way she barely understood that Archer was telling her this painful tale.
“Anyway,” he continued with a forced briskness, “the point of all this is not to make my father out like some kind of ‘Daddy Dearest,’ but to correct this assumption that you and the rest of the world have made about my backing. No, Gunther never gave me a dime. But”—Archer smiled—“the banks believed he had and I used that belief to establish a line of credit far in excess of anything I deserved. That’s how I managed to get my start. I invested every cent I could borrow in soybean futures at just the right time. They paid off and pretty soon I had something to back up the credit I’d finagled. Go ahead and switch your recorder back on.”
Meredith complied with Archer’s order. He leaned far back in his chair and looked at the ceiling as if a film of his life were being shown there. It was clear that he was not a man given to excessive rumination. He’d been so busy living his life and building his fortune that it took several moments for the details of how he’d accomplished so much in so few years to come back to him.
“Once I’d built up some capital, I looked around for a little business to invest in. Of course, raised as I was, oil was the first thing to pop into my mind. I only had to remind myself of what a long shot wildcatting was, though, for that notion to pop back out. You need more money and more luck to make it as a wildcatter than I had to spare back then. But just as drilling for oil is unreliable, drilling equipment breakdowns are reliable. You never know when you’ll hit, but you always know there’ll be mechanical problems before you do. So I opened an equipment servicing company.” Archer stopped and smiled at the memories of those lean years.
“We had to scramble. I mean every day of the week. I don’t think there was any time there for about five years that I didn’t have grease under my fingernails.” Archer paused to glance down at his large, strong hands with their nails, squared-off and clean now. Meredith saw them for what they were, callused, not as she’d first suspected by the rigors of sailing and tennis, but by backbreaking labor.
Archer continued. “But we had business from the moment we opened. Invariably, some small-time operator would go belly-up before he could claim the equipment we’d repaired for him. Pretty soon, we had quite a backlog of unclaimed equipment. I added some new stuff and diversified into leasing. That was when I cleaned the grime off and went into management. We had contracts all over the country. Both service and leasing. Then the Saudis starte
d inviting us over to help them out. It wasn’t too long before I was spending most of my time in Europe and the Middle East consulting and negotiating one contract or another.”
“You make it sound so simple,” Meredith interjected.
“Do I?” Archer said, quirking an eyebrow. “I loved it, I’ll admit that. It was challenging, hard, frustrating, heartbreaking at times, but I loved building something that was my own. For me it was a gigantic game. All money has ever been to me is just a way to keep score. I honestly believe that if kumquats were the agreed-upon medium of exchange, I’d be just as happy to have a huge pile of kumquats rotting in my backyard.”
Meredith laughed.
“You don’t believe me?”
“I do, that’s what’s so funny.”
“How,” Archer asked, “with me doing all the talking and you just sitting there listening, have I managed to finish my dinner and you haven’t touched yours?”
“Just spellbound, I guess.” Meredith dug into the enchiladas with what she hoped would appear to be an unrestrained heartiness. But her stomach had tightened into a hard ball that repelled food. Still, she made herself eat several bites. She didn’t want to leave any clues, clues that might betray her to Archer.
“And now I have a question to ask you.”
Meredith’s heart stopped, but she smiled and answered, “Turnabout is fair play. Ask away.”
Archer’s hand closed the distance between them. A finger, roughened by work, but still long and graceful, stroked the back of her hand. “Where did you get skin like this? I thought it went out with parasols and whalebone corsets.”
“I always hated it when I was growing up. Everyone else was outside tanning their skin to the color of shoe leather and I couldn’t stick my nose outdoors without it blistering.”
“You must have been an adorable little girl.”
“Actually I was . . .” Meredith stopped. She’d been just about to tell him that she’d been chubby as a child, just like she was now. But she knew he’d only protest just like everyone else always did. Even she occasionally protested at the times when she looked in the mirror and saw the slender young woman she actually was. But deep in her heart, she couldn’t root out that image of herself as a plump girl destined to be a fat woman. She even knew her self-image was irrational, but that didn’t make it go away. “. . . pretty goofy-looking,” Meredith finished.
“I don’t believe that,” Archer countered, his hand covering hers.
A flash of heat swept Meredith. She had been both dreading and dreaming of this moment. Two powerful instincts tugged at her. One was to open her hand, her self, to Archer. The other was to run, to hide herself from him.
“Meredith, I tried to tell you today on the phone what last night meant to me. It was something unique in my experience. I’ve never felt for any woman what I felt for you. Never felt so out of control. Wanted someone as much as I did you.”
The intensity of his searching look seared Meredith. She wanted to both escape his scrutiny and to surrender to it, let herself burn forever in its intensity. Archer’s hand closed over hers in an anguished spasm as if so frustrated by the feebleness of his words that he had to reinforce them with his own strength.
“But it didn’t stop after I had you. I didn’t think it could be possible, but I wanted you even more. Do you understand me?”
Meredith nodded. She understood, oh, God, how she understood.
“I want all of you, Meredith. I want to know what’s going on behind those sapphire eyes. Beneath that cornsilk hair.” As if to emphasize his point, Archer’s palm stroked the silken strands.
A storm of confusion, stirred by Archer’s touch, whirled through Meredith. She feared she would splinter open, spilling all the unlovable mental debris she carried within her.
“I’ve told you some of my secrets, Meredith, tell me yours.”
“Who says I have any secrets to tell?” Her voice wobbled over the evasion.
“Your eyes, Meredith. Your voice. The tremble in your hand. What is it?”
“Don’t forget Pandora’s box,” Meredith cautioned him with a counterfeit lightness. She thought of Chad and how safe he was, never pressing her, never demanding to know what lay beneath the placid surface. Archer was altogether different. “Some things are better left in the dark.”
“Not with us, Meredith. Not with what I want for us.”
She thrilled at his protest and the future it implied for them. In the next instant, though, she was brutally downcast. There was no future for her with Archer Hanson, her past assured that. But there was now, the present, and if that was all there could be, she would have it. Her hand found his cheek. Her fingers trembled along the curve of his jaw, still smooth from the razor.
Archer trapped her hand with his, turned his head, and pressed her palm to his voracious mouth. His breath was warm and moist on the tender skin, his tongue expressive and questing.
The metallic taste of desire came to Meredith’s mouth. Archer stood, pulling her from her chair.
“I want to love you, Meredith, love you the way you deserve to be loved.”
His words, repeated from the night before, broke the dam and a molten river flowed through Meredith, drowning her fears and anxieties, suffocating everything except this moment. Her hands fluttered over the taut skin covering his biceps. “Yes, Archer,” she whispered.
A low moan answered her as Archer pressed her to him. The seething power of his need was explosively evident. It pulsed from him like current from a hot wire. She was electrified by the contact of their mouths. His moved hungrily over hers, alternately filling her with the force of his need, then sapping her strength so utterly that she feared her legs would buckle beneath her.
When they actually did begin to give way and she swayed gently against Archer, he wordlessly took her hand and led her through the living room, with its vaulted ceiling and fireplace, and down the hall. Flickering lanterns lit the long corridor.
“This place is huge,” she whispered, lowering her voice almost as if the house were a physical presence that might overhear her discussing it.
“Huge is a good description. It came with four more bedrooms than I plan on using for some time, but it also has more land around it than any other place in this area, so I put up with all the unnecessary space. This is the only bedroom I ever use. It has my favorite view.”
Meredith stepped into the darkened room and was awash in luminous pools of moonlight that flooded in through the picture windows. The Sandias were framed in one window, their mighty peaks outlined in silver moonglow.
Archer flipped a switch and artificial light crackled through the room, revealing a thoroughly masculine lair. But Meredith didn’t have time to study the decor for, with the light, panic streaked through her.
“No lights,” she said swiftly, adding in a calmer voice, “Let’s enjoy the moonlight.”
Archer complied and the room was again cloaked in a velvety darkness gilded with silver moonlight. “However you want it, Meredith,” he whispered hoarsely, moving toward her. “However you want it.”
His arms twined around her, wrapping her again in the pulsing urgency of his desire. He tilted her mouth up and his own descended on hers for a kiss that was a serious beginning to what they both ached for.
Meredith felt hollowed out, emptied by the demanding savagery of his lips, his tongue. But that void was quickly filled by passion’s inexorably rising tide. Her shawl slid off her shoulders and whispered to the thick rug as she reached up to Archer. His mouth nestled in the hollow of her neck, uttering primitive sounds in a language that her brain couldn’t decode, but her body responded to flawlessly. His hands roamed with a wild willfulness over her shoulders, her back. They teased the upthrust tips of her breasts and stroked a path of fire along her belly and deep into her most intimate recesses.
He returned to her neck and began untying the ribbons that fastened her blouse.
“No,” Meredith said, stilling his hand.
Her protest echoed wildly through her mind. No, she couldn’t allow him to undress her, to see her. She couldn’t stand naked before him and let him see her inadequacies. She couldn’t lose him. Not yet. “You first.”
Archer’s hands fell away from her blouse and hers found the buttons at his neck. Slowly, she undid them. Archer crossed his arms in front of his chest and pulled his shirt over his head. He was magnificent. Meredith remembered what he had said about her skin looking like lilies in the moonlight and thought the same of his. Except that beneath his were hard juts of solid muscle. The silvery light curved and bowed around his broad shoulders and over the corrugated firmness of his chest, his stomach.
Meredith, almost by way of paying homage to such perfection, kissed the small, stiffened nub of his nipple. A groan of pleasure rumbled in the chest beneath her lips. She ran her hands along the smooth, hard columns of his back. They were like warm marble chiseled by a master sculptor.
Quivering with excitement, Archer unloosed his buckle and the sculpture of his body was completely unveiled. A mat of tawny bourbon-colored curls covered his chest. It was mirrored by a darker thatch farther below. A dizzying spiral of delight whirred through Meredith as her gaze lighted on his stiffened manhood.
“Come here, darling,” Archer coaxed huskily. As he lifted his arms, Meredith watched, entranced by the bunching and rippling of muscles. He began again to unloose the ribbons at her neck. This time, she scampered away with a nervous laugh.
“Let’s just lie down,” she suggested, quickly burrowing beneath the covers on his king-sized bed.
For a second, Archer merely stared at her, tilting his head to one side and puzzling over her inexplicable behavior. Meredith trembled beneath the sheets as he came forward, then stood above her, his displeasure as plainly evident as his wilting ardor.