by Tory Cates
“No, I don’t mind,” she lied. “I’ll be right over.”
She blinked in the brilliant sunshine that was warming the city, but barely noticed the unseasonable radiance. Her mind was fully occupied with visions of what awaited her at Hanson Development Corporation. She imagined that Archer would have his team of lawyers already assembled and briefed and poised, ready and waiting to pounce on her. The word libel flashed on and off in her brain, rattling her even further. If Archer sued, no matter if he was totally wrong, her future at Enterprise would be over. No publisher in his right mind enjoyed working with writers who collected lawsuits. Far worse even than the specter of a libel suit was knowing that Archer hadn’t liked the piece. Hadn’t even respected her craftsmanship.
Her palms were as damp as they’d been that first time she’d pulled up in front of Hanson Development. Only this time her stomach was also churning and her heart was fluttering as well. Seeing Archer again would have been sufficient in and of itself to elicit any of these symptoms, but seeing him with the threat of a lawsuit hanging over her caused her reactions to go into overdrive. Aside from a few company trucks the only car in the lot was Archer’s Porsche. As she walked to the front door, she made herself take the steps slowly, breathe deeply, and think. Hard. By the time her hand was on the doorknob, she had worked out the semblance of a defense.
Archer opened the door. Hard as it was for Meredith to accept, he was even more handsome than he’d been before. He’d lost some weight and had acquired a few lines and shadows that gave his face an added interest. For one frozen fraction of a second, such a short time that both of them were able to pretend it didn’t happen, they each stared into a face they had hungered for.
Pretending to clear his throat, Archer backed quickly away, swinging the door open. “Come on in. No one else is around.”
“No one?” Meredith asked, peering around the office for men in three-piece suits carrying briefcases. She relaxed a tiny bit when she saw there were no lawyers waiting to ambush her.
“Just you and me,” Archer said, lingering over the words in a way that freighted them with significance. “Well, shall we . . .” He paused and threw open his hands, holding them out to her, then abruptly slapped them together, his fingers twining over one another. Meredith wondered if the gesture suppressed the same nearly uncontrollable urge that was bursting within her—the urge to touch.
“. . . step into my office,” he finished.
Meredith gave herself a stern lecture. Just because there wasn’t a battery of lawyers hovering about did not mean that she was out of danger. And just because Archer seemed slightly nervous did not mean that he had any deeper feelings for her. She had, once again, to do what she’d become so adept at over the past months—she had to compartmentalize herself, locking her feelings for Archer far away.
Archer slid his leanly muscled frame behind the desk and hunched over it, his shoulder muscles straining at the fabric of his shirt. Meredith took a chair on the other side of the desk. It might have been on the other side of the world, as distant as she felt from Archer. She couldn’t help remembering another day—it seemed an eternity ago—when she’d first walked into this office and found him with his feet propped regally on the desk. She waved the memory away as if it were a marauding crow. Such thoughts had no place in her current dealings with Archer.
“Archer,” Meredith started off, hoping that the best defense was a good offense, “I honestly don’t see how you could object to the article. I’ve searched my conscience and if I did err, and I don’t think I did, it was in your favor.” As she said the words, Meredith was fortified by their irrefutable veracity. Her voice gathered strength as she went on. “You couldn’t have paid a P.R. firm to have gotten you any better coverage. To say nothing of having yourself and your solar balloon splashed all over the cover of the most respected popular business journal in America.”
Archer’s face hardened. Her impassioned words seemed to run off of it like rain off the chiseled heads on Mount Rushmore. “You lied,” he said with a frightening blankness.
Meredith was stunned into silence for a moment by the accusation. “Lied? Where? I might have been subjective in a few parts, but I had to be. The piece was based on my subjective impressions. But aside from that, I can back up every assertion of fact in that article.” Her voice and temper rose as she thought of all the extra time she’d spent corroborating all her data. “On anything that was the least bit questionable, I have no less than two sources and you, Mr. Hanson, are usually one of them.” She bit off her words with a crisp finality, knowing that she stood on absolutely firm ground.
“Meredith, you lied.” Archer repeated the charge. When Meredith opened her mouth to protest again, he silenced her with an upraised hand. “No,” he ordered her. “Listen.” He punched a button hidden beneath his desk and a whirring sound filled the office as though a swarm of locusts were descending on them.
“Archer, what is that?”
“Just listen,” he repeated with the same icy control. The sound of another button being pressed clicked with an amplified volume over what Meredith guessed were hidden speakers. Then a recorded voice was speaking. With a jolt, she realized it was her voice.
“Yes,” she heard herself say, “Chicago was gray, my job was gray, the weather was gray, and I was tired of it. I suppose most of all, I was tired of the gray men who had been populating my life and their dreary vision of life as a one-track scramble up the ladder of success with no stops for joy or laughter. They were devoid of passion, emotion, all the things that make life worth living . . .”
“You recorded me!” Meredith burst out as her voice faded in the background.
“I told you I’d had problems with overzealous reporters in the past,” Archer explained. “I wanted to have my refusal on tape. Then, after I changed my mind, I didn’t see any point in telling you that I’d recorded our first interview, just as I record all sensitive meetings.”
“I still don’t understand,” Meredith muttered, becoming increasingly befuddled.
“That was merely Exhibit A. This is Exhibit B.” Archer plucked his copy of Enterprise off his desk and stretched across it to hand it to Meredith. Her concluding remarks, the words she had labored so long and hard on, were highlighted in yellow.
“Read them,” Archer ordered.
Meredith glanced away from the article into Archer’s face. It was set in an expression of deadly seriousness. She began to read her closing words. “In a world of black and white and shades of gray, Archer Hanson is a polychromatic rainbow dancing on the horizon as vividly as one of his banner-draped, sun-heated balloons.”
“Those two statements,” Archer observed drily, “don’t jibe with the last one you made to me. The one about our not being right for each other.”
The scrappy brittleness was gone from Meredith’s voice when she softly answered, “As I recall, you didn’t disagree with me.”
“No, I didn’t. I’ve fought for everything I have. But there’s one thing you can’t ever take by force and that’s love. It’s either freely given or it’s not worth having. I wasn’t about to battle you for your love, Meredith. I’ve done that before, and it’s a mistake. One I’ll never repeat.”
The last thing she’d ever expected to see on Archer Hanson’s face was plainly evident—a look of hurt vulnerability. In that instant, Meredith realized how badly she’d misjudged him. Not once, when she’d taken him for an indulged rich kid, but twice. The second time she’d missed the mark was in her assumption that Archer was emotionally invulnerable. That he could have walked out on all they’d shared together and felt nothing but relief. She should have known better after what she’d learned about him at the uranium mine. The love he was talking about having battled for was his father’s.
Meredith barely trusted her voice. It was quavery and small when she spoke again. “My love isn’t something worth fighting for, Archer. That’s why I told you it wouldn’t work for us.”
&nbs
p; “Why didn’t you just tell me that, tell me something, anything, in the first place?” Archer probed, but his tone had lost its granite edge.
“I would have if you hadn’t bolted out of my apartment, my life. All that I could assume was that you were relieved I’d called it off.”
“Relieved?” Archer leaned back in his chair and unloosed a dry, humorless laugh that bounced hollowly off the ceiling. “Were you ‘relieved’ when I left without making a fuss, Meredith?”
“Relieved?” Meredith said, echoing his incredulity. “Archer, I was devastated.” That flat admission opened the floodgates behind which she had kept the swirling tides of her grief, loneliness, and love dammed up. She was swept away on a wave of emotion. She choked back the currents raging within her. “I’m not strong enough for your love, Archer. I was slipping back into . . .” She stumbled over the word just as her mother had, swallowed, and made herself spit it out. “Back into some anorexic patterns. Not eating, not wanting to eat. I was losing weight and, worst of all, losing my perspective. I was starting not to be able to tell if I was skinny or fat or safely in between. I couldn’t risk having all that start again, Archer. Not for anything.”
This time Archer’s laugh was not the dry, hollow thing of a moment before; it was his own full-throated, robust sound of true amusement. “You silly little fool,” he grinned. “I haven’t eaten right since the day I met you. Did you ever stop to think that you might be in love?”
“Archer, if this is love, then it’s a weak and destructive thing on my part and it’s not worthy of you. I can’t spend the rest of my life falling apart and then waiting for you to come home and put the pieces back together. To make me whole again. That’s not love, Archer, that’s emotional parasitism.” She hesitated, waiting for his reaction. It was a very strange one.
“Why do you keep trying to destroy yourself, Meredith?”
“Destroy myself?”
“I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. It’s practically all I have been able to think about for the past two months. You’ve even admitted that you denied yourself what you really wanted to do in life when your brother died and you went into finance. Then, when you couldn’t perform the impossible by becoming your lost brother, you attempted a slow form of suicide that came perilously close to succeeding. Instead you made a courageous decision and chose life.”
As Archer spoke the truths she herself had uncovered with her mind, she finally began to believe them with her heart as well. Like the perfectly executed illustration that accompanies the most insightful of texts, Meredith’s recurring nightmare came to her. She saw herself through the dark mists of the frightening dream running after Rory, trying to catch his escaping wheelchair. She saw herself running still, even after he’d disappeared over the cliff. It was painfully obvious in that moment, with Archer’s eyes boring into her as if he too were watching the drama being played out on the screen of her mind, exactly what she’d been doing. She had been trying to destroy herself.
Meredith felt her heart pound. She didn’t want to hear his question. Didn’t want to answer it. But his eyes, those dark, crystalline chips, wouldn’t relent. They gouged into her, digging a reply from the deepest part of her soul, a part she had buried beneath years of pain and subtle rejection.
She tried to deflect the question with a brittle attempt at humor. “You certainly don’t make a very good Freudian analyst. Shouldn’t you have a little goatee and a notebook and shouldn’t I be lying on a couch?”
“Don’t do that, Meredith,” Archer commanded, his gaze unwavering.
She didn’t have to ask what he meant; she knew she was trying to hide behind a shield of humor.
“First you tried to eradicate you, who you were, by abandoning what you really wanted to do with your life and trying to take your brother’s place in your father’s firm. But that wasn’t enough, was it?” Archer asked the question gently, in a way that only a person who had done the same thing could ask it.
She wondered how much of his childhood Archer had spent trying to turn himself into the person his father had wanted him to be. The undeniable fact that he understood what she’d done and why, and didn’t condemn her for it, kept Meredith from closing her ears to the painful truths he was holding up for her inspection. She nodded in answer.
“No, nothing was ever enough,” she whispered, barely noticing the tear that slid over her cheek, a dagger-shaped streak that pierced Archer’s heart. “I remember once, I was about eleven. I’d never brought home a report card of all A’s before. There were always one or two B’s. And they were what my mother commented on. Never the A’s. But this one time I’d worked really hard. Studying after school. Never going out to play. And I had all A’s. I brought the report card to my parents, waiting for, dying for a word, just one word of praise. My father looked at it. Then, without speaking, he passed it to my mother. She put on her little half-moon reading glasses and looked down at it. I was bursting, barely able to contain myself.”
Meredith sucked in a deep, shuddering sigh as if it had all happened only moments before. “Then my mother just put my report aside as if it were a thing of no importance. ‘But, Mother,’ I said, ‘I made all A’s.’ She looked at me over the tops of her glasses and said, ‘Well, I should hope you did, my dear. A little girl without any friends had better make good grades.’ ”
Archer ached to fold her in his arms to soothe the hurt that had been burned into her so many years ago. But he knew that if there was any hope of them building a future together, he had to let her go on. To tell it all.
“I was never bright enough, diligent enough, popular enough, amusing enough, or even thin enough.”
“But you almost killed yourself trying to be.” Archer leaned forward as if pleading for her to understand. To understand what he was saying and, more important, to understand who she was. “And you’re still doing it, Meredith. You’re doing it right now by denying yourself the happiness that we could have together. For whatever reasons and rationalizations you care to come up with, that’s what it all boils down to.”
Archer’s voice mesmerized Meredith. She barely breathed, so riveted was she by what he was saying and by the passion with which he delivered his message.
“If you can look at me right now, Meredith,” Archer said, the heat in his gaze soldering a connection between them that she was powerless to break, “and tell me that you don’t love me, I’ll disappear from your life forever. It will be like you never knew me.”
The desolation Meredith had known for the past two months became like a few minutes of discomfort when matched with the possibility that Archer’s entire existence would be forever eradicated from her life.
“No!” As she began to wake from the spell cast by Archer’s mesmeric revelations, she bolted from her chair. “No, Archer, please, no!” The strangled cry was wrenched from her.
Compelled by a call that went beyond words, Archer was drawn to her. His arms encircled her with a sheltering tenderness. But Meredith could not surrender to them. Not yet, not before she unburdened her heart.
“God, yes, I love you, Archer. I love you more than anything else on this earth.”
“Why, then, have we been torturing each other this way? Why haven’t we been together?”
She heard the question only as a deep rumbling against the ear she rested on Archer’s chest. She drank in his feel, his smell like parched earth absorbing a long-delayed summer rain. For the first time in weeks, she felt whole, not a fractured mosaic ready to crumble at any moment.
“Archer, I’ve ached for you. You don’t know how many times I almost called. I even drove by your house one night and it was all I could do to keep myself from stopping.”
“You should have. You should have come to me.”
“I couldn’t. Not after you had forbidden me to call. Not when I still felt like a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing.”
“How do you feel now?” he murmured, his voice a velvet enticement.
“I feel as if I was born to be held in your arms,” she whispered.
“You were, darling, you were,” he answered with a rising ardor. “I can’t begin to tell you how I missed you. I tried to seal off the hurt, to harden myself. But I couldn’t. You opened doors inside of me that I never knew existed and I couldn’t shut them. When I read your article, I realized that I could stop trying. It was a great piece of writing. I read it and thought that no one could have written about another person with such depth and understanding without loving him.” Archer smoothed back the fine wisps of hair around Meredith’s face, gently massaging her temples as he tilted her face upward.
“I clung to that thought like a drowning man hanging on to a piece of driftwood, I wanted to believe it so badly. But there were corners of doubt and fear in my mind. I even had another excuse ready when I called. I was going to say I was just ringing up to tell you that I’m going to be launching Cloud Waltzer III tomorrow. Even with that extra excuse in reserve, my hand was trembling when I dialed your number.”
“My whole body was trembling when I walked in here,” Meredith confessed. She opened her mouth to say more, but realized that a far more eloquent vehicle of expression was hers. Sliding her hands up over the broad expanse of Archer’s shoulders, she brought the tips of her fingers to his sturdy jaw. With infinite care and a torturing slowness, she tilted his mouth down. At the same time, she raised herself up on the tips of her toes, skimming the awakening points of her breasts along the bulwark of Archer’s chest as she reached up to deliver the symbol of all that pounded in her heart.
His lips met hers, and for a second they were both stilled by the awing significance of this moment. Then all thoughts were blown away by the cyclone of desire that touched down as their lips reunited. It howled through Meredith, a whirling funnel of need that sucked up remorse, sadness, and regret. It churned through her, leaving only a devastating path of passion.