by Sarah Morgan
“The first time Chase brought me here I actually got lost. I was looking for the bathroom and ended up in the guest residence. Don’t even ask.”
Fliss dragged her gaze from the dome. “You have a guest residence? Because you’re in such cramped quarters.”
Matilda grinned. “Three beds and three baths. Chase uses it to store his sailing gear. It’s mostly full of wet suits and the odd sail in the middle of being repaired.”
“What? No live-in staff?”
“We have a housekeeper who comes in from the village, but she doesn’t live in. Chase likes his privacy.”
“Yeah, must be hard having spontaneous sex if you have people lurking around every corner.” She spoke without thinking and was about to apologize when there was a loud bark and a large black Doberman bounded out of the kitchen.
“And here’s the other reason we don’t have staff—they can’t handle my dog.” Matilda braced herself and held up her hand. “Stay. Stay!”
The dog didn’t stay. Instead he cannoned into her, tackling her around the knees, almost sending her flying.
“Whoa, that is one enthusiastic animal you’ve got there.” Fliss grabbed Matilda’s arm, steadying her. Then she grabbed the dog by the collar. “Well, hello. You must be my client. Hasn’t anyone told you it isn’t polite to tackle a pregnant woman?”
Hero wagged his tail so hard he almost removed her eye.
Matilda grabbed him and tried to persuade him to sit. “I apologize for his behavior. It’s my fault. I don’t like scolding him in case I crush his spirit.”
“I think it would take a lot to crush his spirit.” Like her sister, she knew animals. And she knew dogs. This one was bright-eyed, intelligent and mischievous. Her favorite type. “It’s great to see a Doberman with a long tail.”
“I found a breeder who didn’t dock them at birth. I wanted him to have his tail. A tail is how a dog expresses himself and it’s important to be able to express yourself, don’t you think?”
“I do, and Hero is seriously cute.”
She recognized a kindred spirit when she saw one. She knew all too well how it felt to have a continual urge to do the wrong thing. And she knew how it felt to have everyone think the worst of you.
“Chase wanted me to have security when he’s working, but I couldn’t think of anything worse than having a stranger in the house when I’m trying to work, so we compromised.”
Fliss held out her hand to the dog and let him sniff her. “So you’re a compromise, are you?” She smiled as he thrust his nose into her palm, and she slid her hand around to rub his neck. “Yeah, you like that, of course you do. You’re a pushover, do you know that? A big, cuddly, oversized baby.”
“Most people are terrified of him, but Chase thinks that if someone broke into the house he would lick them.”
“Maybe, but the point about a dog like this is that he’s a deterrent. The breed comes with a certain reputation. That reputation is often enough to make someone think twice.” Fliss stroked her hand over the dog’s head. “It’s instinctive to him to protect those he loves. There’s a reason they make great guard dogs and are often used in search and rescue.”
“You know a lot about dogs.”
“It’s my job. Knowledge is power, and when I’m walking a strange dog I like to be the one with the power.”
“He likes you. You have a way with him.” Matilda seemed relieved. “Does that mean you’ll be willing to walk him for me until I have the baby?”
“It will be my pleasure.”
“I’d want it to be a business arrangement. I know how hard you’re working to grow the business, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable otherwise.”
“I appreciate that. Does he have any bad habits I need to know about? Does he munch on small children? Growl at old ladies?”
“If anything he’s too sociable. He greets everyone as if they’re his long-lost best friend. It’s the reason my cranberry juice is all over my shirt and not in my stomach.”
Fliss petted the dog. “Enthusiasm is not a bad habit, although the way you’re expressing it might need a little modifying. Dobermans are supersmart. They need consistent training and lots of exercise.”
“I was taking him to classes in Manhattan before I got too big to comfortably move. Chase said you were also walking your grandmother’s dog. Will you walk the two of them together?”
“Maybe. I’ll see how they get on. Sometimes they benefit from a little company. Sometimes they’re better on their own. Harriet and I personalize the service we offer and do whatever we think is best for the animal.” She guessed that Hero might be the type who preferred to be the center of attention. “You have a nice dog there.”
“Thank you.” Matilda gently scratched his head. “Chase is worried I’m going to trip over him because I’m so clumsy. Which reminds me, I need to do something about this shirt. I look like a walking murder victim.” She let go of Fliss’s arm. “Let’s go through to the kitchen. I have a mountain of cookies that need eating.”
“Cookies? You love baking?” Fliss felt a rush of inadequacy. Was she the only person on the planet who didn’t find baking soothing? “Harriet is the same. I’m beginning to see why the two of you get along so well.”
Matilda laughed. “I’m nothing like Harriet and I loathe cooking. The sum total of my creative endeavor is writing. Whenever I cook I inevitably get distracted by the scene I’m working on and forget about whatever is in the oven. Which is probably why I burn everything. I’ve set off the smoke alarm twice this summer already. We’re connected direct to the fire department, and Chase gives them a huge donation every year in order to smooth any frustrations they have for having me living on their turf.”
“Really? So you had a team of hot firemen running through your house? If I knew that was a possibility I’d burn the toast every day. Wait. Come to think of it I do that anyway.” She followed Matilda through the house, wondering if it would be rude to give in and let her jaw drop open. She thought about the guy standing next to Seth on her grandmother’s doorstep. He’d been casually dressed. Relaxed. She never would have suspected he was a gazillionaire. “So if you don’t bake, how did you end up with a mountain of cookies?”
“I mentioned to Chase that I had a craving for them, and ever since then he’s been picking them up on his way home. He’s so thoughtful, I don’t have the heart to tell him I can’t eat them all.”
Fliss glanced at Matilda’s bump. “You’re sure that’s a baby and not cookies?”
Matilda laughed and pushed open a door.
The kitchen was large and airy, positioned at the back of the house overlooking the garden and the beach.
Fliss thrust her hands into the pockets of her shorts and stared at the view. “This is incredible. How could anyone cook here and not burn everything?”
“It’s even better from the second level. That’s where most of the living space is. I’m always worried Hero is going to go leap off the balcony, so when I’m on my own we spend a lot of time down here. And we have quick access to the beach.”
Private beach, Fliss noted. And Matilda Adams might not have much visible security in terms of beefy guys with dark glasses and discreet headsets, but she certainly had protection. The house was on its own spit of land, bordered by ocean.
And then there was the dog, of course.
Fliss was in no doubt at all that if his family were threatened, Hero would live up to his name.
“Does your beach connect with the main beach?”
“In one small area at low tide. Hero has been known to escape. Which isn’t great, because as you know there are strict rules on the public beach. Up until ten in the morning they can be loose as long as they’re under voice control. Hero struggles with that.”
“We’ll work on it.”
“He’s not great with authority.”
“Don’t worry. Neither am I.” Fliss glanced around, noticing a laptop set up on a table by the window. Every available surface wa
s covered in paper. “That’s a lot of paper. Did your printer malfunction?”
“It’s my next book. I printed it out to do a final read and then dropped it when Hero used me as target practice. I’ve been putting the pages back in order.”
Fliss stooped and picked up a page that had fallen under one of the chairs. “Page two hundred and sixty-five.”
“Brilliant! I was looking for that one.” Matilda took it from her and added it to a pile on the countertop. “I should have printed it out a chapter at a time.”
“So you make your living writing stories. What kind of stories? Anything I’m likely to have read?”
“I don’t know. I write romance fiction, populated by strong, capable heroines who are nothing like me. Women who would not answer the door spattered in cranberry juice.” She grabbed a cloth and mopped at her shirt.
“So are your heroes like Chase?”
Matilda blushed. “In a way. They’re all versions of Chase, but don’t tell him I said that. He’s very private. He’d hate to think I’d put any part of him in a book. Tea or coffee?”
“Coffee, please. Black and strong.” Trying not to think how it must feel to be that crazily in love with a man who loved you back, Fliss picked up another sheet of paper from the floor. “Page three hundred and thirty-four. Looks important. Sex scene. Wow. This is pretty hot. You wrote this?”
“Yes, and you shouldn’t read it out of context!” Matilda tried to snatch it out of her hand, but Fliss held it out of reach as she read the first two paragraphs.
“Hey, you’re good! So is this kind of thing embarrassing to write?”
“No.” Matilda snatched it from her hand, tearing the paper in the process. “The type of sex I write about is always part of character development. It happens for a reason, and it always changes the relationship.” She added the page to the others.
“And that reason can’t just be because the character gets a little desperate?”
“It could be—” Matilda made coffee using a complicated-looking espresso machine “—but the reason they’re desperate is probably to do with reasons a little deeper than that.”
“I don’t understand.”
Matilda leaned against the counter, waiting while the machine did its thing. “So as a writer if I had a character who hadn’t had sex in a while, I’d be asking myself why. There is always a reason.”
“What sort of reason?” Fliss was fascinated.
“Maybe she was hurt in the past, in which case when she eventually has sex that’s going to be a big deal and she’s going to be dealing with those issues.”
“What issues?”
“That’s for me to figure out when I’m writing. I ask myself what’s in the character’s past. What do they want? Why do they want it?”
“I never realized it was so complicated. You think like this for all your characters?”
“Yes. That’s what makes them real to me. I know how they’d act in any situation.”
“Even I don’t know how I’m going to act in any given situation, so you’re one up on me. So what happens if the character doesn’t know what they want?”
“Then they figure it out over the course of the book. And sometimes what they want changes, of course. That’s the fun part of writing—working out what they’ll do. Throwing in some surprises. And every book, every character, is different because no two people ever do the same thing even when faced by the same situation.”
“You mean some people always do the right thing and some the wrong thing.”
She knew all about that. She was the second sort.
“No, that’s not what I mean.” Matilda put the coffee mug in front of Fliss. “Who decides what is ‘wrong’? Wrong by whose standards? What is wrong in our culture may be normal somewhere else. And people are never ‘bad’ or ‘good.’ They’re just people. And ‘good’ people are capable of doing bad things and making bad choices. That’s what makes people endlessly fascinating. For example, ask me if I’d steal and I’d tell you no, but if my baby was starving and stealing was the only way to keep it alive, would I steal then? Maybe. Who knows? None of us know how we’d act if circumstances pushed us to our limits. We don’t always know what we’re capable of doing, or becoming.”
You’re useless, worthless.
Fliss took a sip of coffee. “This is delicious, although that machine looks like you need two doctorates to operate it.”
“That machine is a typical Chase gift.” Matilda made herself tea. “We had a coffee in a coffee shop once and I enjoyed it, so he bought me the same machine. Had it shipped from Italy. All the instructions were in Italian, and I don’t speak Italian. Adorable, but it took me three days, full time, to learn how to work it. And the irony is that since I got pregnant I can’t bear the taste of coffee.”
Fliss laughed, but she felt a little pang of envy. “You’re lucky.”
“Because of the quality of my coffee, or because I have a good man?”
“Both. So going back to the whole sex thing—” Fliss kept her voice casual “—what other reasons do you give characters for not having had sex in a while?”
“The simplest is that they just haven’t met someone they like enough, but that doesn’t make for interesting reading, so generally my characters have bigger issues. Maybe they have serious issues with intimacy. Maybe they’re in love with someone from their past and no one else has matched up.”
Fliss’s heart beat faster. “But that would be crazy, right? I mean when something’s over, it’s over.”
Matilda slid onto the nearest chair. “Are we still talking about my books, or is this about Seth?”
Instantly defensive, Fliss looked at her, fighting the impulse to leave the room. “You know about Seth?”
“I know the two of you were married. He and Chase have been friends a long time. Chase has helped remodel his house. But I guess you already know that.”
Fliss shook her head. “No. I didn’t know that.” But it made sense. Chase was the one friend he’d brought to their wedding. The fact that there was so much of Seth’s life that she knew nothing about felt odd. In some ways he was a stranger. A familiar stranger. And suddenly she had a fierce urge to know more. “So do you see him socially?” Really it was none of her business, and she had no idea why she was even asking that question. Seth Carlyle could have dinner with the whole of the Hamptons if he wanted to. Why should it bother her? Why should she even care?
“He’s been here for dinner a few times. Once he brought Na—” Matilda stopped herself finishing the sentence, and Fliss gave a shrug, hoping the hideous lurch of her stomach hadn’t been reflected in her expression.
“If ‘Na’ is a woman, you don’t need to worry about me. Seth and I haven’t seen each other in a decade. We’re definitely history.”
“Her name was Naomi, but they’re not together anymore.”
“Right.” And that fact shouldn’t interest her. It really shouldn’t. It certainly shouldn’t lift her spirits. It was inevitable that a man like Seth wasn’t going to stay single for long. She suppressed the impulse to ask a thousand questions about Naomi.
“I was so relieved when they broke up.”
“She was wrong for him?”
“Well, yes, there was that, and also the fact she made me feel totally crap about myself. You know there are some women who fall out of bed looking put together? Perfect hair. Perfect skin. Not an ounce of extra flesh anywhere. No accidents with champagne glasses or cartons of cranberry juice. Naomi was like that. She was really sweet, but I always felt she was privately amazed that someone like me hadn’t been wiped out by evolution.”
Fliss laughed. “So she broke it off?” Had she managed to make that question sound casual?
“No, Seth did.” Matilda studied her carefully. “Seth always ends relationships.”
Did he?
He hadn’t ended theirs. She’d been the one to do that.
She felt a stab of guilt. Was she the reason he always
ended relationships now? Had their short, painful marriage put him off commitment altogether?
Being afraid of commitment just didn’t sound like him. But ten years was a long time, wasn’t it? He’d probably changed.
She certainly had.
“So why was Naomi wrong for him?” Damn, why had she asked that? Now it was going to look as if she cared, and she didn’t. She really didn’t. It was of no interest to her who Seth dated.
“She was saccharine sweet. And a little manipulative, although it took a while for me to spot that. She got her own way through charm. She tried to manipulate Seth, but he wasn’t having it. I felt a little sorry for her to be honest. I think she genuinely adored him, and it was a little uncomfortable to watch. The more she wrapped herself around him, the more he withdrew.” Matilda sipped her tea. “Have we reached the part where you tell me why Chase thinks you’re Harriet? You told him that?”
“Actually Seth did.” Fliss stared into her coffee. “I got myself into a bit of a fix.”
“Sounds like you could use a cookie.” Matilda pushed the box toward her. “And a friend.”
Fliss reached into the box and pulled out a cookie. She nibbled the corner absently and then frowned. “This is delicious.”
“I know. If I could only ever eat one food again it would be this cookie. It’s from Cookies and Cream.”
Fliss chewed slowly, savoring the explosion of sugar and comfort. “No idea where that is, but I need a map right now.”
“It’s on Main Street, next to that boutique that sells all those gorgeous beach clothes, none of which I can squeeze into anymore.”
“Harriet loves that place. And you’re tiny apart from your bump.”
“Are you kidding? I’ve been called many things in my life, but ‘tiny’ isn’t on the list. The bump affects my balance. Most of the time I look like a cross between a drunken camel and a giraffe who swallowed a watermelon.”
“You look nothing like either of those things.” Deciding that willpower was overrated, Fliss took another cookie. “And in case you were wondering, this isn’t emotional eating. It’s ‘these are too good to pass up’ eating.”