by Carole Buck
“Just take a few deep breaths,” she advised with a smile. “I’m sure everything will be just fine.”
The mustachioed guard gave an odd little laugh. “I certainly hope so.”
At that moment, the main door to the building swung open, admitting a blast of chilly wind and two equipment-laden men. The men—one bearded and bulky, one a balding bantamweight, both clad in midnight-blue jumpsuits-stopped dead in their tracks when they spotted Lucy.
There was a peculiar pause.
“Is there a problem, gentlemen?” Lucy finally felt compelled to ask.
The balding repairman cleared his throat then said, “Toilets, ma’am.”
“Toidets?”
“Uh-huh,” the bearded repairman affirmed, flashing a gap-toothed smile. “Toilets.”
Lucy glanced at Tom. “There’s trouble with the toilets?”
“S-some of ’em, yeah,” be replied, fingering his collar again. “On the, uh, third floor.”
“Overflow potential,” the balding repairman stated. “Could get ugly.”
Lucy wrinkled her nose distastefully at the image this statement conjured up. “Not exactly the nicest way to see out the old year.”
The balding repairman shrugged, shifting his grip on the equipment he was holding. He didn’t meet her eyes. “It’ll be worth our while.”
“Yeah.” The bearded repairman bobbed his head and grinned happily, looking directly at her. “Definitely worth our while.”
Remembering the outrageously high plumber’s bill she’d had the previous winter, when two of her pipes had frozen and burst, Lucy didn’t doubt this. That had been a “regular” job, and it had cost her what seemed like a small fortune. She couldn’t imagine what the charge would be for work done after hours on a holiday!
“Well, better you than me,” she said after a few moments. “I hope it doesn’t take too long.” Then she nodded at Tom. “Good night. Happy New Year.”
“Uh, thanks. S-same to you.”
Lucy headed for the heavy glass doors that opened onto the sidewalk, her heels clicking against the lobby’s marble floor. She caught a glimpse of a bright yellow cab pulling up beside the curb. Although she normally rode mass transit to and from work, she occasionally treated herself to a taxi. Deciding to try to flag the vehicle down, she picked up her pace.
The godawful clatter of metal hitting polished stone made her check her step and pivot back toward the security desk, her heart thudding. The bearded repairman apparently had dropped his equipment.
“It’s okay, ma’am!” the guard called loudly.
Lucy hesitated. “Are you sure?”
“Positive!” The guard waved her off. “Everything’s under control!”
It didn’t look under control, Lucy reflected, watching the two repairmen scrabble around on the floor. And Tom’s voice sounded just a wee bit panicked.
Oh, well. It really wasn’t her concern.
She turned and pushed one of the heavy glass doors open.
A split second after stepping out into the chill night air, she collided with someone. A pair of hands gripped her forearms, preventing her from toppling over. She caught a tantalizing whiff of spice and musk.
Lifting her gaze, Lucy found herself staring up into a leanly handsome face that she hadn’t seen in the flesh for nearly a decade. Her vision seemed to blur. She began to feel the way Wayne Dweck had claimed he felt around Tiffany Tarrington Toulouse. Warm. Woozy. And vaguely in danger of losing her lunch.
“Ch-Chris?” she whispered, barely able to utter the name.
“Lucy.” Her ex-husband sounded stunned. He looked the same way. “You ... you cut your hair.”
Three
On a scale of one to ten—with one representing the worst possible thing a man could say to his ex-wife upon encountering her for the first time in nearly a decade and ten representing the most suavely brilliant—Chris rated his opening gambit a 2.5.
Lucy’s expression suggested that she’d mark his effort lower. A lot lower. Like, maybe—if she was feeling exceptionally generous—a minus three. Her verbal response underscored this impression.
“Yes,” she snapped, jerking herself free of his grasp and glaring at him. “I cut my hair. Do you have a problem with that?”
“No. Of course not. It looks...nice.” And it did. Where Lucy’s hair had once tumbled to the middle of her back, it now skimmed her shoulders and feathered across her forehead. The style was sleekly sophisticated. It emphasized the dark beauty of her eyes and made her cheekbones seem more prominent. Or maybe that was makeup. While the illumination where they were standing wasn’t the greatest, Chris had the impression that his ex-wife was doing more to her face than she had a decade ago. “It’s just that...well, I’ve spent a lot of years visualizing you with long hair.”
Lucy arched a brow in an achingly familiar fashion, clearly unmoved by his complimentary assessment of her coiffure. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“What’s...what...supposed to mean?” The facility with language that had served him so well in the legal profession seemed to have deserted him. So, too, had the ability to think quickly and clearly on his feet.
“Your claiming to have spent a lot of years ‘visualizing’ me.”
“My claiming?” Chris stiffened with indignation. “I say you’ve been on my mind, and you accuse me of making it up?”
There was a fractious silence.
“No,” Lucy finally said. There was an odd edge to her voice. She looked as though she’d flushed, but the lighting was too iffy to tell for sure. “That’s not what you said.”
“Excuse me?”
“You didn’t say I’d been on your mind, Chris. You said you’d been visualizing me.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“No, it’s not.” His ex-wife shook her head, her hair rippling about her face. The urge to touch the thick, dark tresses itched in the tips of Chris’s fingers. He clenched his hands, willing the sensation to go away. “Visualizing someone is something you decide to do. It’s intentional. But having someone on your mind... well, that’s not necessarily a voluntary situation. You can’t always help it.”
Chris took a deep breath. Maybe Lucy had a point, he conceded. Maybe she didn’t. Whatever the case, he didn’t want to argue about it. Not here. Not now.
“Fine.” He unclenched his fingers and made a conciliatory gesture. “Forget the visualizing. It was a bad choice of words. I’ve thought about you on and off during the last ten years. And when I’ve thought about you—sometimes intentionally, sometimes not—I’ve gotten an image inside my head. And until a minute ago, that image had long hair. The next time I think about you, the image will probably have—uh...uh...uh...”
“Not-so-long hair?”
Chris controlled a grimace at the undercurrent of quintessentially feminine sarcasm. All right. All right. So he wasn’t fluent in fashionese. “I suppose,” he said after a moment. “More or less.”
There was a pause. A gust of wind sent a lock of Lucy’s not-so-long hair fluttering across her cheek. She brushed it back. It pleased Chris to note that her manicured fingers did not appear to be entirely steady. Ignoble though it might be, he didn’t like the sense of being the only one who was feeling off-balance in this situation.
And then, the inevitable question: “What are you doing here, Chris?”
He hesitated. He’d intended to be as up-front as possible with Lucy once he finally made contact with her. To tell her about his chance meeting with her former maid of honor and to explain the reasons behind his subsequent determination to seek her out after all these years. But considering how things had gone thus far...
Lord! She’d probably accuse him of stalking her. Or worse. And given the way he’d violated her trust more than a decade ago, he couldn’t very well fault her for regarding his actions with suspicion.
“Here in Atlanta, you mean?” He didn’t want to lie. Unfortunately, he couldn’t quite see his way clear to t
elling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, either. Not under the circumstances.
Lucy nodded, thrusting her ungloved hands into the pockets of her coat.
“I came in on business yesterday. I was supposed to fly out late this afternoon, but there are weather problems on the other end.”
“So you’re ... stranded?”
“Temporarily. I’ll try to head home tomorrow.”
“I see.”
Chris cleared his throat. So much for the easy stuff, he thought. The stuff he could finesse without resorting to falsehood. But any second now, Lucy was going to hit him with the big one. Specifically, she was going to want to know how he’d just happened to turn up in front of the building in which she worked on what would have been their eleventh wedding anniversary.
Assuming that complete candor was not an option, what was he supposed to tell her? That fate must have conspired to bring them together again?
Oh, sure. Right.
Although...
There was something serendipitous about the way things had worked out, Chris reflected suddenly. Had he gone into-Gulliver’s Travels and found Lucy still on the job, that would have been one thing. But they’d collided with each other! What were the odds of that happening?
Had he arrived a minute or two later...
Had she departed a minute or two earlier...
They wouldn’t have connected. At least not tonight.
Lucy started to open her mouth, clearly about to press her interrogation. Chris preempted her by asking, “What about you?”
She blinked. “What about me?”
“What are you doing here?”
He watched an unsettled combination of emotions streak across her expressive face. His breath snagged in his chest as a disturbing possibility occurred to him. Damn! What if Lucy had spoken with Tina Palucci? What if she knew that he knew what her current situation was?
No, he told himself a moment later. If Lucy had heard about his meeting with her one-time best friend, she would have countered the question he’d just asked with that fact. Because whatever her faults—and even in the first, deliriously happy days of their marriage he hadn’t deluded himself that his bride was free of human flaws and foibles—Lucia Annette Falco wasn’t into playing cat-and-mouse games with the truth.
At least she hadn’t been, he amended with a pang. Ten years was a long time. Supposing—
“I live here.” Lucy’s crisp response disrupted his troubled line of conjecture. “In Atlanta, that is. But not in this building. This is where I work.” She lifted her chin. “I’m office manager for an agency called Gulliver’s Travels.”
“Really?” Chris ventured a smile. She wasn’t jerking him around, he decided. The pride in her voice and expression was too genuine. “Sounds challenging”
Lucy took a moment, seeming to weigh the sincerity of his reaction. Then, slowly, her lips started to curve upward. Her dimples indented for a heady half second. Chris’s pulse spurted at the sight. While he hadn’t forgotten how very lovely her smile was, memory was a pallid substitute for the real thing.
“It is,” she told him. “Very.”
There was another pause. They just stood there on the sidewalk. Still. Silent. Staring at each other. Then the wind kicked up. Despite his earlier comment to the hotel concierge, Chris shivered. He saw the woman who had once been his wife do the same.
“Are you in a hurry to get somewhere?” he asked abruptly.
Lucy pulled a hand from her coat pocket and swatted at her hair. Then she gave what apparently was meant to be a casual little laugh. “It’s New Year’s Eve, Chris.”
The implication of this statement was as obvious as the laugh had been artificial. But just because it was obvious, that didn’t mean that Chris was going to accept it.
“Meaning what?” he pressed. “You have a date?”
Lucy’s gaze held his for another moment, then skittered away. He knew she was tempted to lie. He was also willing to lay odds that she wouldn’t.
“Lucy?”
“No,” she said flatly, still not looking at him. “I don’t have a date.”
“How about a husband waiting at home?” He was ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent certain that there wasn’t. Had his ex-wife made a second marriage—particularly a happy second marriage—the former Tina Roberts undoubtedly would have shoved the news down his throat and enjoyed watching him choke on it.
Her eyes slewed back to his. The flash of temper he saw in their depths told him he’d hit a nerve. But that was all it told him. “No.”
“So?”
Lucy moistened her lips, plainly waging some kind of internal battle. Finally she countered, “What about you?”
“Me?”
“Did your getting stuck here in Atlanta put a crimp in your holiday plans?”
Chris felt his mouth twist. He wondered fleetingly how his ex-wife would react if he informed her that he’d spent what would have been their first two wedding anniversaries drinking himself into a stupor. He’d abandoned alcohol for work in subsequent years. Burying himself in legal files had proved almost as effective at holding memories at bay as guzzling booze. And when all was said and done, eyestrain and paper cuts were easier to cope with than a killer hangover.
“Not that you’d notice,” he said flatly.
“No...date?”
“No. And no wife, waiting or otherwise.” He let a few seconds tick by, then added, “I’m not really big on New Year’s Eve celebrations anymore.”
Lucy glanced down, her jaw working. After what seemed like a very long time, she quietly confessed, “Neither am I.”
Chris released a breath he hadn’t known he had been holding.
“What do you say we go someplace warm and get a drink?” he suggested, ruthlessly suppressing an urge to underscore the invitation with a touch. He told himself that he had to proceed very, very carefully. The territory he was in was strewn with psychological land mines. And while the brunette standing before him seemed breathtakingly familiar in some ways, she was very much a stranger in others. He couldn’t make assumptions about anything where she was concerned, including her receptivity to physical contact.
“Now?”
He nodded.
“Why?”
Lord. How was he supposed to answer that?
“Auld lang syne?” he offered after a moment, sidestepping potentially explosive explanations.
“I don’t know....”
“One drink, Lucy. No strings attached.”
She nailed him with a formidable look. “With nearly ten years and a divorce decree between us? I should think not.”
Chris swallowed hard, sensing that he was one—maybe two—wrong words from provoking his ex-wife into turning her back on him and walking away. The possibility shook him in ways be couldn’t have begun to describe.
“Please?” he said in a low voice.
Lucy lowered her lashes, veiling her dark eyes. After a few seconds, she lifted them. “All right, Chris,” she agreed, meeting his gaze once again. “There’s a place just down the street we can go. One drink. No strings. And since this is my town, it’s my treat.”
They wound up on opposite sides of a small table tucked in a comparatively quiet corner of a hotel bar located a few blocks from Gulliver’s Travels.
Although she’d picked the place and made it clear that she was going to pay for the drinks, Chris controlled the conversation from the moment they sat down. But he did it so subtly that Lucy didn’t figure out what was going on until after she’d finished recounting how she’d come to be the office manager of Gulliver’s Travels and launched into an enthusiastic description of the job she did and the unusual collection of people with whom she did it.
By then ... well, it wasn’t too late for her to stop talking. She could have shut up about herself and what she’d done since their divorce. She could have put her ex-husband on notice that she was wise to his manipulative behavior, as well. Only she didn’
t.
She didn’t because she wanted Chris to understand what kind of woman she’d become since he’d last seen her. She wanted him to recognize that she’d changed a lot more than her hairstyle during the past decade.
That there was a nasty element of “Nyah-nyah-nyah, see how well I’ve done without you” fueling her protracted monologue, Lucy couldn’t have denied. She was only human. It pleased her to have accomplishments to brag about, just as it pleased her to know that the wine-colored wool dress she was wearing just happened to be one of the most becoming garments in her wardrobe. Still, her mean-spirited desire to flaunt and taunt grew weaker and weaker the longer she spoke.
It did so because her ex-husband made it clear that he was impressed by what he was hearing. He nodded in all the right places, his eyes never wavering from hers. He leaned forward several times, as though wanting to make certain that he caught every nuance of what she was telling him. He also asked a lot of perceptive questions.
Questions about the business degree she’d finally earned a year after their split.
Questions about the entry-level job she’d landed with the office that oversaw Chicago’s thriving tourist and convention trade and how she’d leveraged it into a position with a medium-size travel agency.
Questions about the way she’d climbed the ranks at the agency, mastering the ins and outs of organizing complicated trips, pleasing picky customers and keeping up with the massive amount of paperwork imposed by various and sundry local, state and federal bureaucracies.
Questions about how an impulsive response to an ad in the employment opportunities section of a leisure industry publication had led to her job with Gulliver’s Travels.
No one in her family had ever asked her such questions. None of her friends, either. Oh, sure, her onetime maid of honor and postdivorce cheerleader inquired about her work whenever they spoke. But Lucy knew that Tina—now Mrs. Scott “Chachi” Palucei!—wasn’t really that interested.
She didn’t need Chris’s approval, she assured herself as her ex-husband smiled his endorsement of the way she’d handled her initial employment interview with the formidable owner of Gulliver’s Travels. Still, she had to admit that it was extraordinarily sweet to receive it.