"For Miss Bancroft," a
Tribune
reporter said, and when Meredith looked at her she said, "Could you tell us why your marriage broke up?"
Meredith knew this was one question Matt couldn't answer for her and desperation provided inspiration. In what she hoped was an amused voice, she said ruefully, "At the time, I seemed to think that life with Mr. Farrell might be ... boring." While they were still laughing, she added more seriously, "I was a city girl, and very young, and Matt left for the wilds of South America just a few weeks after we were married. Our lives were on very different courses."
"Is there any chance of a reconciliation?" an NBC newsman asked.
"Of course not," Meredith replied automatically.
"That's ridiculous after all these years," Parker added.
"Mr. Farrell?" the same newsman prodded. "Would you care to answer that question?"
"No," he said implacably.
"Is that your answer, or are
you declining to answer?"
"Take it whichever way you'd like," Matt replied with a slight smile that didn't reach his eyes, then he nodded to another reporter to ask his question. They came fast and furious, but the worst ones had already been asked, and Meredith let the noise swirl around her, feeling at the audience and said, "Our time is about up. We all hope that you've had your questions answered. Parker," he said with an admirable imitation of conviviality, "do you have anything to add?"
Parker matched his smile. "I think everything has already been said that needed to be, Matt. Now let's clear out of here and let Meredith get back to running this place."
"Before you go," one woman called out imperatively, ignoring the attempt to close the conference, "I'd like to say that you—all three of you are handling this with extraordinary grace. Particularly you, Mr. Reynolds, since you're rather caught in the middle of something you had no control over—then or now. One might expect you to be feeling a certain amount of antagonism for Mr. Farrell for partially causing the delay of your marriage to Miss Bancroft."
"There's no reason for antagonism," Parker said with a killer smile. "Matt Farrell and I are civilized men and we're handling this in the friendliest of ways. We—all three of us—are caught in unusual circumstances that can and will be easily remedied. In fact, this whole problem is little different from a business contract that wasn't properly executed originally and now has to have the T's crossed."
Lisa was waiting in the wings to catch Meredith's hand and give her a hug. "Come upstairs with us," Meredith whispered, hoping Lisa's presence might force Matt and Parker to behave more civilly to each other. As they rode upstairs in the same elevator that was crowded with shoppers, a woman in the back nudged the woman beside her. "That's Meredith Bancroft with her husband and her
fianc
é
," she said in a carrying whisper. "One of each—isn't that something? And
that's
Matthew Farrell, the husband. He dates movie stars!"
Meredith's color rose at the first sentence, but no one said anything until they were safely within the privacy of
Meredith's office. Lisa broke the silence by giving Meredith another hug and a laughing look. "You were wonderful,
Mer
! Brilliant!"
"I wouldn't go that far," Meredith said weakly.
"No, you were! I couldn't believe it when you said you'd had to dress up like a prune in the sixth grade. That's not at all like your usual proper self." Turning to Matt, she added, "You have an excellent effect on her."
"Don't you have something you're being paid to do?" Parker snapped.
Lisa, who worked incredibly long hours, often after the store was closed, shrugged. "I put in more hours here than I'm paid for as it is."
"I do have things I have to do," Meredith said wryly. Parker stepped forward and kissed her cheek. Smiling into her eyes, he said, "I'll see you Saturday night."
Matt gave Meredith two seconds to decline, and when she hesitated, he looked at Parker and stated flatly, "I'm afraid you won't."
"Now, look, Farrell! Saturdays may be yours for the next eleven weeks, but this one is mine. It happens to be Meredith's thirtieth birthday, and our plans were made weeks ago. We're going to Antonio's."
Turning to Lisa, Matt said shortly, "Do you have plans for Saturday?"
"Nothing I can't change, actually," Lisa said, startled.
"Fine, we'll make it a foursome," he decreed. "But not at Antonio's. It's too public and too bright in there. We'll be recognized in seconds. I'll pick the place." Irrationally annoyed because Meredith hadn't told Parker no, he nodded curtly and left.
Parker followed on his heels, but Lisa lingered, a dazed expression on her face as she sank down on the arm of a chair. "My God,
Mer
," she said, laughing, "no wonder you agreed to his bargain. That is the most amazing man I've ever met—"
"There's nothing funny about any of this," Meredith replied, refusing to comment on Matt's personal qualities. "My father isn't supposed to read or watch anything on his cruise that isn't completely frivolous. If he decides to break the doctor's rules and watch the news, I'll be lucky if we don't have to send a medical evacuation plane for him."
"If I were you," Lisa said in disgust, "I'd be sending fighter jets out to get him, after what he did eleven years ago!"
"Don't make me think about that now, it only drives me insane with frustration. When he comes home, he and I will have it out. I've thought about all this for days, though, and in fairness to my father, I think he probably believed he was protecting me from a fortune hunter who would break my heart in the end."
"So he broke it instead!"
Meredith hesitated then quietly admitted, "Something like that." Then she forced her personal life out of her mind for now, because that was the only way she could cope. "I'll see you Saturday," she told Lisa.
Chapter 45
At 4:30 the following afternoon Matt glanced up from the conference table where he was meeting with three of his executives and reached for the telephone. "If it's not an emergency," he told Eleanor before she could give a reason for interrupting him, "I don't want to hear about it until I'm done here."
"Miss Bancroft is on the line," she said with a smug smile in her voice. "Does that constitute an emergency?"
"Yes, it does," he said wryly, but as he answered Meredith's call, he wasn't feeling especially pleasant. He'd phoned her late the previous afternoon to tell her
Spyzhalski
was under control and in a place reporters couldn't get to him. Her secretary had said Meredith was going to be in meetings for several hours, so rather than let her stay in suspense, Matt dictated a carefully worded message to the secretary and asked her to take it to Meredith. When she didn't bother to call him back last night, he'd wondered if she was too busy celebrating the news in bed with Reynolds to bother. All week the possibility that she was still sleeping with her
fiance
had been haunting him. Last night it had kept him awake until dawn. Flicking a curt glance of apology at the men seated around the conference table, Matt picked up the phone.
"Matt," she said, sounding harassed, "I know this is your night, but I have a meeting at five o'clock, and I'm swamped with work."
"At the risk of sounding inflexible," he said in a cool, implacable voice, "a deal's a deal."
"I know," she replied with an exasperated sigh, "but besides having to be here late, I also have to bring some work home with me, and come in again tomorrow morning. I'm really not up to a big night out or a big confrontation with you either," she added with a trace of wry humor.
In a tone that conveyed his unwillingness to cooperate, he said, "What are you suggesting?"
"I was hoping you'd be willing to meet me here, and we could have an early dinner, somewhere casual and close by."
Matt's annoyance evaporated, but on the off chance she was trying to taper him off by setting a precedent for quick public dates, he added in a polite but firm voice, "That's fine. I have a briefcase full of my own work. I'll bring it along and after dinner we can spend a quiet, productive evening at—your place or mine?"
She hesitated. "Will you promise we'll work? I mean, I don't want to have to ... to have to ..."
His lips twitched with a smile as her voice trailed off. Obviously she did have pressing work, and equally obviously she was worried that he would try to maneuver her into bed. "We'll work," he promised.
Her relief came out in a laughing sigh. "Okay. Why don't you meet me here about six o'clock? There's a good restaurant just across the street. We can go to my apartment afterward."
"Good enough," he said, completely willing to adapt his schedule to hers as long as she didn't try to avoid him. "Are the reporters leaving you alone?"
"I've had a few calls, but we gave them such a show yesterday, I think it's all going to die a natural death now. I talked to Parker last night and again this morning, and he's being left alone too."
Matt didn't give a damn if reporters devoured Parker alive, and he wasn't thrilled by the discovery that she'd talked to him twice since the press conference when she'd not bothered to call Matt until then. Conversely, he was vastly relieved that she apparently hadn't been with him last night, so he said that was good news, and that he'd come up to her office around six o'clock.
After shouldering his way through the crowds of Christmas shoppers on the main floor at six o'clock, the relative silence on Meredith's floor when Matt stepped off the elevator was a welcome relief. Off to his right, two secretaries were working late, but the receptionist and all the others had already left. At the opposite end of the carpeted corridor, Meredith's office door was open and he could see a group of men and one woman seated in there. Her secretary's desk was cleared, her computer covered for the night, so rather than sitting down in the reception area, Matt took off his coat and perched his hip on the secretary's desk, pleased with this unexpected opportunity to see how Meredith worked and what sorts of things occupied her days. Everything about her intrigued him. It always had.
Unaware of Matt's presence outside her office, Meredith looked at the invoice Gordon Mitchell, the general merchandise manager in charge of women's dresses and accessories, had just handed her. "You bought three hundred dollars worth of gold metal buttons?" she said with a puzzled smile. "Why are you showing me this? It's certainly within your budget."
"Because," he replied blandly, "those gold buttons are the reason for that sales increase in women's dresses and ready to wear that you've been watching happen all week. I thought you'd like to know."
"You bought them and had them sewn on locally, is that it?"
"That's it," he said, stretching out his legs and looking pleased. "If a dress or a suit has gold metal buttons on it, they walk out of here. It's a craze."
Meredith gazed at him levelly, avoiding looking at Theresa Bishop, the vice president of creative merchandising, whose job it was to predict fashion trends far in advance. "I can't completely share your satisfaction," she told him quietly. "Theresa advised us long ago, after she returned from a trip to New York, that one of the continuing fashion trends was going to be clothing decorated with gold metal buttons. You ignored her. The fact that you belatedly bought the buttons and had them sewn on now can't possibly compensate for the sales we lost before and
while you were doing it. What else do you have to report?"
"Very little," he snapped.
Ignoring his attitude, Meredith reached out and pressed a button on the computer screen that showed sales in the past four hours in all the departments under his supervision there and in the branch stores across the country. "Your accessory sales are fifty-four percent higher than over this same day last year. You're doing something right there."
"Thank you, Madam President," he said snidely.
"I seem to recall that you hired a new manager for accessories, and he brought in a new buyer. Is that right?"
"Perfectly correct, as always!"
"What's happening with
Donna
Karan's
DKNY line you bought so much of?" she continued, impervious to his tone.
"It's doing fantastic, exactly as I thought it would."
"Good. What do you intend to do with all those moderate skirts and blouses you bought?"
"I'm going to keystone them and get them out of here."
"All right," she said reluctantly, "but mark them all Special Purchase and keep our labels out of them. I mean that. I was on the third floor today and I saw some blouses with Bancroft labels in them and a price tag of eighty-five dollars. They weren't worth forty-five dollars."
"They are when they have a Bancroft label in them!" he shot back. "That label is worth something to customers. I shouldn't have to remind you of that."
"It
won't
be if we start sticking it on junk. Get those blouses off that floor and onto clearance racks tomorrow. I mean that, and cut the labels out of them. You know which ones I mean. What about the bucket goods you were so high on?"
"I bought them. I've seen the merchandise—mostly costume jewelry, some of it very nice."