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“Right,” Margot said, as if she’d just made her point. “Before that damned premiere of Obsession! Until then, you and Zane were comfortably ensconced in marital bliss. To tell you the truth, I was envious.”
“You?” Kaylie’s eyes rounded on her sister. “But you and Trevor—”
Margot waved impatiently, and sadness stole over her features. “I know, I know. But the truth of the matter was, my marriage wasn’t perfect.”
This was news to Kaylie. For as long as she could remember, Margot had been in love with Trevor Holloway.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong. I loved Trevor more than I should have and I know that he loved me. But—” she lifted a shoulder “—we had our problems, just like anyone else.”
“What kinds of problems?” Kaylie asked.
“It doesn’t matter—they seem stupid now and petty. I’d gladly take all our problems back if Trevor were still alive.” Margot sighed and squinted out to sea, watching the sun lower in a blaze of brilliant gold that scorched the sky and reflected on the water. She seemed to focus on a solitary sailboat that skimmed across the horizon—a sailboat not unlike the one on which Trevor had lost his life.
Kaylie thought she was finished, but Margot settled deeper into her deck chair and continued, “No marriage is perfect, but some are better than others and some are the best. I have a feeling that you and Zane had one of the best—at least until that creep Lee Johnston decided to mess things up.” Margot shuddered.
“Even before the premiere, Zane was…autocratic.”
“He was scared. You’d been getting those letters and he was terrified that something might happen to you—which it did.” Margot leaned across the table, her gaze touching her sister’s. “Give the guy a break, Kaylie. All he’s ever done is love you too much. Is that such a crime?”
“I guess not.”
“I know not!” Margot finished her glass of wine. “The point is that Zane’s crazy about you. Also, he’s handsome, successful, caring, dependable, honest, intelligent and has a great sense of humor. What more do you want?”
“Someone who’ll let me make my own decisions,” Kaylie replied before smiling and adding, “but of course he’ll have to be handsome, successful, caring, dependable—and all the rest of those qualities you reeled off.”
“Then if I were you, I wouldn’t look any farther than your ex-husband,” Margot said as she climbed out of her chair and stretched. “Mark my words, Kaylie, you’ll never find a man who loves you more than Zane does. And, if you’ll stop long enough to be honest with yourself, you’ll realize that you’ll never love a man the way you love him.” She reached for her purse and concluded, “You just have to ask yourself what you really want in life—to be lonely and independent or to take a chance on love—real love. I’ll see you later. Think about what I said.”
Kaylie figured she didn’t have much choice. She watched Margot leave and knew her older sister was right. She’d never love a man as she loved Zane.
* * *
Zane paced around his office. He’d spent the better part of the afternoon listening to his accountant argue that another office, located in Denver or Phoenix, was just what the company needed. Zane wasn’t interested. Expanding the business suddenly seemed trivial.
For the past week he’d tried to stay away from Kaylie. He hadn’t called her, he hadn’t visited her, he hadn’t even shown up on the set of West Coast Morning, though he had tuned in every day and had sworn under his breath whenever Kaylie and Alan shared a smile or a joke.
“It’s just her job,” he told himself, but he couldn’t stem the stream of jealousy that swept through his blood. More than once, he had snapped off the TV in disgust, only to click it on again.
But he was giving her time to come to a decision—the most important decision of his life!
He slumped back into his chair, picked up the accountant’s proposal, then tossed it into his wastebasket. He didn’t need another office to stretch the corporate tentacles of Flannery Security. He didn’t really care if he never made another dollar. He just wanted Kaylie.
“You’re obsessed,” he told himself, not for the first time, as he strode to the bar, found a bottle of Scotch and poured three fingers into his glass. Then he checked his watch. Barely one-thirty in the afternoon. Disgusted with himself, he tossed the drink into the sink, strode back to his desk and fished the figures for the new office from his wastebasket.
“Concentrate, Flannery,” he ordered himself as he picked up a pencil to jot notes. But the letters and numbers on the pages jumbled before his eyes, and Kaylie’s face, fresh and smiling, framed in a cloud of golden hair, swam in his mind.
His pencil snapped.
Muttering an oath aimed at himself, he grabbed his jacket and marched out of the office. “Cancel all my appointments this afternoon,” he told Peggy as he headed toward the elevator.
“And where can I reach you?”
“I wish I knew,” he replied. The elevator doors whispered open, and he climbed inside. He thought of a dozen schemes to contact Kaylie again, but dismissed them all. He’d just have to wait.
* * *
The following few days Kaylie was nervous as a cat. Margot’s advice kept running through her mind. She half expected Zane to fall back into his old pattern—and she suspected that he might have her under surveillance.
But he never showed up at her apartment or the beach house again. Nor did he call or leave a message on her machine.
