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He set down his fork. “She was amazing. Brilliant. Funny. Sweet. I didn’t deserve her.”
“She must have thought differently, or she wouldn’t have married you.”
He looked slightly taken aback, as if he’d gotten so used to regarding himself as a second-class citizen in his marriage that he couldn’t comprehend it any other way. “She was barely twenty-five when she died,” he said. “A kid.”
She rolled her pearls between her fingers. “And you’re still in love with her.”
“Not in the way you mean.” He toyed with the spun sugar miniature of the Scofield mansion resting above his plate. “I guess the twenty-five-year-old inside me always will be, but that was a long time ago. She lived in her head a lot. I was as likely to find the car keys in the refrigerator as in her purse. She didn’t care anything about her appearance. It drove me crazy. She was always losing buttons or ripping things…”
Gooseflesh crept along the base of her spine. “It’s hard to imagine you with anyone like that. The women you date are all so elegant.”
He shrugged. “Life is messy. I look for order wherever I can find it.”
She pleated her napkin in her lap. “But you haven’t fallen in love with any of them.”
“How do you know? Maybe I fell in love and got rejected.”
“Unlikely. You’re the grand prize in the ex-wives sweepstakes. Stable, intelligent, and great-looking.”
“I was too busy managing Georgie’s career to remarry.”
She heard his leftover self-rebuke. “You did a good job with her for a lot of years,” she said. “I’ve heard the stories. As a kid, Georgie couldn’t resist either a microphone or a pair of dancing shoes. Stop beating yourself up about it.”
“She loved to perform. She’d climb up on tables to dance if I wasn’t watching.” His expression clouded over again. “But still, I should never have pushed her so much. Her mother would have hated that.”
“Hey, it’s easy to criticize when you’re standing on the celestial sidelines watching somebody else do the heavy lifting.”
She’d had the audacity to make light of his sainted wife, and his expression grew still and cold. In the old days, she’d have fallen all over herself trying to make up for it, but she didn’t feel the urge, even as his frown grew more pronounced. Instead, she leaned closer and whispered, “Get over it.”
His head snapped up, and his killer glare turned his eyes into bullets.
She met his gaze straight on. “It’s time.”
Withdrawal was Paul York’s weapon of choice, and she waited for him to turn away, but he didn’t. The ice melted from his eyes. “Interesting. Georgie said the same thing.”
He retrieved the napkin Laura had dropped and gave her a long look that melted her bones.
Chapter 23
At first Chaz noticed the waiter because he was really cute and he didn’t look like an actor. Too short, but with a nice body and a dark, burr haircut. As he passed the hors d’oeuvres trays, he kept stealing glances at everybody, a little sneaky, but she was doing the same thing, so she didn’t think much about it. Then she noticed the awkward way he kept turning his body.
When she finally figured out what he was doing, she was totally pissed. She waited until the meal was nearly done before she excused herself and slipped into the service hallway, where she found him arranging dishes on a metal cart. As she came up next to him, he took in her halo with a cocky grin. “Hey, angel. What can I do for you?”
She glanced at his name tag. “You can hand over your camera, Marcus.”
His cockiness faded. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You have a hidden camera.”
“You’re crazy.”
She tried to remember where television investigative reporters hid their cameras.
“I know who you are,” the waiter said. “You work for Bram and Georgie. How much do they pay you?”
“More than you’re getting.” Marcus wasn’t tall, but he looked like he worked out, and it belatedly occurred to her that maybe she should have gotten someone from security to handle this. But there were people around, and it seemed better to keep it quiet. “You can either give me the camera, Marcus, or I’ll have somebody take it off you.”
She must have sounded like she meant it because he looked uneasy. The fact that she could intimidate him, even a little, made her feel good.
