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The lobby doors opened and closed. In the course of one summer, his comfortable life had been destroyed.
“I’m messy and wild and disruptive, and you have broken my heart.”
The unbearable hurt in those green-blue eyes had cut right through him. But what about his heart? His hurt? How did she think he felt when the person he’d grown to count on the most left him in the lurch right when he needed her?
“My stupid heart . . . ,” she’d said. “It was singing.”
He waited in the lobby all afternoon, but Meg never appeared.
That night, he wandered through Chinatown and got drunk in a Mission District bar. The next day he pulled up the collar of his jacket and walked the city in the rain. He rode a cable car, drifted through the tea garden in Golden Gate Park, poked into a couple of souvenir shops on Fisherman’s Wharf. He tried to eat a bowl of clam chowder at the Cliff House to warm up but set it aside after a few bites.
“Just the sight of you made me feel like dancing.”
He woke up too early the next morning, hungover and miserable. A cold, thick fog had settled in, but he hit the empty streets anyway and climbed to the top of Telegraph Hill.
Coit Tower wasn’t open yet, so he walked the grounds, gazing out across the city and the bay as the fog began to lift. He wished he could talk this whole mess over with Lucy, but he could hardly call her up after all this time and tell her that her best friend was an immature, demanding, overly emotional, unreasonable nutcase, and what the hell was he supposed to do about that?
He missed Lucy. Everything had been so easy with her.
He missed her . . . but he didn’t want to wring her neck like he wanted to wring Meg’s. He didn’t want to make love with her until her eyes turned to smoke. He didn’t yearn for the sound of her voice, the joy of her laughter.
He didn’t ache for Lucy. Dream about her. Long for her.
He didn’t love her.
With a rustle of leaves and a chilly gust, the wind carried the fog out to sea.
Chapter Twenty-Three
A few hours later, Ted was headed south on I-5 in a rented Chevy Trailblazer. He drove too fast and stopped just once to grab a mug of bitter coffee. He prayed Meg had gone to L.A. with her parents when she’d left Wynette instead of heading off to Jaipur or Ulan Bator or some other place where he couldn’t get to her and tell her how much he loved her. The wind that had carried away the San Francisco fog had also swept away the last of his confusion. He’d been left with a blinding clarity that cut through all the turmoil of old fiancées and aborted weddings, a clarity that let him see how skillfully he’d used logic to hide his fear of having his easy life disturbed by chaotic emotions.
He, of all people, should have known love wasn’t orderly or rational. Hadn’t his own parents’ passionate, illogical love affair overcome deception, separation, and pigheadedness to last more than three decades? That kind of soul-deep love was what he felt for Meg—the complicated, disruptive, overpowering love he’d refused to admit was missing in his relationship with Lucy. He and Lucy had fit together so perfectly in his mind. His mind . . . but not his heart. It should never have taken him so long to figure that out.
He ground his teeth in frustration when he hit L.A. traffic. Meg was a creature of passion and impulse, and he hadn’t seen her in over a month. What if time and distance had convinced her she deserved something better than a boneheaded Texan who didn’t know his own mind?
He couldn’t think like that. He couldn’t let himself contemplate what he’d do if she’d gotten fed up with the whole idea of ever having fallen in love with him. If only she hadn’t cut off her phone. And what about her history of hopping on planes and flying off to the farthest reaches of the planet? He wanted her to stay put, but Meg wasn’t like that.
It was early evening by the time he reached the Korandas’ Brentwood estate. He wondered if they knew Meg hadn’t shown up in San Francisco. Although he couldn’t be certain they were the ones who’d put up the winning bid, who else would have done it? The irony didn’t escape him. What the parents of daughters most liked about him was his stability, but he’d never felt less stable in his life.
He identified himself over the intercom. As the gates swung open, he remembered he hadn’t shaved for two days. He should have stopped at a hotel first to clean up. His clothes were wrinkled, his eyes bloodshot, and he had a bad case of flop sweat, but he wasn’t going to turn back now.
He parked his car at the side of the English Tudor that was the Korandas’ primary California home. Best-case scenario, Meg would be here. Worst-case scenario . . . He wouldn’t think about worst-case scenarios. The Korandas were his allies, not his enemies. If she weren’t here, they’d help him find her.
But the cool hostility Fleur Koranda exhibited when she opened the front door did nothing to bolster his shaken confidence. “Yes?”
That was all. No smile. No handshake. Definitely no hug. Regardless of age, women tended to go all melty-eyed when they saw him. It had happened so many times he barely noticed, but it wasn’t happening now, and the novelty unbalanced him. “I need to see Meg,” he blurted out, and then, stupidly, “I— We haven’t been formally introduced. I’m Ted Beaudine.”
“Ah, yes. Mr. Irresistible.”
She didn’t say it like it was a compliment.
“Is Meg here?” he asked.
Fleur Koranda looked at him exactly the way his mother had looked at Meg. Fleur was a beautiful six-foot Amazon with the same boldly slashed eyebrows Meg had, but not Meg’s coloring or more delicate features. “The last time I saw you,” Fleur said, “you were scrambling in the dirt, trying to knock a man’s head off.”
If Meg had the guts to stand up to his mother, he could face hers down. “Yes, ma’am. And I’d do it again. Now I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me where I can find her.”
“Why?”
