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She’d delayed looking at him for as long as she could. Any longer, and he’d see weakness. Slowly she turned her head.
He was as dazzling as ever with those tiger eyes and bladed cheekbones, that straight nose and movie-star jaw. He wore a charcoal gray business suit with a white shirt and navy tie. She hadn’t seen him so formally dressed since his wedding day, and she struggled against a dark tide of emotion. “I mean it,” she said. “Let me out right now.”
“Not until we’ve talked.”
“I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to talk to anybody.”
“What do you mean? You love to talk.”
“Not anymore.”
The interior of the stretch had long seats running up the sides and tiny blue lights edging the roof. An enormous bouquet of red roses lay on the seat in front of a built-in bar. She dug into her coat pocket for her cell. “I’m calling the police and telling them I’ve been kidnapped.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“This is Manhattan. You’re not God here. They’ll send you to Rikers for sure.”
“Doubtful, but no sense taking chances.” He snatched the phone away and shoved it in the pocket of his suit coat.
She was an actor’s daughter, and she produced a bored shrug. “Fine. Talk. And hurry up about it. My fiancé’s waiting for me at the apartment.” She pressed her hip against the door, as far away from him as she could get. “I told you it wouldn’t take me long to forget you.”
He blinked, then reached for his bouquet of guilt roses and set them in her lap. “I thought you might like these.”
“You thought wrong.” She flung them back at him.
As the bouquet hit him in the head, Ted accepted the fact that this reunion wasn’t going any better than he deserved. Kidnapping Meg had been one more miscalculation on his part. Not that he’d planned to kidnap her. He’d intended to show up at her door with the roses and a heartfelt declaration of everlasting love, then sweep her off into the limo. But as the car turned onto her street, he’d spotted her, and all his common sense had vanished.
Even from the rear, with her body enveloped in a long purple trench coat, her shoulders hunched against the rain, he’d recognized her. Other women had the same long-legged gait, the same determined swing of the arms, but none of them made him feel as if his chest had imploded.
The dim blue lights in the limo’s interior picked up the same shadows beneath her eyes that he knew had taken up residence under his own. Instead of the rustic beads and ancient coins he was used to seeing dangling from her ears, she wore no jewelry, and the tiny, empty holes in her lobes gave her a vulnerability that tore at him. Her jeans poked out beneath the hem of her wet purple trench coat, and her canvas sneakers were soaked. Her hair was longer than it was when he’d last seen her, spangled with raindrops, and bright red. He wanted her back the way she’d been. He wanted to kiss away the new hollows below her cheekbones and put the warmth back in her eyes. He wanted to make her smile. Laugh. Make her love him again as deeply as he loved her.
As she stared straight ahead at the partition that separated them from his mother’s longtime Manhattan driver, he refused to consider the possibility that he was too late. She had to be lying about the fiancé. Except how could any man resist falling in love with her? He needed to be sure. “Tell me about this fiancé of yours.”
“No way. I don’t want you to feel any worse about yourself than you already do.”
She was lying. At least he prayed she was. “So you think you know how I feel?”
“Definitely. You feel guilty.”
“True.”
“Frankly, I don’t have the energy right now to reassure you. As you can see, I’m doing just fine. Now get on with your life and leave me alone.”
She didn’t look as though she was doing just fine. She looked exhausted. Worse, there was an aloofness—a gravity—about her so at odds with the funny, irreverent woman he knew that he couldn’t make the pieces fit. “I’ve missed you,” he said.
“Glad to hear it,” she replied, in a voice as remote as those mountains he’d feared she might be climbing. “Could you please take me back to my apartment?”
“Later.”
“Ted, I mean it. We have nothing more to talk about.”
“Maybe you don’t, but I do.” Her determination to get away scared him. He’d witnessed firsthand how stubborn she could be, and he hated having that resolve turned against him. He needed a way to break through her ice. “I thought we . . . might take a boat ride.”
“A boat ride? I don’t think so.”
“I knew it was a stupid idea, but the rebuilding committee insisted that was the way to go with you. Forget I mentioned it.”
Her head shot up. “You talked this over with the rebuilding committee?”
