LITMIR.BIZ

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had an in-depth conversation!”

      Debbie’s voice was calm, but then, she was a professional in the mental health field. It would take more than Amy’s imaginary encounter with her dead husband to shock this woman. “Okay. What about?”

      Amy was feeling sillier by the moment. “It’s so dumb.”

      “Right. So tell me anyway.”

      “He said I was going to meet—this friend of his—Harry somebody. Who names people Harry in this day and age? I’m supposed to fall in love with this guy, marry him and have two kids.”

      “Before nightfall?” Debbie retorted, without missing a beat.

      “Practically. Ty implied that I’ve been holding up some celestial plan by keeping to myself so much!”

      Debbie sighed. “This is one that could be worked out in a fifteen-minute segment of the Donahue show, Ryan. You’re a healthy young woman, and you haven’t been with a man since Ty, and you’re lonely, physically and emotionally. If you want to talk this out with somebody, I could give you a name—”

      Amy was already shaking her head. “No,” she interrupted, “that’s all right. I feel foolish enough discussing this with my dearest friend. I don’t think I’m up to stretching out on a couch and telling all to some strange doctor.”

      “Still—”

      “I’ll be all right, Deb,” Amy broke in again, this time a little impatiently. She didn’t know what she’d wanted her friend to say when she told her about Tyler’s “visit,” but she felt let down. She hung up quickly and then dashed off to her first meeting of the day.

      Amy often marveled that she’d made such a success of her business, especially since she’d dropped out of school when Tyler passed the bar exam and devoted herself entirely to being a wife and mother. She’d been totally happy doing those things and hadn’t even blushed to admit to having no desire to work outside the home.

      After Tyler’s death, however, the pain and rage had made her so restless that staying home was impossible. She’d alternated between fits of sobbing and periods of wooden silence, and after a few weeks she’d gone numb inside.

      One night, very late, she’d seen a good-looking, fast-talking man on television, swearing by all that was holy that she, too, could build a career in real estate trading and make a fortune.

      Amy had enough money to last a lifetime, between Tyler’s life insurance and savings and her maternal grandmother’s trust fund, but the idea of a challenge, of building something, appealed to her. In fact, on some level it resurrected her. Here was something to do, something to keep her from smothering Ashley and Oliver with motherly affection.

      She’d called a toll-free number and ordered a set of tapes and signed up for a seminar, as well.

      The tapes arrived and Amy absorbed them. The voice was pleasant and the topic complicated enough that she had to concentrate, which meant she had brief respites from thinking about Tyler. Under any other circumstances, Amy would not have had the brass to actually do the things suggested by the tapes and seminar, but all her normal inhibitions had been frozen inside her, like small animals trapped in a sudden Ice Age.

      She’d started buying and selling and wheeling and dealing, and she’d been successful at it.

      Still, she thought miserably as she drove toward her meeting, Tyler had been right, she wasn’t happy. Now that the numbness had worn off, all those old needs and hurts were back in full force and being a real estate magnate wasn’t fulfilling them.

      Harry Griffith smiled grimly to himself as he took off his headphones and handed them to his copilot, Mark Ellis. “Here you are, mate,” he said. “Bring her in for me, will you?”

      Mark nodded as he eagerly took over the controls, and Harry left the cockpit and proceeded into the main section of the private jet. Often it was filled with business people, hangers-on and assorted bimbos, but that day Harry and Mark were cutting through the sky alone.

      He went on to the sumptuous bedroom, unknotting his silk tie with one hand as he closed the door with the other. He’d had a meeting in San Francisco, but now he could change into more casual clothes.

      With a sigh Harry pulled open a few drawers and took out a lightweight cable-knit sweater and jeans, still thinking of his friend. He hadn’t been present for Ty’s services two years before. He’d been in the outback, at one of the mines, and by the time he’d returned to Sydney and learned about Tyler’s death, it was three weeks after the fact.

      He’d sent flowers to Tyler’s parents, who’d been like a second mother and father to him ever since his first visit to the states, and to the pretty widow. Harry had never seen Amy Ryan or her children, except on the front of the Christmas cards he always received from them, and he hadn’t known what to say to her.

      It had been a damn shame, a man like Tyler dying in his prime like that, and Harry could find no words of comfort inside himself.

      Now, however, he had business with Tyler’s lovely lady, and he would have to open this last door that protected his own grief and endure whatever emotions might be set free in the process.

      Harry tossed aside his tie and began unfastening his cuff links. Maybe he’d even go and stand by Tyler’s grave for a while, tell his friend he was a cheeky lot for bailing out so early in the game that way.

      He pulled the sweater on over his head, replaced his slacks with jeans, then stood staring at himself in the mirror. Like the bed, chairs and bureau, it was bolted down.

      Where Tyler had been handsome in an altar-boy sort of way, Harry was classically so, with dark hair, indigo-blue eyes and an elegant manner. He regarded his exceptional looks as tools, and he’d used them without compunction, every day of his life, to get what he wanted.

      Or most of what he wanted, that is. He’d never had a real family of his own, the way Tyler had. God knew, Madeline hadn’t even tried to disguise herself as a wife, and she’d sent the child she’d borne her first husband to boarding school in Switzerland. Madeline hadn’t wanted to trouble herself with a twelve-year-old daughter, and Eireen’s letters and phone calls had been ignored more than answered.

      Harry felt sick, remembering. He’d tried to establish a bond with the child on her rare holidays in Australia, but while Madeline hadn’t wanted to be bothered with the little girl, she hadn’t relished the idea of sharing her, either.

      Then, after another stilted Christmas, Madeline had decided she needed a little time on the “the continent,” and would therefore see Eireen as far as Zurich. Their plane had gone down midway between New Zealand and the Fiji Islands, and there had been no survivors.

      Harry had not wept for his wife—the emotion he’d once mistaken for love had died long before she did—but he’d cried for that bewildered child who’d never been permitted to love or be loved.

      Later, when Tyler had died, Harry had gotten drunk—something he had never done before or since—and stayed that way for three nightmarish days. It had been an injustice of cosmic proportions that a man like Tyler Ryan, who had had everything a man could dream of, should be sent spinning off the world that way, like a child from a carnival ride that turned too fast.

      “Mr. Griffith?”

      Mark’s voice, coming over the intercom system, startled Harry. “Yes?” he snapped, pressing a button on the instrument affixed to the wall above his bed, a little testy at the prospect of landing in Seattle.

      “We’re starting our descent, sir. Would you like to come back and take the controls?”

      “You can handle it,” Harry answered, removing his finger from the button. He thought of Tyler’s parents and the big house on Mercer Island where he’d spent some of the happiest times of his life. “You can handle it,” he repeated gravely, even though Mark couldn’t hear him now. “The question is, can I?”

      Amy

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