LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

something he’d come up with on the spur of the moment. He’d been thinking about it. For how long, she didn’t know. Since his meeting with Dr. Feldman?

      She had been hunting down a husband for nearly two months. She’d called up two former boyfriends, but it hadn’t taken long to cross those names off her list. They had been clumsy, lackluster relationships in the first place, and the passage of several years hadn’t helped.

      She’d made some discreet inquiries through friends. Any men out there with a reason of their own for wanting to sprint down the aisle at short notice? No takers. She’d placed that ill-fated personal ad.

      Now, this stranger, Jodie’s first cousin, had offered her just what she wanted and she was holding back, wary and skeptical.

      “Does that matter?” he asked. “Do my reasons matter?”

      “Of course they matter!” She crashed her soda glass onto the table, splashing her hand with cold, fizzy liquid. “Obviously it would help my case if we got married, and you’ve realized that, but what do you stand to gain from it?”

      “The same thing that you do, Suzanne.” He was watching her, his eyes steady and open. “The knowledge that it will give Alice the best chance of a happy future.”

      “My mother and her husband, Perry, are planning to give her exactly that. It’s not as if she’s going to get sent to an orphanage, or something. She’ll have a mom and a dad and it’ll be fine.”

      “If that’s the case, why are you fighting it?” he asked.

      She couldn’t answer. Just sat there with her mouth half-open, feeling as if someone had doused her in a bucket of hot water. He had cut to the heart of the issue in nine words. If she could sincerely believe that Mom and Perry would love Alice and would put her first in their lives, then she wouldn’t be scrambling so desperately for ways to strengthen her claim, and Stephen Serkin-Rimsky knew it.

      So maybe he did care. He’d talked to Michael Feldman, and he wasn’t stupid. He understood the situation, and he cared.

      “Where would we live?” she asked.

      He blinked. “Well…wherever is best for Alice.”

      “Okay…I’ll have more questions.”

      She meant it as a threat, but he only laughed. “I don’t promise I’ll have the answers to all of them.”

      “I—I need to think about this,” she told him. The blood was still beating in her head. To occupy her nervous hands, she began soaking up the little puddles of spilled soda with the corner of a napkin.

      “I didn’t demand an instant decision, did I?” One corner of that firm mouth lifted again.

      “No, but if it’s going to happen, it has to happen soon,” she retorted, lightning fast.

      Then she saw the flare of satisfaction in his blue eyes, like the flare of a match striking. He could almost touch the intensity of her need, she realized. It wasn’t a position of strength, on her part.

      “Yes, it does,” he agreed. “But we can take a few days to think about what’s involved, about what it means. The implications of a divorce, if that became necessary sometime in the future. The question of how far we are prepared to go, how much of ourselves we are prepared to give, in order to make it real.”

      He didn’t mention the word sex, but perhaps he didn’t need to. They both knew it was what he meant. She wondered if the prospect should shock her, and immediately discovered that it didn’t. Yes, she could—theoretically, abstractly, distantly—imagine sleeping with him. Despite the distance and the abstraction, it was unsettling. She didn’t often respond physically to a man within an hour of their first meeting.

      “I really need to think about this,” she repeated.

      “Do you think that I don’t?” he said. His smile was crooked, inviting hers in return. “Do you think that I’ve answered all these questions for myself? I haven’t! I’ll give you the phone number of my hotel. Call me whenever you want to. I’ll take your number, too. We might both have things to talk about.”

      Suzanne nodded slowly. “That makes sense.”

      She felt like adding, “I’m going to see Dr. Feldman, too. Check you out a little further.”

      As long as she could manage to do that without giving away too much herself. She didn’t want Michael to guess that she was contemplating a strategic marriage to Jodie’s cousin. She’d prefer to present it to him as a done deal after the event, a practical yet optimistic arrangement that was already working well.

      “Finish your burger,” Stephen said. “Will it help Alice if you get sick?”

      “No, I guess it won’t,” she agreed, and picked up the half-cooled burger. Duty, not pleasure.

      He watched, wearing a small, satisfied smile, and when she had finished eating, he flicked the little bootie back to her, across the table. “Don’t forget this,” he said.

      “It fits your thumb better than it fits her foot, now,” she answered him. “She’s grown so much since she was born.”

      “May I keep it, then?”

      “For your thumb? Gloves would be a little more useful.”

      He laughed. “No, not for my thumb. I’ll send it to my mother, at home, so she can see how frighteningly tiny Alice must have been when she was born. She will probably cry at the sight of it.” His face had fallen into serious lines once more. “She would have come here with me, to see the baby, only she’s been ill. She had some major surgery a couple of weeks ago.”

      “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

      “The discovery of this baby has done wonders for her recovery. I know she’ll want all the news of Alice that I can give her.”

      And that was the moment when I knew, Suzanne thought to herself several days later. When he said that, I knew that he really did care about Alice, and I knew, for better or for worse, no matter what we decided about sex and divorce, that I’d marry him….

      Rose Norton Chaloner Brown Wigan had never stayed at a five-star New York hotel before, but she was trying very hard to act as if she stayed in such establishments all the time.

      It was quite sweet, in a way. At the strangest times, Suzanne detected an odd form of innocence in her selfish, beautiful and eternally blond mother. Rose and Perry had arrived from Philadelphia two days ago, “Now that our commitments have allowed us to get back here again, for a longer stay, we’re itching to see that darling baby!”

      Their commitments had allowed them to do this for about two hours yesterday morning, just before lunch at Tavern on the Green.

      They planned to stay over the weekend, and Mom had begged Suzanne over the phone, with that same exultant innocence, “You must come and see our suite, honey! It’s spectacular!”

      Dropping in to visit Rose, as promised, Suzanne was greeted with the eager offer of anything she liked from the minibar of the sixth floor park view room. Just absolutely anything at all. A cocktail? Champagne? Chocolates?

      “No, I’m fine, thanks.” Tense, too. She had something to discuss, and knew that the mood would change, at that point, like fall weather coming down from Canada on the tail end of a steamy summer.

      “Are you sure, darling?” Rose said. “If there’s something you want that isn’t here, I can order it in special.”

      “I’m really not hungry or thirsty.” She added gently, “You know they charge a bundle for all these little drinks and candies, Mom.” She didn’t want her mother to get carried away. Maybe Mom thought that you got these things for free. She and Perry could end up with an appalling bar bill, on top of what had to be a mammoth tab for this suite.

      But Rose didn’t seem to care. “We’re putting

Скачать книгу