Kitabı oku: «One True Love?», sayfa 2

2

SHE STOOD OUT like a ripe plum in a white bowl.

Okay, so he wasn’t the best at analogies but Matthew understood what he meant. With her red hair billowing out from underneath a grand straw hat, wearing her purple bathing suit and matching sarong, and stretched out in her chair on the powdery white sand, she was exactly as he had described. It just didn’t sound as good when he tried verbalizing it in his mind. Good thing he’d tried this one out silently before he used it on her.

What he wanted to say was, boy she sure did look pretty. It was clear to Matthew, and surely to every one else on the beach, that Rinny was the most stunning girl on the stretch. In the clutter of people—most of whom were happy loving couples—camped out on the beach outside the Paradise Hotel and Casino, Matthew had no problem spotting his girl. If he were less of a practical man he would say that she had a powerful aura about her. Whatever it was, it seemed to attract him like a fly to…He should probably forget the analogies.

Flipping his beach towel over his shoulder, Matthew marched across the beach to her private camp. She had a beach chair on either side of her—probably to keep the happy loving couples at bay—filled with a radio, three books, enough sunblock to ward off a nuclear blast and finally her. She sat in the middle chair, her legs covered by the sarong she wore, her arms covered by the shade of her near-sombrero. The sunglasses that she sported were shaped like cat’s eyes. Purple to match her suit. No doubt she had as many pairs of sunglasses as she had outfits.

His Rinny always knew how to put the package together. Standing before her, he waited for recognition from her that he was blocking her sun, but she was too covered in shade to notice. Beneath the glasses she must have had her eyes closed so Matthew decided to simply plunk his six-foot frame down next to her on one of the chairs. “Hi, Rinny.”

Corinne had been dreaming. Brendan had been down on one knee before her with a ring box in his hand and a loving expression on his face. He had been promising her his love, fidelity and friendship for all the rest of his days. The dream was so powerful she could almost feel the tears well up in her eyes as they might if it were really happening.

Then suddenly, Brendan’s face became Matthew’s face with its deep-midnight-blue eyes and strong chin. And he was calling her Rinny. No one else called her by that absurd nickname. She wasn’t even too sure why she allowed Matthew to continue to use it. Although the thought of trying to break him of the habit seemed exhausting. Matthew was like a steamroller. Slow. Plodding. Inexorable. And difficult to push off course. It made him a phenomenal accountant, but a bit of a bore.

“You asleep, Rinny?”

There it was again. This time Corinne did open her eyes and peer out over her sunglasses. There he was, plain as the sun, sitting next to her as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Matthew Relic was on Paradise Island. Somehow the two didn’t seem to fit, but there was no doubt it was him.

“What are you doing here?” She wasn’t too sure how she felt about his presence. Piqued because he had interrupted her vacation? Confused as to why he would follow her here? Or maybe a little happy to see a familiar face? After only two days, she realized that the next week and a half was going to drag with no one to talk to.

Most of the couples she met only stopped long enough to ask her where her husband was and if they wanted to get together for couples tennis. As soon as she explained that she was on the island by herself, they made their excuses and went on their way, absorbed with each other. She would have found the whole thing utterly depressing if she hadn’t continued to tell herself that the purpose of this trip was to secure the very same happiness that these couples had found.

“Darla told me you seemed a little down before you left. She said something about a lot of brownies.”

Corinne groaned, remembering how sick she’d felt the next day after eating all that chocolate.

“Anyway, she told me where you were staying. And I figured you would still be smarting from your breakup with Brendan, so…”

“Breakup?” Corinne interrupted. “We did not break up.”

“Sure you did. I was in the filing closet, remember? ‘No one is ever going to love you like I loved you.”’ He changed the words, but the meaning was the same.

Corinne laughed her, oh-you-silly-boy chuckle. “Matthew, Matthew. You don’t understand. That wasn’t a breakup, that was an ultimatum.”

“It was? It sure sounded like a breakup.”

“It wasn’t,” she explained. “You see I left him to give him a chance to feel what it would be like if I really left him. No doubt right now, at this very minute, he is at home contemplating what his life without me will be like and he’s wondering how he can get me back.”

Right now, at this very minute, Golden Boy was probably at home romancing Marjorie from human resources. But Matthew kept that opinion to himself. He didn’t want to hurt Rinny. He just wanted her to see that Brendan was no good for her, while he, on the other hand, was perfect. It wasn’t going to be easy. He could see that now. He needed an angle.

“So what does he need to do? What is the ultimatum?”

She shifted a bit in her beach chair. “He needs to stop seeing those other women,” she said tightly.

“You mean the ones that make him virile,” Matthew added in an attempt to show her how misplaced her love was for that man.

“Yes. I’m enough for any man,” she stated confidently.

“You can say that again.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Leaning back on his elbows and stretching his bare legs out to the sun, Matthew took in the view of the ocean. The water spectacularly blue against the iridescent white sand, it was so beautiful it almost hurt. A little like Rinny when she got huffy.

“I was just agreeing with you.”

“Hmm,” she uttered, disbelief evident in her tone. “Somehow I don’t think so. Well, if I’m so difficult then why are you even here? Don’t tell me you came all this way just to cheer me up. Did you follow me down here for another reason, Matthew?”

It was pointless to lie. Even when he tried it, everyone could always guess the truth. “Yep.”

“That’s it? ‘Yep.’ That’s the only answer I get? Sometimes you can be so difficult.”

“I don’t mean to be.”

Corinne tried again. “Would you mind telling me why you followed me?”

“Well…”

“Never mind. I think I know,” she stopped him. She tilted her head in his direction and gave him her, oh-you-poor-boy smile—which was only slightly different than her oh-you-silly-boy chuckle. “It’s really no big secret. The truth is you have a little crush on me. Don’t you?”

“I…”

“I don’t mind,” she offered gallantly. “Truly, it’s not surprising. After all, it’s only natural that someone like you would be attracted to someone like me. For one thing, we are complete opposites. That alone can be enough to stir someone’s interest in another person. You see the qualities that you lack in the other and you want them for yourself.”

He didn’t think so, but rather than try to correct her assumptions only to be cut off again, he let her continue.

“The important thing is not to let it get out of hand. You know that I love Brendan and you know he’s the only man I’ll ever love.”

“Why?” Matthew managed to toss into the conversation.

The question brought her up short for a second, but she recovered and quickly stepped up onto her Brendan soapbox.

“He’s really a very sensitive man. I know sometimes he doesn’t show it, but that’s because of his insecurities. He feels he has to hide his true self. There’s that and he’s a talented salesman. Of course he has excellent fashion sense. And we’re very much alike. We both enjoy the spotlight. We both play to the crowd. We understand each other.”

“If he understood you,” Matthew argued, “he would know that you’re not the type of woman who would tolerate cheating.”

“He’s going to stop cheating. He knows he has to or he will lose me forever.” There was a catch in her voice even as she said the confident words. “Would you want to lose me forever?” she asked him a bit frantically.

Gently, he shook his head, and said, “No. I wouldn’t want to lose you forever. I guess I’m worried about you. What if he doesn’t stop cheating? You’re not going to stick around for that, are you?”

He would have to kill Golden Boy if he ever caught him with his pants down around his ankles with some other woman while he was married to his Rinny. And Matthew would hate like hell to have to go to jail.

Back to huffy in the blink of an eye, Corinne whipped off her sunglasses in a fluid movement and he could see how indignant she was. “Do I look like one of those pathetic women who would let her husband cheat on her?”

“No,” he answered thoughtfully. “There’s nothing pathetic about you, Rinny.”

“Certainly not,” she affirmed. “I promise you, I have no intention of sitting by and watching his roaming eye for the rest of my life. If he can’t settle down, then we’re through. Unfortunately, that means I will have to spend the rest of my life alone, and I would really rather it not come to that.”

“Why alone? Why can’t there be someone else?” he challenged.

Thoughts of her sister and all of her fiancés, and of her brother and his two—soon to be three—wives and her parents with all of their paramours came rushing to the forefront of her mind. “Because it’s not supposed to be like that,” she stated adamantly. “There’s not supposed to be scores of lovers in a person’s life. Maybe there are multiple relationships, some that work and others that don’t. But there is only one true love. The one that you’re meant to be with. The one that makes your world complete. Sometimes that love only lasts for a day. Sometimes people never find it. Sometimes they find it but they let their day-to-day worries mess it up. Sometimes it lasts forever. You never know how it’s going to end up. I’m lucky enough to have found my true love. If I’m not lucky enough to keep him…well, then I’ll just have to live with the consequences. But it wouldn’t be fair to anyone else who might want to be with me when I would know the whole time that they were just a substitute.”

“I think you’re wrong.”

“What do you know about love anyway?” she asked impatiently.

“I know plenty,” he said as he stared at the calm water. “I was engaged once.”

Matthew had been engaged? This was news to her. Most people who met him automatically came to the conclusion that he was single. It was because there was something very solitary about him. When Corinne defended him to their co-workers, which she often did, she called him an independent spirit. Her colleagues said she was simply being kind.

They believed he was odd. Too staid. Too regimented. Too private. He ate the same thing for lunch every day—a bologna and cheese sandwich and a green apple. He wore a tie and suit every day, even on dress-down days when everybody else wore jeans. He always had a tissue and a pencil on hand and ready to lend. The man was as predictable as the turning of the earth. The girls in the office joked that being married to Matthew would be like being married to one of the presidents on Mt. Rushmore. In other words, not too exciting. No, no one ever seemed to question why he was single. And everyone took it for granted that he always would be.

Only come to find out that he was engaged. To be married. “Who was she?” Despite her best efforts, Corinne couldn’t quite keep the incredulity from her voice.

“Her name was Debbie.”

Wow, he thought. It had been too long since he thought of her. There was a time when Matthew used to think about her every second and what his life would have been like had she lived. But time had passed. His heart had healed. The memories would always be precious, but they weren’t as keen as they used to be. And he had learned to love again.

“What happened?”

Corinne’s curiosity was like a hungry animal that simply had to be satisfied, Matthew knew. She wouldn’t stop until she had all the answers. “She died in a car accident two months before the wedding. Debbie was a schoolteacher, and there was a bad snowstorm and she wanted to make sure all the children got home safely, so she drove them herself rather than put them on the bus. They all got home, but she didn’t.”

It was tragic. A lump the size of a fist formed in her throat. “I’m so sorry.”

He shrugged and sat up to take the pressure off his elbows. “It was seven years ago. I miss her, but I’ve moved on. And I believe that she would want me to find someone else. Someone who I could love as deeply as I loved her. She was generous like that.”

The lump wasn’t going away. Around it, Corinne choked out, “She sounds wonderful.”

“She was. But after she was gone I never once thought that my life was over. I never believed that she was my only chance at happiness. Instead, I felt the opposite. I was reminded how dear life is and how I should always try to seize every moment. Somewhere along the way I forgot that lesson. I guess I’ve never been too good at seizing. It took a two-bit crook with a .38 Smith and Wesson and a craving for slushies to remind me.” Reactively, Matthew reached up to rub his heart where he could still feel the residual pain from the bullet that had just missed that vital organ.

The scar was invisible behind the white cotton T-shirt he wore. But Corinne knew it was there. Odd, because he didn’t seem like the type to be prudish about such things, but Matthew refused to let anyone see the mark that the bullet had left. He said it was a private matter between him and the man who put it there.

Corinne remembered that awful day as clearly as if it happened yesterday rather than several months ago. A police officer had shown up at the office with the news that Matthew had been shot during a holdup at a convenience store. Foolishly, Matthew had tried to talk the crook into putting his gun down, but the kid, doped up on PCP, had snapped and pulled the trigger. By the time Corinne got to the hospital, Matthew was nearly gone. The doctors said that although they had removed the bullet and closed the hole in his lung, he had lost so much blood in the process that they didn’t know if he would ever wake from the coma that he had fallen into.

Miraculously however, just two hours later while Corinne sat with him, telling him about the plot of her sister’s latest movie, Matthew had opened his eyes and smiled.

“I’m glad you didn’t die,” she blurted, abruptly returning to the present.

“Thanks. Me, too,” he returned. “I’ll never forget what you said to me in the hospital.”

Corinne struggled to recall what he might be referring to, but she often said so many memorable lines. It would be nearly impossible to remember each and every one. It was one of the advantages of scripting most of the major events in her life. She always mentally wrote herself great dialogue.

“You said, ‘Thank heavens, you’re awake. I’ve few enough real friends in this world and I would just as soon not lose one.”’

“It was true,” she reiterated.

“It was nice. It got me through, thinking that I had a friend like you who cared.”

Now it was starting to make sense, Corinne realized. That’s why he was here. It had nothing to do with a crush. It was out of some warped sense of gratitude that he felt for her because she was the only one who had come to visit him in the hospital.

Her vanity was somewhat offended. After all, chasing her down because he thought she was kindhearted wasn’t nearly as flattering as being chased down because he thought she was gorgeous and sexy.

In an easy manner she laid a hand on his arm and gave him her let-me-give-you-some advice expression. “You just need to open up a little more, Matthew. People don’t know you because you don’t let anyone inside.”

He never considered himself closed. He never thought about it one way or the other. He worked. He paid his bills. And he had his painting. By nature he liked solitude, but he didn’t think he ever intentionally cut people out of his life. Then again, he never went to a lot of trouble to include them either.

“You know me,” he reminded her.

And he knew why. It was because Corinne wasn’t the type of person to wait to be let inside. She was the type who disregarded any barrier that got in her way. Even his stoic silence. He remembered their first meeting vividly.

They’d begun with the growing software company at the same time to establish internal financial controls—him as the auditor and her as the financial controller. She had waltzed into his office, and he’d immediately felt as if he were in the presence of a star rather than a serious businesswoman who worked with numbers all day. Her flaming-red hair had been loose about her shoulders; she’d worn a yellow sundress that flowed over her body like water over land, and from her wrist had dangled five gold bangle bracelets that clinked about and made music while she spoke.

We’re both new which means we’re bound to be friends. I’ll meet you in the cafeteria for lunch. I prefer to eat around noon, low blood sugar and all of that, is that all right with you?

At the time, he recalled nodding, and then another gust of wind hit him in the face as she blew out of his office as dramatically as she had blown in to it. She’d left behind a lingering hint of her perfume and a hell of an impression.

They did eat lunch together that day. Mostly, Matthew sat and listened while she spoke about her plans for the company. He knew then that it was going to be his job to keep her in check. For whatever reason, that bologna and cheese sandwich and green apple had tasted better that day than it ever had before.

“Of course I know you,” Corinne said, snapping him back to the moment. “After all, we work together. And you can’t hide anything from me. Every thought you have is always written right there on your face. Come to think of it, you would make a lousy poker player. Be careful that you stay away from those tables when you go to the casino.”

“I’ll do that.”

“It’s not that I mean to be critical, Matthew. Truly, you are a wonderful man. And you deserve to have someone in your life. If you would behave more like a single man and less like a…like a…”

“Relic,” he supplied.

“Yes…you would be amazed at the women who would come knocking at your door.”

“But would any of them be you?” he muttered under his breath. Aloud, he said, “Thank you for the advice. Maybe I’ll try that.”

“Good,” she said, pleased with her apparent success. “So what are you going to do now?”

“I was thinking of taking a swim.”

“So you’re staying?”

“If I wouldn’t bother you.”

“See,” she pointed out. “That’s another one of your problems.”

“Another one?”

“You’re too accommodating.”

He thought he was just being polite. “But…”

She continued without interruption. “What difference does it make if I want you to stay or I want you to go? You probably paid just as much money as I did to get here therefore you have every right to enjoy your vacation. You shouldn’t let me tell you what you can do.”

“That’s true….”

“You’ve got to learn to take what you want out of life and stop letting other people dictate your actions,” she charged.

“Okay.”

“You have to speak up, Matthew. Learn to just barge right in there with your thoughts and your wants. Let people know you’re serious.”

And he would have, too, if she hadn’t kept rambling. After a few minutes he tuned her out, the point of her little speech having already been made. It wasn’t the first time he heard one of Rinny’s speeches, and he wasn’t the only one ever to receive them.

Often, he could hear Rinny inviting people into her office, giving them a pep talk along with their assignments. She would listen to their woes and then pick that person up off the floor again with her cheerleader-like attitude.

Just another thing to love about her was her good and generous heart. It was a shame that few people ever understood her generosity. Most people got lost in the act she portrayed. They believed her to be whatever she wanted them to. Many were convinced she was simply shallow and self-absorbed.

But Matthew knew differently. He’d known it the minute he’d wakened from his coma and found her on the other side of his bed with unshed tears in her eyes.

“You’ve got to be bold,” she continued. “You’ve got to be aggressive. And most important, you must always implement a course of action!”

Inwardly, he chuckled as her cheeks started to heat up and her eyes began to take on a new glow. She wanted him to implement a course of action, huh?