Judith McNaught (24 page)

all the geegaws are coming in from Paris, France, on a plane, but Miss High and Mighty wanted the dress made by the Eldridge twins because nobody's handwork is as fine as theirs." Belatedly realizing that Ted

Mathison might not want to hear the details of his former wife's extravagant wedding plans involving another man, the loyal woman swung back to the paperwork on her desk and said, "I'm sorry. That was dumb of me."

"Don't apologize. It doesn't matter a damn to me what she does," Ted said, and he meant it. The knowledge that Katherine Cahill was planning to remarry, this time to a fifty-year-old Dallas socialite named Spencer Hayward, was of no interest to Ted, nor did it come as a surprise. He'd read about it in the newspapers, including the glowing account of Hayward's jet planes, twenty-two-room mansion, and

alleged friendship with the president, but none of that evoked any feelings of jealousy or envy in Ted.

"Let's go talk to Mother and Dad," he said, shrugging into his jacket and holding the door open for Carl

to proceed him. "They know Julie didn't get back last night and they're worried sick. Maybe they've thought of some detail about her plans that I don't know."

They had just crossed the street when the door to the Eldridge sisters' shop swung open and Katherine stepped forward. She halted in midstep when she found herself a sidewalk's width from her former husband, but Ted merely nodded at her with the sort of distant courtesy one bestows on a total stranger of no importance whatsoever, then he opened the driver's door on his black and white. Katherine, however, apparently had other—more socially correct—notions about how divorced couples ought to

behave when meeting each other in public for the first time since their divorce. Refusing to be ignored, she stepped forward and her cultured voice reached Ted, forcing him to pause. "Ted?" she said. Pausing to smile briefly and with impeccable courtesy at Carl, who'd stopped with one foot already in the car, she

turned back to her ex-husband and added, "Were you really going to drive off without saying hello to me?"

"I intended to do exactly that," he replied, his face impassive, even as he registered a new softer and more somber quality to her voice.

She walked forward in a cherry red wool suit that hugged her narrow waist, her long blond hair spilling

over her shoulders, her hand held out. "You look
…

well," she finished a little lamely when Ted ignored her hand. When he refused to respond, she sent a look of appeal at Carl. "You look well, too, Carl. I hear you married Sara Wakefield?"

In the shop behind her, Ada Eldridge's eyeball appeared in the crack between the shutters, and in the

beauty shop next door, two of the town's biggest gossips were standing in the window with rollers in their

hair, blatantly spying. Ted's patience snapped. "Are you finished with what you learned in Social Interaction 201?" he asked sarcastically. "You're causing a scene."

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Katherine glanced at the window of the beauty shop, but she persevered despite the flush of humiliation staining her cheeks at his contemptuous attitude.

"Julie wrote me that you finished law school."

He turned his back on her and opened the car door.

Her chin came up. "I'm getting married—to Spencer Hayward. Miss Flossie and Miss Ada are making my gown."

"I'm sure they're glad of any business, even yours,"

Ted said, climbing into the car. She put her hand on the door to stop him from closing it.

"You've changed," she said.

"You haven't."

"Yes, I have."

"Katherine," he said with deadly finality, "I don't give a damn whether you've changed or not."

He closed the door in her face, started the engine, and drove away, watching in the rearview mirror as her shoulders straightened with the haughty dignity that wealthy, privileged people seemed to be born with, then she turned and glowered at the faces in the beauty shop window. If he didn't despise her so thoroughly, Ted would have admired her spunk in the face of such public humiliation, but he felt no admiration nor any jealousy at the thought of her marrying again. All he felt was a vague sort of pity for

the man who was about to get himself a wife who was nothing but an ornament—beautiful, hollow, and

brittle. As Ted had already learned to his agonized disappointment, Katherine Cahill Mathison was spoiled, immature, selfish, and vain.

Katherine's father owned oil wells and a cattle ranch, but he preferred to spend much of his time in Keaton where he'd been born and where he enjoyed a position of unquestioned prominence. Although Katherine had grown up there, she'd been away at fancy boarding schools since she was twelve years old. Ted and she had never really met until she was nineteen years old, when she came home after her sophomore year at a ritzy eastern college to spend the summer in Keaton. Her parents, who were spending two months in Europe, had insisted she remain in Keaton as a punishment, she'd later told Ted,

for her having cut so many of her college classes that she'd nearly flunked out of school. In a typically childish tantrum of the sort that Ted was later to become accustomed to, Katherine had retaliated against

her parents by inviting twenty friends from her college to spend a month, partying at her family's mansion.

It was during one of those parties that gunshots were fired and the police were called.

Ted had arrived with another local sheriff to check on the disturbance, and Katherine herself had answered the doorbell, her eyes wide with fear, her body scantily clad in a revealing string bikini that showed off nearly every tanned centimeter of her beautiful, curvaceous young form. "I called you,"

she

burst out, gesturing toward the back of the house where French doors opened onto a swimming pool and

terraces that overlooked the town of Keaton. "My friends are out there, but the party's getting a little wild, and they won't put my father's guns away. I'm afraid someone will get hurt!"

Trying to keep his lustful gaze off her rounded derriere, Ted had followed her through the mansion with

its Persian carpets and magnificent French antiques.

Outdoors, he and his partner found twenty young adults, several of them nude, all of them drunk or stoned on pot, frolicking in the swimming pool and shooting skeet off the back terrace. Calming the party down was easy: The moment one of the swimmers

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yelled, "Oh God, the cops are here!" the revelry screeched to an abrupt halt. Swimmers emerged from

the pool and the skeet shooters laid down their shotguns—with one alarming exception: a

twenty-three-year-old, high on marijuana, who decided to reenact a scene from
Rambo
with Ted as his

adversary. When he turned the shotgun on Ted, Katherine had screamed and Ted's partner had drawn his service revolver, but Ted had motioned him to put it away. "There's not going to be any trouble here,"

he told the youth. Improvising quickly, he added,

"My partner and I came to enjoy the party. Katherine invited us." He glanced at her and smiled winningly.

"Tell him you invited me, Kathy."

The nickname he'd invented on the spur of the moment may well have saved a life, because it either startled the boy enough to tip down his weapon or it convinced him Ted was actually a family friend.

Katherine, who had never been called by any nickname whatsoever, had collaborated by hurrying to

Ted's side and draping her body against his side, her arm around Ted's back. "Of course I did, Brandon!" she told the young man with only a tiny betraying tremor in her voice, her eyes fixed on the loaded shotgun he still held.

Intending only to play along, Ted put his arm around her, his hand curving around her incredibly narrow waist as he bent his head to say something to her.

Whether by accident or design, Katherine

misunderstood her cue, and she leaned up on her toes and kissed him full on the mouth. Ted's lips parted

in surprise but his arm tightened automatically, and suddenly she turned fully into his arms, kissing him deeply. And just as automatically, he responded to her unexpected ardor—his arms tightened and his body hardened with desire. His tongue slipped between her eager lips and he kissed her back while a

bunch of cheering, drunken, stoned rich kids looked on and another kid named Brandon held a loaded gun on him.

"Okay, okay, he's one of the 'good guys,'" Brandon shouted. "So, let's shoot some skeet!"

Ted let go of Katherine and sauntered toward the young man, his gait slow, relaxed, a fake smile pinned

to his face. "What'd you say yer name was?"

Brandon demanded as Ted neared him.

"Officer Mathison," Ted snapped as he jerked the shotgun out of the young man's hand and spun him around, shoving his face into the fence and slapping handcuffs on his wrists. "What's yours?"

"Brandon Barrister III," came the outraged reply.

"My father is Senator Barrister." His voice shifted to an ugly, wheedling whine. "I'll make you a deal, Mathison. You get these cuffs off of me and get the hell

out of here and I won't tell my father about the way you treated us tonight. We'll forget this misunderstanding ever happened."

"No, I'll make
you
a deal," Ted countered, spinning him around and shoving him toward the house. "You tell me where your stash is, and I'll let you spend a nice quiet evening in our jail without booking you on

the dozen charges I can think of right now—all of which would deeply embarrass your father the senator."

"Brandon," one of the girls pleaded when the boy balked, "he's being really decent about this. Do what he tells you."

Slightly mollified by their reactions, Ted said, "That goes for all of you. Get in the house, collect all the pot and anything else you've got here and bring it to the living room." He turned to Katherine, who was watching him with a strange, absorbed little smile.

"That goes for you, too, Miss Cahill."

Her smile warmed and yet her voice seemed almost shy. "I liked Kathy better than Miss Cahill."

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She looked so delicious standing there with the moonlight gilding her hair, wearing a sexy bikini and a

Madonna's smile, that Ted had to remind himself that she was too young for him as well as too rich and

too spoiled. Remembering all that became even more difficult in the days that followed, because Katherine Cahill possessed all the determination of her pioneering ancestors who'd trekked across half a continent to stake their claim in Texas's oil fields.

Wherever Ted went and no matter how coolly he treated her, she seemed to continually reappear. She fell into step beside him when he left the office to go home at night, asking him about police work; she invited him for dinner; she came to the sheriff's office to

ask his advice about what car to buy, when he went to lunch, she slid into the booth across from him and pretended it was a chance meeting. After three weeks of such fruitless antics, she tried a final, desperate

ploy: She put in a fake burglary call to the police station at ten o'clock one night after making certain Ted

was on duty.

When he arrived to check the house, she was standing in the doorway wearing a seductive black silk

lounging robe, holding a plate of what she called canapés in one hand and a drink she'd made for him in

the other. The realization that the burglary call had been nothing but a childish trick to bring him to her snapped Ted's strained nerves. Since he couldn't let himself take advantage of what she was offering, no matter how badly he wanted to, or how much he'd enjoyed her company, he let himself lose his temper instead. "What the hell do you want from me, Katherine?"

"I want you to come in and sit down and enjoy the lovely dinner I made for you." She stepped aside and gestured with her arm to the candlelit dining room table, which had been set with sparkling crystal and gleaming silver.

To his horror, Ted actually considered staying. He wanted to slide into a chair at that table, to see her face in the candlelight while he savored the wine in the silver cooler, he wanted to eat slowly, enjoying each bite, knowing that she was going to be his dessert. He wanted to taste her so badly he could hardly

bear to stand there without dragging her into his arms. Instead he spoke as harshly as he could, attacking

her in the one place he knew instinctively she'd be the most vulnerable—her youth. "Stop acting like a childish, spoiled brat!" he said, ignoring the tug he felt when she stepped back as if he'd slapped her. "I don't know what the hell you want from me or what you think you're going to accomplish with all this, but

you're wasting your time and mine."

She looked visibly shaken, but her eyes were level and direct, and he found himself admiring her courage

in the face of such ruthless opposition. "I fell in love with you the night you came to break up our party,"

she told him.

"That's crap! People don't fall in love in five minutes."

She managed a wavering smile at his vulgarity and persevered. "When you kissed me that first night, you

felt something for me, too—something strong and special and—"

"What I felt was common, ordinary indiscriminate lust," Ted snapped, "so knock off the infantile fantasies

about love and stop pestering me. Do I need to make it any clearer than that?"

She gave up the fight with a slight shake of her head.

"No," she whispered shakily, "you've made it perfectly clear."

Ted jerked his head in a nod and started to turn, but she stopped him. "If you really want me to forget about you, about us, then I guess this is good-bye."

"It's good-bye," he said shortly.

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"Kiss me good-bye, then, and I'll believe you. That's my bargain."

"Oh, for God's sake!" he exploded, but he yielded to her "bargaining." Or more correctly to his own desire. Pulling her into his arms, he kissed her with deliberate roughness, crushing her soft lips, then he pushed her away while something deep inside him howled in protest at what he'd done—and what he'd deprived himself of by doing it.