Читать книгу Beyond Business - Elizabeth Harbison, Allison Leigh - Страница 19

Meredith moved the phone to her other ear and subtly turned the volume on the earpiece down. “I don’t have that information with me right now. I can go home and get it, though, if you need me to.”

“You’re not alone?”

“Um … no.”

“I need to talk to you about this. Can you call me back soon, in private?”

She didn’t want to, but Meredith knew she really had no choice. “All of those records are at home, Mother.” She hated having to stoop so low as to pretend it was her mother. “Can it wait until morning?”

“Sorry, you have to do this now.”

“Okay, let me just call you back in—” she glanced at her watch “—about forty-five minutes. Is that okay?”

“That’s fine. But sooner is better. Try and hurry, Meredith, okay?”

“You got it.” She gave Evan an exasperated look as she flipped the phone shut and put it back into her purse. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to get back home and get some documentation together for my mother. Something to do with her new housing situation and needing to prove she sold her assets out here.”

Evan nodded. “I’ll take you home right away.”

That just seemed wrong. With everything she was doing she couldn’t bear to make him feel like he had to accommodate her. “No, no, I know you were looking forward to eating here. It’s not a big deal for me to take a cab back to the office and drive home. Heck, I’d walk if I had the time.”

“Meredith, I’m not letting you take a cab back to the office so I can go get myself some souvlaki. I’ll drive you.”

“You don’t—”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he interrupted. He started the car and put it in gear. “This isn’t a big deal.”

“Well, thanks.”

He pulled out of the parking lot. “Is everything okay with your mom?”

“What? Oh. Yes. Fine. It’s just—” She had to tell herself this really was about her mother, that it was routine personal business and not something that could affect Evan or his family. “She’s constantly needing one document or another from the house. She left a ton of stuff behind.” That much, at least, was true.

“Your mom is lucky to have you,” Evan said as he drove. “After she lost your dad, she must have been really lost.”

“She was,” Meredith agreed.

“I remember how close they were,” Evan continued, smiling more to himself than Meredith. “They’d be worse than teenagers at the dinner table, laughing and finishing each other’s sentences.”

Meredith smiled, remembering. “I always thought that was the definition—”

“—of true love, yeah,” Evan agreed, apparently unaware that he had just finished Meredith’s sentence himself.

But she was aware of it.

“When you know each other so well, and agree with each other so completely, that you can finish each other’s sentences,” he went on, “that really shows a certain comfort level. It’s enviable, really.”

“Yes,” she agreed, looking at him through the darkness, illuminated only occasionally by the streetlights they passed. “I think you’re right.”

“It probably had a lot to do with how you turned out.”

“Meaning.?”

“You have always been secure in yourself, Meredith. Some might even say a little bull-headed—” he gave a quick smile “—but definitely secure with who you are and what you think. I think that comes from growing up in a house where everyone was loved and accepted for who they were.”

“As opposed to how you grew up?” she asked, before she could think better of it.

He didn’t even hesitate to answer. “Definitely. I knew before I could talk that I had to watch what I said around my father. The strain of keeping us all quiet and agreeable for him probably had a lot to do with my mother’s eventual illness.”

And death, Meredith thought, but she didn’t say it. She didn’t have to. She knew they were both thinking it. “You must have had some good times with your family,” she ventured. “It’s not like you were a miserable kid.”

“Not when I was with you.” He kept his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel. “Maybe whatever you had in your upbringing spilled over to me when we were together. The only time I really felt comfortable back then was when I was with you.”

The thought warmed her heart, even while it rang every warning bell within her. “It obviously didn’t mean that much to you,” she said. “You didn’t have too hard a time leaving it.”

He drew to a halt at a stoplight and looked at her, the red hue illuminating his left cheek, casting shadows that made him look older. “That,” he said, “is not true.”

Once again she found herself wishing he’d explain. Yet even while she wished, she didn’t want him to. “No? Then how did you do it? Evan, you never looked back. No call, no letter, no message in a bottle.”

“It was best for you that you didn’t hear from me.”

She scoffed. “Best for me? Who do you think you’re kidding?”

“It was,” he insisted. The car behind them honked its horn and Evan looked up to see the light had changed. He drove forward and went on, saying to Meredith, “You’ll just have to trust me on this.”

“Evan, we’re grown people now. This happened more than a decade ago. I’d like to know what happened. This cryptic ‘it was best for you’ business just doesn’t cut it. Either tell me the truth or don’t talk about the past at all.”

“You’re right. We shouldn’t talk about it at all.”

She sighed. “Just tell me the truth.”

He laughed lightly. “Fine, Meredith. It’s simple. My father wanted to use our relationship, yours and mine, to his advantage over your father. He wanted me to get information on your father’s writers, the stories they were coming up with, how best to get in there and switch the facts around and cast doubt on your father’s credibility.”

Meredith felt the blood leave her face. “He wanted you to spy for him?”

“Essentially, yes. Though that’s a pretty dramatic label.” He blew a long breath out. “Either way, what it would have come down to was me using you, or appearing to.” The next light turned yellow, and Evan slowed the car again.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

He looked at her. “Because I was eighteen and I didn’t know how to betray my father like that.”

“But you could betray me.”

“I didn’t betray you. I left the country. I cut out of the whole deal so I wasn’t part of hurting anyone.”

Which felt to her like a betrayal of the highest order. He had hurt her, and he still didn’t seem to realize it. “It was pretty damn easy for you,” she said, hating the bitter edge to her voice, even though she couldn’t soften it.

He shook his head. “It was the hardest thing I ever had to do!”

“But …?”

His gaze landed evenly on her. “But I did it. It was the best I could do for everyone.”

This wasn’t going anyplace good. Meredith knew she shouldn’t have indulged her impulse to talk to him about this. It made her regress to an angry, confused teenager, and she had gotten so far away from that until Evan had reappeared.

She didn’t want to be this person.

“Okay, okay. Uncle,” she said, glad to see they were approaching the entrance to the office building’s garage. “We’re not getting anywhere with this conversation.”

“Agreed.”

“So let’s drop it.”

He gave a single nod. “Consider it dropped.”

The entered the grungy grey garage in silence, the dim fluorescent lighting acting as the perfect punctuation to Meredith’s dissatisfaction.

“Okay.” She pointed to her little blue sports car. “That’s it right there.”

“I remember.” He pulled the car up behind hers and turned to her. “Here you go.”

“Thanks.” She started to get out of the car, then stopped and turned back to him. “I’m sorry I had to cut dinner off. I hope you’re not starving.”

“I’ll survive.” He smiled. “I’ll just drive through and get a burger somewhere.”

She nodded. “Good night, Evan.”

He looked at her evenly, his gaze inscrutable. “Good night.”

She got out of the car and felt him watching her as she unlocked the doors, got in and started the ignition. He pulled his car away, and she backed up and followed him out of the garage. He turned right and drove off in the opposite direction of where she was going.

She was struck by the thought that soon he’d be back in the building, staying in his office overnight. It was a nice office, of course. Luxury accommodations by almost any standards. But what made her sad about it was the fact that he was staying at the office because he wasn’t going to be in Chicago long.

He was leaving. Again.

As soon as Evan’s car’s taillights were out of sight, Meredith put hers in Park and put her head in her hands. This was so much harder than she’d thought it would be. Her nerves were not as strong as they usually were.

Neither was her willpower, come to think of it.

What a fool she was to keep having these romantic leanings toward Evan Hanson. For heaven’s sake, he’d left her, abandoned her. Made promises he’d clearly had no intention of keeping, and when faced with the challenge of standing up and being a man against his father, or running away, he’d chosen to run.

Okay, that was then and this was now. The fact remained that Evan had always been a wild kid. It was as if he was incapable of following the rules. She’d seen it in school, then she’d seen it again when he ran away from his promise of commitment.

Guys like that didn’t change. People like that didn’t change, she amended.

And if being with Evan now was going to create this rush of longing in her, then she was just going to have to avoid him. As hard as that might be.

She drove home in silence, not daring to turn on the radio for fear of hearing some old love song that would make her feel even more melancholy. What was wrong with her? Why was she suddenly feeling so hung up on Evan Hanson again?

It wasn’t the Evan Hanson of the past that she was wanting, either, it was Evan today. Past Evan was the main obstacle, that was for sure. She couldn’t trust the today Evan because of what he’d done before, and it didn’t look as if she was ever going to get a satisfactory resolution to that.

And frankly, she felt like an idiot for even trying.

She got home and went inside, hating the emptiness of the house and the way her footsteps echoed on the hardwood floors. Once upon a time she’d crept across these floors on tiptoe in the middle of the night, trying to avoid the creakiest boards so she didn’t wake her parents up.

Now she could jump and yell and sing “The Star Spangled Banner” if she wanted to and no one would come.

It was lonely.

And it hadn’t struck her that way until Evan had returned. She hated how much she loved being with him, and more than that she hated how alone she felt every time he left.

She couldn’t wait until this job was over so she could move on. That he was staying temporarily in his office with the intention of leaving himself should only make her feel better.

She took out a key and went to the back room, where she’d locked her confidential work files. She found them, carried the folders into the kitchen and spread the information out on the counter.

Then she picked up the phone and dialed.

“Okay, I’m home,” she said when the line was answered. “And I’ve got the information you need. Are you ready?”