Strapless

“I must have stood in line at that ticket kiosk in Times Square for over an hour,” Janet Baxter said, one reason they were meeting here. “This is still a filthy neighborhood. I hope I don’t regret even the half price. Most of these shows have no substance.”

“The audience, either. That’s what you get on Wednesday and Saturday matinees.”

Only tourists and suburbanites from Connecticut and New Jersey filled the seats then. In town from Cincinnati, Janet Baxter belonged to the former group, and had come with friends from Ohio, but of course she must have another purpose, too—something even beyond this visit with her older daughter, Darcie had decided. Her mother’s clear brow furrowed before she seemed to remember that a frown could cause lines. Permanent ones at fifty-five. Her expression smoothed out like a banana peel.

“I’m deeply concerned about your grandmother,” she said, apparently the real reason for their chat over tea (for Janet) and black coffee (for Darcie). Cheap tobacco, sweat and bad perfume roiled in the heavy air around them. So did conversation from the other tables, and Darcie had to raise her voice.

“About Gran? Why?”

Naturally, Darcie thought she knew. But in her current frame of mind she’d enjoy hearing her mother talk about a subject Janet found distasteful and uncomfortable.

“Your father and I sent you to live with Eden for two reasons.”

“Cheap rent. Free utilities.”

“And…” She obviously wanted Darcie to recite this part of the old litany, and one of Darcie’s hot buttons. It was all about security, a safe place for their firstborn daughter to live. Darcie felt she could take care of herself.

“There’s a third? You go ahead, Mom.”

Janet squirmed in her chair. She pursed her lips, then just as quickly stretched her mouth to erase the tension. Toying with her cup of Darjeeling, she avoided Darcie’s all-knowing gaze. Darcie let the moment—and her own chance to escape her bad mood—build. Until her mother surprised her.

“We wanted you—” Janet cleared her throat “—to keep an eye on her.”

“There’s a new slant. I’m supposed to baby-sit my eighty-two-year-old grandmother?” Darcie paused for effect. “Mom, she’s had more dates in a month than you and I combined, in our entire lives. You should see the guys she comes up with.”

Janet turned pale. “You’re joking. Aren’t you?”

Sure, but why let her off that easy? “I tell you, those men are already wearing a path in the brand-new carpet she had installed in December—a trail from her front door to her bedroom.” Let her tell you what’s in Julio’s pocket.

Janet plucked lint from her navy Talbot’s suit, straight from the Kenwood Mall store in Cincinnati. “You’re trying to upset me.”

“Go see for yourself.”

Janet looked around the narrow shop, at the various array of Saturday-in-Times Square characters, as if only just aware of them, and wrinkled her nose. “I wouldn’t cross the river to stay with her. I’m not welcome. Eden has always hated me.”

“Hate’s a strong word.” Darcie couldn’t even use it on Merrick yesterday.

“I’m sorry we ever suggested you share her apartment for a few months.”

With the seemingly casual statement, Darcie’s instincts went on full alert. Uh-oh. Checking up on her wasn’t the issue, but neither was Eden’s sex life. Darcie had lived in Fort Lee for her four years in the East. Both she and Gran liked the arrangement. Although Darcie planned to get an apartment of her own, in the meantime, except for Sweet Baby Jane, they didn’t get in each other’s way and Gran was as tolerant of Darcie’s lifestyle as Darcie had become of hers. She liked to think Eden’s social life was mainly invention (good grief, she’s my grandmother) even when she knew better. But obviously, she’d missed something. Janet had still other ideas.

“Perhaps we should find you a place now. With your pay increase—”

“It’s not that much.”

Which seemed to play right into her mother’s hands. “You could get a roommate to share the rent. A real roommate.”

“Mmm.” Darcie remembered her college days sleeping with the lights in her face because her art student roomie needed to finish a project. All night. Tripping over someone else’s clothes, someone else’s boyfriend. Finding used tampons on the dresser and spent condoms on the rug. “I’ll pass. At Gran’s I have my own room and no one bothers me.”

Janet was undaunted. “When you get back from Australia, we’ll see.”

“See what?” Darcie shook her head. “Mom, I don’t need help.” Not from her Midwestern parents anyway. “What’s this really about?”

“Your sister,” her mother finally murmured, sending Darcie’s sharpened senses into another spin. Janet studied her lap. “She graduated from Smith last June. Seven months ago.”

“Now there’s a tragedy.” UC—the local university—for Darcie, the Ivy League for her kid sister. “I was at the ceremony. What’s she done?” Darcie smiled to soften the words. So Annie was the bottom line here. Annie, who didn’t give a damn what other people thought. Darcie wouldn’t mind if she had gotten herself into some sort of trouble for the first time in her life. Not serious trouble, of course. “Speeding ticket?” she said. “Didn’t register to vote Republican?”

Janet waved a hand. “She’s headstrong, you know how she is. She wants to come to New York.” Her mother said this as if Annie’s career goal was to become a prostitute—though Janet would likely say “lady of the night.” She pushed her cup aside, a drift of pungent Darjeeling rising into the stuffy air. “I honestly can’t imagine her living with your grandmother.”

“Corruption, Incorporated.”

“Yes. Well. You may smirk but it’s true. Eden is a bad influence.” She dragged the cup back for another swallow, and another little frisson of discomfort trickled down Darcie’s spine. “Your father and I are adamantly opposed to Annie’s wishes—unless, as her big sister, you could look out for her. If you shared an apartment—”

“Mom, Annie’s a slob.”

Clearly defeated for the moment, Janet surged to her feet, then ruined her exit by stumbling in her Via Spigas. “I’ll be late for the theater. Please think about what I’ve said.” Recovering her balance, she gave Darcie a tight smile. “It was good to see you. I’ll phone tomorrow. Perhaps we can do something together before you leave.”

“I leave tomorrow night.”

“Sunday brunch, then. We’ll talk more about Annie.”

Darcie rose, too, determined not to make any logical decision until after her trip to Sydney. But the devil rode her heels. “And I can tell you all about Julio.”

Darcie was still smiling to herself when she whipped through the revolving doors at FAO Schwarz into the Saturday afternoon chaos that always reigned there. She didn’t often venture into such stores—after all, she didn’t have kids, as Janet might point out—but before she left the States she wanted to buy a gift for Claire’s new baby. Her goddaughter.

A little thrill went through her. She’d only seen the baby once, but already she loved the tiny girl. And the promise she represented. Maybe this one fragrant little human being would get everything right. No errors, no strikeouts. Just a solid crack of the bat, and a home run down the center line of life into the bleachers.

Darcie wasn’t a sporting person. “I’m the last one chosen for the softball team,” she murmured and swept past a display of basketballs and soccer pads. “You should have seen me when I took horseback riding lessons. Ever watched someone end up backward in a saddle? And don’t forget swim camp. I sank like a rock.”

“May I help you, miss?”

A clerk stepped into the aisle, his gaze curious.

“No, thank you.” She gave him a bland, unfocused smile.

“I heard you talking….”

“Was I? Oh, I must have forgotten to take one of my medications.” She zipped onto the escalator to the second floor, and waved at a mountain of Bob the Builder toys on display. “Gotta watch it, Darce. Even in New York.” She grinned. “But gee, he noticed.”

She wandered through the video games department, then stopped to watch two boys tap out a tune on the giant keyboard that had become famous years ago when Tom Hanks played it in Big, still one of Gran’s favorite movies. Eden espoused its same whimsical, youthful view of life. By the time Darcie located the baby area, she had nearly forgotten tea with Janet. An apartment with Annie? The possibility raised the hairs on her neck.

Darcie lingered over a table full of stuffed animals. She tried to envision herself holding an infant like Claire’s daughter, standing at an altar for the christening beside her own husband—handsome, well-dressed, with a look of absolute devotion on his face as he gazed at his new family. The image was her mother’s, not Darcie’s right now…but was she seeing Merrick?

The fantasy ended when she remembered Merrick’s vagueness about his nephew. And her need to figure out her own life first. Darcie surveyed the pile of animals, discarding the usual bears and bunnies. She had just paid for a cross-eyed zebra sporting a huge red bow when, across the aisle in the doll department, she spied a familiar form.

What would he be doing here? In a toy store?

It didn’t fit his image, but Darcie sidestepped a woman pushing a stroller so she could get a better look. Dark-blond hair, not a strand out of place, that recognizable GQ look even on Saturday in khakis and an Irish fisherman’s sweater. Her heartbeat tripled in alarm. Since leaving Janet, she hadn’t combed her hair, couldn’t have any lipstick left. And her dark-green eyeliner, which tended to run when she got warm, probably streaked her face. It was too hot in the store. She must look a mess.

What difference does it make? You’re you, with or without makeup.

He moved and so did she. Darcie saw a flash of profile—straight nose, not a bump or deviation—that tilt of his head, a little imperious, a lot commanding, even arrogant. The set of his shoulders. And wouldn’t she recognize those hands anywhere? Especially on her bare body. It must be…

“Merrick,” she called softly just as he lifted a hand to someone—not Darcie. Mad at her? He’d left in a mood yesterday morning. So did she. Once he saw her, and they talked… She didn’t want to leave for Australia in a snit. Claire was wrong about him, she tried to tell herself. So was Gran.

When a little blond girl rushed toward him, Darcie didn’t react. Someone’s child had run headlong into a stranger—not unusual here, except that he seemed to know her. Merrick caught her slight shoulders with a laugh, said something, then watched her skip away. An odd look on his face…like adoration.

Her pulse thudding (the zebra’s head sticking out of its bag with apparent suspicion, too) Darcie crossed the aisle into the doll department. It was pink. Hundreds—thousands—of Barbie dolls dominated the display space. Dentist Barbie. Wedding Barbie. Olympic Barbie. A host of international Barbies, the Dolls of the World collection. A little too crowded for Darcie’s taste. She wouldn’t make that mistake in Sydney. “Her” store would be clean, uncluttered, sophisticated.

“Merrick.” He stood in front of a rack of miniature clothing, his back to her, and Darcie saw him stiffen. When he turned, his smile looked wooden.

“I thought I heard your voice.”

She shrugged. “Just talking to myself again. Or Buster.” She held up the zebra bag then closed the distance between them, wondering why she didn’t feel better about this chance meeting in a city they both shared. “Shopping for your nephew?”

Again, he looked blank. Carefully blank this time.

“Guess not,” she said, gazing at the pink all around them. Like onlookers at a circus, scores of Barbies smiled at her, at Merrick from their plastic-windowed boxes. “I mean, what would an eight-year-old boy want in this department?”

“What are you doing here, Darcie?” His voice sharp, his eyes harder.

“Talking to you. Now.” She brightened her tone. “I wondered…before I leave town…if we might…” Fall into bed again in apology?

“Daddy!” The same little girl pelted full-tilt into his knees.

Merrick set her away, smoothing her dress—Saks Fifth Avenue, Laura Ashley…?—running a hand down the length of her sleek blond hair. Hair almost like his. She wore a blue plaid ribbon to hold it back, and had Merrick’s eyes, too.

Darcie’s unwanted coffee sloshed in her stomach. No, this wasn’t a circus for the Barbies to watch. It was the Roman Colosseum. Lions, gladiators, victims…

Daddy. Darcie bent down until she reached eye level with the child.

“Hi.”

Merrick stepped between them. “Uh, why don’t you run over there, kiddo.” He pointed at a pyramid of dolls on a nearby table “Pick out one you like.”

Assuming he was talking to the child, not to her, Darcie straightened and the little girl said, “Can I? Can I?”

“Yes,” he said. “You may.”

Her mission approved, she scampered off. A heavy silence hung in the air.

Claire had been right. He’s lying, Darcie.

She squished her package in rigid fingers, choking the zebra. Buster goggled at Merrick and so did Darcie—without her eyes crossed. Shoppers pushed by. A baby, like Claire’s, fussed. Over the PA system a male voice announced a sale in Electronic Games.

She felt sick.

“Well. Now I know.”

“Darcie, don’t make a big deal of this.”

She reeled back at his weary tone.

“No big deal? Just call me naive…” To her horror, she choked up. She hadn’t thought this would really matter, if it proved true.

“It isn’t what you think.”

“Oh, that’s too tacky. What a classic line.” She swallowed hard. She could smell his aftershave, expensive, woodsy. Smell popcorn on the air. Smell the more acrid scent of…betrayal. “Are you saying you’re not married?”

He turned away. Darcie snagged his arm.

“Merrick, you owe me an explanation.” When he remained silent, she said, “No wonder you didn’t remember your ‘nephew.’ Or are you more used to calling him your son?” She flicked a glance toward the table nearby. “Your daughter looks like you. So does he. How old is she?”

“Six. Yes,” he said. “I’m married.” The words came out loud, and he deliberately lowered his voice, color slashing across his cheeks as if Darcie had slapped him. Not a bad idea. “I’ve been married for ten years. Is that what you want to hear?”

“No, I want to hear why you’re screwing me instead of your wife!”

His tight schedule. His one-night-a-week free. Two this week, lucky her. You wouldn’t leave a man in need, would you?

“It doesn’t work between us,” he said.

“What doesn’t work? Sex? You and me? What?” She’d never felt so mortified, so hurt, in her life. Which was saying a lot.

He tried to lead her to a quieter corner but Darcie dug in her heels. She thrust the zebra bag between them like a shield.

“Just say it here.” And if there was anyplace more absurd, more public, than the doll department of FAO Schwarz, she couldn’t think where. That didn’t matter now. Then he shocked her again.

“I love you, Darcie.”

“Oh. You bastard.” A first, she thought. It was a wonder he didn’t strangle.

“No, I mean it. It’s over between Jacqueline and me. She won’t even care.”

“Her name’s Jacqueline?” He nodded, looking at the floor, and Darcie’s mouth tightened like a prune. His wife had probably gone to Smith, like Annie.

He glanced up through a screen of thick lashes. “Do you hate me?”

“Right now, I’d say that’s a definite yes.”

For several moments neither of them spoke. Darcie clutched the zebra and listened to her own breathing. It seemed capable of overriding the noise around them. Roared like an oncoming subway train. She might drop dead right here on the floor. Attention, please. Emergency. Would Medic Barbie go to Aisle Four…

“When do you leave?” he said.

“I told you, tomorrow.”

“I can’t see you before then?”

“I don’t want to see you.”

He looked miserable. “How long will you be gone?”

“I don’t know. Days, weeks.” She’d already told him that, too. Didn’t he listen? “Whatever it takes to negotiate the space we want for the new store.” Whatever it took, not just in Sydney, to heal her broken heart. Forever.

Darcie tried not to focus on Merrick. When his beautiful child bolted from the nearby table straight into his arms, Darcie flinched at her sweet voice.

“Would you buy me this one, Daddy?”

She thrust a pink, plastic-windowed package in his face. International Barbie. Dolls of the World. It seemed just right to Darcie.

Holding Darcie’s gaze, Merrick grasped the box hard.

“Sure, kiddo.”

The little girl gave him a coy smile. “Do you want one, too?”

Merrick managed a small laugh. “Nice try. We’ll just buy this today.”

Darcie stared over his daughter’s head into Merrick’s dark-blue eyes. Then she tightened her grip on Buster the zebra—and marched toward the escalator.

“Darcie. Wait!”

She kept going. She didn’t look back. It was the upside escalator, of course, but Darcie only needed to escape. Suddenly the setting, the noise, the displays seemed absolutely fitting. For once, she had the last word.

“Daddy already bought himself a doll—or so he thought.”

Merrick didn’t know it, but he needed the Returns Department. As for herself…

Australian Barbie.

Merrick Lowell would never see her—a.k.a. Darcie Elizabeth Baxter—again.

Chapter

Three

“‘Waltzing Matilda,’” Darcie sang to herself. “‘Once a jolly swagman…’” Losing the lyrics again, she hummed a few bars. “‘Dum-de-dum…his billabong…’” For some reason her eyes filled.

Jet lag, she thought, and tipped her head back. She hadn’t thought it would be this bad. The new Westin Sydney, with its open expanse of chrome, glass and satiny wood led her gaze upward to a vast skylight showing a night-black canopy full of twinkling, but unidentifiable, stars. New to the southern hemisphere, Darcie sat in the hotel bar digesting the beef tenderloin en croute she’d eaten earlier in one of the trendy lower level restaurants with Walt, and nursing a glass of local Chardonnay to settle things.

Wearing her pinstripe suit, even alone she shouldn’t feel this out of place. In New York—ten thousand miles to the east, as her long, sleepless night on a Boeing 747 from San Francisco could attest—women wore black, too, particularly after five. With a good strand of pearls, her mother would advise. In most big cities of the world, you couldn’t go wrong in dark colors, but Darcie frowned into her glass. She wasn’t wearing pearls, and opals seemed the gem of choice in Australia, if she believed the many shop displays she’d passed on her way to the hotel tonight. And according to the group of what appeared to be thirtyish executives at the next table, beer had it over wine.

Idly, Darcie studied them.

She couldn’t concentrate. A continued low-down cramping had made her order the glass of wine she didn’t really want, or need.

“Thank God he didn’t get me pregnant,” she said of Merrick.

Bastard.

His being married wasn’t the issue. She might be naive at times but she was no brainless ingenue. As a woman of the new millennium, sexually free and unencumbered, she could handle his being married—even if that little fact rankled some deep down remnant of tradition in her own character. Thanks, Mom and Dad. But Merrick’s failure to reveal the truth? That still hurt.

Darcie hated lying. Liars, most of all.

Blinking, she straightened in her roomy club chair. Her glass clicked onto the marble tabletop. What if he carried some STD? That’s all she needed to remember Merrick Lowell—genital herpes or warts. As if she didn’t feel enough of a sexual outcast.

She pressed a hand to her suddenly thumping heart. But they had used protection. Every time. Remember, Merrick didn’t relish having kids. Darcie grimaced. Then why did he seem to have two of them? Maybe it was only her imagined children he didn’t want. Her middle-class genes.

With a sigh, she fell back into the deep chair again.

Twirling the stem of her glass, she gazed around the dimly lit room—and oh, as if a band had struck up the national anthem, “Advance Australia Fair,” would you look at that. Yummy. A lone man stood talking to the bartender, another Aussie male Darcie had noticed earlier. Now, she barely saw him. Eclipsing every other man in the room, this one had dark hair, unlike Merrick’s (a point in his favor) thicker, longer. Hair a woman could twine her fingers through, letting its sinuous silk send a message of desire straight to her achy loins.

His broad shoulders blocked out the bartender to his left, behind the bar. He lounged in three-quarter profile to her, an amazing profile if she bothered to linger on it. Better than Merrick’s. Busily, Darcie’s gaze swept like a huntress down his long frame, from those incredible shoulders and well-developed deltoids—bunched, and nicely rounded, under his chambray shirt—to his washboard belly, then his muscled, jeans-clad legs and, finally, his feet. Boots, she saw. Good ones, if she could judge from this distance. His fingers looked lean and graceful wrapped around the beer bottle in his hand, and when he lifted it for a long swallow, Darcie watched his Adam’s apple work in his strong, beautiful throat. It was true. Australian men were not to be believed.

Could he be any more perfect? Like a fantasy come true, even the Akubra hat from Gran’s wish list lay next to him on the bar. Darcie decided it was on her agenda, too.

“You jolly swagman,” she murmured, sending him a flirty smile.

Heck, why not? She was on her own, for tonight at least, in an exotic foreign environment—for once in her life. No one watched her, certainly not all the executives at the next table who were telling loud jokes and laughing among themselves. Their cigarette smoke created a cloud of anonymity, like the famed Blue Mountains with their eucalyptus haze. Janet Baxter—or Darcie’s father—were nowhere to be seen. And Cincinnati, though not quite as far away as New York, could be ignored for one night. Not that she needed to care. For good measure, feeling defiant after Merrick, she tipped her glass in salute.

She detected no response to the smile or the toast, but his steady gaze did even crazier things to her equilibrium, to her lower abdomen, and Darcie swallowed hard. With her nod in his direction—three strikes, you’re out—the beer bottle stopped halfway down and he stared at her. Then he glanced over his shoulder as if to see whether she’d been signaling the bartender for a refill, not coming on to him. He picked up his hat. What else could she do? Darcie looked down into her half-full glass, and waited. Pulse pounding. Stomach clenched.

Would he come over?

When a tall shadow fell across the table a moment later, she realized she’d been holding her breath. Raising her eyes, Darcie exhaled. Seeing him up close, she struggled not to slip out of her chair onto the floor in a puddle of need.

“If you were a mate—” he pronounced it “might” “—which you’re clearly not, I’d say G’day, but we Aussies don’t use the expression between the sexes.” The word hung between them. “You’re a blow-in, eh? Welcome to Sydney.”

“Blow-in?”

“That’s Ozspeak—for newcomer. Or you could say Strine.”

Ozspeak? “A stranger is a Strine?”

“No.” He smiled. “That’s how we say Aus-tra-lian.” He tangled the syllables.

Darcie smiled, too. “And I thought you spoke English here.”

His wasn’t the smoothest line she’d ever heard, and he’d guessed she was a tourist, but that voice could warm the polar ice cap—which wasn’t all that far away. Darcie gripped both arms of her seat. His gray-green hat, plopped at a jaunty angle on his head, the lightweight sport coat that dangled from one finger over his shoulder, shouted Take me. I’m yours.

She couldn’t help herself. Darcie hummed the first few bars again of “Waltzing Matilda,” for his benefit this time, and he laughed.