Unfinished Business

Culley raised his glass and tapped it against hers

“To two old friends running into one another.”

Addy raised the glass to her lips and took a long sip. “Your mom told you about the divorce?”

“I’m sorry.” He reached across and covered her hand with his.

Addy couldn’t say anything for a moment. He turned her palm over, squeezed her hand tight, and she held on as if it were a lifeline. Finally she said, “I know what all the marriage manuals say. That when something like this happens, the affair isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom.”

“It still hurts.”

“That from personal experience?”

“Yep.”

Culley glanced away, a cloud of something that looked like sadness in his eyes. Not what she would have expected of the Culley Rutherford she had known in high school.

Dear Reader,

Every now and then I hear people say reading can’t be what it once was. There are too many other forms of media to choose from. While it’s true we have many choices these days when it comes to entertainment, I noticed something on a recent trip to a hair salon in Dallas, Texas, that reassured me books are doing just fine.

This was one of those great places where they offer you hot tea and massage your hands while you’re getting your hair washed with flaxseed shampoo. It was a Saturday, and the place was busier than a hive of bees. While I waited for my appointment, I noticed how many people were reading. An older lady with a Larry McMurtry, a twentysomething young woman with a Nora Roberts. A mother with a baby in tow snatching paragraphs of something that looked light and fun. A gray-haired man waiting for his wife, deep into James Patterson. And really, it seemed as if they were all enjoying the opportunity to read every bit as much as they were enjoying the salon’s exceptionally nice treatment.

I think those people all knew what I know about reading. That even with all the entertainment we have to choose from today, there’s something special about a book. Maybe it’s the one-on-one connection we have with the characters, or the fact that we can keep turning the pages without commercial interruption. And what a pleasure it is to read the first page and think, “Ah, this is going to be a good story.”

That’s what I wish for you. Many, many good stories!

All best,

Inglath Cooper

P.S. Please visit my Web site at inglathcooper.com. Write to me at P.O. Box 973, Rocky Mount, VA 24151.

Unfinished Business

Inglath Cooper

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Mac for showing me what real love is.

And to Grandpa Holland for the Sunday morning rides.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

PROLOGUE

ADDY PIERCE HAD always believed in the power of intuition.

That little voice had a purpose.

Hard to explain, then, why she ignored it this particular day.

She’d worked on the Lawson case until after midnight, setting the alarm for four and leaving Mark asleep when she headed out the door for the office at five.

She had just sat down at her desk with a cup of much needed coffee when she missed the file, remembered she’d left it on the dining-room table. She was to be in court at ten o’clock, but she had enough time to run home and pick it up on the way.

It was then that the little voice had sounded inside her.

Send someone else.

Looking back, this was the detail that continued to play like a CD track stuck on what-if. What if she had sent someone else to get the file? Would they have told her Mark was at home? Or taken pity on her and left her unaware of the fracture in her marriage?

But none of those things had happened.

Addy had been the one to drive to her house. The one to open the front door and notice his suit jacket draped across the back of the living-room couch. The one to hear his voice coming from upstairs. The words not clear from where she stood in the foyer, but distinctly his voice. Followed by a woman’s laugh.

The voice inside Addy screamed. Leave. Turn around and leave.

But eight years of practicing law had shown her that knowledge, once gained, can rarely be ignored.

Standing there in the foyer of a house that already felt as if it didn’t belong to her, a feeling of dread swept through her, weakened her knees, so she put a hand on the wall and stood for a moment, waiting for the room to stop its listing.

Her feet moved of their own volition, the runner on the staircase deadening her footsteps. She followed the hall to the master bedroom, the voices drawing closer.

They’d left the bedroom door open. This amazed her. That in their own house, their own bed, he hadn’t bothered to close the door.

How could he have been so comfortable that he left the door open?

Through that rectangle she watched the husband who was supposed to have been hers rest his cheek on the woman’s belly, rounded with child.

Addy swallowed. Went absolutely numb as if someone had flipped a switch and obliterated all feeling inside her.

Mark turned, as if he’d felt her gaze. Shock skidded across his too good-looking face, then froze there.

“Addy. What are you doing here?”

The question hung in the air, ridiculous, considering. The woman scrambled up—as well as a woman in her condition can scramble—and yanked the covers around herself with a well-sculpted arm.

She was so young. She had the kind of skin that made Addy want to run out in search of face creams guaranteed to halt the aging process in its tracks.

What was Mark doing with someone who looked like she should still be in college?

He jerked out of the bed. Addy stared at her naked husband while the woman made no effort to hide the possessiveness in her own assessment of him. Mark reached for a robe where it lay on top of the thick comforter. Addy recognized it as the one she had bought for him at Bloomingdale’s for Christmas last year.

A robe. She’d given him a robe.

Was that the cause of this? The fact that their marriage had deteriorated to the point that she couldn’t come up with anything more exciting than a robe for a gift?

The room suddenly had no air in it. Her lungs screamed in protest. She was going to be sick. She turned and bolted down the hall.

“Addy! Addy, wait!” Mark called out.

She stumbled down the stairs. Don’t think. Not yet. Get out. Just go. Her throat had closed up, and her eyes burned with the need to cry. Not in front of him. She would not cry in front of him!

“Addy, please!” He caught her in the foyer, his chest rising and falling with what looked more like agitation than exertion. Her gaze dropped to his ab muscles. A six-pack. Like those guys in the men’s fitness magazines. When had he started working out? And he’d lost weight, hadn’t he?

She realized then how long it had been since she’d seen him without his clothes on. How long it had been since the two of them had made love. She felt a wash of mortification for what she now knew to be the reason.

“We need to talk, Addy,” he said, a note of uncertainty in his normally confident attorney’s voice.

She focused on the navy crest of his robe, the knot in her throat so thick she could barely speak. “Aren’t we a little beyond the talking stage?”

“This isn’t how I wanted to tell you,” he said, compassion edging the admission.

Fury exploded through her. She did not want his pity! Damn him. “How long has this been going on?”

He looked away, then dropped his gaze, guilt etched in every angle of his posture. “I never wanted to hurt you, Addy.”

“You knew I wanted children. You weren’t ready, you said. How could you? How could you do this?” The words throbbed with pain, and she hated her own inability to keep them neutral.

He stepped toward her, reached out, then dropped his hands to his sides. “Please, Addy, I don’t know what to say. This wasn’t planned. It just—”

“Don’t you dare say it just happened. I can’t believe you would do this to us. Who are you?”

He blocked the door with one hand. “Wait. Addy! You don’t understand—”

“I understand,” she said, the details of their marriage clicking into place like the numbers on a vault lock. All those late nights he’d been working, his lack of interest in her and the fact that they hadn’t made love in months.

The anger collapsed inside her, and she felt as though her bones might not support her. She walked over to the dining-room table, picked up the file she’d left that morning.

And, without another word between them, she left. Game over. Marriage finished.

CHAPTER ONE

ADDY TAYLOR STOOD at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 48th Street, hand raised for a taxi. Rain pelted her already-a-lost-cause hair, and her lightweight coat drooped beneath the downpour. She glanced at her watch, waved harder as another cab sped past her like a bullet, tossing a wave of muddy water across the toes of the Italian leather pumps she’d stalked for two months at Neiman’s until they finally went on sale.

She stepped back from the curb, reached down and pulled off a shoe, emptied it of water, then did the same for the other.

Her flight was due to leave LaGuardia in forty-five minutes. She had been in Manhattan since Monday, taking depositions from the board of directors of a company Owings, Blake was representing in a securities fraud suit. She’d known she was pushing it, allowing so little time to get to the airport, but she’d been close enough to finishing to not have to come back next week.

Fifteen minutes later, a taxi whisked to a stop beside her. She opened the door, shoved her small suitcase and laptop bag across the blue vinyl seat, slid in and closed the door. “LaGuardia, please.”

The driver had thick black frame glasses and a scruff of a beard that looked as if his razor had gone dull several days before. He pulled out into traffic, looking in the rearview mirror. “Which airline?”

“U.S. Air.”

“What time’s your flight?”

“Five-fifteen.”

He gave her a pointed look, muttered something about the taxi not having wings, then rammed the accelerator to the floor, tossing her against the back seat.

She looked down at her lap. A drenched mess. She reached inside her purse and pulled out a couple of tissues, attempted to wipe the rain from her face, only to have them dissolve in a sodden lump in her hands. A complete waste of time.

She dropped her head back, pressed a thumb to her throbbing right temple. What she would give for a hot bath and a long soak. The last thing she wanted to do was get on an airplane. So spend the night.

The thought beamed up from nowhere, only to be squashed by a wake of practicality. Too expensive. She hadn’t planned to stay.

But then why not? What did she have to hurry home for?

Another weekend, and nothing but an empty house that stood as an all too recognizable symbol of her empty life.

April third. First day as an officially no-longer-married woman. Addy hated the sound of it, hated everything about the new tag, its implications of failure and rejection. The realization that like her own mother, she had been left. Half a year had passed since Mark had moved out, and sometimes Addy felt as though she were still standing in the doorway of their bedroom, trying to make sense of the fact that there was another woman in her bed. Six months, and she had not moved beyond that single truth.

Maybe it was finally time she got moving. At the very least, she could indulge herself for the night.

She sat up in the seat. “Wait. I’ve changed my mind. The Plaza Hotel, please.”

Another pointed look through the rearview mirror, this time with compressed lips to complete his disapproval.

A few minutes later, the taxi jarred to a stop outside the 59th Street entrance to the Plaza. A bellman opened Addy’s door and took what luggage she had. She paid the driver who managed to complete the transaction with a single huff and an acceleration back into traffic worthy of NASCAR.

Addy went inside and checked in, relieved that there was a room available, astronomically expensive though it was.

The bellhop, an older man with white hair and shoulders hunched from the weight of several decades worth of suitcases, directed her through the hotel’s ornate lobby to the elevator and up to her room. Inside, he pointed out the minibar, the safe inside the closet. “May I get you some ice before I go, miss?”

“No. Thank you. I’m fine.” She handed him a tip for his help, and with a nod, he left her alone. Under other circumstances, she might have enjoyed the luxurious room. An Oriental rug, two double beds with a mound of pillows propped high, a wall cabinet which housed the TV, fax machine and Internet connection.

Heat crowded the room. She cracked the window, letting in the sounds of the city below, the whine of a trumpet, the clip-clop of horses’ hooves on the paved streets.

With methodical movements, she emptied her suitcase. Nothing inside except two wrinkled suits and workout clothes she’d worn to Crunch, the club she’d escaped to each night that week in order to avoid the late dinners she was semi-expected to attend with her client.

On another spur-of-the-moment impulse, she grabbed her purse and headed back out of the hotel. The rain had stopped, so she didn’t bother putting up the umbrella the doorman had just handed her. Barney’s was a short walk away, and she headed up 59th Street, aware that she could be accused of trying to avoid the pain gnawing at her stomach. And maybe she was. She’d racked up enough billable hours in the past six months to put her in the running for junior-partner status. Work was the distraction she needed. As long as she focused on whatever case was before her, she could avoid looking at the state of disaster currently posing as her personal life.

She crossed over to 60th and headed toward Lexington Avenue. Her cell phone rang. She pulled it out of her purse. “Hello.”

“Where are you?” Ellen Wilshire rarely bothered with greetings. As a newly appointed partner in the same firm for which Addy worked, she trimmed minutes from her non-billable schedule just as she trimmed fat from every morsel of food she ate.

“Still in the city. Currently headed toward Barney’s.”

“You’re supposed to be back in D.C.”

“I decided to stay the night.”

“And I had planned to take you out on the town!”

“Sorry.”

“You don’t sound it.”

There was a smile in Ellen’s voice, so Addy didn’t bother to deny it. As grateful as she was for her friend’s consideration, she wasn’t sorry she’d missed the outing. Ellen’s idea of cheering her up would be a night spent in some currently hip spot where thirty-somethings with their own set of divorce papers were trying to anesthetize reality with Cosmopolitans. “I’m still in training wheels on the social scene, Ellen. Rusty and not interested.”

“Yeah, the unapproachable signs are hard to miss. Poor Teddy’s been asking me for detour instructions again.”

A young, fast-track attorney at Owings, Blake, Teddy Simpson had made no secret of his interest. He’d been consulting Ellen on a regular basis for tips on getting Addy to go out with him.

But the thought of entering the dating scene again all but gave her hives.

“Let me guess. You’re going in search of a little black dress for a night out in the city.”

“Actually, that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

“Whoo-hoo! Is there a man etched into this anywhere?”

“No. I thought I’d fix myself up, get a table in the Oak Bar and spend the evening with a book.”

“Excellent social outing,” Ellen said with a frown in her voice.

“Practicing for the future.”

“When you decide to stop living like a nun.”

Addy smiled. Ellen had been on her case for months. Get back out there. Find someone else, and you’ll forget all about Mark.

But Addy didn’t think it was possible to forget eleven years of marriage, and especially not one that had ended as hers had. If anything, it had run a stake through her heart and anchored her to a single spot of relative safety from which she was reluctant to move.

“Okay, one more night of this solo stuff, and you’re mine,” Ellen conceded. “You’re thirty-three, not eighty-three, and I can’t in good conscience stand by and let every social skill you ever had atrophy. Tomorrow night. We’ll paint Georgetown red.”

“I can hardly wait,” Addy said.

“Just finish the book tonight. You won’t need it for a while.”

The line clicked off with Ellen’s usual abruptness.

Addy put the cell phone back in her purse, turned the corner to the front entrance of Barney’s. The customers here all looked as though they took their Vogue subscriptions seriously. Lots of black, chunky heels, skin that had been exfoliated and moisturized into a blemish-free existence. She took the escalator to the third floor, bought a too-short black dress and a pair of too-high heels to go with it, both of which dealt a near death blow to her AmEx.

On the way back to the hotel, she passed an antique store, caught a glimpse of herself in the wavy glass of an old framed mirror. She stopped, stared for a moment, wondered how she could have thought a new dress and shoes could fix the tear inside her. Allow her to look in the mirror and see a woman capable of getting past her husband’s betrayal. The truth? There wasn’t a black dress in Manhattan that could get her past that.

Nothing she had believed about herself fit anymore. If her life had once been a puzzle whose pieces had long been put in place, it had all been ripped apart the morning she found Mark in bed with his pregnant lover. Since then, she’d been trying to put those pieces back together, but nothing fit where it had once been. Her vision of herself as a desirable woman, her once-certain career goals.

An older man in a red bow tie stepped to the window, raised an eyebrow in inquiry. She lifted a hand and walked on.

Back in her room, she took a long bath. Up to her neck in bubbles, fatigue hit her in a wave, sent off little alarms along her nerve endings. People weren’t supposed to be this tired at thirty-three, were they? This kind of tired was the stop sign at the end of the road for lawyers who’d been practicing for thirty years. The kind that made them start thinking about retirement and second homes in south Florida.

Maybe she just needed a vacation. Some downtime. Owings, Blake expected a lot from its attorneys. Sixty to seventy hours a week was standard unless they had a big case going, and then it was whatever it took to get the job done. Past that, Addy shied from taking apart her own question. Examining the nuts and bolts of it.

At some point in her marriage, she had developed a fairly keen ability to let things she didn’t know how to fix merely coast along as they were. The fact, for example, that somewhere along the way, she and Mark had begun to feel like two roommates sharing the same home. “Morning, honey,” on the way out the door to work. “Night,” before they went to bed. And very little else in between.

Every marriage had its problems. Hers had certainly been no exception. And yes, she would take full credit for sinking herself so deeply into work these past couple of years that she had ignored the warning signs. Late nights. Saturdays at the office.

But the simple truth was that she had trusted her husband. Had married him thinking he was a man who would take his vows as seriously as she did. And this was the part she couldn’t get past. That she could have been so wrong.

When she’d been eight or nine years old, she’d gone on a camping trip with her church youth group. There had been a heavy rain on the first night, and early the next morning she had waded out into the middle of the river that flowed near where they had pitched their tents. The water had risen quickly, covering the rocks she had used as a path coming out. No one else had been up yet, and she stood in the middle of the once placid river, transfixed with fear. She had known that just below the surface were rocks that would lead her back to shore. But some might have already grown too slick. And what if she slipped and fell into the current? Was she strong enough to swim back?

She had finally forced herself to move, found her way to shore before anyone realized she was missing.

In these past six months, she hadn’t been able to make herself pick a path back to safety. She just kept standing in the same spot while the water rose around her.

The bath was cool now. She stood, reached for one of the big white towels hanging beside the tub. Maybe she should just order room service and go to bed. She thought of Mark, knowing he wasn’t alone tonight, this first night of their divorce. He had started a new life. With another woman and a baby boy, now six weeks old. Addy had been made aware of the birth after running into a mutual friend of theirs in the grocery store, the information imparted with a kind of I-hate-to-tell-you-this-but reservation, beneath which was hidden an almost malicious glee to be the first to reveal the news.

One thing was true about divorce. It showed a person who her friends were. And weren’t.

Suddenly, Addy was sick of rehashing the same stuff she’d been rehashing for six months. She would put on the new dress and go downstairs. Ellen was right. She was spending way too much time alone with her own thoughts. At least in a room full of people, there was the odd chance of drowning them out.

CHAPTER TWO

THE OAK BAR, the Plaza Hotel’s wood-paneled watering hole, had a gracious charm that allowed even out-of-towners to feel welcome. It was the kind of place where people didn’t mind double-digit pricing for their highballs. Heavy, dark-wood tables filled the room, surrounded by brown leather chairs, invitingly worn.

In town for a medical conference, Culley Rutherford had agreed to join three of his buddies here in a salute to old times. They were drinking scotch. He was nursing fancy-label bottled water.

“I knew you when that would have been two jiggers of J.D.” This from Paul Evans, his old roommate from Hopkins.

“Too much to hope I’ve matured since then?” Culley asked in a neutral voice while a knife of familiar pain did a slow turn inside him, its edges sharp enough to make him wish he’d never agreed to this buddies-weekend.

“We’re supposed to be taking advantage of this, aren’t we?” Paul held up the red-embered tip of the thirty-five-dollar cigar he’d been pretending to smoke for the past hour and a half. “We’re in New York City, the Oak Bar, no less. No wives. No children. No patients. I’ve seen at least fifteen bombshells walk through that door since we got here,” he said with a meaningful head tilt toward the bar entrance. “Does life get any better?”

Culley had once been the least serious of the foursome. And there had been a time—surely, it hadn’t been that long ago?—when he would have agreed and ordered the next round of drinks. Actually, he would have been the one to make the statement in the first place. Actually, he would have already left with one of those bombshells Paul had been ogling.

Until he’d run head-on into a wall called consequence, and everything had changed.