Unfinished Business. Inglath Cooper

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      Now he was just another guy closing in on thirty-five. He checked his watch to see how much longer he’d have to stick with this group before he could escape to their hotel down the street and the decently comfortable bed waiting for him there without having to cart along more than his share of ridicule for being an old party pooper.

      The three other guys at the table— Paul, Wallace Mitchell and Tristan Overfelt—had hounded him by e-mail until he’d finally agreed to come this weekend. Culley had nearly backed out at the last minute—there would have been plenty of excuses that held water—but even he had thought it might be good for him to try to start being sociable again.

      “This next round has your name on it, Culley.” Tristan helped the hovering waiter pass around the drinks from the tray in his hand, then threw the check across the table to Culley. He pulled a fifty out of his wallet and handed that and the bill back to the waiter who nodded and moved on.

      Another hour passed during which they waded through some of their more memorable med-school experiences: the day Paul had passed out when they’d delivered their first baby (he still swore on his mother’s Bible that he’d had a virus; he was an OBGYN, for heaven’s sake, he had a reputation to uphold). The time Wallace had spent their rent money on tickets to an AC/DC concert, and they’d gotten thrown out of their apartment, spending the rest of the semester living out of their cars.

      And there was the usual guy stuff. Bad dirty jokes. Boasts from the still-married guys about how their wives wanted to have sex five nights a week, none of which any of them believed. Everybody except Culley ordered another cigar, stage-smokers all. They didn’t actually like smoking them; they just liked the way they looked pretending to smoke them.

      “Now there’s one I’d give it all up for.”

      Culley glanced at Paul who was doing a dead-on imitation of a balding, sex-deprived, turned-loose-for-the-weekend husband who’d just caught a glimpse of what he’d been missing. His tongue was practically hanging out.

      A look at the door revealed why.

      She was a knockout. Even Culley, disinterested as he was, would admit that. And he’d barely noticed the fifteen women Paul had pointed out before her. With a seven-year-old daughter, dating just wasn’t worth the complications it inevitably created. He hadn’t been with a woman in—

      He didn’t want to think about how long that had been.

      Wallace and Tristan were busy agreeing with Paul that the breasts were real. The figure-defining black dress certainly gave ample evidence on which to base their conclusions. A low dip at the front of the dress revealed a vee of cleavage. Something inside him stirred, and for the first time in longer than he could remember, he felt the itch of physical need for a woman.

      His gaze went to her face. She didn’t have the expectant expression of a beautiful woman meeting a date or a husband. There was sadness there, disappointment of some kind.

      He had a ridiculous urge to ask her if she was alone.

      She followed the maitre d’ across the floor, winding through the busy bar past their table.

      There was something awfully familiar about her. And then recognition jolted through him. It couldn’t be. No way.

      Paul, Wallace and Tristan stared like three men who’d spent the last six months at sea. Culley stared, too, but now for a different reason altogether.

      Addy.

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