Do-Over (3 page)

“And you never even mentioned his name to me? What gives?”

“Well, as it turned out, I did get screwed, and it happened without him even touching me.”

Bri raised her glass in a toast. “Now that’s talent. How’d he manage it?”

“We were both being interviewed for editor-in-chief of the law review…the two of us in front of the current editorial board. Anyway, for the first time ever, I didn’t play at the top of my game. I kept looking at him and thinking… God, I don’t know what I was thinking except I wanted him to finally see me as more than the mouthy, smart girl in class.”

She hesitated before admitting the truth aloud. “I let
him out-interview me. It was like I was hovering somewhere on the ceiling, watching and totally freaked out as someone else down there operated my voice.” Her sigh was powered by sheer disgust. “I rolled over and played dead.”

Bri’s green eyes grew wide and round. “Wow. Ms. High School Class President, college superstar and law school whiz? No way, I don’t believe it.”

“Trust me on this,” Cara said. She and Morgan had been a total train wreck, ending with one best-forgotten scene on the night after the Michigan bar exam. Enough soul-bearing was enough.

“So what happened to the guy?” her friend asked as she traced her fingertip over the raised lettering on her jar.

“The Shark became editor-in-chief, and I was thrown the bone of managing editor of articles. When the big firms came to campus to interview for summer associate positions, they were all over him. He landed a dream job in New York City…my dream job, to be exact. I settled in at Saperstein, Underwood for about half the pay Mark was getting, and took their offer of a job after graduation. In fact, I didn’t even bother to interview elsewhere. The law review screwup really spooked me.”

“You’ve done fine,” Bri consoled. “I don’t know anyone else among our friends who could afford a condo over there.” She hitched her thumb in the direction of Cara’s future three-thousand-square-foot home-sweet-home.

“It’s not the money. It’s knowing that I was less than I could be. I failed myself.”

She took the last sip of her drink, tucked the cup under the fainting couch, and lay back down. “And
that,” she said, “is why I’m now officially applying to the do-over gods.”

“I dunno,” Bri replied. “I’m sure there are candidates with stronger cases. And what are these gods going to do, anyway? Spin the Earth backward until we reach that fated moment once again?”

Cara watched the disco ball glitter as it spun. “Feels like we’re doing that already.”

Bri hauled her up by the hand. “Stop watching that thing, you know it makes you dizzy. Now here’s the deal. Your do-over gods might be a little slow on the uptake, but I have just what you need.”

While Cara stood a bit unsteadily, thinking that lunch might have been a bright option, Bri hustled to the back room.

“These came in today,” she called from some muffled corner. “They’re the coolest ever.”

Eyeing a display of embroidered Chinese robes, Cara wondered what could be exotic enough to summon this level of enthusiasm in her friend.

Bri emerged with an armful of bright silk and satins. “Back in the early sixties, the lady who sold me these used to sing in the cocktail lounge at the Sands in Vegas. She said that Frank Sinatra thought the red one was real hot.” She thrust the dresses at Cara. “Come on, try them on. They’re going to take a skinny, leggy number like you to look good.”

“I really don’t—”

Bri planted a hand in the middle of Cara’s back. “This, babe, is your do-over. Do it or lose it.”

Cara looked around for a means of escape, but saw none.

“Don’t be a wimp,” her friend urged.

Grumping and moaning, Cara made her way to the
dressing room. She caught her reflection in the narrow mirror and made a sound of disgust. Her blue eyes had picked up the faint purple shading of the shadows beneath them, and at some point when she wasn’t looking, she’d worked her way past pale and gone straight to pallid.

“Just do it!” Bri ordered from the other side of the curtain.

“You can be such a pain in the ass,” Cara groused, but began sorting through the dresses. Honestly, she doubted that trying on some old clothes was going to improve her mood, but hell, the chocolate and vodka were beginning to kick in, so why fight the buzz?

Like a modern-day and slightly slutty-looking Goldilocks, Cara worked her way through “don’t have the butt,” “too much on top,” and “white makes me look dead,” but then with a wiggle and a slight adjustment over the hips, found
absolutely damn perfect.

“Are you ready for this?” she called to Bri. “Because it’s showtime!”

A
T
L
EAST
R
OYAL
O
AK
wasn’t country club territory, Mark consoled himself as he ushered two old friends down the sidewalk. But he knew he’d better work on his golf swing and get over this club phobia, because late this morning, he’d taken the offer from Saperstein, Underwood. And at S.U., he’d been told golf ruled.

Mark had spent the afternoon preparing for reentry into the Midwest. He supposed that his moving from New York to Detroit was kind of like the experience an astronaut had reacclimating to Earth after having experienced the wonders of space. There was so damn much he was going to miss. And so damn
much he needed to accomplish to make this new life work.

When he’d contacted the management committee of his current firm, the conversation had gone well once he’d explained his family circumstances. Should he ever change his mind, a job awaited him in New York. Tempting, but impossible.

After lunch, he’d talked to some of the clients he’d lured to New York over the past several years. More than a few would actually benefit by having Michigan-based counsel, and most of them had agreed to move to Saperstein, Underwood with him.

Finally, he’d tapped his college pals to discuss prospects for new business, which was why he was about to have drinks and dinner with Bob and Trey.

“How long since you’ve been in Royal Oak?” Trey asked.

“About five years, I think,” Mark replied, trying to refocus his thoughts on his companions.

Bob and Trey slowed, then stopped.

“Five years ago, you wouldn’t have seen this,” Bob said in tones that could only be described as awestruck.

Mark glanced in the window where his friends had halted. When his gaze was captured by the same sight that held his friends’ riveted, Mark’s world was rocked once again.

In a man’s life, some females are never to be forgotten: first kiss, first breakup, first lover. Cara Adams was none of those women, but damned if she didn’t fall into the category of unforgettable, anyway.

Six years ago she’d been vibrant.

Now she was…

She…

Mark swallowed, trying to ease the cottony dryness that had settled in his mouth. He, king of the glib phrase, the subtle nuance, couldn’t summon a word sufficient to describe the incredible sight before him.

It wasn’t just the dress, though plunging black fabric with a sprinkling of what looked to be diamonds was admittedly out of the ordinary. She shimmered, and he didn’t think it was because of the disco ball.

Aretha Franklin’s unmistakable voice was belting out
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
with enough volume to travel through the thick plate glass of the window. Eyes closed, oblivious to her audience, Cara shimmied, shook and downright boogied to the beat.

After some indeterminate amount of time—an hour, a week, a full loop around the sun—his friends hauled him away from the window. It was then that the word he had been seeking came to him:
elemental.

This morning, in a fit of self-delusion, he had signed on to compete against a full-out, red-haired act of God. And like any poor fool facing down a volcano, Mark knew that only some very fancy footwork would stop him from being cooked alive. Unfortunately, as a white-bread, country-club-bred boy, he couldn’t dance.

Which meant…

There was a distinct possibility that he was toast.

Cara’s Rule for Success 3:

Reasoned thinking must always prevail

over impulsive behavior…

unless you’re temporarily incapable

of thought.

I
T WAS NO TRIBUTE
to self-restraint that Cara lasted until Saturday afternoon before she conducted a drive-by of her office. No, a killer harpy of a hangover, with its filthy, curved talons piercing the flesh of her skull and its foul breath curling down the back of her neck, had a lot more to do with it.

She couldn’t recall how much she had drunk the night before, except that she hadn’t stopped until the cranberry juice was exhausted. She had a blurry memory of scrambled eggs and chili-cheese fries with a far more sober Bri and her fiancé, Seth, at one of those all-night greasy spoons where the only things slower than the cooks are the waitresses.

She wasn’t certain when, exactly, Seth had arrived on the scene, but knew for sure that the enamored couple had taken her home, since they had also awakened her at nine this morning to return her car keys.

After they flitted off, she’d dragged her sorry, aching carcass back to bed for a party girl’s ménage à trois
with a pitcher of water and a couple of aspirin as her companions. There was a reason she didn’t drink frequently: she was no damn good at it.

Just past three, Cara managed to shower without drowning, and then pull on her best pair of ripped-at-the-knees jeans, a T-shirt and the Spitfire cap her eight-year-old skateboarder nephew had given her for her thirtieth birthday. She’d found the hat a lot more entertaining than the office her co-workers had filled floor-to-ceiling with black balloons.

Once she’d completed a mandatory stop at the dry cleaner’s to pick up half her wardrobe and drop off the other half, Cara headed north on Woodward, telling herself that she was just going for a relaxing drive. If it so happened that her randomly selected route took her past the imposing edifice of Saperstein, Underwood, it was mere happenstance.

Yeah, and she’d be singing backup for Aretha real soon.

As Cara neared her building, she asked herself a crucial question, one that should have occurred to her a good while earlier: Wasn’t there something the smallest bit
sick
in needing to see her office, if not actually be in it? She supposed there was, which meant she could always blame it on the hangover. Feeling marginally more justified, she flipped on her right turn signal and approached her brick-and-mortar security blanket.

In the lot were Vic Mancini’s Beemer and some cars she knew belonged to first-year associates. Among those, she still hadn’t bothered to sort out who owned what because they weren’t even blips on her “path to partnership” radar screen.

Cara slowed. Stewart Harbedian’s dark blue Mercedes
was parked on the back side of the building, far from its usual spot of honor by the entry. Stewart was a partner in the finance practice group, which meant he was supposed to be a few hundred miles north in Bay Harbor, plotting the future of the free world.

Just the other side of Stewart’s car was the same black convertible she’d seen leaving the lot yesterday morning. She was sure of it; this wasn’t the sort of car you’d overlook. Cara narrowed her bloodshot and rather dry eyes.

Maybe this odd tingling she felt was an aftereffect of too much Aretha Franklin.

Maybe it was a harbinger of true craziness.

Or just maybe she had good instincts.

Whatever the reason, she pulled into the open spot on the other side of the sleek black car, and after glancing at the building to be sure nobody was watching her, switched off her Saturn and got out for a closer look.

“Michigan plates,” she murmured. “No dealer tag.” She ventured nearer, to see if any papers or other hints of ownership might have been left on the seats. No such luck. Anyone checking out
her
car would immediately know that she was addicted to tall lattes, alternative rock and Diet Coke. This piece of fine British machinery was cleaner than a surgical field.

Since it really needed a smudge of some sort to remove the pretentious aura, Cara touched the very tip of her finger to its shiny fender. Just then, the back door to the building slammed. Even her hangover-slowed neurons and synapses got the message. She jumped backward, but not with much grace. One foot tangled with the other and she staggered into the side of her own car.

“Oof,”
she grunted as her hip hit the passenger door latch. Arms flailing in a losing battle for balance, she brushed her hand against the front of her hat, knocking it crooked.

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a stranger heading her way. Between the sun in her face and the fact that she remained pretty fried, she couldn’t see him too clearly. She needed to escape before she had to explain why she was skulking around his car. He was too close, though.

In a bad imitation of the already stupid Chicken Dance, she spun in a tight circle between the two cars. All the while, this little song played in her head, one with unimaginative yet heartfelt lyrics of
ohcrap, ohcrap, ohcrap.
Since there was no place to hide that didn’t involve crawling, she decided to take comfort in anonymity. She could just lie to him, hop in her car and drive off.

“Cara, is that you?”

Un-freaking-believable. Six years of peace, now this.

Before answering, she sent a desperate plea to Olympus that this man was a hangover hallucination.
“Morgan? Mark Morgan?”

“Yeah.” He pulled off his sunglasses and smiled at her. Bastard. His looks were as killer-handsome as ever. “It’s good to see you.”

The do-over gods had obviously had one fine party themselves last night, because today they were total zip-heads. What had happened to the part where she was supposed to magically travel back in time? Huh? Would that be too much to ask?

Apparently so.

Cara righted her cap, pulling it low over her eyes. “So what are you doing here, Morgan? Slumming?”

He didn’t answer immediately, which gave her some satisfaction. He glanced up at the building, then back at her. “Were you just headed inside?”

“Yes,” she lied. “Yes, I was.”

“Why don’t I join you? I think we need to talk.”

Cara froze. The last time she’d heard the phrase
we need to talk
given in such dire tones was back when her college boyfriend had told her he was entering the seminary.

On top of that, even if she wanted to talk—which sounded about as appealing as licking the asphalt beneath her sneakers—the Saperstein offices remained strictly off limits.

“I’m sure whatever it is can wait,” she said while edging past him and working her way to the driver’s side of her car. At least she’d left her keys in the ignition. “I mean, we’ve gone six years without speaking to each other, so why start now?”

“Cara…” he said in a tone even darker than the one that had signaled priesthood.

If she were four years old, like her sister’s youngest child, she could plug her fingers in her ears and incessantly chant, “Can’t hear you…can’t hear you.” To her deep regret, she was thirty and had already expended her dignity by snooping around his car, so she forced herself to stand tall and take it like a woman.

“I’m joining the firm,” he said.

With no help from her brain, which had shut down, Cara’s lips tried to form an appropriate platitude.

“How—how nice for you,” she finally managed.

She reached for her car’s door handle and pulled. Nothing happened. She gave it one more frantic yank.

Why did she have to be such a pathetic creature of habit? Always come to the office…

“I, ah, think the car’s locked,” Mark said.

And always lock the car doors.

She could see the beginnings of a smile he was fighting to hide, and hated him all the more for it.

“And it looks like the keys are inside,” he added, gesturing at the ignition.

Somewhere just beneath the low rumble of a passenger jet cutting through the cornflower-blue sky overhead, Cara was quite sure she heard a pack of gods up on Olympus, laughing their asses off. And she had only herself to blame.

G
REEN SKIN DID NOT
complement a redhead. Mark debated if he should tell Cara to sit down and put her head between her knees. Since he didn’t want to think about where, in return, she might tell him to put
his
head, he kept his advice to himself.

“Do you have a spare set of keys handy?” he asked.

“Sure…in my apartment.”

“I could give you a ride,” he offered.

“Except the key to my apartment is in the car.”

“Do you have a spare?”

“In my office.”

Thank God, an easy out. “Well, let’s go on up and—”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. You go upstairs, find a guy named Vic Mancini, tell him to come down here and then you leave.”

That green complexion was developing slashes of red on her high cheekbones. “Are you feeling okay?”

Her hands clenched into fists at her sides. “How the hell do you
think
I’m feeling? First, Rory takes off, then Howard puts me in solitary confinement and now the
most hideous nightmare of my adult life materializes and tells me that he’s joined the firm. I
feel
like hiring a hit man.”

Mark instinctively backed away a step. He might be new to the firm, but already he’d heard bits and pieces about the Rory thing, had a sense about Howard and was damn sure he was to be the hit man’s target.

He had liked Cara better dancing behind glass, happy and unable to harm him.

And she’d like him better in concrete boots, anchored in the middle of the Detroit River.

It looked as though it was time for some diplomacy…and a retreat. “So this guy’s name is Vic?” he asked.

“Vic Mancini.” She waved a hand at him in a
shoo
ing motion that seemed kind of benign compared to the evil look in her blue eyes. “Use your fresh new pass card, go on up there and get him. When you come back down, don’t look at me or acknowledge me in any way. Just climb in your fancy-ass car and drive off.”

Had she been this psychotic in law school? He didn’t think so, or she’d have never made it through.

“When was the last time you had a vacation?”

“Shut…
up.
”

Clearly no time in the recent past. Mark pulled his pass card out of his wallet, ignored her low growl and went to fetch Vic Mancini. Now he knew how those Roman guards who threw the Christians to the lions had felt. But hey, better Vic than him. Which, he supposed, was exactly what the guards had thought, too.

C
ARA SELDOM CRIED
for the same reason she seldom drank: she didn’t do it well. She couldn’t relate to
those women who produced pearly drops gently coursing down alabaster cheeks. She was more the puffy-eyed, snot-filled type, and she never,
ever
felt better when she was done making a mess of herself. So, for all concerned, it was a good thing that she held herself together until Vic had driven her back to the parking lot with her spare keys.

All the way to Cara’s apartment and back, he’d exercised a level of tact she’d thought him incapable of showing. He didn’t ask about Morgan. He didn’t ask why she was curled up in the fetal position on his passenger seat. He simply drove.

Once she was behind the wheel of her car, Cara fled the office lot as though a tidal wave were closing in on her. And in an emotional sense, one was. She could feel a horrible burning behind her eyes, and these scary sobbing sounds kept sneaking past her clenched teeth. She was scarcely on the road home before the first tears began to seep and had made it only another mile or so when the wailing started in earnest.

When she was finally in her apartment, she removed her Spitfire hat because she was unworthy of the label, and then grabbed a fistful of tissue. Now properly equipped, she flung herself onto the black down-filled duvet covering her bed. Not even fear of a major comforter cleaning bill would slow these tears.

She’d scarcely started when the phone rang. Cara wiped her eyes, then commando-crawled up the queen-sized mattress, toward the telephone on the nightstand. Two rings…three… It could be someone from the office, maybe even a partner who wanted to tell her that they really hadn’t hired Mark Morgan.

She picked up the handset, pushed the talk button, and choked out, “’Lo.”

“Cara, is that you?”

Her last hope spiraling down in flames, Cara lay back against the pillows. She cleared her throat.

“Yes, Dani, it’s me,” she said to her sister.

“You’re not sick, are you?”

“Not in the germ-bearing sense.”

“Good. Matt and Sarah would have a fit if you missed dinner tomorrow.”

She loved Dani, really she did. It was just sometimes she felt that she was supposed to show up at these weekly, multigenerational, straight-out-of-the-Waltons family dinners to be a prop. She was Cara, career girl and convenient butt of her father’s semi-jokes about bad cooking and compulsive overwork. It wasn’t as though Cara couldn’t have deflected the attention with a few “Suzie Homemaker” jabs sent her sister’s way. But Cara always kept her mouth firmly shut, or filled with Dani’s admittedly spectacular cooking. Besides, Cara adored her niece and nephew. They were worth a little suffering.

“I’ll be there,” she promised.

“Good. I was thinking maybe you could fix yourself up a little.”

“Fix myself up? Like, how?” At the moment, she’d lay odds her lips were puffy enough to look as if she’d OD’d on collagen injections.

“You know, maybe wear something other than jeans,” Dani wheedled. “And you might put on some makeup…”

Well, that raised a warning flag. “Hey, I thought we agreed that these dinners were off limits for matchmaking. Just who have you invited?”

“A—a friend of John’s,” Dani said, referring to her
picture-perfect husband. “This one’s from the hockey league he joined.”

“Does the guy even have all his teeth?”

“I think so. He’s a librarian.”