Rough Harbor (13 page)

Caitlyn watched Tony carefully. He had enjoyed his poached salmon and pasta salad, and seemed to feel at ease in the conference room. She had told her friend, a local chef, who was coming to lunch. Once the nervousness of cooking for one of the restaurant world’s celebrities had worn off, she had outdone herself. Which was good, Caitlyn thought, because lunch seemed to be the one thing Tony was enjoying the most.

They had chatted and gossiped, and it was going well until Caitlyn started to get down to business. Her plan made sense, and Tony could see that. He was having a little more difficulty in facing the truth.

“I don’t know, Caitlyn. It all sounds so difficult,” he said. “You make it sound like going on a diet.”

“It’s not depravation. It’s not very exciting, I’ll admit, but it works. Was opening your first restaurant sexy and exciting, or was it a lot of hard work, day in and day out, repetitive work until you got things right?”

“True, but…” he said.

“It was all part of a bigger picture for you. I understand that, Tony, and that’s what I want to help you with. Once we get the foundation set, you can build whatever you want on top of it. This is a beginning, something to put you on the right course.”

“If I tie up all of my free cash in these other things,” he glanced down at the paper, “I won’t have the money I need to expand.”

“Tony, you need to think about your future – protecting the money you have. You could easily become one of those shooting stars, Tony, white-hot in the moment and then tomorrow, gone.”

Caitlyn thought for a moment and tried to put into terms he would understand. “What if someone got food poisoning at one of your restaurants or you got a bad review? Attendance drops, the buzz switches to someplace else and suddenly you don’t have the money coming in like you’ve always expected.”

“I’ve been rich, and I’ve been poor. Rich is better,” Tony said.

Caitlyn nodded. “Exactly.” She felt a surge of excitement. He was starting to feel it; he was getting there.

There was a knock on the door, and Caitlyn froze.

Heather came in, looking nervous. “There’s a phone call for you.”

“I’m a little busy.” Caitlyn kept the annoyance of her voice, but she had told Heather that nothing, nothing was to interrupt her meeting with Tony.

“It’s Mr. Harris. He says it’s important.”

Tony looked between the two of them. “Go ahead, Caitlyn. I’ll just take a look at these things again.”

Caitlyn smiled in thanks and got up.

“I’m sorry, but he said that he had to speak to you.” Heather was apologetic.

Caitlyn went into her office and picked up the phone. Sam was in Boston on business, and his voice came across the telephone crisp and demanding.

“Caitlyn, I need you pull up the statements on the Harts.” The Harts were a couple, her clients.

“Why? I’m busy with a client now.” She tried to keep the waspish sound out of her voice, but Sam couldn’t have picked a worse time to call.

“Who, Tony Biddle?” Sam didn’t think Tony was a proper client for the firm. “I’m supposed to meet with Richard Hart, and I just want to be prepared. Pull them up and fax them to me.”

He gave a number, and Caitlyn did as she was asked. She gave the task to Heather, and the whole thing took no more than a few minutes. Why Sam couldn’t have just asked Heather or his own assistant for it made no sense.

She returned to the conference room and stopped on the threshold. Tony was staring at Tommy Anderson, who was telling him a story. Tony laughed, and Caitlyn felt a pang of unease. They looked like they’d known each other for a while.

She walked in, and they both looked up, undisturbed.

“You were holding out on me,” Tony said, and Caitlyn smiled as she sat down.

“What do you mean?”

“I was just telling Tony about some of our exciting opportunities for qualified investors,” Tommy said, oozing charm.

She looked between the two of them. “Yes, we do have those opportunities, but Tony and I were talking about some basic diversification of his portfolio.” Caitlyn tried hard to keep the ice out of her voice, feeling the familiar sense of a knife inching up her back, ready to be pushed in and twisted.

“I am sure you were, but as I was telling Tony, I’m sure we can accommodate both goals,” Tommy said.

“I would be interested in seeing the paperwork that relates to your ideas,” Tony said, looking directly at Tommy.

Caitlyn might as well have been invisible. “Tony, I know that those deals sound exciting, and profitable, but you do understand the amount of risk that they entail?”

“Caitlyn, if I thought too much about risk, I never would have opened my own restaurant. The world belongs to the risk-takers.”

Tommy agreed, and Caitlyn felt her stomach sink. She couldn’t very well disagree with Tommy in front of Tony, nor could she tell Tony she thought he was being foolish, especially since she had practically been chomping at the bit to show Tony some of those ideas herself. Caitlyn looked across the table to Tommy’s cool blue eyes. He was smiling at her, and she needed to resist the urge to lean across the table and throttle him. Once again, he had bested her.

“You’re certainly right. The new client paperwork is right here. I’ll go over it with Tony, and then we can all talk further,” she said, quelling her seething anger and trying to put everything in perspective. She was not going to let Tony Biddle walk out of here without a signed contract. She and Tommy could fight over him later.

Michael St. John looked at the Fed Ex package on the desk. It was late in the evening. He was scheduled for dinner in an hour, but he had waited until now to open it. His secretary had signed specially for it. Michael poured himself a drink from the bottle of single malt. Alcohol in private offices was frowned upon, but he didn’t care about the rules. He poured, noticing that he already needed another bottle; he’d replaced it just a few days ago.

He looked at the return address, and his jaw clenched. Throughout the day, he had looked at it, aware of whose it was and what might be inside. She could have sent it straight home, instead of to the office. Several people, including his secretary, might have guessed the contents as well. In that case, it would be all around the office. Caitlyn’s final and big go to hell.

Michael opened the package anyway, and there nestled among protective wrap was the black box. He removed it from the package and flipped open the lid, the hinges stiff and tight. It was there, all fifty thousand quid of it. It glinted in the fluorescent office lights. Almost absently, he moved it around, letting the light catch the stones, creating a rainbow of prisms on the floor, the wall, before he put it aside.

She had included a note. A single cream-colored card, her handwriting, which was beautiful, staring up at him. In no uncertain terms, in black and white, in elegant, cursive script, she told him it was over.

He put the card down and looked at the ring. It wasn’t quite over, he thought. Caitlyn Montgomery had another thing coming.

“I don’t understand what you’re getting at.” Noah took a sip of his wine.

She was having trouble explaining it herself. It had taken her a few days to cool down after the meeting with Tony. She had gotten him to sign the paperwork; he was officially a client. Even that had been small solace after being outflanked by Tommy.

“You just won Tony Biddle as a new client, something you’ve been working on for a few weeks, and now you don’t seem very happy about it. You’ve been so busy, I’ve hardly had the chance to congratulate you.”

“I am happy,” she had already calculated the commission she could receive and had been very happy. She was thinking she might take the money, offer to buy her mother out of her half of the house. That way it would be Caitlyn’s, all hers.

They were sitting on the couch at his house, in the study Noah had taken over from his father. He’d made it his own, papers and folders stacked around, not one, but two laptops set up on the desk.

“I shouldn’t be talking to you about this,” she said, throwing a pillow at him. He caught it and laughed.

“No, I want to hear about your workday. Tell me,” he slid across the couch and picked up one of her bare feet.

“That tickles,” she said, but didn’t move. All of a sudden, their relationship had slipped into a sort of easiness, something comfortable, like they really had known each other all of their lives. It had taken her by surprise, the way she expected to see him, hear his voice on the phone.

“Sam Harris is acting strangely.” She paused and then followed up, “Not strangely. Just different.”

Sam was checking up on her constantly, the call about the Harts’ accounts just the latest example.

“Maybe he’s just being conscientious,” Noah suggested.

“Maybe.” Sam was taking accounts away from her. She had signed two more small ones last week, but he had already reassigned them, telling her that she should focus solely on finding new business.

“So you think he’s giving you a hard time on purpose?”

“No, no, it’s not that.” That was the last thing she meant to suggest. It was too difficult for her to speak to Noah about work, sounded too much like she was complaining.

“Are you sure you’re not just getting too worked up about things? I mean, all you seem to do is work.”

“That’s not true,” Caitlyn said, stung. “I’m right here now, with you.” She still refused to go out with him in public, preferring to keep their relationship, or whatever it might be called, private. She was thankful that he didn’t insist, but she could sense that he might start pushing for something more.

“You’re talking about work now.”

“I’m sorry. I guess it’s just natural for me.” It was out of her mouth before she could stop it. She had meant it had been natural for her to speak about work with Michael. They had talked about work all the time.

“Old habits die hard,” she said, hoping Noah wouldn’t notice.

“It’s okay. I know there was a life before me,” he said with a smile, but it didn’t linger.

“Sorry. Let’s talk about something else. How’s your new opportunity going?” Noah had been in and out of Manhattan a lot, meeting with people.

He looked at her. “When are you going to tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“What really happened? With him. Why all of sudden you left your life, your perfect life in London and came back here? And if you tell me it was because my father offered you a job, I’m not buying.”

“You don’t really want to know,” Caitlyn said, but knew it was because she didn’t want to talk about it.

“I think I do. Caitlyn, we spend all of this time together, yet we never seem to talk.”

“I thought that was never a problem for men,” she said lightly.

“You know what I mean. We never talk about us, about what happened then, or why you’re here now.”

“We never talk about the future either. Don’t you have to go back to California? For a man in demand, you seem unusually able to leave your life behind.”

“I can work anywhere I want. I’m not tied to any one place.”

They were almost shouting.

“You aren’t?” Caitlyn asked, her voice softening.

“Caitlyn, I don’t talk about the future because you don’t. You’re too busy dealing with the past, which you won’t talk about either.” Noah ran a hand through his hair. She had moved away from them as their discussion heated up, and now she watched him carefully.

“Would you want to talk about it?” she asked.

“Yes, I would, because I need to know if you can forget him, before I can talk about the future.”

Noah waited, the silence loud, marked by the ticking of a grandfather clock in the hallway. She stared at him, debating, and then she began.

“I got an internship right after college in London. Maxwell asked me if I wanted to work at the firm, and I said no. I didn’t want to do that. Anything to avoid coming back here, possibly seeing you. A week later, someone from a bank in London called and said they had ‘happened’ upon my resume. I am now sure that Maxwell was behind it, helping me out, but I never did find out for sure.”

“So I went to London. At first, it was an internship in the marketing department of the bank. It wasn’t very time-consuming, and I spent a lot of time going out. There was a young woman there, Zoë, who was my age, recently graduated from Cambridge. She was one of those people – you know, old, old money. She was playing around at the bank and spending most of her daddy’s money going to clubs and dinners. I went with her most of the time, though I took work seriously, too.”

“At the end of the summer, I got a full-time job at the bank, and Zoë didn’t. Not that it mattered much. She went to work in publishing and had a lot more fun. We shared a flat together, and I decided to stay on. I liked my job, and because of the people I met through Zoë, I came to the attention of the private banking division. They had a group that worked with very high net worth individuals, figuring out who they were, what they liked and targeting them. Were they interested in becoming art collectors? If so, we had art advisors to guide them through the gallery. If they liked the theatre, we got them seats to opening night, and so on. I became a chaperone to these events.”

It had been fun, and she had been good at it. It had all seemed so much simpler back then.

Noah nodded, encouraging her to go on.

“And one time I met Michael, not because he was a client, but because he worked for the same bank. I looked great that night,” she said, with a smile. The dress had been amazing.

“I had earned this reputation, the crazy Yankee, a curious mix of working too hard combined with the ability to party. Michael asked me to lunch the next day, and probably because I didn’t act all that impressed by him, even laughing at his pretensions, it went on from there. He said I was refreshing. I took it to mean I was naïve, and I spent a great deal of time planning my interactions with him. I hadn’t had many boyfriends, really, so…”

She trailed off, glanced up and, seeing she still had his attention, kept going. Noah had been her first real boyfriend, and her last serious relationship before Michael. Sure, in college, she had dated, but after Noah she’d been determined to keep things light.

“I think that was part of the attraction for him. One thing led to another, he wanted to get married and I said yes. It all seemed perfect. The accent, the clothes, the convertible roadster, the country house, the dinners, all of the right gestures. It made me feel grand. It made me feel respectable.

“As soon as I said yes, things began to get a little odd. Not that he became a different person, or any less attentive, he was just there a little less, a little less engaged. It seemed okay, healthy to spend the time apart, the perfect example of a modern couple, charming in our own right with no need to be selfish or jealous with each other. I still wanted to work, even though he kept telling me to stop. I thought it didn’t bother him. I thought everything was fine.” Caitlyn smiled. “It’s not like I have a lot of role models in the relationship department.

“Things went on like that, and I decided to come home from a trip to Paris early and surprise him. And I surprised him. In the most traditional sense of the word, right in the bedroom with Zoë. Who, I might add, I still considered a friend.”

She glanced at Noah and saw that he was staring at her, his jaw clenched tightly, his hands balled into fists.

“I was angry, and I moved out. I think that was what stunned him, that we couldn’t work it out. He still wanted to marry me, but didn’t think that he needed to observe the traditional idea of monogamy. That was a deal breaker for me, and he called me American and provincial.” Along with a few other things.

“Didn’t that make you angry?”

Caitlyn laughed. “Angry was an understatement. But I tried to take the high road, not telling people what really happened. He used that to his advantage, so suddenly I seemed like the bad one. What I had thought of as my circle of friends had shrunk considerably. My personal life was in shambles. I didn’t get the promotion I thought would and, well, London didn’t look so friendly anymore.”

“So my father called and suddenly good old Queensbay looked okay,” Noah connected the dots.

Caitlyn nodded. “I thought it would be better to get away, to come back, to see what this place held for me.”

“Did you ever love him?”

Caitlyn paused for a moment before answering. “I thought I did.” She didn’t add what she was thinking. Not the way I thought I loved you.

“So, I guess you’re over him?”

Caitlyn looked at Noah, held his deep brown eyes. “I would say so.”

He moved towards her, and she let him kiss away the memories. They still hadn’t talked about the future, or about their past, but she knew that could wait.

“You haven’t had it easy, have you?” Noah paused, his hands holding her face to his.

“I don’t know. Things could be a whole lot worse. Who said life was easy? As long as there is some fun in it.”

“We could have some fun now.” He skimmed his thumb along her cheek, his smile back, and Caitlyn felt relieved. She wasn’t ready for serious. She didn’t do serious anymore.

“Yes,” she agreed, wrapping her arms around him, “we could.”