Too Rich and Too Dead (18 page)

“Fortunately, this entire meal is on the magazine,” Mallory replied. “Which means we can't say no to the El Rey Chocolate Tasting.” Reading aloud, she said, “‘Venezuelan artisan chocolates that include a
milk chocolate almond tartlet with Earl Grey gelato, chocolate cake with peppermint crème, orange pudding cake, and a malted chocolate milkshake’… How can one person possibly eat all those desserts?”

“Trust me. You're going to need a magnifying glass to find them.”

When the waiter came by, she ordered one chocolate tasting and two forks.

“Microscopic or not, I'm counting on you to help me out with this,” she told Gordon.

“How could I live with myself if I refused to come to the aid of a damsel in distress?” he replied.

Mallory laughed. “Or at least one who was at a terrible risk of not being able to fit in her clothes anymore.”

When dessert arrived, Mallory saw he was right.

“No wonder no one in Aspen is overweight,” she joked, peering at the narrow rectangular plate dotted with three dollop-size blobs of chocolate and a chocolate milkshake in a shot glass.

“Are you sure you still want me to split that with you?” Gordon teased.

“A deal is a deal.”

As he picked up his fork, he commented, “I hope you're not just being nice because you're planning on having your way with me later. It just so happens that chocolate is my weakness. One of them, anyway.”

Once again, Mallory could feel her cheeks burning. “No! I—I wouldn't… I mean—”

He smiled. “You're not very good at this, are you?”

“It depends on what you mean,” she replied, still flustered. “Do you mean eating in restaurants, handling alcohol, dating—”

“That last one,” he said earnestly, gesturing with his fork.

By this point, her cheeks were burning. She would have bet the entire dessert that her face was as red as the wine in their glasses.

“I guess I owe you an explanation,” she said. “I recently lost my husband—”

“I was only joking,” he insisted. “And seriously, Mallory, you don't owe me anything. The last thing I want to do is embarrass you.” He reached over and took her hand. “It sounds as if you just need a little practice.”

“You're right,” she admitted.

“In that case,” Gordon said, digging into the chocolate cake, “you can consider me a willing rehearsal partner.”

Walking on air was such a tired old expression, yet as Mallory stood outside the Hotel Jerome, watching Gordon walk away, she had to admit that it perfectly described the way she felt.

She wanted to savor the moment, to luxuriate in the feeling of having just experienced such a marvelous evening. In fact, as she turned and floated into the hotel lobby, it was all she could do to keep from breaking into “I Could Have Danced All Night.”

She was picturing herself sliding between the silky sheets and reliving every moment of the evening when the concierge interrupted her reverie.

“Ms. Marlowe?” he asked as she passed the front desk. “There's someone here to see you. He's waiting in the lobby.”

She stopped in her tracks. “Someone to see
me?”
she asked, frowning.

“He specifically said Mallory Marlowe.” Pointing toward the sitting area just beyond where they stood, he added, “He's right over there.”

Mallory was still convinced that the concierge had to be mistaken. That is, until she stepped onto the thick Oriental carpet in front of the black marble fireplace and spotted the silhouette of a man. She recognized him immediately, even though he was sitting in one of the upholstered chairs with his back to her.

“Trevor?”
she cried in astonishment, for a moment wondering if she was hallucinating or if her boss, the managing editor of
The Good Life
, had really materialized here in Aspen. “What are
you
doing here?”

He jumped to his feet and whirled around. “Good God, Mallory. I've come to see what's going on with the story I assigned you, now that Carly Berman has been murdered! I also wanted to make sure you're all right!”

Trevor ran the fingers of one hand through his dark, silver-flecked hair. While he always wore it on the long side, at the moment it was so disheveled that it perfectly matched his wrinkled dark brown pants. He also wore a puffy blue coat that struck Mallory as the kind of jacket Manhattanites assumed people wore in ski towns like Aspen. The bags under his
hazel eyes were almost as puffy. In short, he looked like someone who had just spent too many hours on a cramped plane, suffered from jet lag, and badly needed to down a few quarts of water before serious dehydration set in.

“But… but there was no reason to come all this way!” she cried. “I told you on the phone that everything was fine. I'm perfectly all right!”

“But you didn't
sound
all right.” Trevor sighed deeply. Holding out both hands helplessly, he said, “Look, Mallory. I was worried. Can I help that? It's not that I don't think you can take care of yourself. Of course I do! Otherwise, I never would have hired you. Not for a job that requires infinite flexibility and plenty of common sense and the ability to think on one's feet…”

He stopped long enough to take a deep breath. “For heaven's sake, since I came all this way, aren't you at least going to invite me to join you for a drink so we can talk about what's been going on out here?”

Mallory's indignation over her boss's surprise appearance had already melted. “Trevor, I appreciate your concern,” she said, reaching over and lightly touching his shoulder. “But right now I happen to be exhausted. As you can imagine, I had a very long day. One that began with some pretty devastating news.”

She decided not to mention that the day in question also happened to have ended with a dinner date that left her feeling like a sixteen-year-old girl, one whose hormones were just beginning to demonstrate the kinds of tricks they were capable of playing.

“But I thought you'd find it helpful to have someone to talk to,” he protested.

“Absolutely,” she agreed. “But right now, the only thing I want to do is get some rest.” Peering at him more closely, she gently added, “You look as if you could use some rest, too. But drink a lot of water before you get into bed. It's one of the best ways of combating jet lag. And the word around here is that it's a good idea to avoid alcohol until your body's had a chance to get used to the altitude.”

“All good advice.” Trevor's shoulders slumped. “It
is
one A.M. my time, after all.”

“Why don't we meet for breakfast tomorrow morning after we've both had a good night's sleep?” Mallory suggested.

“Fine,” he replied. “How about right here in the hotel? I managed to get a room.”

Mallory nodded. “Just tell me when and where.”

She was willing to agree to anything, since at the moment, tomorrow seemed a long way off. Besides, now that she'd recovered from her astonishment over finding her boss in the lobby of her hotel, she was eager to get back to her original plan: drifting upstairs to her room to enjoy what she expected would be a night filled with sweet dreams.

T
revor looked considerably better over breakfast. In fact, as Mallory appraised the man sitting opposite her at the hotel's restaurant, she realized that even though she'd sat in a room with him three or four times since he'd hired her, she'd never really taken a good look at him before. That is, one in which she viewed him as a man, rather than merely her boss.

Yet in the dawn's early light—or at least seven o'clock, since they were both enjoying the ease of rising early thanks to still being on East Coast time—she noticed that he was actually quite handsome.

Of course, she'd noticed before that he had a nice face with a thin-lipped mouth that easily broke into a slightly lopsided smile, a straight, unobtrusive
nose, and hazel eyes edged by those crinkled laugh lines she found so attractive. But she'd never quite responded to his good looks this way before.

She was as surprised by how good he looked to her as she was by her strong reaction to him.

Get a grip, girlfriend, she scolded herself. Just because you're in the Wild West doesn't mean you have to turn into a wild woman.

Mallory figured her sudden compulsion to assess every member of the male gender in terms of his physical attributes was merely a spillover effect from having been wined and dined by Gordon the night before—even if she had technically been the one doing both the wining and the dining. Either that or it was merely the fact that the two of them were huddled together over coffee in a cozy hotel dining room instead of discussing the magazine's circulation and demographics in a sterile, impersonal office setting.

“So what is it about you,” Trevor drawled, wrapping his fingers around his coffee mug, “that leads to someone being murdered practically every time you travel to a new destination?”

Mallory opened her mouth to protest even before she'd decided whether to be amused or offended. But she quickly snapped it shut. Even she had to admit that he had a point.

Still, this was no joking matter. Carly Berman's murder had hit her hard. Not only did the two of them share a history. She had also spent the evening before Carly was killed in her company.

“You really don't have to worry about me, Trevor,” she insisted. “I know I've had a few bad
experiences since I started this job. But that doesn't mean I can't handle it.”

“I know you can handle it, Mallory.” Trevor pushed his coffee mug away, folded his hands on the table, and gazed at her intently. “But I have a magazine to put out. If your story about Aspen falls apart, I don't have a lot of time to find a way to fill those pages.”

“I'll just have to shift gears,” Mallory said thoughtfully. “Instead of focusing on what attracts entrepreneurs like Carly to Aspen, I'll stick to your original concept: activities for nonskiers.”

“Sounds like a plan.” His voice softening, he added, “Actually, there's another reason why I came. I thought you might need someone to talk to. About how the murder of an old friend of yours is affecting you, I mean.”

“I feel terrible about it, Trevor,” she told him sincerely. “True, I hadn't seen Carly in decades. And we were never close. We were never more than acquaintances, in fact, if you could even call it that. We just happened to know each other because we were in the same grade at school.”

She picked up a packet of sugar and began to fiddle with it. “But the idea that someone you know can just disappear like that, someone you've just spoken to and laughed with—even if it's just because you had the same gym teacher thirty years ago… Well, it brought up all kinds of feelings that remind me of how I felt—how I still feel, in fact—about losing my husband.”

“And how is that?” Trevor asked, his tone gentle.

“As if going through life is like living in an earthquake zone,” she replied, methodically folding over each corner of the sugar packet. “At any moment, the ground beneath you can just fall away, swallowing up things you just assumed would be there forever. But I finally realized that if you're left behind to deal with the rubble, you owe it to those who are gone to pick up the pieces and set things right again.”

She paused, then thoughtfully added, “You owe it to yourself, too, since the whole point of life is to keep living.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Trevor said softly. “I felt the same way when I got divorced. The thing about the earthquakes, I mean.”

Mallory hesitated for a few seconds before saying, “You've never told me anything about your divorce.”

With a sad smile, “I've never had a chance. Unfortunately, it's taken something this extreme for the two of us to sit down together and have a real conversation.”

“I'd like to listen,” she said softly, “if you'd like to tell me.”

Staring into the depths of his coffee mug, Trevor said, “Admitting that our marriage wasn't working, and that it hadn't been for some time, was one of the most difficult things I'd ever done. Making the decision to end it was at least as difficult. And even though losing a connection by getting divorced is different from losing a spouse through death, it was still incredibly painful.

“I thought I had it all under control,” he continued. “For the first couple of months, I acted as if nothing in my life had changed. I got up, went to work, spent a couple of hours at the gym, kept myself busy with errands on weekends… I was the picture of efficiency. No one at work could believe how well I was handling things.

“But then I crashed. I went into a deep depression. Nothing seemed right. I walked around like a zombie. I even felt uncomfortable living in my own body.” He spoke as if he was in a daze, his voice so soft Mallory could barely hear him. “I slept too much. Hardly ate anything. Didn't exercise at all. It was as if all the normal human feelings, even the basic ones like hunger, were beyond me. It was at that point that somebody at work suggested that it might not be a bad idea for me to get some help.”

Trevor sighed. “It was the best advice I ever got in my life. I found myself a shrink and started talking about everything. My marriage, its failure… I even dredged up stuff from a long, long time ago. After a few months, I started to feel like my old self again. I realized that my life wasn't over; it had just started a new phase. And that deep down I had the strength to adjust to my new circumstances. I began to look forward to what was ahead instead of simply mourning what I'd lost.”