att was pacing in the foyer of his apartment when Meredith finally arrived at seven o'clock that night— thirty minutes late. He pulled open the door, jerked her into his arms, and said furiously, "Dammit, if you're going to be late, and bombs are going off all over the place, call me to let me know you're all right!" He held her away, tempted to shake her, and instantly regretted his outburst. She looked exhausted.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't think you'd imagine anything like that"

"I evidently have an overactive imagination where you're concerned," Matt said wryly, smiling to take the sting out of his greeting. He led her toward the back of the apartment and up the steps to the lounge area because it was the coziest part of the place, and because the view from the corner windows was the best.

"I was at the police station most of the afternoon," she explained as she sat down on the leather sofa, "trying to give them any information I could that might help them find whoever put the bomb in the store. When I went home to change and come over here, Parker called, and we were on the phone for almost an hour."

Meredith trailed off, remembering Parker's phone call. Neither of them had brought up the fact that he'd spent the night at Lisa's. Parker was no liar, and his deliberate failure to offer an explanation was silent confirmation to Meredith that the night had not been platonic. It felt strange to imagine those two being involved—strange and yet almost reassuring somehow, because Meredith loved them both.

Before he hung up, Parker had wished her happiness, but he'd sounded dubious and worried about her ability to be happy with Matt. About Matt he'd said little— except that he regretted starting the fistfight with him. "The only thing I regret more," Parker had said dryly, "is that I missed my punch."

The rest of their conversation had been about business, and it had not been either reassuring or pleasant.

Pulling herself out of her reverie, she said, "I'm sorry if I seem preoccupied. This has been an incredible day, from beginning to end."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

Meredith looked up at him, struck anew by the aura of quiet command, of absolute competence that surrounded him. Casually dressed in dark trousers with his white shirt open at the throat and the cuffs folded back on his forearms, Matthew Farrell positively exuded indomitable power and strength. It was stamped on his jaw and etched into every one of his hard, chiseled features.

And yet, she thought with an unconscious smile, in bed she could make this bold, powerful man groan with need and turn to her in stormy desperation. She loved knowing that. She loved him.

His question pulled her back to less pleasant thoughts: "Would you rather try to forget about the day?"

"I feel guilty about burdening you," Meredith said, though she was longing for his advice and perhaps reassurance.

His lips quirked, and there was a decidedly sensual note in his eyes. "Having you burden me again is a fantasy that kept me awake until dawn." He watched the telltale glow of knowledge and memory in her eyes and he smiled, but he didn't try to distract her further. Sobering, he said, "Let's hear about your day."

With a conscious effort Meredith pulled herself from the sensual spell of his fantasy. "Actually, it's easy to sum up," she said, curling her legs beneath her and twisting toward him. "Last but not least, our stock closed down three points this afternoon."

"It'll come back up once the bomb thing dies down," Matt said.

Nodding, she continued. "This morning, the chairman of the board called. They want an explanation from me about the fight Saturday night. I was talking to him when the first bomb call came through, so we never finished our conversation."

"The bomb scares will distract them for a while."

With a weak attempt at humor, she added, "I guess every cloud really does have a silver lining." Averting her gaze from Matt's quiet scrutiny, she stared out the windows.

"What else is bothering you?"

It was obvious from his insistent tone that Matt knew there was something else and that he fully intended to hear about it. Feeling excruciatingly self-conscious, she looked at him and said, "Could I have more time to arrange financing to buy the Houston land from you? Parker had arranged for another lender to make us the loan since his bank couldn't. Today, when that lender heard about the bomb threats, they called Parker and pulled out of the deal. They said they want to wait and see what happens at Bancroft's for a couple of months."

"It was nice of Reynolds to unload all that on you today," Matt said sarcastically.

"He called to be certain I was all right and to apologize for what happened Saturday. The rest—the part about the money—came up because we'd had a meeting scheduled to negotiate the terms of the loan tomorrow with the new lender. Parker had to tell me the new lender had called off the meeting—" A loud beeping noise from her pager made Meredith stop talking and reach for the purse she'd put down beside the sofa. She removed the pager, looked at the message on it, and with a silent, frustrated moan she let her head fall back against the sofa, her eyes closed. "This is all I needed to make today perfect."

"What's wrong?"

"It's my father," she sighed, reluctantly looking at Matt. The warmth had left his eyes at the mention of her father, and his jaw was rigid. "My father wants me to call him. It's two or three A.M. in Italy. Either he's calling to say hello in the middle of the night, or else he's finally seen a newspaper. May I use your phone?"

Her father was in Rome at the airport, waiting for a flight home, and when his voice exploded over the phone, Matt scowled and Meredith flinched. "What in the living hell are you doing!" he shouted the moment the operator connected him.

"Calm down, please," Meredith began, but there was no calming him.

"Have you lost your mind!" he thundered. "I leave you alone for a couple of weeks and your face is plastered all over the newspapers next to that bastard's face and then we have bomb threats—"

Ignoring the issue of Matt for the time being, Meredith tried to soothe him about that day's bomb scares, which she thought he'd discovered. "Don't give yourself a stroke over them," she pleaded, holding on to her temper and her strained nerves. "All three bombs were found and removed with no harm to anyone—"

"Three!" he roared. "Three bombs? What are you talking about?"

"What were you talking about?" she asked, but too late.

"I was talking about the fake scare in New Orleans," he said, and she could feel him striving for control. "There were three bombs found? When? Where?"

"Today. In New Orleans, Dallas, and here."

"What's happened to our sales?"

"The inevitable happened," she said, trying to sound both matter-of-fact and encouraging. "We had to close down for the day, but we'll make it up later. I'm already working on some sort of special sale—Advertising wants to call it a bomb sale in lieu of a fire sale," she tried to joke.

"What happened to our stock?"

"It was down three points at closing today."

"And Farrell?" he demanded with renewed fury. "What's happening with him? You stay the hell away from him. No more press conferences—nothing!"

He was talking so loud that Matt could hear him, and Meredith looked at him in helpless consternation, but instead of giving her an encouraging smile, or any form of moral support, Matt waited for her to refuse her father's orders, and when she didn't do it immediately, he turned on his heel and walked over to the windows, standing with his back to her.

"Now, listen to me," Meredith pleaded with her father in a shaky, calming voice, "there is no point in working yourself up and having another attack over any of this."

"Don't speak to me like an idiot invalid!" he warned, but his voice was straining and she was certain she heard him pause to swallow a pill. "I'm waiting for an answer about Farrell."

"I don't think we should discuss this on the phone."

"Stop stalling, dammit!" he raged, and Meredith realized that it was probably better to deal with the issue now instead of trying to delay it, since he seemed to be getting more worked up over her evasiveness.

"All right, fine," she said quietly, "we'll deal with it now, if that's what you want." She paused, thinking madly for the best way to go about it. It seemed wisest to first try to relieve him of the anxiety he'd undoubtedly have over whether or not she'd discovered his duplicity eleven years before, so she started there. "I realize you love me and you did what you believed was best eleven years ago..." Taut silence followed that, so she cautiously added, "I'm talking about the telegram you sent Matt telling him I'd had an abortion. I know about it—"

"Where the hell are you right now?" he demanded suspiciously.

"I'm at Matt's apartment."

His voice shook with rage and something that sounded to Meredith like fear. Panic. "I'm coming home. My plane leaves in three hours. Stay away from him! Don't trust him. You don't know that man, I tell you!" Reverting to blazing sarcasm, he added, "See if you can manage to keep us out of bankruptcy until I get there."

He slammed the phone down, and Meredith slowly hung up, then she looked at Matt, whose back was still turned on her, as if accusing her of not taking a stronger stand. "This has been quite a day," she said bitterly. "I suppose you're angry because I didn't come right out and tell him more about us."

Without turning, Matt lifted his hand and wearily rubbed the tense muscles at the base of his neck. "I'm not angry, Meredith," he said in a flat, emotionless voice. "I'm trying to convince myself you won't back down when he gets here, that you won't start doubting me and yourself, or, worse—start weighing what you have to gain by staying with me against what you have to lose if you do."

"What are you talking about?" she said, walking over to him.

He gave her a grim, sideways look. "For days I've been trying to second-guess what he'll do when he gets back here and finds out you want to stay with me. I've just figured it out."

"I repeat," she said softly. "What are you talking about?"

"Your father's going to play his trump card. He's going to make you choose: him or me; Bancroft and Company, along with the president's office—or nothing if you choose me. And I'm not sure," he added on a ragged sigh, "which way you'll go."

Meredith was too worn out, too spent, to take on a problem she didn't have yet. "It won't come to that," she said, because she honestly believed she could, with time, persuade her father to accept Matt. "I'm all he has, and he loves me in his own way," she said, her eyes pleading with him not to make things harder on her now than they already were. "And because he does, he'll rant and rave, and he may threaten me with that, but he'll relent. I've thought a lot about what he did to us. Matt, please, just put yourself in his place," she urged. "Suppose you had an eighteen-year-old daughter whom you'd sheltered from every reality and ugly thing in life. And suppose she met a much older man who you honestly believed was a—a gold digger. And that man took her virginity and got her pregnant. How would you feel about him?"

After a moment of silence Matt said tersely, "I'd hate his guts," and just when Meredith thought she'd scored her point, he added, "but I'd find some way to accept him for her sake. And I sure as hell wouldn't crush her by making her think he'd walked out on her. Nor would I try to bribe him into doing exactly that," he added.

Meredith swallowed. "Did he try to do that?"

"Yes. The day I took you home to him."

"What did you say?"

Matt gazed into her wide, troubled blue eyes, smiled reassuringly, and put his arm around her. "I told him," he whispered as his mouth came down on hers for a long, drugging kiss, "that I didn't think he ought to interfere in our lives. But," he murmured thickly, kissing her ear as she melted against him, "not quite in those words."

It was midnight when he walked her down to her car. Exhausted from the trials of the day and deliriously limp from his lovemaking, Meredith sank into the driver's seat of the Jaguar. "Are you certain you're awake enough to drive?" he asked, his hand on the open door.

"Just barely," she said with a languorous smile, turning the key in the ignition. The heater and radio came on as the engine throbbed to life.

"I'm giving a party for the cast of Phantom of the Opera on Friday night," he said. "A lot of people you know are coming to it. My sister will be here, too, and I thought I'd invite your lawyer. I think the two of them would hit it off."

When he hesitated, as if afraid to voice the question, Meredith said teasingly, "If that was an invitation, my answer is yes."

"I wasn't going to ask you to come as a guest."

Embarrassed and confused, Meredith glanced at the steering wheel. "Oh."

"I'd like you to act as my hostess, Meredith."

She realized then the reason for his hesitation. He was asking her for what constituted a semi-public declaration that they were a couple. She looked into those compelling gray eyes of his and smiled helplessly. "Is it black tie?"

"Yes, why?"

"Because," she said with a jaunty glance, "it's very important for a hostess to be dressed just right."

With a half-laugh, half-groan, Matt pulled her out of the car and into his arms, seizing her lips in a long kiss of gratitude and relief.

He was still kissing her when the newsman on the radio announced that the body of Stanislaus Spyzhalski, who'd been arrested for falsely representing himself as an attorney to clients including Matthew Farrell and Meredith Bancroft, had been found in a ditch on a county road outside of Belleville, Illinois.

Meredith jerked back and she stared at Matt in shock. "Did you hear that?"

"I heard it earlier today."

His complete indifference and his failure to mention it to her struck Meredith as a little odd, but exhaustion had rendered her incapable of rational thought, and Matt's mouth was already opening on hers again.