Unfinished Business Read online

  Every marriage had its problems. Hers had certainly been no exception. And 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.

  Addy!

  The woman whose breasts he and his friends had been assessing with clinical horniness was Addy Taylor.

  Culley got up from the table as if puppet strings pulled him out of the chair one limb at a time.

  “You’re not going over there, are you?” Paul laughed. “We know you’re probably short on goddesses down there in Podunk, Virginia, but this would be ballsy even for the Culley of old.”

  “I know her,” Culley said.

  “No way,” came back the chorus of three.

  “And we thought things had changed. You still get all the hot chicks,” Paul grumbled.

  Cull
ey tamped his friend down with a look of disapproval. “I’m just going over to say hi to an old friend.”

  “How do you know her?” Tristan piped up, suspicion drawing his brows together.

  “We kind of grew up together. She married a friend of mine from high school.”

  “Oh, yeah, Mark—” Paul searched for a last name.

  “Pierce,” Culley finished for him.

  “So where is he? If she were mine, I sure wouldn’t be turning her loose in the likes of this city.”

  Culley shook his head. “You always did hold the reins way too tight, Evans. Don’t you know that just makes them want to run faster?”

  Paul frowned while Tristan and Wallace laughed, their hoots ripened by the Scotch they’d been drinking like Gatorade.

  Culley headed across the room on the crest of their still rumbling laughter. Six paces into it, an extended family of butterflies had taken up residence beside the campfire still smoldering in his stomach. How long had it been since he’d seen Addy? Years. His brain couldn’t seem to wrap itself around a number, but he knew it had been shortly after Mark and Addy had gotten married, definitely not since Mark had stopped keeping in touch, quit returning Culley’s phone calls.

  Just a few feet from her table now, he was struck again by the differences in her. He remembered her in her wedding dress, how perfect and…virginal she had looked that day.

  He remembered how envy had nearly eaten a hole in him.

  The woman sitting at the table in front of him did not look virginal.

  She looked…hot. Paul’s word, but appropriate here.

  She glanced up then, cutting short his visual assessment.

  “Hello, Addy,” he said, his voice sounding like it needed to go home and come back after it had gotten some more practice.

  The surprise on her face fit every cliché ever used to describe it. “Culley?”

  “Small world, huh?” He tried for a smile, but found it had apparently unionized with his voice, and they were both on strike.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, one hand fluttering to her throat.

  “Ah, conference, with those guys,” he said, hitching a thumb back toward his table. He didn’t dare look around; his three friends had lost any nuances of subtle behavior several jiggers ago. “How about you?”

  She cleared her throat, looked down, then, “Just here for the night, actually. I’ve been working in the city this week.”

  Culley knew about the divorce. His mother had kept him apprised of the details, sparse as they were, despite his reluctance to hear them.

  There had been plenty of times over the years when he’d thought about picking up the phone and calling Addy. She’d been his friend first, after all. But her marriage to Mark had shifted the balance of their relationship, redefined it. And then there had been that last, awful scene between Mark and him the night of their wedding. Nothing had been the same after that.

  Even after he’d heard about their divorce, it felt as if too much time had passed for him to contact Addy, or maybe he still felt guilty for protecting Mark all those years ago.

  “Is someone joining you?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Mind if I do?”

  She met his gaze, held it in silence long enough to make him wonder if she might turn him down, then said, “I’d like that.”

  “Let me just go tell these guys,” he said, hit with the inexplicable feeling that he was aimed for the edge of a cliff, and his brakes were about to fail.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HE WAS THE last person in the world Addy had imagined seeing in the Oak Bar of the Plaza Hotel.

  She watched him wind his way through the tables to the corner of the smoke filled bar where he’d said his friends were sitting. He looked different, and yet there was a sameness to him that was familiar and somehow comforting.

  Culley.

  She let the name settle over her, sink into an awareness that had been elbowed out of existence long ago.

  They had grown up together, their mothers best friends, both of whom had once nurtured the idea of their children marrying the way some people cultivate prize-winning gardens.

  But Addy had recognized early on that she and Culley were different. His bedroom walls had been lined with pictures of a half-dozen stars. Hers had a single picture of Tom Cruise, to whom she had remained faithful until her junior year when Mark started school in Harper’s Mill.

  To Addy, Culley had been one of those guys who would never settle down, never be happy with one permanent relationship. Girls left their bras in his locker with their phone number written on a strap. She had teased him mercilessly about it, told herself she didn’t mind. The two of them had been friends since they were toddlers. And she had her own goals. On the day her father had walked out to make another family for himself, she had decided the man she eventually ended up with would be the kind of man who meant it when he said one and only, forever.

  “Hi.”

  He was back. She didn’t miss the interested glances of the two blondes sitting at the table across from them, both of whom looked as though they would have been all for leaving their bra with a room number written inside.

  “Hi,” Addy said. “Sit down.”

  He took the chair across from her, and she stole the unobserved moment to notice a few details about him. Short, dark-blond hair. A slash of jaw that, in her opinion, had always been the defining feature of his good looks. He was lean and fit, and she was glad to see that he had taken care of himself. That his need to push life’s limits had never taken him over the edge.

  He looked up then, caught her staring. Gripped with sudden awkwardness, Addy anchored her hands around the wineglass in front of her and tried for a neutral smile. She didn’t need a mirror to know she’d failed.

  He signaled a waiter who promptly stepped forward to take their drink order.

  “What would you like, Addy?” Culley asked.

  She tapped the edge of her glass. “I’m good for now.”

  “A bottle of water for me, please,” he said to the waiter, who nodded and strode off in the direction of the bar.

  His departure left behind another gulf of silence over which Culley’s gaze found hers, serious, a little intent.

  “You look incredible, Addy.”

  It was not what she’d expected him to say, but she was suddenly glad she’d bought the black dress even though it had no magical powers of transformation. She took a sip of her wine, finding it easier to let the compliment hover, than acknowledge it with a response.

  The waiter reappeared with his water. Culley raised his glass and tapped it against the edge of hers. “To two old friends running into one another. A very nice surprise.”

  She raised the glass to her lips and took a long sip. “Your mom told you about the divorce?”

  He nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  Her smile wavered. “Thanks.”

  Culley reached across and covered her hand with his. “Are you all right?”

  She couldn’t say anything, his touch surprising her, then suffusing her with a simultaneous rush of warmth and something way too close to gratitude. He turned her palm over, squeezed her hand tight, and she held on as if it were a lifeline, sure of nothing except that she didn’t want him to let go.

  He didn’t.

  He held on while he got up from his chair, and said, “Scoot over.”

  She slid across the leather seat, and he settled in beside her. “Just when you think you know someone,” she said.

  “So what happened?”

  “Imagine the most boring cliché, and you’ll have the picture.”

  He considered that, then said, “Were you having problems?”

  “I didn’t think so, but looking back from here, I guess we were. I know what all the marriage manuals say. That when something like this happens, the affair isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom.”

  “Still hurts.”

  She took another sip
of wine. “That from personal experience?”

  “Yep.”

  “So what happened to yours?”

  He looked down, but not before she saw the shadow cross his face. “That’s a story for another time.”

  Addy’s gaze skittered away from his, settling on the next table over where an older couple had just been seated. In a booming voice, the man told their waiter that he and his wife were celebrating their fortieth wedding anniversary.

  Culley glanced at them, a cloud of something that looked like sadness in his eyes. Not what she would have expected of the Culley Rutherford she had known in high school, Mark’s opposite, the one whose mission it was to play the field, steer clear of anything remotely hinting at commitment.

  Addy pulled her hand from his and said, “Mama told me you took over Dr. Nettles’s practice.”

  “Kind of surprised the whole town, I think.”

  “No wonder, considering how you egged his car that Halloween.”

  He smiled. “You know, he forgave me for that, but I think he tacked on a little extra anyway when I bought him out.”

  Addy laughed. And the sound of it chipped away at a chunk of the ice frozen inside her. Simultaneously set up a small stir of appreciation for the presence of the man sitting next to her.

  “Tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself all these years,” he urged now.

  “I graduated from college and woke up one day to find out I’d turned thirty. I think I billed out all the hours in between.”

  He smiled. “What kind of law are you practicing?”

  “Corporate.”

  “Do you like what you do?”

  “The rewards are good,” she said, not exactly answering the question.

  Which he didn’t let her get away with. “But do you enjoy it?”

  “It was exciting at first. I’ve wondered now and then if it’s what I want to do the rest of my life.” She looked down for a moment, suddenly anxious to turn the conversation away from herself. “So what about you? You have a daughter. Tell me about her.”