Beyond Business. Elizabeth Harbison

down Meredith’s spine. He looked as if he was going to kiss her again.

      More to the point, she wanted him to kiss her again; she wanted to feel herself in his arms again; she wanted to feel that rough beard against her cheek. Heat pulsed between the two of them. He moved toward her and she leaned in ever so slightly until he was just the merest breath away.

      Then her phone rang.

      She started in surprise. Who would be calling her at this hour?

      Her first thought was that it might be an emergency, something to do with her mother.

      “I’m sorry,” she said to Evan, fumbling through her purse. “I have to get this. It could be my mom.”

      She answered the phone.

      “I’m sorry to call so late,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “But I’m getting ready to leave for Japan and I need to know if you finished assembling the data you were working on about Hanson Media Group.”

      Chapter Thirteen

      Meredith moved the phone to her other ear and subtly turned the volume on the earpiece down. “I don’t have that information with me right now. I can go home and get it, though, if you need me to.”

      “You’re not alone?”

      “Um … no.”

      “I need to talk to you about this. Can you call me back soon, in private?”

      She didn’t want to, but Meredith knew she really had no choice. “All of those records are at home, Mother.” She hated having to stoop so low as to pretend it was her mother. “Can it wait until morning?”

      “Sorry, you have to do this now.”

      “Okay, let me just call you back in—” she glanced at her watch “—about forty-five minutes. Is that okay?”

      “That’s fine. But sooner is better. Try and hurry, Meredith, okay?”

      “You got it.” She gave Evan an exasperated look as she flipped the phone shut and put it back into her purse. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to get back home and get some documentation together for my mother. Something to do with her new housing situation and needing to prove she sold her assets out here.”

      Evan nodded. “I’ll take you home right away.”

      That just seemed wrong. With everything she was doing she couldn’t bear to make him feel like he had to accommodate her. “No, no, I know you were looking forward to eating here. It’s not a big deal for me to take a cab back to the office and drive home. Heck, I’d walk if I had the time.”

      “Meredith, I’m not letting you take a cab back to the office so I can go get myself some souvlaki. I’ll drive you.”

      “You don’t—”

      “Don’t be ridiculous,” he interrupted. He started the car and put it in gear. “This isn’t a big deal.”

      “Well, thanks.”

      He pulled out of the parking lot. “Is everything okay with your mom?”

      “What? Oh. Yes. Fine. It’s just—” She had to tell herself this really was about her mother, that it was routine personal business and not something that could affect Evan or his family. “She’s constantly needing one document or another from the house. She left a ton of stuff behind.” That much, at least, was true.

      “Your mom is lucky to have you,” Evan said as he drove. “After she lost your dad, she must have been really lost.”

      “She was,” Meredith agreed.

      “I remember how close they were,” Evan continued, smiling more to himself than Meredith. “They’d be worse than teenagers at the dinner table, laughing and finishing each other’s sentences.”

      Meredith smiled, remembering. “I always thought that was the definition—”

      “—of true love, yeah,” Evan agreed, apparently unaware that he had just finished Meredith’s sentence himself.

      But she was aware of it.

      “When you know each other so well, and agree with each other so completely, that you can finish each other’s sentences,” he went on, “that really shows a certain comfort level. It’s enviable, really.”

      “Yes,” she agreed, looking at him through the darkness, illuminated only occasionally by the streetlights they passed. “I think you’re right.”

      “It probably had a lot to do with how you turned out.”

      “Meaning.?”

      “You have always been secure in yourself, Meredith. Some might even say a little bull-headed—” he gave a quick smile “—but definitely secure with who you are and what you think. I think that comes from growing up in a house where everyone was loved and accepted for who they were.”

      “As opposed to how you grew up?” she asked, before she could think better of it.

      He didn’t even hesitate to answer. “Definitely. I knew before I could talk that I had to watch what I said around my father. The strain of keeping us all quiet and agreeable for him probably had a lot to do with my mother’s eventual illness.”

      And death, Meredith thought, but she didn’t say it. She didn’t have to. She knew they were both thinking it. “You must have had some good times with your family,” she ventured. “It’s not like you were a miserable kid.”

      “Not when I was with you.” He kept his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel. “Maybe whatever you had in your upbringing spilled over to me when we were together. The only time I really felt comfortable back then was when I was with you.”

      The thought warmed her heart, even while it rang every warning bell within her. “It obviously didn’t mean that much to you,” she said. “You didn’t have too hard a time leaving it.”

      He drew to a halt at a stoplight and looked at her, the red hue illuminating his left cheek, casting shadows that made him look older. “That,” he said, “is not true.”

      Once again she found herself wishing he’d explain. Yet even while she wished, she didn’t want him to. “No? Then how did you do it? Evan, you never looked back. No call, no letter, no message in a bottle.”

      “It was best for you that you didn’t hear from me.”

      She scoffed. “Best for me? Who do you think you’re kidding?”

      “It was,” he insisted. The car behind them honked its horn and Evan looked up to see the light had changed. He drove forward and went on, saying to Meredith, “You’ll just have to trust me on this.”

      “Evan, we’re grown people now. This happened more than a decade ago. I’d like to know what happened. This cryptic ‘it was best for you’ business just doesn’t cut it. Either tell me the truth or don’t talk about the past at all.”

      “You’re right. We shouldn’t talk about it at all.”

      She sighed. “Just tell me the truth.”

      He laughed lightly. “Fine, Meredith. It’s simple. My father wanted to use our relationship, yours and mine, to his advantage over your father. He wanted me to get information on your father’s writers, the stories they were coming up with, how best to get in there and switch the facts around and cast doubt on your father’s credibility.”

      Meredith felt the blood leave her face. “He wanted you to spy for him?”

      “Essentially, yes. Though that’s a pretty dramatic label.” He blew a long breath out. “Either way, what it would have come down to was me using you, or appearing to.” The next light turned yellow, and Evan slowed the