Unfinished Business. Inglath Cooper
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wait!” Mark called out.
She stumbled down the stairs. Don’t think. Not yet. Get out. Just go. Her throat had closed up, and her eyes burned with the need to cry. Not in front of him. She would not cry in front of him!
“Addy, please!” He caught her in the foyer, his chest rising and falling with what looked more like agitation than exertion. Her gaze dropped to his ab muscles. A six-pack. Like those guys in the men’s fitness magazines. When had he started working out? And he’d lost weight, hadn’t he?
She realized then how long it had been since she’d seen him without his clothes on. How long it had been since the two of them had made love. She felt a wash of mortification for what she now knew to be the reason.
“We need to talk, Addy,” he said, a note of uncertainty in his normally confident attorney’s voice.
She focused on the navy crest of his robe, the knot in her throat so thick she could barely speak. “Aren’t we a little beyond the talking stage?”
“This isn’t how I wanted to tell you,” he said, compassion edging the admission.
Fury exploded through her. She did not want his pity! Damn him. “How long has this been going on?”
He looked away, then dropped his gaze, guilt etched in every angle of his posture. “I never wanted to hurt you, Addy.”
“You knew I wanted children. You weren’t ready, you said. How could you? How could you do this?” The words throbbed with pain, and she hated her own inability to keep them neutral.
He stepped toward her, reached out, then dropped his hands to his sides. “Please, Addy, I don’t know what to say. This wasn’t planned. It just—”
“Don’t you dare say it just happened. I can’t believe you would do this to us. Who are you?”
He blocked the door with one hand. “Wait. Addy! You don’t understand—”
“I understand,” she said, the details of their marriage clicking into place like the numbers on a vault lock. All those late nights he’d been working, his lack of interest in her and the fact that they hadn’t made love in months.
The anger collapsed inside her, and she felt as though her bones might not support her. She walked over to the dining-room table, picked up the file she’d left that morning.
And, without another word between them, she left. Game over. Marriage finished.
CHAPTER ONE
ADDY TAYLOR STOOD at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 48th Street, hand raised for a taxi. Rain pelted her already-a-lost-cause hair, and her lightweight coat drooped beneath the downpour. She glanced at her watch, waved harder as another cab sped past her like a bullet, tossing a wave of muddy water across the toes of the Italian leather pumps she’d stalked for two months at Neiman’s until they finally went on sale.
She stepped back from the curb, reached down and pulled off a shoe, emptied it of water, then did the same for the other.
Her flight was due to leave LaGuardia in forty-five minutes. She had been in Manhattan since Monday, taking depositions from the board of directors of a company Owings, Blake was representing in a securities fraud suit. She’d known she was pushing it, allowing so little time to get to the airport, but she’d been close enough to finishing to not have to come back next week.
Fifteen minutes later, a taxi whisked to a stop beside her. She opened the door, shoved her small suitcase and laptop bag across the blue vinyl seat, slid in and closed the door. “LaGuardia, please.”
The driver had thick black frame glasses and a scruff of a beard that looked as if his razor had gone dull several days before. He pulled out into traffic, looking in the rearview mirror. “Which airline?”
“U.S. Air.”
“What time’s your flight?”
“Five-fifteen.”
He gave her a pointed look, muttered something about the taxi not having wings, then rammed the accelerator to the floor, tossing her against the back seat.
She looked down at her lap. A drenched mess. She reached inside her purse and pulled out a couple of tissues, attempted to wipe the rain from her face, only to have them dissolve in a sodden lump in her hands. A complete waste of time.
She dropped her head back, pressed a thumb to her throbbing right temple. What she would give for a hot bath and a long soak. The last thing she wanted to do was get on an airplane. So spend the night.
The thought beamed up from nowhere, only to be squashed by a wake of practicality. Too expensive. She hadn’t planned to stay.
But then why not? What did she have to hurry home for?
Another weekend, and nothing but an empty house that stood as an all too recognizable symbol of her empty life.
April third. First day as an officially no-longer-married woman. Addy hated the sound of it, hated everything about the new tag, its implications of failure and rejection. The realization that like her own mother, she had been left. Half a year had passed since Mark had moved out, and sometimes Addy felt as though she were still standing in the doorway of their bedroom, trying to make sense of the fact that there was another woman in her bed. Six months, and she had not moved beyond that single truth.
Maybe it was finally time she got moving. At the very least, she could indulge herself for the night.
She sat up in the seat. “Wait. I’ve changed my mind. The Plaza Hotel, please.”
Another pointed look through the rearview mirror, this time with compressed lips to complete his disapproval.
A few minutes later, the taxi jarred to a stop outside the 59th Street entrance to the Plaza. A bellman opened Addy’s door and took what luggage she had. She paid the driver who managed to complete the transaction with a single huff and an acceleration back into traffic worthy of NASCAR.
Addy went inside and checked in, relieved that there was a room available, astronomically expensive though it was.
The bellhop, an older man with white hair and shoulders hunched from the weight of several decades worth of suitcases, directed her through the hotel’s ornate lobby to the elevator and up to her room. Inside, he pointed out the minibar, the safe inside the closet. “May I get you some ice before I go, miss?”
“No. Thank you. I’m fine.” She handed him a tip for his help, and with a nod, he left her alone. Under other circumstances, she might have enjoyed the luxurious room. An Oriental rug, two double beds with a mound of pillows propped high, a wall cabinet which housed the TV, fax machine and Internet connection.
Heat crowded the room. She cracked the window, letting in the sounds of the city below, the whine of a trumpet, the clip-clop of horses’ hooves on the paved streets.
With methodical movements, she emptied her suitcase. Nothing inside except two wrinkled suits and workout clothes she’d worn to Crunch, the club she’d escaped to each night that week in order to avoid the late dinners she was semi-expected to attend with her client.
On another spur-of-the-moment impulse, she grabbed her purse and headed back out of the hotel. The rain had stopped, so she didn’t bother putting up the umbrella the doorman had just handed her. Barney’s was a short walk away, and she headed up 59th Street, aware that she could be accused of trying to avoid the pain gnawing at her stomach. And maybe she was. She’d racked up enough billable hours in the past six months to put her in the running for junior-partner status. Work was the distraction she needed. As long as she focused on whatever case was before her, she could avoid looking at the state of disaster currently posing as her personal life.
She crossed over to 60th and headed toward Lexington Avenue. Her cell phone rang. She pulled it out of her purse. “Hello.”
“Where are you?” Ellen Wilshire rarely bothered with greetings. As a newly