A Purrfect Romance (14 page)

T
he diary fell out of Bridey’s hands and slid down her lap and onto the floor. If she had been struck by lightning, the effect couldn’t have been any more electrifying.

“So there was nothing more to it than that.”

Her voice was a whisper in the silent room.

“The whole crazy feud was simply because Mack’s father rejected Henrietta’s book. Wait till I tell him. It was nothing more than that.”

Silk climbed into her lap, and Bridey stroked her fur absentmindedly while her thoughts returned to the diary.

“How foolish Henrietta was to be so angry just because her book wasn’t accepted by the first publisher she gave it to. Why, she was lucky he even looked at it, wasn’t she, Silk?”

Silk stuck out a tiny pink tongue and licked a paw, apparently agreeing.

“She should have known better. A book often has to go to several publishers before it gets accepted. Surely she knew that. And if she’d done just a little bit of checking before she approached him, she’d have found out his firm didn’t publish cookbooks.

“But then, to have carried a grudge that way, to the grave. Even beyond the grave. To have caused so much trouble, and for such a silly, vain, high-handed reason.”

She picked up the diary again and reread those last words.

“Did she think Llewellyn Brewster owed it to her to publish her book? Just because he was her neighbor and had eaten at her table? Just because she was accustomed to a life of indulgence and privilege and special favors. And then, did she not even try to talk to him about it?”

But Bridey already knew the answer to that question. As headstrong and stubborn and self-centered as Henrietta Willey was, once her mind was made up, there would have been no further discussion.

“Oh, I can’t wait till Mack hears about this.”

She felt a tingle in her cheeks and across the bridge of her nose, a little like the feeling she got when the vinegar in a salad dressing was too strong.

“Of course, that means confessing that I read Henrietta’s diary. Do you think he’ll be scandalized?”

Silk snuggled into Bridey’s lap, and Bridey took that for reassurance. Silk would have done the same thing, for sure.

Now she was glad she’d agreed to see him again. Really glad.

“I brought the cats along. Will that be all right?”

She had arrived right on time, bearing a bowl of crispy hot French fries.

“Of course,” Mack said. He was struggling to hang on to a bottle of wine and two glasses in one hand as he held the door for her with the other. “I was expecting them. Come on in.”

She was bursting to tell him her news, but she was determined to wait for the right moment, and the effort added an extra measure of excitement to her usually lively manner. Mack had been expecting her to be cool and cautious, but instead he saw the heightened sparkle in her green eyes and the charming flush in her cheeks, the air of animation that danced all around her. In her bright miniskirt and skimpy little top, her slim form seemed especially fragile and feminine, and he felt his heart make a hot thump in his chest. The spicy fragrance of her hair distracted him as she passed him, entering the foyer of his apartment, and made a cloud of confusion in his head. For a moment he forgot the glasses in his hand, and it wasn’t until she held up the bowl of fries and said, “Where do you want me to put these?” that he remembered why she was there.

“Oh,” he said, recovering his wits and waving the glasses and the wine vaguely. “Outside, on the terrace.”

He led her to the terrace, where the table was already set in a bizarre mixture of picnic casual and banquet formal. The tablecloth was the traditional red-and-white check, but the napkins were fancy double damask. The silver was hand wrought, the plates were paper. The buns were still in their cellophane wrap, but next to them was a crystal bowl filled with ketchup. A tiny, rose-patterned silver ladle stuck up out of the ketchup, its ornate design gleaming in the late afternoon light that bathed the terrace in gold as the sun dropped over the Hudson River.

Bridey laughed at the odd display.

“I was torn,” Mack said. “I couldn’t decide whether to make this an informal barbecue or go all out to impress you. Seems I got stuck somewhere in between.”

He already had a platter of raw burgers ready to be grilled, including some tiny ones for the cats, and after offering her a choice of beer, Coke or wine—she chose the wine—he was ready to start them going. She set the bowl of fries on the table. Dishes for Silk and Satin were waiting next to Scout’s, and the two cats did their usual cat thing, examining every corner of the terrace for potential hiding places, while Scout watched them eagerly, like a proud host happy to show off his home to new visitors. He’d never had guests of his own before and was on his very best behavior. “They seem to be getting along pretty well, don’t you think?” Mack said as he prepared to cook the hamburgers.

“Like old friends.”

“And how do they like their hamburgers,” Mack asked, “rare, medium or well done?”

“Medium rare.”

“And you?”

“Very rare,” she said.

“Me, too.”

He laid the raw meat over the hottest part of the coals.

“I’ve got an apology to make,” he said as he tended the burgers, which started to sizzle immediately, their aroma rising invitingly into the air. “I’ve been thinking about it all day. I shouldn’t have teased you about letting Silk get out that night. It seemed kind of funny at the time, and it didn’t take a lot of IQ points to figure out what was bouncing around in your bag. That and the look on your face: trying so hard to be cool and looking so scared at the same time.”

“You’re right about that. I was plenty scared.”

“How did it happen?”

“I don’t really know. She must have slipped into my bag when I wasn’t looking and then slipped out again down at the fish market. I was there for almost an hour, and apparently she had herself a high old time during that time. The amazing thing is that she turned up just as I was ready to leave. It was such a coincidence. I looked up and there she was, cool as you please. She jumped into my bag like it was her taxi home. If I’d left the market a minute earlier, I’d have totally missed her. And what’s even scarier, I wouldn’t have realized till hours later that she wasn’t in the apartment, and then she could have been gone for good. I wouldn’t have had a clue where to look for her.”

“Are you always so lucky?”

Bridey laughed. “My grandma used to say I carry a guardian angel on my shoulder. And I certainly did that time. But I’ve been feeling guilty ever since, and I hated having to lie to Mr. Kinski about it.”

“You feel better now that the secret’s out?”

“I sure do.” She lifted her glass in a kind of toast and said, “I have to thank you for not giving me away.” And then, as he raised his spatula in acknowledgment, she added, “I know another secret.”

“Oh?”

“Mmmm.” She savored the moment. “It concerns you. And it’s a biggie.”

He looked at her thoughtfully. “A real biggie?”

“Oh, you bet!”

He put the burgers into the buns, slipped them onto the plates and brought them to the table.

“Maybe I’d better sit down.”

“Maybe you’d better.”

She smiled knowingly at him, looking disarmingly nonchalant and drawing out the moment as long as she could.

“I’m sitting,” he said.

She carefully spooned some ketchup out of the crystal bowl and dropped it in globs on her hamburger. She laid a slice of raw onion over that and covered it all up with the toasted bun top. Then she reconsidered, removed the onion and set it at the edge of her plate
.

You never know . . .

She laughed to herself as she noticed that Mack was doing the same thing.

“Okay,” he said at last, preparing to take a bite of his hamburger. “I’m ready.”

“I found out why Henrietta Willey was so mad at your family.”

Mack paused with his hamburger in midair. His mouth, opened to receive it, had forgotten its job and remained agape, making him look a little foolish, and he stayed that way while she told him about her discovery of the diary and its revelations. Many heartbeats passed as he took in the full significance of her news. Then he replaced his burger on his plate and closed his mouth.

“I don’t believe this,” he said incredulously.

“Well, believe it.”

“You mean to tell me that all those years, all that insane hostility of hers was based on nothing more than my father’s rejection of her cookbook? That’s crazy!”

He got up and walked over to the edge of the terrace and looked down for a minute. Then he raised his eyes, as though to heaven, turned back to Bridey and lifted his hands in a gesture of exasperation.

“We don’t even publish cookbooks. Surely she must have understood that.”

“Well, your father’s note was a little brusque. Maybe if he’d been a little more tactful—spoken to her personally . . .”

“Nonsense! She was just a spoiled, self-centered woman. Expecting to have her hand held, thinking the world owed her favors—”

“That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?” Bridey found herself rising to Henrietta’s defense. “She was a first-time author and she’d put her heart and soul into her manuscript. That’s a very vulnerable experience, something totally new for someone like Henrietta. Surely your father had dealt with enough writers to have understood that. And he could have told her right off that it wasn’t his kind of book without putting her through weeks of suspense. He must have known what torture the waiting would be for a writer. I think it was heartless of him.”

Mack’s dark eyes flashed angrily. “You can’t talk about my father that way. You didn’t even know him. And what makes you think writers need such coddling? Writers are accustomed to rejection. That’s part of the writing game. And anyway, no offense, Bridey, but cookbooks just aren’t in the same class as the kind of work we handle at Harmon and Brewster. If Henrietta had done her homework, she would have known we publish serious, scholarly nonfiction. You would know that, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t ask me, for example, to publish your book. I’m sure it’s a fine book and all that, and cookbooks serve a valid purpose, I suppose, but after all, we do have very high standards.”

“Oh! So cookbooks don’t meet your precious ‘standards.’ Is that it? And that justifies being rude and unkind to an old woman who’d worked hard to produce something she thought had some value.”

“Now, wait a minute. You’re making her sound like a wispy, little old apple-cheeked grandma,” Mack interrupted her impatiently. “Henrietta Willey was tough as nails and hard as tempered steel. Her trouble was, she expected everyone to cater to her, and when she didn’t get special treatment, she turned into a viper. And my father wasn’t rude or unkind to her. He just sent her a nice little note that didn’t happen to say what she wanted to hear. That’s not a crime, you know.”

“Well . . .”

“I’d probably have done the same thing myself. I
do
do the same thing myself. All the time. Harmon and Brewster has to reject most of what’s submitted to us. Though usually it’s our editors who do the rejecting. Actually, my father did her the courtesy of writing to her himself.”

“Oh, big deal!”

Mack was struggling with his rising temper. What did this girl know about the publishing business? How could she possibly understand the pressures: of time, of market demands, of bottom lines?

But still . . .

He came back to the table, sat down and looked seriously at her for a long minute. His eyes searched hers, and what he saw in them were her stubbornness and her passionate commitment to her own dreams, striking contrasts to her hair, made more golden than ever in the sunset, and the soft, feminine grace of her delicate shoulders and slim, shapely arms. His gaze dropped to her hands, with their little nicks and burns and bruises. Perhaps it was the air of brave strength that he saw in her fine features, the tiny, harsh signs of her work that showed on her lovely hands. He felt again that surge of protectiveness, like a sudden rein on his anger. His loyalty to his father made him ready to do battle in his name, but he realized he couldn’t bear to be unkind to this girl.

“Bridey.” He spoke with unaccustomed restraint. “I understand how you might be sympathetic to Henrietta’s efforts, even if she was a wicked old bat—”

“She wasn’t a wicked old bat!”

“She was too. She was a bad-tempered, vindictive woman. And maybe, because she shared your passion for cooking and wrote about it, just as you do, you feel a kind of kinship with her. But still, my father did the right thing, and I’m surprised to hear you attack him. As I said, I’m sure I would have done the same thing myself.”

“Oh, you would, would you?”

“Yes, I would.” His voice carried an air of finality, as though the matter was closed.

But Bridey had to have the last word. “Well, you’d be wrong.”

After that there seemed to be nothing left to say. Mack’s long habit of siding with his father stopped his mouth, leaving him rigidly defensive. He felt as though he’d painted himself into a corner, asserting his father’s rectitude even when he knew what a tactless curmudgeon the old man could be. And Bridey, though incensed at Mack’s apparent cold-heartedness, felt foolish for having defended a silly, demanding old woman. Both of them had been left unable to find any reasonable topic of discussion.

So they ate their hamburgers in silence and frustration, each one stuck in a hole of their own digging.

And yet, even as they struggled with the stubbornness that sat like an iron fence separating them, something—perhaps it was the last radiance of the setting sun—blanketed them, creating a current of warmth that seemed to leap the space between them. Though Mack’s jaw was set in a mask of manly resolve, and he was determined to remain unmoved, his heart ached, telling him to reach across the table and take her hand in his. The shine of her hair in the soft light begged to be touched. The long fringe of her lashes, lowered while she ate—for she refused to raise her eyes to look at him—was heart-stoppingly lovely, and he yearned to feel them brushing his lips.