Cloud Waltzer Read online

  “Tolliver,” she supplied stiffly.

  “Right. Tolliver,” he burst out as if she’d correctly answered an especially difficult item on an oral quiz. “But you’re the fourth reporter Charlie has tossed my way. You wouldn’t have gotten past the receptionist except that she’s new and I haven’t had time to explain to her that I don’t care to see any member of the press at any time.”

  “I certainly didn’t intend to force myself on you,” Meredith answered coolly. Inside she was shrieking with the desire to turn sharply on her heel and leave. Preferably with a satisfyingly resonant slam of the door behind her. Much as it galled her to even appear that she was pursuing this insufferably arrogant man, she had no choice. If she planned on establishing herself as a business writer, she absolutely couldn’t go back to Charles Wendler empty-handed. “It’s just that there’s been so little written about you beyond the bare bones facts of your business dealings. I’d like to flesh out that picture a bit.”

  “Miss Tolliver, if it were up to me not even the barest of my bones would ever appear in print.” Hanson did nothing to soften the brusque finality of his comment. “I haven’t been terribly impressed by my few experiences with business reporters. They’ve been underinformed and overzealous and I’d prefer just to avoid the entire issue. So, if you will excuse me, I’m sure you have a busy day ahead of you.”

  Rather than stand up as Hanson clearly expected her to do, Meredith slumped farther into her chair. “You’re wrong, Mr. Hanson. I don’t have a busy day ahead of me. I have a very empty day. I’ve finished my column for the week and have no other assignments. I’m running out of my savings from my old job and what they pay at the paper for my column barely keeps my cat fed. I can understand your feelings”—Meredith was not going to let the depression that was threatening to crush her creep into her voice—“but I am neither underinformed nor overzealous. I brought along clippings of my column and some of the magazine articles I’ve freelanced.”

  For a long moment Hanson stared at the odd woman who seemed to have collapsed in front of him. He carefully slid his legs off of his desk and faced her head-on. When he spoke again it was with the voice of a completely different person. It was almost as if, at the same time that Meredith abandoned her Ice Princess armor, he laid aside his hard-boiled facade. “Come on, then,” he prompted gently, “let’s have a look.”

  He extended a large hand toward the portfolio that Meredith clenched on her lap. She stood awkwardly before him and passed over the collection of her work. He leafed through it, pausing to read sections with an absorption so total that Meredith felt he’d forgotten she was there. The sound of his voice startled her.

  “Unlike most of your colleagues, Miss Tolliver, you do seem to have a passing acquaintance with your subject.” He continued studying the clippings spread before him. Suddenly he glanced up. “Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

  Meredith, brightening somewhat at his encouraging tone, delivered a truncated version of her professional résumé. “Master’s from the Wharton Business School in Philadelphia. Then a year on the Street,” she said, watching Hanson’s reaction to be sure that he understood that she meant the Street, Wall Street. He did. “Then two years with an investment firm in Chicago.” She didn’t add that the firm was the largest of its kind in the country outside of New York. Or that it belonged to her father. “I’ve been in Albuquerque for nearly half a year now.”

  Hanson scribbled some figures on his desk blotter. “That makes you what? Twenty-six, twenty-seven?”

  “Twenty-six,” Meredith admitted reluctantly, afraid that her relative youth would be seen as a handicap. She was surprised that Hanson had guessed so accurately. Most people assumed that, with a master’s degree and several years experience, she must be considerably older than she was.

  “Why’d you give it up? You were obviously a whiz kid, a Wall Street wunderkind on the express route straight to the top. Why are you out here scrambling around for freelance assignments?”

  Meredith was no stranger to fielding hard questions and thinking under pressure, but this man’s directness unnerved her. She yearned again to escape. This time from his laserlike scrutiny. If Archer Hanson weren’t the one subject in Albuquerque who could guarantee her a feature story in Enterprise, she would have. But too much was at stake to indulge her pride. Instead she’d have to swallow it and at the same time convince him to agree to an interview. Meredith decided to try the truth. Or a small portion of it at any rate.

  “I came out here a year ago last fall on a business trip and fell in love with New Mexico. When I went back to Chicago”—she paused, sorting through that tortured time in her life, looking for an explanation that wouldn’t be either a complete lie or too close to the truth—“my whole world suddenly seemed gray and empty.” It was an innocuous enough description. Meredith wondered grimly how the intimidating Mr. Hanson would react if he knew the facts it hid.

  Her world had begun to come apart at the seams long before that trip. As her memory swirled briefly over it, one image surfaced from those memories: Meredith saw herself, alone, long after even the most ambitious workaholic had gone home, still slaving away in the plushly appointed office her father had insisted she take when she had started to work for him. It was an office that far exceeded her position as the most junior associate in the firm. Still he had insisted upon it, and Meredith had acceded to that wish just as she had to all his others ever since her brother’s death. She took the office, then proceeded to drive herself slowly crazy in her attempt to be worthy of it.

  That was when the dieting had started. Convinced that she was a grotesque embarrassment to her father and his firm, she had whittled away at what seemed to be lumpy mounds of fat. She had dieted until there was no fat and nearly no flesh left. But instead of the walking skeleton that everyone else saw, when Meredith looked in the mirror she found a disgusting, undisciplined blob. That was when the whispers behind her back had begun, and the visits to doctors that her father insisted were just social calls. When the word anorexia had entered her vocabulary.

  “Gray and empty?” Hanson prompted. The piercing eyes urged her on and suddenly the interview was forgotten. Meredith found herself aching to tell this man her whole story. About her illness, about Chad, about the ongoing dilemmas she lived with. Quickly she reminded herself that Archer Hanson was in the mold of privilege and insensitivity that she had struggled so desperately to free herself from. She would tell him the truth, but only a palatable, sanitized version.

  “Yes, Chicago was gray, my job was gray, the weather was gray, and I was tired of it. I suppose most of all, I was tired of the gray men who had been populating my life and their dreary vision of life as a one-track scramble up the ladder of success with no stops for joy or laughter. They were devoid of passion, emotion, all the things that make life worth living. After my initial visit out here, I couldn’t stand the life I’d been living in that twilit country. I spent all my time daydreaming about moving out here where the colors are so vibrant they make your eyes ache.”

  Archer Hanson fixed her with a stare that made Meredith think of her first glimpse of the New Mexico sky. Somehow she felt he’d understood everything she’d said. She’d forged a link with Archer Hanson. Surely he wouldn’t turn down her request now. Surely he could see that she wasn’t one of the bungling, inept reporters that blighted the profession she’d chosen. Buoyed up by that certainty, Meredith elaborated on her answer.

  “Sure, I’m only making a fraction of what I made before. But there are other rewards. For the first time ever I feel like my life is my own. I don’t feel as if I’m living out someone else’s dream of success. I’m proud of the work I do, especially my column. I think it’s important to make finance understandable to ordinary people. To keep it from being a closed game played by anonymous men who hold all the cards of wealth and power.”

  “Men like myself?” Hanson asked, steepling his hands on the desk in front of him.

  M
eredith suddenly felt that she had been lured into a trap, tricked into exposing herself. Still, she’d struggled too hard to uncover that self to deny it now. “Does the shoe fit, Mr. Hanson?” she asked with a disarming piquancy.

  “That’s somewhat immaterial here, isn’t it? The relevant point is that I’d be a damned fool to let myself be interviewed by a writer who’d already pretty much made up her mind that I was going to wear that shoe whatever the fit.”

  Meredith forced herself to answer in a neutral tone. “I haven’t come to any conclusions yet about you, Mr. Hanson.”

  “Haven’t you? I wonder.” He spoke the words in a way that left no doubt that he had seen Meredith’s prejudices for what they were. “No, Meredith, I’m not going to allow this interview. But not for any of the reasons I’m sure you’ll come up with.”

  In that moment, Meredith wasn’t sure whether the fact that Archer Hanson had blocked her way into Enterprise magazine or his demeaning use of her first name irritated her more. “Well, then, Archer”—she took pointed aim at his first name and then gleefully fired on it—“I won’t waste any more of your time.” She stood crisply, almost as if the icy armor of the Ice Princess were freezing around her again, and leaned forward to collect her portfolio from his desk. As she did, Archer Hanson clamped one strong hand around a wrist that appeared matchstick fragile by comparison.

  “Since we’re already on a first-name basis, Meredith”—again he threw her name up to her, taunting the image of cool professionalism she wanted to project—“why don’t we have dinner together? You can tell me all about reshuffling the cards of wealth and power and I can . . . well, perhaps a woman like yourself would be more comfortable telling me exactly what she’d like from a man like myself.”

  Meredith jerked her wrist free. Anger flushed a blaze of color into her cheeks. “Of all the arrogant, high-handed . . .” She let the words trail off in her mind. Sealing her mouth into a tight line, she wordlessly gathered up her other things and left.

  What in God’s name had driven him to act like that? The question scalded Archer Hanson’s brain the instant the door closed with a barely muffled slam. He wished it were possible to rip the boorish words that he had spoken from the air around him. He winced as those words reverberated in his mind. Perhaps he’d spoken them as some kind of instinctual protest against the prejudices she had worn as surely as her executive-lady demeanor. For a second he wondered if those instincts might have been wrong.

  No, he answered himself, Miss Meredith Tolliver had definitely come into his office with a strongly preconceived set of notions about the man she was going to be meeting. His tip-off had been the way she’d looked at him. It was a look that he’d become all too familiar with in his boyhood.

  A brief remembrance of those days, of riding out with his father to the old man’s oil fields, came to Archer Hanson totally unbidden and fully intact. He saw himself sitting up as tall as a gangly eight-year-old could in the front seat of his father’s brand-new candy apple red Cadillac with white leather upholstery, watching the miles of beige landscape fly past his window.

  His father, with his stockman’s narrow-brimmed cowboy hat clamped down on his head and half-moons of sweat forming under the arms of the long-sleeved shirts he always wore buttoned all the way up, kept the big car aimed straight down the middle of the road. The dust rolled in the windows as his father pushed the gas pedal down flat and they flew over those endless unpaved miles. Archer remembered thinking that no other boy had a father who could drive so straight and true. He’d nestled, utterly content, into the cushioning leather seat where his mother used to sit before she got sick and went to the hospital and never came home again.

  That had been the same day that Archer first became aware that his view of his father as a shining hero didn’t jibe with the opinion the rest of the world held. He’d gone with Gunther to check on some drilling not too far from their home in Fort Worth. All the men had smiled and kowtowed to his father, to the big boss, when they were speaking to him directly. Archer, though, remembered walking away, then turning back briefly. That was when he saw it for the first time, the unconcealed contempt the workers held for the man who ruled their lives.

  Much as Archer resisted at first, his childhood illusions began to dissolve that day. In time, he too saw the man those workers had seen. His father was bombastic, high-handed, spoiled, and a rank abuser of privilege. In short, he was everything that Archer himself had been with Meredith. Everything that she had expected him to be. For he’d caught the same look in her eyes today that he’d seen more than a quarter of a century ago in the eyes of those oil field workers.

  “Damn her self-righteous assumptions,” Hanson breathed as he thought of her again. His burning annoyance mysteriously cooled, however, as he remembered the way her hair, that straight, silken curtain, had shimmered along the curve of her jaw as she’d leaned forward over his desk, touching him with the smell of perfume and the unconscious grace of her motions. He remembered her leaning there and the way her lips had hung above him like some unspeakably delectable fruit, plump and ready for the picking.

  Irritation and arousal collided within Archer Hanson, muddling into a soppy pool of frustrated self-recriminations. He wished he could back up for only half an hour and start again. He’d still deny Meredith Tolliver her interview. But he wanted very badly to redo his refusal in such a way that he still might have a chance of tasting those lips.

  Dammit all, Archer Hanson thought again as he plowed into the work waiting for him in a day already soured by regret.

  Chapter 2

  Meredith was still fuming when she wrenched open the door to her small efficiency apartment. Inside was a paradoxical mixture of possessions. Like the silver heirloom coffee service surrounded by the mismatched ceramic mugs she’d picked up at a yard sale. Meredith had balked at taking the silver service, but her mother had forced it on her, saying that her own mother had intended for Meredith to have it.

  Then there was the handwoven Italian tapestry bedspread thrown over the rickety roll-away bed that she slept on. The monogrammed, silver-backed brush and comb set she’d grown up with now sat beside a discount store lipstick and a cake of soap she’d bought with the help of a cents-off coupon.

  Even her cat, a Persian with a pedigree longer than the querulous animal’s dense coat of blue-gray fluff, was a walking monument to the schizophrenic nature of Meredith’s new life as he nibbled disdainfully at the generic-brand cat food in his monogrammed porcelain bowl.

  The sight of her pampered pet, Thoreau, named in honor of an undergraduate passion for the early American writer, caused the nimbus of anger whirling around Meredith to dissipate.

  “Oh, Thor,” she sighed, slumping into a chair beside her kitchen table, “we both have such a long way to go on this new road I’ve set us on. Don’t we, old boy?”

  Thor looked up from the dish of food he was picking at desultorily. Winding a sinuous path lazily toward Meredith, the plump Persian sprang into her lap.

  “You big bully,” she laughed as the overstuffed cat began kneading her stomach. It was inevitable; Thor never sought the slightest bit of human attention unless his mistress was wearing either a dark outfit, preferably one that had to be dry-cleaned, or something like the raw-silk skirt with little nubbies that the claws he didn’t bother to retract could pull out and unravel.

  “Go ahead, you little lardbelly, do your worst. I’m through with the corporate camouflage. Not only is it unutterably drab, it doesn’t even work.” She stroked between his ears, and the soft kneading against her belly stopped. Thor’s jade green eyes closed into two slits of feline bliss.

  “Are you listening to me?” Meredith asked. Thor replied with a deep rumbling purr. Thor. When had she stopped calling him Thoreau? she wondered. Probably about the same time she’d put aside her literature studies at college and changed her major to business. About the time Rory had died. Rory, a golden name for the golden boy who had been her brother and the sh
ining hope of the Tolliver family. Meredith noted that it almost didn’t hurt anymore to think about him. Almost. And it had only taken six years.

  “Thor.” She breathed the cat’s name, but he didn’t respond. Now, instead of symbolizing her love of literature, everyone who heard her call her cat thought she had some strange fixation on Nordic gods. Against her will she found herself thinking of Archer Hanson and wondering whether his ancestry was Nordic. She could easily picture him as a rampaging Viking with his white-blond hair and ruddy, hard-planed face. Could imagine his thickly muscled shoulders swinging a broad axe as he pillaged coastal villages. And coastal virgins? she asked herself wryly.

  In a way, she thought abstractedly, we each represent opposite ends of the blond spectrum. She visualized herself, with her cool, aloof, porcelain-doll fragility, at one end of that spectrum, and Archer Hanson, with his wild thicket of hair, unearthly eyes, and flaming, sun-burnished magnetism, at the other.

  Just as she had been trained to, Meredith followed that detached intellectual perception to its source. It led to the emotional core of her reaction to Archer Hanson. Magnetism. Beneath irritation, humiliation, scorn, and any thoughts for the career she was trying to build lay attraction. She had been undeniably and overwhelmingly attracted to the man.

  “Up, up, up.” She stood abruptly, sending Thor skittering down the front of her skirt, pulling out more threads of raw silk the whole way. “Now look what you’ve done,” Meredith moaned, though the lament was intended far more for herself than Thor. “I’m going to need to sell this suit, you know, to keep us both fed.”

  Thor flipped his puffy tail straight up toward the ceiling and padded away, regally unconcerned with his human’s plight.