“We work together,” Neve explained. “I work for her, actually. She owns—”
Maggie was back before she had a chance to finish. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to leave you two alone.”
Neve blushed. “We were just talking about—”
“The past,” Jack interjected as the band shifted into a slow ballad. Couples fused together as the lights dimmed. From the corner of his eye, he could see waiters serving salads to the far tables. Suddenly, a sense of urgency swirled about him, a need to hold onto the moment before dinner and Paige and the rest of the night took Maggie away from him. He wanted to know more about her. He wanted to know where she’d ended up. He wanted to know how she’d done for herself after all this time. He wanted.
“Dance with me,” he said. He hardly heard the words come out of his mouth, didn’t know they had until Maggie’s jaw snapped shut. “Just once. For old time’s sake.”
In slow motion she shook her head. “Oh. Jack, I just…I can’t. I’m sorry. Like I said, I’m only here to see someone. For business.” She cocked her head. A tentative smile passed across her face and fell away, as if the very thought of touching him again pained her down deep. “And to be honest, I’m not sure I can do that again.”
“Do what?”
She motioned to the space between them. “Us. You and me. Even if it is only a dance.” She paused. “You know what I mean.”
He opened his mouth to protest, but before he could plead his case, she backed away. The crowd surrounded her and in another second, Maggie was gone.
Jack stood in the middle of the dance floor, unsure of what had just happened. He scowled, angry with himself for asking, angrier with her for refusing. Disappearing in that green dress was the only woman who’d ever had the power to make him feel like he was slipping down a hill at breakneck speed, like he was skating on ice that might crack at any second. He didn’t like that feeling, that loss of control. He’d never felt it before meeting Maggie, and he sure as hell hadn’t looked for it after leaving her. He preferred ease, comfort, predictability: all the things he had with Paige.
So why he went after Maggie in that moment, why he set into place the events that tumbled together that night, he could never really explain. He only knew he didn’t have a choice.
“Wait.” Jack pushed through the crowd, catching her as she and Neve walked into a smaller room off the main one. He reached for her arm and wrapped his fingers around smooth, freckled skin. Something unexpected tingled in his wrist.
“Jack, please.” This time, fire jumped in Maggie’s eyes, and she pulled away from him.
He took a step back, palms raised. “Sorry. Geez. I just wondered…you still didn’t tell me what you’re doing here. If you‘re not living in Boston, I mean.”
“I did too. I’m looking for someone.”
“A guy?”
She smiled for the first time and put her hands on her hips. Against his will, Jack noticed the swell of them and remembered the way his own hands used to fit there.
“Why do you want to know? Jealous?”
“Maybe.” Suddenly he was. “Can’t we just talk?”
“About what?” She glanced at the guests still streaming through the doors behind them. “About your life now? Mine?” She laughed a little. “Believe me, you don’t want to know.”
“I just—”
“Ah, Jack,” she said, her voice softer this time. “It’s too late to play catch-up. Too late to pretend we can be friends.”
“Why?”
She waited. Swallowed. Ran a hand over her brow and closed her eyes for a long moment. “I’m not sure I have the energy.”
“But—”
Eden appeared out of the crowd again, this time with a stocky, dimpled guy in tow. She ignored Jack. “Listen, Mags, Jarod here talked to Dillon a few days ago and says he was definitely planning on coming. But now the whole east side of the city’s lost power—”
“Meaning what?” Maggie’s voice climbed an octave.
Eden patted her friend on the shoulder. “Meaning he might be running late, that’s all. Don’t freak out. He’ll show.”
Jack frowned.
Dillon
. Who the hell was that? The guy Mags was there to find? Not her date, that was for certain, or else he’d be standing beside her. Then who? Jack didn’t know what else to say, and the longer he stood there, the more like an idiot he felt.
“Mags, it’s good to see you again,” he said, interrupting the women’s conversation. “If you change your mind about that dance, I’ll be inside.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
On impulse, he drew closer, bending until his lips brushed her ear. “You look terrific,” he whispered.
“Um…thanks.” She laid one hand on the lapel of his jacket, for a moment only. But it was long enough that for the next hour, all Jack could feel was the imprint of Maggie’s fingertips on his heart.
“I have to go,” she said.
This time Jack did let her walk away. Yet as she vanished into the crowd, with Eden and Neve beside her, something twisted inside him, a sort of yearning mixed with anger, regret, and something else he couldn’t quite identify.
Just when he’d gotten his life where he wanted it, just when his future as CEO and devoted husband seemed clear, the redhead from Jack’s past, the ache from another life, showed up again. He hadn’t planned for this. The mixed-up thoughts in his head he couldn’t deal with. The longing below his navel he couldn’t control. All he wanted to do was talk to Maggie. All she wanted to do was get away from him.
What the hell was he going to do now?
9:00 p.m.
Maggie stood in the middle of the dance floor and fought for stillness she couldn’t find.
This isn’t happening to me. It can’t be
. Her fingers fluttered against her skirt.
How big is this world, where I look for Dillon in one place and find Jack there instead?
She ignored the music and the couples moving around her. That cold feeling passed along her arms again, the chill that had set upon her in front of Spectacular ‘Scapes. This time she couldn’t ignore it.
You moved to Hart’s Falls because of Jack.
That’s not true,
she argued back.
Wasn’t it? Hadn’t some part of her been waiting for this moment, since the day she looked at the map and traced the highway from Rhode Island to Boston? Hadn’t she imagined him lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, fifty miles away? Didn’t part of her want to be close to him after everything that happened?
“No.” Of course not. That was silly. That didn’t make sense. “No.”
She didn’t realize she’d spoken the word aloud until Neve waved a hand in front of her face. “No, what? Maggie? Are you in there?”
Of all the people she had to run into tonight, it had to be him.
Him
. She looked for a place to sit down before she fell over.
Jack Major: dark-haired, sexy without speaking a word, kind in the right ways, rough around all the best edges. The man who’d made her realize that falling in love was like jumping off a cliff. The man who made her crazy. The man who made her want to fly. The man who promised to love her forever, right before she broke up with him because the secret inside her was bigger than the two of them and all their love put together. This man had just been standing two feet away from her, smiling down with that sensual smile and thinking she was going to dance with him as if nothing had ever happened.
She wanted to scream.
Jack and Maggie. Maggie and Jack. It had been the two of them, inseparable, as soon as they met on NYU’s campus. Parties, hand in hand. Classes, side by side. Coffee in a local diner or a stroll down Times Square. It never mattered where they went or what they did, as long as they were together. Eden dated five or six fraternity brothers in the same two-year span. And Stefan? Maggie wondered what had happened to Jack’s closest friend from school, a laid-back guy with heavy-lidded eyes and a slow, sexy smile. He’d never settled down either. Most of their friends had dated around, falling in and out of love the way college students do.
But we were different
, Maggie thought, and sadness thudded against her heart.
We knew too soon. Fell too hard. And I didn’t know how to deal with the consequences.
“Are you okay?” Kind, sweet Neve hovered close beside her.
Maggie ran her fingers, damp with perspiration, through her hair. “I’m fine.” But she took her friend by the wrist and steered her in the direction of the Ladies’ Room. “I need some air.”
“That was him, wasn’t it?” Neve asked after they pushed their way inside.
Maggie stared at her hands as she washed them furiously. She didn’t answer. She couldn’t.
“That was the guy from college. From Vegas. The one you and Eden were talking about earlier.” Neve adjusted her dress and waited as Maggie dried every last drop of water from her hands. Twice.
A group of women walked in, giggling. Their eyelids drooped from the mascara caked onto their lashes.
“So I told him to get lost,” one said as she applied a thick coat of lipstick and peered into the mirror. “I told him it would take more than some flowers to make up for what he did…”
Maggie pretended to inspect her own makeup as the women cooed and rearranged their faces.
“Did you see what Stella is wearing?” another said. “I wouldn’t be caught dead…”
After a few long minutes, the women exited.
Maggie sank onto an ottoman and kicked off her shoes. “Yes. That was him.”
“Wow.” Neve plopped down opposite her. “He’s really good-looking.”
Maggie rubbed her instep. “I know.”
Why hasn’t he changed?
Why didn’t he get fat, or gray, or paunchy around the jowls? Why does he still look so damn perfect?
She stared at her own reflection in the wall of mirrors beside them and wondered what Jack had seen there. The girl of twenty? The woman of thirty? The lines around her eyes, or the question marks inside them?
“What does he do for a living?”
“I have no idea. He’s probably a very rich businessman. That was always his plan, anyway.”
“Really? He doesn’t seem like a snob. Like some of them, I mean.”
Maggie shook her head. “No, he doesn’t.” Jack never had been like that, despite his last name and the reputation attached to it. When she’d known him, he had just been a regular guy. He was nice to everyone, the sort of person who worked really hard and dreamed big dreams and didn‘t care about the money his family came from. He’d always wanted to make it on his own. He refused a scholarship to his father’s alma mater. He turned down an entry-level position in a family friend’s business and chose to study abroad instead.
I want to do my own thing, make my own decisions, he said one night, as he traced circles on her bare stomach. I don’t ever want people to say I made it because of my father. Or his money. Or my goddamned last name.
Maggie wondered if Jack had finally sold out, though. What else would he be doing in a place like this?
“So? How do you feel about him? Do you still—”
“No. Of course not.” Maggie answered before Neve finished the question, in part because hearing it out loud might make it harder to lie. “We’re different people now. God, it was ten years ago. Things change.”
But it hadn’t felt that way when she’d seen him. In fact, part of her wondered if they’d somehow fallen back through time, rewound the heartache and arrived back at the moment when every minute they spent together was magic. Because in just a few minutes of talking with Jack, something had stirred inside her. A tingle at the base of her spine had worked its way up to her throat and down to the soles of her feet until she’d felt like she was on fire, the way she used to. The way just smiling at Jack across a room, knowing he belonged to her in a million little ways, had lit her up.
How is it possible that those things don’t die away? How can it be so easy to feel that way again?
Maggie shook it off. She couldn’t afford to indulge a thought like that, not tonight.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. She reached down and pulled her shoes back on. “I’m not here to spend time with Jack.” A red spot, sore and puffy, had already begun to bloom at the base of one heel.
Great. Blisters. Just what I need, pain inside and out
.
“Come on. We’re not going to find my stepbrother in the women’s room, that’s for sure.”
Just find Dillon
, she reminded herself as they made their way out.
Stay away from Jack at all costs, and find Dillon. Then get the hell out of here
.
“There you are!” Eden glided across the room. Her hair fell across her brow in sheets of gold. “Are you okay?”
Maggie wondered how to answer that.
Okay
. It was the most mundane word in the English language, as far as she was concerned. It meant nothing at all, but when you used it to answer a question, everyone accepted it. No one looked beneath it. No one asked what you really thought or felt.
“I guess.”
Eden draped an arm around Maggie’s neck. “I didn’t know Jack would be here. Really. Don’t let him upset you. It’s not worth it.”
Easy for you to say
. Maggie leaned into the weight of her friend’s arm for support. “Dillon isn’t here yet, is he?”
“I don’t think so.” Eden paused. “Mags, how much money do you need?”
She started. “What do you mean? I don’t need — I’m not asking—”
“Stop it.” Eden unwrapped herself. “Listen, it’s not a big deal. I asked Neve what the hell the rush was about, you coming up here tonight to find your brother.”
Stepbrother,
Maggie corrected silently.
“She told me your business was in trouble. Why didn’t you just say so? There are plenty of people I can borrow money from.”
“Forget it.” But even as Maggie spoke, part of her wanted to give in and say yes. Could Eden really help her? Could she really borrow that kind of money? How tempting, to know that circling the ballroom right now were people rich enough to write that check without blinking an eye.
Fifteen thousand, four hundred and eighty dollars
. That kind of cash—it probably meant nothing to them. They wouldn’t miss it no matter how long it took Maggie to repay. Still, she hesitated. She didn’t want to owe her best friend. She didn’t want money or the slippery details of debt to come between them. It was easier to talk money with someone you didn’t have a relationship with.
“It’s not that simple,” she said. “I need it by tomorrow.”
Eden shrugged. “Not a problem.”
“You can get your hands on fifteen thousand dollars in the next twelve hours?”
“That much?” Eden’s eyes widened, and she paused for a second. “Maybe. Kurt at the firm owes me a favor. Let me ask.” She was gone before Maggie could protest any further.
“Really, maybe she can help,” Neve said, her tone apologetic. “That way you won’t have to spend the rest of the night worrying about finding Dillon. Or not finding him. Or figuring out how to ask him…” She looked at her toes. “I’m sorry I told Eden about the foreclosure. I just wanted to help.”
“Oh, hell, it’s okay,” Maggie said.
Okay. Covers everything, right
? “Maybe she
can
get the money. I should just be grateful for that.”
Neve swished her skirt from side to side. “Then we could stay a little bit longer. Dance, maybe.”
She looks like a girl at the prom
, Maggie thought. The clock on the wall read almost 9:30 but what Maggie really wanted to do was drive home and sink into her mattress, not paste a smile on her face and dance the night away.
Another hour or two
, she told herself.
Neve came up here with you. Let her have her music and her ball and her big night with Boston’s high society. I’m sure she’ll be ready to leave by midnight.
Maggie found a vacant spot near the wall and told herself to deal with it.
“Excuse me.” One of the men at the table nearest them leaned over to Neve. He looked close to seventy, Maggie guessed.
“Would you do me the honor of a dance?” He patted the arm of the elderly woman sitting beside him. “My wife is feeling under the weather this evening.”
Maggie thought Neve might fall over with pleasure. “I’d love to!” She glanced at Maggie. “You’re okay here? I’ll just be a few minutes.”
“Of course.” Maggie smiled as her friend took the man’s wrinkled hand and followed him onto the dance floor. Leaning back, she watched the dancing couples spin by, counting how many women she saw in black, how many in gloves and how many bare-handed, how many with fake eyelashes and how many with fake cleavage.
I wonder how much a boob job goes for these days.
Even better—I wonder how much money people here have spent on plastic surgery. Total.
She tried to do the math in her head, men versus women, and tried to imagine the most common knife job for each.
Breast implants? Definitely.
Botox and collagen injections? Absolutely.
Nose jobs, eye lifts, liposuction? Probably a few.
And the men just dye their hair and suck in their stomachs
, she thought, biting back laughter.
“We need to talk.” Jack appeared from nowhere, sliding his way behind the tables to where she stood.
Maggie’s eyes closed for a second.
Oh, Jack, don’t do this me.
“No, we don’t.” She tried to back away from him, but the wall gave her about an inch of wiggle room. “I told you—I can’t—just leave me alone, please.”
“No.” He set his chin in that stubborn way she remembered. “You never returned any of my calls. Why?”
I was trying to heal, you idiot
.
I was trying to get over you
. Exasperated, she crossed her arms over her chest. “You want to talk about this? Now? Why? It’s been ten damn years.”
“Exactly.” He stood his ground and waited.
Maggie rolled her eyes.
Unbelievable
. “Okay, fine. Why didn’t I call you? You were in England. Remember? And I was in New York. What were we going to do, have a conversation at two in the morning?”
“That’s just an excuse.” His voice was measured and controlled though underneath she thought she sensed rising anger. “I wouldn’t have cared what time it was, or—”
“Jack, it was over.” She let out a long breath. Why
does it still hurt to think about this? To talk about it?
“I didn’t return your calls because I didn’t have anything to say.”
“Over?” His eyebrows hit the ceiling. “
Over?
No, it wasn’t. Not for me. Not then.” Jack’s eyes blazed as his mouth came close to hers, until she thought the words slipping from his lips might burn her neck. “And I don’t think it was over for you, either. You know what I think?”
Oh, I can’t wait to hear this.