"Hello, It's Me"
Warner Forever Release
March 2005
ISBN: 0-446-61453-X
©2005 by Wendy Corsi Staub
Page 3
The caterer-Marvin? Myron?-flits back to the first bottle and pours sparkling amber liquid into a clean flute. "Keep your menu in mind."
Thom nods, sipping the champagne. What is the menu again? By the time he's finished selecting the beverages that will be served, will he even remember? Or care? Did he ever care in the first place? "Dry enough?" Marvin or Myron asks.
It isn't, but Thom declares it just right. If he doesn't stop now, he won't be able to focus on his work. And when one is at the helm of a major financial institution and in the midst of yet another corporate takeover bid, one cannot afford not to focus.
"You're working again tonight?" Joyce pouted earlier when he informed her that he couldn't join her for dinner after all. "I thought you were on vacation." Vacation. Yeah, right.
He might be spending as many long weekends as he can at his sprawling seven-bedroom summer house complete with tennis court, pool, and private beach, but he doesn't really use the amenities. His mind is rarely far from his Wall Street office.
He watches the caterer make a note on a clipboard, then look up with a brisk smile. "We'll do the red wine next."
"Actually, Marvin-" "It's Merlin." Oops. "Actually, Merlin, I'll leave that up to you." "But-" "I'm sure you'll choose the right wine." "But-" "If you'll excuse me, I'd better get back to work," Thom says in his best class-dismissed tone, pushing back his chair.
I could have been a teacher in another life, he thinks, watching as Merlin takes his cue and begins clearing away the wineglasses and bottles. A teacher. Sure.
That would have gone over well with Mother. About as well as Thom's sister Susan's temporary engagement to an actor a few years ago. An Oscar nomination and a Beverly Hills mansion meant little to Mother. What counted more than anything, as far as she was-and is-concerned, is breeding. Susan's former fianc? didn't have it. The man she eventually married does. And so, Thom thinks with a twinge of resentment, does Joyce.
Like him, she grew up on Park Avenue and in Southampton . Like him, she went to all the right schools, rubbed shoulders with all the right people. Like him, she's attractive and intelligent.
Unlike him, she's thinking that it's time to settle down. As far as Thom is concerned, his whole life has been settled down. He can't help longing to . . . well, unsettle. "I'll just need to go over a few more details with you, and then I'll be out of your hair," Merlin announces, breaking into Thom's errant thought pattern.
Which is for the best, of course. There's little time for daydreaming when you're in the midst of putting together a multibillion-dollar corporate takeover bid to acquire a New England-based seafood packaging company and hosting a political fund-raiser for two hundred of your-make that your mother's and sister's-closest friends.
With a sigh, Thom dutifully shifts his attention from fantasies about unsettling to Myron and his clipboard. The next morning, Annie is sitting on the porch swing with Trixie, a bag of cheese crackers, and a dog-eared copy of Green Eggs and Ham on her lap when she hears the rain-dampened gravel crunching at the foot of the driveway.
For a moment-the most fleeting and exhilarating of moments-she thinks, Andre's home. Then the familiar, bittersweet sound of crunching gravel gives way to the sight of a vehicle that isn't Andre's truck. No, it's Merlin's latest ridiculously extravagant purchase: a cherry red 1956 Mercedes convertible 220S.
What that cost him, Annie thinks ruefully, would probably provide a few years' college tuition for one of her kids.
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