“I am sorry,” she managed again.
“Why?”
Claire frowned. “I think I just explained why.”
“I guess I mean, why apologize now? It’s been, what, ten years? Excuse me for suspecting an ulterior motive here, but it seems strange that, after all this time, you are suddenly calling me to say you’re sorry.”
Claire caught her reflection in the window’s glass. A woman with short, sassy hair and an angled-up chin that bespoke confidence stared back.
“I’ve changed.”
He was quiet for a long moment. “Me, too, Claire. I’ve changed, too. Don’t contact me again. Unless, of course, it’s to discuss business. In that case, I’ll be more than happy to give your father a quote for a new security system, either for Mayfield’s Chicago headquarters or any of its other sites in the United States or abroad.”
“It wouldn’t bother you to take his money?” she asked quietly, though she already knew the answer.
“Not in the least. Goodbye.”
“Ethan—”
But he’d already hung up. The dial tone had switched to an agitated beep before Claire finally placed the cordless receiver back on its charger.
Disappointed, that was how she felt. She’d expected to experience a vastly different emotion once she’d contacted him, confronted her past. Instead of moving forward, though, she was stuck in Neutral.
“I said I was sorry,” she murmured. It dawned on her that he’d never accepted her apology. “But he would accept a check.”
She prowled her apartment, too restless to sit still. Not that she had much of anything to sit on. She had no furniture, although she had picked out a couch, chairs and an ottoman for the living room, as well as a cherry bedroom suite. It would be several weeks yet before any of it would be delivered. The bare walls and floors didn’t lend any hominess to the place. Indeed, they added to her sense of isolation. She paced to the bedroom, where a queen-sized mattress and box spring were pushed against one wall. At least she wasn’t sleeping on the floor any longer.
But she was sleeping alone.
For the first time in years she allowed herself to recall the way it had felt to slumber next to Ethan and to wake with his heavy arm draped across her torso. The gesture had seemed protective rather than possessive, just as the caresses had been patient and instructive as well as seductive.
She shivered now. She’d trembled then.
I promise I’ll make you happy, Claire.
Caught up in the moment, caught up in the magic, she’d promised him the same. Another vow that both of them had broken.
Angry with Ethan, but more angry with herself, Claire tossed her workout clothes into a duffel bag and tugged a baseball cap low over her brow, leaving her short locks to sprout out the sides. She didn’t bother with makeup. She left for the gym she belonged to across town, determined to exorcise old demons and sweat away her frustration and self-directed irritation on a stationary bike.
An hour later, as she pedaled furiously, perspiration slicking her brow and sliding down her spine to soak the waist of her cotton workout shorts, Claire didn’t miss the irony that, just as with her ex-husband, she was getting absolutely nowhere.
Ethan thought he had come so far since his short-lived and foolishly impulsive marriage to Claire, but merely hearing her voice that morning had yanked him backward and left him dangling from the same high precipice he’d fallen off a decade earlier.
It had been nearly two hours since her telephone call and he still couldn’t get his mind to settle or his memory to shut off. Recollections from their past haunted him. Snippets from their conversation nagged.
“I’m sorry.”
He had to admit, the apology had come as a complete surprise. Even more shocking, though, had been the fact that Claire hadn’t denied using him. Nor had she tried to foist the blame for the fiasco that had been their marriage onto anyone else. No. She’d accepted full responsibility for behavior she’d readily conceded was selfish and immature.
Why didn’t that make him feel any better? Why was he still sitting at his desk two hours later poking at her every word with the same morbid fascination of a gawker slowing down at the site of a car wreck?
Why hadn’t he just said, Apology accepted, nice knowing you, and let it go at that?
Perhaps because she’d also claimed, “I’ve changed.”
The words had him wondering. They had him curious.
Changed? What exactly did she mean by that? Had she grown a conscience? Or had she, too, at odd times over the past decade, found herself wondering where he was, what he was doing, if he was happy?
She’d been the only woman who’d ever made him fall so hard and fast. Love at first sight? Not exactly, but damned close. Ethan shoved a hand through his hair in disgust and sipped his coffee. The usually mild blend seemed as bitter as his mood. Well, whatever the reason for her call, he wasn’t about to find himself in the same room as Claire Mayfield again.
It wasn’t like him to avoid confrontation. Claire, of course, had a way of making him do things that were out of character. Like marrying her after only a handful of dates. Like seeking a divorce mere days after making what he’d thought would be a lifetime commitment.
I, Ethan James Seaver, take thee, Claire Anne Mayfield, as my lawfully wedded wife…
Even though he didn’t want to remember, he was tugged back in time. He’d been twenty-six, determined to take on the world even though he’d been a mere security guard working second shift at the Mayfield corporate headquarters in Chicago. The family-owned company manufactured everything from toothpaste to pharmaceuticals with operations in seventeen countries around the globe. Claire had been twenty-one, reserved to the point of shyness. She’d been vulnerable, delicate, the kind of woman a man felt he needed to protect.
And she’d been beautiful.
Her hair had hung nearly to her waist, a dark veil of sorts behind which she’d seemed to hide. Once they’d properly met it had been his habit to push it away from her face and tuck it behind her ears so that he could see her better. The first time he’d done it, her eyes had grown wide. Then she’d smiled slowly and he’d felt the earth shift under his feet. She was the only woman who’d ever had that effect on him. He told himself he didn’t miss that feeling of being out of control, that feeling of being…lost.
Claire had been doing an internship in the marketing department at Mayfield that summer. Each day, she’d left work at precisely five-thirty—the same time that Ethan took his dinner break in the employees’ cafeteria. She’d always stopped in for a bottle of water to drink on the drive home. At first, Ethan hadn’t known who Claire was, not that her identity would have mattered much or ended the attraction. He might have grown up poor on Chicago’s south side, but even back then he’d had no shortage of confidence, no dearth of pride.
He’d never considered that he might not be “good enough” for her. What did it matter that his diploma had come from a community college rather than the Ivy League? What did it matter that her family’s name regularly appeared in the newspaper, announcing Mayfield’s many innovations and triumphs, whereas the only time the Seaver name had made the Sun-Times or Tribune it had been in the obituaries?
Everett Daniel Seaver, beloved husband of Mary, doting father of Ethan, Michael and James, died on Monday as the result of a motorcycle accident. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to the family to cover funeral expenses.
Ethan had been in elementary school and, at eleven, the oldest. His father had held a low-paying job. He’d had no life insurance, no savings put away. He’d left behind a heap of credit-card debt and a devastated wife who had barely managed to keep their family