Beyond Business: Falling for the Boss / Her Best-Kept Secret / Mergers & Matrimony

Chapter Three

Why had he picked the diner, of all places?

He probably just wasn’t thinking about it, Meredith decided. Perhaps it didn’t have the same ring of melancholy for him that it did for her. Not that it was a huge deal or anything. After all, it had been years since they were together, and the fact that he had been her first lover probably gave the relationship far more weight in her memory than in his. Twelve years had passed, yet some memories felt like yesterday.

* * *

“I love you, you know,” eighteen-year-old Evan had said to seventeen-year-old Meredith as they walked into the Silver Car Diner at 3:00 a.m. for a late-night snack.

“I thought you did.” She smiled, still languishing in the afterglow and warmth of his touch, despite the cold outside. “Otherwise I never would have … you know. Done what we just did.”

“Neither would I.”

“Liar.”

He smiled, that gorgeous devil smile that made her heart flip every time. “Maybe I would have,” he conceded.

“You would.” She smiled, privately secure in the wholehearted belief that he did love her, and nothing else mattered.

He echoed her thoughts. “Okay, but it doesn’t matter because I do love you.”

“I love you, too, and you know it,” she said, thrilling at the feel of the words tripping off her tongue. She’d been with Evan for over a year now, but she still felt the tickle of infatuation. That, she decided, was how she knew this was real love.

Evan squeezed her hand, and a tired-looking waitress led them to their favorite booth in the corner and took their orders for blueberry pancakes and colas.

When she had gone, Evan put money in the jukebox. Their eyes met and, as was their custom, he pushed a random letter and she pushed a random number and they listened to see what would play.

This time it was Jerry Lee Lewis singing “Breathless.”

Perfect.

“So you know what I’m thinking?” Evan asked.

“Probably the same thing you’re always thinking,” Meredith answered with a giggle. “But can we take a break to eat first? I’m starving. And it wasn’t a half hour ago that you told me you were going to die if you didn’t come here and eat some blueberry pancakes.” She gave a mock sigh of exasperation. “Even Don Juan took a break sometimes.”

He rolled his eyes. “That wasn’t what I was going to say. I mean, I’m all for that, but I was going to say I think maybe we should get married after we graduate.”

Her breath caught in her throat. Thrills filled her like bubbling champagne. “College, you mean.”

He shook his head. “High school. Why not? If we know that’s what we’re going to do anyway, why wait?”

A voice somewhere in her warned that this might not be a good idea, but at the moment she couldn’t think why not. “Graduation is in two months!”

“Great.” He reached across the formica tabletop and took her hands in his. “The sooner, the better. Let’s make your prom dress a wedding dress instead.”

“Come on.”

“Fine, we’ll go to the prom and you can wear something else for our wedding. What do you say?”

Meredith would have run off with him right this minute but someone had to be the voice of reason here, didn’t they? “What would we do about jobs? A home?”

He shrugged. “Whatever we’d do anyway. We could stay and work here, of course, but what about that trip to Greece? Why not just go and stay a year? We could work in a bar at night and just lie in the sun all day long, doing whatever we want. Whenever we want,” he added meaningfully.

She sighed. It sounded like heaven.

“Seriously, Mer, I would talk to your parents right now if they were in town.”

She gave a laugh. “If they were in town, we wouldn’t be here. And we wouldn’t have been able to—” she hesitated “—do what we did tonight.”

He twined his fingers in hers, and looked deep into her eyes. “And we wouldn’t be able to go back to your house and spend the whole night together.”

Spend the whole night together. She turned the idea over in her mind. She could sleep in Evan’s arms and wake up with him, seeing his eyes and his smile before anything else in the morning.

God, she loved him.

“I wish it could be like this every night.”

“It can,” he insisted. “It will. You’ll see.”

But Meredith was always skeptical of things that seemed too good to be true. There was always something deep inside her warning her that she might be disappointed. “I hope so,” she had said wistfully.

Instead of answering, Evan had kissed her.

At the time, she had taken that kiss as reassurance. A promise that would be kept.

Now she knew better.

As Evan and Meredith entered the restaurant together to discuss the mundane details of Hanson Media, the familiar smell of cheese burgers and waffles drifted into Meredith’s senses, and she had to remind herself to be as professional and as aloof as she could be.

It was hard to forget the past they shared here, but if Evan could be cavalier about it, she would, too. Since they had no choice but to work together, she needed to be very careful not to add undue discomfort to the situation.

“Man, this smell takes me back,” Evan said, inhaling deeply as they followed a pink-uniformed hostess to a booth along the back wall. “This is one thing I really missed when I was overseas.” He gave a laugh. “It’s hard to find blueberry pancakes and wet fries in Europe.”

Meredith thought he’d lost a lot more than diner food when he’d left, but she didn’t say so. “I’ll bet,” she said, sitting down opposite him on the cold vinyl seat. She felt like a poorly cast actress in a play about her own life. “But I’m sure Europe had its perks.”

“Yeah, chief among them being that it wasn’t here.” He looked at the small jukebox on the wall of the booth and shook his head. “Good Lord, they’ve still got Jerry Lee Lewis on here. You’d think they’d have updated that.”

“The jukebox only runs 45s,” Meredith pointed out, sounding didactic and snooty even to her own ears. “It’s not like you can just stick CDs in it.”

He looked at her with amusement in his eyes. “I left the country, Meredith, I didn’t leave the planet. I know how a jukebox works.” He smiled. “Though they do make CD ones now.” He reached into his pocket and produced a handful of change, which he dropped on the table with a clatter. “Still a quarter?”

She glanced at the box and felt for a minute as if she was watching a movie of her own life. How many times had they been here together? She’d probably studied the jukebox in this very booth before. Multiple times. It was a quarter. It was always a quarter here.

If only the rest of life were so consistent.

“You okay?”

His question startled her back into the moment.