MARK SPENT a lonely weekend sampling the dozens of disks artist reps had sent him during the past week. He would have loved to get together with someone, but Sherry and her dangerous purse were out of the question, and when he phoned Jenna, another woman he’d been seeing, she said, “Oh, fabulous news, Mark! I’m so happy for you! Guess what? I just got engaged, too! How about we all get together, you and your fiancée and me and mine?”
“I’ll pass,” Mark said, because it was easier than explaining that he didn’t have a fiancée.
Listening to assorted cuts by up-and-coming artists in the privacy of his Somerville condo was all the excitement he could hope for this weekend. In a few more days, maybe a week or two, the world of Boston would move on to some other gossip, people would forget Mark’s name had ever appeared in the same sentence as the word engaged, and he’d get back to his regular bachelor life. And Claire would get back to her regular life, as well.
Claire.
He shouldn’t have kissed her after bringing her home from her mother’s house, but he’d been…curious. The kiss had more than satisfied his curiosity. It had assured him that if she wanted to be someone’s fiancée, she’d have no trouble achieving that goal. Any woman with such gorgeous hair, such creamy skin and gentle eyes, such long legs and elegant shoulders and such a wickedly talented tongue should have no trouble snagging a commitment-ready man. Mark wouldn’t be surprised if Claire made Mary Maude O’Connor a very happy mother in the not too distant future.
He was irked at how much of his weekend he actually spent thinking about Claire and the lucky bastard who would ultimately make her his bride. It was all Rex Crandall’s fault for linking her and Mark together in the first place. Rex’s idea of a joke had completely screwed up Mark’s weekend. If not for him, Mark would never have met Claire, and he wouldn’t have spent the weekend all alone except for a stack of CDs and memories of a kiss hot enough to melt steel.
Had Claire ever kissed Rex like that? If she had, Mark might just have to kill Rex. Torture him, at least. Assign him to the graveyard shift, 2:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m., when a grand total of three desperate Boston insomniacs might be willing to listen to his show.
On Monday morning, Mark listened to Rex’s voice through the speakers in his office as the guy made jokes about the Rolling Stones—“the Kidney Stones,” he called them—and played Weezer, Beck and the Pogues, and fielded phone calls from “Barry in Quincy” and “Marlene in Woburn” who wanted to sound off on the governor’s hairstyle. Hearing the usual smug tone of Rex’s voice made Mark decide that the time for torture, or at least a confrontation, had arrived. Rex owed Mark an apology. He owed Claire one, too. Maybe forcing the jerk to make an on-the-air retraction wasn’t such a bad idea—although Mark still hadn’t abandoned the notion of reassigning him to the overnight slot.
At his request, Ellie corralled Rex as he stepped out of the broadcast booth shortly after his show ended at ten o’clock, and escorted him down the hall to Mark’s office. Mark looked up from the ad schedule as Ellie nudged Rex into his office and then left, shutting the door behind her. Rex slid his hands into the pockets of his baggy overalls and smiled out at Mark from behind his scraggly mane of hair. “How’s it going, boss?” he asked amiably, his gaze deceptively innocent.
“How should it be going?”
Rex shrugged and leaned against the closed door. “Am I getting fired?” he asked, sounding not the least bit alarmed by the possibility.
Mark wasn’t going to fire him. The guy’s ratings were too damned good. Unfortunately, they were also too good for the graveyard shift.
In any case, Mark didn’t want to come across as unable to laugh at himself. He could laugh at himself. He often did. He just hadn’t done any laughing for the past forty-eight hours, and Rex deserved the blame for that. “Is that your way of telling me you want to quit?” he tested the deejay.
Rex laughed. He obviously felt pretty secure in his position.
Mark gestured toward a chair but Rex shook his head and remained standing. With a shrug that said “suit yourself,” Mark spoke. “Okay, here’s what I want to know: why her?”
“Why who?”
Rex seemed determined to make this as difficult as possible. Mark sighed. “Why Claire O’Connor? Of all the women in Boston you could have hooked me up with, why her?”
“What happened? Did you go and fall in love with her or something?”
“Of course not,” Mark snapped, fresh anger building on the stockpile of anger he’d amassed over the weekend. “She’s not my type.”
“Well, yeah,” Rex drawled.
Mark peered up at Rex. He couldn’t miss the defiance in the guy’s smirk. “That was the point, wasn’t it?”
“She’s so wrong for you, I just had to do it. The perfect mismatch. Sorry, boss,” he added as an apparent afterthought. It was one of the most synthetic apologies Mark had ever heard.
“What made you so sure she was wrong for me?” he asked, aware that he was far too eager to hear Rex’s answer.
“For one thing, she listens to classical music.” Rex uttered the word classical as if it were a curse. “Public radio, that kind of stuff. Beethoven. Bach. Dvorak! You know? What kind of babe listens to Dvorak?”
Dvorak or no Dvorak, Mark would never consider Claire a “babe.” She was too thoughtful, too considerate, too…tall. Her hair wasn’t brassy enough, either. It was a muted red, the color of sugar maple leaves turning in autumn. And her kiss…very adult. Nothing babe-ish about it at all.
“Plus, she’s a city bureaucrat,” Rex went on. “A paper pusher in City Hall. Major yawn. And of course she’s seriously lacking in the sense-of-humor department. To say nothing of the mammary department.”
True, she wasn’t exactly buxom—but a huge chest wouldn’t look right on her. Mark thought her body was perfectly proportioned. “I take it you became acquainted with her mammaries during your hot little affair with her?” he asked, his stomach tensing slightly as he awaited Rex’s reply.
“Our hot little affair? Is that what she told you?” Rex let out a hoot. “That girl was colder than the summit of Mount Washington in January. I spent a few evenings with her and realized, hell, I could shut myself up inside a refrigerator if I wanted to die of hypothermia.”
Cold was the last word Mark would use to describe Claire, especially after he’d kissed her. That she’d been cold to Rex pleased him enormously, though. His abs relaxed and his hand unfisted against his knee. “No sense of humor, no breasts, colder than Mount Washington,” he ticked off her flaws according to Rex. “Okay. Just wanted to get a sense of your reasoning here.”
“It played out well,” Rex said, his grin growing self-congratulatory. “We got tons of phone calls on that show, and e-mails are still coming in. And who would’ve guessed the Boston Globe would pick it up? I mean, that was sweet.”
“The Boston Globe,” Mark said dryly. “How lucky can you get?”
“So, is that magazine going to sue you? The one that anointed you the top bachelor boy?”
“I think I’ve straightened things out with them. There have been some other repercussions, though. No lawsuits—yet—but repercussions.” Mark recalled the cranial whack Sherry had given him with her purse, and his miserable weekend, one of the worst weekends he’d endured since hitting puberty. Amazing how such a bad weekend could have followed such a good kiss.
“Well, damn,” Rex said, continuing in the fake-sympathy mode. “I’m real sorry to hear that.”
“I can see how sorry you are. All right, get out of here. I just wanted an idea of what you were thinking when you pulled this stunt.”
“I was thinking, it’s April Fool’s Day,” Rex told him.
“And what an honor it is to have been chosen as your fool. We’re not done yet, Rex, but for now I want you to go away.”
Rex twisted the knob and opened the door. He appeared on the verge of saying something, but Mark’s grimace must have silenced him, because he only shrugged sheepishly and exited, shutting the door behind him.
Once Mark was alone, he swiveled to his computer and punched the keys to call up the archives of the station’s CD library. Just out of curiosity, he wanted to see if the station had any Dvorak CDs in stock. Hadn’t the guy had a big hit with the New World Symphony back in the late 1800s? If Mark could spend the entire weekend listening to songs by bands named Linotype and Thumping Baboons, it wouldn’t kill him to give old Dvorak a spin.
“SO,” MAGGIE SAID, “what’s the decision on that Hanover Street building? Are we granting the owner permission to put in new windows?”
Claire leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes and rubbed the knotted muscles at the base of her skull. She’d spent much of the day reading reports and arguing with Steve LaPina about the landlord’s petition to install thermopane windows in the nineteenth-century building in the North End. The ground floor of the structure was a decidedly twenty-first-century Italian restaurant, so Claire didn’t see a significant issue of architectural integrity in installing the new windows for the tenants who lived upstairs. However, she sensed that the landlord was hoping the Landmarks Commission would turn down his application so he’d be spared the expense. His was one of the most slipshod applications Claire had ever seen. Steve thought they should reject it because of that, but she couldn’t stop thinking of the tenants, shivering as icy winds seeped in the old windows in the winter and paying a fortune in electrical bills as their air-conditioning seeped out the old windows in the summer.
“No decision yet,” Claire remembered to answer Maggie. “We’re still bickering.”
“Bickering’s fun,” Maggie said, dropping onto the chair across the desk from Claire. “Are you free tomorrow night? I know it’s short notice, but I was wondering if you might want to come over for dinner.”
Claire opened her eyes and stared at her friend. The lilt in Maggie’s voice implied that this was more than just a dinner invitation. “Why would I want to come over for dinner?” she asked warily.
“Because I’m a great cook?” Maggie shrugged and grinned. “Lowell’s cousin Tom is in town—his company wants to relocate him to their Boston office, and he’s spending a week looking around and checking out the housing market. We thought it might be nice if you could join us for dinner tomorrow.”
“Tom is a single man, I take it? You and Lowell are doing a little matchmaking?”
“He’s a great guy,” Maggie said. “An accountant, but not the accountant type at all.”
“What’s the accountant type?” Claire asked, a stalling tactic. Much as she enjoyed Maggie’s cooking, she didn’t want to be set up with Maggie’s husband’s cousin. She didn’t want to be set up with anyone. Given the odds that she’d ever meet another man who could insinuate his way into her consciousness, into her waking moments and her dreams, the way Mark Lavin could, she was figuring on remaining single for the foreseeable future, if not the rest of her life.
Of course, if she remained single she’d have to change her telephone number so her mother and sisters couldn’t badger her.
Too shrewd to phone Claire and nag her personally, Claire’s mother had delegated that task to Frannie and Liz. Frannie had called Saturday to ask about the guy she’d introduced their mother to; Liz had stepped up to the plate on Sunday, favoring Claire with a long phone conversation that covered the joys of motherhood and the importance of family. Claire loved her family, and she didn’t doubt that motherhood was a noble pursuit. But before motherhood, before marriage, a woman needed a man. The right man.
Mark wasn’t the right man. If Claire told herself that enough times, she might eventually come to believe it. Not that it mattered, since he’d walked out of her life.
Without even saying good-bye.
He was a bachelor—a top-rated one, as if bachelorhood deserved ratings. He drove an expensive bachelor car and lived in a bachelor world of rock stars, concerts and blurbs in the local newspapers and magazines. He kissed like a pro. And he’d regretted kissing her. He’d made it pretty damned clear, when he left her outside her building Friday night, that she would never see or hear from him again.
She ought to jump at the chance to have dinner with Tom the accountant. But Mark Lavin was like a virus, infecting her. Until she was cured, she didn’t want to meet anyone else.
“I’m sorry, Maggie. I don’t think so,” she said.
“We could do it Wednesday, if that works better for you.”
“No day works better for me.” Claire forced a smile, hoping to forestall questioning from her friend. “I hate blind dates.”
“It’s not a blind date. It’s just dinner at my house.”
Still smiling, Claire shook her head. “Some other time, maybe. If this guy accepts the transfer and moves to Boston, I’ll come for dinner then.” Maybe she’d have recovered from the Mark Lavin disease by then.
Maggie scrutinized her. “Getting together with Tom—or with anyone, for that matter—would be a good way to reacquaint certain people with reality,” she pointed out.
“What people?”
Maggie leaned forward. “Meryl, Beryl and Jo-Anne are still talking about hosting a bridal shower for you,” she whispered, even though she and Claire were all alone in the office. “You’re not supposed to know about it. It’s going to be a surprise.”
Claire groaned. “The only shower I want is the one in my bathroom at home,” she said. “If you overhear them discussing this shower, please set them straight for me.”
“If you socialized with guys—like Tom, for instance—that would set them straight.”
“No, it wouldn’t. They’d think I was cheating on my fiancé and report me to the Boston Globe,” Claire argued. “When some people get an idea stuck in their heads, it’s hard to unstick it.” The way Mark was stuck in her head, she thought glumly.
Her phone rang. “Okay, I’m leaving,” Maggie said, shoving herself to her feet. “Let me know if you change your mind about coming for dinner.”
Claire nodded. She watched Maggie exit her office, then lifted the receiver. “Claire O’Connor,” she said.
“Claire? It’s Mark.”
Her palm, wrapped around the molded plastic of the receiver, grew damp. Her breath caught in her throat. She closed her eyes again, and remembered the erotic pressure of his mouth on hers, the heat of his body so close to hers, the way he’d tangled his fingers into her hair. Why had he called? How was she going to get over him if he charged back into her life?
“Hello, Mark,” she said in as calm a voice as she could muster.
“How are you?”
Had he called to chat? “I’m fine,” she said, irritation dampening the mindless excitement she felt at hearing his voice. “And yourself?”
“I’ve got a problem,” he told her, then reconsidered his answer. “Actually, Claire, we’ve got a problem.”