Leigh Michaels - Maybe Married

Dana hit her temple with the heel of her hand. “What on earth is wrong with me? Did I just imply that you were trying to be polite? My mistake. I take it all back.” She slid out of the car, slammed the door, and leaned in the still-open window. “If you waited around just so you could insult me, you wasted your time, Zeke. Good night.” She took two steps.

The car crept forward. “You keep saying you want me to tell you what happened.”

“Well—yes, now that you mention it, it would be nice to know what inspired you to say such a stupid thing. No, wait—let me guess. You just had to make sure that Barclay knew I’d been married—is that it?”

Zeke’s voice was soft. “So I was right on target. You hadn’t told him.”

Dana could have kicked herself for admitting as much. “No, I hadn’t. But—” She stopped. She was not about to confide in Zeke that she hadn’t even known Barclay well enough to tell him about her past; Zeke would laugh himself into tears.

“Barclay’s first lady will have to be like Caesar’s wife, you know,” he said with a sanctimonious air that made Dana want to punch him. “He couldn’t possibly marry any woman who had a breath of suspicion hanging over her, and I…well, I just couldn’t live with myself if I hadn’t done my best to prevent a scandal.”

“You’re the one who caused the scandal,” Dana pointed out. “Besides, there’s nothing for anyone to be scandalized about. It happens all the time. We got married, we decided it didn’t work, we got divorced—”

Zeke shook his head. “Not quite.”

“Look, enough of the joke already.”

“I wish it was a joke, Dana.”

There was a deep and obviously heartfelt note in his voice that made Dana’s stomach feel like lead. She said uncertainly, “You weren’t making it up?”

Zeke shook his head. “Come on,” he said and pushed the car door open. “We’ve got some talking to do.”

Dana chose the restaurant, but as soon as they walked in Zeke knew why she’d made that particular selection—it was the darkest little bar he’d ever been in. “I can’t quite see Barclay bringing you here,” he murmured as she led the way to a table. “As a matter of fact, I can’t see much of anything at all. But I suppose that’s the biggest attraction of the place—he’s not likely to walk in and spot us together.”

To his disappointment Dana didn’t rise to the bait. “No, I chose it because the music is loud enough to keep anyone from overhearing us, but not so loud that we’ll have to shout. And you did say you wanted a steak—they’re supposed to have the best ones in town.”

“Supposed to? You don’t know? Don’t tell me you’ve gone vegetarian.” She looked it, he thought. She was thinner than he remembered. Did that mean that Barclay liked his women as angular as clothing racks?

“I got so used to rice and beans when we were married that it became a habit.”

“Sarcasm isn’t your strong point, Dana.”

“Then I’ll have to work harder at it.” She took a menu from behind the salt and pepper shakers and handed it to him. It was so battered that the lamination was coming loose from the paper. Zeke maneuvered the menu into the glow of the single narrow spotlight above the table and tried to read around the scratches and reflections.

Dana seemed to have no trouble figuring out what the menu said. “It’s my lucky day,” she said. “Pinto bean and wild rice soup. Just what I wanted.”

“Don’t starve yourself for my sake.”

“Still being bossy, I see.” She put her menu down with a slap.

“No, just practical. I saw you knocking back champagne at Barclay’s party, and if we’re going to have a serious discussion—”

“You’d like me to be sober for it? Gee, and here I thought you were asking me out to dinner for old times’ sake. You can rest easy, Zeke. I had one glass of champagne. I carried it around with me most of the evening, and I dumped the last of it down the drain right before I left Baron’s Hill.”

“Fine.” One thing was already obvious, Zeke thought. She was still just as stubborn as she’d ever been—if not more so.

“But if you insist, I’ll order something besides rice and bean soup.” She looked up at the server. “I’ll have your most expensive steak.” She pointed at Zeke. “And he’ll have the bill.”

The server didn’t even blink. “For you, sir?”

“Make it two.” The server went away, and Zeke said, “The last thing I would have expected, years ago when we were just trying to survive the semester, was that you’d end up being the university’s first lady.”

Dana shrugged and fiddled with her menu, putting it neatly back in place and propping it up with the ketchup bottle. “And who would have thought you’d end up as Mr. Industrialist?”

“Not for much longer.”

She nodded. “Barclay said something about you selling your business. He’s hoping that when you hold all those millions in your hands, you’ll remember the university with fondness.”

“Tell me something I didn’t know,” Zeke said dryly.

“What are you going to do then? Go lie on a beach in Hawaii?”

Zeke shook his head. “Oh, no. I wouldn’t dream of restricting myself to one beach when there must be hundreds of them out there around the world, just waiting for me.”

Her laugh brought a sparkle of gold to her big brown eyes, he noted. At least that much hadn’t changed.

The server brought salads and a basket of bread.

Dana drizzled blue cheese dressing over her lettuce. “All right,” she said. “Enough polite conversation. What makes you think—”

“Poor Barclay,” Zeke interrupted.

Dana paused. “What about him?” She sounded a little uncertain.

“He must think you’re a diplomat, or he wouldn’t have proposed. Boy, is he in for a nasty shock.”

“Thank you very much for that helpful dissection of my character. I don’t normally have trouble making nice to people—only when they say completely idiotic things. What makes you so sure there’s something wrong with the divorce, anyway? I have all the papers—or didn’t the lawyer ever send you a set?” Her eyes widened. “Dammit, Zeke, if you caused all this trouble just because you didn’t get any paperwork—”

“I got it. It’s a very impressive set of documents. Lots of fine print and gold seals and flowery signatures and whereases and heretofores.”

“Yeah,” Dana said slowly, “that sounds like the same thing I got. But then—”

“Did you ever read the fine print?”

She hesitated, as if she was considering the ramifications of telling the truth, before she finally said, “No. Not all of it.”

“Well, I didn’t either, until just recently. It turns out that we applied for a divorce in the Dominican Republic instead of Wisconsin. Or, rather, our attorney applied, in our names.”

Dana looked at him blankly. “Why would he do such a thing?”

“Apparently because he’d found it to be a very accommodating legal system—and it appears to be a perfectly fine one for the people who live there. Unfortunately, as far as I can find out, very few other courts in the world seems to recognize a Dominican divorce as legal. So if a couple who lives in Wisconsin gets a divorce in the—”

“They’re not really divorced at all,” Dana groaned.

“Not unless they move to the Caribbean. Though, come to think of it, there are plenty of beaches there. It’s worth considering.”

She obviously wasn’t listening. “That shyster! Why bother to file it anywhere? Why not just create the fancy document out of thin air and tell us it was real? We’d have believed it—we’d have believed anything he told us. We were just a couple of kids who were anxious to put a mistake behind us.”