A porterhouse had never tasted so good.
“Are you sure you should be telling me all this, Morris?” Ethan had said to the older man, then chewing his steak and feeling like the cat who’d swallowed the canary. “It’s been my experience that women don’t like it when you talk about your sex life. Or in this case, lack thereof.”
Morris chuckled. “You’re probably right, Tom, but it’s no secret. She was pretty up-front with me when we first met. She wanted to wait till marriage. I actually really liked that about her. It made me want to get to know her.”
“So she’s old-fashioned.”
Morris speared a sauteed mushroom. “That’s the thing. She’s not. She’s a very modern woman in most ways. But we had an instant connection. We met in a Starbucks, you know. She’s the one who convinced me to go to AA.”
Ethan put down his fork. “Really.” His stomach churned. He hadn’t known they’d met in a Starbucks. What else had Sheila kept from him?
“Yeah.” Morris squeezed more lemon into his sparkling water and looked ruefully at Ethan’s beer. “It took me a year to get up the guts to ask her out on a real date. Look at me. I’m a buffoon. Everything about me’s oversized. Sheila’s beautiful. Everybody who’s met her thinks so. What would she want with me?”
Ethan almost agreed with him but remembered he wasn’t supposed to know Sheila. “I thought they discouraged dating in AA,” he said instead.
“They do. That’s why I waited a year. And it was clearly worth it, because I’m sober and getting married.” Morris grinned.
Ethan thought about that now. Married? Not if he could help it.
The episode of Friends he was watching ended and a rerun of Seinfeld came on. He switched off the TV and sat in the quiet room.
Fuck if he was going to sit back and let them live happily ever after.
Morris’s cuff link was warm in his palm and Ethan held it up to the light once again, wondering.
If they autopsied this out of Sheila’s stomach, would they arrest Morris for the murder?
CHAPTER 5
C alvin Klein shirt, Gucci tie, and Armani suit, tailored to perfection. But going by Morris’s crestfallen expression in the full-length mirror at Romano’s Formal Wear, it still wasn’t perfect enough.
“I look like a jumbo-sized jelly bean.”
“Shush.” Sheila smoothed the lapels of Morris’s jacket and smiled up at him. Her neck muscles were strong. He was thirteen inches taller and she’d had lots of practice looking up at him over the past two years. “It looks great.”
Morris stared at his reflection, the space between his thick eyebrows creasing. He clearly didn’t agree.
Sheila sighed. “You look so handsome. I wish you could see yourself as I see you.”
The small Italian tailor who was fitting Morris’s jacket watched them intently, thin lips pursed. “You don’t like it?” Pietro’s eyes were microscopic behind his thick glasses. “Tell me what you don’t like and I fix.”
“We like it.” Sheila gave her fiance a look, but Morris said nothing. She smiled warmly at the anxious tailor. “Would you mind giving us a minute?”
Pietro disappeared into the next room.
Sheila faced the mirror beside Morris, linking her arm through his. “Come on, babe. What’s the problem? It fits you perfectly.”
“I look nine months pregnant.”
“You’ve lost forty pounds! Why can’t you be proud of that?” Sheila couldn’t keep the dismay out of her voice. “You’ve been working so hard.”
“Yeah, well, I need to lose forty more.” Morris unbuttoned the suit jacket, exposing the crisp white tuxedo shirt underneath. “Be honest. Would I look thinner with a vest or a cummerbund?”
He was joking, but it wasn’t funny. Sheila touched his hand and his fingers closed reflexively around her palm. Big, capable man though he was, he still struggled with his body image. He might be a bulldog walking into a boardroom filled with millionaire investors, but inside, he was a giant marshmallow.
She loved him for this paradox. It made him real. Human.
Cupping her chin, he tilted her face upward and kissed her.
“Hey, ever done it in a change room?” he stage-whispered.
A zingy reply was on the tip of her tongue, but a discreet cough interrupted her thoughts. They pulled apart to see Pietro standing in the corner of the change area looking completely uncomfortable. Morris’s face flushed a deep red, and Sheila put a hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh.
“Excuse me, I don’t mean to bother you beautiful couple, but my shift end in five minute. You want I fix something or is everything okay?” The tailor fidgeted, tape measure in hand, ready to act quickly at the slightest indication of dissatisfaction.
Sheila glanced at Morris. He was still flushed. “The tuxedo is wonderful, Pietro. Perfect the way it is.”
The little man beamed. “Excellent. That make me very happy. You need handkerchief? Cuff links? You want I fit you for cummerbund?”
Morris frowned slightly, touching the French cuffs of the shirt he was wearing. “I don’t think so, my friend. I’m kind of partial to the James Bond look, no cummerbund, no vest. But I’ll come back if I change my mind.”
Pietro’s smile grew wider. “Okay. I give final price to cashier. Thank you for your business, and, please, you tell everyone who needs good suit that your friend Pietro is the best.”
Sheila thanked him. Morris was still fingering the empty holes at the end of his sleeves where his cuff links should go.
“You didn’t bring any with you?” Sheila pointed to the naked French cuffs. “You must have a dozen.”
“Yeah, but there’s only one pair I would’ve worn for the wedding.” Morris’s face was glum. “I lost one of the cuff links Randall gave me. I looked everywhere-I don’t know what the hell happened. I know I had them on last week. I would’ve worn them for the Okinawa conference call this morning, but I could only find one.”
Morris always wore his monogrammed platinum cuff links when he was working on a particularly difficult business transaction. They’d been a Christmas gift from all three of his sons, back when he was still drinking and married to their mother. The cuff links were special. Shortly after that Christmas, Lenore had filed for divorce and his oldest son, Randall, had stopped speaking to him.
That had been over five years ago.
“I’m sure it’s somewhere at your house.” Sheila squeezed his arm. “It probably rolled under the bed or behind the bureau or something. I’ll help you look tonight.”
She shooed him back into the changing room to undress. When he pulled the curtain closed, she dug into her purse and fished out her BlackBerry.
No new e-mails. Damn. Nothing from Randall.
She’d been trying to get hold of Morris’s estranged son for weeks. But he hadn’t lived in the United States for years and wasn’t an easy man to track down. Randall Gardener’s work with Amnesty International had taken him to seven different countries in the past decade, and while Amnesty kept solid records of where their people were at all times, they were stingy about giving out that information. Sheila had been forced to get creative, sneaking into Morris’s address book to contact his other two sons-Stephen, a high school football coach in Orlando, and Phillip, a grad student in San Francisco-to see if maybe they could help. Neither brother had heard from Randall in months.
Frustrated, Sheila stuck her phone back in her purse. While she was fine spending her Sunday helping Morris search for his missing cuff link, the best wedding present she could give him was Randall. The wedding was four weeks away and she was running out of time-and ideas. The thought of speaking to Lenore, Randall’s mother and Morris’s ex-wife, wasn’t too appealing.
She left Morris in the changing area and headed toward the cashier’s counter at the front of the store. Angling her way past the racks of men’s suits and tuxedos, she took her place in line behind a young couple complaining
