Impossible (22 page)

“Nope. Nice, but boring.” She liked Phillip Henshaw, although she had no chemistry with him. But now that Liam was back, Phillip had flown right out the window, and didn't even know it. She knew what she was doing with Liam was insane, but she felt compelled to try it again. She reminded herself that doing the same thing again and again, and expecting a different result, was the definition of insanity. But there was absolutely no way she could resist him, and she didn't want to. She was so happy he was back in her life. She could hardly wait for the weekend. They had talked about her coming to London to see him on weekends too, but she was afraid she'd run into Xavier. She was definitely not ready to tell her children. First, they both wanted to see if this could work. She was betting on it, and so was he.

Her driver took her to the airport, and when she got back to Paris, she was all smiles. Bernard and Eugénie saw it the minute she walked into the gallery.

“Well, you're in a good mood,” Bernard commented drily. And when she got home that night, she was happy to see Socks. She was happy to see everyone now that Liam was back. Something was so different and so much better with him in her life.

She had a busy week at the gallery, and when Liam arrived on Friday night, she was waiting for him. She had made a cassoulet, which he said he loved, pasta, salad, and even bought fancy pastries for him at Fauchon. They ate in the dining room, put the music on, and lit all the candles. It felt like a honeymoon to both of them. And on Saturday she invited him to join her in Italy for three weeks in May. He was ecstatic. Everything was better than it ever had been for both of them.

He drove to Paris every weekend for the rest of April. They went to Deauville for one of them. They stayed in a funny old hotel and walked on the beach and gambled. Miraculously, no one in her life seemed to know what was going on. He arrived late on Fridays, lay low on Saturdays, and on Sundays they walked around, or drove into the country. They went to mass at Sacré Coeur, visited Notre Dame, and walked in the Luxembourg Gardens. They never ran into anyone she knew, and she turned down all invitations on weekends. Not because she was hiding him, but because she wanted to savor every moment she could spend with him. And once or twice, they dined with his artist friends in the Marais, who nearly fainted when they found out who she was. Most of them were half her age, which made her uncomfortable, but she knew being with them was something she had to tolerate for his sake. They told them they were friends. She knew he needed to see his friends. She saw hers, and the clients she entertained during the week, while he worked in London. They both knew it would be too complicated if he spent the weeks in Paris, and there would be no way they could keep their secret, with her gallery right in the same house. They had agreed this time to keep their affair quiet, until they felt more secure with each other again.

They left for Italy on the first of May. They began their trip in Venice just for the fun of it, and spent four glorious days like a honeymoon at the Danieli. He had flown in from London, and she from Paris, and they met there. They did all the tourist things, rode in a gondola under the Ponte dei Sospiri, which the gondolier said would bind them to each other forever. They had sumptuous dinners, shopped, visited churches and museums, and sat in cafés. They were the happiest days they'd ever shared.

From Venice, they rented a car and drove to Florence, where she was meeting with four artists. They did the same things in Florence they had done in Venice, and had lunches and dinners with the artists in between. She liked two of them very much, and thought their work was right for the gallery. She was uncertain about the third, and said she needed to think about it. They were unusual sculptures and possibly too big for her space. And the fourth artist was charming, but she disliked his work immediately. She told him kindly that she couldn't do him justice, and their gallery wasn't worthy of his work. She liked letting people down gently. There was no point hurting their feelings, or crushing them with unkind rejection. As Liam watched and listened, he liked how she did things. She was a good person and a nice woman, and he loved sharing what she did.

They went to Bologna and Arezzo, spent a week in Umbria, driving through the country and staying in small inns. A few days in Rome. A visit to an artist on the Adriatic Coast, near Bari, and they spent the last days of the trip in Naples, visiting an artist whom Sasha had warned him was utterly insane, but she was also very charming, had six children, cooked them a fabulous dinner, and Sasha adored her work, as did Liam. She did enormous paintings in vibrant colors, which would be a nightmare to ship. But by the time Liam and Sasha left her, they were all in love with each other, including the artist's Chinese lover of twenty years who was the father of her six kids. They were beautiful children. And it was a fabulous trip, for both of them.

They spent their last weekend in Capri, in a small romantic hotel. They were both sad at the prospect of going back to real life, and their own worlds. She loved waking up with him in the morning, going to sleep in his arms at night, discovering things together, meeting people, and sometimes just walking around while they shared pieces of their history, or laughed. They had both had difficult, somewhat lonely childhoods. He because he had been a talented artistic misfit in a supremely conservative and unimaginative family, and she because her father had been a cold taskmaster much of the time, although he loved her very much. It was only once she was an adult that he had come to respect her, and her opinions. Liam's family never had, and he still paid a high price for the ridicule and rejection he had suffered at their hands. They had both been shortchanged by not having their mothers present as they grew up. Liam remembered his as a warm, wonderful woman who adored him, and in whose eyes he could do no wrong. He was still looking for the unconditional love he had gotten from her and no one else, and sometimes Sasha felt that he expected her to mother him now. That kind of unconditional love was a lot to expect from anyone who had entered his life later on. Love between adults and lovers was always somewhat conditional, and often fell short of expectations, particularly when not all needs were reciprocally met. She had similar memories of her own mother, and she sometimes wondered if people always believed that those who had died had loved unconditionally. Perhaps they hadn't, or wouldn't have later on. But her memories of her mother were as sweet and gentle as his recollections of his. She wondered sometimes what it would be like if her mother were alive now, although she would have been very elderly, eighty-eight years old. Sasha had turned forty-nine on their trip. Liam had woken her up that morning singing happy birthday to her, and she groaned thinking of it. He had given her a simple gold bracelet he had bought for her in Florence. She never took it off once he put it on her wrist, and knew she never would.

The age difference between them still bothered her at times. There was no avoiding it. They seemed to have more in common than she once thought, the loss of their mothers, their passion for art, the things they enjoyed doing when they were relaxed and had more time. Galleries, museums, churches, shops. When removed from daily stresses, they were both fairly easygoing, loved traveling together, and were curious about life. They were drawn to different kinds of people. She gravitated toward venerable elders, perhaps because of her much older father and the people she'd been exposed to with him all her life. She was impressed by reputations and education, as well as talent. Liam was instantly attracted to all things different, unusual, new, and young. She liked innovation and eccentricity in art, but not in people. When they sat in a café, she watched older people. Liam always gravitated toward youth and within minutes had met every young person in the place. He was most comfortable with people in their twenties and thirties, she preferred people her own age, or older, which created a gap of many decades between the people they wanted to meet and spend time with. It was a difference between them that they both had to learn to respect and tolerate, which was not always easy to do. It bored her to hang out with traveling students, and even young artists. She felt she had nothing to say to them, and wasn't interested in their juvenile ideas. Liam felt there was much to learn from the young, and he identified with them to an unusual degree, for a man his age. Watching him with them, Sasha felt like he was one of them. Liam seemed to feel that way too. And he also said that talking to the people who interested her put him to sleep. It was definitely a stumbling block between them. But traveling on their own, isolated from their familiar lives, they were both somewhat more willing to investigate and explore new worlds.

“What are you doing with someone as old as I am?” she asked him one day, as they left a beautiful fourteenth-century church, and stopped to buy gelati by the side of the road. He looked like a big kid as he ate his, as it dripped everywhere, and she was holding hers in a lace handkerchief she had bought at Hermès. She felt like his mother, or worse, his grandmother, sometimes. “You're going to get tired of being with an older woman one day.”

It was one of her worst fears, and she always noticed him checking out young women. But so far, to the best of her knowledge, he had never acted on it. He just liked to look. She kept a close eye on him, and was more jealous than she was willing to admit. No matter how fit and attractive she was, young bodies were undeniably more appealing than hers.

“I like looking at young women sometimes, all women in fact,” he admitted readily, “but I love talking to you and being with you. You turn me on more than any woman I've ever known. I don't give a damn how old you are.”

She smiled at him, tossing the last of the gelato away. He was still licking the stick, and then wiped his hands on his jeans, which made an even bigger mess. She sat looking at him with a rueful grin. It was his childlike style that made her feel old sometimes, not her age.

“I love you, Sash. You're a beautiful woman. And yeah, okay, so you're not twenty-two. Who cares? Twenty-two-year-olds don't get it, don't interest me, and don't understand me. You do.” She didn't tell him that at times she wasn't sure she did either, but she knew what he meant and what he expected of her: tolerance, nurturing, and understanding above all else. He was very needy sometimes, and self-centered, as children are, and he liked the way she nurtured him. Sometimes, when she treated him like a child, it worked best. At other times, he wanted respect, and made a lot of sense when he expressed himself. They seemed equal at times, and not at others. In truth, they were not equal. She was older, more successful, more powerful in the art world than he was, she was respected and important, she had more money. But he was just as talented and smart. He could hold his own, even in her world, if she let him. So far they had not ventured into her world together. And when they did, he would still be viewed as a young artist, and she was one of the most respected art dealers in the world. It was a huge difference between them. People paid more attention to her than to him, which she knew would annoy him. Liam liked being the center of attention, which he always was with young girls. People her age expected more of him than great paintings, good looks, and blond hair. They expected him to be a serious person, and at times he wasn't. But with him, she wasn't always serious either, and she liked that about the time they spent together. She loved being playful with him. Sometimes they laughed so hard at each other's stories, or their own, that tears ran down their cheeks. No one had ever made her laugh like Liam. Or made love to her the way he did.

There were a lot of benefits to the combination they offered each other, and also some risks.

When they were in Rome, they went to visit an art dealer she liked and had done business with, a man in his late sixties whose ideas she respected. When they saw him, Liam had been having an off day. He acted like a bored schoolboy while they sat in his office. Liam had been sitting there pouting, swinging his foot, and kicking the desk, until Sasha turned to him quietly and asked him to stop. He was so furious over the reprimand that he had stormed out. Her colleague had raised an eyebrow and didn't comment. And she had been forced to decline lunch as a result.

Afterward, they had had a huge argument about it, and how badly behaved she thought he had been. It was the only unpleasant moment on the trip. Later, Liam had apologized for it, after they made love that night. He said he had been bored and tired, didn't like the way the man looked at Sasha, and it made him jealous. His confession touched Sasha, but it was too late to convince the Roman art dealer that the man she had brought with her was an intelligent, civilized adult. And it didn't bode well for the future yet again. There were lots of meetings like that in her life, and sometimes Liam just wasn't up to it. In fact, he rarely was. When he was bored or felt left out or unimportant, he almost always acted out, more often than not, like a child. Sometimes it was hard to believe that he was forty years old. At times, he seemed half his age, and looked it, which was part of his appeal, but also his greatest downside in Sasha's life. They still had a lot to work out. But all in all, their trip to Italy was a huge success.

Sasha called her children several times while she and Liam traveled. They both had her itinerary, as they always did, but rarely called her. It was almost always Sasha who called them, because she was harder to find, and she often turned off her cell phone. She and Liam were registered in hotels as Liam Allison and Sasha Boardman, which Liam said sounded like a law firm, Allison and Boardman, or tax accountants. And once in a while the hotels got it wrong and registered them as a single person, Allison Boardman, which they didn't mind. Tatianna was amused by it when she called her mother in Florence, and laughed, saying that she had asked for Sasha Boardman and they said all they had was an Allison Boardman, which was obviously the right person but the wrong first name. It meant nothing to her. If it had happened to Xavier, he might have wondered. But Tatianna made no association between her mother and Liam, except that she knew Sasha represented him. So it never occurred to her, that he was there. Sasha laughed along with her at the stupidity of operators in hotels, even good ones, to screw up her name.