“Huh,” I said, my voice oozing disbelief. “Well, I’m sorry that I accused you of trying to get me up here to yell at me, and I do appreciate you offering your shoulder. That’s very selfless of you.”
“Alix, you’re my friend,” she said simply, and lifted the teapot. I shook my head and sipped my now lukewarm tea.
Silence wrapped around us. Only the faint whir of a fan disturbed us as we both sat and contemplated the
view across the square to the tiny green. An old lady with an elderly corgi wandered the perimeter, while in the center of the lawn a group of teens lay in various states of undress looking like so many slabs of beef at a butcher.
“But as you’ve mentioned the subject…”
I groaned and closed my eyes. I knew she wouldn’t be able to resist!
“…I believe you have a mistaken impression about Alexander’s intentions toward you.”
It was no use, there was just no fighting her. I put my cup down, stifled the sigh I wanted to heave, and sat back against the gold and rose settee, resigned to hearing her out. I made a mental note to not visit Isabella again without a protective tinfoil Juliet cap, and slapped a smile on my face. “Go on, I’m listening.”
She shot me a questioning look, then leaned forward to select a chocolate from a footed crystal dish. “Would you prefer to hear the polite version of my thoughts or the honest one?”
“Polite,” I said quickly. A flicker of disappointment flashed in her eyes, but was quickly gone. She opened her mouth to speak, but I interrupted her before she could. “No, no, I didn’t mean that. Go ahead, give me the full poop.”
“Very well. Alix, you know I think you are a very smart woman.”
I released the death grip I had on the settee’s arm. Perhaps the truth wouldn’t be as bad as I expected.
“You’re witty, clever, and have a generous heart. I know your joking manner with Alexander hides some rather deep feelings for him, and I know he returns them.”
I snorted and reached for the teapot.
“You don’t believe me, but I am in a position to know. I knew how he was with his ex-wife, you see—and of course, how he acted with me.”
I paused in the act of stuffing an orange liqueur chocolate in my mouth. “His
what?”
She looked surprised by my shriek. “His ex-wife. Jill. Hasn’t he mentioned her? She was a friend of mine in university. You might wish to eat that, dear. You’re dribbling liqueur down your blouse.”
I looked down at the chocolate squashed between my fingers. He had been married and he never told me? I’d told him about my ex-husband, why hadn’t he told me about his ex? Tears pricked behind my eyes as I answered my own question. He hadn’t told me because I didn’t matter that much to him. I was merely a comfy body to dally with, but no one he wanted to become emotionally involved with. No one he wanted to truly share his life with, no one he wanted to gift with his heart.
The bastard.
“I’m sorry, Alix, I appear to have put a foot wrong here. I assumed he had told you about Jill.”
I swallowed back a lump of unshed tears and popped the sticky, squashed chocolate in my mouth. “No,” I said indistinctly around the now-tasteless chocolate, wincing as the tiny shards that were all that remained of my heart ground into powder at yet more proof that Alex didn’t think I was worthy of his love. How could he love me when he didn’t even trust me? If I didn’t believe it before, I did now—I just wasn’t an important part of his life. “No, he didn’t tell me.”
Isabella looked uncomfortable for a moment; then her
usual poise returned. “I’m sure he had a reason why he didn’t, and after all, he has been divorced for almost ten years, so it’s not as if it is recent news. The only reason
I
mentioned it is because I wanted to reassure you that I know Alexander very well, and I can see the difference in the manner he has treated every other woman he’s dated, and the way he is when he’s with you.”
I was nothing to him. I was less than nothing, I didn’t even exist. Expendable, unimportant, trivial. An ache started deep inside me, deep within my womb, deep in all those secret, dark inner places that only he had touched, really touched. “Oh, great! Not only did he break my heart, utterly destroying it so it will never be whole again, now he’s broken my womanly bits as well!”
Isabella’s mouth hung open in surprise for a nanosecond before she said, “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of the end of a romantic relationship resulting in a broken uterus.”
I rubbed my hand on my abdomen. “You underestimate Alex’s power of destruction. No”—I raised my hand when she started to object. “I take it back. He doesn’t have the power to give me cramps, and I’m sure that’s all this is. Would you mind wrapping up your lecture? I think I’m going to want to go lie down with the heating pad.”
She hesitated for a minute, then set down her plate and folded her hands nicely upon her lap. “All right, I’ll say what I need to say and leave you alone. You’re an exceptional woman, Alix, with many good qualities, but you are probably the most selfish and self-centered person I’ve ever met.”
I stared at her with my mouth hanging open, and not
just a little bit. My jaw rested on my knees. Selfish? Selfcentered?
Me?
“All you seem to be concerned about is what Alexander can do for you, how he can make you feel better, how he can fulfill your needs. Have you ever once considered what
he
needs? Have you ever tried to put yourself in his shoes to understand the decisions he makes? Has it never struck you that you entered into the relationship with the idea of taking what you could from it while you could, because you had no intention of staying with Alexander after the summer was over? Don’t you understand the power you have to destroy him? Don’t you see how you are destroying him
now
with your unthinking, selfish actions?”
Tears bullied their way forward in my eyes, but I blinked them back, too stunned by Isabella’s words to muster a coherent response.
“Alix.” She put a hand on mine and squeezed. “I know the truth can be cruel and hurtful, but you and Alexander are my friends. I see the love you both have for each other, and I see the pain that the obstacles you’ve created are causing. If you could just see them as clearly, I believe you would be a very happy woman, very much in love and loved. Won’t you try to open your eyes and see what I see?”
I swallowed down my grief and stood up, wiping at my eyes with the linen napkin I still held crushed in my hand. “Thank you for a lovely tea, Isabella. I’m afraid I’m not feeling terribly well, but perhaps we can do this again one day.”
Maybe when hell froze over.
She reached out to grab me before I could slip away. “Alix, please don’t do this. I only want to help you—”
Help me? Did she really? Maybe she was right, maybe I was wrong…but no, I couldn’t be. Every event of the last couple of days stood as a familiar signpost along the road to rejection. I knew them well, I couldn’t mistake them for something more benign. “I know you want to help, and I appreciate your good intentions, but this is something I have to work out by myself.”
She shook her head, her platinum hair swinging as she rose in one graceful movement. “You see? You’re thinking only of your own problems, as if the problems are yours alone and not affecting both you and Alexander. As long as you continue to isolate yourself from him, as long as you guard your heart against the pain that comes from loving, you’ll never be able to truly love him in return. And, oh, Alix, he deserves to be loved by all your heart, not just the tiny bit you’re willing to let him see.”
I spun around at her hall door, furious at her soft entreaty. “I
beg
your pardon? Guard my heart against the pain of loving Alex? Have you heard nothing I’ve said? My heart is broken! Crushed! Completely destroyed, by Alex, because of Alex, due solely to Alex! If I didn’t love him so much, he wouldn’t have that sort of power over me!”
She shook her head again. “You
think
your heart is broken. You’re re-creating what you know from your prior experiences with men. You’re evoking the feelings that followed when you were rejected in the past, the feelings of being small and unworthy. But that’s not love, Alix. You may love Alexander—in fact, I believe you do—but you’re guarding your heart by thrusting him away before he has a chance to betray that love. Oh, Alix, if only you could see his eyes when he looks at you, you would realize you have no reason to fear him.”
I stared at her, aghast by what she said, tears filling my eyes as fast as I could blink them away. “Fear him? Now I fear him?” I raised my hands and dropped them helplessly. “Well, thank you for that insightful analysis, Doctor Isabella! Just send me a bill for your time, would you?”
I started to leave, then thought better of it. I couldn’t let her hurl those accusations at me without answering them. I marched down her hallway and stood before her, my hands fisted at my hips. “Just so you know, just so you have it clear in your mind, I am
not
guarding myself against Alex. From the very first moment I met him, he got to me, really got to me, got under my skin so that I had no choice in the matter—I had to have him. And I knew,
I knew
what would happen! I knew there wasn’t going to be any happy ending for me, because there never is! Tell me how going into a relationship knowing it’s doomed to end in heartbreak is guarding my heart, Isabella! Tell me, please, because I’d really like to know!”
“Alix—”
“No!” I spun on my heel and stomped off a few steps, then whirled back around on her. “I love him. I always will. He is everything to me, do you understand?
EVERYTHING!
Leaving him is going to kill me!”
She was silent for a few seconds, watching me angrily swipe at my eyes with her damned napkin. “I see I was wrong.”
“Damned straight you were wrong!” I sniffed and turned back to the door, but stopped when she called after me.
“Alix? Would you answer one question, please?”
I ground my teeth as I stood before the door, my hand on the knob. I didn’t want to answer any more of her
charges. I didn’t want to look any closer at my motives than I already had. I just wanted to escape and be left alone to nurse my shattered heart in peace.
“What is it?” I growled.
The faint scent of her perfume, light and flowery and completely Isabella, wafted by as she glided up behind me.
“If you love Alexander, truly love him with all your heart, isn’t he worth any sacrifice to be with?”
My stomach dropped down to my feet. I ground my fingernails into my palms to keep from screaming out that I couldn’t give him what he wanted, that it would all end in disaster if I pretended to be something I wasn’t. No matter how much I loved him, I would never be the woman he needed. So I said nothing. I bit my lip until I tasted blood; then I turned the doorknob and left Isabella without a word.
“If ye’d stand yersel’ a wee bit closer to the laird, m’lady, ye’d be able to reach his puir fevered haid wi’out dribblin’ water all over him.”
“He’s not a laird, McReady, he’s a knight. A simple knight. A very simple knight,” Lady Fenella replied with smug satisfaction. She swished the cloth around the bowl of water, and reached across Sir Christopher’s broad chest to slap the soggy piece of linen on his forehead. Storm off in a pique, would he? Ride off on a horse that couldn’t see its hoof before its face, hmm? Wouldn’t listen to her advice, eh? Well, he’d be eating his words once he regained his senses, and she’d be there watching him swallow every mouthful!
I set my laptop aside with a muttered, “Crap. It’s all crap. I’m doomed.” Then I decided it wasn’t really the story that was at fault, it was me. I hate Mr. Monthly Visitor.
Oh, I know, who enjoys it? But I
really
hate cramps. I can live with all sorts of other pain—headaches and backaches and various assorted and sundry aches—but I can’t function with cramps. In fact, while reading and writing historical romances I’ve always wondered just how women dealt with cramps. Willow-bark draughts and possets would never have been enough for me.
No, my way was much more effective: I swallowed painkillers, fired up the heating pad, and retired to my bed with a collection of comfort-read books, a tall glass of the fizzy lemon drink the Brits call lemonade, and a chocolate orange I had hidden for emergencies.
If a broken heart and throbbing reproductive organs isn’t an emergency, I just don’t know what is.
An hour later I was feeling much more human and less likely to kill innocent passersby. A quick glance at the clock left me pondering fate, however. It was seven minutes to six o’clock. Six was the hour Alex had designated for my attendance at the restaurant on the corner. I wasn’t going, of course. I had made that decision long before Isabella’s unjustified attack on my character, an attack that left me so infuriated I still couldn’t think about it. No, I wasn’t going to have dinner with Alex. It would serve him right to sit there all by himself, waiting for me. Everyone in the restaurant would be smiling to themselves over the poor man who was left to dine alone, pitying him because he was clearly waiting for someone, someone who didn’t care enough about him to keep a date with him. I pictured their smug smiles as they talked behind their hands about him, no doubt speculating as to just what he had done to drive his dinner date away. I wondered how long he would sit there before he realized
I was standing him up. An hour? A half hour? Ten minutes?
“Selfish and self-centered! The nerve of her!” I complained as I pushed the heating pad off my stomach and padded over to the wardrobe. “I’m the least self-centered person I know. And selfish? Ha! That’s a laugh.”
I pulled out a lightweight blue and green batik print dress made of cotton so soft it felt like silk next to my skin. I loved the way the dress made me feel when I wore it, sexy and seductive and attractive, not in the least bit bloated and cranky. I swore the dress must have had pheromones woven into the fabric.
It was a lovely dress, the very dress I might wear were I going out to dinner, but I wasn’t. And Alex, sensitive, intelligent Alex, would sit in the restaurant by himself and feel the weight of all those stares and snickers. He would be embarrassed, shamed that he was the focus of so much speculation, uncomfortable because I had made him an object of pity by standing him up.
I slipped on my midnight-blue sandals with the cute jeweled ankle straps.
It served him right. Who did he think he was, crushing my heart, then ordering me out to dinner without so much as asking me if I wanted to go?
I yanked a comb through my hair and spritzed it with some hair spray so it would stay kicky and out of my face.
What would he do once he realized I wasn’t showing up? Would he eat his dinner alone, a sad, pathetic, solitary figure in a room of happy, chatting groups? Would he leave in a huff?
I stared at myself in the mirror as I applied a quick slash of crimson to my lips. Would he call someone to
have dinner with him? Someone close by? Someone he knew well—very well? Someone he knew on an intimate level? Someone blond and cool and elegant who probably never, ever raised her voice to him?
I couldn’t decide which was worse, the picture of a humiliated Alex sitting in lonely splendor at the restaurant, or the image of him dining cozily with Isabella, their heads together as they had a good laugh about the stupid American who thought she was entitled to love.
“Hell!” I told my reflection, then snatched up my purse and turned off the fan. “Fine, I’ll go to the restaurant, but I
won’t
have dinner with him. I’ll just go there to tell him I’m standing him up. That way he can leave if he wants to, or he can stay and have his dinner by himself.”
I nodded to myself as I glanced again at the clock, then dashed out the door. After all, I didn’t want to hurt him, I just wanted to make him understand that we weren’t together anymore. I could do that without cruelty. It certainly wouldn’t cost me anything in pride to simply go to the restaurant and tell him I would not be dining with him. In fact, it might serve very well as a good demonstration of how
not
together we were. I could tell him I wouldn’t be eating with him, then move to another table and have dinner by myself. That should certainly drive home the point! Yes, yes, it was a good idea!
Five minutes later I stood in the entrance of the restaurant and glanced around. The place was almost full, but I spotted Alex immediately. He was sitting in a corner table perusing a menu as if he had no other concern in life but to decide between the Galletto alla di Avola and the Petto di Pollo al Pepe Verde.
The rotter.
I marched over to where he sat and stood with my hands on my hips until he looked up.
“I half expected you to stand me up,” he said with a self-deprecating smile.
His devilishly sexy voice raised goose bumps on my arms. I ignored both them and his smile. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d been married?”
He looked surprised for a moment, then stood and pulled out a chair for me. “I didn’t think it mattered.”
I pushed the chair back in and glared at him. “I’m not having dinner with you, Alex.”
One delectable eyebrow went up. God, how I loved those eyebrows! I loved how he cocked them just so, making my fingers tingle with the desire to trace along their smooth arch. Worse yet, they never failed to make me want to kiss that look of disbelief/surprise/questioning right off his face.
“You’re not having dinner? Then why are you here?”
“I came to tell you I was standing you up so you wouldn’t sit here and be the object of everyone’s pity because you’re such a terrible man that no one wants to have dinner with you. That’s all. I am, however, having dinner. Just not with you.”
He tapped one long finger on the table top for a few seconds while he considered my statement. “Does this have anything to do with the fact that I didn’t mention my previous marriage to you, or are you still in a snit because I was on duty yesterday?”
I picked up the menu lying in the place that would have been mine and took it to the table next to Alex’s. I waved the waiter over as I appropriated a chair. “Giorgio, I will be dining by myself tonight. And I don’t want to share my table with anyone.”
Giorgio, a small man with a neat beard and the most beautiful black wavy hair I’ve ever seen, looked puzzled for a moment, glanced over at Alex, then back at me. He shrugged and asked if I was ready to give my order. “Not yet. Give me a few more minutes,” I said nonchalantly, casting my eyes over the menu as if it were the most fascinating object I’d ever seen.
To my left Alex heaved a martyred sigh, then picked up his drink and menu and sat down at my table. I glared at him over the top of my menu. “I am
not
having dinner with you!”
“Fine. I’ll have dinner with you. Does that salvage your pride?”
I stood up. “No.” I took my glass of water and my menu and sat down in Alex’s recently vacated spot. I would be damned if I’d have dinner with him! He had to understand we were through. Over. Finished. Finito.
He gave me an annoyed look, tossed back his drink, then stood up like he was going to join me. I stood up as well, prepared to move to whichever table he wasn’t at. His jaw tightened. His eyes narrowed. His fingers clenched around the edge of the table in front of him. With a grim smile, he heaved it to the side, pushing it up against the one I was occupying.
I glanced around the room. The rest of the tables were filled, all but a large one in the center with a reserved card on it. Damn! “May I ask just what you think you’re doing, confiscating my former table like that and having the nerve to push your unwanted self up against my new stronghold?”
Alex’s grim smile lost a little of its grimness and warmed up just enough to kindle several small but intense
fires in my innards. I sent out a call for the internalorgan fire brigade and sat back down.
“You seem to be unable to make up your mind as to which table you wish to sit at. I’m just trying to make it easier for you.”
“Whatever. Just so long as you realize I’ve stood you up and am now
not
having dinner with you.”
He sat down at my ex-table. “Yes, I am aware of that fact. Might I say that I appreciate your telling me in person that you are standing me up?”
I gave him a quick little nod and picked up the menu. “I thought it was the polite thing to do.”
He waved for the waiter’s attention, pointed at me, and did that weird mental-telepathy drink-ordering thing that men can do. I frowned at him. “I don’t like whiskey.”
“I’m not drinking whiskey.”
“I don’t like vodka, either.”
“I’m not drinking vodka.”
I transferred the frown to his glass. There was no color in the little pool of liquid at the bottom, which eliminated any of the rye or bourbon type drinks. What else was clear?
“I don’t like ouzo, either.”
“Neither do I.”
I switched my frown from his glass to the waiter as he approached with two drinks on a tray. Gin? Rats. I liked gin. The waiter pursed his lips and shot us both a look that spoke volumes, but he placed the drinks down at each of our tables with nothing more than a noncommittal murmur.
I poked at the wedge of lime in the drink, then sucked
my finger. “Gin and tonic? How did you know I like G&Ts?”
Alex looked up from where he was reading his menu. “I beg your pardon, madam? Were you speaking to me, a stranger dining here quite alone at my own table?”
“Oh, very funny.” I pulled my menu out and stared at it, wondering what the hell I was doing sitting there trying not to throw myself on him. Maybe showing him just how not together we were wasn’t the best of ideas. He didn’t seem to be overly offended by my refusal to have dinner with him. In fact, he wasn’t even sitting at the same table as I was. Pushed together or separated by distance, they were still two different tables. Well, fine, if our breakup wasn’t going to give him any grief, that was great! That was fabulous! It made my life so much easier! I would just sit here and ignore him and have my dinner by myself, and by the end of the meal he would go his way and I would go mine, and that was all there was to it.
Except of course I would never recover from the loss of him in my life, but that was my issue, not his, no matter what Isabella thought.
Selfish? Self-centered?
Certainly Alex didn’t think I was selfish and self-centered. Or did he?
I glanced over at him. He was studying the back of the menu, but he looked up when he felt my gaze on him. “Isabella said you’ve started work on a new story.”
Oh, so he wanted to do the polite-conversation thing? I debated ignoring him completely, but decided I was bigger than that. I lowered my menu and plucked the wedge of lime out to suck on it. Alex watched with an indescribable look of horror on his face. I chewed the lovely pulpy bits out of the lime, then waved it about
nonchalantly. “Why, yes, as it is, Isabella is quite correct.” I narrowed my lips at him. “About
that
she is correct. She’s very, very wrong about other things.”
“Is she? I have no doubt of that. Despite what you seem to think, Isabella isn’t perfect.”
“Big words, coming from her former partner in Hide the Salami.”
Alex blinked twice. “Christ, don’t tell me you’re jealous of Isabella, too?”
What? Jealous? Me? He had to be kidding. “You’re kidding, right? You think I’m jealous? Of Isabella? And what the hell do you mean,
too
? As in, I’m jealous of more than one person? Is that what you think? You think I’m jealous? Of Isabella and someone else? Some mystery person? Who? Bert? Ray?
Philippe?”
He leveled an emerald gaze at me, one that sizzled its way down to my scarlet-painted toenails. I loved those looks, I just hated the way they left me wanting to slither across him and lick every square inch of his skin. “Actually, I think you’re jealous of my ex-wife.”
I goggled at him. There was just no other word for it, I goggled. At him, at his ridiculous ideas, at his suggestion that I could be jealous of anyone, but most of all, I goggled at the expression of pity on his face. He was serious! He thought I was jealous!
“You’re out of your friggin’ mind!” I finally de-goggled enough to say. “Totally and completely out of your mind! Jealous of your ex-wife? Oh, I grant you, I might be the teensiest bit envious of Isabella’s perfect face and perfect hair and perfect clothes and perfect life and perfect relationship with you, but you think I’m jealous of your ex-wife? A woman I don’t even know? Why would I be jealous of her?”
That rattled him enough to wipe the look of pity off his face. He frowned instead. “Alix, my relationship with Isabella—”
I held up a hand and interrupted him. “No! Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know! I don’t care at all! I don’t want to know anything about how you and Isabella were, not how much you loved/liked/worshiped her, not how long you were together, not how she lay in your arms at night and talked to you about all sorts of interesting, intelligent things, the sort of things that I never talked to you about because we never stopped doing it long enough to have time for talking—none of it! I don’t want to hear anything about you and Isabella!”