by Cara Colter
“Yes.”
Her voice suddenly went very soft. “Things that make a man very lonely.”
Her eyes felt as if they were looking deep within him, as if she could see his soul, as if she could see the vast emptiness that was there. Her hand tightened marginally on his.
“Maybe,” he said, telling himself he was only agreeing because he didn’t want her to get riled up.
“I feel lonely, too, sometimes.” And then, just like that, she was crying.
“Hey.” He patted her shoulder clumsily, realized how very naked she was and pulled his hand away. He stared at it as if it was burning.
She seemed to realize how awkward this situation really was. “You need to leave me alone,” she sobbed. “I’m not even dressed.”
What wasn’t happening? He wasn’t leaving her alone. What was happening? He was going to try and make her okay with this.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, pulling his attention away from his hand and ordering himself to buck up. “You’ve had a bit of a shock. People say and do things they wouldn’t normally say or do. I’m a trained professional. I deal with stuff like this all the time.”
Even as she scrubbed furiously at her tearstained face, she looked dubious. She slid a look down at her thin covering of a shower curtain. “Like a doctor?”
“Sort of,” he agreed.
“And you deal with unclothed, crying, lonely women who have been assaulted by exploding showers? All the time?”
“I just meant I deal with the unexpected.” He tried for a soothing note in the face of her voice rising a bit shrilly. “It’s what I’m trained to do. Let’s get you up off the floor.”
He reached for the nearest towel rack and tugged a towel off it, and then, as an afterthought, another one. He put both of them on top of her, trying to fasten them, without much success, around the sopping, slippery, transparent shower curtain.
Tucking the thick white terry towels around her as best he could, he slipped his arm under her shoulder and lifted her to a little dressing table bench. It was the first time he had touched her since he had held her hand at the pool in the river. Awareness quivered along his spine, but he could not give in to that. He needed to be professional right now, as he never had been before.
Connor guided Isabella to sitting and tucked the towels a little tighter around her.
Professional, he told himself grimly.
“Let’s just have a look at that bump on your head.” That was good, he told himself of his neutral tone.
“Why are you lonely?” he heard himself growl as he parted her hair and dabbed at the bump with a wet cloth.
What was professional about that? Distracting her, Connor told himself. He turned from her for a moment and opened the medicine chest over her sink. He found iodine and cotton balls.
“I suppose you find me pathetic,” she said.
Distracting her would have been talking about anything—the upcoming royal wedding, the grape crops—not probing her personal tragedies.
She grimaced as he found the cut on her head and dabbed it.
“I don’t find you pathetic,” he told her. “You were married. Your husband died. It seems to me you would be lonely.”
“Thank you,” she said softly.
Leave it, he ordered himself. “I mean, of course I’ve wondered why such a beautiful woman would stay alone.”
“You wondered about me?”
Just as she had wondered about him, going online to find out about the SEALs. All this curiosity between them was just normal, wasn’t it? They were two strangers sharing a house. Naturally they would have questions.
“Did you love your husband that much?” Connor asked. “That you are prepared to stay lonely forever? To grieve him forever?”
“Yes,” she said. It came out sounding like a hiccup. “Where there is deep grief, there was deep love.”
And something about the way she said that made his radar go up. He realized he didn’t believe her. It was none of his business. He ordered himself not to probe. He was, at heart, a soldier. He would always be a soldier. That’s what he did. He obeyed orders.
So, why did he hear his own voice saying, in direct defiance of the command he had just given it, “Tell me about your husband.”
It was not, as he would have liked himself to believe, to provide a distraction for her while he doctored her head.
“No one, least of all not my very traditional family, understood my decision to marry him,” she said, sticking her chin up as if daring him to reach the same conclusion.
“Why’s that?” he asked, keeping his voice carefully noncommittal.
“He was very ill when we married. We knew he was going to die.”
He had to work to keep his face schooled.
“My mother was begging me, on the eve of my wedding, not to do it. She said, Life has enough heartbreak—you have to invite one by marrying a dying man?”
It seemed to Connor her mother had a point, but he didn’t say anything. He pretended intense concentration on the small bump on her head.
“Giorgio was part of the fabric of my life from the first day I started school.”
Connor could just picture her starting school: little dark pigtails, a pinafore dress, knee socks and a scraped knee.
Something that had never happened to him happened—he wondered what Isabella’s daughter would look like, if she had one someday. He felt it was a tragedy that she had said no to her own little girl somewhere along the line.
“Giorgio was never good-looking.” Isabella looked at Connor critically. He was pretty sure she found him good-looking, but not nearly as sure if she saw that as a good thing or a bad thing.
“He wasn’t even good-looking as a child, though his eyes held such depths of beauty they took my breath away from the first moment I looked in their liquid dark depths.”
He had to bite his tongue from saying cynically, How very poetic.
“He was always sickly—perhaps seeds of the illness that killed him had been growing since we were children.”
Connor did not like the picture she was painting of the man she had married. Good grief. What had she been thinking?
She seemed to sense his judgment, because she tilted her chin at him. “He took the fact he was different from all the other boys and made that his greatest strength.”
“Oh,” he said flatly, not a question. But she took it as a question.
“Giorgio was able to use such a simple thing as a word to spin entire worlds, enchanted kingdoms. He could see what others missed—the pure magic in a ladybug’s flight, the whole universe residing in the center of an opening flower. While other boys were crass and full of frightening energy, Giorgio was sensitive and sweetly contemplative.”
Connor hoped he wasn’t scowling. He himself had been one of those crass boys, full of frightening energy.
“When he asked me to marry him, I didn’t even have to think about it, I just said yes.”
What kind of man, knowing his prognosis was fatal, would ask someone he supposedly loved to share that with him?
“I’ve never even been on a real date. Giorgio was not well enough to go out for dinner, or to the movies. Certainly not dancing.”
She’d never been on a date? That last—certainly not dancing—seemed to have been offered with a bit of wistfulness.
“I still have the poems he wrote for me, and the splendor of them is still wrenching enough to make me weep.”
Connor looked at her lips. If she hadn’t dated any other men, she probably hadn’t kissed any other men, either. He had the irreverent feeling he could make her forget the splendor of those poems in about twenty seconds flat. He made himself focus on the small cut on her head.
“At sixteen I declared my love fo
r him. At twenty I married him, over the protests of my entire family. He had already been diagnosed with his illness. At twenty-six I laid him to rest. In my heart is nothing but gratitude for the amazing time we had.”
She seemed to be expecting him to say something, so he said, “Uh-huh,” when what he really wanted to do was take her by those slender, very naked shoulders and shake some sense into her.
“Now in me is an empty place that nothing—and no one—can ever fill.”
Her tale made Connor want to kiss the living daylights out of her, to wake her up from her trance, to show her maybe that empty place inside her could be filled. But he recognized he was treading on dangerous and unfamiliar ground if he thought he would be the one who was up to the challenge of filling her empty places. Isabella apparently liked the sensitive type. Which, if the way he felt about her husband was any indication, Connor most definitely was not. The man had been sick. That wasn’t his fault. And yet Connor felt aggravated, as if Giorgio had taken advantage of Isabella’s soft heart to give her a life of looking after him.
“You think I felt sorry for him,” she gasped. “You think I didn’t love him at all.”
“Hey! I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. I saw it in your face. You think I don’t have a clue what love is.”
He was the one who had told her to be observant, but he hadn’t been expecting this. “I don’t know what you think you saw in my face, but it wasn’t that. You did not see that in my face, because you are looking at a person who truly does not have a clue what love is.”
“Humph.” She seemed unconvinced. She seemed unfairly angry at him.
“Maybe,” he suggested carefully, “you said out loud the doubt you’ve been nursing inside since the day you married him.”
With speed that took him by surprise, she smacked him hard, open-handed, across his face, hard enough to turn his head. He looked slowly back at her as she stood up. The towel fell to the ground, leaving only the shower curtain around her. Gathering her shower curtain, regal as Christina Rose could ever hope to be, as confident as the emperor with no clothes, Isabella got up and walked by him and out of the bathroom. He watched as she walked down the hallway to her bedroom, entered it, sent one damning look back at him and slammed the door.
Connor Benson stood frozen to the spot, absolutely stunned. He touched his face where her palm had met his cheek.
Jeez, for a little bit of a thing she packed a better wallop than a lot of men he’d known.
* * *
Isabella lay, wrapped in her shower curtain, on her bed in a pool of dampness and self-loathing. She could not believe she had struck Connor. She was going to have to apologize. It was so unlike her!
It was only because she had hit her head. He’d said it himself. She’d had a bit of a shock—people did and said things they wouldn’t normally say under those circumstances.
Isabella would not normally confess all kinds of things to him. She had told him she was lonely in a moment of dazed weakness. It was also in a moment of dazed weakness that she had given in to his encouragement to talk about Giorgio.
What a mistake that had been. She had seen in Connor’s face that he thought her marriage had been a sham.
Or was what he said more accurate? That bump on the head had removed a filter she had been trying desperately to keep in place, and her own doubts, not Connor’s, had spilled out of her.
She got up off the bed. Enough of the self-pity and introspection. Yes, she was lonely, but why had she confessed that to him instead of just looking after it herself?
People had to be responsible for themselves!
Tonight was a case in point. She had been invited to the sixteenth birthday party of one of her former students. As a teacher, she was often invited to her pupils’ family events, but she rarely attended. So, who did she have to blame but herself if she was lonely?
It wasn’t Connor’s fault that he had made her aware of the loneliness as if it was a sharp shard of glass inside her.
She went to her closet and threw open the door. She wasn’t going to the party as a demure little schoolteacher, either. She wasn’t wearing a dress that would label her prim and tidy for all the world to see.
She was not dressing in a way that sent the message she was safe and boring, and not quite alive somehow.
Way at the back of the closet was a dress she had bought a long time ago, on a holiday she had forced herself to take a year or two after Giorgio died. The purchase had really been the fault of one of those pushy salesclerks who had brought her the dress, saying she had never seen a dress so perfect for someone.
It was the salesclerk’s gushing that had made Isabella purchase the dress, which had been way more expensive than what she could afford. When she brought it home, she had had buyer’s remorse, and dismissed it as not right for her. Still, it hung in her closet, all these years later. Why had she never given it away?
She took it out and laid it on the bed, eyed it critically. Not right for the old her. Perfect for the new her.
The dress was red as blood and had a low V on both the front and back, which meant she couldn’t wear it with any bra that she owned.
It was the dress of a woman who was not filled with unreasonable fears.
Feeling ridiculously racy for the fact she had on no bra, she slipped the dress over her head, then looked at herself in her full-length mirror. She remembered why she had purchased the dress, and it wasn’t strictly because of the salesclerk gushing over it.
The dress gave Isabella a glimpse of who she could be. It was as if it took her from mouse to siren in the blink of an eye. She looked confident and sexy and like a woman who was uninhibited and knew how to have fun and let go. It was the dress of a woman who had the satisfying knowledge she could have any man she wanted.
Isabella put makeup on the bump on her head and then arranged her hair over it. She dabbed mascara on her lashes and blush on her cheeks. She glossed her lips and put on a little spray of perfume.
She found her highest heels, and a tiny clutch handbag, and a little silver bracelet. Taking a deep breath, she marched out of her room. Connor’s bedroom door was closed. Summoning all her courage, she knocked on the door.
After a long moment, long enough for her heart to pound in her throat as if it planned to jump out of her, the door opened. He stood there looking down at her. He was wet, still, from the water from the broken shower spewing all over him, from helping her. Awareness of him tingled along her spine.
She was so glad she had put on the red dress when Connor’s mouth fell open before he snapped it shut. Something flashed in his eyes before he quickly veiled it. But even if she had led a sheltered life, Isabella knew desire when she saw it.
He folded his arms over his chest.
“My, my,” he growled.
She tossed her head, pleased with the way his eyes followed the motion of her hair. “I’m going to a birthday party. I wanted to apologize before I left. I have never hit a person in my whole life. I’m deeply ashamed.”
“Really?” he growled doubtfully.
“Really,” she said, lifting her chin.
“That’s kind of not the dress of someone who is deeply ashamed.”
“The dress has nothing to do with this!”
“I think it does.”
“Explain yourself.”
He lifted a shoulder. “All right. I think you’re a boiling cauldron of repressed passion.”
“Maybe it’s not repressed,” she snapped.
His eyes went to her lips and stayed there long enough to make the point that they could find out how repressed or unrepressed she was right this second if she wanted. Her eyes skittered to his lips. She blinked first and looked away. When she looked back, his gaze was unflinching.
“In a
dress like that, lots of people are going to want to find out, is she, or isn’t she? You aren’t going be lonely for very long at all.”
Since the whole idea of putting on the dress had been to look passionate, why did she want to smack him again? And badly. She could tell this apology was premature. She had to grip her clutch extra tightly to keep her hand from flying free and hitting him across his handsome, smug face.
No, she didn’t want to smack him. That wasn’t the truth at all. The truth was exactly as he had said. She was a boiling cauldron of repressed passion, and she wanted to throw herself at Connor and let all that repressed passion boil out.
Isabella was absolutely appalled with herself. She took a step back from him and turned away. “Have a good evening, signor,” she said formally, the prim little schoolteacher after all, a child playing dress-up in her red finery.
“Yeah. You, too.”
She turned and walked away. And just because she knew he was watching her, or maybe to prove to herself she wasn’t just playing dress-up, she put a little extra swing in her step and felt the red dress swirl around her.
She glanced over her shoulder and caught him still watching her, his eyes narrowed with unconcealed masculine appreciation.
Surprisingly, given that unsettling encounter with Connor, Isabella did have a good evening. Sixteenth birthday parties for young women were a huge event in Monte Calanetti. It was a coming-of-age celebration, probably very much like a debutante ball in the southern US. The party signified the transition from being a child to being a woman.
While looking at the giggling young woman, Valerie, flushed with excitement in her finery, Isabella was struck by how extremely young and innocent she was. She was no more an adult that Isabella was an astronaut.
And yet Isabella had been sixteen herself when she had first declared her undying love for Giorgio. And how adult and sophisticated and sure of herself she had felt at that time. Now, watching this young woman, it seemed it would be laughable to make a lifelong declaration of love at that age, and then to feel bound by it.
The pensive thoughts did not last long, though. Isabella had been seated with some of her coworkers, and the talk turned to preparations for the spring fete and anticipation of the royal wedding being held in Monte Calanetti.