“The apology comes first, Gabriella.”
She drew in a long, deep breath and for a moment he thought her pride might get in the way and she’d tell them both to go to hell. Then she slowly rose to her feet, straightened her impeccable spine, and pinned Willow in that compelling green gaze. “I’m sorry if I have a you unjustly, and I apologize.”
Just that. No beating around the bush with excuses, just a straightforward admission uttered with all the dignity and grace of a true aristocrat. He hoped he could carry through with what he had to say, with half her class.
“Okay,” he began. “First, the earrings were in rec ognition of the extra hours Willow put in to help save a project that would have gone down the tubes otherwise. Instead, it paid off handsomely, and I acknowledged my gratitude in similar ways to everyone on my staff who gave up evenings and weekends to get the job done. The women got earrings, the men watches.”
“Well, if I’d known that, I’d—”
“Second, she had to vacate her leaky condo for a month while it was being repaired, so I offered her the use of the penthouse. If it matters at all, I happened to be in Cairo the entire time she stayed.”
Gabriella moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “I see.”
“Yes,” he said wearily, “I’m sure you do, now. The
pity of it is, you didn’t see fit to come to me for the answers in the first place.”
“How was Ito know there was more to her story?”
“Because you know me, Gabriella. At least, I thought you did. And I thought we’d agreed we’d be up front with each other about any concerns or questions we might have. Apparently, I was wrong on both counts.”
He turned again to Willow. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“No, Max. All is forgiven.”
“Not quite,” he said. “I’d like your resignation on my desk first thing tomorrow.”
Aghast, she stared at him. “Why?”
He’d have felt sorry for her if he’d had a drop of pity left in him. But he was so choked, it was all he could do to be civil. “Because there’s a world of difference in the way we interpret the truth, Willow.”
“I won’t do it,” she said, her face pale with disbelief.
“Then I’ll fire you.”
“You can’t!”
“Watch me!” he said harshly. “Not only will I fire you, I’ll sue you for sexual harassment.”
“You’ll sue me?” She laughed. “I think not! You seem to have forgotten about a certain night when you lured me to the penthouse and poured wine down my throat—”
“And kissed you. I haven’t forgotten.”
Jeez, but he was a fool! He’d seen this coming for weeks but, in the end, done nothing to defuse it. So much for his belief in confronting trouble head-on!
“Then you might want to reconsider asking me to re sign.”
“Before you think about trying to blackmail me, Willow, let me remind you that the incident to which you refer took place nearly nine months ago, that you arrived
at my front door uninvited, brought the wine in question, and showed yourself more than willing to engage in an affair with me, even though you knew I was married. You even went so far as to follow up with a letter stating as much.”
“You received no such letter from me!”
“No, I didn’t. But you did write it, and were careless enough to leave a óopy of it on your desk. And I’m per fecfly prepared to produce it as evidence, if I have to.”
He was bluffing, of course. He’d shredded the letter months ago. But she didn’t have to know that.
“So this is what it comes down to, is it? You’ll fire me to placate the woman who walked out on you and left me to pick up the pieces?”
“You leave me little choice.”
He thought he knew all there was to know about her. He’d seen her at her most efficient, her most sympathetic, her most charming, and at her most vulnerable. But he’d never seen the controlled rage that crept over her features then. “This is my reward for all those times I listened while you poured your heart out about the mistakes you made with her? For the times I picked up your thy clean ing, made sure your passport was renewed on time, filled in as your hostess?”
Her voice quavered; her big brown eyes filled with tears. “I remembered your birthday. I made fruitcake for you at Christmas, and fudge. I even sewed a button on your jacket once! And not one of those things was part of my job description.”
“That’s not to say I didn’t appreciate your efforts.”
“I don’t want your appreciation!” she wailed. “I want you, and I thought, in time, you’d see how much better off you’d be with someone like me.” She pointed a dis traught finger at Gabriella. “I might not be beautiful like
her, but I’d look after you. You’d never come home to an empty house. You’d never have to go out to get a decent meaL I’d be there, whenever you needed me. I’d never leave you the way she did. I wouldn’t steal the limelight every time we went out in public. I’d give you babies and make you proud and...”
The words dissolved into a sob.
“The only flaw in all that, Willow,” he said gently, “is that I never saw you in any role other than my ex ecutive assistant. I admire and respect you for what you brought to the job, but that’s as far as it goes.”
The tears rolled unchecked down her cheeks. “It could have been more, if she’d stayed away!”
“No. And that isn’t going to change, regardless of where my wife chooses to live.”
“Then I guess there’s nothing inore to say.” With a mighty effort, she wrenched herself under control and smeared the back of her hand across her wet cheeks.
“I’ll have Brent paged and get him to take you home,” he said, because it was the kindest way to put an end to a scene which had already dragged on too long.
“I’m sure he’ll be delighted to oblige. You’re the boss, after all, and what you say goes, doesn’t it?” she said sullenly. “I suppose you want the earrings back, as well. Well, why not? You’ve taken away everything else I ever cared about.”
“Keep the earrings, Willow. You earned them.”
“I’d rather have earned your love.”
Love? The word lingered like bad wine on his palate in the silence she left behind. If lying and manipulating amounted to love, he wanted nothing to do with it.
After a moment, (3abriella came to where he slumped against the table and slipped her hand into his. “Oh,
Max,” she murmured, “I feel so sorry for her! And it’s all my fault! If I’d listened to you—”
Pointedly, he freed his hand and checked his watch. “Look at that—after midnight already. The do upstairs must be winding down. Go get your parents while I line up our limo.”
He must have sounded as peeved as he felt because she looked at him anxiously. “But you and I will talk later?”
“Enough’s been said, for one night, Gabriella.” For a lifetime, come to that. Because, as the old saying went, the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
Impassively, he watched her leave. It was the one thing he could always count on her doing well.
Max barely said a word on the way home but her parents were very tired and seemed not to notice. They declined her offer of hot chocolate, and went straight upstairs as soon as they reached the penthouse.
Alone in the big living room, Gabriella faced her hus band, tension arcing between them like invisible lightning. “Is there anything I can get for you, Max?”
“No.” He ripped loose his bow tie. “Go to bed, Gabriella. If I want something, I’ll get it myself.”
“You’re not coming up with me?”
He looked her over from head to toe with such slow and scrupulous attention to every detail of her appearance that even she, used as she was to being in the public eye, found herself twitching nervously.
“No,” he finally said again. “You’re a very desirable woman an
d despite everything that’s gone down tonight, I’m not sure I trust myself not to make love to you.”
She shrugged and drummed up a smile to cover the
ominous uncertainty sweeping over her. “Would that be so very terrible?”
“It would be disastrous,” he said harshly. “I’m real istic enough to recognize a lost cause when it’s staring me in the face. You and I are not going to work out, Gabriella, much though we might wish we could.”
His words struck a dull, thudding pain to her solar plexus. “You’re giving up on us, because of what hap pened at the hotel?”
“Name one good reason why I shouldn’t.”
“I love you!” she cried, reaching for him. “Enough to fight for you, which I surely proved tonight.”
“Wrong,” he said. “All you proved is that when it comes down to the crunch, we play by different rules.”
“We were happy until Willow came between us with her half-truths!”
He went to stand at the open doors leading to the roof garden, and took a deep breath as if to cleanse his lungs of the air she breathed. “Willow is not the problem, Gabriella,” he said flatly, staring out at the bright city lights. “We are. The only way she was able to come be tween us tonight was because we let her. And the only thing we proved tonight is that our marriage is too fragile to withstand any sort of outside pressure.”
“How can you say that? We won.”
“That might be your idea of a victory, Gabriella, but it’s not mine. I’d rather have no mairiage than one so flawed that I never know from one day to the next if it’s going to fall apart because of some imagined sin on my part.”
She’d remained standing by the sofa, but anger sent her rushing over to grab him by the sleeve and haul him around to face her. “You listen to me, Max Logan! I’d find your holier-than-thou attitude a bit easier to swallow
if you weren’t every bit as much to blame as I am for the state our marriage is in. You never miss a chance to throw it in my face that Fve deceived you in the past, but I notice you’re not above resorting to blatant lies when it suits your purpose.”
‘I have never knowingly lied to you.”
He bore no resemblance at all to the man who’d se duced her with such tender passion just a few days before. His tone, his expression, even the arm she clutched, were iron-hard, and brought back such vivid reminders of the weeks following their marriage that the old Gabriella would have crumbled in the face of it. But that pale, in timidated creature bad had so little left to lose that fighting to hold on to it had been a lost cause from the start.
Today’s woman, though, had seen a glimpse of paradise and wasn’t about to forfeit it willingly. “You did!” she said heatedly. “You told me the apron I found in the kitchen had been left behind by a housekeeper when you knew it really belonged to Willow.”
“If that’s the case, this is the first I knew of it and I made an honest mistake, which is a whole hell of a lot different from telling an outright lie. But the fact that you’d allow so insignificant an item to be instrumental in eroding what little trust you have in me merely proves my point.”
“It need never have been an issue, if you’d been up front with me in the first place and told me Willow lived here for a month. But you couldn’t bring yourself to do that, could you?” She let go of his sleeve with fastidious distaste. “And you want to know why? Because you do such a good job of deceiving yourself and I am disap pointed beyond words to discover you could be such a coward.”
His face flushed dull red, his eyes sparked blue fury.
“Don’t push your luck, Gabriella. I’d flatten any man who dared call me that.”
“Sony if the truth hurts, but that hardly changes it. If you’d dared to face up to what Willow has really been after for months now, things would never have come to such a pitiful pass tonight.”
He shrugged. “Pitiful’s the word, all right, if a pair of earrings or an apron can bring about this much damage!”
“I’m not talking about material things like jewelry, or having some other woman make herself at home here. For heaven’s sake, you’re not a stupid man, even if you some times act that way. At some level, you must have known that her feelings for you crossed the line from professional to personal a long time ago.”
“Not necessarily. I don’t go around assuming every woman I clap eyes on has the hots for me.”
“Oh, spare me, Max! You kissed her and from all ac counts, she kissed you back. Are you trying to tell me you thought she was being motherly?”
Even before he replied, she knew she’d scored a point from the way his lips thinned into a severe line. “At the time, she agreed with me that it was a mistake best for gotten.”
Gabriella shook her head despairingly. “How is it that you are so ready to believe what another woman tells you despite evidence that’s she either lying or deluding her self, yet you refuse to accept that I mean it from the bot tom of my heart and soul when I say I love you, and everything I’ve ever done, ill-conceived or otherwise, proves it?”
“You call walking out on me after only six months of marriage proof that you.. .care about me?”
“It’s because I cared that I left. I couldn’t stand watch ing us destroy each other. And how come a man who
claims he isn’t a coward can’t bring himself to say the word ‘love’?”
“Because I don’t believe in tossing it around as a Band- AId solution every time something goes wrong in a rela tionship. It takes more than that to hold a couple to gether.”
“Yes, it does,” she said. “But love also goes a long way toward keeping a marriage intact when the going gets rough.”
“Then I guess that explains why ours is such a mess.” He tossed the words at her almost glibly, but she wasn’t about to let him get away with that. “It might not be in such bad shape if you were as quick to recognize your own weaknesses as you are mine.”
“And how do you figure that?”
“You make much of my not being able to trust you, but the fact is, you’re afraid to trust yourself.”
“I am not!”
“Yes, you are,” she said defiantly. “You’re afraid to look into your own heart.”
“Bull!”
“Really? Then answer me this.” She cupped his jaw and forced him to meet her gaze. “Have you ever, for a single moment, loved me?”
His glance veered away, past her and out to the dark waters of the strait. And she knew, if he could, he’d have disappeared into them and never surfaced again. Anything to avoid having to deal with a subject she’d never laid bare to him before because she hadn’t wanted to put him on the spot, and she supposed, if she were honest, because she’d been afraid to hear how he might respond.
But the way she saw it, they were at such a low point
that she might as well face all her demons and have done with.
“Well?” she said. “I’ve put my pride on the line and asked the question, Max. Do you have the guts to answer it honestly?”
CHAPTER NINE
THE strain of maintaining appearances for those last hours of her parents’ visit was worse than all that in the days which had gone before. Not that anyone made specific reference to the previous night’s closing act at the hotel; in fact, the morning routine they’d established began as usual. After Max left for the office, Gabriella served oven- warm brioches with fruit preserves, then her father took a swim in the pool while she and her mother lingered over coffee.
They were barely settled under the terrace umbrella, though, when Maria observed, “You have dark circles under your eyes, darling. Did you not sleep well?”
“Not particularly.” Gabriella pushed her fingers through her hair dispiritedly. “I miss you already, Mama. The time’s gone by so quickly and we haven’t taken you to half the places we’d planned to show you. You’ve spent most of your time here in the penthouse.”
“But we’ve seen how you live. When I’m home again, I’ll be able t
o picture you here with your husband, and I’ll remember the happy times we’ve shared with you.”
“Happy? Oh, Mama!” She’d promised herself she wouldn’t cry, but trying to hold back the tears was as impossible as trying to get Max to say he loved her. “You could hardly have helped hearing us after you’d gone to bed last night. The French doors were wide open, and I think half the people in this city probably must have heard.”
“So?”
146
“So you know that Max and I are anything but happy!”.
“I know that two people can fight as fiercely as they love. I know, too, that sometimes the love can become poisoned and seem more like hate.”
“And this doesn’t upset you?”
Her mother took a sip of coffee before replying,. “It would upset me more if I saw only apathy between you and your husband. Passion doesn’t kill a marriage, my daughter. Only indifference can do that.”
How true! Max’s dismissal of her question, his bruising detachment when at last he’d joined her in bed, had spelled out quite clearly that, as far as he was concerned, their marriage was dead. The poison, as her mother put it, had been left too long to do its treacherous work.
Her mother stroked her hand lovingly. “You’ll make up, as soon as we’re gone, Gabriella. It puts a strain on any marriage always to have to be on one’s best behavior in front of guests.”
“It’s more than that, Mama. i’m afraid the truth is that Max and I are too used to living apart. We don’t know how to be a real couple anymore.”
“Then stay at home. Remind him all over again how it is to come home at night to find his wife waiting.”
But sound though the advice was, and much though Gabriella would have loved to follow it, it caine too late.
“I suppose you’ll be leaving right after your parents are gone?” Max had said to her, just that morning.
She’d been in bed still when he’d come out of the bath room wearing only a pair of white briefs. His hair, still damp from the shower, lay flatter than usual against his well-shaped head. His jaw was smooth as silk, his eyes a stunning blue against his sun-dark skin.
He strode past the foot of the bed to fling open the long windows and as he passed, she picked up on a faint trace
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