by Ciji Ware
Serena knew she was starting to sound petulant, but she couldn’t help herself. Jack had now all but admitted he was, indeed, one of those emotionally unreliable characters that had been the bane of her adult life. Within a brief twenty-four hours he had made a complete about-face, intimating that it was she, and she alone, who had rushed into their relationship. She stared at him with bitter disappointment. What was unfolding in these beautiful surroundings was totally infuriating—and she felt blindsided.
Even so, if she were honest with herself, a tiny doubt had surfaced when he didn’t turn up at Ca’Arco Antico. The texts he’d sent sounded an alarm bell that she’d obviously ignored, ascribing her feelings of unease as merely her old paranoia raising its ugly head. But now...
She felt an utter fool.
“Serena, we both knew from the start that Venice was having its way with us—”
“I was the one that first posed that possibility!” she snapped. “You were the one who said to disregard it, but hey... I’m glad you’re being so honest about your uncertainty concerning the two of us.” She glared across the table at him, adding, “I just wish you’d declared that playing this exit card was your default M.O. before we made love at the atelier, and prior to my asking for help regarding the flooding at the palazzo.”
“I wasn’t ‘playing’ anything,” he retorted.
She balled up her large, snowy linen napkin between both hands.
“Well, you know I’m the daughter of a dry drunk. I cannot deny that I’ve gotten mighty addicted to you, Jack Durand, to say nothing of your come-hither ways. Unfortunately, my faulty assumption, given everything that’s happened between us, was that you felt the same. Your abrupt pullback, now, is definitely coming as a shock... but then—that’s the chance we all take when we ignore the evidence, isn’t it?”
“It’s nothing you’ve done—”
“You bet it’s nothing I’ve done—other than to ignore the facts!” she interrupted. “Your own sister sounded the warning at the airport. ‘Meet my elusive brother, Jack.’ I made the mistake of thinking, as things went along with us here, that this time it was different for you.”
“Believe me, Serena, it’s different!” he declared heatedly, and then lowered his voice to avoid garnering unwanted attention in the hushed dining room. “I’ve felt the exact same pull towards you, but the only sane thing to do at this juncture is for me first to deal with the situation with Lauren and—”
“And what?” she hissed, unable to hide her exasperation.
Jack hesitated and then replied with resignation, “See where we are with everything.”
“Oh, puh-leez,” she declared with undisguised sarcasm. “This is just nuts!”
“You’re probably right, and believe me, I’m well aware that I’ve had this particular character flaw of push-pull in the past.”
“I thought you’d gotten over it,” she replied softly and heard the catch in her voice.
Jack paused as if carefully debating his next words. Then he said, “So had I.”
Serena’s mind was racing with five different notions for how she could make an exit without causing a scene.
“I-I can’t stay,” she said, finally.
“Yes you can. Let’s have a nice dinner. I want you to.”
“You can’t have what you want this time,” she bit back, desperate to make her departure before the tears spilled down her cheeks. “Please give me back my key.”
She carefully shook out her linen napkin and began to fold it in neat squares while she watched Jack dig in his pocket and place the key to the front door of her guesthouse between them on the table. After another long pause, Jack spoke first.
“Well, at least I hope you know that I’ll do everything I can to help you with the seepage issue at the palazzo.”
“Oh! What a comfort! You care about seepage?”
She flung her napkin at his chest.
“Serena... this isn’t the way I—”
She cut him off.
“Now, here’s some honesty back from me.” She raised her right hand. “I swear upon Saint Mark and all the other holies around here that I will never again—as I did those years in Las Vegas—allow myself to pine an instant over an emotionally untrustworthy guy who can’t—or doesn’t chose—to be a central part of my life!”
She grabbed the key off the table, rose from her chair, and glanced toward the exit.
“Serena, look, I am so sorry for all this...”
She shot daggers down at him and continued as if he hadn’t spoken.
“Trust me, I will soon recover from this coitus interruptus because the man I want is someone who also pines to be with me, like I do with him—you know what I’m saying?”
“I do pine.”
“There you go again!” she protested. “Push-pull.”
Before Jack could reply, Serena seized her purse from the floor and then rose to her full height beside their table.
“And by the way, what we’re arguing about is not over future promises to each other or—God forbid—the ‘M Word,’ marriage, if that’s what’s triggered this insanity, though marriage is very much something I want in my life one day,” she declared. “It’s about knowing—without a single doubt—that the guy in my life is the guy in my life. That he has my back under any and all circumstances... and that I have his!”
She turned, but before she could take a step Jack pleaded, “Serena, please don’t go. Maybe I should explain to you—”
“Any more of your ‘explanations’ will just make this worse!” she exclaimed over her shoulder. Then, she turned to face him again. “But I do want to thank you for warning me now, rather than when I got back to New Orleans, that you’d pull something like this. And if Lauren Hilbert ever gets wind of what happened between us here, you can just sing her that old song.”
“What song?” Jack asked, looking as if he were actually trapped in the lowest rung of Dante’s Inferno.
By this time, she was seething with anger at the notion that Jack had calculated he could avoid a scene simply by playing the “I-have-to-deal-first-with-Lauren-Hilbert” card. The plain fact was he simply was exhibiting his well-documented too-close-for-comfort emotional claustrophobia.
“Oh, you know that tune,” Serena replied with a brittle smile. “‘It was great fun... but it was just one of those things...’”
“That’s not how this was and you know it!”
“Do I? I’m sure Lauren will forgive you for this minor ‘slip’ because it sounds to me as if the long-distance toe dance you two have had going—where you’ve kept each other at arm’s length for years—is exactly what both of you really want.”
“It’s not what I want, but—”
“Jack,” she warned in a low tone of voice. “What’s just happened here is not what I wanted either.”
For some strange reason, she’d suddenly grown very calm. She put her purse’s strap over her shoulder as if she were merely departing for a brief visit to the ladies room to refresh her make-up.
“Then why won’t you sit down?” he urged, adding, “Please.”
She ignored his request and replied quietly, “I’m glad you finally played it straight and told me tonight that you needed a break. What I need, though, is to put a period at the end of this particular sentence.”
She realized she startled him by coming around to his side of the table, bending down, and lightly kissing him on both cheeks as she had when she’d arrived earlier. He had done her a favor, she told herself, fighting the lump in her throat that had grown the size of a ravioli. Knowing Jack during this brief, intense time had shown her that she could feel love again. It had demonstrated there was a possibility that there existed someone out there with whom she might want to share a life.
It just wasn’t going to be Jack. And that fact nearly cut off her breath.
She stood back and drank in the sight of his face, handsome as always despite his expression of—what? Pained relief? Locking gl
ances, she lectured herself to be thankful she’d only known him less than a month and that he’d awakened her from the beautiful, romantic, impossible dream that was Venice before she’d totally lost her heart and soul.
At least, she prayed that was true. Certain memories she’d shared with him, though, would last her a lifetime. But, she would get over this, she vowed silently. She’d done it before.
Gratitude, Serena. Feel thankful you are still able to experience such wonderful feelings of joy... and let it go this time...
“Serena, can’t you just sit down and we can—”
“Goodnight.” she murmured, firm in her resolve to get away from the table with her dignity intact. “Safe travels home, Giovanni. And thank you for recruiting Stefano and his crew. We can take it from here.”
The disconcerted look on Jack’s face at the mention of Stefano Fabrini morphed into a genuine grimace, although she hadn’t a clue why that should be.
With a small shrug, Serena turned and—in an admirable display of poise, she thought—slowly walked out of the roof-top restaurant just as the waiter arrived at the coveted table by the window to serve their favorite first course, orecchiette con amorini.
CHAPTER 11
Jack recalled his flight back to New Orleans as one of loneliest twelve hours of his life. Fortunately, a text message with an invitation to dinner at the Duvallons his first night home awaited him as soon as he landed at Louis Armstrong International.
After their meal, King invited him onto the wrought iron gallery of his home that overlooked Dauphine Street in the Lower French Quarter.
“Here,” King said, handing Jack a brandy. “I ’spect getting back to New Orleans feels like quite a change after all that snow in Venice you described tonight. It’s amazingly balmy, here, for late January, don’t you think? ’Bout fifty degrees this hour, the weatherman said.”
“Is Corlis joining us?” Jack asked.
“She will in a minute. Since I did the cooking tonight, it’s her turn to stack the dishes in the dishwasher,” he said with a lazy smile.
Jack had always admired the rather egalitarian marriage between Louisiana’s celebrated crusader to save historic buildings and New Orleans’s best-known TV anchor. Both were busy people, just like Serena and him... but before his thoughts drifted too far in that direction, King bid him to take a seat in one of the wicker chairs.
“You said you wanted to ask me something?”
Jack nodded, deciding to get right to the point.
“Do you know—or have you ever met—Serena Antonelli?”
“From the costume company Antonelli’s?” King asked, nodding affirmatively. “I know who she is, of course, but haven’t met her, I don’t think.”
“Do you know that the two of you are cousins?”
King laughed. “Our family’s been here so long, I’m cousins with practically everyone in New Orleans.”
“Her mother was a Kingsbury.”
“Yeah...” King said, looking thoughtful. “Actually, now that I think about it, I’ve heard Serena’s name mentioned over the years, but my magnolia mama was never close to the women in her family. Too much competition, I guess.”
Jack knew well the troubled relationships King had endured within his complicated family circle, so he merely nodded and made no further comment about Serena. However, King was clearly intrigued that Jack had asked about her.
“So... I take it you know her. How did you meet?”
“On the way to Venice.”
“Well, well,” he chuckled. “And did you see her while you were in that most romantic of cities?”
“Dinner a few times,” Jack replied noncommittally, but King had caught the scent.
“And—?” his friend demanded in a teasing tone.
“She’s a terrific, talented lady, but as a result of meeting her, I’ve got something else I’ve got to ask you.”
King stopped smiling at the seriousness of Jack’s tone and gazed at his friend with his full attention.
“Shoot.”
Jack inhaled a deep breath. King was a few years older than he was and when it came to politics and public scandals, the crusader was deeply knowledgeable about where most of the bodies were buried in New Orleans.
“Do you have any first-hand information about the role either of my uncles may have played back in the day regarding the construction or maintenance of the Seventeenth Street and London canals?”
King looked startled by the question and then narrowed his gaze.
“Why are you interested in that subject after all these years?”
“Before I can answer that,” Jack replied, “I have to stress that this is one of those ‘Cone of Silence’ conversations,” he added, making an arc in the air above his head with both hands. “I’m actually violating journalist ethics naming a potential source on my story to anyone outside the Times-Picayune, but I have to talk to someone who’ll understand what I’m up against, and you are my first and only choice.”
King, for many years a lawyer who specialized in land use and saving the city’s historic housing stock, grew grave.
“Look, Jack, I’ll consider whatever you want to tell me privileged information. It won’t leave this balcony, guaranteed.”
King was his best friend. Corlis and her husband were the most trustworthy people he knew. Jack decided to come clean.
“I’m interested to find out if either of my uncles could legitimately—or even partially—be blamed for the canal and levee collapses because I learned that Serena Antonelli’s brother, Cosimo, and his pregnant wife lived on Fortieth Street in Lakeview where they—”
“They drowned when the canals gave way,” King intervened. “I read about it in your newspaper when it happened. Did you cover that story?”
“Thankfully, no. I was too busy on my environmental beat talking to scientists who were trying to figure out whether it was the wind or the water that caused so much damage during Katrina.”
“But the role your uncles may or may not have played in this sorry history of the canals and levees is important to you because...?”
King let his sentence dangle and looked at Jack expectantly.
“Because I fell pretty hard for Serena Antonelli and it matters if my uncles had a hand in her brother’s death.”
“Whoa,” King responded.
“Yeah... whoa... big time.” Jack raised a warning hand. “It has obviously occurred to me that it would be a total non-starter if my family, in any way, was responsible for what happened to her brother, his wife, and their unborn child.”
“That’s mighty heavy,” King agreed, his sympathy a welcome respite from Jack’s thinking these thoughts on his own. “So, how did you leave it with the nice lady in Venice?”
“I didn’t tell her about the possible connection, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“It is. And why didn’t you tell her?”
“I figured I should find out first if there was a connection—and then... deal with it. Complicating everything is that if my uncles are involved in this story, I can’t tell anyone until my editor and I decide how the information will be used—and published.”
“So when it occurred to you there might be a connection, you abruptly came back to New Orleans, leaving Serena—whom you’ve just told me you fell for hard—with no idea of this possible linkage between your families?”
“That is correct, and you’re too damn smart.”
Ignoring Jack’s aside, King asked, “So, assuming she fell just as hard for you, she still thinks everything is a ‘go’ between you two, am I right?” Jack nearly winced in the wake of King’s stern, disapproving look.
“She did until our last few days together... but not any more,” Jack replied glumly. “I didn’t call or see her for two days before I left, and she sensed, right away, during our last dinner together that something had gone wrong between us. Now, I ’spect, she just thinks I’ve cooled down on how I feel about her—and probably concludes it’s
because I’m a commitment-phobe, or something.”
King remained silent as a sign he wanted Jack to explain himself more thoroughly before rendering any opinions.
“Just before I left Venice I told Serena that I’d have to resolve my on-off relationship with Lauren Hilbert before she and I could—”
“That was your excuse for not telling her what was up with you?” interrupted King.
Jack nodded sheepishly. “I had to give her some reason I was pulling back until I knew what the story is with my uncles. Serena thinks I’ve simply gone into my famous ‘Keep-’Em-At-Arms-Length’ mode.”
“Everybody around here knows you do that, so maybe she already heard about your M.O.,” King agreed mildly. Then he demanded, “Why didn’t you just tell her your worries?”
Jack shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
“I didn’t want to malign my uncles until I really know if they had anything to do with the canal failures that killed all those people in Lakeview. It’s not fair to them, either, to speculate to outsiders about any accusations until I dig out the facts about all this. So... I just kept my distance from Serena my last two days there... and then I left.”
“You did a proverbial about-face, did you? Smooth move.” King cast Jack a sour look. “Corlis did that kinda thing to me once, years ago, and then I reacted like a total ass because I didn’t understand how this ‘don’t fry a source’ thing worked with you reporters and it all nearly derailed us, permanently!”
“Jesus, King—”
“Well, I’m just saying that if you really think she’s the one, you gotta trust that she can handle whatever it is you ultimately find out—and journalistic ethics be damned.”
“It just doesn’t work that way!” Jack shot back with frustration. “And besides, how could she handle it, as you say, if it turns out—”
“Well, maybe it’s time to find out what’s real between you?” insisted King with a wave of his hand. “And what about Lauren?” he pressed. “How much does Serena know about that torturous tale?”
“I told her some of the history between us,” Jack replied, knowing he sounded defensive.
“And is Lauren still in the picture?” King challenged.