by Penny Jordan
He stopped looking for a good rock. “I can’t remember. It’s been years since I’ve done this.” He pushed his hands into his pockets so he wouldn’t throw rocks until he’d surpassed twenty. It would eat him alive now she’d given him a number to beat. He silently cursed her.
She held out her hand. “Phone, please.”
“Lauren—”
“You win, Paolo. I won’t flaunt my loose morals all over Milan. I just want to use the map thingy to find a place to eat. You can drop me at a café and I’ll figure things out from there.”
That didn’t sound like a win. It sounded like he wouldn’t know where she was.
“Don’t be silly. The house is fully stocked. At least come inside for a look. I’ll make you something if you’re hungry.” He glanced at his watch, recalling that he had a cocktail party at his aunt’s tonight, but he had time.
Since he didn’t have to collect Isabella, he recalled with a scowl.
“Fine,” Lauren said with a short sigh of frustration as she began climbing the steps that led to the pool, planting her feet with little stomps. “But I want it on record that I hate acting like such a doormat.”
“Accepting my invitation to cook for you is polite, not weak,” he stated.
“You weren’t serious, so that makes me weak. The minute someone with the least bit of assertiveness tells me what to do, I fold like a cheap lawn chair. ‘Lauren,’” she mocked, “‘you have to come to New York. No one else can afford it.’” She swung around at the top of the stairs, tapping her own chest. “I didn’t want to go, you know. I didn’t want to meet some military flyboy who saw me as a challenge. I certainly didn’t want to marry him. If I don’t start standing up for myself, I’m going to raise another wimp who trembles like a Chihuahua all her life like I do.”
He stood on the step one down from the top, trapped in the stairwell by her passionate speech. She was almost eye level with him and he couldn’t get past her without touching her. She had no idea the power she had over him right now. All he could think was that he only had to lean forward a few inches to kiss her. He was the one in danger of trembling and folding.
He kept his one hand locked on the cold rail and flattened the other on the damp stone wall, focusing instead on all that she’d said. Most specifically, I didn’t want to marry him. He’d been tortured by the vasectomy remark the whole way here, trying to dismiss it, but she’d sounded so bitter and convinced.
“You’re shivering like a toy poodle right now,” he noted to distract himself from his disturbing inner conflicts. “Go inside. The lock is coded to your birthday.”
That made her take a step back. “How do you know my birth date?”
“We met on your birthday.”
She snorted. “Crystal lied. It wasn’t my birthday. I’m October, not April.”
Well, didn’t he feel a fool. He’d been using that date as one of his pin codes for years.
The warmth that greeted Lauren as she entered was like a welcoming hug. It wasn’t just the central heat, but the open plan and soft lines in the overstuffed furnishings. Even the kitchen with its shiny appliances was a sunny place that encouraged lingering.
“The house is a hundred years old, but the interior was redone last year. Take off your shoes. The tiles are warm,” Paolo said.
She did, sighing as she moved through the rooms of heritage blue and sea foam green with splashes of sunset yellow and moody indigo. Upstairs in the master bedroom, translucent curtains framed the windows while French doors led to a private balcony overlooking the lake. The house was roomy yet cozy, extravagant, yet practical. She felt at home.
Damn you, Paolo.
Returning to the kitchen, she found him with his sleeves rolled back, water set to boil on the stove as he chopped fragrant herbs on a cutting board.
“You were serious,” she said, utterly taken aback.
“Of course.”
“Huh. I’ve been doing the cooking for so long I can’t remember what it’s like to watch.” She looked out all the windows, fingers trailing the smooth edges of windowsills and cupboard doors, eating up quaint details in the decor so she wouldn’t gawk at the handsome man moving with such confident economy around the spacious kitchen.
“Why didn’t you want to marry him?” Paolo asked behind her, startling her with the question that nudged like a hard shove.
She glanced back, mentally taking a photo of his masculine grace as he skimmed the herbs off the cutting board into a saucepan, filling the room with scents of crushed garlic and tangy basil.
“That was hindsight talking,” she clarified, turning back to the window. “Five years of realizing I’d married the wrong kind of man. If I wasted my youth on anything, it was waiting for my husband to come home and start our life together. He was never going to.”
“Because he was a military man.”
She felt her shoulders fall. More doormat behavior, coming up.
“I don’t want to talk about this, Paolo. You’ll call me a liar, and the lie is acting like Ryan was a flawless hero who deserved my devotion and still does. I can’t keep doing it. I’m too angry with him. It’s another reason I had to get away. People kept offering me sympathy and I’m ready to spit venom. It’s not nice.”
“Because he wasn’t honest about not wanting children.”
Her chest swelled with unspoken anger. “He wasn’t honest about anything,” she said, trying to keep her voice even and failing miserably.
Silence.
She curled her fingers in the white lace curtain, trying to hold the guilty anguish at bay, but it pressed outward, making her shoulders ache and her throat sting.
“I asked him for a divorce,” she choked out, unable to hold it back. “He didn’t want to give it to me. I keep thinking he was distracted and that’s what got him killed.”
CHAPTER FIVE
PAOLO HAD NEARLY blown off his fingers at eleven, playing with fireworks. This felt like that same moment of realizing he was too close, a life-changing explosion imminent.
Lauren wore the same shattered look she’d had on her face when he had arrived at the Bradleys’. Her skin was nearly translucent, her eyes like bruises. The tiniest flicker of dimming hope quested in her gaze. Please tell me it’s not true.
An instinctive need to cradle and comfort her had him taking a step toward her before he stopped himself. Was he insane? She had just admitted to being at fault for Ryan’s death!
With a distracted glance around, he got his bearings, remembered he was cooking, but at least he was at a point where he could let things simmer since his concentration was shot. He pushed a heavy hand through his hair.
“Why?” he demanded. “Why would you do that to him? Because he wasn’t coming home often enough? You knew what you were marrying.”
“Did I, Paolo? Did I really?” She turned all the way around, blinking wet eyes as she fought for control, arms protectively crossed over her chest.
“He was serving his country,” he insisted, hammering the points he’d used to justify to himself why Ryan deserved this woman. “Was it so hard to step outside yourself and see there are bigger things than playing house?”
“I wasn’t playing!” She came a few steps toward him, angry energy spinning around her like a funnel cloud.
He felt it try to yank him into a fight and rooted his feet, holding his stance against her whirling temper as he searched for the source, sensing it was both in and outside himself.
“I realize you and Ryan got drunk off your faces at his thirtieth,” she continued heatedly, “but it was still early in the evening when I asked you if he cheated on me while he was away. You acted like I was the lowest form of life for even thinking it. ‘Stop looking for excuses to go after other men,’” she repeated hotly. “That’s what you said to me. I felt exactly th
e way you wanted me to feel. Disloyal, paranoid and wrong. Well, guess what, Paolo?”
Her jagged question, laced with bitter irony, made him shake his head, refusing to accept that she knew, that he would be caught out in a weak moment when a prevarication had seemed the lesser of two evils.
He remembered everything about the evening she was talking about: the unwelcome excitement he’d fought as he’d anticipated seeing her; the way he’d struggled not to reveal his resurgence of fascination and desire from the second he’d spotted her; the blaze of heat that had engulfed him when she’d approached him. Even the shower of culpability that had hit him before she’d spoken hadn’t been cold enough to kill his desire for another man’s wife.
He’d reminded himself that he’d vowed to Ryan that nothing would ever happen again. He’d fought everything he was feeling, telling himself she was being so earnestly bashful and tentative to tease him. She had wrung her timorous hands while her twenty-two-year-old body had been rocking a sexy black cocktail dress and a pair of four-inch heels that had set every man in the room alight.
She was trying to get a rise out of him, to see if she could taunt him into another rash act like at the wedding, he’d told himself. All he’d wanted was to keep a wall firmly between them. There couldn’t be any openings, even if he did know something that might make her available....
Paolo had shut down the thought and the conversation as swiftly and ruthlessly as possible. He wanted to do the same now, but Lauren was still talking.
“His lover found me online. I’ll be nice and call her that since she believed he truly loved her. That’s why she had an affair with a married man, she said. You know what’s wrong with digital communication? You can’t burn it. Hitting Delete doesn’t feel as permanent, especially when every word is imprinted right here.” Lauren tapped the middle of her forehead. “No matter how I try to forget, the begging for forgiveness is carved into my psyche. I knew he was a player but I thought I was different. Did you know, Paolo? Did you know then, when I asked you?”
Lie, he told himself, but he couldn’t. Not again. It had chewed on his conscience all this time, but he hadn’t been willing to break up his best friend’s marriage. Not when he’d nearly done it once before. He had owed Ryan for that and, now he looked back on it, realized it was the reason he hadn’t made much effort to see his friend since. He’d resented withholding his suspicions from Lauren. It had made him feel sordid and had severely damaged the respect he’d had for Ryan.
His hesitation was all the answer she needed. Her face paled into a look of disillusionment and betrayal then cold criticism. She took a step back as though repelled, forcing him to rush with a defense.
“I didn’t know. It was a collection of things I’d heard. A possibility, not a certainty.” An awareness that Ryan had never gone long without sex and a remark from Vittorio that he’d seen a man who looked like Ryan in a low-end bar in Berlin, a buxom fräulein in his lap.
“Yet you made me feel like a criminal.” Her face contorted with the stunned pain of misplaced trust. She bit her lips together, but her chin crinkled and her brows came together in deep hurt.
He knew he had to say something, but couldn’t form a reply to save his life, and she was shaking her head, shutting him out, making him desperate. Making his stomach tie up.
With a pained sob, Lauren took off out of the room, snatching up his keys along the way.
“No! Lauren—!” Before he could go after her, a hissing sound behind him warned of a pot overboiling. In two steps he was back at the stove, snapping off the gas then racing after Lauren.
She wasn’t tearing out of the drive in his Lamborghini as he’d feared. It was worse. She’d popped the lid into the storage compartment and was trying to lift her bags out of it.
“What are you doing?” He brushed her out of the way to lift them himself. “What do you need so damned badly you’d give yourself a miscarriage over it?”
“Just go, okay? I’ll stay alone in your wretched house hosting pity parties for myself the way I’ve been doing for months and you can go live your life of righteous double standards.” She wiped angry fingers under her wet eyes before yanking up the handle of her bag, bouncing and rattling its wheels over the stones toward the front door.
Over her shoulder, she continued acridly, “Go sleep with your future wife and conveniently forget to mention you have a baby on the way with another woman. I’m glad you don’t believe me. I hate all of you, the way you stick together and act like your sexual needs are more important than our hearts. No, you’re not invited in.”
She barred the door when he tried to come in. Pointing to the stoop, she only let him set down her remaining bags then dragged them inside to thump into a pile around her ankles.
“Let me carry them up the stairs for you,” he cajoled.
“I’ll manage.” Standing in the crack of the door so only half of her was visible, she let him glimpse the hollow point in one smudged copper eye. She was devastated, but what was worse was the flatness. Until this moment, he’d always seen a certain reliance and confidence in her eyes when she looked at him. As though she knew she could count on him. Now there was only dejection and betrayal.
“The keys are with the car. Goodbye, Paolo. This time I mean it.”
She closed the door and he heard the electronic lock hum into place.
He lifted his finger to hover it over the keypad, determined to go inside and explain—What? How could he defend himself, or Ryan for that matter? His ex-wife had lied to him. He knew what betrayal felt like. It didn’t just undermine your belief in everything you’d been raised to see as inviolable, it crushed your ego. At least he had heard it from his spouse.
He pinched the bridge of his nose, hating himself.
Walk away, part of him urged. Let it go. Let her go.
Why in hell had Ryan done it? No man in his right mind would cheat on her. She was...
He rubbed the back of his neck, refusing to let himself dwell on exquisite memories of lips supple as rose petals, nipples so turgid and aroused he could hardly stop sucking on them, a wet pocket of heat so sensitive she’d climaxed the first time he’d pressed his finger inside her.
Breathing hard, he made himself return to the car when everything in him was screaming to go inside and take.
Who was he kidding? She’d claw his eyes out. And wasn’t it painfully funny how the thought of fighting past her defenses to the passionate woman beneath made the blood in his arteries sting with the urge to battle through and conquer.
This was the problem. His primitive self, so unpredictable and given to self-destruction, wanted things that were no good for anyone.
He drove back to Milan in a state of unrest, trying to convince himself it was for the best that she hated him. Maybe Ryan had been a cheat, but it didn’t make sleeping with the man’s wife okay. It didn’t mean Lauren was telling the truth about the baby.
Wallowing in his foul mood, he cursed passionately over tiny inconveniences like his shirt bringing the hanger with it as he pulled it off the rung. His cuff buttons refused to release and then, as he finally removed the shirt he was wearing, Lauren’s mobile phone dropped out of his shirt pocket onto the carpet. He stared at it for a long moment, striving for control, then eventually swore tiredly.
Searching out the number for the villa, he called her. It rang four times before she answered cautiously, “Buenasera.”
“It’s me. I have your mobile. I’ll bring it out tomorrow,” he told her.
Nothing.
“Lauren?”
She swallowed audibly and said a strained, “I’m sleeping,” then hung up on him.
She wasn’t sleeping. She was crying. Damn you, Ryan.
Damn himself. He shouldn’t have left her like that, but the last time he’d tried to comfort her—
Dio! What an untenable situation. Why hadn’t he said something to Ryan at least? Chastised him?
Because he hadn’t seen Ryan more than three or four times since that night. Occasionally he had received an email reading something like, Hey Buddy, I have a layover in Amsterdam. Come by for a beer? It was even more seldom that Paolo had been able to make it.
When they had sat down, it had been a rehash of glory days and whatever chances Ryan was taking on his missions and ruthless ribbing about how staid and responsible Paolo had become. They were both well past the age when they bragged about women, so the topic was avoided. Still, all the wild talk out of Ryan had often left Paolo wondering when his friend would grow up.
Ryan hadn’t had to, he supposed. That was the major difference between the two of them. Losing his father had been a lesson in mortality for Paolo, one that Ryan had never taken seriously despite watching comrades fall around him. Ryan had lived in a bubble of belief that he was free from impact no matter what he did.
And Paolo had perpetuated that belief by not challenging him on his betrayal of Lauren. Lauren’s asking for a divorce, questioning his fidelity, would have been Ryan’s first hint that he wasn’t as golden and untouchable as he’d come to believe. Thinking she was responsible for Ryan’s death was a burden Lauren didn’t deserve to bear. Paolo, the best friend, should have been the one to instill in Ryan that actions had consequences. If anyone was to blame for Ryan losing his life, it was Paolo. He should have made him see it was possible.
Instead he’d enabled Ryan to cheat on his wife, perpetuating Ryan’s belief that Lauren would never know and so wouldn’t be hurt by it. Perhaps Ryan had even operated under the certainty he would never be hurt by it.
Because his heart hadn’t been as deeply involved as his wife’s?
Disturbed, Paolo stroked his thumb on the cool black screen of Lauren’s phone. Ryan had loved Lauren, hadn’t he? Whenever Paolo had asked about her, his friend had always smiled with deep satisfaction. Smug, almost.