Lisa smiled and nodded as her friend left, but she knew she wouldn’t do as Beth suggested. She’d never known Marcus to look so beaten as he had the night she’d tried to talk to him about giving him a child through artificial insemination. She’d never seen him so angry. Or so hurt. No, she couldn’t do that to him again.
TWO DAYS LATER when she unpacked Marcus’s suitcase and found the shirt rolled in with his other dirty clothes, she was tempted to change her mind. She picked up the shirt slowly, staring blankly at the lipstick-stained collar for a moment, her mind masked with disbelief. It couldn’t be.
Standing there, unable to move, to look away, she felt frightened—and stupid. Had Marcus…? Surely he hadn’t…No. Of course not. He wouldn’t. Not ever.
And then she remembered his phone call from New Jersey. Not only had he not called when he’d promised, he’d been strangely evasive.
She blinked, surprised when a tear splashed onto the incriminating collar. Had they come to this, then? Had they really come to this? Were their ties of friendship, their loyalties to each other, in jeopardy? Was the love she’d cherished for more than a decade going to slip through her fingers right along with her dream of having a child? She dropped the shirt as if she’d been burned.
And then just as suddenly picked it up again. The lipstick was still there. She could see it through the blur of her tears. She just couldn’t believe it. And didn’t know what to do about it. This happened to other women, other couples. Not to her and Marcus.
“Nothing happened.”
Lisa jumped. She hadn’t heard Marcus come upstairs.
“Something apparently did,” she said, throwing his shirt in his face. It was too much. To lose Marcus on top of everything else was just too much.
He grabbed her arm as she pushed by him. “Nothing happened, Lisa.”
She looked up at him, this man of her dreams, and even blinded by tears of anger and disappointment, she knew she still loved him. After ten years of marriage, after eighteen months of anguish, even after finding another woman’s makeup on his clothes, she felt the impact of him clear to her soul. “Her lipstick’s on your collar.”
Marcus dropped her arm and bowed his head. “We had dinner—and one dance. That’s all.”
It was enough. She knew him that well. Wrapping her arms around her middle, she warded off the darkness that threatened to consume her. “You wanted her.”
“She wanted me. And yes, I guess part of me wanted her, too, wanted to be with a woman who didn’t know I could only do half the job.”
A sob broke through the constriction in Lisa’s throat, and she backed away from him.
“Who was she?” She willed herself to speak calmly.
Marcus swore and strode over to her, grabbing her arms, forcing her to look at him. “Nobody. She was nobody, Lis. Just a woman. Any woman who’d looked at me the way she did would probably have had the same effect. Which, in the end, was no effect at all. Because she wasn’t you.”
“Was she pretty?” Lisa couldn’t let it go.
“She was pretty, sure, but so are you. And you’re the one I want to be with. You’re my best friend, Lis.”
She studied his face, his blue unblinking eyes. “Are you sure about that?”
“Absolutely.”
His gaze bore into her, telling her things mere words couldn’t, and suddenly some of the tension that had held her rigid, barely able to breathe, drained away, leaving her feeling weak and helpless. She sank against his chest.
He held her silently, his hand rubbing the back of her head soothingly as she soaked the front of his shirt with her tears. He was still wearing his business suit, and Lisa burrowed her arms beneath his jacket, taking comfort in his lean hard strength, letting his love console her, just as it had done for well over a decade. She needed him more than life itself. And she felt it all slipping away.
“I love you, Lis.” His voice was thick through the whispered words.
“I love you, too.”
But she knew that love might not be enough, not if he refused to believe in the strength of that love, not if he continued to blame himself for something he couldn’t help and was convinced that she blamed him, too.
MARCUS LAY FLAT on his back, staring at the shadows the moonlight made on the ceiling as he listened to Lisa breathing beside him. He’d made love to her that night, giving her everything he had to give, and she’d been smiling when she fell asleep in his arms. But still, he knew that what he had to give wasn’t enough. It was never going to be enough. Because no matter how often or how expertly he made love to her, he was never going to leave behind the seed of that love. He was never going to impregnate his wife. He wondered how long it was going to be until she started to think about leaving him for a man who could.
She stirred in her sleep, snuggling up against his chest, and Marcus automatically put an arm out to pull her close, settling her head in the crook of his shoulder. He used to love these moments in the night when he lay awake and cradled her, glorying in the knowledge that this gorgeous, intelligent, caring woman was his. Until he’d met Lisa, the only kind of affection he’d known had come in terms of discipline, respect and loyalty—necessary, but so cold. It had taken years before he’d really believed that Lisa’s body curled warmly and lovingly into his was something he could count on for the rest of his life.
Now the feel of her against him was merely a reminder of how he’d failed her, of what he couldn’t do, of things he couldn’t make right.
Being careful not to disturb her, Marcus got up from the bed and went downstairs, hoping to dispel his demons with a shot of whiskey. But after the second shot, he knew the hope was in vain. He sat alone in the living room of the home where he’d grown up, where his father and grandfather had grown up before him.
He had it all. He’d taken the family shipping business and turned it from a solid respectable venture into an enterprise that far surpassed even his father’s vision. Cartwright Enterprises had been through many transitions since its inception almost two centuries before. His early ancestors had made the family’s first millions in whaling and sealing, and the generation following them were glorified Yankee Peddlers. His grandfather had expanded into imports and exports. Marcus’s father had doubled the Cartwright shipping fleet before a car accident had taken his life—and his wife’s, as well.
But in the eight years since Marcus had taken over, Cartwright Enterprises had become a business of the nineties. It owned several of the companies it had once shipped for. It was no longer just the middle man.
And like his father before him, Marcus had done it all for the son to whom he would one day pass his heritage. He was a Cartwright. One of the Cartwrights. His ancestors, English gentry with everything but money, had come to the New World with dreams and determination. Through the early battles with Indians, the revolutionary war, the Civil War and both world wars, the Cartwrights had remained strong, determined and successful, each generation continuing and surpassing the achievements of the one before. And from the time he was old enough to understand, Marcus had worked hard to fulfill his responsibility to his birthright, to ensure that the breath of his ancestors, when he passed it on, would continue to thrive.
But unlike his father, who’d worked for financial power, Marcus had worked like a madman for another reason. He’d done it to buy his freedom, to have the time to be at home with his family when he had one, to make it to every school play, to watch each and every game, to attend all recitals, birthday parties and Christmas pageants. He wanted to make enough babies with Lisa to fill the rooms in the home he was born to, and to dispel forever the emptiness of his boyhood.
He didn’t look back on those lonely years with any fondness. His parents had been interested in raising the Cartwright heir, not a child.
Marcus reached for the bottle and poured another inch of scotch. His mind turned to his sterility, and he tried for the millionth time to think about the alternatives Lisa had talked about soon after
his diagnosis. But as hard as he’d tried, and God knew he’d tried, he just couldn’t consider them rationally. He felt the rage coming, felt it in the sudden heat in his veins, in the tenseness in his muscles. Why? By what cruel twist of fate did he have to be the one to end the Cartwright line, to silence forever the voices of his ancestors? He who wanted children more than wealth, who understood their value in a way his father never had?
He’d worked hard all of his life, earning an honest living when, in his position, it would have been surprisingly easy to do otherwise. He gave to charities. He upheld the faith of his ancestors and never balked when there was a task to do. He’d never left a job unfinished in his life.
So why had he been robbed of the ability to do the one thing he wanted most to do? There were plenty of men out there who didn’t want children, who fathered them without even knowing or caring. Yet it was Marcus who’d had that privilege revoked. His wife who had to look elsewhere to get his job done.
Marcus strode around the living room, trying to outdistance his demons. And as always, as the rage within him continued to boil, he was seized by the desire to just pack his bags and leave this town for a place where the Cartwright name meant nothing, where he could hide from his shortcomings—and his heritage. Where he could live out the rest of his days, if not in happiness, at least in peace. He’d have gone, too. If it wasn’t for Lisa.
Marcus took one last swallow from the crystal shot glass, then hurled it into the fireplace where it shattered into a thousand glittering pieces, reminiscent of the dreams he had once been foolish enough to have.
CHAPTER TWO
DREAMS. LISA HAD always had two of them. One was to grow up, get married and have babies as sweet as her little sister, Sara, had been. Lisa had been an only child, a somewhat lonely child, until she was ten years old. And then Sara had come along, surprising them all, like a ray of sunshine that continued to shine in Lisa’s heart long after her baby sister was gone.
Lisa’s second dream, also a by-product of Sara, was to become a pediatrician. So at least she had realized one of the two. And as the weeks passed, she immersed herself more and more in her work. Marcus was never home anymore, and on the rare occasions when he wasn’t working late, he kept busy in his den or out on the grounds, rarely smiling and hardly looking at Lisa at all.
So Lisa volunteered for an extra shift on call. She added to her already full patient load; she offered to cover for whatever physicians were on vacation or taking a long weekend to spend with their families. Anything she could do to stay busy, to keep her mind occupied, to ignore the fact that Marcus was slipping away from her. He still made wonderful love to her—Marcus had always had an incredible sexual appetite—but he didn’t gaze into her eyes while they were making love anymore, nor did he linger in her arms afterward.
Pushing away the fear that had become her constant companion, Lisa pulled some recently delivered X rays from their folder, placed them up on the view box beside her desk and flipped on the light so she could study the results. Her heart sank.
Little Willie Adams’s back was broken; he wouldn’t be playing Little League any more this season, and probably not next, either. Depending on the damage to his spinal cord, he might never be playing it again. Reaching for the phone, she punched in the number for one of the best neurosurgeons she knew, all the while thinking of the little redheaded boy lying so still in the hospital bed across the street. Willie was one of the patients Lisa saw gratis, courtesy of state welfare. He was one of six kids, the only boy, that his mother was raising single-handedly. His father had run off before Willie was born. The one good thing in Willie’s life was his success in Little League.
Lisa pulled into the gate at home two hours later, weary in body, but even wearier in soul. She’d spent an hour with Willie until Dr. Shea had come; she’d told Willie and his mother Willie’s prognosis, she’d answered all of his mother’s questions and watched Willie’s face turn to stone, but she’d never seen him shed a tear. Considering the amount of pain he was in, that was amazing in itself, but to have just had his one hope of getting out of the ghetto snatched away…
Lisa left her Mercedes in the circular driveway, then trudged up the steps, her briefcase weighing on her exhausted muscles as she let herself in. It was late, long past dinnertime, and she knew Hannah, the parttime housekeeper who saw more of Lisa and Marcus’s home than they did, bad left hours before. She started to call out for Marcus, needing him desperately, but closed her mouth before she wasted her breath. He’d been out until midnight or later most every night lately, attempting to keep Blake’s, a family-owned chain of department stores in Rhode Island, from going bankrupt. She didn’t begrudge him the time. Not really. She knew her husband well enough to know how good it made him feel to be able to help save someone else’s dream. Especially since he couldn’t seem to save his own.
But that didn’t stop her from needing him.
Taking her briefcase into the home office she shared with Marcus, she shrugged out of her suit jacket and rubbed the stiff muscles along the back of her neck. Sometimes she wondered if she was meant to be a doctor. She’d never been able to develop that impenetrable shell they’d talked about in medical school.
“Rough day?”
At the sound of Marcus’s voice she whirled around, filled with the instant warmth that still came to her every time he walked into a room.
“Yeah.” She didn’t elaborate as she once might have, rubbing at her neck again.
He looked relaxed, wearing slacks and a polo shirt, instead of one of the suits he always wore to work. She wondered how long he’d been home and was instantly disappointed that she hadn’t been here with him. The gorgeous Connecticut June weather was perfect for evenings sitting out under the stars, sharing a drink. Or more.
His eyes were loving, sympathetic, as he moved closer to her.
“You want to tell me about it?” He pushed her hands aside and began massaging her tense muscles with the expertise born of experience.
Lisa bowed her head, giving him easier access to her neck. “A patient of mine, an eleven-year-old boy, broke his back today playing baseball. He was sliding into home and the catcher fell on top of him.”
“God, the poor kid.” Marcus’s hands continued to work their magic.
“He’d just had an offer from a city team. He’s good, Marcus. And he’s inner city. Baseball was his one shot out.”
“He’s young, Lis. He’s got time to mend.” Marcus pulled her fully into his arms and Lisa soaked up his strength, nestling her head into her usual place on his shoulder.
“He’s paralyzed. The damage may be permanent.” As she said the words out loud, words she hadn’t yet had the heart to tell Willie or his mother, the dam inside her broke and she started to sob, not only for the stalwart little boy lying so still across town, but for the man who held her, for the permanent damage that long-ago fever had done to him, for the damage it was still doing to them.
Marcus held her until her emotion was spent. And then he started to kiss her, long, slow, tender kisses. The healing kind. Offering her forgetfulness in the one way that always worked. She clung to him desperately, and when they moved upstairs to their bedroom, arms wrapped around each other, she gave him all the love within her, all the passion only he could raise. He was her husband, her lover, her best friend. And just as she was going to do everything in her power to help Willie Adams, including footing his bills anonymously if she had to, she was going to do whatever it took to fix the problems between her and Marcus.
Her life’s work was saving lives, but her life was nothing if she didn’t have her soul mate beside her, sharing it with her.
WITH HER NEWFOUND RESOLVE still burning inside, Lisa approached her tenth wedding anniversary the following week with optimism. She checked in on Willie that morning, satisfied that he’d come through his second surgery better than they’d hoped, and then took the rest of the day off. She had some primping to do.
Stopping a
t the mall on the way home, she wandered through a couple of exclusive lingerie shops until she found just what she was looking for—a black pure-silk teddy. Marcus was a sucker for silk.
“Will there be anything else, Mrs. Cartwright?” the saleswoman asked when Lisa handed over her charge card.
“Is that lavender bubble bath?” Lisa gestured toward the display beside the counter.
“Yes, ma’am. It’s not too overpowering, though, and it’s full of moisturizers. I use it myself. Would you like to try some?”
“Sure, why not?” Lisa said, feeling a little decadent. These days she rarely had time for more than a quick shower, let alone a leisurely bubble bath, but her husband had always liked the scent of lavender. And she’d bet he could think of a few interesting things to do in a lavender-scented tub. He was wonderfully inventive.
She hurried home and stayed there only long enough to pack a few things for herself and a bag for Marcus. Telling Hannah not to bother with dinner, she jumped back in her car and headed out of New Haven. She knew exactly where she was going. Haven’s Cove, the beautiful private resort on the coast between New Haven and Milford. It was the perfect place for her and Marcus to celebrate. If the memories they’d find there didn’t remind them of all that they were to each other, nothing would.
She spent half an hour or more reacquainting herself with the grounds, glad to see that little had changed since the last time she’d been there, and then whiled away the afternoon in the salon, treating herself to the works. She was going to bring the hungry look back into Marcus’s eyes.
At five o’clock on the nose, she sent a telegram to Marcus: MEET ME AT HAVEN’S COVE. I NEED LOVIN’. And then she waited.
Some of the best hours in Lisa’s life had been in the cabanas at Haven’s Cove. It was where Marcus had first told her he loved her. Where, months after they’d become lovers, she’d finally seen the knowledge of her love for him dawn in his eyes. Where he’d asked her to marry him.
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