“I’ll get you some.”
“I’ll get it myself, thank you.”
Her voice was cool. Don’t argue with me, it said, and he decided it might be best to take the hint.
He sighed, went back into the living room and sat down, nursing his cognac, anticipating her return, trying to figure out what to say, hell, trying to figure out what he could possibly do, to convince her he was sorry.
The seconds passed, and the minutes, and finally he put down his glass, stood up and walked back out to the hallway.
“Joanna?”
There was a light at the end of the hall. He followed it, to the kitchen. Joanna was standing in front of the open refrigerator, in profile to him. Her body was outlined in graceful brush strokes of light: the lush curve of her breast, the gentle fullness of her bottom, the long length of her legs.
His throat went dry. His hands fisted at his sides as he fought against the almost overwhelming urge to go to her, to take her in his arms and hold her close and say, Don’t worry, love, everything’s going to be fine.
He cleared his throat.
“Did you find the aspirin?”
She nodded and shut the refrigerator door.
“Yes, thank you. I was just making myself some cocoa.”
“Cocoa?” he said, and frowned.
She went to the stove. There was a pot on one of the burners. She took a wooden spoon from a drawer and stirred its contents.
“Yes. Would you like some?”
He shut his eyes against a sudden memory, Joanna at the stove in Connecticut, laughing as she stirred a saucepan of hot milk.
Of course it’s cocoa, David. What else would anybody drink when there’s a foot of snow outside?
“David?”
He swallowed, looked at her, shook his head.
“Thanks, but I don’t think it would go so well with cognac.”
She smiled faintly. Then she shut off the stove, took a white porcelain mug from the cabinet and filled it with steaming cocoa.
“Well,” she said, “good night.”
“Wait.” He stepped forward, into the center of the room. “Don’t go, not just yet.”
“I’m tired,” she said in a flat voice. “And it’s late. And I don’t see any point in—”
“I’m sorry.”
Her head came up and their eyes met. Joanna’s throat constricted. He looked exhausted and unhappy, and she imagined herself going to him, taking him in her arms and offering him comfort. But there was no reason for her to comfort him, dammit, there was no reason at all!
It was he who’d hurt her, who’d been hurting her, from the minute she’d awakened in the hospital.
Tears stung in her eyes. She blinked hard and forced a smile to her lips.
“Apology accepted,” she said. “We’ve both been under a lot of pressure. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”
“Joanna.”
His hands closed on her shoulders as she walked past him.
She stood absolutely still, her back to him.
She’d been awake all the night, staring at the ceiling and telling herself that what she felt for her husband—what she’d thought she’d felt—had been a lie, that in her confusion and the loneliness that came of her loss of memory, she’d fooled herself into thinking he meant something to her.
And she’d believed it.
Then, why was his touch making her tremble? Why was she fighting the urge to turn and go into his arms?
Stop being a fool, she told herself angrily, and she slipped out from beneath his hands and swung toward him.
“What do you want now, David? I’ve already accepted your apology.” She took a ragged breath. “In a way, I guess some of what happened was my fault.”
“No. You didn’t—”
“But I did. I showed up uninvited, as you so clearly pointed out. And…and I suppose I should have worn something more in keeping with…with my status as your wife.”
“Dammit, Jo—”
“As for what happened in the limousine…” Her cheeks colored but her gaze was unwavering. “I’m not a child, David. I’m as responsible for it as you. I shouldn’t have let you—I shouldn’t have…”
“Will you listen to me?”
“Why? We have nothing to discuss…unless you want to talk about a separation.”
He recoiled, as if she’d hit him again. She couldn’t blame him. What she’d said had shocked her, too. She hadn’t expected to say anything about a separation, even though that was all she’d thought about for the last few hours.
“What in hell are you talking about?”
“It would be best,” she said quietly. “You know we can’t go on the way we are.”
“You’re talking nonsense!”
“Just give me a couple of days to—to find a place to live and—”
His hands clamped down on her shoulders.
“Are you crazy? Where in hell would you go?”
“I don’t know.” Her chin lifted. “I’ll find a place. All I need is a little time.”
“You’re ill, don’t you understand that?”
“I’m not ill. I just—”
“Yeah, I know. You just can’t remember.” David’s eyes darkened. “Forget it, Joanna. It’s out of the question.”
“What do you mean, it’s out of the question?” She wrenched free of his grasp. “I don’t need your permission to leave. I’m not a child.”
“You’re behaving like one.”
They glared at each other. Then Joanna slammed the mug of cocoa down on the table, turned on her heel and marched out of the room.
“Joanna?” David stalked after her. She was halfway up the stairs. “Where in hell do you think you’re going?”
“Stop using that tone of voice with me.” She spun toward him, her eyes flashing with anger. “I’m going to my room. Or do I need your approval first?”
“Just get this through your head,” he snapped. “There won’t be any separation.”
“Give me one good reason why not!”
“Because I say so.”
Joanna’s mouth trembled. “That’s great. If you can’t win a fight, resort to typical male tyranny…” Her words tumbled to a halt and a puzzled look came over her face. “Typical male tyranny,” she whispered. Her gaze flew to his. “David? Haven’t I…haven’t I said that before?”
He came slowly up the stairs until he was standing a step below her. “Yes,” he said softly, “you have.”
“I thought so.” She hesitated. “For a minute, I almost remembered…I mean, I had one of those flashes… Did we…when I said that to you, had we been quarreling over the same thing? About—about me leaving you?”
A smile curved across his mouth. He reached out his hand and stroked his forefinger along the curve of her jaw.
“We hadn’t been quarreling at all,” he said in a quiet voice. “We’d been horsing around beside the pond—”
“In Connecticut?”
He nodded. “I’d been threatening to toss you in and you said I wouldn’t dare—”
“And—and you made a feint at me and I laughed and stepped aside and you fell into the water.”
He was almost afraid to breathe. “You remember that?”
Joanna’s eyes clouded with tears. “Only that,” she whispered, “nothing else. It’s—it’s as if I suddenly saw a couple of quick frames from a movie.”
He cupped her cheek with his hand. “I came up sputtering and you were standing there laughing so hard you were crying. I went after you, and when I caught you and carried you down to the pond to give you the same treatment, you said I was a bully and that I was resorting to—”
“Typical male tyranny?”
“Uh-huh.” His voice grew husky. “And I retaliated.”
Joanna stared at him. There was something in the way he was looking at her that sent a lick of flame through her blood.
“How?”
His smile was slow and sexy.
“I d
idn’t dump you into the pond. I carried you to the meadow instead.”
“A…a green meadow,” Joanna said. “Filled with flowers.”
“…and I undressed you, and I made love to you there, with the sweet scent of the flowers all around us and the sun hot on our skin, until you were sobbing in my arms.” He cupped her face with his hands. “Do you remember that, Gypsy?”
She shook her head. “No,” she whispered, “but I wish…I wish I did…”
Silence settled around them. Then David drew a labored breath.
“Go to your room,” he said quietly.
Joanna swallowed hard. “That’s where I was going, before you—”
“Get dressed, and pack whatever you’ll need for the weekend.”
Her brow furrowed. “What for?”
“On second thought, don’t bother.” He smiled tightly. “It seems to me you left the skin you shed in the bedroom closet in Connecticut.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“We’re going away for the weekend. Trust me,” he said brusquely, when she opened her mouth to protest, “it’s a very civilized thing to do, in our circle.”
“I don’t care if it’s the height of fashion! I’m not going anywhere with you. I absolutely refuse.”
“Even if going with me means you might begin to remember?”
She stared at him, her eyes wide. “Do you really think I will?”
Did he? he thought. And if she did…heaven help him, was that what he really wanted?
“David?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“But you think I might…?”
“Get going.” His tone was brisk and no-nonsense as he clasped her elbow and hurried her to her room. “I’ll give you ten minutes and not a second more.”
“David?”
He sighed, stopped in his tracks halfway down the hall, and turned toward her.
“What now?”
Joanna moistened her lips. “Why do you call me that?”
“Why do I call you what?” he said impatiently.
“Gypsy.”
He stared at her and the moment seemed to last forever. Then, slowly, he walked back to where she stood, put his hand under her chin and gently lifted her face to his.
“Maybe I’ll tell you while we’re away.”
He bent his head to her. She knew he was going to kiss her, knew that she should turn her face away…
His lips brushed softly over hers in the lightest, sweetest of caresses.
The gentleness of the kiss was the last thing she’d expected. Her lashes drooped to her cheeks. She sighed and swayed toward him. They stood that way for a long moment, linked by the kiss, and then David drew back. Joanna opened her eyes and saw a look on his face she had not seen before.
“David?” she said unsteadily.
He smiled, lifted his hand and stroked her hair.
“Go on,” he said. “See if you can’t find some old clothes and comfortable shoes buried in that closet of yours and then meet me downstairs in ten minutes.”
Joanna laughed. It was silly, but she felt giddy and girlish and free.
“Make it fifteen,” she said.
Impetuously, she leaned forward and gave him a quick kiss. Then she flew into her room and shut the door behind her.
CHAPTER NINE
THERE’D been a time David would have said he could have made the drive to Fenton Mills blindfolded.
He hadn’t needed to check the exit signs to find the one that led off the highway, nor the turnoffs after that onto roads that grew narrower and rougher as they wound deeper into the countryside.
It surprised him a little to find all that was still true.
Even after all this time, the Jag seemed to know the way home.
Except that it wasn’t exactly “home” and hadn’t been for almost three years.
A young couple who farmed some land up the road from the house were happy to augment their income by being occasional caretakers. They kept an eye on things, plowed the long driveway when it snowed and mowed the grass when summer came, even though David never bothered coming up here anymore.
Sometimes, he’d wondered why he bothered hanging on to the property at all.
His accountant had asked him that just a few months before.
“You get no financial benefit from ownership,” Carl had said, “and you just told me you never use the house. Why not get rid of it?”
David’s reply had dealt with market conditions, real estate appreciation and half a dozen other things, all of which had made Carl throw up his hands in surrender.
“I should have known better than to offer financial advice to David Adams,” he’d said, and both men had laughed and gone on to other topics.
Remembering that now made David grimace.
He’d done such a good snow job on Carl that he’d damned near convinced himself that he was holding on to the Connecticut property for the most logical of reasons.
But it wasn’t true.
He’d hung on to the house for one painfully simple, incredibly stupid reason.
It reminded him of a life he’d once dreamed of living with a woman he’d thought he’d loved.
With Joanna.
He’d bought the place years ago, with his first chunk of real money. He had no idea why. This was not the fashionably gentrified part of Connecticut, though the area was handsome. As for the house…it was more than two hundred years old, and tired. Even the real estate agent had seemed shocked that someone would be interested in such a place.
But David, taking the long, leisurely way home from a skiing weekend, had spotted the For Sale sign and known instantly that this house was meant for him. And so he’d written a check, signed the necessary papers, and just that easily, the house had become his.
He’d driven up weekends, with a sleeping bag in the back of his car, and camped out in the dilapidated living room, sharing it from time to time with a couple of field mice, a bat and on one particularly eventful occasion, a long black snake that had turned out to be harmless.
Carpenters came, looked at the floors and the ceiling, stroked their chins and told him there was a lot of work to be done. Painters came, too, and glaziers, and men with specialties he’d never even heard of.
But the more time David spent in the old house, the more he began to wonder what it would be like to work on it himself. He found himself buying books on woodworking and poring over them nights in the study of the Manhattan town house he’d bought for its investment value and its location and never once thought of as home.
He started slowly, working first on the simpler jobs, asking for help when he needed it. Had he undertaken such a restoration in the city, people would have thought him crazy but here, in these quiet hills, no one paid much attention. New Englanders had a long tradition of thrift and hard work; that a man who could afford to let others do the job for him would prefer to do it himself wasn’t strange at all.
He found an unexpected pleasure in working with his hands. There was a quiet satisfaction in beginning a job and seeing it through. He learned to plane wood and join floor boards, and the day he broke through a false wall and uncovered a brick fireplace large enough to roast an ox ranked right up there with the day years before when he’d opened the Wall Street Journal and realized he’d just made his first million on the stock exchange.
Local people, the ones who delivered the oak boards for the floors or the maple he’d needed to build the kitchen worktable, looked at the house as it evolved under his hands and whistled in admiration. The editor of the county newspaper got wind of what he was doing and politely phoned, asking to do what she called a “pictorial essay.”
David just as politely turned her down. Dumped on a church doorstep as a baby, he’d grown up the product of an efficient, bloodless state system of foster child care.
This house, that he was restoring with his own hands, was his first real home. He didn’t want to share it with
anyone.
Until he met Joanna.
He brought her to the house for a weekend after their second date. The old plumbing chose just then to give out and he ended up lying on his back, his head buried under the kitchen sink. Joanna got down on the floor with him, handing him tools and holding things in place and getting every bit as dirty as he got.
“You don’t have to do this stuff, Gypsy,” David kept saying, and she laughed and said she was having the time of her life.
By the end of that weekend, he’d known he wanted Joanna not just in his bed but in his heart and in his life, forever. Days later, they were married.
At first, he was wild with happiness. The usual long hours he spent at his office became less important than being with his wife.
Morgana came as close to panic as he’d ever seen her.
“I don’t know what to tell people when they phone, David,” she said. “And there are conferences, and details that need your attention…”
He pondered the problem, then flew to the coast for three intensive days with the latest Silicone Valley wunderkind. By the time he returned home, the problem was solved.
After a squad of electricians spent a week rewiring the house, a battery of machines came to beeping, blinking life in the attic. Faxes, computers, modems, laser printers, even a high-tech setup that linked David to his New York office by video…
There was nothing he could not do from home that he had not once done in Manhattan, though he still flew down for meetings on Thursdays and Fridays, and always with his beautiful, beloved wife at his side. Sometimes the meetings ran late. Joanna never complained but David was grateful to Morgana, who kept her occupied the few times it happened.
And then, things began to change.
It started so slowly that he hardly noticed.
Joanna suggested they spend an extra day in the city. “I’d really love to see that new play,” she said.
An invitation to the opera came in the mail. He started to toss it away but Joanna caught his hand, smiled, and said she’d never been to the opera in her life.
Before he knew it, they were spending five days a week in New York, then the entire week. Joanna met people, made friends, joined committees.
Connecticut, and the simple life they’d enjoyed there, got further and further away.
The Second Mrs. Adams Page 12