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“Just to talk.”

The look she gave him denied that that was possible. Despite everything that had happened, they were too drawn to each other, too much in love. After staring at him for another minute with a longing that tore him to bits, she wrenched her hand away and left.

The movie was lost on him, as were the charms of his date. Long after he dropped her at her home, he paced his hotel room. He might have called Pam if he’d known where she was staying. It was lucky he didn’t. What he had in mind wasn’t right. She was married. But he wanted her with a fever that hadn’t diminished in two and a half years, and she’d shown him that the fever was shared.

He saw her two months later, at an art show in New York, then three months after that at a gala benefit in Dallas. Both times he exerted the utmost control, but the control steadily eroded until finally, the following March, when he and Pam were attending the same jewelers’ conference in New Orleans, the needs that had been gathering for three years broke loose.

Pam didn’t tell a soul. She wasn’t proud of what she’d done, but somehow the knowledge that she was betraying Brendan didn’t hold any weight when she was with Cutter. The sight and the feel of him blotted out everything else. Inevitably, when she returned home she felt remorse; just as inevitably, to compensate, she doted on Brendan. She couldn’t keep from dreaming of Cutter, though, and when she began to fear that she might call out the wrong name in her sleep, she knew she had to do something.

She went to see Patricia. She was taking a chance, but Patricia was growing stronger, Bob said. He kept urging her to draw her mother into her life, and to some extent she had. She visited regularly, showed Patricia her jewelry, and talked about the business and her friends. She brought Brendan to visit.

The hospital represented security for Patricia, and since she could afford it, she stayed. But she had moved into the smallest, most private cottage, and had begun to take short outings with Bob. Although she hadn’t reached enough confidence to go out with Pam, she was conversing more.

That was what Pam needed. She didn’t expect absolution, but she had to talk, had to tell someone what she’d done, had to have someone say that she wasn’t as wicked as she felt at times.

It was a hot and humid July day. The tall elm in the yard behind the cottage offered shade, and a faint breeze stirred from time to time. Pam wheeled Patricia there and went back for two tall glasses of iced tea before sinking down on the creaking wooden swing.

She sipped her tea while she searched for the right way to broach the subject. Inadvertently, Patricia did it for her.

“You’re frowning,” she said softly. “Are you upset?”

“Upset?” It wasn’t that, exactly.

“Angry at me?”

“Oh, no! Not at all!” She took a breath. “It’s me.”

“Something with Brendan?”

“In a way.” She jumped in. “I’ve been seeing Cutter.”

Patricia accepted the statement as though it was perfectly logical. “You love Cutter.”

“But I’m married to Brendan. I’m supposed to love Brendan. I
do
love Brendan.”

A tiny frown crossed Patricia’s brow. “Then everything’s fine. Isn’t it?”

“Cutter is . . .?Cutter and I . . .?we fought it but . . .” She took a breath. “I slept with him.”

The tiny frown came again. “Before you married Brendan.”

Pam wanted to cry. Her mother thought her innocent and good, which was both incredibly wonderful and terribly unfair. She was human, like everyone else. “I slept with Cutter last week. We keep running into each other. All over the country. All over the world. And each time, it’s like there’s a fire that just—” she motioned with her hands, “explodes. I thought maybe it was just something I had to do so that I could move on, but I still feel it, as strong as ever, and I can’t do a thing to stop it. I need him.” She ran out of air, dragged in a new breath, and said, “Tell me there are reasons why things like that happen. Tell me there’s some justification for it.”

Patricia bowed her head, and for an instant Pam wished she’d talked with Bob first. But she hadn’t wanted to tell him about her affair with Cutter. And anyway, he was the one who was always telling her to test Patricia’s limits.

Eyes down, Patricia said, “My situation was different. I didn’t love John. There was no justification for what I did.”

“Maybe not in terms of love.”

She shook her head. “No justification at all.”

“But you needed him.” It had taken Pam a long time and many discussions with Bob to accept that.

After a time, Patricia said a quiet, “Yes.”

“Was it the kind of thing where you didn’t think you’d be able to survive another day without him?”

“No. It was never that desperate.” She hesitated, then said even more quietly, “Not the physical part. The other was. He said what I needed to hear. He made me feel better.” She sipped her tea, careful to keep her eyes low. “It wasn’t that he forced me . . .?physically. The attraction was there.”

Pam had always wondered about the nature of that attraction, since John didn’t turn her on in the least. “Was it the age factor? His being younger than Daddy?”

“It was security. Excitement.” She thought for a minute. “Maybe danger. But I always felt so guilty afterward.”

Pam knew that feeling all too well. “Did you ever want to tell Daddy about it?”

Patricia’s head came up. “I couldn’t! It would have destroyed him!” Her voice fell. “It did destroy him.”

“No, Mom. His temper was what destroyed him.”

“But if I hadn’t—”

“You didn’t put that car in the middle of that intersection at that particular instant.”

“Neither did he. He tried to stop. He stepped on the brake and swore, then there was the crash. He didn’t do it on purpose.”

“I know.” Pam rocked the swing. Its creak was rhythmic, comforting. “And you didn’t hurt him on purpose.”

“No. I wouldn’t have done that. I loved him.”

“I know.”

Patricia looked up. “Do you?”

“Uh-huh. For a while, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t understand how you could have been with John if you loved Daddy.” She sniffed. “Self-righteous of me, wasn’t it?” When Patricia didn’t answer, she went on. “I thought that you either loved or you didn’t, and if you did, that love was pure and right and all-powerful. That was how things always were with Cutter and me.” With her thumb she wiped at the condensation on her glass. “Then Cutter wasn’t ready to get married, so I married Brendan.” She dared a glance at Patricia. “You never said anything about that.”

Patricia gave a slow, one-shouldered shrug.

“I wanted to be married. I wanted to be free of John.” When Patricia still didn’t speak, Pam nudged the ground with her toe. “I liked Brendan from the first. Once we were married, it was easy to love him. He’s a sweet, generous man.”

“Yes,” Patricia said.

“And I feel bad, because he trusts me. He has no idea that I’ve seen Cutter.” She let the swing carry her to and fro. “What should I do?”

Patricia poked at the ice cubes with her straw. “I’m not the best one to ask.”

“I can’t ask anyone else.”

The ice cubes clinked, then clinked again. “What do you want to do?”

“I want to do the right thing, which means being faithful to Brendan. But then there’s all I feel for Cutter. I need him. I can’t explain it. Brendan gives me so much, but Cutter is Cutter. When I’m with him, I’m something more than just me. It’s like the two of us create something together, something powerful. Brendan is calm and quiet. He’s gentle and undemanding. He’d give me the shirt off his back if I asked for it.” She smiled helplessly. “With Cutter, I want the back, not the shirt.” Her smile faded with the conjuring up of his scars. She figured she knew them better than Cutter did.

“Passion isn’t enough. Don’t ruin what you have with Brendan.”

“But I love Cutter, too.”

Patricia shook her head. “It won’t work.”

“Even if I’m careful?”

“It’s not right.”

“But I’m a good wife to Brendan. I make him a nice home. I’m there for him whenever he wants. He’s the one who gets my time and attention.”

“He should. He’s your husband.”

“But Cutter’s alone.”

“Cutter had his chance.”

“Not a fair one. I was angry. My rushing to marry Brendan was like Daddy jumping in that car and racing down the street on the ice. I didn’t think things through. I was being impulsive. I made a mistake.”

“We have to live with our mistakes sometimes.”

“But all the time? Take you.” Pam sat forward on the swing. “You don’t have to stay here. You could come live with me. Or get a place of your own.”

“No.”

“Daddy would have wanted that.”

“No!”

Pam wanted to argue more, wanted to extend the argument to her own situation, but instinct told her she’d said enough. So she lapsed into silence, sat back again, and rocked on the swing, alternately sipping her tea and rubbing the glass. The sound of Patricia’s voice took her by surprise.

“What you feel for Cutter,” she began tentatively, “does it make you warm and light-headed?”

“Very.”

Her eyes grew distant. “Does it stay with you . . .?like a layer under your skin?”

“Always.”

Her fingers curled around the arm of her wheelchair. “When you’re with him . . .?like that . . .?does it make you forget other things that may be all wrong?”

“Oh, yes.”

Patricia sighed.

Pam waited for her to speak. Finally, hesitantly, she asked, “Is that what you felt with John?”

Looking straight at her, Patricia shook her head. “No. It’s what I felt with your father.”

For a minute Pam could only stare. Then she came off the swing and gave Patricia a hug. It wasn’t that she had condoned what she was doing or even given her direction. But by equating her feelings for Eugene with Pam’s for Cutter, she had taken some of the sting from the act of betrayal. Pam’s love for Cutter did the rest.

She didn’t see him often, and then only when she was away from Boston and Brendan. Usually they just talked, smiled, held hands. They fought making love, fought it with everything they had, but there were times when the need was simply too great. Such was the case in Paris the following November when, with a single goal in mind, Pam half-walked, half-ran down the Rue Jean-Coujon.

Hoping not to be noticed, she had the collar of her fur raised to overlap the sable turban that covered her hair. She would have worn something more bland if she’d had time to change, but time was of the essence. From the moment she’d spotted Cutter in the opening-night crowd of the Jeu de Paume, she’d thought of nothing but getting closer, and from the moment he’d approached, taken her hand in his and kissed first one cheek, then the other with Gallic grace, his whispered words had rung in her ears.

The San Regis, room twenty-one, twelve-thirty. Be there.

There was never any question but that she would. It had been too long since she’d seen him, too long since she’d lain in his arms and known what it was to be well and truly loved.

At that thought, she quickened her step. When she reached the small hotel, she trotted up the stone steps and slipped through the door. Breezing across the plant-filled lobby with little more than a breathy bonsoir to the clerk behind the desk, she ran lightly up the stairs, down the hall, and around a turn to the door with a 21 marked in small swirls of brass.

She knocked softly. Within seconds the door opened a crack, then widened, and Cutter drew her inside. In the very next instant, he pressed her back to the door, cupped her chin with a single large hand, and covered her mouth with his.

There was nothing gentle about his kiss. It had the feel of hunger and the taste of need. It was Cutter at his most fierce, his most hungry, and it excited her almost beyond bearing. Closing her fingers around fistfuls of his hair, she returned his kiss until the sheer need for air tore them apart.

Dislodging her turban, he put his forehead to hers. “You’re late,” he accused in a voice that was deep and ragged. His lower body pinned her to the door while he worked at the buttons of her coat.

“I had trouble getting a taxi,” she gasped, trying to catch her breath and open his shirt at the same time. “Then the damned thing got stuck in a jam. Then it kept stalling. Then the driver dropped me at the wrong end of the street.”

Cutter had already dispensed with his tuxedo jacket, and his bow tie dangled crookedly from his starched collar. With the impatient release of three diamond studs, Pam spread the shirt wide and put her mouth to his chest. Her lips moved lightly over the fine hair there. Closing her eyes, she inhaled the familiar scent of his skin.

The fur fell from her shoulders to the floor and had barely settled in a heap before Cutter lowered the zipper of her shimmering black sheath. He slipped a hand inside, curved his fingers over her bottom, and pulled her hips against his.

But the satisfaction of that was brief, when the real thing was so near. With a nudge, he sent the sheath whispering to the floor. Pam reached for his pants, but the feel of his hands molding her breasts through the silk of her teddy distracted her. She had to grasp his shoulders for support.