Fierce (43 page)

The man was dressed in a dark suit, and carrying a paper bag. He asked, “Hope Sinclair?”

“Yes?”

“I have a delivery for you. Could I see some ID, please?”

“Some
ID?
” I stared at him blankly. Is this some...am I in some sort of trouble?” 

I was being served with papers, I thought wildly. Hemi hadn’t paid the hotel bill, and they were demanding...what? The emotions that had been ping-ponging so wildly for days were at it again, and I yanked them fiercely back under control.
No.
That was ridiculous, because the man was smiling.

“I don’t think you’re in trouble,” he said. “It’s a delivery. I just have to see ID first, and to get you to sign for it.”

“Oh. OK.” I went for my purse and pulled out my driver’s license. “Here you go.” 

He scrutinized it against my face, nodded, and handed me a computer tablet to sign. Once I did, he handed over the bag and said, “Enjoy.” 

I shut the door, opened the bag, and pulled out a rectangular package wrapped in pale-blue paper, tied with a white satin bow. And my heart leaped in my chest.

Tiffany.

I sank down on the couch and pulled the bow off with trembling fingers, then opened the box, pulled out the velvet case inside, lifted the lid, and gasped aloud. 

It was a bracelet, but that word wasn’t nearly enough to describe it. Flowing, sinuous waves of sapphires in varied shades of blue were interspersed with undulating lines of diamonds. It was the sea, exactly the sea, all shifting blues and foaming white. It was beautiful. It was spectacular. It was way over the top. 

The better it’s been, the better the gift. 

I had a sudden thought, scrabbled wildly through velvet case and blue gift box, turned the bag upside down, picked up the ribbon again in search of something I knew wasn’t there.

No card. No note. Because what would a note from Josh say? 

I remembered the note with the shoes.
You could call it an apology.
The one with the flowers.
Can’t wait for Paris. Can’t wait for you.
I had a sudden thought, a hysterical surge of hope, rummaged through my purse for my phone, and fumbled for my texts.

Blank.

I didn’t think. I couldn’t. I shoved the impossible thing back into its velvet case, didn’t bother with the gift box or the bag, picked up my keycard, and ran. 

It had to have been at least an hour since Tiffany would’ve delivered it. I’d had my phone off, tied up in an endless meeting with the attorneys and finance people, but surely she would’ve left a message. But—nothing. 

Maybe she’d been out, I thought, and almost slapped my forehead in annoyance. But—wait. She’d told me Martine was coming over that morning to discuss the work. She wouldn’t have gone out. And if she had, I would’ve had a call. I’d left instructions.

I paced from the living room to the bedroom once again, not taking in one bit of my surroundings, unable to concentrate on the emails I should have been answering. The suite at the Four Seasons Milano could have been the Holiday Inn, for all I was aware of it. 

Had she hated it? Had she thought it was over the top? Or had she…I turned on a heel again on the thought as if walking faster would allow me to outrun it. 

Had she decided, after all, that what I was offering wasn’t enough? Now that Karen was out of danger, was Hope looking at her situation clearly for the first time, deciding that she didn’t want a man who could never be there for her the way she needed him, could never say the words she needed to hear? Whose silences and absences were more than she could bear? All Hope’s warmth, the shining force of her spirit—had it hit the wall of my reserve one too many times? 

I should have talked to her before I left, no matter how shattered she’d been. I should never have left her in any doubt. I should have called her more often and said it all then, and the hell with how hard it would’ve been to do it over the phone. I should have gone back sooner, no matter what. Or not have gone at all. 

But this was who I was. This was all I had. My drive, my ambition, my success. Hope had known I wasn’t good at love, that I didn’t know how to do it, and she’d loved me anyway. At least she’d said she had. Once. What if she’d decided it wasn’t enough?

The phone vibrated in my hand, and I glanced at the caller ID. The leaping hope was there for a second, then gone in an instant.

“Te Mana.”

“Mr. Te Mana, this is Charles Farquar at Tiffany,” I heard. And then, damningly, the hesitation, and even before the man spoke again, I knew.
I knew.
“I’m sorry, sir, but the bracelet came back.”

“Came…back.” My blood was ice. “How?”

“The messenger said…” More hesitation.

“Just tell me,” I snapped.

“Yes, sir. He said that he was still in the lobby when the lady came…flying out of the elevator. Agitated, he said. That she shoved it at him and said, ‘Take it back.’ I’m sorry, sir,” he said again. “We’ll credit your account, of course.”

I didn’t answer. I was already hitting the
End
button, getting my pilot on the phone. 

“Warm it up,” I said. “We’re going home.” 

Maybe I couldn’t do it. Maybe it was going to be the thing that defeated me. The thing that crushed me.

But I was going to do it anyway, or I was going to die trying. 

I landed at JFK after the most uncomfortable flight of my life to find a single voicemail. It was from ten hours earlier, and it told me nothing at all. 

Hope’s voice, not sounding steady. “Hemi. It’s me. But you’re not there. Call me when you can. If you want to.” 

I didn’t call, because it was almost two in the morning in New York. I went to the hotel instead. And heard at the front desk that Hope and Karen had checked out at noon the day before. 

They were gone.

I almost told Charles to drive to Brooklyn, but I didn’t. If Hope thought I was too much for her, too demanding, how would she feel if I turned up at three o’clock in the morning and told her she was coming back to me? I couldn’t possibly be reasonable, not now, and I needed to be reasonable. 

I was always in control. Always. Except now. Now, I was nowhere close, and I was going to have to do better. Starting by turning up at a reasonable hour and talking to her like a reasonable man. 

In the end, it took me nearly twenty-four hours from the time I’d left Milan before I was standing on a snowy sidewalk and pressing the buzzer for their apartment. When a fella came up behind me and opened the door with his key, though, I didn’t hesitate. I followed him inside. If Hope didn’t want to see me? That was too bloody bad. She was going to see me anyway. I didn’t understand any of this, but I was going to.

So much for reasonable.

I took the four flights of stairs two at a time, then stood outside their door and knocked. When I didn’t get an answer straight away, I may have lost my equilibrium entirely and pounded on the door.

They
had
to be here. Where else would they have gone? 

“Hope!” It was a bellow. I knew it, and I couldn’t help it. “HOPE!”

The door opened just as my fist was coming down on it again, and I spun with the effort to pull the punch, not to hit Karen in her poor abused head. 

Because it was Karen, not Hope. Karen, looking…looking well, even though a bandage still covered the crown of her head. And somehow, despite the adrenaline, the fury, the grinding frustration, I softened.

“Hi, sweetheart.” I ran my hand gently over the fuzz that had begun to grow back to cover her naked scalp. She still looked vulnerable and plucked as a baby robin, and I kissed her cheek and asked, “How you goin’?”

“I’m good. I mean, I’m
good
. I hardly hurt, and it’s…” She laughed. “It’s amazing, you know?”

“Yeh,” I said. “I know. How about letting me in?”

She stepped back. “Oh! Sorry. What’s going on, though? I don’t get it. Did you break up with Hope? Is that why we had to leave the hotel?”

“No.” I could hear the grimness in my voice and couldn’t help it, because it had all come straight back again. “It wasn’t me. I’m here to find out what it was. Where is she?”

“In the bedroom.”

I was across to it in three strides, because that was how tiny this grotty apartment was. I knocked on this door, too, but I didn’t pound this time, because I’d reminded myself of that “reasonable” thing again.

She was hiding from me. Why? That wasn’t like Hope. She’d always faced me, no matter how forbidding I may have seemed, no matter how much a lesser woman would have quailed.

“Hope,” I called out. “Open up. Talk to me.”

The door opened, and she was on the other side, her mouth opening in shock. With headphones in her ears, and her laptop and files sitting on the bed. 

Oh. She hadn’t heard me.

She yanked the headphones out, seeming to be struggling herself for something to say. “Hemi. You’re...you’re here.”

“Yeh.” I put my hands on my hips to keep from grabbing her. “Tell me what’s happened to make you leave me, and I’ll make it right. Whatever I have to do, I’ll do it. Just tell me.”

“Leave
you? I...I
didn’t.
”

“What?” Now I was the one staring. “What do you mean, you didn’t? You moved out. You gave back the bracelet. Why?”

“Oh, boy.” She ran a hand through her hair, took in a deep breath, and blew it out. “I can’t...I can’t process. I think we’d better sit down. And I—did you
mean
it? The bracelet?”

“Did I mean
what?
” 

She
was
sitting, collapsing onto the bed as if she couldn’t stand up anymore, and I sat beside her and took her hand, because I needed to touch her. My heart was galloping, and her pulse, I realized, was racing just as fast. Something had gone very wrong, but it wasn’t going to stay wrong. We were going to fix it. I knew it. I could feel it, and just like that, the emotions had shifted directions yet again, leaving me gasping in their wake.

“Give me a...a second to explain,” she said, not sounding any steadier than I felt. “It’s sort of a...it’s a long story. It was Martine. Well, at first it was.”

“Martine?”
Of all the things I’d expected to hear, that was the last.

“She came to see me yesterday. Well, you know that. And she said…she said that you gave her that necklace she wears all the time, and that when that extravagant present came for a...a woman, it was the…” Her voice wobbled on the words. “The end. That that was goodbye. And I thought that you’d had me working for your old mistress. I couldn’t believe you’d do that, though.
I couldn’t.
I told myself I was going to wait to talk to you. But when the bracelet came after all…” Another breath. “I just...I snapped. I’d been up and down so much, and I know that’s an excuse. I know I should have waited for you to explain. I knew it a couple hours later. I had the most horrible feeling that I’d gotten it all wrong. And then I couldn’t reach you, and you didn’t answer, and I thought again...I thought I must have been right. And the longer it went on, that I didn’t hear anything, that you didn’t call...”

“Because I was on my way back to you.”
She’d
been up and down? That made two of us. “I was on the plane. Thinking the same thing. Thinking I’d stuffed up somehow, not knowing how to make it right. But Martine? No.” There was rage there now, but not at Hope. At Martine, and at myself. I should’ve seen this. I should’ve known it. “I gave her that necklace to say ‘thank you’ after our very first Milan show. She worked bloody hard, and she did well, and that’s why she’s where she is, but after today, she won’t be. She’s going to be gone. Because I never slept with her. Never. And I guess she was bitter about that. And hard work or no, she’s gone. Today.”

“No.” Hope was looking up at me, the urgency clear to see, and something else, too. Distress? Why? “No, don’t. Please. I don’t want to work for her anymore, but I don’t think you should fire her. I think it just burned her too much, having me foisted on you. I think, on some level, she might even have been trying to...trying to help. She was jealous, but I don’t think that was all. I think she thought she was telling the truth. Not the truth about that, but the truth about you. Except it’s
not
the truth. You know what I realized? Last night, when I was thinking? When I was so
sure
of how I’d screwed up, and so worried that you’d never forgive me?”