Summer at Willow Lake (6 page)

In her business, the key question was, When I walk into this place, do I feel like taking off my shoes, pouring a glass of sherry at the sideboard, then settling into a cushy chair with a good book and sighing, “I’m home”?

Forty-five minutes later, she was trying out the cushy chair and struggling to stave off a yawn. She tried Rand’s cell phone and his voice mail picked up on the first ring, indicating that his was still turned off. He was probably still in the air.

She waited another thirty-one minutes before heading into the kitchen. This was also beautifully arranged, right down to the retro apple design on the tea towels from a vintage-linens shop she frequented. One of the keys to staging was to find authentic things that had lost that artificial sheen of newness. The tea towels, faded but not shabby, perfectly fit the bill.

Olivia headed for the pantry, stocked with imported pasta from Dean & DeLuca, cold-pressed olive oil, pomegranate juice and dolphin-safe tuna. The stuff Rand usually ate, like Lucky Charms and canned ravioli, now lay hidden in covered wicker baskets that looked as though they wanted to go on a picnic.

She pulled out a basket and grabbed a bag of Cheetos. One of the many nutritionists she’d been sent to as a chubby teenager had counseled her about mood eating.

Screw that, she thought, ripping into the bag of Cheetos, which opened with a cheese-flavored sigh. Screw everything.

For good measure, she grabbed an Alsatian beer—another contrivance; he usually drank Bud—from the stainless-steel Sub-Zero fridge. She took a long, defiant swig and belched aloud.

She was about ten minutes into the Cheetos-and-beer-fest when she heard the front door open and close.

“Hey?” called a voice from the entryway.

Uh-oh. She looked at the orange dust clinging to her fingertips. It was probably crusted around her mouth, too.

“I’m back,” Rand called unnecessarily. Then: “Wow. Hey, this place looks awesome.”

Olivia threw the Cheetos bag and the beer bottle in the trash and rushed to the sink to wash her hands. “In the kitchen,” she answered, her voice a tad shrill. “I’ll be right out.”

She was bent over the sink, her hair falling to one side as she rinsed her mouth, when he walked in.

“Olivia, you’re a freaking genius,” he said, opening his arms.

She hastily wiped her mouth with a tea towel. “I am, aren’t I,” she said and walked into his arms.

He held her for a moment, then kissed her forehead. “You need to bill my real-estate agent for everything you’ve done here.”

Olivia froze. Her heart knew, even before her mind caught on. The awareness prickled up her spine and over her scalp. There was something in the way a man held a woman when he was about to let her go. The knowledge was in his frame and in his muscles—a tangible stiff reluctance. The air of discomfiture hovering around him was unmistakable.

She stepped back, stared up at his handsome face. “Oh, my God,” she said. “You’re breaking up with me.”

“What?” Her blunt observation clearly took him by surprise. “Hey, listen, babe. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

The protest only underscored her conviction. She was right, and they both knew it. Many women with more powerful denial mechanisms than Olivia were able to shut out the warning sign. Not Olivia, not with her sensitive radar, not after two previous failures had left her bleeding. She was like one of those dogs trained to an electric fence. She only had to be popped twice, and then she got it.

The Cheetos and beer formed a cold, unpleasant knot in her stomach.
It isn’t going to happen again,
she thought.
Not even if I have to do it first.
“I completely misread you,” she said. “God, what an idiot.” She took another step away from him.

“Slow down,” he said, and the hand he laid on her arm was gentle and made her want to cry.

“Do it fast,” she snapped at him. “Like ripping off a Band-Aid. Get it over with quick.”

“You’re jumping to the wrong conclusion.”

“Am I?” She folded her arms across her middle. Don’t cry, she told herself, blinking away the tears that boiled behind her contact lenses. Save the crying for later. “All right. How about telling me exactly what you intend to do after selling this apartment?”

His gaze flirted ever so briefly with the light fixture on the ceiling, the one she’d replaced at two o’clock this afternoon. That was another symptom of man-on-the-run. He didn’t want to meet her eyes. “Something came up while I was in L.A.,” he told her, and despite his obvious discomfort with her, his face lit with enthusiasm. “They want me there, Liv.”

She held her breath. He was supposed to say, I told them I couldn’t make a decision until I talked to you. She already knew, though. With a dry laugh of disbelief, she said, “You told them yes, didn’t you?”

He didn’t deny it. “The firm’s going to create a new position for me.”

“What, asshole-in-residence?”

“Olivia, I know we talked about a future together. I’m not ruling that out. You could come with me.”

“And do what?”

“It’s L.A., Liv. You can do anything you want.”

Marry you? Have your babies? She knew that wasn’t what he meant.

“My whole life, my family, my home, my business, everything is here in New York. I put the last five years of myself into Transformations,” she said. “I built it. I’m not going to just walk away.”

“L.A. needs a company that does what you do,” he claimed. “The market’s just as hot there as it is here. Hotter.”

She thought about starting over from scratch, all over again. Networking, cultivating contacts, doing public relations, getting out the word of mouth. The idea exhausted her. She had finally whittled her work hours down to a manageable number, but it had taken years to get there. Starting over in L.A. would be even harder. There, her name and connections wouldn’t open any doors for her as they had in Manhattan. This can’t be happening, she thought. Not again.

“Say you love me,” she challenged him. “Say you can’t live without me. And mean it.”

“When did you turn into such a drama queen?”

“You know what?” she said, shaking back her hair and squaring her shoulders, “if I loved you enough, I would do it. I wouldn’t care. I’d be packing my things right now, and gladly.”

“What do you mean, love me enough?” he demanded.

“To follow you anywhere. But I don’t. And that’s a very liberating notion, Rand.”

“I don’t get you.” He ran a hand through his hair. “It’s a simple situation. You can move to L.A. with me or not. Your choice.”

My choice, thought Olivia. Surprisingly enough, she realized she did have a choice. “All right, then,” she said, somehow getting the words past a sudden, breath-stealing agony. “Not.”

And with that, she headed for the door. She’d done well this time—this third time. But if she lingered any longer, her control might waver. She passed through the foyer, noting the artful placement of the red plum blossom plant, which added an auspicious
je ne sais quoi
to the entryway. It was hard to miss the irony of this beautifully composed, staged setting. She considered kicking the damn thing over, but that would be so…so un-Bellamy-like.

She took the stairs to avoid waiting for the elevator. She had tried that the first time, with Pierce. She still remembered standing in the lobby, willing him to come bursting out the door, shouting, “Wait! I was wrong! What was I thinking?”

It never worked that way except for people like Kate Hudson or Reese Witherspoon. People like Olivia Bellamy took the stairs.

She didn’t even remember the taxi ride home. She blindly overpaid the cabby and, shell-shocked, climbed the stairs to her brownstone.

“Oh, this is not good,” her neighbor, Earl, said, not bothering with hello as he stepped out into the foyer between their first-floor apartments. “You’re home way too soon.”

A silver-haired older man who had come up through school with Olivia’s father, Anthony George Earl the Third owned the brownstone. Since his second wife had left him, he claimed Olivia was the only woman he wanted in his life. In a flurry of midlife ambition, he was taking cooking lessons. At the moment, the rich scent of coq au vin wafted from his kitchen, but it only made Olivia feel queasy. She wished she hadn’t told him she thought Rand was going to pop the question today.

Although Earl was divorced and lived alone, he turned and called to someone in his apartment. “Our girl’s back. And it’s not good.”

Our girl. He only referred to her like that to one person—his best friend. She scowled at Earl. “You told him?” Without waiting for a reply, she pushed past Earl and stepped into his apartment. “Daddy?”

Philip Bellamy rose from a wing chair and opened his arms to Olivia. “The rat bastard.” He pulled her into a hug. Her father was her rock, and probably the sole reason she had survived her turbulent adolescence. She leaned against his chest, breathing in the comforting scent of his aftershave. But only for a moment. If she leaned on him too hard, she’d lose the ability to stand on her own.

“Ah, Lolly,” he said, using the old nickname. “I’m sorry.”

There was something phony in her father’s tone; didn’t he know she could hear it? Pulling back, she studied his face. He looked like Cary Grant, everyone had always said so because of the cleft in his chin and those killer eyes. He was—had always been—a tall, elegant man, the sort you saw at museum fund-raisers and at weekend house parties in the Hamptons.

“What’s going on?” she asked him.

“Does something need to be going on in order for me to visit my only child and my best friend?”

“You never come downtown unannounced.” Olivia glared at Earl again. “I can’t believe you told him.” She also couldn’t believe both Earl and her father knew it would go badly, that she would come home upset and in need of comforting. She supposed that, this being the third time, they had learned to expect false alarms from her. “I need to check on Barkis,” she said, fumbling for her keys and stepping out into the hallway.

She let herself in, and despite the blow she’d taken, Barkis was Barkis. He came bursting through his little dog door and sailed into her arms. Olivia’s parents thought the dog door was a security breach, but she deemed it necessary, given her crazy work schedule. She didn’t worry about break-ins anyway. Earl was a playwright who worked at home and had the watchdog instincts Barkis seemed to lack.

What the little dog had in abundance was exuberance. Just the sight of her caused him to do a dance of joy. Olivia often wished she was as fabulous as her dog thought she was. She set him down to pet him, which sent him into paroxysms of ecstasy.

Just being home lifted her spirits a little. Her apartment wasn’t all that special, but at least it was hers, filled with a profusion of color and light and texture, created in layers over the three years she’d lived here. This was as un–New York as an apartment could get, according to her mother, and that was not a compliment. It was far too warm, even dangerously cozy, painted in deep glowing autumn colors and filled with overstuffed furniture that owed more to comfort than to fashion.

“You’re such a fine designer,” her mother often said. “What happened here?”

Plants in colorful pots bloomed on every window-sill—not the spare, sleek-tongued tropicals that indicated taste and sophistication, but Boston ferns and African violets, primroses and geraniums. The back garden surrounding the tiny flagstone-paved patio was no different, its candy-colored blooms brightening the brick privacy wall on all three sides. Sometimes she sat out here and pretended the rush of traffic was the sound of a river, that she lived in a place with room for her piano and all her favorite things, in a setting of green trees and open space. As her relationship with Rand progressed, children entered the picture, tumbling into her fantasy in laughing profusion. Three or four of them, at least. So much for that, she thought. Right dream, wrong guy.

Her father and Earl barged in and went to the not-very-well-stocked liquor cabinet. “What’ll it be?” asked Earl.

“Campari and soda,” her father said. “Rocks.”

“I was talking to Olivia.”

“She’ll have the same.” Her father lifted one eyebrow, looking young and mischievous, and Olivia was grateful for once that he was not a sentimental man. If he offered sympathy right now, she might just melt. She nodded, forcing a wan smile, then looked around the apartment. If things had gone the way she’d anticipated today, this would be a much different moment. She’d be looking at her place through new eyes and feeling bittersweet, because she would soon be moving on with her life, planning a future with Rand Whitney. Instead, she saw the place where she would probably live forever, turning into an odd spinster.

Olivia and her father sat down at the bistro table by the window overlooking the garden and sipped their aperitifs. Earl managed to rustle up a tray of pita triangles and hummus.

Olivia had no appetite. She felt like a survivor of some disaster, shocky and tender, assessing her injuries. “I’m an idiot,” she said, the ice clinking in her glass as she set it on the wrought-iron table.

“You’re a sweetheart. What’s-his-name is a world-class heel,” her father said.

She shut her eyes. “God, why do I do this to myself?”

“Because you’re a…” Always careful with words, her father paused to find the right ones.

“Three-time loser,” Olivia suggested.

“I was going to say hopeless romantic.” He smiled at her fondly.

She knocked back the rest of her drink. “I guess you’re half-right. I’m hopeless.”

“Oh, now it starts,” Earl said. “Let me take out my violin.”

“Come on. Don’t I get to wallow for at least one night?”

“Not over him,” her father said.

“He’s not worth it,” said Earl. “No more than Pierce or Richard was worth it.” He spoke the names of her previous two failures with exaggerated disdain.

“Here’s the thing about broken hearts,” Philip said. “You can always survive them. Always. No matter how deep the hurt, the capacity to heal and move on is even stronger.”

She wondered if he was talking about his divorce from her mother, all those years ago. “Thanks, guys,” she said. “The whole you’re-too-good-for-him-anyway routine worked once. Maybe twice. This is the third time, and I have to consider that the fault might be with me. I mean, what are the odds of meeting three rat bastards in a row?”