Breathing Room (30 page)

Harry hunched his shoulders and turned to Isabel, the shadows in his eyes making him look like a man with nothing left to lose. "I'd hoped to do this privately, but apparently that's not going to happen, and sinceTracywon't listen, I'll tell you, if you don't mind."

Tracyseemed to be listening, and Isabel nodded. "By all means."

"I fell in love with her the moment she dumped her drink in my lap. I thought it was an accident. I'm still not sure whether to believe her that it wasn't. There were all kinds of good-looking guys at that party tripping over each other to get her attention, but it hadn't occurred to me even to try, not just because of her physical beauty – and God knows she was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen – but because of her...because of thisglow she had. This energy. I couldn't take my eyes off her, but at the same time I didn't want her to know I was watching. Then she dumped her drink, and I couldn't think of one thing to say."

"He said, 'My fault.'"Tracy's voice caught on a little hitch. "I dump the drink, and the idiot says, 'My fault.' I should have known right then."

He still paid no attention to her, focusing on Isabel instead. "I couldn't think. It felt like my brain had gotten a shot of novocaine. She was wearing this silver dress that dipped low in the front, and she had her hair up, except it wouldn't stay up and these curls had fallen down her neck. I'd never seen anything like it. Anything like her." He gazed into his glass. "But as beautiful as she was that night..." His voice grew thick. "As beautiful as she was then..." He swallowed. "I'm sorry. I can't do this." He set his glass on the counter and disappeared through the garden door.

Tracy's eyes were bleak, but she shrugged as if it didn't matter. "See what I have to put up with? The minute I think he's finally ready to talk, he shuts down. I might as well be married to a computer."

"Stop acting like an ass," Ren said. "No guy wants to spill his guts in front of an ex-husband. He's been trying to talk to you all day."

"Big deal. I've been trying to talk to him for years."

Isabel glanced toward the garden. "He doesn't seem like a man who's too comfortable with his feelings."

"I've got a news flash for both of you," Ren said. "No man is comfortable with his feelings. Get over it."

"You are,"Tracysaid. "You talk about how you feel, but Harry has terminal emotional constipation."

"I'm an actor, so most of what comes out of my mouth is bullshit. Harry loves you. Even a fool can see that."

"Then I'm a fool, because I'm not buying it."

"You're not fighting fair," Isabel said. "I know it's because you're hurt, but that doesn't make it right. Give him a chance to say what's on his mind without an audience." Isabel pointed at the door. "And listen with your brain when you talk to him, because your heart's too bruised right now to be reliable."

"There's no point! Don't you understand? Don't you think I've tried?"

"Try again." Isabel gave her a firm push toward the door.

Tracylooked mulish, but she went outside.

"I already want to kill them both," Ren said, "and we haven't even had the appetizers."

*

Harry stood by the pergola, hands shoved in his pockets, the frames of his glasses picking up the last rays of sun.Tracyfelt that familiar dizziness that had first plagued her twelve years ago, right before she'd dumped her drink in his clueless lap.

"Isabel made me come out here."Tracyheard the hostility in her voice, but she'd begged him once today, and she wasn't going to do it again.

He pulled his hand from his pocket and braced it on the side of the pergola, not looking at her. "What you said this morning... Were you just throwing up another one of your smoke screens? About being fat and having stretch marks, when you know damned well you get more beautiful every day? And saying I don't love you when I've told you a thousand times how I feel?"

Words uttered by rote."I love you, Tracy." No emotion behind them. Never,"I love you because..." Just,"I love you, Tracy. Don't forget to buy more toothpaste when you go to the store."

"There's telling and there's believing. Two different animals."

He slowly turned to her. "It's never beenmy love in question, not from the beginning. It's always beenyours ."

"Mine? Ipicked you! If it had been up to you, the two of us would never have happened. I found you, I stalked you, and I reeled you in."

"I wasn't that big a prize!"

Harry never yelled, and just the surprise of it silenced her. He pushed himself away from the pergola. "You wanted kids. And I had 'Daddy' written all over me. Don't you get it?

For you, it wasn't about us. It was all about your need to have kids. About me being the father you wanted for them. Someplace in my subconscious I always knew that's what you were after, but I kept fooling myself. And it was easy to do when there were only Jeremy and Steffie. Even whenBrittanycame along, I could pretend it was still about us, that you wanted me for me. I might have been able to keep on pretending, but then you got pregnant with Connor, and you walked around with this cat-that-ate-the-canary smile on your face. Everything was about being pregnant and the kids. I tried to swallow it, to keep on pretending I was the great love of your life and not just your best source of sperm, but it got harder. Every morning I'd look at you and want you to love me the way I loved you, but I'd done my job, and you didn't even see me. And you're right. I did start shutting down. So I could keep going. But when you got pregnant this time and you were so happy, I couldn't even go through the motions. I wanted to, but I couldn't." His voice broke. "I just...couldn't."

Tracytried to take it in, but so many conflicting emotions were barreling through her that she couldn't begin to sort them out. Relief. Anger at him for being so obtuse. And joy.

Oh, yes, joy, because it wasn't completely hopeless after all. She didn't know where to begin, so she decided to start small. "What about the toothpaste?"

He stared at her as if she'd grown a second pregnancy from her forehead. "Toothpaste?"

"The way I don't always remember to buy toothpaste. And the way it drives you crazy when I lose my keys. You told me if I screwed up the checking account one more time, you were going to take away my checkbook. And do you remember that dent in the fender of your car that you thought happened when you took Jeremy to Little League? I put it there. Connor threw up in my car, and I didn't have time to clean it up, so I took yours instead, and I was yelling atBrittanyin the parking lot at Target and drove my shopping cart into it. What about that, Harry?"

He blinked. "If you'd keep an organized shopping list, you wouldn't forget to buy toothpaste."

In typical Harry fashion, he didn't get it. "I'll never keep an organized shopping list or stop losing keys or get much better at any of those other things that drive you wild."

"I know that. I also know there are a thousand men who'd line up for the chance to buy you toothpaste and let you run a shopping cart into their car."

Maybe he did get it.

Isabel had told her to think with her brain instead of her heart, but that was hard to do when it came to Harry Briggs. "I did know you'd be a great father, and that might have been part of the reason I fell in love with you. But I'd have kept on loving you even if you hadn't been able to make a single baby. I found all my missing parts with you. I don't keep wanting to have more babies because you're not enough for me. I keep wanting them because my love for you gets so big it needs more places to go."

Hope flickered in his eyes, but he still looked sad. She realized that his insecurities ran even deeper than her own. She'd always regarded him as the most intelligent person she knew, so it was difficult to adjust to the idea that she might be the smarter partner. "It's true, Harry. Every word."

"A little hard to believe." He seemed to be drinking in her face, even though he knew every pore. "Just look at us. I'm the kind of guy you could pass on the street a dozen times and never notice. But you... Men walk into mailboxes when they see you."

"I never knew a man so hung up on appearance." She forgot all about thinking with her head and smacked his jaw to get his attention. "I love the way you look. I could stare at you for hours. I used to be married to the most gorgeous man in the galaxy, and we made each other miserable. And you're right – I could have had any man in the room at that party, but I wasn't attracted to a single one of them. And when I dumped that drink in your lap, I definitely wasn't thinking of you as anybody's father."

She sensed his spirits begin to lighten, but she wasn't nearly done. "Someday I'm going to be old, and if you'd seen my grandmother, you'd know there's a good chance I'll be ugly as sin by the time I'm eighty. Are you going to stop loving me then? Is appearance all it comes down to with you? Because if it is, we're in just as much trouble as I thought."

"Of course it isn't. I didn't... I never..."

"Talk about throwing up smoke screens. I've always believed that you were so clear-thinking, but even on a bad day I'm thinking more clearly than you. God, Harry, next to me you're an emotional basket case."

That made him smile, and he looked so goofy that she realized she was finally getting through. She wanted to kiss away his fears, but she still had too many fears of her own to deal with, and their troubles were too big to be kissed away. She didn't want to have to spend the rest of their marriage reassuring him. She also didn't like how important her looks were to him. The face he loved so much was already showing signs of wear and tear. How was he going to feel when it went south with the rest of her body?

"After all these years of marriage, you'd think we'd understand each other better," he said.

"I can't keep living like this. We need to get whatever is broken between us permanently fixed."

"I don't know how we're going to do that."

"With a good marriage counselor, that's how. And the sooner we get one, the better." She stood on tiptoe, kissed him hard, and turned to the farmhouse. "Isabel! Could you come out here?"

Chapter 18

Isabel andRen lay naked together outside on the thick comforter, where they kept each other warm in the chilly night air. She gazed up at the sputtering candles in the chandelier that hung from the magnolia tree. He brushed her hair with his lips. "Too heavy for you?"

"Mmm... In a minute." Funny, but lying beneath him didn't bother her at all. Odd to feel so safe with such a dangerous man.

"Just for the record – that one sexual hang-up you used to have? I think we can safely say it's a thing of the past."

She smiled into his hair. "I was just trying to be polite."

"Do unto others?"

"A philosophy I try to live by."

He chuckled.

She trailed her fingers along his spine. He turned his lips into the pulse at her wrist, then nudged her bangle. "You always wear this."

"It's a reminder." She yawned and traced the outline of his ear with her index finger.

"'Breathe' is engraved inside."

"A reminder to stay centered, I remember. I still think it sounds boring."

"Our lives are so hectic that it's easy to lose our serenity. Touching the bangle keeps me calm."

"It would have taken a lot more than a bracelet to keep me calm tonight. And I'm not just talking about the last hour on this blanket."

She smiled. "The porcini weren't completely ruined."

"Just about."

He eased off her. She propped herself on an elbow and trailed her fingers across the hard landscape of his chest. "Your spaghetti al porcino was the best thing I ever tasted."

"It would have been even better an hour earlier. They've been fighting for months. I don't know why they decided they had to go into marriage counseling tonight."

"They needed some emergency triage. I'm not really a marriage counselor."

"You're sure not. You made them swear on their children's lives not to have sex."

"You weren't supposed to hear that."

"Pretty hard to go deaf when you're in the next room and everybody keeps telling you not to leave."

"We were hungry, and we were afraid you'd take our dinner with you. Physical communication is easy for them. It's the verbal that's causing them trouble, and they need to concentrate on that right now. They looked happy during dinner, didn't they?"

"As happy as two people can look who know they aren't going to get any for a while. And aren't you afraid those lists you told them to make will only stir things up again?"

"We'll see. One thing I didn't have a chance to mention to you – and I think you'll be happy about this..." She nibbled on his shoulder, not just to be manipulative, although that was part of it, but because it was right there in front of her and looked particularly tasty. "We're going to live together for a while."

He lifted his head far enough to regard her suspiciously. "Before I start dancing the tango, let me hear the rest of it."

The chandelier above their heads swayed in the night breeze. She used the tip of her finger to trace a ripple of shadow that meandered across his chest. "I'm moving into the villa tomorrow morning. Just for a few days."

"I've got a better idea. I'll move down here."

"Actually..."

"You didn't!" He sat up so fast he nearly knocked her over. "Tell me you didn't invite those two neurotics to stay in this farmhouse."

"Only for a few days. They need privacy."

"Ineed privacy.We need privacy." He fell back onto the comforter. "I'm going to kill you.

Really. This time I'm going to do it. Do you have any idea how many ways I know totake a human life? "

"Quite a few, I'm sure." She slid her hand down over his stomach. "But I'm hoping you'll find something more productive to do."

"I'm cheap, but I'm not that easy."

His breath caught. "You sound easy." She let her fingers move lower, until they located a particularly sensitive region.

He groaned. "Okay, I'm cheapand easy. But let's try it on a bed this time?" He caught her head as she pressed her lips to his stomach. "We definitely need a bed." He moaned.