then she returned to the living room and sat down on the sofa and couldn’t believe what she had just done. She’d said goodbye to Danny, her best friend, the man she had been so certain would one day be her husband and the father of her children. Danny, the exact right man for her, good and honest and true.
She sat there alone on her sofa and wondered which was worse: that she’d lost the sweetest guy she’d ever known, that she was actually relieved that Danny ended it—or that Danny was right. Somehow she’d gone and let herself fall for Fletcher Bravo, a man who was everything she’d sworn never to fall for.
It occurred to her that maybe she was more like her mother than she’d ever let herself admit. Now there was a seriously scary idea. It wasn’t as if all the hard lessons had faded from her mind. Uh-uh, they were with her, still fresh and vivid and full of pain.
She could close her eyes and see Lolita now—at three in the morning, standing in the doorway of the bedroom they’d always had to share since there was never money to “waste” on a two-bedroom place. Every spare penny had to go to headshots and building their portfolios, to hair and makeup and killer clothes and the endless series of dance lessons.
Oh, yeah. Cleo could still see her mother now: Lolita Bliss, standing in the bedroom doorway, the light from the hallway behind her falling on her platinum-blond hair, making a halo effect around her shadowed face….
“Baby, you up?” Lolita whispered—a stage whisper loud enough to wake Cleo if by chance she had been sleeping.
Cleo dragged herself to a sitting position, squinting against the bright hallway light. “Yeah, Mom. What?”
And her mother came dancing in, smelling of Joy perfume and Max Factor and something else—something musky and thick: sex, though Cleo hadn’t realized it then.
Lolita dropped with a happy giggle to the edge of the bed. “Oh, darling. It’s happened. It’s happened at last. I’ve met him. My own real-life Prince Charming. He’s rich and he’s so handsome and he can’t take his eyes off me—not to mention his hands.” Another throaty giggle escaped her, followed by along, dreamy sigh. “Oh, honey, he loves me already.” Lolita held out her arms, wiggling her fingers. “Come on. Come here.” And Cleo moved closer, into the warmth of her mother’s supple, sculpted body and those mingled smells of perfume and makeup and sex. Lolita hugged her so tight and whispered against her hair. “Cleopatra Bliss, our lives are about to change big-time. You’d better believe it.” Her mother’s long, lean dancer’s arm squeezed her harder. “Say you do.”
“I do, mom,” Cleo lied.
“Say it again. Please …”
“Mom, I do.”
Her mother’s lips brushed her hair. “Oh, sweetheart, he’ll make everything good for us. Just wait. You’ll see….”
But their lives didn’t change. And the men came and went, each of them breaking her mother’s heart when he left her.
And Cleo grew up dreaming of an ordinary life—a life where her kids ate three square meals a day, where they went to bed at a decent hour and woke up at daybreak and Cleo cooked them all a nutritious breakfast. In Cleo’s dreams, she lived in a real house and everybody had her own bedroom and Cleo’s husband was a good man, a regular, down-to-earth guy, both steady and true.
A guy exactly like Danny, as a matter of fact—Danny, who had just said goodbye and walked out the door.
So what about Cleo’s lifelong dreams now? She’d never have the life she longed for with someone like Fletcher. And please, who was she kidding? It was highly unlikely she’d have any life with Fletcher. He wanted her, period. And she wanted him.
This thing between them had nothing to do with the two of them building a life together. So if she couldn’t forget about him, she’d better learn to accept that what they’d have together wouldn’t last all that long.
Cleo supposed it was funny in a grim sort of way. Here she sat, contemplating the brief white-hot affair she and Fletcher would share. She was heading right into the kind of nowhere relationship her mother had never been able to resist. Lolita, though, had always believed that each player she fell for was finally the right one, that she’d found him at last.
Not Cleo. She was cursed with a crystal-clear view of hard reality. Fletcher Bravo was no knight in shining armor. With him, it would be hot and heavy and overwhelming … and brief.
The more Cleo thought about that—about how she was following in her mother’s footsteps without the benefit of her mother’s stubborn and somehow valiant illusions—the more she resisted her longing for Fletcher.
As the week went by, she tried to keep from running into him. In the morning and in the afternoon, when the kids were picked up and dropped off, she stayed away from the five-year-olds’ classroom and off the breezeway where she could easily cross paths with him coming or going.
She avoided him—and she longed for him. She daydreamed about kissing him. And at night her dreams went way beyond mere kisses.
On Thursday, she happened to be in with the three-year-olds again when Celia brought Davey in. J.J. wasn’t with them.
“Where’s that beautiful little girl of yours?”
Celia grinned. “Up at the apartment.”
Since Cleo had access to Davey’s student file, she knew already that Celia and her family lived in one of the big penthouses at the top of High Sierra Hotel. She couldn’t resist asking, “You like it … living on-site?”
Celia leaned a little closer and whispered, “I wouldn’t have it any other way. And J.J.’s with her aunties, Jilly and Jane. They refused to part with her even long enough for me to come down here and drop Davey off at school.”
Cleo remembered what Ashlyn had revealed at her birthday party. “Jilly and Jane. J.J.’s named after them, right?”
Celia nodded. “They’re my best friends. We grew up together, up north in the dinky little town of New Venice. Our husbands are New Venice natives, as well. They all had bad reputations as those wild Bravo boys. We—Jilly, Jane and I—were very, very good girls. It’s the classic story, I guess. A bad boy and a good girl. Sparks flying. Love. And marriage. Though I must admit, when I fell in love with Aaron, I never imagined we’d end up husband and wife. He so was not the marrying kind, if you know what I’m saying….”
Cleo did know. She nodded and made an agreeable noise in her throat, feeling wistful. Celia and her friends were not only happily married to Bravo men, they’d also lived the kind of childhood that Cleo had always longed for. “I know New Venice. It’s not far from Lake Tahoe.”
“That’s it—and hey, why don’t you come on up to the apartment around noon? You’ll like Jane and Jilly. And Jane is cooking lunch for us. She’s a genius in the kitchen. I guarantee the food will be fabulous.”
“Oh, I couldn’t….”
“Yeah, you could. Come on. Say yes.”
What could it hurt? And Cleo was curious about the other two Bravo wives. Plus, she’d liked Celia from the first
