Her work here is done.”
That was exactly the answer he didn’t want to hear. “Then she’s not coming back?”
As far as Anastasia was concerned, she was playing her part beautifully, seeing as how she was improvising her dialogue as she went along.
In true motherly fashion, she put her hand to his cheek. “Darling, is there something wrong with your attention span? I just said I was ‘good as new.’ Isabelle’s accomplished what she came here to do. I’m sure she’ll be moving on to another assignment. She might even be starting right now,” Anastasia speculated.
He was having a very hard time wrapping his head around this. “And she left here—for good—without saying goodbye?”
“Well, she said it to me,” Anastasia informed him, as if she was the primary one who counted in this scheme of things. “But I suspect that was only because our paths crossed at the front door. I think she just wanted to slip quietly away without making a fuss.” She smiled. “You know how unassuming Isabelle can be when it comes to herself.”
He knew. He also saw her leaving like that as something different than not wanting to “make a fuss.” He saw it as running out on him.
Just as his ex-wife had.
Except that back then, he knew why Jean had run out on him. She’d told him in no uncertain terms. She wasn’t cut out to be a mother and didn’t want to be tied down by either a baby or a husband.
It was different with Isabelle. She was everything he wanted in a woman, in a life partner—or at least he thought she was everything he wanted.
Now he didn’t know.
What he didn’t want was someone who couldn’t be counted on. Someone who literally turned around and ran after all but pledging her heart to him.
Or had he misread that, too?
“What’s the matter, dear?” Anastasia asked, playing the concerned mother for all she was worth. “You look as if you’ve just lost your best friend.” Deliberately pretending that she was misinterpreting the reason for the look on his face, she crossed to him and took his chin in her hand. “Don’t worry, darling, I’ll be back to visit you and Victoria regularly. I promise.”
He forced a smile to his lips, removed her hand and turned it so it was palm side down. In the fashion of gallantry of centuries gone by, he pressed a kiss to her hand.
“I know you will, Mother.” He let her hand go and stepped back. “I’ll get out of your way so you can finish packing. Let me know when you want me to take the suitcase to the front door for you.”
“Won’t be for a while yet, dear.”
His mother’s voice followed him out into the hallway, but he hardly heard her.
She was gone, he thought, numbly placing one foot in front of the other.
Isabelle was gone.
Gone, just like that.
Without a word, without so much as a nod. Gone as if those nights they’d spent together hadn’t meant anything to her. As if their days together, the drives, that moment in the rain on the beach, hadn’t meant anything to her.
Without his knowing exactly when, exactly how, Isabelle, with her lighter-than-air laugh and her quiet determination, had become embedded in his life, in his family. And then, just like that, like some Band-Aid being ripped off, she’d torn herself away and was gone.
His mind spinning every which way at once, he thought of going out and finding her. Of shaking her and shouting at her for doing this to him.
For lying like this to him without saying a single word.
Damn it, he upbraided himself, clenching his fists at his side, how could he have been so hopelessly stupid to let himself get ensnared like this? How could he have been so—
He had a book to work on, he told himself sternly. He had no time for any grieving, dramatic or otherwise. It was time to submerge himself in his work, the way he’d always been able to do before, and forget about everything else.
Forget about lips the flavor of strawberries and eyes that seemed to shine whenever she looked at him. Forget about skin the texture of cream and a body—
This wasn’t helping, Brandon berated himself. At this rate, he would talk himself into a state mental institution by evening.
“Write, Slade. It’s what you do,” he ordered sternly as he marched into his office. “At least she didn’t take that away from you.”
Brandon closed the door behind him and willed his mind to focus.
Isabelle tried, she really, really tried to summon up her former enthusiasm. She needed it in order to do her work. She needed it so that she could find just the right way to motivate her clients.
But try as she might, she just couldn’t seem to find it. It was as if every last drop of enthusiasm had evaporated on her. Along with her sense of humor, her energy and forget about her mind. That seemed to be long gone.
At various times of the day and evening, she’d find herself suddenly “stuck.” Lost in a motion or a thought that went no further. She looked like an adult playing the old children’s game of “statue” where players would “freeze” in a position when the word was suddenly called out.
Except that no one was calling out anything. It was just her. She seemed utterly unable to function properly. Not without her heart. And that was gone.
It had been a week like this. A whole terrible, debilitating week.
She had to snap out of it.
Zoe had already said that one of the clients had complained about her. Well, not exactly complained, but they’d wanted to know if there was something “funny” about her because she was acting so very strangely, getting lost midsentence. Staring off into space.
Of course, her present client, Bobby Johnson, a major league baseball player who was on the team’s disabled list because of a pulled hamstring, didn’t seem to mind her slipping into a trancelike state for a minute or so at a time. That was probably because he thought it had to do with him.
Currently, Bobby was in one of the firm’s therapy rooms, expounding on how hard it was to live a normal life, surrounded by women who insisted on following him everywhere he went, even to the men’s room at the gym he frequented.
“But I guess that all just goes with the territory,” he concluded with as phony a sigh as she’d ever heard. “That really feels good,” he commented, then suddenly he swiveled around on the padded table he’d been lying on. He pulled his towel around himself as he sat up, leaving it deliberately loose in order to serve as an unspoken invitation for her benefit, Isabelle’s couldn’t help thinking. “Hey, you doing anything after this?” Bobby asked. He didn’t wait for her to answer, but just assumed it would be what he wanted to hear. “Because if you’re not—”
“She is.”
Both she and the technically disabled infielder turned to look at the man walking
