professional. I deal with stuff like this all the time.”
Even as she scrubbed furiously at her tearstained face, she looked dubious. She slid a look down at her thin covering of a shower curtain. “Like a doctor?”
“Sort of,” he agreed.
“And you deal with unclothed, crying, lonely women who have been assaulted by exploding showers? All the time?”
“I just meant I deal with the unexpected.” He tried for a soothing note in the face of her voice rising a bit shrilly. “It’s what I’m trained to do. Let’s get you up off the floor.”
He reached for the nearest towel rack and tugged a towel off it, and then, as an afterthought, another one. He put both of them on top of her, trying to fasten them, without much success, around the sopping, slippery, transparent shower curtain.
Tucking the thick white terry towels around her as best he could, he slipped his arm under her shoulder and lifted her to a little dressing table bench. It was the first time he had touched her since he had held her hand at the pool in the river. Awareness quivered along his spine, but he could not give in to that. He needed to be professional right now, as he never had been before.
Connor guided Isabella to sitting and tucked the towels a little tighter around her.
Professional, he told himself grimly.
“Let’s just have a look at that bump on your head.” That was good, he told himself of his neutral tone.
“Why are you lonely?” he heard himself growl as he parted her hair and dabbed at the bump with a wet cloth.
What was professional about that? Distracting her, Connor told himself. He turned from her for a moment and opened the medicine chest over her sink. He found iodine and cotton balls.
“I suppose you find me pathetic,” she said.
Distracting her would have been talking about anything—the upcoming royal wedding, the grape crops—not probing her personal tragedies.
She grimaced as he found the cut on her head and dabbed it.
“I don’t find you pathetic,” he told her. “You were married. Your husband died. It seems to me you would be lonely.”
“Thank you,” she said softly.
Leave it, he ordered himself. “I mean, of course I’ve wondered why such a beautiful woman would stay alone.”
“You wondered about me?”
Just as she had wondered about him, going online to find out about the SEALs. All this curiosity between them was just normal, wasn’t it? They were two strangers sharing a house. Naturally they would have questions.
“Did you love your husband that much?” Connor asked. “That you are prepared to stay lonely forever? To grieve him forever?”
“Yes,” she said. It came out sounding like a hiccup. “Where there is deep grief, there was deep love.”
And something about the way she said that made his radar go up. He realized he didn’t believe her. It was none of his business. He ordered himself not to probe. He was, at heart, a soldier. He would always be a soldier. That’s what he did. He obeyed orders.
So, why did he hear his own voice saying, in direct defiance of the command he had just given it, “Tell me about your husband.”
It was not, as he would have liked himself to believe, to provide a distraction for her while he doctored her head.
“No one, least of all not my very traditional family, understood my decision to marry him,” she said, sticking her chin up as if daring him to reach the same conclusion.
“Why’s that?” he asked, keeping his voice carefully noncommittal.
“He was very ill when we married. We knew he was going to die.”
He had to work to keep his face schooled.
“My mother was begging me, on the eve of my wedding, not to do it. She said, Life has enough heartbreak—you have to invite one by marrying a dying man?”
It seemed to Connor her mother had a point, but he didn’t say anything. He pretended intense concentration on the small bump on her head.
“Giorgio was part of the fabric of my life from the first day I started school.”
Connor could just picture her starting school: little dark pigtails, a pinafore dress, knee socks and a scraped knee.
Something that had never happened to him happened—he wondered what Isabella’s daughter would look like, if she had one someday. He felt it was a tragedy that she had said no to her own little girl somewhere along the line.
“Giorgio was never good-looking.” Isabella looked at Connor critically. He was pretty sure she found him good-looking, but not nearly as sure if she saw that as a good thing or a bad thing.
“He wasn’t even good-looking as a child, though his eyes held such depths of beauty they took my breath away from the first moment I looked in their liquid dark depths.”
He had to bite his tongue from saying cynically, How very poetic.
“He was always sickly—perhaps seeds of the illness that killed him had been growing since we were children.”
Connor did not like the picture she was painting of the man she had married. Good grief. What had she been thinking?
She seemed to sense his judgment, because she tilted her chin at him. “He took the fact he was different from all the other boys and made that his greatest strength.”
“Oh,” he said flatly, not a question. But she took it as a question.
“Giorgio was able to use such a simple thing as a word to spin entire worlds, enchanted kingdoms. He could see what others missed—the pure magic in a ladybug’s flight, the whole universe residing in the center of an opening flower. While other boys were crass and full of frightening energy, Giorgio was sensitive and sweetly contemplative.”
Connor hoped he wasn’t scowling. He himself had been one of those crass boys, full of frightening energy.
“When he asked me to marry him, I didn’t even have to think about it, I just said yes.”
What kind of man, knowing his prognosis was fatal, would ask someone he supposedly loved to share that with him?
“I’ve never even been on a real date. Giorgio was not well enough to go out for dinner, or to the movies. Certainly not dancing.”
She’d never been on a date? That last—certainly not dancing—seemed to have been offered with a bit of wistfulness.
“I still have the poems he wrote for me, and the splendor of them is still wrenching enough to make me weep.”
Connor looked at her lips. If she hadn’t dated any
