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 other men, she probably hadn’t kissed any other men, either. He had the irreverent feeling he could make her forget the splendor of those poems in about twenty seconds flat. He made himself focus on the small cut on her head.
“At sixteen I declared my love for him. At twenty I married him, over the protests of my entire family. He had already been diagnosed with his illness. At twenty-six I laid him to rest. In my heart is nothing but gratitude for the amazing time we had.”
She seemed to be expecting him to say something, so he said, “Uh-huh,” when what he really wanted to do was take her by those slender, very naked shoulders and shake some sense into her.
“Now in me is an empty place that nothing—and no one—can ever fill.”
Her tale made Connor want to kiss the living daylights out of her, to wake her up from her trance, to show her maybe that empty place inside her could be filled. But he recognized he was treading on dangerous and unfamiliar ground if he thought he would be the one who was up to the challenge of filling her empty places. Isabella apparently liked the sensitive type. Which, if the way he felt about her husband was any indication, Connor most definitely was not. The man had been sick. That wasn’t his fault. And yet Connor felt aggravated, as if Giorgio had taken advantage of Isabella’s soft heart to give her a life of looking after him.
“You think I felt sorry for him,” she gasped. “You think I didn’t love him at all.”
“Hey! I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. I saw it in your face. You think I don’t have a clue what love is.”
He was the one who had told her to be observant, but he hadn’t been expecting this. “I don’t know what you think you saw in my face, but it wasn’t that. You did not see that in my face, because you are looking at a person who truly does not have a clue what love is.”
“Humph.” She seemed unconvinced. She seemed unfairly angry at him.
“Maybe,” he suggested carefully, “you said out loud the doubt you’ve been nursing inside since the day you married him.”
With speed that took him by surprise, she smacked him hard, open-handed, across his face, hard enough to turn his head. He looked slowly back at her as she stood up. The towel fell to the ground, leaving only the shower curtain around her. Gathering her shower curtain, regal as Christina Rose could ever hope to be, as confident as the emperor with no clothes, Isabella got up and walked by him and out of the bathroom. He watched as she walked down the hallway to her bedroom, entered it, sent one damning look back at him and slammed the door.
Connor Benson stood frozen to the spot, absolutely stunned. He touched his face where her palm had met his cheek.
Jeez, for a little bit of a thing she packed a better wallop than a lot of men he’d known.
* * *
Isabella lay, wrapped in her shower curtain, on her bed in a pool of dampness and self-loathing. She could not believe she had struck Connor. She was going to have to apologize. It was so unlike her!
It was only because she had hit her head. He’d said it himself. She’d had a bit of a shock—people did and said things they wouldn’t normally say under those circumstances.
Isabella would not normally confess all kinds of things to him. She had told him she was lonely in a moment of dazed weakness. It was also in a moment of dazed weakness that she had given in to his encouragement to talk about Giorgio.
What a mistake that had been. She had seen in Connor’s face that he thought her marriage had been a sham.
Or was what he said more accurate? That bump on the head had removed a filter she had been trying desperately to keep in place, and her own doubts, not Connor’s, had spilled out of her.
She got up off the bed. Enough of the self-pity and introspection. Yes, she was lonely, but why had she confessed that to him instead of just looking after it herself?
People had to be responsible for themselves!
Tonight was a case in point. She had been invited to the sixteenth birthday party of one of her former students. As a teacher, she was often invited to her pupils’ family events, but she rarely attended. So, who did she have to blame but herself if she was lonely?
It wasn’t Connor’s fault that he had made her aware of the loneliness as if it was a sharp shard of glass inside her.
She went to her closet and threw open the door. She wasn’t going to the party as a demure little schoolteacher, either. She wasn’t wearing a dress that would label her prim and tidy for all the world to see.
She was not dressing in a way that sent the message she was safe and boring, and not quite alive somehow.
Way at the back of the closet was a dress she had bought a long time ago, on a holiday she had forced herself to take a year or two after Giorgio died. The purchase had really been the fault of one of those pushy salesclerks who had brought her the dress, saying she had never seen a dress so perfect for someone.
It was the salesclerk’s gushing that had made Isabella purchase the dress, which had been way more expensive than what she could afford. When she brought it home, she had had buyer’s remorse, and dismissed it as not right for her. Still, it hung in her closet, all these years later. Why had she never given it away?
She took it out and laid it on the bed, eyed it critically. Not right for the old her. Perfect for the new her.
The dress was red as blood and had a low V on both the front and back, which meant she couldn’t wear it with any bra that she owned.
It was the dress of a woman who was not filled with unreasonable fears.
Feeling ridiculously racy for the fact she had on no bra, she slipped the dress over her head, then looked at herself in her full-length mirror. She remembered why she had purchased the dress, and it wasn’t strictly because of the salesclerk gushing over it.
