“Deal. ”
Conspiratorially they crept out through a flap in the tent and away through the shadows, away from the reception, into the hotel and up the stairs to Bianca’s room. Once inside she turned her back to him and showed him where to unfasten the hooks.
“This,” he said, “is fun.” He kissed the back of her neck, but she slipped out of his grasp and slid out of the poufy dress in one fluid motion.
“It’s going to get to be a lot more fun,” she said with a hint of insouciance. She grabbed slacks and a light summer sweater from the closet. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said as she went into the bathroom.
Neill heard her opening and closing the cabinet doors and running water in the basin. While he waited, he went to the window to look out. Out under the tent, the reception was in full swing, and he wondered where his brother Eric was right now. He also wondered what had gotten into Caroline. At least by this time, the helicopters and the airplane had gone away, and from the looks of things in the tent below, Hainsworth was putting on quite a party.
He remembered his promise to order champagne and goodies delivered to Mulberry Cottage and went to the phone beside the bed. He called room service and ordered a bottle of Cristal, his favorite, and then on a whim asked if the dining room could obtain two Burger King Whoppers.
“Whoppers, sir?” said the puzzled clerk.
“Yes. With two orders of fries.”
“I suppose we can do that, sir.”
“Good. Have them at Mulberry Cottage in forty-five minutes or so.”
“Will do, sir. Anything else?”
“No, thanks,” Neill said, and as he replaced the phone in its cradle, his eyes fell,on the notepad beside it. There were a few doodles scribbled alongside the name “Vittorio.”
Vittorio? Who was this Vittorio whose name kept turning up?
He turned to greet Bianca as she emerged from the bathroom. Her eyes were bright, her face glowing. She’d scrubbed off her makeup and looked entirely natural with her lovely hair sweeping her shoulders and simple diamond studs winking from her earlobes.
In his opinion, diamonds were usually given to a woman from a man. And these looked like high-quality diamonds, too.
Still, Bianca was a jewelry designer. She could be wearing any kind of jewelry. And yet, she said she was still considering expanding into gemstones, so certainly she wouldn’t have designed these. Besides, they were too simple to have been designed by Bianca, whose well-known trademark was boldness in jewelry design.
Would this Vittorio, whoever he was, have given Bianca diamonds? He felt a pang of jealousy, and he decided that Bianca would look better in emeralds.
“Let’s go,” she said. “Before something else happens.”
He slid his arm around her as they went out the door, but he couldn’t help thinking about Vittorio anyway.
“TELL ME ABOUT the mine,” Bianca said. They were in his cottage sitting in front of the fireplace, which Neill was determined to light against the chill that he said was in the air. She didn’t feel much chill, but she thought a fire would be romantic.
Neill fanned the growing blaze. “When we took it over, it was losing money because of poor management. It’s finally turned around, and I’m going to take a less active part in running it from now on. There are some things I really want to do.” The logs finally caught, flaring so that the golden light illuminated Neill’s face.
“Like climb Mount Everest?”
“That, and learn how to be a good father.”
“But that can wait until you climb the mountain, right?” She cut a glance at him out of the corners of her eyes as he came to sit on the floor in front of the couch.
“Bianca, being a good father comes first. But climbing Everest is a chance that happens along only once in a lifetime.” His jaw was set in that stubborn way he had, and even though she didn’t agree with what he said, she found his stubbornness as appealing as anything else about him. Love, she thought, was dangerous. It made you overlook a person’s inadequacies.
“We need to talk about things,” she said helplessly. “We might not have another chance.”
He picked up her hand and looked at it. She wore a gold-and-silver ring of her own design on the third finger of her right hand, and he twisted it around and looked at it.
“One of the things we need to talk about is Vittorio,” he said.
She stared at him blankly. Why in the world, with so many other important things to discuss, would Neill want to know about her manager?
“You told me there isn’t a man in your life at present,” he said, his eyes burning into her.
“There isn’t.
“I want to believe you, Bianca.”
“And why shouldn’t you?” She was beginning to feel angry.
“I saw the name Vittorio written on the pad beside your phone. It made me think that perhaps you hadn’t been truthful.”
Bianca yanked her hand away. “He’s my manager, Neill, and we’ve been calling back and forth to confer.”
He looked at her as if to measure the truth of her words. Then he tipped his head back and laughed. It was full-bodied laughter, long and loud.
“I thought—well, you have to admit that I had reason to doubt you were telling the truth.
“You mean because I didn’t tell you about Tia?”
“Of course,” he said, quieter now.
She stared into the flames. “I deserved that,” she said evenly.
“Tell me about Vittorio.”
She drew a deep breath. “I’ve finally given him the go-ahead for the gemstone line, and he wants to know all about Viceroy-Bellamy mines and the emeralds. If you don’t mind, I’d like to send him the videotape you showed me.”
“Sure. I’ll mail it myself before I leave here,” he said. A knock sounded at the door. “That’s the food I ordered,” he said, getting up to answer it.
Bianca rallied at the thought of food. She hadn’t eaten anything at the reception, and she was feeling shaky. However, the shakiness might be due to nervousness, not hunger, or to everything that had happened at the wedding or to something else that she’d rather not think about.
Neill brought the tray and set it on the low table beside the couch. On it were a bottle of Cristal in a silver ice bucket, two champagne flutes, and—
Two Burger King Whoppers?
She looked at Neill. He looked at her. And they both burst out laughing.
“It’s something we both like,” he said by way of explanation.
“Not just the same old hors d’oeuvres,” she agreed.
“Not the same old crudités.”
“Or boring onion dip.”
He poured the champagne and held his glass up to hers. “To Tia,” he said.
“To Tia,” she said solemnly, and drank half of it down.
“Do you know, Bianca, I think you’re my favorite relation,” Neill said when they were lying side by side in front of the fire, their heads propped on pillows.
“We’re not related,” she said.
“We’re something,” he reasoned.
“We’re parents.”
“Do you have pictures of Tia when she was just born?”
“In the delivery room.”
“And of the nursery where she sleeps?”
“Both of them—one in Paris and one in Rome.”
“I can’t wait to see them,” he said.
She rolled over on her stomach and looked into his eyes. They were gentle, and she sensed his pain over all the losses he had felt in his life. “Why don’t you come to Paris and to Rome after you climb Everest? You’ll need somewhere to wind down.”
“What do you mean, ‘wind down?’ ” His eyes held a lurking amusement now.
“This,” she said, kissing his eyelids playfully. “And this,” she added, kissing his lips.
He pulled her on top of him and kissed her thoroughly. He tasted of champagne and of Burger King Whopper and of chances missed, of cha
nces regained.
“I think,” he said slowly, cupping her face in his hands, “I’d like to ‘wind down’ right now.”
He kissed her, taking her breath away, and she melted against him, inhaling his musky male scent, feeling the roughness of his skin against her cheek. She held on to him with all her might, closing her eyes against pestering doubts. For a moment he stopped and gazed at her, in his eyes a complexity of emotions, and then his lips were on her throat, his hands parting buttonholes from buttons, caressing her breasts and belly.
It felt so wonderful to be touched by him. And to be kissed by him on her nipples, darker now than before she had the baby, and to lift her hips so that he could slide her clothes away. Somehow his clothes slipped away, too, and then they were together again, urgently seeking and finding.
Now they were greedy, wanting everything all at once. The fire in the fireplace snapped and cracked, heating their faces and their bodies into a frenzy of desire. She guided him into her softness when she couldn’t stand the wanting anymore, and he cried out as she rose to meet him. His arms crushed her to him as she pressed her face into his neck, and then she couldn’t see, could only feel, and what she felt was so profound that she felt tears springing into her eyes.
But if he didn’t feel the same thing, it was all wasted emotion, leading nowhere.
She held on and reveled in his hot breath on her hair, and she moaned his name and he gasped hers. When they reached their climax, it was together, and it was the best it could possibly be.
Afterward he pulled her into his arms and caressed her hair, saying nothing about the tears still damp on her cheeks. She marveled at the fulfillment she felt and wondered if he felt the same.
They slept briefly, dozing in each others’ arms. When Bianca opened her eyes, Neill was wide-awake. He smiled at her and kissed the tip of her nose, rousing her from a delicious sexual lethargy.
“I’ve been thinking about something you said,”he said after a while.
She angled her head to look at him. He was staring into the fire, his expression thoughtful. Her look was questioning.
“It was when you said that you wished you could give Tia a stable home life, the kind neither of us ever had.”
Bianca swallowed. “I remember,” she said.
“Well, didn’t you ever stop to think that the best way to provide that for Tia was to give her a daddy?”
“I suppose I did, but I didn’t think you wanted to be a daddy,” she said.
“And now that you know I do?”
“I—I—”Words failed her.
He sat up and looked down at her, his expression serious. “We can give our daughter the kind of home we never had, you know.”
She lay frozen, unsure where this was going. “You mean live together? Like you said Mother and Budge should have done?”
He nodded, his gaze never leaving her face. “And more.”
“What do you mean?” She felt as if her heart had stopped, as if she couldn’t breathe.
“We could marry, Bianca. Do you think it’s possible?”
She sat up and pulled the afghan from the couch around her shoulders. He regarded her anxiously.
“Maybe,” she allowed.
“We’d have to work out the details. Where we’d live, for instance.”
She wrapped the afghan tighter around her. It suddenly seemed too chilly in the cottage, even in front of the fire.
“You’re talking about an—an arrangement?” she stammered.
“A marriage,” he substituted. A log fell and splintered, distracting him for a moment, and as he prodded the fire with a poker, Bianca’s mind raced. A marriage for the sake of raising their child? With homes in Colombia and Rome and Paris and the U.S.? Leading separate lives, their togetherness nothing but a sham? No love, but maybe great sex now and then?
She waited, hardly daring to hope, willing him to say the three words that would make everything fall into place. He only jabbed the logs one more time and carefully replaced the poker where he’d found it.
Out of her innermost soul welled a sorrow so deep that there were no words to express the pain of it. I love you, I always have, she wanted him to say. I love you and I always will. But he only turned to her, his eyes beseeching but, she thought, empty of the one thing that could have made her say yes.
“Bianca?”
“I can’t marry you,” she blurted. In that moment, when she turned down the marriage proposal that she’d been waiting all her life to hear, she felt all the desolation that it was possible to feel. She wanted to die, she wanted to run and run as far as she could and never come back, and she wanted Neill Bellamy to fall into a pit as deep as the loss she felt. She stood up and grabbed her clothes, pushing her feet into her shoes, reaching down and yanking one of them on when it fell off.
“Bianca,” Neill said. He looked confused. Well, good.
She limped toward the door, still trying to fit her foot into the shoe. She shook her hair out of her eyes and fixed him with a look that would have stopped a tank at twenty paces. “You know what the Bellamy curse is, Neill? It’s lack of commitment, and not knowing a good thing when you see it, and being just plain stupid! And yes, you have the Bellamy curse, and I wish I’d never met you, and I don’t care if you ever see Tia again as long as you live!”
She flung the door open and hovered for a moment on the doorstep, haughty and looking for all the world as if she could spit nails. Then she slammed the door, hard.
Neill stared blankly at the still-trembling door. He’d proposed marriage to her, which seemed like the best idea he’d had in a long time, and she’d gotten crazy. It’s not like he’d ever proposed to anyone before, so he didn’t have a lot of experience at it, and he had to admit that maybe he could have approached it differently.
He pulled on his own clothes, determined to go after Bianca and make things right. After he was dressed, he saw that there was one item of clothing left over. He held it up and realized that Bianca had dropped her sweater. And not only that, but she was running around somewhere outside completely naked under that afghan.
ACROSS THE POND, the band was still playing swing tunes. People were laughing and talking; the society non-wedding of the year was in full swing. Bianca, huddled into the afghan, knew that she couldn’t go back to the hotel. She’d be spotted in no time.
Where then? She shivered. She knew she’d better put her clothes on, but she didn’t want to do it right outside Mulberry Cottage. And she couldn’t very well show up at the Ofstetlers’ to pick up Tia like this.
She plunged blindly into the shrubbery when she heard footsteps on the path. It was only a couple of hotel guests on their way to their cottage for the night. They stopped a few cottages beyond, let themselves in, and shut the door. Bianca was preparing to emerge from her hiding place when Neill came out of his cottage.
She crouched lower and craned her neck, the better to see. Neill looked determined and headstrong and better-looking than he had a right to be. His jaw was squared in anger, and his eyes were blazing, and despite her anger her knees went weak at the sight of him. At first she thought he was going back to the party, but instead of taking the shortest route along the path to the hotel, he headed toward the Ofstetlers’.
Oh no! Maybe he wanted Tia. All that stuff about wanting to be a good father was one thing, but was he so enraptured with the idea of being a parent that he wanted Tia to himself? Enough to try to get custody? She ran the things he’d said through her mind, trying to figure out if that might be on Neill’s agenda. He’d said he wanted to be a better father than Budge. He’d said he wanted to give Tia a home.
What he hadn’t said was that he loved Tia. Bianca, in that moment, didn’t believe that Neill, Bellamy that he was, knew how to love anyone.
Bianca crashed out of the bushes as soon as Neill was out of sight, and she pulled on her underwear right out in plain sight of anyone who might have happened along. Fortunately no one did. On with the slacks, on with
her sweater—but where was the sweater?
It was a fine cotton knit, a pretty pale blue, with buttons up the front, and it wasn’t there. She flung the afghan around her like a shawl and ran back to Neill’s cottage. Her sweater wasn’t lying on the ground anywhere, so maybe she’d left it inside. She stood on her tiptoes and peered in through one of the mullioned windows. The draperies were drawn, but there was a tiny chink in the space where the two sides met, and she squinted in an attempt to see better. Her eyelid caught the edge of her contact lens and knocked it sideways, and then her eye started to water.
“Miss?”
She let go of the windowsill and almost dropped the afghan.
It was a uniformed employee of the hotel, the watchman, probably, and he aimed a flashlight full in her face. She blinked, which dislodged the contact lens so that it rolled out of her eye and caught on her lower lashes.
For a moment she considered that this might be the perfect time to let loose with a stream of Italian, something to the effect that she spoke no English. On the other hand, that might convince him to haul her right straight into the hotel security office. In light of that possibility, she opted for the English version.
“I—uh, I was looking for my contact lens. Found it. See?” She snaked a hand out from under the afghan and plucked the lens from her eyelid.
The watchman frowned. “I’ve seen you around the hotel,” he said. “You and your baby.”
She smiled, hoping he wouldn’t insist that she come to the hotel office for questioning, that he wouldn’t call Hainsworth or any other member of the Knox-Lambert tribe, that she could convince him that she wasn’t up to no good.
“Yes, well, I left the wedding—well, you know, what was supposed to be the wedding—and I’m going to get my baby right now. Right this very minute. But my contact was giving me trouble and I had to come over to this window so I could see. Sometimes I can’t tell if a lens is in or out. They make them so thin now, you know. And guess what, it’s out, but the other one is still in, and I’d better go collect my baby right now.” She didn’t sound very convincing, even to herself, but as she talked she edged away from the cottage.
RSVP...Baby Page 19
