Kitabı oku: «The Marriage Experiment», sayfa 3

CHAPTER THREE

LOOKING supremely at ease, and for all the world as if he had every right to be there, he lounged against the frame of the French doors leading from her living room, his shabby attempt to look grave sadly undermined by the supercilious little smirk on his face.

“How did you get in here, Grant?” she spat, doing her best to sound both dignified and affronted—no easy task given that she was sprawled out practically naked before him and he was making no secret of the fact that he’d noticed.

“I let myself in,” he said, staring his fill at great leisure. “The butler doesn’t seem to be on duty. I thought perhaps you’d given him the night off.”

“I don’t have a butler.”

His smirk grew. “What, and no maid, either? Gee, it must be tough, having to do for yourself!”

“It is. But somehow I manage.” Aware that her strapless bikini top was precariously close to letting all it was supposed to contain fall out before his amused inspection, she tried rather unsuccessfully to cover herself with a towel.

Of course, if he’d had a grain of decency in his make-up, he’d have averted his eyes and let her fumble in private, but he’d never been long on chivalry. “You don’t seem to be managing that too well,” he drawled, shoving himself away from the door frame and ambling toward her. “Need any help?”

“Not from you,” she fumed, slapping the towel in his direction to keep him at a distance.

“No need to get all exercised, Olivia,” he said mildly. “I didn’t come here with seduction in mind.”

“What did you come for, then?” To her horror, the question emerged loaded with unintentional petulance, a fact he was also quick to pick up on.

“You sound almost disappointed, sweet face, as if it’s been a long time since a man reminded you how it feels to respond like a woman. Am I to take it that Hank from the Bank is no great shakes between the sheets?”

“His name is Henry,” she exclaimed, almost choking with anger, “and I thought I made it plain on Saturday that we are not lovers! This might come as a surprise to you, Grant, but there are men for whom sex is not the be-all and end-all of existence.”

“Only if they’ve been neutered.” Uninvited, Grant took a turn around the patio, peering into the various jardinieres as if he suspected Henry might be lurking amid the flowers. “If you were my woman, I’d be out defending my territory, especially if her unattached ex suddenly showed up in town.”

“But I’m not your woman. I never was, although I suppose it would be expecting too much for you to understand the difference between sharing your life with someone and treating her as if she were just another possession to load in the trunk of your car.”

“I was willing to share my life with you, Olivia,” he said, the very softness in his tone a warning as lethal as a jungle cat’s low snarl. By now, the sun had begun its descent toward the horizon so that his shadow lay long and narrow on the flagstones, making it seem almost as if he were reaching out to her. “I was willing to share everything—all my dreams and ambitions and, most assuredly, my heart. You just weren’t interested in coming along for the ride.”

His accusation brought the resentment she’d thought she’d buried years before rising up to engulf her, along with a smattering of remembered agony and a wealth of bitterness. “You’re the one who walked out, Grant Madison, not I, so don’t try rewriting history now, because I’m not about to buy it! I might not have been bright enough to have the letters ‘M.D.’ after my name, but I was far from the simpleton you took me to be. I knew exactly what you were doing, the day you presented me with an ultimatum no sane person would have found acceptable. You wanted an excuse to back out of our marriage and you found one.”

“I offered you adventure and freedom,” he said, the sudden edge in his voice sharp as a scalpel, “but you didn’t have the guts to seize opportunity when it came knocking. Instead you chose to remain in your father’s shadow and to hell with me!”

“As if you even cared! Your only passion was medicine.”

“Not just medicine, Olivia. At one time, I was passionate about you, too.”

“You didn’t let that stop you from abandoning me at a time when I was most vulnerable, though, did you?”

He swore at that, a profanity so explosively obscene that she cringed. “Save it, Olivia! I didn’t come here to be raked over the coals yet again for something over which I had absolutely no control!”

She shrugged contemptuously. “So, leave! I don’t see anyone keeping you here against your will.”

“Not until I’ve said my piece, which is simply this: it seems that you’ve carved quite a niche for yourself in hospital affairs, which means we’re bound to cross paths frequently in the next month or two. I suggest that, unless you want to set every tongue in town wagging, you learn to leave your personal antipathies at home, because the job site is no place to air them and I won’t put up with being made to look like a fool in front of my colleagues. Your little performance this morning will not be repeated, Olivia. Do I make myself clear?”

“Don’t you condescend to me, Grant Madison! I’m no longer the insecure little twit you once knew. I haven’t just grown older, I’ve grown up, as well. Meet the new me: Olivia Whitfield, B.Comm., fully accredited fundraising executive. It takes determination and guts to go out into the big world of business and hustle for bucks. But you wouldn’t know about anything like that, would you, locked away in your pure, anti-bacterial ivory tower?”

“Holy cow!” he murmured. “I’m impressed!”

But he didn’t sound impressed; he sounded highly amused.

“Listen to me,” she hissed. “I won’t put up with being treated like some feather-brained socialite playing at being important for want of something better to do! So the next time you get the urge to tell me to consult an expert, remember that I am the expert when it comes to finding ways for Springdale General to operate in the black, and if you really want to see that new equipment in CCU, you’d be well advised to put a lid on your ego and listen to me on the best way to go about getting it.”

She hadn’t rehearsed the tirade, but it rolled off her tongue as smoothly and with as much fire as if she’d been practicing for weeks. She was breathless when she finished: breathless and triumphant. In the old days, she’d never have put him in his place so effectively that he was rendered momentarily speechless.

“Well,” he said, when he finally found his voice again. “Well, well, well! Daddy’s little girl seems to have grown up after all, and about time, too. Tell me, sweet face, how did you manage to slide out from under that big, controlling thumb of his?”

“After surviving ten months of marriage to you, it was a breeze, I can assure you!”

“Oh, come now, Olivia, I don’t deserve that. They weren’t all bad months. We had some memorable times.”

“Too few to count, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, really? Is that why you lost it on Saturday night? Because you couldn’t remember how it used to be with us?” He shook his head. “If you’re going to go over the top like that for no reason at all every time we happen to meet, you’ll turn the next few weeks into one long soap opera for everyone else in town.”

“I don’t give a hoot what everyone else in town thinks.”

Of course, it was a bald-faced lie, but, surprisingly, he bought it. Abandoning his contemplation of the flower pots, he strolled over to where she sat in the chaise with her knees drawn up to her chest so that he had no opportunity to subject her cleavage to further inspection. “You know,” he said, looking down at her with a mixture of respect and regret, “if you’d shown half the backbone then that you’ve acquired since, we might still be married today.”

“I don’t think so. Say what you like about my father, but he was right when he warned me that you and I shared nothing in common. It’s a miracle we stayed together as long as we did.”

She ought to have known better than to bring her father into the discussion. The old light of battle sparked in Grant’s eyes before her words had cooled on the evening air. “Nothing?” he echoed. “Oh, that’s not quite true, Olivia. We shared something quite extraordinary—for a little while, at least.”

“I suppose you’re harping on sex again,” she said, squirming a little under his gaze, “but I’m afraid it doesn’t have any staying power when it’s the only thing holding a relationship together.”

“You’re sure of that, are you?”

“Yes,” she said, but he heard the betraying quaver in her voice and, like the predator he was, took immediate advantage of her weakness.

“Why don’t we put your theory to the test, Olivia?” he murmured silkily, and before she could blink, let alone refuse him, he dropped down beside her on the chaise and kissed her.

How ridiculous that the same word used to describe a peck on the cheek should apply to the exchange which occurred between them at that moment. How preposterous that nothing Henry had been able to devise in the way of romantic overtures came even close to the utter seduction of Grant’s mouth on hers.

He didn’t touch her anywhere else. No hands sliding up her bare arms to find her throat and trace a daring line to where her bikini top clung tenuously to her breasts. No forcing her lips apart with his tongue to take possession of the dark and secret enclaves of her mouth. No doing any of those things she found herself wanting him to do. Just simple devastation with a touch as light as thistledown that lasted a second, and then two, and then three, and which left her aching in every pore. Hurting for something she had missed more than she’d ever dared admit.

The pain roared through her like fire, as though it had been lying in wait for the last eight years for just such an opportunity to destroy her. The starch went out of her spine, seeping away like water to expose the great arid desert where her heart had lain untouched for so long.

She felt the moan rise in her throat and did her best to smother it, but it escaped anyway, a pleading, shameless whimper of need. The fingers she’d knotted around her knees lost their strength and let her legs fall slackly apart, leaving her with nothing but the yellow triangle of her bikini bottom to protect her where she was, and always had been, so susceptible to his advances.

“Grant,” she implored him faintly, begging him in that single word to tell her that he understood, that he felt the same, that he wanted her as rapaciously as she wanted him.

But, although she heard the unspoken words as clearly as if she’d screamed them from the rooftop, he either did not or he chose to ignore them. Or perhaps he listened instead to his own, more prudent inner voices, because, very slowly, he lifted his head and drew back from her and muttered, “I shouldn’t have done that. It was a mistake. A very big mistake.”

“Why did you do it, then?” she asked, tears trembling in her throat.

“To prove a point that no longer has any relevance in either of our lives,” he said soberly, and stood up. “I thought it was important that we clear the air between us, but it would have been better if I’d found some other place to do it because I should never have come here, nor will I again.”

The sun still slanted across the garden, filming the surface of the pool with gold and leaving the air soporific with heat, but suddenly she was so cold that gooseflesh stippled her limbs and set her teeth to chattering. He would never know what a supreme effort it took for her to reply, “So leave. Run off and play with your stethoscope. Learn to knit with it, for all I care. I’m sorry I don’t have a butler to show you out, but I’m sure you’ll find your own way.”

Just briefly, he paused, as though perhaps he had something more to convey, some small indication that he was not completely unmoved by what had happened between them. But then he straightened his shoulders and swung away.

Miserably, she watched as he strode across the patio, dwelling on the sight of him and trying not to remember the time when she’d had the right to explore all that height and breadth of sheer masculine beauty. When to hold him in her arms and welcome him into her body had been the joy of both their lives. When to reach up and kiss him for no reason other than that he was her husband and she loved him had been as natural and instinctive as breathing.

Gradually, his footsteps faded, and as the silence he left behind came pressing down on her so did the tears. Not because he had left her tonight, but because he had reminded her too vividly of the pain she’d experienced when he’d left her before. She had not known he could hurt her so badly a second time.

Since Henry was out of town on business, Olivia spent the following Saturday evening exchanging news with her friend, Bethany, who’d just returned from three weeks of shepherding her grade twelve art class through the galleries of northern Italy. But everyone else worth knowing attended the bi-monthly dinner-dance at the Country Club, and, by Monday, the town was buzzing with the news that handsome Grant Madison had squired Joanne Bowles to the affair and danced with her well into the small hours. Mrs. Bowles was reputed to be over the moon, according to the waitress at The Hanging Garden Café, where Olivia met Bethany for lunch that afternoon.

“Why do you care?” Bethany inquired, after the waitress had adjusted the angle of the umbrella over their table and left them to enjoy their meal in peace.

“I don’t,” Olivia said.

“I see. Then it must be the avocado shrimp that has you looking so green about the gills.”

Olivia looked down at her salad and almost gagged at the glutinous concoction staring back at her. “I just never imagined Grant with another woman, I guess.”

“Why on earth not, Olivia? Eligible men under fifty and over six feet are in short supply around here, or haven’t you noticed? Add a full head of hair and all his own teeth to the mix and you’ve got a product calculated to have every woman under eighty drooling into her morning oatmeal.”

“You’re right, of course. When he puts his mind to it, Grant can be charming.”

“Having only ever seen the man in photographs, I’m not in a position to say, but you obviously found him irresistible at one time. The adoration on your face in those wedding pictures you keep stashed at the back of your bedroom closet is pretty hard to miss.”

“I’d only just turned twenty at the time, and was easily dazzled.”

“And it takes more than great biceps, fabulous pecs and a good-looking face to impress you now, does it?”

Olivia thought of Henry, sweet, faithful Henry whose fair skin burned to a crisp in the sun and whose hair was thinning noticeably on top, but who would cut off his right arm before he’d hurt her feelings or make her cry. “Definitely!”

“Hmm.” Bethany stirred her iced tea thoughtfully. “Then why haven’t you trashed that wedding album? Why hang on to something you no longer value?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I tried a dozen times to throw the damned thing away but I could never bring myself to go through with it. Once, I got as far as dumping the whole works in the garbage can, but the next morning I brought it back in again, cleaned it off, and put it back in its tissue-lined box.”

“Where neither dust nor grime nor light of day can damage its embossed white leather covers and the flawless memories they contain.” Bethany looked at her meditatively. “Is that why you waited so long to divorce him, Olivia? Because you were still in love with him and hoping he’d come back to you?”

“Certainly not! What an absurd idea!”

“Well, you don’t have to bite my head off. It’s a reasonable enough question, given that you hung on almost two years before taking the final step to end things.”

Olivia grimaced apologetically. “You’re right, of course, and I suppose the reason is that he was my first love and I had a hard time admitting that anything ugly could ever touch something so entirely magical and magnificent. I guess, in a way, that I still believed in fairy tales.”

“I didn’t know he was your first love. I always assumed there’d been others before him. You were nineteen when you met him, after all.”

“Oh, I’d dated other men, but I was really just a girl playing at romance with a succession of suitors properly impressed by my father’s position in the community and his wealth.”

But Grant, as she remembered all too well, had cared nothing about those, and in fact had despised her father—a mutual dislike which had flourished despite her efforts to effect some sort of truce between them.

“What’s so special about money and power,” Grant had scoffed, shortly after she’d started going out with him, “if a man’s lacking in integrity?”

She’d been shocked. Nobody ever criticized Sam Whitfield, at least not in front of his daughter. “Are you saying my father’s dishonest?” she’d asked.

“Not in so many words, Olivia. But he’s pretty big on self-interest.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Well, look at the way he controls you, for a start. You practically have to ask his permission to leave the house because he expects you to be there whenever he needs a maid or secretary or hostess.”

“It’s only been that way since Mother died.”

“And how long ago was that?”

“Four years.”

“Plenty of time for him to hire someone else to pick up the slack, I’d say. Except it’s more convenient this way because, unlike paid help, you can’t—or won’t—walk out when he goes too far. He’s a bully, Olivia, and you’re making a big mistake in letting him get away with it.”

“I don’t mind,” she’d said, half-scandalized at the idea of defying her father, and half-thrilled by the prospect. “It gives me something to do, besides my volunteer work at the hospital.”

Grant had snorted in disgust. “You need to cut those apron strings before they strangle you, sweet face, and put a little distance between you and your old man. You need to get a life—set that mind of yours to better use.”

“Hey!” Bethany tapped her arm. “Where have you gone, girlfriend? I feel as if I’m having lunch with a shadow.”

“I was just marveling at how sheltered and naive I was when I met Grant. I remember him telling me to grow up and make something of myself, instead of letting my father control everything I did.”

“Sounds like pretty good advice, if you ask me,” Bethany said judiciously. “Your dad does like to run roughshod over anyone who gets in his way, you know.”

“The trouble was, I was besotted enough to believe that marrying Grant was the answer, and immature enough to think that, as my husband, he’d run interference for me with my father.”

“I gather he didn’t see that as part of his husbandly job description?”

“No. And if I’d been able to see past the…um…the sex—”

“It’s okay to say the word out loud, Olivia. No one’s going to brand you a hussy. Sex between a man and a woman is considered quite normal—and even preferable to some of the kinky things going on behind closed doors these days. So, to get back to what you were saying, if you’d been able to see past the sex, what then?”

“I’d have listened to my father, because for once he was right. He warned me that I was making the biggest mistake of my life, that nothing good would come of the marriage and that I’d live to regret it. But what woman pays attention to that sort of advice when she’s in love and consumed with desire for a man?”

“Not you, obviously.” Bethany grinned. “Nor should you have. It’s not up to the parents to choose their children’s spouses, at least not in our culture. What did old Sam have against Grant, anyway? I mean, I could understand if you’d hooked yourself up with some shiftless bum who couldn’t hold down a decent job. But we’re talking Doctor’s Wife, here, Olivia. Not too shabby a situation to find yourself in, by most people’s standards.”

“But there were red flags going up all over the place, if only I’d had eyes to see them. Instead, I married Grant in a flurry of confetti, champagne and fantasies so fragile they never had a hope of surviving beyond the honeymoon phase. It took only a few months for me to wake up to the fact that real life wasn’t going to live up to my girlish expectations and by then the damage was done. Too many things had happened.”

Bethany tipped her head to one side inquisitively. “What kind of things?”

“Oh, just…things,” Olivia said, trying to shrug the question aside.

But Bethany was having none of it. “Oh, come on, Olivia! We’re supposed to be friends, and friends don’t shut each other out like this. You seem to forget that I didn’t set foot in Springdale until four years ago, and that the only Olivia Whitfield I’ve ever known is the super-confident, super-effective fundraising exec who manages to coax money out of thin air to keep every charity in town afloat, particularly the hospital. She’s not the type to run away from a challenge, so how come she didn’t fight for her marriage?”

“Because, for all that he was a dedicated and skilled doctor, his treatment of me was cavalier, to say the least. For instance, you don’t know the number of times, both before and after our marriage, that I’d spend an evening waiting for him to phone or show up as promised, only to be stood up in favor of more urgent hospital concerns.”

“No, I don’t know,” Bethany said evenly. “But I do know that’s what being a doctor’s wife is all about. It strikes me you should have expected it and accepted it.”

“That’s because you’re pushing thirty. But at barely twenty, and admittedly a bit spoiled, I wasn’t prepared to take second place to a career whose demands never stopped. The way I saw it, if Grant had loved me as I loved him, he’d have put me first.”

“Maybe, at that stage of his career, he didn’t feel he had that choice.”

“All medical interns are overworked, Bethany, but most still manage to find time to play, to nurture relationships, to commit to something other than medicine.”

“And you didn’t realize he was different from the rest before you said ‘I do’?”

“Yes. But another flaw in my twenty-year-old’s thinking was the belief that, once we were married, I’d be able to change him. He’d always had something of the gypsy in his soul, but I really thought that if I made home the most irresistible place in the world, he wouldn’t be able to wait to come back to me at the end of the day.”

“But people don’t change, do they?”

“No. He didn’t, and neither did I. He continued to be obsessed with his work and I continued to behave like a child deprived of her favorite toy. Worse, I became jealous of the people who saw more of my husband than I did—especially the women who’d also chosen to make a career in medicine. Why would he want to rush home to someone who had only her high school diploma to hang on the wall?”

“Because presumably he didn’t fall in love with your high school diploma, you idiot. He fell in love with you.”

“Not far enough,” Olivia said bitterly. “If he had, he’d never have left me the way he did, especially not then.”

“I’d ask what that means, except I don’t think I’m going to get an answer, at least not right now.” Bethany straightened in her chair and squinted at some point beyond Olivia’s left shoulder. “Don’t look now, but if your ex looks anything like his photograph, he just came out to the patio and is being shown to a table. And he has Joanne Bowles with him.”

“Oh, good grief!” The small amount of salad she’d managed to consume shot to the pit of Olivia’s stomach like a bullet.

“You want to leave?”

“And have it seem that I’m running away? Not on your life! Let him leave, if he doesn’t like the company!”

“Well, I don’t exactly think he’s seen you yet,” Bethany said. “Right now, he’s concentrating on Joanne, who’s pulling out all the stops to keep his attention focused on her—and succeeding pretty well, I might add. If her neckline were much lower, we’d all be able to see what she ate for breakfast.”

Over the sudden, crushing ache in her heart, Olivia said, “I don’t care. I really don’t. He can have lunch with whomever he pleases. It makes not a scrap of difference to me.”

“So you say, Olivia, but it seems to me that you remember an awful lot about him—all kinds of details that most other women would have forgotten if, as you claim, they were over a man. Are you sure you’re not still carrying a torch for him?”

“Quite sure. I have no feelings for him, one way or the other. In fact, he could come and sit at the same table with us and it wouldn’t bother me.”

“Oh, goody,” Bethany said, with wry humor. “Because he’s finally noticed you and he’s on his way over. Plaster a smile on your face, kiddo, and try not to look as if you’ve just been dug up. All eyes in the joint are watching the latest episode in your personal soap opera.”