Breathing Room (5 page)

She realized right away that it wouldn't be an easy fit, not like with Michael. She gritted her teeth and wiggled against him until his self-control gave way and he embedded himself inside her.

Even then he wouldn't move along, so she tilted her hips, urging him to hurry, to get her where she needed to be, to finish up so she could be done with this before the sober whispers invading her wine-soaked brain turned into shouts and she had to deal with the fact that she was violating everything she believed in andthis was wrong!

He angled, pulled back, and gazed down at her with hot, glazed eyes. She closed her own eyes so she wouldn't have to look at him, as superb as he was. He slipped his hands between their bodies and rubbed her, but his patience only made everything worse. The wine curdled in her stomach. She pushed his arm away and moved her hips. Eventually he took the hint and began a slow, thorough thrusting. She bit her lip and counted backward, counted forward, pushed his hand away again, and fought the bleakness of self-betrayal. Eons passed before he convulsed. She endured his shudders and waited for the moment when he would roll to his side. When it finally came, she leaped from the bed.

"Annette?"

She ignored him and shoved herself into her clothes.

"Annette?Che problema c'è?"

She reached into her purse, threw a handful of bills on the bed, and fled from the room.

Chapter 4

Eighteen hours later her blinding headache still hadn't eased. She was somewhere southwest ofFlorencetrying to drive a stick shift Fiat Panda through the dark night on a strange road marked with signs in a language she couldn't read. Her knit dress had bunched under the seat belt, and she'd been too groggy to do her hair. She hated herself like this – messy, disorganized, depressed. She wondered how many disastrous missteps an intelligent woman could take and still keep her head up. Considering the current condition of her head, this woman had taken a few too many.

A sign flashed by before she could read it. She slowed, pulled off to the side of the road, and made herself back up. No worry about hitting anyone coming from behind, since she hadn't seen another car for miles.

The Tuscan countryside was reputed to be exquisitely beautiful, but she'd made the trip after dark, so she hadn't seen much. She should have gotten an earlier start, but she hadn't been able to drag herself out of bed until late afternoon. Then she'd simply sat in front of the window and stared, trying to pray but unable to do so.

The Panda's headlights came to rest on the sign.CASALLEONE. She turned on the dome light to look at the directions and saw that she'd somehow managed to stumble back onto the proper road. God protected fools.

So where were you last night, God?

Someplace else, that was for certain. But she couldn't blame God or even all the wine she'd drunk for what had happened. Her own character defects had driven her to monumental stupidity. She'd rejected everything she believed in, only to discover that Dr.

Favor had been right as usual. Sex couldn't heal the broken places.

She pulled back out onto the road. Like so many other people's, her broken places originated in childhood, but how long could you keep blaming your parents for your own failures? Her parents had been college professors who'd thrived on chaos and emotional excess. Her mother was boozy, brilliant, and intensely sexual. Her father: boozy, brilliant, and hostile. Despite being authorities in their respective academic fields, neither could achieve tenure. Her mother had a tendency to indulge in affairs with her students, and her father had a penchant for getting into shouting matches with his colleagues. Isabel had spent her childhood being dragged from one college town to the next, an unwilling witness to lives that had spun out of control.

While other children yearned to escape their parents' discipline, Isabel craved a structure that never came. Instead, her parents used her as a pawn in their battles. In a desperate act of self-preservation, she'd turned her back on them at eighteen. She'd been on her own ever since. Six years ago her father had died of liver failure, and her mother had followed not long after. She'd done her duty at the end, but she hadn't mourned them as much as she'd mourned the waste of their lives.

Her headlights picked out a narrow, winding street with picturesque stone buildings set close to the road. As she drove farther, she saw a collection of shops shuttered for the night. Everything in the town seemed old and quaint except for the giant Mel Gibson movie poster plastered on the wall of a building. In smaller letters beneath the title, she made out the name Lorenzo Gage.

That's when it hit her. Dante hadn't reminded her of a figure in a Renaissance painting.

He'd been a ringer for Lorenzo Gage, the actor who'd recently driven her favorite actress to suicide.

Her stomach felt queasy again. How many of Gage's movies had she seen? Four? Five?

Way too many, but Michael loved action films, the more violent the better. Now she'd never have to see another one.

She wondered if Gage felt any remorse for Karli Swenson's death. It would probably add to his box-office appeal. Why were nice women so fascinated with bad boys? The rescue fantasy, she supposed – the need to believe they were the only women powerful enough to transform those losers into husbands and fathers. Too bad it wasn't that easy.

She cleared the edge of the town, then turned on the dome light again to see the rest of the directions:"Follow the road from Casalleone for about two kilometers, then turn right at the rusty Ape."

Rusty ape? She envisioned King Kong with a bad dye job. Two kilometers later her headlights picked out a lumpy shape off to the side of the road. She slowed and saw that the rusty Ape wasn't of the gorilla variety, but the remnants of anAh-pay , one of those tiny vehicles beloved by European farmers. This particularjunker had once been the famous three-wheeled Ape truck, although its trio of tires had disappeared long ago.

As she turned, stones clicked against the undercarriage. The directions mentioned the entrance of the VilladeiAngeli , "Villa of the Angels" and she took the Panda around another series of uphill curves before she saw the open iron gates marking the villa's main drive. The gravel road she was looking for lay just beyond. It was barely more than a path, and the Panda lurched as it rolled downhill, then took a sharp curve.

A structure rose in front of her. She slammed on the brakes. For a moment she simply stared. Finally she turned off the ignition, killed the lights, and dropped her head against the back of the seat. Despair welled inside her. This crumbling, neglected pile of stones was the farmhouse she'd rented. Not beautifully restored, as the description from the real-estate agent had indicated, but a dilapidated heap that looked as if cows still lived inside.

Solitude. Rest. Contemplation.Action. Sexual healing was no longer part of her plan. She wouldn't even think about it.

The house offered solitude, but how could she rest, let alone find an atmosphere conducive to contemplation, when she was locked inside a ruin? And she needed contemplation if she intended to come up with an action plan to get her life back in gear.

Her mistakes piled higher and higher. She could no longer remember what it had felt like to be competent.

She rubbed her eyes. At least she'd solved the mystery of why the rent was so cheap.

She barely summoned the energy to get out of the car and drag her suitcases toward the door. Everything was so quiet she could hear herself breathe. She would have given anything for the friendly blare of a police siren or the gentle roar of a plane flying out of La Guardia, but she heard only the chirping of crickets.

The rough wooden door was unlocked, just as the rental agent had indicated it would be, and it creaked like a bad movie sound effect. She braced herself for a flock of bats to come flying out at her, but she was greeted with nothing more ominous than the musty scent of old stones.

"Self-pity will paralyze you, my friend. So will a victim mentality. You're not a victim.

You're filled with a magnificent power. You're—"

Oh, shut up!she told herself.

She fumbled along the wall until she found a switch that turned on a floor lamp with the wattage of a Christmas-tree bulb. She glanced around just long enough to note a cold, bare tile floor, a few ancient furnishings, and an unwelcoming stone staircase. At least there were no cows.

She couldn't cope with any more tonight, so she grabbed her smallest suitcase and made her way upstairs, where she found a functioning bathroom – thank you, Mother God –

and a small, stark bedroom that looked like a nun's cell. After what she'd done last night, nothing could have been more ironic.

*

Renstood on the Ponte alla Carraia and gazed down the Arno at the bridges that had been built to replace the ones the Luftwaffe had blown up during the Second World War.

Hitler had spared only the Ponte Vecchio, built in the fourteenth century. Once Ren had tried to blow upLondon'sTowerBridge, but George Clooney had taken him out first.

The wind whipped a short lock of hair over his forehead.

He'd had it cut that afternoon. He'd also shaved and – since be intended to avoid lighted public spaces tonight – removed his brown contact lenses. Now, however, he felt exposed. Sometimes be wanted to step out of his own skin.

The Frenchwoman last night had spooked him. He didn't like misjudging people.

Although he'd gotten the anonymous sex he'd wanted, something had been drastically wrong. He managed to find trouble even when he wasn't looking for it.

A pair of street toughs ambled toward him from the other side of the bridge, looking him over as they came closer to decide how big a fight he'd put up if they tried to take his wallet Their swagger reminded him of his own youth, although his crimes had been limited more to self-destruction. He'd been a punk with a silver spoon up his ass, a kid who'd figured out early on that misbehavior was a good way to get attention. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Nobody got more attention than the bad guy.

He reached for his cigarettes, even though he'd quit six months ago. The crumpled pack he pulled from his pocket held exactly one, all he let himself carry these days. It was his emergency stash.

He lit it, flicked the match over the side of the bridge, and watched the boys come closer.

They disappointed him by exchanging uneasy glances and passing on.

He drew the smoke deep into his lungs and told himself to forget about last night. But he couldn't quite manage it. The woman's light brown eyes had shone with intelligence, and all that buttoned-up sophistication had excited him, which was probably why he'd neglected to pick up on the fact that she was a wacko. At the end he'd gotten this gut-churning feeling that he was somehow attacking her. He might rape women on the silver screen, but in real life that was one outrage even he couldn't imagine.

He left the bridge behind and wandered along an empty street, taking his foul mood with him, even though he should be on top of the world. Everything he'd worked toward was about to happen. The Howard Jenks film would give him the credibility that had eluded him. Although he had more than enough money to live the rest of his life without working, he loved the whole business of making films, and this was the role he'd been waiting for, a villain who would be every bit as memorable to audiences as Hannibal Lecter. Still, he had those six weeks to get through beforeNight Kill started filming, and the city felt claustrophobic around him.

Karli... The woman last night... The sense that nothing he'd achieved meant anything...

God, he was sick of being depressed. He tucked the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, shoved his hands into his pockets, hunched his shoulders, and kept walking. James-fucking-Dean on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

The hell with it. Tomorrow he was leavingFlorenceand heading for the place that had drawn him here.

Chapter 5

Isabel turned over in bed. Her travel clock said nine-thirty, so it should be morning, but the room was dark and gloomy. Disoriented, she gazed toward the windows and saw that the shutters were closed.

She rolled to her back and studied the combination of flat red roof tiles and rough wooden beams above her head. Outside she heard something that might have been the distant rumble of a tractor. That was all. No reassuring clank of garbage trucks or musical shouts of taxi drivers cursing each other inThird Worldlanguages. She was inItaly, sleeping in a room that looked as if its last occupant had been a martyred saint.

She tilted her head far enough back to see the crucifix hanging on the stucco wall behind her. The tears she hated started leaking out. Tears of loss for the life she'd lived, the man she'd thought she loved. Why hadn't she been smart enough, worked hard enough, been lucky enough to hold on to what she'd had? Even worse, why had she defiled herself with an Italian gigolo who looked like a psychopathic movie star? She tried to fight the tears with a morning prayer, but Mother God had turned a deaf ear to her delinquent daughter.

The temptation to pull the covers over her head and never get up was so strong that it frightened her into dropping her legs over the side of the bed. Cold tile met the soles of her feet. She made her way across the dreary room into a narrow hallway with a utilitarian bathroom at one end. Although small, it had been modernized, so maybe this place wasn't quite the ruin she'd imagined it to be.

She bathed, wrapped herself in a towel, and returned to her martyred saint's cell, where she slipped into a pair of gray slacks and matching sleeveless top. Then she walked over to the window, unlocked the shutters, and pushed them back.

A shower of lemony light drenched her. It streamed through the window as if it had been poured from a bucket, the rays so intense she had to close her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she saw the rolling hills ofTuscanylying before her.

"Oh, my..." She rested her arms on the stone ledge and took in the mosaic of buff-, honey-, and pewter-colored fields, broken here and there by rows of cypress, like pointed fingers against the sky. There were no fences. The boundaries between the harvested wheat fields, the groves of trees, and the vineyards were formed by a road here, a valley there, a simple curve of land somewhere else.