As You Wish (The Summerhouse 3)

“But not you,” Elise said.

Kathy rolled her eyes. “When we got married, he was barely civilized. I taught him table manners, gave him ballroom dancing lessons. You know what he got me for our first anniversary? A handbag with a lizard on it. A real lizard that had once been alive. He said his mother had always wanted one of those bags.”

Olivia was the first to laugh.

“He gave me so many weird gifts that a condition I put on his secretary was that she had to do whatever was necessary to keep him from buying me anything. And I opened an account at Chanel.”

Olivia was laughing harder. “He told me that Elise was all Chanel and Cartier.”

“And who do you think taught him that?” Kathy drained her glass and leaned forward. “This thing—” she nodded at the card “—is a scam. Whoever it is will want lots of money, but I say let’s go anyway. I haven’t had so much fun in years. Just thinking about rewriting my past and not marrying Ray Hanran is making me feel like dancing.”

“Me too!” Elise said. “Imagining running down the aisle in my wedding dress—away from Kent—is a great fantasy.”

“No dancing for me,” Olivia said. “It’s making me feel like driving—not that it’ll do any good. There is no Everlasting Street anywhere in Summer Hill and there’s nothing on FM 77 but a few old houses. One of them was abandoned years ago.”

“I vote for anything that might help me with my current situation. Or at least give me some hope of a solution.” Elise stood up.

“I second that,” Kathy said.

“Put everything in the sink and let’s get in Kathy’s car,” Olivia said. “Mine might be recognized. Anyone have some big sunglasses and some scarves?”

“Prada and Hermès do for you two?” Kathy asked.

“No dead lizards?” Elise said. “Darn!”

They laughed.

* * *

Olivia drove, Kathy beside her, and Elise got in the back. Olivia was glad the two of them were chatting, bonding. They each had body hang-ups. Kathy obsessed about her weight, and eyed every morsel of food as though weighing it for calories and nutrition.

Whenever Kathy moved, Elise looked at her, assessing every curve. She seemed to be wondering whether being more voluptuous would help her capture love.

Olivia had to fight the urge to lecture both of them. It wasn’t their body types that won or lost a man. It was him. The man. The women had chosen wrong—and Olivia was an expert on that. The things Kit liked about her were what Alan had abhorred. Olivia’s competence, her ability to get a job done, had made Alan feel useless, had taken away his essential feeling of being a man.

It was after Kit returned to her life that she thought about the differences in personalities.

Kit didn’t know it, but she’d asked his son about his mother.

Rowan’s usually serious face softened. “Mom is lovely. She’s related to Italian nobility and she’s quite beautiful. She’s well educated, well traveled, and can talk to anyone about anything.”

“Oh.” Olivia’s eyes showed her disappointment. How could she compete with “Italian nobility”? And she had never been out of the US.

“What Mother couldn’t do was deal with Dad’s peripatetic life. He’d get a call from some government and we were to be gone in twenty-four hours. He expected Mother to organize the move and to take care of everything. But she couldn’t do it. She was used to being taken care of, not the other way around.”

Olivia’s eyes brightened at his words. Moving, organizing, managing people were all things she could do. And more importantly, she would have loved it.

Rowan’s handsome face hardened. “Dad wanted Mother to be something she wasn’t, and when she couldn’t be that person, he got angry.”

Olivia had just nodded. She’d understood well. But understanding didn’t take away the pain.

She drove past Mr. Ellis’s farm. Long ago it had been sold to a developer and a few little houses had been built, with many more planned. If she could go back in time, she’d buy the land with the rocks where she and Kit had sat and talked. Someone told her that the new owner was going to blast them out of the ground. Boring houses needed boring, flat tracts of land to be built on.

Just as there was no Everlasting Street in Summer Hill, Olivia was sure that no one on earth could rewrite the past—if that’s what that silly card even meant.

Kathy and Elise were now discussing the design details of Phillip Lim handbags and enthusiastically agreeing that he was someone to watch.

Olivia couldn’t help smiling, happy that they were finding a common ground—and glad that for a moment they’d forgotten the bad of their lives. What concerned her was that the young women were so traumatized by what the men had done to them that they’d never recover. They were both beautiful women. Different but quite lovely. But years of being put down and found to be lacking had made them feel less than they were. How could big, lusty Ray not want to pounce on Kathy? As for Kent, he was just plain stupid.