“…and I undressed you, and I made love to you there, with the sweet scent of the flowers all around us and the sun hot on our skin, until you were sobbing in my arms.” He cupped her face with his hands. “Do you remember that, Gypsy?”
She shook her head. “No,” she whispered, “but I wish…I wish I did…”
Silence settled around them. Then David drew a labored breath.
“Go to your room,” he said quietly.
Joanna swallowed hard. “That’s where I was going, before you—”
“Get dressed, and pack whatever you’ll need for the weekend.”
Her brow furrowed. “What for?”
“On second thought, don’t bother.” He smiled tightly. “It seems to me you left the skin you shed in the bedroom closet in Connecticut.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“We’re going away for the weekend. Trust me,” he said brusquely, when she opened her mouth to protest, “it’s a very civilized thing to do, in our circle.”
“I don’t care if it’s the height of fashion! I’m not going anywhere with you. I absolutely refuse.”
“Even if going with me means you might begin to remember?”
She stared at him, her eyes wide. “Do you really think I will?”
Did he? he thought. And if she did…heaven help him, was that what he really wanted?
“David?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“But you think I might…?”
“Get going.” His tone was brisk and no-nonsense as he clasped her elbow and hurried her to her room. “I’ll give you ten minutes and not a second more.”
“David?”
He sighed, stopped in his tracks halfway down the hall, and turned toward her.
“What now?”
Joanna moistened her lips. “Why do you call me that?”
“Why do I call you what?” he said impatiently.
“Gypsy.”
He stared at her and the moment seemed to last forever. Then, slowly, he walked back to where she stood, put his hand under her chin and gently lifted her face to his.
“Maybe I’ll tell you while we’re away.”
He bent his head to her. She knew he was going to kiss her, knew that she should turn her face away…
His lips brushed softly over hers in the lightest, sweetest of caresses.
The gentleness of the kiss was the last thing she’d expected. Her lashes drooped to her cheeks. She sighed and swayed toward him. They stood that way for a long moment, linked by the kiss, and then David drew back. Joanna opened her eyes and saw a look on his face she had not seen before.
“David?” she said unsteadily.
He smiled, lifted his hand and stroked her hair.
“Go on,” he said. “See if you can’t find some old clothes and comfortable shoes buried in that closet of yours and then meet me downstairs in ten minutes.”
Joanna laughed. It was silly, but she felt giddy and girlish and free.
“Make it fifteen,” she said.
Impetuously, she leaned forward and gave him a quick kiss. Then she flew into her room and shut the door behind her.
CHAPTER NINE
THERE’D been a time David would have said he could have made the drive to Fenton Mills blindfolded.
He hadn’t needed to check the exit signs to find the one that led off the highway, nor the turnoffs after that onto roads that grew narrower and rougher as they wound deeper into the countryside.
It surprised him a little to find all that was still true.
Even after all this time, the Jag seemed to know the way home.
Except that it wasn’t exactly “home” and hadn’t been for almost three years.
A young couple who farmed some land up the road from the house were happy to augment their income by being occasional caretakers. They kept an eye on things, plowed the long driveway when it snowed and mowed the grass when summer came, even though David never bothered coming up here anymore.
Sometimes, he’d wondered why he bothered hanging on to the property at all.
His accountant had asked him that just a few months before.
“You get no financial benefit from ownership,” Carl had said, “and you just told me you never use the house. Why not get rid of it?”
David’s reply had dealt with market conditions, real estate appreciation and half a dozen other things, all of which had made Carl throw up his hands in surrender.
“I should have known better than to offer financial advice to David Adams,” he’d said, and both men had laughed and gone on to other topics.
Remembering that now made David grimace.
He’d done such a good snow job on Carl that he’d damned near convinced himself that he was holding on to the Connecticut property for the most logical of reasons.
But it wasn’t true.
He’d hung on to the house for one painfully simple, incredibly stupid reason.
It reminded him of a life he’d once dreamed of living with a woman he’d thought he’d loved.
With Joanna.
He’d bought the place years ago, with his first chunk of real money. He had no idea why. This was not the fashionably gentrified part of Connecticut, though the area was handsome. As for the house…it was more than two hundred years old, and tired. Even the real estate agent had seemed shocked that someone would be interested in such a place.
But David, taking the long, leisurely way home from a skiing weekend, had spotted the For Sale sign and known instantly that this house was meant for him. And so he’d written a check, signed the necessary papers, and just that easily, the house had become his.
He’d driven up weekends, with a sleeping bag in the back of his car, and camped out in the dilapidated living room, sharing it from time to time with a couple of field mice, a bat and on one particularly eventful occasion, a long black snake that had turned out to be harmless.
Carpenters came, looked at the floors and the ceiling, stroked their chins and told him there was a lot of work to be done. Painters came, too, and glaziers, and men with specialties he’d never even heard of.
But the more time David spent in the old house, the more he began to wonder what it would be like to work on it himself. He found himself buying books on woodworking and poring over them nights in the study of the Manhattan town house he’d bought for its investment value and its location and never once thought of as home.
He started slowly, working first on the simpler jobs, asking for help when he needed it. Had he undertaken such a restoration in the city, people would have thought him crazy but here, in these quiet hills, no one paid much attention. New Englanders had a long tradition of thrift and hard work; that a man who could afford to let others do the job for him would prefer to do it himself wasn’t strange at all.
He found an unexpected pleasure in working with his hands. There was a quiet satisfaction in beginning a job and seeing it through. He learned to plane wood and join floor boards, and the day he broke through a false wall and uncovered a brick fireplace large enough to roast an ox ranked right up there with the day years before when he’d opened the Wall Street Journal and realized he’d just made his first million on the stock exchange.
Local people, the ones who delivered the oak boards for the floors or the maple he’d needed to build the kitchen worktable, looked at the house as it evolved under his hands and whistled in admiration. The editor of the county newspaper got wind of what he was doing and politely phoned, asking to do what she called a “pictorial essay.”
David just as politely turned her down. Dumped on a church doorstep as a baby, he’d grown up the product of an efficient, bloodless state system of foster child care.
This house, that he was restoring with his own hands, was his first real home. He didn’t want to share it with
anyone.
Until he met Joanna.
He brought her to the house for a weekend after their second date. The old plumbing chose just then to give out and he ended up lying on his back, his head buried under the kitchen sink. Joanna got down on the floor with him, handing him tools and holding things in place and getting every bit as dirty as he got.
“You don’t have to do this stuff, Gypsy,” David kept saying, and she laughed and said she was having the time of her life.
By the end of that weekend, he’d known he wanted Joanna not just in his bed but in his heart and in his life, forever. Days later, they were married.
At first, he was wild with happiness. The usual long hours he spent at his office became less important than being with his wife.
Morgana came as close to panic as he’d ever seen her.
“I don’t know what to tell people when they phone, David,” she said. “And there are conferences, and details that need your attention…”
He pondered the problem, then flew to the coast for three intensive days with the latest Silicone Valley wunderkind. By the time he returned home, the problem was solved.
After a squad of electricians spent a week rewiring the house, a battery of machines came to beeping, blinking life in the attic. Faxes, computers, modems, laser printers, even a high-tech setup that linked David to his New York office by video…
There was nothing he could not do from home that he had not once done in Manhattan, though he still flew down for meetings on Thursdays and Fridays, and always with his beautiful, beloved wife at his side. Sometimes the meetings ran late. Joanna never complained but David was grateful to Morgana, who kept her occupied the few times it happened.
And then, things began to change.
It started so slowly that he hardly noticed.
Joanna suggested they spend an extra day in the city. “I’d really love to see that new play,” she said.
An invitation to the opera came in the mail. He started to toss it away but Joanna caught his hand, smiled, and said she’d never been to the opera in her life.
Before he knew it, they were spending five days a week in New York, then the entire week. Joanna met people, made friends, joined committees.
Connecticut, and the simple life they’d enjoyed there, got further and further away.