She pressed her hand to her stomach. “I mean sex, Reed. You don’t feel any big attraction for me.”
Reed never lost his temper. He had more patience than Job. But she could see he was stretching to keep it together by then. “You’re the one who didn’t want to sleep together until we were married.”
“I know.”
“You felt strongly about it. As you put it, people sleep together like it’s automatically on their to do list after they’ve been together a while, rather than it being something unique or special for the two of them. That’s why you wanted to do it the old-fashioned way-waiting. Because you wanted intimacy to be something more.”
“I know I said that. And I meant it.”
“You said you were tired of casual values. And so am I. As far as I know, we weren’t waiting because of not
“But you don’t,” she said quietly. “Want me.”
“Of course I do. For Pete’s sake, Emma. This is a ridiculous conversation. You’re a gorgeous woman. You can’t possibly believe that desire wasn’t part of the equation.”
She persisted. “If you wanted me-the right way, the way I’d like to be wanted-you wouldn’t have waited. And it’s the same for me. I love you. You’re a wonderful, wonderful man. And for a long time I believed that kind of love would make a good marriage-”
“But now you suddenly don’t,” he said with exasperation.
She nodded. “I think we’d…manage. But in the long run, I think we’d both be miserable. Lonely. That we would never have the kind of marriage your parents have, but more my parents’ kind of arrangement, because the chemistry just isn’t there.”
He fell silent, looking at her, clearly considering what she said. “I could argue with you, keep trying to talk. But I can see your mind’s made up. You want to call it off,” he said.
She pulled the sapphire off her finger, offered it to him. When he didn’t take it, she gently tucked it in his chest pocket. But he still wouldn’t look at it.
“I’ll tell everyone it’s my fault. Because it is,” she said.
He immediately dismissed that idea. “You’re going to get a ton more backlash out of this than I will. I’ll take the blame. But right now…” He shook his head, then spun around. “Right now I think I’ll just take off. Disappear for a few days. If you don’t mind, I really don’t want to talk to you for a while.”
He walked away from her, past the pool gate, yanking off his tux jacket as he headed straight for his car.
Emma couldn’t remember the last time she felt lower than a skunk.
She’d never have chosen to hurt as good a friend, as good a man, as Reed.
Yet no matter how badly she felt about hurting him, deep in her heart she felt the steady beat of relief. For the first time in months she felt as if she could breathe.
Tomorrow there’d undoubtedly be gossip hell to pay when Eastwick caught wind of the broken engagement. But for right now she was free-and that included the freedom to be as upset as she needed to be. She whirled around, thinking that she needed to return to the ballroom to retrieve her bag and wrap before she could get out of there. For just an instant she thought she glimpsed the shadow of movement in the shady trees beyond the wrought iron gate. Someone there?
Whether there was or there wasn’t, she headed back into the ballroom. She seemed to be shaking from the tension of the whole emotional scene. She wanted to go home-or back to the gallery-as quickly as she could get her things. Escape was the only thing on her mind.
At four-thirty in the morning, Emma had given up pretending she could sleep. Sipping a cup of tea, she sat on the screened back porch at the gallery, still dressed in her evening gown but barefoot now, and when the evening temperature had dipped, she’d scared up an old sweater from the shop to drape over her shoulders.
She had to look pretty ridiculous, but there was no one around to see. The sun wasn’t due up for at least another hour. And although lack of sleep was undoubtedly going to catch up with her, she was trying to bolster some peace into her system before facing the day ahead. She knew it wasn’t going to be easy.
Before leaving the country club, she’d cornered her mother to let her know the engagement was off-it was the only way to stop her mom from talking up the wedding for the rest of the evening. By the time Emma arrived back at the gallery, though, her phone had rung nonstop.
Her mother had called several times. Then Felicity and other friends.
Then her father.
Even between phone calls, she’d thrown up, which struck her as darn near funny. Everyone in Eastwick always thought of her as calm, cool and collected. She was the diplomat of the Debs, not the instigator-the peacemaker, never the confronter. And this, of course, was why. Whenever she had to do confrontations, she heaved.
Her stomach had settled down hours before, and she’d turned off her cell phone and all the landlines inside Color. It was so late the crickets and frogs had stopped chirping. So late the baby moon had started dipping low in the sky. So late there hadn’t been the sound of a car passing in hours.
Still, she leaned her head back against the rough porch wall and couldn’t seem to find an ounce of peace.
In the darkness she heard the backyard gate latch, saw a tall, dark shadow-and probably should have responded with fear. Yet she didn’t.
By the time Garrett climbed the step and rapped softly on the screen door, she already knew it was him.
Unlike her, he was dressed in comfortable old chinos and a shirt, the kind of clothes someone intelligent would wear at this time of the morning. But at the moment she didn’t feel intelligent. She felt vulnerable and shaken. Too vulnerable to want to see a man who’d come to mean way, way too much to her.
“I told myself to leave you alone, but I saw the light in the gallery when I first got home. I never saw it turned off. Started worrying that you were still up, even this late. And I can see you are.” He stepped in, quickly closed the screen against mosquitoes. But instead of approaching her, he went to the far side of the screened porch and hunkered down on the Japanese mat. “See me? I’m staying on the other side of the porch. Not causing any trouble. Not planning to. But…I saw you. With your fiance. At the pool.”
“I thought someone was there.” Her pulse started that dancing thing again, just from being with him. “There was no reason for you to worry about me, Garrett.”
“Worry is what I do. What good would it be to be a hardcase obsessive workaholic if I didn’t know how to worry constantly? And it kept bugging me…You had to have had a mighty rough night.”
“Yeah, well…I think a woman’s supposed to have a miserable night when she’s been a creep.”
“After you left, the gossip swooped over the club like a tidal wave. The talk was that the marriage was off. But no one had a clue who called off the engagement. Or why. You two were supposed to be the perfect couple.”
“The one who called it off-that’d be me. The creep in the story.”
“Feeling pretty low, are you?”
“It hurts like the devil. I hate hurting people. I hate hurting someone who’s been nothing but good to me even more. The whole thing…”
“Sucks?”
“A perfect word for it,” she agreed miserably.
“Anything you want to vent?”
She didn’t. Not to anyone. And maybe not to Garrett especially. Yet the silence had been beating inside her for hours now. Silence that wasn’t as simple as guilt. “Reed’s been a good friend for years. So I didn’t just lose a fiance. I lost a friend.”
Garrett said nothing. Just leaned his head against the far porch wall the way she leaned her head in the shadows at her end.
“For a long time…for years…I was determined not to marry, didn’t want anything to do with marriage. I remember all that wild, lusty heat I felt with you…”
“So do I.”
“But when you went off to college, broke it off, you know what? Once I was through suffering from a crushed heart, I started feeling relieved. Even as a girl, even that young, I was afraid of that chemistry.” He didn’t prod her, didn’t push-which, damn him, made it all that much easier to spill her guts. “My parents have possibly one of the sickest marriages around. Not
“My parents’ marriage might be able to compete at that level.”
“That’s the thing. The money in this community, the power, is fabulous. There’s so much potential to do so
