moments, cradled against his body. He was stroking her hair, cuddling her. And when he saw her eyes flutter open and look up at him, he grinned at her and said, “Gotcha.”
She clung to his smiling warmth and strength, giving herself up to the joy of realizing that Carey Fersten, whom she'd never stopped loving, was holding her and kissing her and telling her the world would be right. Blotting out all thought, she abandoned herself to an incendiary happiness.
He queried her later with that essentially pragmatic side of his nature about the “no problem” comment. “On the pill?” he asked. Rarely permitting himself to surrender so completely, he was now troubled with his carelessness. “No?” he apprehensively uttered at her negative headshake. “Has your body altered into some regular schedule now, that you can so assuredly say, ‘no problem'?” he asked, startled and newly suspicious.
“Sort of.”
“What the hell does that mean?” he urgently demanded. She was half-turned into the curve of his chest and arm, and he lifted her within inches of his serious face.
“It means I think so. It means I'm more or less regular. It means I haven't slept with anyone for two years so I'm not totally certain if the regularity is regular or only that it hasn't been put to the test.”
He looked incredulous. “You're joking,” he said in a disbelieving voice. “You were joking before, right? Look,” he went on with a quick shrug, “it's none of my business, really.”
She slowly shook her head. “No joke.”
His brows arched in astonishment over narrowed eyes: “Not you, Honeybear.” Not only recent events but carefully preserved memory fostered his incredulity. “Don't expect me to believe that,” he crisply added.
Molly shrugged, innocent of deception, calmly acceptant of her own idiosyncracies. “They have to appeal. I told you and I mean it. And appeal is mystical, esoteric, an inexplicable feeling with
“They?” he said with territorial maleness, his black on black eyes piercing, jealous and edged with worldly cynicism.
“He,” she corrected, knowing even with Bart it had never been like it was with Carey. But she wasn't foolish enough to inform him of that fact. “He,” she repeated. “Don't get agitated,” she teased. “I always take men one at a time.”
“That's reassuring,” he mocked. “But not for what-two years?” His skepticism was blatant.
“Nope.”
And that single word inexpressibly gave him more pleasure than a thousand Cannes Film Awards. He didn't realize how moral he could be.
“Unlike you,” Molly returned. And despite her best intentions, an edginess came through. “Your prowess with starlets, models, Italian countesses is world news. Wasn't there a Berber beauty at the last location in Morocco? You see how busy the paparazzi are keeping us titillated Stateside.”
His own good mood restored, Carey reached out to smooth away the hostile line between Molly's pale brows. “Honeybear, I don't care about all those women. They're just
Mild affront greeted his casual disclaimer and too many photos over too many years colored her reply.
“Don't try to tell me there's no enjoyment in all that adulation.”
“They all want something,” he said, speaking deliberately. “Most of them, anyway,” he added, “and it's not necessarily me. They'll go after anyone who can give them a role, a job, a chance in a film. A lot of those beautiful women have been trained from birth to sniff out the scent of power. Understand? But no one has ever come close to touching what we had. You've always been in my heart, my soul, in hidden corners of my mind.”
“Tell me about Sylvie,” Molly said with impudent bad manners. Until today she'd never allowed herself to deal with the jealousy that had eaten at her when she first saw the wedding pictures splashed across the tabloids. The timing had been disastrous. Bart had just moved out of the house the month before for the first of their trial separations.
Carey grimaced. “A very bad mistake,” he said with rue in his voice. “I should have known better; but I'd turned thirty… thought maybe I should consider settling down. She'd moved into the villa and was… well, insistent.”
“And you married because some pretty German countess was insistent?”
“No, not really. If that was the case, I'd have been married any number of times. But don't forget, love,” he added to forestall the flashes of fire in her eyes, “insistence does play a role occasionally. Remember Bart? Hmmm?”
“Touchй,” Molly admitted, her temper deflected by the reminder.
“You lasted a long time. What-six, seven years?”
“Eight. I was dumb. Stubborn. Believed in marriage till death do us part. And then there was Carrie. She needed a mother
“What finally changed your mind?” he asked curiously.
Molly sighed. “The proverbial straw was when one of his girlfriends came over to the house to return the wallet Bart had ‘forgotten.' He told me he was going out of town on business. Arizona in winter. The girl had a beautiful tan. At that point, I decided Carrie would have to make do with a one-parent family, anxieties or no anxieties. It was better than having a murderer for a mother.”
“I'm sorry,” Carey said quietly. “I wish I could have been there to help.”
“It probably was better I went through it alone. I grew up beaucoup fast. Finally recognized the frustration as counter-productive, started shifting priorities and revising my notions of marriage to more accurately reflect my reality, not someone else's. I learned to take care of my own life and enjoy the freedom. It was, as they say, educational.”
“And Bart?”
“Bart who?”
“Does your daughter miss him?”
“He was never home much.”
“Oh,” Carey said, startled. “I'm sorry.”
“Don't be, or I'll have to be sorry for you and Sylvie,” Molly responded pertly.
Carey broke into a grin. “That would be a great waste of emotion.”
“Ditto, in my case. Underlined, exclamation points.”
“Do you think we made a mistake somewhere down the line, Honeybear?”
“I'd be inclined to conclude perhaps our judgment in spouses had a flaw or two,” she agreed with an easy smile. “Although,” she went on, her tone less facetious, “my marriage wasn't so different from others I knew. None of my friends adored their husbands. No one thought marriage was made in heaven. We all agreed that marriage was a mutual compromise, a great deal of hard work and an occasional sweet, tender moment in a hectic schedule. All the men had their flings, and lots of the wives did, too. That was life. We were mature adults. We read the statistics on marital fidelity and understood life's passages. I didn't expect to have a marriage different from anyone else's. But…” She seemed to reflect for a moment, considering.
“But what?” Carey inquired, wanting to know everything about the years he'd missed: how she felt, what she cared about, how she lived. He stroked her back, for the pleasure of feeling her warmth, for the reassurance.
She propped her chin on the flattened back of her hand, gathered comfort from the solid feel of his chest beneath her palm, and tried to explain her coming of age in America. “I finally decided,” she said very softly, “I wanted more.
“Was it better?”
“It was great. It was hard work and scary sometimes when the money was low, but independence is primo.”
The warm glow in her eyes was just as he remembered. She was so intensely alive that other women seemed pale in comparison. He used to go through the intellectual games occasionally when his spirits were disastrously
