In Bed with Beauty (14 page)

“Knew what?” she asked, not sure where he was going.

“That love wasn’t all softness and light.”

“Don’t bring cynicism into this,” she said.

“Why not, you brought manipulation in?” he asked.

“How did I manipulate you?” she asked.

“When you asked me to negotiate with the developers. Because I won’t do that I don’t measure up in your eyes and now you don’t love me. Someone once told me that love wasn’t like that,” he said.

She was a bit ashamed of herself but she hadn’t meant to manipulate him. “It’s not the same. My loving you doesn’t depend on your actions toward my business.”

“It sure as hell feels like it.”

“Then you’re missing the big picture.”

“What is the big picture?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I’m not sure anymore. I thought it was you and me—together. But now I have to wonder if I was just imagining it.”

“Well I’d have to say you did a good job of convincing me that all those happily-ever-after tales were worth a shot. I let myself be pulled into your illusion.”

She heard him leave. And the first time since she met Harris she was glad that he ran from involvement.

Ten

H
arris knew what he’d found with Sarah wouldn’t last so it came as no surprise to find himself outside her restaurant alone. The curse of the Davidson men strikes again, he thought. He turned to leave.

“Hey, man,” Burt said. “You up for a little one-on-one basketball tonight?”

Harris wanted to say yes. It would give him an excuse to see Sarah again. And he liked Burt. He liked the kid’s smart mouth and intelligence and the way Burt thought that charm could get a man through life. “I think I’ve worn out my welcome at your house.”

“I doubt it,” Isabella said. “Sarah’s crazy about you.”

“Not anymore.” He didn’t know if she’d ever thought that. It seemed to him that Sarah had been looking for something elusive with him. Something more than the nights of hot passion they’d shared. More than the quiet conversation and debates about books and movies. More than Harris could give and finally she’d figured that out.

“What’s going on?” Burt asked, all humor gone from the young man.

“Taste of Home has been evicted from the mall.”

“What does that have to do with you?” Isabella asked. Sarah’s sister looked too much like Sarah for Harris’s peace of mind. He couldn’t look into those dark brown eyes one more time and see disappointment.

“I negotiated the buyout.”

“Are you the one evicting us?” Isabella asked again.

Burt cursed under his breath and though Harris longed for a fight he hoped Burt kept his temper under control. Fighting with Sarah’s brother was something he wouldn’t do.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Stop the corporate double-talk and tell us what’s going on,” Burt said. He dropped his backpack on the ground and flexed his muscles under the T-shirt. Harris hoped the kid wasn’t working up the nerve to punch him.

“I’m a consultant to the group that purchased the strip mall. I analyzed the occupants and recommended they evict the ones that didn’t fit with the new image,” Harris said, inching out of Burt’s range.

“Did you know Taste of Home was our restaurant?” Isabella asked.

“Yes,” he said, running his hands through his hair. Words of explanation hovered on his tongue but he left them unsaid. He stunk at personal relationships and now he knew why—they hurt too damned much.

“How could you do that? Our sister loves you.”

Did she? She’d said so but then she’d pushed him away. Harris hoped she’d been trying to manipulate him with her emotions but a part of him knew Sarah wasn’t an actress.

And that she wouldn’t lie about her response to him. But that didn’t stop him from hoping she didn’t really love him. Because the woman he’d left a few minutes ago looked like her world had changed.

Like the gauze that she used to view life through had been striped away. He didn’t want to be responsible for breaking her heart and shattering her illusions. Even though he knew he had.

“It was just business,” he said. The Malcolms all needed a course in business realities.

“What about all the time you’ve spent at our house, didn’t it mean anything?” Isabella asked.

“It meant more than any of you can ever understand,” Harris said. “When your sister calms down, tell her I never intended to hurt her.”

When he got to the limo Ray was on the phone and Harris waved him to stay where he was opening his own door.

Harris entered the car smoothly and shut the door before either of Sarah’s siblings could respond. For a minute he was isolated from everyone. The tinted windows ensuring his privacy. The raised partition making sure that he was ensconced in a world he could control.

He thought it would be soothing after the emotional interchanges with the Malcolms but instead the limo felt oddly flat. Stale almost.

Ray lowered the partition. “Where to, Harris?”

Harris cursed under his breath. His first instinct was to go to the hotel, pack his stuff and go back to L.A. There he could spend his time alone in his cold sterile mansion licking his wounds. But that sounded exactly like something his dad would do.

“Just drive,” Harris said at last. He’d guarded his heart. He’d protected himself from Sarah. Was she the kind of woman who could make him run and hide from the world?

The deluge of memories dancing in his mind said she was. He remembered the hundred sweet things she did for him. The way she’d made him a part of her life even though he’d struggled to keep her at bay.

He didn’t understand why she couldn’t see that business and relationships were two different things. Harris had always been good at business and money. But bonds with people had always eluded him. Not just a love affair with one special woman but even the simplest bonds of friendship had always seemed out of his grasp.

He realized suddenly that he was hiding from whatever had hurt his father. Whatever it was that had driven his dad up to his penthouse and not let the man come out.

Affection? Caring? Dependence… He couldn’t afford to be dependent on anyone.

“Any ideas where you want to go yet,
compare?
”

“Back to my hotel.”

“You look like a
babbeo
who just got sucker-punched.”

“I feel like one.”

“Sarah?”

“Why are women so hard to understand?”

“I’ve never been able to figure that out. Give me a punk with knife and I know how to come out a winner. But with the opposite sex? I feel like an idiot, you know like a
gavone.

Harris shrugged. He didn’t want to discuss his in adequacies.

“How bad is this problem?” Ray asked.

He rubbed the back of his neck and glanced out the window. “She’s angry.”

“Will an expensive gift fix it?” Ray asked.

Harris wasn’t sure. He started running the numbers in his head. Making columns of pros and cons. The pluses of fixing things with Sarah were scary. He’d have to let go of the control he’d always used to protect himself. He’d have to change. The downside, the minuses, offered him the comfort of his routine and the continuation of his lonely existence.

“I don’t think anything will,” he said to Ray but in his mind, he was playing with the puzzle that was Sarah and trying to find a way to get her back without losing his control.

Four hours later, Sarah talked to her staff with her siblings and Roger by her side. She was suddenly the same girl she’d been at eighteen. There was so much work to be done and she was inadequate to the task.

But she’d made everything work then and she’d do it again. She’d go talk to the new developers. She knew they hadn’t had a chance to talk to any of the renters. And she knew that Harris wouldn’t have mentioned anything about the businesses or hers in particular because he compartmentalized everything.

While she admired his business acumen and later she might understand why he’d acted the way he had, right now the only thing that dominated her mind was that he’d betrayed her. And she’d just gotten used to believing he could be her Prince Charming.

The picture of her parents over the register seemed to stare at her with a certain sense of…disappointment. After keeping it all together for twelve years she was going to fail them. She’d come so close to making their final wish come true. Her siblings were almost out of high school, almost to college and on their own. It seemed wrong to fail so close to the finish line.

“Are we closing down now?” asked one of her waiters, Antonio. He was fifty-five and had worked at the restaurant when her parents owned it. Most of her servers were older and had worked for her for years. In a way the restaurant was the extended family she and the twins didn’t have.

“No. We’re open today as usual. We’ll have another all-staff meeting tomorrow morning.”

Why hadn’t she been able to show Harris that family wasn’t just blood relatives? Family came in all shapes and sizes.

“Phone call for you, Sarah,” Roger said.

“I’ll take it in my office,” she said, fearing it might be more bad news. She smiled at her staff before she left. “We’ll get through this. I promise you.”

It was strange to walk through the kitchen and see it empty during the day. She remembered her father, a Master Chef at the stoves. Remembered the loving way he’d always prepared every meal before they’d served it.

His premise was to give each customer a little
taste of home.
It had taken her a long time to get used to the kitchen without her dad. She didn’t know if she was going to be able to come to terms of being without this restaurant.

She prayed for a miracle as she entered her office. The desk was still bare in the center where Harris had made love to her. She shivered and looked away from it. Reaching at the same time for the handset of her phone.

“This is Sarah Malcolm,” she said.

“It’s Harris.”

Her stomach dropped and her knees were weak. She sank into her office chair and looked at the Monet print on the wall. It was a walkway under snow. The Impressionist brush strokes took the harsh reality off what was an Industrial town. She wished for a moment that someone could come into her life and paint her with those same strokes.

“Sarah?”

She wasn’t ready to talk to him. Only by keeping busy for the last hour had she been able to put him from her mind. Her hand started to shake and she realized she wasn’t ready for this. She might never be ready to talk to him again.

All she’d accomplished with her life had disappeared. And she was back at square one. With no experience or knowledge to help her through the situation. But she’d had twelve years experience, she reminded herself.

“Sarah? Are you there?”

She let out the breath she’d been holding and closed her eyes. “Yes.”

“Talk to me,” he said.

She wished she could. But her gut said conversation wasn’t ever going to change Harris’s mind. She realized that losing the restaurant hurt, but not as badly as being betrayed by Harris. How could she have been so naive as to not to see the real Harris. “I’m trying to think of something to say to you.”

“Would calling me a bastard help?” he asked.

She was stunned at first but then chuckled. Maybe she hadn’t been the blind one after all. She knew Harris had a hard time seeing himself as a lasting part of anything. Even companies. He helped them and moved on. “Maybe.”

Silence echoed for a few moments and then she heard him sigh. “You’re important to me. What can I do to make this right?”

“I wish I knew.”

“How about if I buy you another building? You can start from scratch there. Maybe with the bakery you’d been thinking of adding to the restaurant.”

“Why would you do that?” she asked, a twinge of hope spreading through her. He was going to confess his emotions for her. She might lose Taste of Home but she’d be okay with Harris by her side.

She’d known deep in her heart that he was capable of deep love for her. He just didn’t know how to recognize it. But faced with losing each other seemed to have made him realize it. Or was she just hoping it did. Because Harris was the kind of man she wanted with her for the long haul. The kind of relationship that would last a lifetime. The kind of forever that she’d dreamed of since she first realized the differences between men and women.

“Because I want to make this right,” Harris said. She knew he did. She could feel the force of his will through the phone.

A spark of hope sprung to life inside her and she had the first flash that maybe things weren’t going to be as bad as she feared. Maybe this time she wasn’t going to be alone. Maybe this time she’d loved wisely.

“Only one thing can make this right,” she said, hoping she wouldn’t have to say anything more.

“I’ve never had a relationship that lasted more than a few weeks.”

“I know,” she said. And she did know that. Even if he hadn’t told her it was apparent in the way he was careful not to let anyone get to close too him.

“I want to make things right,” he said again.

Disappointment swamped her. This time it hurt so much worse than before, because she’d hoped that he was calling with the seeds of the future. Instead she’d just realized that he wanted things to go on as they had been.

“Tell what it is and I’ll do it, honey,” he said.

She rubbed her eyes to keep from crying and took a deep breath before she said, “If I have to tell you then it will never work.”

“I mean it, Sarah. No price is too high,” he said.

“I think the price is too high, Harris. Because the only thing that could make this right is love.”

“Love?”

“Yes, love. But you can’t admit you feel anything for me, can you?”

“There has to be something else you want,” he said.

“There isn’t.”

“How can you be sure that love will make this better? Honestly, I’ve seen some gruesome things done in the name of love.”

“And I’ve seen miraculous things done by love.”

He sighed heavily. “I guess this is goodbye then.”

“I’d never have figured you for a coward, Harris.”