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“I don’t even know how to block a call. And I got no messages. Willa told me she couldn’t get any response from you at all. I got no response to my messages.”
“Your messages?”
“Dozens of emails. I didn’t have your cell number. I emailed Tina Peters to get it, and never got a response. I asked Willa to… Well, it seems that anything I sent in that direction went into the abyss. But I sent you emails, some wanting to know where you were, and some about business ideas, and nothing. Dead, cold silence.”
“Why would your assistant work so hard to keep us from communicating?”
“Jealousy? I’m not certain. Somehow you, our relationship, must have made her feel threatened. But why didn’t Tina Peters reply or pass along my proposals?”
“Another kind of jealousy. The bitch was trying to steal my clients and ruin my business reputation. She started a rumor that I had a drug problem.”
Julio nodded. “The big one—that you were in rehab under your sister’s name.”
“My sister did go through rehab, actually.”
“Giving the rumor a veneer of truth if anyone checked,” Julio pointed out.
“Exactly.”
They both sat there, lost in thoughts, wrapping the whole truth around the piles of beliefs and assumptions that had been driving them for so many months. Finally, Lissa spoke, and looked at Julio in his eyes, watching hard for his reaction. “So you think we’ve both been played, both of us victims?”
He held her gaze. “I’m finding it hard to believe in simultaneous attacks of jealous subordinates, but I don’t know how else to explain things.”
Lissa found her hand moving across the table towards his. Julio’s fingertips grazed hers, and for a moment their fingers spoke quietly to each other. Lissa pulled her hand away and placed it safely on her lap. There was a quiver in her voice when she spoke. “What do we do? Can we move on?”
Julio’s eyes became clouded for a moment and then he closed them. Lissa saw him suck in a deep breath as if was searching in his lungs for what to say. She feared that he’d come up with some way of telling her that he was sorry he knocked her up, that he’d gladly send her some money for child support, but other than that and maybe borrowing her brain power for the Milan project, he hoped she didn’t have any grand expectations about him sticking around or being a part of her and the boys’ lives. Her chest tightened as he continued to think. When he opened his eyes again, they’d gone soft, relieved, as if a great weight had been taken off his chest. “Do you have photos of my boys?”
Lissa couldn’t help the smile that spread across her face. “Of course I do!” she said enthusiastically as she bent down to pull up her purse and hide the tears of unexpected joy. “I’ve got a phone full of them.”
~ ~ ~
Julio tried to tamp down the myriad of feelings coursing through him as she showed him the pictures of his three boys. For the first time, the news that he was a father truly hit him. Pride and love for these creatures that were merely pixels on a cell-phone screen mixed with anger over what they’d lost. He hadn’t been wrong about what they’d meant to each other. He’d been wrong in thinking that she’d lost interest in him. But it wasn’t his fault. He’d been conned. They’d both been conned. Anger grew inside him, even as something hard in his heart melted with each new look at the three lives he’d unwittingly created. He wanted to get to the bottom of the hows and whys, but unraveling what the con was could wait.
He dragged his eyes away from the phone long enough to see Lissa. She was the same woman he’d fallen so hard for in Switzerland, yet even more beautiful. He hadn’t made a mistake. His heart raced. He felt a sudden urge to pull her into his arms and never let her go.
A waiter came over. “Are you ready to order?”
Lissa suddenly sat up straight, her face lit up with an almost childlike glee. “Julio, are you really hungry, or would you rather come to my apartment and meet your sons?”
A flash of happiness rushed through him. He looked at the waiter. “I apologize for the inconvenience, but we’ve lost our appetites.” He handed the man some twenty-dollar bills without counting them. He wanted the waiter to be happy too. “Let’s go.”
# # #
Lissa’s sister was at the apartment, glaring at Julio, so his thoughts of a passionate reunion and heart-to-heart with Lissa didn’t occur. Seeing the boys, however, was a moment he wouldn’t forget.
He’d become reticent on the cab drive over, and the two had stopped discussing the situation. He’d left soon after, and had to stop at a hot-dog stand for dinner by himself. He’d promised Lissa to call her in the morning, and had made sure to get her cell-phone number and learn how to unblock her calls.
As he brooded in his hotel room, waiting for his mind to calm down so he could go to bed, he thought about the big picture. None of it made sense. He could tell that Lissa was as perplexed as he was. What should have evolved into a promising relationship, or been allowed to take its natural course, had been artificially stunted, with each of them believing they’d been used and discarded by the other. How could they have even imagined that Willa and Tina would have both played such a game?
After lying on his bed with his eyes open, Julio got dressed and went downstairs to the hotel bar. He wanted to drink, to nurse his wounds. How did you establish the truth of things? Was Lissa telling the truth? It seemed likely. What if she had sent him messages and entreaties? What if they’d been intercepted? He knew he had sent messages and Willa had assured him she’d sent the flowers and gifts. And of course Willa had been responsible for the business messages, the suggestions they work together. And it was Willa who assured him that Lissa had been stubbornly silent.
And it was Willa who had been furious when he took Lissa’s call and accepted a dinner meeting. Of course he’d hurt her feelings, both by letting her know that she didn’t mean anything to him romantically and by defying her and having dinner with Lissa. But she’d seemed apologetic at the end. So what was going on? Had she been panicked that he’d find out what she’d been up to? And now Willa wasn’t answering her phone. That was a first.
But back then, at the start, why would Willa have cared if he had an affair with Lissa? Had she been in love with him? He didn’t think so. He didn’t think she was now, either.
The entire situation was too impossibly convoluted to be an accident. He had to assume that someone had been making a big effort to keep them from communicating. But who?
Tom Acker wouldn’t want him to work with Lissa. He was smart enough to see that they would make a formidable team. But the interference in his romance had started well before the Milan proposal came up. Until then, he wouldn’t have had any interest in what Julio was up to. He’d know about Lissa, he might even know her, but so what? No, the conspiracy, or whatever it was, had to do with him falling in love. He hadn’t had any trouble with getting in contact with anyone else. Only Lissa. Only the woman he’d fallen in love with.
That suggested a personal motive.
Which brought him back to Willa.
Willa had been a fantastic assistant, and supportive. Unless that was a mask, and she had been hiding something from him, or something had changed.
He caught a glimpse of an elegant woman in a black silk sheath dress moving to the bar stool next to him. She was a tall, lithe black woman, and for a moment he thought, hoped, that Lissa had returned. He wanted to talk to her. He wanted more than that, but talking would be a start.
A closer look at his new neighbor let him see his mistake. This woman was also pretty, and in her twenties, but not Lissa. She wore a gold ring through one nostril and an intriguing necklace of large reddish-orange beads. “Amber,” she said, smiling. He realized he’d been staring. “It’s African.”
“It’s beautiful.”
She turned to give him a better look at the necklace and her slender hips, firm breasts. “I’m glad you like it.”
“Fossilized tree resin,” he said. “Electru
m, to the Romans.”
“Really?”
“Yes, the myth says that when the son of the sun God was killed, his mourning sisters became poplar trees and their tears became electrum—amber.”
“That’s sad,” she said.
“And you don’t believe a word of it.”
She shook her head. “You did say it was a myth.”
“But you don’t even believe that.”
“I’ll admit it’s a better conversation opener than asking my sign.”
“And you’d rather think I have a line like that for every type of jewelry a beautiful woman might wear?”
“That would show initiative.”
“I suppose.”
Her smile was inviting, and part of him wanted to continue this conversation that was clearly nothing more than flirting talk. She aroused him, but at the same time made him ache for Lissa. Lissa’s presence was in the room, and powerful. A mad affair would clear his head. Trying to do that with this woman, however, would complicate his thoughts.
“I’m afraid I have to leave. I have early meetings tomorrow.”
She pouted. “We were getting along so well. I hoped you’d buy me a drink.”
“Do you like irony?”
She smiled. “Another myth?”
“Sometimes something is the opposite of what it seems.”
“Sarcasm?”
“It can be. In this case, I just had dinner with a beautiful woman who looks much like you.”
“And you two didn’t hit it off.”
“We hit it off too well.”
