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No. He’d be damned if he was going to think about that trip to Vermont again.
He thought about it too much already.
And the dreams that awakened him at night…What were they, if not an indication that he was losing his self-control?
Why would he dream about a woman he despised? For the same reason he’d kissed her, damn it. Because the ugly truth was that he still wanted her, despite her lies and her infidelity. Despite the fact that she’d borne another man’s child. Nothing kept the dreams at bay. Each night, he imagined her coming to him, imagined stripping her naked, making love to her until she cried out in his arms and said, Yes, Dante, yes, you make me feel things he never did.
And awakened hard as stone, angry at himself for an adolescent’s longings, for the frustration that he couldn’t lose in another woman’s bed though, God knew, he’d tried.
What an embarrassment that had been! I’m sorry, he’d
said, that’s never happened to me before.
It hadn’t, though he doubted if the lady believed him. He could hardly believe it!
He was not himself since Vermont, and he didn’t like it. One day in a snow-bound village and he’d discovered he was still an old-world Siciliano at heart, reacting to things with emotion instead of intellect.
How could a woman he didn’t want ruin his sex life from a distance of four hundred miles?
Taylor had—what was the old saying? She’d put horns on his head, sleeping with another man while she was still his. She deserved whatever happened next.
She had been his, no matter what she claimed. So what if she hadn’t let him pay her bills? If she hadn’t lived with him?
She had belonged to him. He’d marked her with his hands. His mouth. His body.
And she’d let another man plant a seed in her womb. She’d given him a child. A child who should rightly have been—should rightly have been—
Dante frowned, gave himself a mental shake and prepared to vent his anger on the half a dozen idiots who’d come to a dead stop in the middle of the sidewalk.
“Excuse me,” he said in a voice so frigid it made a mockery of the words.
Then he saw it wasn’t only the people ahead of him. Nobody was moving. Well, yes. The crowd was shifting. Sideways, like a brontosaurus spying a fresh stand of leafy trees, heading for a huge, world-famous toy store.
Dante dug in his heels. “Excuse me,” he said again. “Pardon me. Coming through.”
Useless. Like a paper boat caught in a stream, the crowd herded him toward the doors.
“Wait a minute,” he said to a massive woman with her elbow dug into his side. “Madam. I am not—”
But he was. Like it or not, Dante was swept inside.
A giant clock tower boomed out a welcome; a huge stuffed giraffe gave him the once-over. He was pushed past a tiger so big he half expected it to roar.
Somehow, weaving and bobbing, he worked to the edge of the crowd and found refuge behind a family of stuffed bears. He gave his watch one last glance, sighed and took out his cell phone.
“Traffic,” he told the man he was to lunch with, in the tones of a put-upon New Yorker. It turned out the other man was still trapped in a taxi. They laughed and made plans for a drink that evening.
Dante put his phone away, folded his arms over his chest and settled in to wait for a break in the flow of parents and children so he could head for the door.
He didn’t have to wait long. A trio of pleasantly efficient security guards cleared the way, formed the crowd into an orderly queue outside. Dante started toward the door, then fell back.
What a place this was!
And what would he have given to be turned loose in it when he was a boy. Just to look, to touch, would have been a time spent in paradise.
His toys had been stick swords. Newspaper kites. And, one magical Christmas Eve, an armless tin soldier he found in a dumpster while he scavenged for his supper.
How could he have forgotten that?
