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You didn’t want to know it, a sly voice in his head told him.
A muscle knotted in his jaw.
No, he thought coldly, no. What was inside him was rage. It was one thing not to let your emotions rule you and another to suppress them, which was what he had done since she’d left him.
He’d kept his anger inside, as if doing so would rid him of it. Now, without warning, it had surfaced along with all the memories he’d carefully buried.
Not of Taylor. Not of what it had been like to be with her. Her whispers in bed.
Yes. Dante, yes. When you do that, when you do that…
He groaned at the memory. The need to be inside her had been like a drug. It had brought him close to believing in the ancient superstitions of his people that said a man could be possessed.
He was long past that, had been past it by the time she left him.
It was the rest, what had happened at the end, that was still with him. Knowing that she believed she’d left him, when it wasn’t true.
He had left her.
He’d never had the chance to say, “You made the first move, cara, but that’s all it was. You ran away before I had a chance to end our affair.”
She didn’t know that and it drove him crazy. Pathetic, maybe, that it should matter…but it did. Obviously it did, or he wouldn’t be standing out here in the cold, glaring at a stack of empty produce cartons and finally admitting that he’d been walking around in a state of smoldering fury since a night like this, precisely like this, late November, cold, snow already in the forecast, when Taylor had left a message on his answering machine.
“Dante,” she’d said, “I’m afraid I’ll have to cancel our date for tonight. I think I’m coming down with the flu. I’m going to take some aspirin and go to bed. Sorry to inconvenience you.”
Sorry to inconvenience you.
For some reason, the oh-so-polite phrase had irritated him. Was inconvenience a word for a woman to use to her lover? And what was all that about canceling their date? She was his mistress. They didn’t have “dates.”
Jaw knotted, he’d reached for the phone to call and tell her that.
But he’d controlled his temper. Actually, there was nothing wrong in what she’d said. Date implied that they saw each other when it suited them. When it suited him.
So, why had it pissed him off? Her removed tone. Her impersonal words. And then another possibility had elbowed its way into his brain.
Maybe, he’d thought, maybe I should call and see if she needs something. A doctor. Some cold tablets.
Or maybe I should see if she just needs me.
The thought had stunned him. Need? It wasn’t a word in his vocabulary. Nor in Taylor’s. It was one of the things he admired about her.
So he’d put the phone as
ide and gone to the party. Not just any party. This party. The same charity, the same hotel, the same guests. He’d eaten what might have been the same overdone filet, sipped the same warm champagne, talked some business with the men at his table and danced with the women.
The women had all asked the same question.
“Where’s Taylor?”
“She’s not feeling well,” he’d kept saying, even as it struck him that he was spending an inordinate amount of time explaining the absence of a woman who was not in any way a permanent part of his life. They’d only been together a couple of months.
Six months, he’d suddenly realized. Taylor had been his mistress for six months. How had that happened?
While he’d considered that, one of the women had touched his arm.
“Dante?”
“Yes?”
