The Ring on Her Finger (27 page)

Max, despite his gruff exterior—though this discovery wasn’t all that surprising—had a very soft center. He gave his things to people who really did deserve them and would use them to make the world a better place. Presumably because he thought he darkened it so much himself.

But of all the articles she and Rosemary found that night, what captured Lucy’s attention most was a story about Sylvie Balisteri that appeared in a British dance magazine three years after the accident. It was about how she opened a dance studio in Rome for children with disabilities similar to her own. Sylvie spoke at length about how her old life of endless partying and reckless extravagance had been so shallow and meaningless, and how she now felt she had a purpose and was making a difference for others. There were photographs of the beautiful, dark-haired Sylvie in her dance attire, wearing a prosthetic leg she didn’t bother to hide. Other pictures showed her dancing with little girls and boys who were also physically challenged, who seemed to be having the times of their lives. The last picture was of her and her fiancé, Vincenzo Romero, a widowed shipping tycoon whose daughter was one of her students.

In every single photo, Sylvie Balisteri was smiling with sheer, unmitigated happiness. Where Max completely retreated from his life after the accident, Sylvie completely rebuilt hers. And in the rebuilding, she found a better life than the one she lived before. She found meaning. She found satisfaction. She found joy.

Max needed to know this. But he needed to hear it from someone other than Lucy. Not because she didn’t want him to know she’d been snooping into his life, but because she knew he wouldn’t believe her if she told him what she’d found. He’d only believe it if he learned it from Sylvie Balisteri.

“What did you say the time difference is between here and Italy?” Lucy asked as Rosemary powered down the PC.

“I don’t know. It’s five hours earlier here than it is in Ireland. So Italy can’t be too far behind. Of course, we’re on Daylight Savings Time right now, and I don’t think they have that in Europe... Oh, Lucy, don’t ask me to be doing math before I’ve even had my morning tea. I can’t believe I let you keep me up all night.”

Funny, but Lucy didn’t feel a bit tired. She felt roaring and recharged and ready to take on the world. Or, at least one little part of it. Europe, to be specific. Italy, to be exact.

WWDD? she asked herself. Then she realized that was a no-brainer. Dino would fix a drink, call up Sinatra and the boys, leave for his homeland, then sing “Night and Day.” Lucy didn’t have the funds or the time to leave for Dean Martin’s homeland, but she could pick up a phone, and if she concentrated very, very hard, she could probably push the numbers in the right order. If there was one thing worth concentrating very, very hard for, it was Max Hogan.

She glanced at the clock on Abby’s desk and saw that it was going on 7:00 A.M. That would make it afternoon in Rome. She wondered if Sylvie Balisteri—or, rather, Sylvie Romero now—had a listed number.

“Just one more favor, Rosemary, please,” she said. “And then I promise I’ll leave you alone for the rest of the day.”

Tuesday evening found Max feeling cranky for two reasons. Number one, he couldn’t stop thinking about Lucy and how much he wanted her and how there was no way he could have her. Number two, he’d been forced to wear his stupid chauffeur getup again to drive Alexis to a party in Lexington. Thankfully, he didn’t see anyone he knew, it being an out-of-town event, so he wasn’t as cranky—or embarrassed—as he might have been. There was nothing, though, that could temper his irritation at missing Lucy so much and realizing he was going to feel that way as long as she was living at Harborcourt. But thinking about her eventually leaving Harborcourt just irritated the hell out of him all over again.

It was a vicious cycle.

Luck was with him in other ways that night, however. Alexis, for once, decided not to stay late, so Max was heading west on I-64 by nine-thirty, pretending he didn’t look like an idiot in the dark charcoal double-breasted jacket and jodhpurs, or the shiny black Gestapo boots, or the black-billed cap that topped off the ensemble. Damn Alexis anyway. Next she’d be telling him to change his name to Jeeves.

By the time he finally made his way up to his apartment, he was exhausted and angry and frustrated. All he wanted was to have an exceedingly bad beer and go to bed, to escape into blissful unconsciousness, because he could at least have Lucy in his dreams. The minute he walked into his kitchen, however, his phone began to ring, and he halted. The only people who ever called him were the Coves, and only because one of them needed for him to bring the car around. Seeing as he’d just dropped Alexis off, and Justin was out of town, there was little chance it was one of them.

Warily, he picked up the phone and pressed it to his ear. “Hello?”

“Max! Is that you? Is it really you?”

His knees buckled beneath him at the sound of the woman’s voice tinted with an Italian accent. He gripped the countertop with stiff fingers. “Sylvie?” he replied incredulously.

“Oh, Max!” she cried happily. “It is so good to hear your voice! I have been trying to call you all night. Where have you been, you naughty boy?” And then she began to speak quickly in her native language, words Max had trouble following, since it had been so long since he’d spoken Italian himself.

“Sylvie, stop,” he said. “You’re going too fast.”

She laughed at the other end of the line. “That was never a problem for you before, Max.”

Jesus, how could she joke about that? “I’m sorry,” he said, the apology sounding so inadequate, since it needed to cover so many things, and he didn’t know where to begin. “It’s just been a while since I’ve heard anything but English. You have to slow down.”

He heard a soft sound of disapproval from the other end of the line. “You know me, Max. I can never slow down. I love to go fast.”

There, she’d done it again. How could she speak so lightly about speed in light of what had happened? “Where are you?” he asked, fearful she’d lost her mind on top of everything else.

“I am in Rome.”

“How did you know where to find me? Why are you calling?”

“We have a mutual friend who telephoned me today, and it made me think of you, and so I wanted to call and see how you are.”

“I’m okay,” he lied, the reply automatic. “But how did you find me? And how about you? How are you doing, Sylvie? Are you all right?”

Her laughter rang out again, from thousands of miles away, but it sounded so familiar, so intimate, that he almost felt as if she were standing right there in the room with him. He remembered her bright smile and her dark eyes, and the way she could laugh at anything. He wondered how much she had laughed in the last five years.

“Oh, Max,” she said again. “I have so much to tell you. So many wonderful things have happened to me since I saw you.”

Oh, yeah. He’d just bet.

“Are you busy?” she asked. “Do you have some time to talk?”

Max looked around at his empty apartment and thought about his empty life. And how it was all going to stay empty, since he wasn’t allowed to fill it with anything but emptiness. “I’m not busy, Sylvie,” he said wearily. He opened a cabinet and reached for an exceedingly bad beer. “I have all the time in the world.”

And damn him for that, anyway.

Lucy thumbed the remote control a couple dozen times before realizing she wasn’t paying a attention to the images flickering rapidly across the TV screen. She switched it off and wandered restlessly into the kitchen to see if there was anything in the refrigerator that hadn’t been there the last time she checked it seven and a half minutes ago. She’d tried to relax earlier in a lavender-scented bath, having heard somewhere that lavender was supposed to be a calming aroma. All it had done for Lucy was stir her into a frenzy of need and wanting. Or maybe the frenzy of need and wanting had been caused by the fantasies she’d entertained about Max while soaking in the bath all naked and wet and hot. At the moment, she was anything but calm.

Max had left late that afternoon, driving the Duesenberg and dressed in his libido-scrambling chauffeur outfit. Lucy didn’t know why she found the getup so sexy. Probably she wouldn’t, if it hadn’t been him wearing it. He’d returned more than an hour ago, and now it was going on midnight, and all Lucy could think was that if she had to spend another night alone, recalling in vivid detail what it had been like to be half-naked and totally aroused with Max, she was going to have a nervous—or, at the very least, a sexual—breakdown.

She wondered if Sylvie Balisteri had gotten ahold of him. And if she had, had it made any difference?

No sooner had the thought unrolled in her head than there was a soft tap-tap-tapping on her front door. A little flicker of heat ignited in her belly. Who on earth could that be? She glanced at the bottle of exceptionally good Shiraz she had opened a little while ago to let breathe, and tugged on the belt of Phoebe’s ankle-length, pale pink velvet robe with the marabou collar—she did so feel like a Hollywood diva wearing it. Okay, an X-rated Hollywood diva, since she was wearing only a couple of scraps of pink lacy lingerie beneath it, but a diva nonetheless.

Oh, she really hoped Sylvie had gotten ahold of Max by now and that it had made a difference.

“Why, Max,” she said when she opened the door to find him standing on the other side.

He was still wearing his chauffeur outfit and looking unbelievably sexy, making her mouth go dry. That was okay, though, because even if her vocabulary evaporated, every hormone she possessed leapt up to say “Howdy!” In fact, when she saw that the jacket part of his chauffeur outfit was halfway unbuttoned, revealing a tantalizing glimpse of dark hair beneath, her hormones shouted a few more things, too, all of them much too indecent for her to repeat verbally. Not that she figured she needed to repeat them when she saw how Max was looking at her. She was reasonably certain his hormones heard every word her hormones were saying. And his hormones were responding very nicely, too, thanks.

“Ah...what a surprise,” she added. “What brings you out?”

He said nothing at first, only let his gaze travel hungrily from her face to her breasts, the top halves of which—oops—were revealed by her bra’s demi-cups and the robe’s gaping opening. Then his attention dropped lower, to her belly, and on to her legs, which—oops—were revealed from ankle to thigh thanks to the robe’s gaping opening. Then his gaze roved hungrily back up again.

“Hiya,” he said in a very low, very sexy voice. He glanced down at his own attire. “I should probably go change, shouldn’t I? I’m kind of overdressed.”

“No, you shouldn’t. I, ah...” She battled a blush. “I kind of like you in that,” she confessed.

He smiled, a devilish, playful smile. “You don’t strike me as the type who likes to play The Chauffeur and the Heiress.”

Who said they’d be playing? Lucy shoved the thought out of her head—not just because she was uncomfortable with how close Max had skated to the truth, but because they were getting way ahead of themselves. The Chauffeur and the Heiress would come later.

But not too much later.

She ignored his quip for now. “You want to come in?”

“Oh, yeah,” he told her with much confidence, his tone indicating he was talking about entering a lot more than just her apartment.

Oh, goody.

Her heart rate doubled at his assurance, sending her blood hurtling through her veins at a speed that made a Formula One racer look like a Sit ’n’ Spin. She stepped aside, silently inviting him in. To her apartment. For starters.

“You look like you’re getting ready to go to bed,” he said as he strode past her. “Maybe I should come back tomorrow.”

Or maybe you should stay until tomorrow. “No, no,” she said. “That’s okay. I wasn’t planning to go to bed until, ah...”

“When?” he asked, his eyes as gray as smoldering charcoals.

“Ah...in a little while.”

“Funny thing happened to me tonight,” he said.

“Oh?” she asked innocently.

He nodded again, more thoughtfully this time. “I got a call, out of the blue, from Sylvie Balisteri.”

“Really? How interesting.”

“Yeah. I thought it was kind of interesting, too, seeing as you and I were just talking about her. And then, boom, she’s calling me from Rome, and she’s telling me it’s because she heard from a mutual friend of ours, and it made her think of me.”

“What a coincidence.”

“It was a coincidence,” Max agreed. “But you know, now that I think about it, she never did tell me who that mutual friend was that she talked to, and she never answered my question about how she knew where to find me.”

“Women’s intuition, I bet. Women know these things.” Adopting her best noble savage voice, Lucy added, “It is the way of the estrogen people.”

“We’ll have to talk more about that,” he said. “Later.”

“So did she tell you why she called?” Of course, Lucy already knew the answer. Of course, Max knew she already knew the answer. Of course, she wanted it to be later now.

He gave Lucy another thorough once-over. This time, though, he didn’t stop at the once-over. This time, he gave her a twice-over, then a thrice-over, as if he couldn’t quite believe she was real. He took a few steps toward her, stopping when only a scant breath of air separated them. Then he pushed the front door shut and closed the last inch between them, cupping his hands over her shoulders.

“Yeah, she told me why she called.” He skimmed his fingertips along her shoulders, down her arms to her elbows, then back again, lighting little fires along the way. “She called to say she was happily married and joyfully expecting her first child with her wonderful husband. And she said she has an adorable stepdaughter she dotes on. And she said she has a thriving business that has brought her a purpose she never thought she’d find. And she said...” He had been watching the movement of his hands along Lucy’s arms and shoulders as he spoke, but his voice trailed off as he brought his gaze back to meet hers. “She said she’s happier than she’s ever been in her life. And she said... She said she hoped I was happy, too.”