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had ever made her laugh like Liam. Or made love to her the way he did.

There were a lot of benefits to the combination they offered each other, and also some risks.

When they were in Rome, they went to visit an art dealer she liked and had done business with, a man in his late sixties whose ideas she respected. When they saw him, Liam had been having an off day. He acted like a bored schoolboy while they sat in his office. Liam had been sitting there pouting, swinging his foot, and kicking the desk, until Sasha turned to him quietly and asked him to stop. He was so furious over the reprimand that he had stormed out. Her colleague had raised an eyebrow and didn't comment. And she had been forced to decline lunch as a result.

Afterward, they had had a huge argument about it, and how badly behaved she thought he had been. It was the only unpleasant moment on the trip. Later, Liam had apologized for it, after they made love that night. He said he had been bored and tired, didn't like the way the man looked at Sasha, and it made him jealous. His confession touched Sasha, but it was too late to convince the Roman art dealer that the man she had brought with her was an intelligent, civilized adult. And it didn't bode well for the future yet again. There were lots of meetings like that in her life, and sometimes Liam just wasn't up to it. In fact, he rarely was. When he was bored or felt left out or unimportant, he almost always acted out, more often than not, like a child. Sometimes it was hard to believe that he was forty years old. At times, he seemed half his age, and looked it, which was part of his appeal, but also his greatest downside in Sasha's life. They still had a lot to work out. But all in all, their trip to Italy was a huge success.

Sasha called her children several times while she and Liam traveled. They both had her itinerary, as they always did, but rarely called her. It was almost always Sasha who called them, because she was harder to find, and she often turned off her cell phone. She and Liam were registered in hotels as Liam Allison and Sasha Boardman, which Liam said sounded like a law firm, Allison and Boardman, or tax accountants. And once in a while the hotels got it wrong and registered them as a single person, Allison Boardman, which they didn't mind. Tatianna was amused by it when she called her mother in Florence, and laughed, saying that she had asked for Sasha Boardman and they said all they had was an Allison Boardman, which was obviously the right person but the wrong first name. It meant nothing to her. If it had happened to Xavier, he might have wondered. But Tatianna made no association between her mother and Liam, except that she knew Sasha represented him. So it never occurred to her, that he was there. Sasha laughed along with her at the stupidity of operators in hotels, even good ones, to screw up her name.

She wasn't aware of it at the time, but the same thing had happened to Bernard, when he called her from the gallery in Paris. He had corrected the error of the first name, and they had insisted, and then corrected it themselves to Mr. Allison and Mrs. Boardman, which had stunned him, but he said nothing to Sasha about it until she got home.

It was her first day back, and she was working her way through the mountain of correspondence, files, and slides from aspiring artists that had accumulated on her desk during her three-week absence. It was overwhelming, but the price she had to pay for her trip.

Bernard had stopped in her office for a minute, sat down across the desk from her, and looked at her cautiously, wondering if it was the wrong time to broach it, or if he even should. But he was always concerned about her, like an older brother. He had been trained by her father, just as she was, and had worked for the gallery for more than twenty years. He had started there before she moved back to New York and opened the gallery there. He was ten years older than Sasha, but in an odd way, she had always felt as though they