he cried.
He was about to climb over the rail and jump in with me when Breanne Summour, head-to-toe in a hot pink nightgown, the color of Ricky Flatt’s corpse, strode up and whispered in his ear.
He nodded, then laughed and swung his leg back, behind the rail. Suddenly, Joy was there on the yacht’s deck, moving up to the rail, squeezing in between them. “Bye, Mom! See ya!” she called, waving happily in her white sundress.
As I sunk deeper and deeper into the river, I watched all three of them wave, then turn from the rail and disappear, laughing and raising glass latte mugs. I closed my eyes, devastated beyond words…
I opened my eyes—
Matteo’s face was next to mine. His jawline was no longer clean-shaven but shadowed with dark stubble. His brown eyes appeared tired.
“What the…” I murmured.
“You were having a bad dream,” Matt informed me. “You were moaning.”
I was also still floating, I realized, but not in water.
“Where am I?”
“On your way to bed.”
I blinked again and saw that Matt was carrying me with ease in his muscular arms. He was cresting the short flight of carpeted stairs and heading into the duplex’s master bedroom—my own. Matt had his own, smaller room at the other end of the short hall, for his infrequent layovers in New York.
On and off since I’d moved into the Blend duplex, I’d tried to get Matt to see reason and stay in hotels for the ten or so days a month he came back to New York. But he balked, claiming the cost was an outrageous expense that would bust his budget, especially when he had legal permission from the duplex’s owner (his mother) to reside here for free. He suggested that if I didn’t like it, I could always move out. But I couldn’t afford to live anywhere near the Blend without taking on roommates—and at my age, I wasn’t about to go back to collegiate living. Neither did I want to give up my residential right to the duplex or end up driving any great distance to do the sunup to sundown job of properly managing the business. So Matt and I agreed to be French about the whole thing and try to make the arrangement work by giving each other our distance and our privacy.
At the moment, neither was in play. I was wearing nothing more than a white cotton nightgown, beneath which were slight lace panties and no bra. I was small but my breasts weren’t, and the intimate grip of my ex’s hands was quickly having an unwanted effect on them.
“Matt, it’s okay,” I told him gently. “You can put me down.”
He did, on the four-poster bed of carved mahogany—part of Madame’s exquisite antique bedroom set. Then he sat down beside me, sinking into the white cloud of a comforter. I shifted into a sitting position, pressing my back against the gaggle of goose feather decorative pillows piled up against the headboard, and yawned, aware my ex-husband was no longer wearing the Good Humor Man white suit and bow tie from my bizarre dream. His faded blue NO FEAR—CLIFF DIVE HAWAII T-shirt stretched across his hard chest, gray sweats covered his legs.
“You’re okay then?” he asked.
“Sure…” I rubbed my eyes and sighed, trying to remove the lingering images of Tucker drowning, my father rowing, and Matt and Joy laughing as they carelessly waved ciao to me. I even glanced around the room to get my bearings.
Like the rest of the duplex, Madame had decorated the master bedroom with her romantic setting on high. The carved ivory-colored Italian marble fireplace was not original to the room, neither was the gilt-edged French mirror above it, or the fleur-de-lys medallion in the center of the ceiling, from which hung a charming chandelier of hand-blown, pale rose Venetian glass. The walls had been painted the same pale rose as the imported chandelier while the door and window frames echoed the same shade of ivory as the silk draperies pulled back from the floor-to-ceiling casement windows.
My favorite aspect of this room, however, wasn’t the furnishings, the fireplace, or the draperies. Hanging on practically every inch of free wall space were priceless original oils and sketches from artists my former mother-in-law had known over the years—including Jackson Pollack, whom she’d attempted to sober up more than once with hot, fresh pots of French roast, and Edward Hopper, one of my all-time favorites, who’d sketched this very coffeehouse for Madame on one of the marble-topped tables