her words mean so much to so many women…it validated her existence and her worth in a way Paul could never even have begun to understand. More amazingly, she hadn’t really understood how much she’d needed it, either. With that nurturing, freeing validation she had blossomed into the kind of person she’d always dreamed of being, wearing what she wanted, saying what she liked, doing what she pleased. Growing up shy and overlooked in a country club town of beautiful people, she never would have seen herself evolving this far in a hundred years.
Unfortunately, her publisher very understandably wanted a follow-up book, to keep her—and them—riding the wave. But writing a book that had poured out of her in an extended fit of passion and in a need to document her pain was very different from sitting down on purpose and conjuring something up. Her next book was tentatively titled Jenny’s Guide to Getting What You Want.
What Jenny wanted was to be able to write the book. Three chapters lay on her desk, as they’d lain for the better part of the last year, each page practically red from all the revisions and crossouts and edits….
In short, the book wasn’t happening. Her regular online advice column and the occasional pieces she wrote for women’s magazines presented no problem. They were satisfying and fun even if they were only rehashes of What Have I Done for Me Lately? So maybe this would be it for her, a one-shot wonder. Better to have shot once than never to have shot at all was how she’d decided to look at it, though she wasn’t sure her publisher agreed.
After dessert at Eagans—she always ordered dessert now, without Paul to give her The Disapproving Look—she thanked her hostesses warmly and, declining their offer of a ride, walked the few blocks down Water Street to the Wyndham Hotel, enjoying the chilly night breeze off Lake Michigan on her still-heated face.
Up in her room, she went into her antihyper routine, to calm herself down after the rush and excitement of a lecture/performance so she’d have some hope of falling asleep. First, the deep warm bath, then lavish amounts of perfumed powder and lotion so she smelled way too strong, then the bright coral silk teddy she adored, the kind Paul thought made her hips look big, and a long, leisurely emptying of a cup of herbal tea in bed reading the New York Times. Not that news was always restful, but fiction risked bringing on the can’t-put-it-down syndrome, and she’d never had a problem dropping the paper when sleep overwhelmed her.
Halfway through a front section so full of natural and political and man-made disasters she was starting to get depressed, she rolled her eyes and picked up the Sunday Styles section. Nothing could be more soporific than that. A few pages of wedding and engagement announcements and grinning rich people at fund-raisers should put her right off to dreamland.
Tomorrow she’d be on a plane back home to New York, arriving in time for a lunch date with her agent, then she and Jessica were going to the Metropolitan Art Museum to see—
Jenny gasped, sat bolt upright and held the paper closer. Oh. My. God. Oh my god. Omigod.
Ryan Masterson.
Ryan Masterson.
Only he didn’t look like Ryan Masterson. He looked like…she wrinkled her nose and peered at the awkwardly smiling tuxedoed image. Ryan Masterson’s boring twin brother.
Was this what Wild Boy Masterson had turned into? Geez o Pete, was nothing sacred? The sexiest rebel alive reduced to posing at some society event with Frumpy Dame So-and-so and Squeaky Debutante This-’n’-that?
Had hell, in fact, frozen over?
She couldn’t stand it. What a waste.
And yet…okay, he wasn’t twenty-one anymore. Being wild and angry was hot as hell in high school and college, but she supposed it wouldn’t help in the career department.
Imagine the résumé: Exceptionally skilled at sullen smoldering looks and general bad attitude. Expert in alcohol consumption and high-speed motorcycle operation. Some experience with mild street drug use. Unpredictable outbursts available upon request. Vast experience in seduction of women, including one shy straightlaced girl from Southport, Connecticut, who had never forgotten a second of their time together….
Jenny’s rapturous sigh trailed off. But of course he had probably forgotten, most of it anyway. Before that summer when they’d both been home from college—she from Tufts and he from UC Berkeley—he’d undoubtedly thought of her only as the daughter of his widowed mom’s friend from down the street. She’d thought he was way hot, like every other breathing female that saw him, and made herself sick with nerves every time their families got together—his family being a loud, out-of-control one with six kids and an always stunned-looking mother; hers consisting of her and her parents, jovial, but reservedly so, warm, loving…quiet. Jenny and Ryan had overlapped two years at Fairfield High, but they hadn’t acknowledged each other as more than familiar faces passing in the hall, though once in her sophomore year he’d made a point of complimenting her performance in Brigadoon and she’d nearly hyperventilated. That was it.
Why he’d turned to her of all people…Maybe at such a turbulent time he’d needed someone rock-solid predictable and not at all challenging.
Jenny lay back, holding up the picture of his staid, respectable face, bland smile in place for the camera. If his name hadn’t been under the photo, she wouldn’t have believed…
He was extraordinarily good-looking, no question. She’d bet heads still turned. But not like before. Not like when he strode around the village of Southport, Connecticut, looking like a savage bomb that could go off any second.
Not like the night a month or so after the motorcycle accident that killed his best friend, when he came to her house while her parents were away, pale and haunted, soaked by the rainstorm he’d been walking through, dark hair hanging over his forehead, blue eyes glowing behind the clumped strands.
On her doorstep, he’d mumbled something she hadn’t heard. She’d let him in anyway, and he’d stopped next to her, fixed her with an angry pleading look she’d never forget, and to her total rapturous shock, he’d kissed her. Not a sweet peck, not a gentle “may I?” kiss, not the soulless kisses Paul had given her. But a hot, hard rush of a kiss. A kiss she measured all subsequent kisses against.
That night and many nights after, in the park by Southport harbor, in cars, on the country club golf course, on the beach by Long Island Sound, she’d let him use her body to rid himself of his rage and his guilt over his friend Mitch’s death. She’d never told anyone, not about the visits, not about the sex, not about the way he’d cried in her arms after.
She’d just wanted to heal him. And then, sweet, ignorant, impressionable girl that she’d been, she’d fallen in love.
Jenny tossed the paper aside. Right. Love. Who knew anything about love at age nineteen? It was a crush, that’s all, born of his appeal and the thrill of being the one he’d picked out in his time of grief, the last girl anyone would have expected, least of all her. Predictably, the night she’d finally given voice to her feelings, he’d run. Far, fast and into someone else’s arms. No big surprise, though it had hurt like hell anyway.
She picked up the paper again, as if he still had the ability to draw her, after all these years, even as an image on newsprint. What did Ryan Masterson now think of what he’d been?
And what would he think of what shy, sweet Jenny Hartmann had become?
3
“TELL ME ABOUT your childhood.”
“Oh.” Christine smiled at Ryan over the white-cloth-covered restaurant table and stalled with a sip of beer. She preferred white wine, but he’d made some comment about Thai food killing any chance a wine had, and she couldn’t very well order it after that. “Charsville, Georgia. Southwest corner of the state, not far from the Alabama border. I guess you knew that already.”
“I did, yes.”
He looked at her expectantly and she kept smiling, searching for what to say next. He’d told her about his childhood, mostly pleasant impersonal facts, though she got the