The protest only underscored her conviction. She was right, and they both knew it. Many women with more powerful denial mechanisms than Olivia were able to shut out the warning sign. Not Olivia, not with her sensitive radar, not after two previous failures had left her bleeding. She was like one of those dogs trained to an electric fence. She only had to be popped twice, and then she got it.
The Cheetos and beer formed a cold, unpleasant knot in her stomach. It isn’t going to happen again, she thought. Not even if I have to do it first. “I completely misread you,” she said. “God, what an idiot.” She took another step away from him.
“Slow down,” he said, and the hand he laid on her arm was gentle and made her want to cry.
“Do it fast,” she snapped at him. “Like ripping off a Band-Aid. Get it over with quick.”
“You’re jumping to the wrong conclusion.”
“Am I?” She folded her arms across her middle. Don’t cry, she told herself, blinking away the tears that boiled behind her contact lenses. Save the crying for later. “All right. How about telling me exactly what you intend to do after selling this apartment?”
His gaze flirted ever so briefly with the light fixture on the ceiling, the one she’d replaced at two o’clock this afternoon. That was another symptom of man-on-the-run. He didn’t want to meet her eyes. “Something came up while I was in L.A.,” he told her, and despite his obvious discomfort with her, his face lit with enthusiasm. “They want me there, Liv.”
She held her breath. He was supposed to say, I told them I couldn’t make a decision until I talked to you. She already knew, though. With a dry laugh of disbelief, she said, “You told them yes, didn’t you?”
He didn’t deny it. “The firm’s going to create a new position for me.”
“What, asshole-in-residence?”
“Olivia, I know we talked about a future together. I’m not ruling that out. You could come with me.”
“And do what?”
“It’s L.A., Liv. You can do anything you want.”
Marry you? Have your babies? She knew that wasn’t what he meant.
“My whole life, my family, my home, my business, everything is here in New York. I put the last five years of myself into Transformations,” she said. “I built it. I’m not going to just walk away.”
“L.A. needs a company that does what you do,” he claimed. “The market’s just as hot there as it is here.
Hotter.” She thought about starting over from scratch, all over again. Networking, cultivating contacts, doing public relations, getting out the word of mouth. The idea exhausted her. She had finally whittled her work hours down to a manageable number, but it had taken years to get there. Starting over in L.A. would be even harder. There, her name and connections wouldn’t open any doors for her as they had in Manhattan. This can’t be happening, she thought. Not again.
“Say you love me,” she challenged him. “Say you can’t live without me. And mean it.”
“When did you turn into such a drama queen?”
“You know what?” she said, shaking back her hair and squaring her shoulders, “if I loved you enough, I would do it. I wouldn’t care. I’d be packing my things right now, and gladly.”
“What do you mean, love me enough?” he demanded.
“To follow you anywhere. But I don’t. And that’s a very liberating notion, Rand.”
“I don’t get you.” He ran a hand through his hair. “It’s a simple situation. You can move to L.A. with me or not. Your choice.”
My choice, thought Olivia. Surprisingly enough, she realized she did have a choice. “All right, then,” she said, somehow getting the words past a sudden, breath-stealing agony. “Not.”
And with that, she headed for the door. She’d done well this time—this third time. But if she lingered any longer, her control might waver. She passed through the foyer, noting the artful placement of the red plum blossom plant, which added an auspicious je ne sais quoi to the entryway. It was hard to miss the irony of this beautifully composed, staged setting. She considered kicking the damn thing over, but that would be so … so un-Bellamy-like.
She took the stairs to avoid waiting for the elevator. She had tried that the first time, with Pierce. She still remembered standing in the lobby, willing him to come bursting out the door, shouting, “Wait! I was wrong! What was I thinking?”
It never worked that way except for people like Kate Hudson or Reese Witherspoon. People like Olivia Bellamy took the stairs.
She didn’t even remember the taxi ride home. She blindly overpaid the cabby and, shell-shocked, climbed the stairs to her brownstone.
“Oh, this is not good,” her neighbor, Earl, said, not bothering with hello as he stepped out into the foyer between their first-floor apartments. “You’re home way too soon.”
A silver-haired older man who had come up through school with Olivia’s father, Anthony George Earl the Third owned the brownstone. Since his second wife had left him, he claimed Olivia was the only woman he wanted in his life. In a flurry of midlife ambition, he was taking cooking lessons. At the moment, the rich scent of coq au vin wafted from his kitchen, but it only made Olivia feel queasy. She wished she hadn’t told him she thought Rand was going to pop the question today.
Although Earl was divorced and lived alone, he turned and called to someone in his apartment. “Our girl’s back. And it’s not good.”
Our girl. He only referred to her like that to one person—his best friend. She scowled at Earl. “You told him?” Without waiting for a reply, she pushed past Earl and stepped into his apartment. “Daddy?”
Philip Bellamy rose from a wing chair and opened his arms to Olivia. “The rat bastard.” He pulled her into a hug. Her father was her rock, and probably the sole reason she had survived her turbulent adolescence. She leaned against his chest, breathing in the comforting scent of his aftershave. But only for a moment. If she leaned on him too hard, she’d lose the ability to stand on her own.
“Ah, Lolly,” he said, using the old nickname. “I’m sorry.”
There was something phony in her father’s tone; didn’t he know she could hear it? Pulling back, she studied his face. He looked like Cary Grant, everyone had always said so because of the cleft in his chin and those killer eyes. He was—had always been—a tall, elegant man, the sort you saw at museum fund-raisers and at weekend house parties in the Hamptons.
“What’s going on?” she asked him.
“Does something need to be going on in order for me to visit my only child and my best friend?”
“You never come downtown unannounced.” Olivia glared at Earl again. “I can’t believe you told him.” She also couldn’t believe both Earl and her father knew it would go badly, that she would come home upset and in need of comforting. She supposed that, this being the third time, they had learned to expect false alarms from her. “I need to check on Barkis,” she said, fumbling for her keys and stepping out into the hallway.
She let herself in, and despite the blow she’d taken, Barkis was Barkis. He came bursting through his little dog door and sailed into her arms. Olivia’s parents thought the dog door was a security breach, but she deemed it necessary, given her crazy work schedule. She didn’t worry about break-ins anyway. Earl was a playwright who worked at home and had the watchdog instincts Barkis seemed to lack.
What the little dog had in abundance was exuberance. Just the sight of her caused him to do a dance of joy. Olivia often wished she was as fabulous as her dog thought she was. She set him down