Heather couldn’t. She didn’t even want to try…
But he wasn’t thinking about his ex-wife right now.
He wanted to grab Rowena Madison and stand her in front of a mirror and tell her, “Look at yourself! Attractive, intelligent, perceptive. Don’t be so afraid to let it show. Don’t be afraid to take risks and to feel. Make an effort. Change. Fight. And please, don’t be afraid to let other people get close to you.”
Although not me, he mentally revised, because I’m not ready to get close to anyone.
Just when he really was about to scold her about the hair chewing, she caught herself at it, frowned in disgust, hooked the strand out of her mouth and tucked it back behind her ear.
“Much better,” he murmured.
“Oh…” She was clearly upset that he’d seen.
“I was about to tell you to stop.”
“Um, thanks. I try not to do it. I’ve almost stopped. But sometimes it happens when I’m thinking about something else.”
Right now, Ben realized, the something else would be his divorce, and that line he’d let slip about not having kids. She’d almost certainly heard him.
Damn.
“But at least I don’t bite my nails anymore.” She held them up for his approval and threw him a wobbly yet triumphant smile.
He gave her what she wanted. “Good. That’s great.” It was like congratulating a five-year-old who’d eaten her green vegetables three nights in a row, but he meant it, too. “Bad habits are pretty hard to let go of sometimes,” he told her.
“Mmm, so how long were you married?” she asked.
“Eleven years.”
“I guess it would be hard to let go, after such a long time.”
“I meant your nails. You let go of biting your nails.”
“Oh, gosh, I’m sorry.” She looked stricken again. “I didn’t mean to say that your marriage was a bad habit.”
“Hmm. Maybe it was.”
“Well, you’d be the one to know…”
They’d been so clumsy with each other this morning. Angry. Not listening properly. Saying too much. Laughing when they shouldn’t have. Getting it all wrong. In Ben’s experience this didn’t usually happen with strangers. You were usually too careful and polite to generate that level of complexity and emotion in a conversation when you hadn’t met someone before.
“It’s fine,” he told her shortly. “I don’t like mess, and I don’t like failure. A divorce means both, whether it happens after eleven months or eleven years or half a lifetime.”
She nodded. “And you’re right, it would be so much harder with kids.”
“I’m sorry you heard that.”
“I won’t call the tabloids about it.” She gave a sudden, captivating grin that changed her whole face. She looked mischievous and perceptive and alive. “You can safely stick to the script, Mr. Radford.”
“You mean that Heather and I will always remain friends?”
“That’s the one.”
They smiled at each other again, but the softer moment didn’t last.
Ben didn’t understand, in hindsight, why he’d felt compelled to spill so much to a woman like this—a stranger and someone who surely had problems of her own—about his impending divorce. And he suspected suddenly that she hadn’t been at all taken in by the cynical tone with which he’d tried to mask his sense of bitter failure.
Already, after less than two hours spent in his company, Dr. Rowena Madison knew way too much about him.
Chapter Three
Four weeks after submitting her draft garden plan and costing to Ben Radford, Rowena concluded that he must either have abandoned the project or given the contract to someone else. He hadn’t struck her as the kind of man to sit on a decision for a long time, nor one who would vacillate back and forth. Maybe he’d concluded that his ex-wife was right and that the whole idea was a huge mistake.
Oh, yes, she’d heard that part, too, although she didn’t think Ben knew that.
She wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t chosen her. There had been too much awkwardness between them for one short and supposedly professional morning, too many moments of hit-and-miss understanding. He would choose a landscape designer who hadn’t experienced those instant and unsettling windows into his soul as he talked about his impending divorce—someone much safer, in other words.
Rowie knew she’d never forget his final muttered words as Heather Radford had driven away.
Thank heaven we never had children.
Beneath the arrogant, successful facade suggested by his business suit, he was a complex man. Strong yet with a vulnerable streak that he didn’t like admitting to. Good-looking yet by no means skin-deep. Passionate and creative and alive in a way that hadn’t so far made him very happy, she guessed.
For some reason, he fascinated her and frightened her at the same time. He was very definitely not safe.
Which made it all the more fortunate that she would probably never see him again.
And yet that wasn’t how she felt about it, as time went by. She didn’t want total safety anymore in her life; she wanted some danger.
“What are we going to work on this spring?” Jeanette asked at their next therapy session at her office in Santa Barbara.
“Men,” Rowena told her firmly.
Earghh, why had she said that? She should have disguised it in therapy-speak, at least!
Not that Jeanette was very into that kind of jargon. “You’re dating someone?” she asked, sounding interested and ready to approve.
“N-no. But I think I’m ready. I’m sure I am. Only, I don’t know if the kind of man I’d like to get involved with would see that I’m ready.”
Jeanette laughed. She was a practical woman in her late forties, interested in present-day problem-solving, not endless examinations of childhood influences, traumas and dreams. She expected Rowena to come to their sessions with clear-cut goals they could work on achieving together, and the approach had been wonderfully successful so far.
Rowena had first started seeing her a year ago, after moving to California from Florida and contacting her on the recommendation of Francine, the therapist she’d been seeing back east. The first goal Rowena had expressed to Francine two years ago had been, “Being able to leave my apartment on my own.”
Yes, really. Whether you labeled it agoraphobia or anxiety or just plain wimping out, Rowena had gone through a horrible, paralyzing period when she hadn’t been able to leave the safety of her own or her parents’ apartment without someone she loved and trusted by her side coaxing her through it.
She’d made a lot of progress since then, including the move across the country.
Her parents had been concerned about the move initially. California? All on her own? What if the panic attacks came back?
But Rowena had known it was the right thing. Her twin sister, Roxanna, was living in Italy with her gorgeous husband, Gino. And Rowena was only in Florida in the first place because she’d fled to her parents in their retirement condo after her anxiety problem had become too severe to handle on her own.
It was time to strike out, to find her independence, her courage, her self-sufficiency and her place in the world. Apart from her parents, she’d had no ties in the Fort Lauderdale area, and no important ones in New Jersey, where she and Rox