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Wa-a-ay better gunshots than Rowena’s own shoes had made when she’d attempted a similar exit, she noted with a twinge of self-mocking envy. It was the Ferrari versus the two-door compact, all over again.
Ben followed his not-quite-ex-wife, with that familiar, vinegary feeling flooding into his stomach.
They used to be happy, the two of them. Heather could bewitch a man, when she wanted to. Twelve years ago, as a very focused and overserious biotechnology student, he hadn’t had a clue why she’d chosen to bewitch him.
“I just fell for you,” she’d said later, but had added something that was possibly more honest. “I saw the potential.”
Fell for him, saw the potential, then made improvements.
He’d already spent most of his adolescence building up his body as an antidote to the crippling loneliness and brutality of his expensive British boarding school, but he’d never taken any interest in clothes. Heather supervised his grooming and his wardrobe, boosted him out of his solitude and seriousness in a hundred energetic and very determined ways. And since he didn’t like failure, he had recognized that everything she wanted for him was necessary and important.
On the business front, she supported him in applying for commercial patents on his ideas instead of his original plan of going into academic research, and helped him start his company while he was still completing his master’s degree.
He’d respected her for all of it and had kept the respect for years. He’d loved her, and considered their marriage to be as close to ideal as marriage could get. Practical. Workable. Companionable. A success. In fact, he still didn’t want to deny the years they’d been happy together. Why backdate their failure that far?
Heather was no airhead herself. She’d come to England on a college scholarship, and she had ambition as well as brains. When she’d shelved her own plan to become a research chemist in order to put her energy into helping him build Radford Biotech, he’d seen it as a sacrifice on her part.
Now he wasn’t so sure. Had she viewed him as nothing more than a diamond-encrusted meal ticket all along? The prospect galled him, and made him question his own judgment.
He’d first put forward the idea of selling the company around two and a half years ago, at a time when he’d also begun to think seriously about starting a family. Heather had been against the sale from the beginning. “As far as I’m concerned, the company’s still in its infancy. Its potential is barely tapped.”
“Look at me, though, Heather,” he’d argued from the heart, in a way he rarely did. “I’m in a business suit sixteen hours a day. My frequent-flyer miles could get me to the moon and back on a free first-class ticket. I never even get into the labs to play around with ideas anymore, let alone have a chance to do anything else that interests me. You used to tell me I was too serious when we first met, now you want to push me right back into that box. I’m not interested in that box anymore. There are other challenges out there, other frontiers. What’s it all for?”
“Oh, around five hundred million in pocket change, maybe?”
“Don’t we already have more money than we can spend? I never get time to spend any of it. And I’ve never cared about cold cash for its own sake, you know that.”
He’d talked about wanting to enjoy his business interests, wanting to apply his mind and his energy to something new, wanting to give a percentage of their growing fortune to carefully chosen charities, wanting to have kids who would actually know what he looked like because he would have time to spend with them occasionally, wanting to buy a house and some land that was unique and really worth something, not just a mega mansion amongst a dozen others in the billionaire version of a gated community, but Heather had hated all of those ideas.
She’d almost been frightened of them.
And she’d been adamant that she didn’t want kids.
She’d come from a difficult background. An unhappy family, poverty and debt and struggle. She’d made herself into the woman she was through sheer gritty determination, brains and hard work. She wanted to keep climbing the ladder of success higher and higher, and she seemed terrified by the idea that Ben might invest in business interests that didn’t pay off—that they might have a few million dollars less in the bank, five years from now, rather than a hundred million more.
She had an unrealistic, gut-level fear that they would lose everything and end up in the gutter. He began to understand that no fortune would ever be large enough for her, no financial security blanket ever thick enough.
He tried to get her to see why she was like this, that it was sourced in unresolved feelings about her childhood, and that it was a problem. He suggested therapy, but she wouldn’t listen. “I’m a strong person, Ben. I know what I want and what I don’t want, and I don’t intend to change. Is that wrong?”
He’d kept trying, for almost two years, but their dealings with each other only became angrier and more distant, with no compromise possible on either side. When he’d sold Radford Biotech, Heather had yelled at him for three days, then didn’t speak to him at all for a month. When he’d bought the Santa Margarita ranch and tried to share with her his vision of how beautiful it could be, she’d started threatening divorce.
Even then he didn’t give up on his marriage. His own father had bullied his mother for years. They’d been a terrible match, after the first sizzle of desire wore thin. They’d divorced when Ben was fourteen. That was why he’d been packed off to boarding school, to keep him away from the ugliness. The fact that he’d been utterly miserable at boarding school wasn’t an issue for his parents. They’d never asked if he was happy, and he’d never told them. But he’d vowed then with an icy kind of idealism that he wasn’t going to repeat any of their mistakes.
He wasn’t a quitter, he wasn’t used to failure, and he wanted to turn this around.
But marriage required commitment from both parties, not one, and Heather wasn’t interested in trying, just in getting her fair share. That valuation of assets she’d presented to him and then snatched back again just now was the product of months of bitter wrangling between them.
Heather wanted as much liquid finance as she could possibly argue for. When it was safely in her hands, she planned to invest it in a mix of reliable stocks and gilt-edged securities to make it grow and grow for the rest of her life so that, like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind, she would never risk being hungry again.
Ben suspected she wouldn’t even attempt to marry for love, next time around. It would purely be a business transaction—the best dollar value she could get for her assets of beauty and brains and social ambition. He was bitterly angry with her, bitterly disappointed in his own utter failure to get her to change, and deeply sorry for her at the same time. None of these emotions left much room for love, and all of them had shaken him to the core. Hell, he never intended to go through something like this ever again!
“Explain something, Heather. Why does my plan to landscape Santa Margarita affect the valuation?” he asked as she climbed into her car.
“Because you’re going to pour a huge amount of money into it, and that kind of thing never recoups itself in the value of the house. You’ll put in a quarter of a million dollars, and the valuer’s estimate on the house will go up by twenty thousand.”
“Even if that’s true, does it really matter?”
“Oh, you mean, what’s a stray couple of hundred thousand dollars between friends?”
“Yes. That’s exactly what I mean.”
“I want what’s mine, Ben.”
“Aren’t you getting enough already?” Many millions, as he well knew.
“Are you suggesting I didn’t contribute as much as you did to the success of Radford Biotech?”
“Heather—”
“Forget it.” She put up a hand, then turned the key in the ignition, and said above the flare of engine noise, “Our lawyers can talk about this. We’re sure as heck not going to get anywhere with it on our own.”
“No, we’re not,” he agreed. It was one of the few things left in their lives that they did agree on.
“Someday, Ben, your charmed life will come to an end.”
“That’s not a threat, I hope.” Threat or not, it chilled him to think that she wished him ill.
“Of course it’s not. I just hope that when it happens you have the right insurance, that’s all.”
“I think our definitions of the word insurance are probably very different.”
“Very! Don’t give me your spiel on the subject. People and memories and priorities and values. I’ve heard it before. And by the way, I think you’re making a huge mistake with whatshername.” She thumbed over her shoulder in the general direction of Rowena Madison and the derelict garden.
“You mean the project or this particular consultant?”
“Both.” Heather snapped her car into gear, revved the engine again, then spun around with a spray of gravel and dirt that showered desert dust onto his trouser legs and shoes.
“Thank heaven we never had children,” he muttered as he watched her drive away. It was the only piece of positive thinking he could drag from the whole mess.
Then he turned to find Rowena Madison standing quietly nearby, awaiting his attention. She must have come out here through the side gate when she’d heard Heather’s car starting. Her serious, enormous eyes were fixed on him with a troubled expression in their dark-blue depths. Her willowy figure had an angular look. Tightly bent elbows, hunched-up shoulders. The set of her limbs created a force field of distance.
She had a very nice body, he decided, although she didn’t seem to be aware of the fact and certainly had no idea how to dress herself to her own advantage. He assessed her impatiently for a moment.
The severe colors and tailored silhouette were totally wrong, especially with her hair—apart from one wandering strand—folded up so tightly on the top of her head. Her eyes would be incredibly beautiful if she did anything whatsoever to help people notice them. Someone should damn well tell her that she didn’t have to imitate a nineteenth-century schoolteacher in order to look like a competent professional.
The escaped strand of bouncy dark hair blew across her face and snagged against her full mouth. She let it stray between her nicely shaped lips and began to chew on it, and he had a ridiculous impulse to pull the strand away and scold her.
Chewing on your hair, Dr. Madison? An appalling habit. Don’t ever let me see you do it again! And do something about the way you dress!
Suddenly she reminded Ben of how he’d been himself, fifteen years ago, at around eighteen or nineteen—so much going for him in some areas and so clueless in others. If he could change, then so could she.
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.
