“I never said where I was going, did I?” Emma asked her supervisor dubiously.

“Isn’t that where you plan to go?” Mrs. Ring asked.

“Well, yes, but . . .” She turned her head and stared at Vanni, her mouth hanging open. His eyebrows furrowed and he briskly folded up his paper.

“You’d called Mrs. Ring already?” Emma asked in a hushed, incredulous tone a moment later after she’d hung up the phone.

He lifted his eyebrows and gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. “I wanted to make sure you had the time off.”

“You wanted to make sure you got your way,” she said, stung. “I can’t believe you did that, Vanni,” she said, anger entering her tone. She swung her legs off the lounger, placing her feet on the hot slate terrace. She suddenly felt like she couldn’t look at him, she was so pissed off.

“Why is it a problem that I smoothed things over for you with your work?”

“That’s what you’d call what you did? Smoothing things over? That’s my job, Vanni,” she exclaimed heatedly. “Maybe you think it’s some kind of unimportant sideshow—I’m not a doctor, after all,” she said, remembering how he’d asked her why she hadn’t gone to medical school when Amanda was going. His eyes flashed. “But my job is important to me. You had no right to barge in and demand I get time off!”

His expression stiffened in rising anger. She couldn’t believe he didn’t understand how heavy-handed and domineering he’d behaved. He was overtaking her mind and her body and her life, and he couldn’t seem to understand how much emptier that would make her when he was gone.

“You’ve already bought my home! Now you have to buy off my employer as well?” she demanded, standing abruptly.

“I didn’t buy anybody off,” he said through a hard mouth. “I simply put in a phone call to Mrs. Ring to explain the situation.”

“To explain what you wanted the situation to be,” Emma corrected as she picked up her cover-up. “And of course she was all too eager to make that happen. Don’t try to tell me that you didn’t make a huge charitable donation to the hospice. I suspected it ever since they assigned us to Cristina around the clock. That’s not normal operating procedure for us.”

“What if I did?” Vanni asked. How could he look so hot and sun-gilded reclining there, while his tone and eyes were frigid? “It’s a good cause. And I wanted special care for Cristina.”

“And you don’t think all the money you sent Mrs. Ring’s way had any effect whatsoever on her decision to give me a vacation on the spur of the moment when you requested it personally?” Emma asked sarcastically, trying to put on her cover-up and twisting it hopelessly because of her angry, jerky motions.

“I have no idea if it did or not,” he said.

“Give me a break,” Emma said disgustedly, jamming her foot into a flip-flop.

“Where are you going?” he asked sharply when she started to walk toward the house and the dressing room. Her clothing was still in there.

“Home. You know, that apartment you own?” she asked scathingly over her shoulder.

“Emma, stop.”

She halted instinctively at his tone, but her immobility seemed to make the fury in her chest froth even higher. He touched her upper arm and she turned to see him standing there, his blue-green eyes seeming to glow in his tanned, shadowed face.

“I’m sorry if you think it was intrusive of me,” he said stiffly. “I did it because I wanted to make things easier for you. Don’t make more of this than it is.”

Her eyes burned. “But it is more, Vanni.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that you’ve offered me a limited affair, and I’ve accepted. You’ve agreed to give little of yourself, besides what you offer in bed,” she said, her voice shaking with emotion. “You can’t do that and then try to control the private parts of my life as well . . . my home, my clothing, my job. It’s not fair.”

“Emma, listen to—”

“No,” she cut him off. Everything seemed to fall down on her all at once, crushing her, making breathing difficult. The whole situation with Mrs. Ring had flipped the lid off her anxiety . . . her fear that she was going to be hurt by him . . . her growing certainty. “Please send back all the clothing you bought for me yesterday.”

His expression went flat. “What about our trip?”

“I’m not going,” she said before she broke his hold on her arm and walked toward the house.

Wednesday evening, Emma heard a knock on her bedroom door. She quickly grabbed a tissue from her bedside table and wiped her cheeks and eyes.

“Come in,” she called.

Amanda poked her head into the crack of the partially open door.

“I made grilled salmon and a big casserole of Mom’s macaroni and cheese,” she said, her gaze running over Emma’s face concernedly. Emma gave her a tired, knowing smile. It’d been their favorite meal when they were kids. Amanda was trying to cheer her up, her worry mounting ever since Emma returned home on Monday afternoon, pale and upset. Emma had provided her sister with the skeleton of an explanation for her emotional state, saying she and Vanni had fought, and that she had canceled a trip to attend the Montand French-American Grand Prix with him. Amanda had been amazed by the news, but tried to be supportive and not ask too many questions.

After their confrontation, Vanni had finally agreed to take her home, but he’d been tight-lipped and fuming for the whole drive.

“You do realize that I have to leave tomorrow, whether you come or not?” he’d demanded when he parked the Montand sedan in her apartment parking lot.

“I know it,” Emma had said, staring out the window because it was too difficult to look at him.

“And you’re still going to continue with this . . . this tantrum?” he’d asked.

That’d poured fuel on her simmering anger. She flared like a flash fire. “Just the fact that you’re calling this a tantrum proves my whole point. I’m not a child! What you did wasn’t a small thing to me, Vanni,” she’d grated out, reaching behind her neck to unfasten the Prisatti angel. She was choking with fear over her realization that she was falling for him, and that he would leave her. Soon. The angel was a constant reminder—

“Don’t you dare take that thing off,” Vanni had seethed, his low voice vibrating with emotion.

Her gaze had flown to his face. She flinched at the blazing fury and wild helplessness in his stare. Repressing a groan of misery, she clambered out of the car and slammed the door.

Since then, he’d called several times, but Emma had stubbornly refused to speak to him. She tried to return to work—the distraction would have done her good—but thanks to Vanni’s interference, all the shifts were covered. There was nothing for her to return to until she supposedly returned from France in two weeks’ time. She’d kept to herself for days, avoiding her sister and Vanni’s calls.

Avoiding the truth, and failing.

“You really are brilliant,” Emma said presently to Amanda, tossing aside the crumpled tissue onto her bedside table. “You figured that if anything could get me out of this funk, it’s carbohydrates.”

“I figured it couldn’t hurt to try,” Amanda said with a hopeful smile, stepping into the room. She came and sat at the foot of Emma’s bed. “Are you okay?”

Emma nodded.

“Liar,” Amanda said ruefully.

“What is it?” Emma asked, noticing her sister’s hesitance.

“Vanni called me. Just now,” Amanda admitted.

“What?” Emma asked, stunned.

Amanda nodded. “He said you were refusing to talk to him, but he wanted to leave an important message. He said that his pilot was flying back to the States as we speak. The message was that he has everything arranged for you to fly to meet him at his villa in the South of France. He said . . .”

“What?” Emma demanded when Amanda faded off reluctantly, hungry for the rest of the message despite her uncertainty . . . desperate for news of him.