COUNTERPOINT
An original romantic serialFrom Alina Adams the author of "When a Man Loves a Woman" (DELL 4/00), "Annie's Wild Ride" (AVON 8/98), "Inside Figure Skating" (METROBOOKS 11/00 & 9/99), "Thieves at Heart" (AVON 12/95) and "The Fictitious Marquis" (AVON 6/95)
Available weekly by e-mail from http://www.AlinaAdams.com
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CHAPTER 43
Never in his life could Gabriel Scott have dreamt of feeling grateful for the illness of a small child. And yet, it was Eve Simonge's frightening attack of the croup, that had brought Gabriel and Nicole back together. And, Hippocratic Oath aside, Gabriel couldn't help feeling grateful.
Because Nicole Simonge was like no other woman Gabriel had ever known. And he suspected that, unlike that spoiled playboy jerk she thought she was married to, Gabriel actually meant HIS assessment in a good way.
It wasn't just Nicole's looks. Though, the afternoon they met downtown for lunch, and Nicole stepped out of her cab dressed in a fitted, blue, silk blouse, its three (!) top buttons provocatively undone, a black suede skirt cut high above the knee and slit up the sides for good measure, and fishnet stockings, Gabriel felt as if he'd been shoved through his own personal time-warp as hormones he hadn't heard from since high-school percolated out to take a peek.
Nicole finished putting on her make-up even as they settled at a table. She called it "freshening up," and blamed her constant need for it on the fact that they were sitting at an outside cafe. The wind, she said, kept messing with her hair. And so she stuck a pair of silver-rimmed sunglasses atop her scalp to work as a headband, then proceeded to reapply her lipstick, lip-pencil, eye-shadow, eyeliner, blush, and powder.
And Gabriel watched her. And Gabriel knew that she looked absolutely ridiculous. Over-made up and cheap, an unintended parody of the way truly fashionable women looked. And yet, he couldn't take his eyes off her.
Because, even in spite of the needless layers of paint, she was an exquisite, natural beauty, with perfect, vibrant features, and a natural grace she'd unfortunately buried in trying to look like a sophisticate. Gabriel thought she'd look fantastic in funkier clothes, maybe in fitted leather or a light cotton. Or, maybe, in nothing at all.
It was a thought, he knew, few people would ever suspect him of having. To most people, to his own sister, who knew him best of all, he was Doctor, with a capital D. Curer of the sick, champion of the masses. As though that somehow made him immune to being a man. As though men who saw women naked on a regular, professional basis, would have no reason to want to see them naked in a more personal way.
Oh, sure, Gabriel could have gone the route of many of his medical-school friends. He could have been the Doctor/Player. Women loved doctors. Especially ones with thick curly, blond hair, and deep purple eyes, and a once broken nose to keep them from looking too much like a cherub. Gabriel could have been a major Doctor/Player. Except for one thing. He had no interest in it.
Gabriel's problem was that he liked women. He liked women too much to see them hurt and abused and any of the other million incidents that brought them, desperate, to his clinic. And he liked women too much to be the one to hurt or abuse them.
Gabriel's schedule -- work 23 hours a day, nap in office, get up, rinse, repeat -- was hardly conducive to the sort of meaningful relationship he wanted. Gabriel had no desire to lead a woman on, or appear to promise her a life he wasn't capable of delivering. And any relationship less than that, he wasn't interested in.
"You've got a big problem, pal," Nicole deduced, after Gabriel spilled out his conundrum over lunch.
He'd been utterly honest with her. The only thing he hadn't said was, the more he got to know Nicole, the more Gabriel wished he could think of some way to make an exception in her case, and combine what he wanted, with what he could have.
Not that, in this particular relationship, there weren't other problems. Her bastard of a husband. His not-to-blame sister.
"Well, you're the expert on men, right?" Gabriel playfully stabbed a baby carrot off Nicole's plate, and popped it into his mouth; Nicole had told him she didn't like vegetables, so Gabriel was playing hero and protecting her salmon in lime sauce from her side-salad. "You tell me what to do."
Nicole shook her head. "No. You don't get it. I'm an expert on making men want me. If that's a relationship then I... then I'm Ms. Victoria Morgan!" Nicole laughed at her own joke.
She wasn't wrong about the making men want her part. Gabriel didn't think he'd ever wanted another woman as much as he wanted her. And still, no matter how hard he tried to convince himself that it was all purely hormonal, Gabriel knew that it was much more than that. His attraction to Nicole went beyond the physical. Yes, she was shallow, and petty, and vindictive. But, to Gabriel, she was also wounded and vulnerable and so scared of not fitting in, of being laughed at or, worse, ignored, that she felt compelled to slather on misguided layer after layer of make-up and hauteur and attitude, to prop up her courage.
"Oh, shit," Nicole said. "I guess I shouldn't have -- she IS your sister, isn't she? You probably think she's got a right to keep on living."
"I know Victoria isn't one of your favorite people," Gabriel understated. "But, she is very important to me, yes."
"Well, then, you should tell her to stay away from married men. Especially married men like Robin."
"Believe me, the subject has come up."
"She can do better, I bet." Nicole seemed to really be giving the topic sincere thought. "I mean, yeah, sure, Robin's one of the wealthiest guys in the world, and those types are pretty hard to pin down. But, if she sets her sites a little lower -- you know, for someone like her, he doesn't have to be a billionaire, just a couple of mil in the bank should do. And she's not horribly bad looking, just a little plain, but, the right clothes could fix that. And she's supposed to be smart, right? Well, some men, especially the self-made types, they go for smart women. So, it's not all lost. She could still be...."
Nicole's voice trailed off, seemingly following her drifting eyes to some spot behind Gabriel's left year. Curious, he pressed his palms into the armrests, and swiveled around in his chair.
To come face to face with Victoria.
She was standing on the outer side of the barrier that marked the outside cafe from the street. She was clutching her briefcase in one hand, her coat over the crook of her arm in the other, and she was looking from Nicole to Gabriel and back again with a facial expression part shock, part disgust, and part fury.
She also had a hell of a shiner under her left eye, and a cut on her cheek that, frankly, were the first things Gabriel noticed. When he sprung from his chair to greet her, he had honestly forgotten that Nicole was even there, much less that Victoria might be a touch surprised to learn that Gabriel even knew Robin's wife, much less knew her well-enough to be scooping salad off her plate. All Gabriel cared about was finding out who'd hurt Victoria.
"Vicky, sweetheart." In the steps it took him to get to her, Gabriel had switched into full doctor/full brother mode. "What in the world happened? Are you all right? Were you in an accident? Why didn't you call me?"
Victoria didn't budge from where she was standing. Her face had grown pale, and she was shaking so hard, her briefcase smacked against her hip like a percussion tremolo.
She jerked her chin in Nicole's direction. "Her?" Victoria demanded, and Gabriel got the feeling a flood of verbs, nouns, and epithets had been left out of the question.
"I know. I'm sorry. I should have told you. I just didn't see the point of upsetting you. Especially after you came to your senses and finally gave Robin the boot."
Victoria didn't seem to be hearing him. She wasn't even looking at him. She was looking straight through him. At Nicole. And the look on her face... Gabriel had never seen anything like it. He was sure if she was about to cry, or pounce.
He tried to diffuse the situation, tried to make Victoria see that it -- Nicole, really -- was harmless. That, in another time and in another place and under different circumstances, Victoria and Nicole might even have been what Gabriel and Nicole were now.
He told his sister, "We're friends."
"F-Friends?" The word sounded as if it had been wrenched out of Victoria by Gabriel sticking his hand down her throat, and ripping her gut out along with it. "You. And she. Are FRIENDS?"
"Yes." In an attempt to keep everyone calm, Gabriel went with the unashamed approach. "We are."
It was exactly the wrong approach to take.
Victoria saw Gabriel's calm, and she raised him an attitude of utter detachment.
Her voice perfectly serene, and so low that it spoke to either deep emotional exhaustion, or a simple, spiritual death, Victoria informed her brother, "Well, in that case, I think you should know that it was your new friend who had you thrown in jail last month. She broke into your apartment, she stole your files, and she turned them over to the D.A. All so she could blackmail me into leaving her husband. Whom I loved. Which I did. And, unlike your FRIEND here, I didn't even get a salmon lunch out of it."