Susan Phillips - Breathing Room

All the screaming was making his head pound. He glanced back up at the screen in time to watch blood spray as the redhead bit the dust. Tough luck, sweetheart. That’s what you get for being taken in by a pretty face.

Neither his head nor his stomach could tolerate more, and he slipped out of the darkened movie theater. His pictures did big business internationally, and as he eased into the milling crowd that was enjoying the warm Florentine night, he glanced around to make certain no one recognized him, but the tourists and locals were too busy enjoying the busy street life to take notice.

The last thing he wanted to do was deal with fans, so he’d taken time to alter his appearance before he’d left his hotel room, even though he’d been functioning on less than two hours of sleep. He’d slipped in some brown contact lenses to hide his trademark silver-blue eyes and let his dark hair-still long and sleek from the picture he’d finished shooting in Australia two days earlier-hang free. He’d also neglected to shave, hoping the stubble would camouflage a chiseled jaw that might have been passed down from his Medici ancestors. Although he’d rather have worn jeans, he’d costumed himself in the elegant garb of a wealthy Italian: black silk shirt, dark trousers, exquisite loafers with a scratch across one toe because he was as careless with clothes as he was with people. Keeping a low profile was a relatively new experience. Generally, if there was a spotlight around, he liked to make certain it was shining on him. But not right now.

He should go back to the hotel and sleep till noon, but he was too restless. If his cronies had been around, he might have headed for a club, but then again maybe not. Club life had lost its appeal. Unfortunately, he was a night owl, and he hadn’t yet figured out what to do instead.

He passed the window of a butcher shop. A stuffed boar’s head stared at him through the glass, and he looked away. The last couple of days had been a bitch. Karli Swenson, his former girlfriend and one of Hollywood’s favorite actresses, had killed herself the week before at her Malibu beach house. Karli had a long history with cocaine, so he suspected that her suicide was drug related, which pissed him off so much he still couldn’t mourn her. One thing he did know for sure-she hadn’t killed herself because of him.

Even when they were dating, Karli had cared a lot more about what was going up her nose than she’d ever cared for him, but audiences adored her, and the tabloids wanted a sexier story than drugs. No surprise, they’d decided he was it. Hollywood’s career bad boy whose heartless ways with women had driven sweet Karli to her grave.

Since those bad-boy stories had helped build his career, he couldn’t blame the media, but he still didn’t like how exposed this was making him feel. That was why he’d decided to go to ground for the next six weeks or so, until shooting for his next picture started.

He’d originally planned to call up an old girlfriend, head for the Caribbean, and get down to the serious business of resuming the sex life he’d put on hiatus a few months before filming on his last picture had started. But the uproar over Karli’s death made him want to put more distance between himself and the States, so he’d decided to go to Italy instead. It was not only the country of his ancestors but also the place where the initial filming on his next picture would begin. He’d get a chance to soak in some atmosphere, slip into the skin of a new character. And he wasn’t bringing along any publicity-hungry old girlfriends to get in his way.

What the hell. He could tolerate his own company for a few weeks until the heat from Karli’s suicide died down and he felt more like getting back into the swing of things. For now, the idea of moving around incognito was novel enough to keep him entertained.

He looked up and realized he’d wandered into the center of Florence, the crowded Piazza della Signoria. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been alone. He made his way across the cobblestones to Rivoire and found a table under the awning. The waiter appeared to take his order. Considering his hangover, he should stick with club soda, but he seldom did what he was supposed to, and he ordered a bottle of their best Brunello instead. The waiter took too long delivering it, and Ren snarled at him when he reappeared. His ugly mood came from lack of sleep, booze, and the fact that he was tired all the way to his bones. It came from sweet, sad Karli’s death, and a general feeling that all the money and all the fame still weren’t enough-that no spotlight could ever shine bright enough. He was jaded, restless, and he wanted more. More fame. More money. More… something.

He reminded himself his next film would give it to him. Every actor in town wanted to play the villainous Kaspar Street, but only Ren had been offered the job. It was the role of a lifetime, the chance for top billing.

Slowly his muscles unwound. Making Night Kill would involve months of hard work. Until filming began, he intended to enjoy Italy. He’d relax, eat well, and do what he did best. Leaning back in his chair, he took a sip of wine and waited for life to entertain him.

As Isabel gazed up at the pink and green dome of the Duomo outlined against the night sky, she decided that Florence’s most famous landmark looked garish instead of grand. She didn’t like this city. Even at night it was crowded and noisy. Italy might have a tradition as the place where soul-bruised women came to heal, but for her, leaving New York had been a terrible mistake.

She told herself to be patient. She’d arrived only yesterday, and Florence wasn’t her ultimate destination. That had been determined by fate and her friend Denise’s change of mind. For years Denise had dreamed about coming to Italy. Finally she’d applied for a leave of absence from her Wall Street job and rented a house in the Tuscan countryside for the months of September and October. She’d planned to use the time to begin work on a book about investment strategies for single women. “Italy is the perfect place for inspiration,” Denise had told Isabel over the glazed pear and endive salad at Jo Jo’s, their favorite lunch spot. “I’ll write all day, then eat fabulous food and drink great wine at night.”

But shortly after Denise had signed the lease on the Tuscan farmhouse of her dreams, she’d met the man of her dreams and declared that she couldn’t possibly leave New York now. Which was how Isabel had ended up with a reasonably priced two-month rental on a farmhouse in Tuscany.

It couldn’t have come along at a better time. Life in New York had grown unbearable. Isabel Favor Enterprises no longer existed. Her office was closed; her staff had moved on. She had no book contract, no lecture tour, and very little money. Her brownstone, along with nearly everything else she owned, had fallen to the auctioneer’s gavel so she could pay off her tax debt. Even the Lalique crystal vase engraved with her logo was gone. All she had left were her clothes, a broken life, and two months in Italy to figure out how to start over.

Someone bumped against her, and she jumped. The crowds had thinned out, and the New Yorker inside her no longer felt safe, so she headed down the Via dei Calzaiuoli to the Piazza della Signoria. As she walked, she told herself she’d made the right decision. Only a clean break from the familiar could clear her mind enough so that she could stop feeling as though all she wanted to do was cry. Finally she’d be able to move ahead.

She had a definite plan for how she would begin the process of reinventing her life. Solitude. Rest. Contemplation. Action. Four parts, just like the Four Cornerstones.

“Can’t you ever be impulsive?” Michael had once said. “Do you have to plan everything?”

A little over three months had passed since Michael had left her for another woman, but his voice poked into her consciousness so frequently she could hardly think anymore. Last month she’d caught a glimpse of him in Central Park with his arm around a badly dressed pregnant woman, and even from fifty feet away Isabel could hear the sound of their laughter, a little giddy, silly almost. In all their time together, he and Isabel had never once been silly. Isabel was afraid she’d forgotten how.

The Piazza della Signoria was as crowded as the rest of Florence. Tourists milled around the statues, while a pair of musicians strummed their guitars near Neptune’s Fountain. The forbidding Palazzo Vecchio, with its crenellated clock tower and medieval banners, loomed over the nighttime bustle just as it had been doing since the fourteenth century.

The leather pumps she’d paid three hundred dollars for last year were killing her, but going back to the hotel was too depressing. She spotted the beige and brown awnings of Rivoire, a café that had been mentioned in her guidebook, and made her way through a group of German tourists to find an outside table.

“Buona sera, signora…” The waiter was at least sixty, but that didn’t stop him from flirting with her as he took her wine order. She would have loved a risotto, but the prices were even higher than the calorie count. How many years had it been since she’d had to worry over menu prices?

When the waiter left, she centered the salt and pepper shakers on the tablecloth, then moved the ashtray to the edge. Michael had looked so happy with his new wife.

“You’re too much,” he’d said. “Too much of everything.” So why did she feel as if she were too little?

She drank the first glass of wine more quickly than she should have and ordered another. Her parents’ long-term love affair with personal excess had made her wary of alcohol, but she was in a strange country, and the emptiness that had been growing inside her for months had become unbearable.

“It’s not my problem, Isabel. It’s yours…”

She’d promised herself she wouldn’t brood about this again tonight, but she couldn’t seem to get past it.

“You need to control everything. Maybe that’s why you don’t like sex that much.”

That was so unfair. She liked sex. She’d even started toying with the idea of taking a lover to prove it, but she recoiled from the idea of sex outside a committed relationship. It was another legacy from watching her parents’ mistakes.

She wiped away the smear her lipstick left on her wineglass. Sex was a partnership, but Michael seemed to have forgotten that. If he hadn’t been satisfied, he should have discussed it with her.

Her thoughts were making her even more unhappy than she’d been when she entered the piazza, so she finished her second glass of wine and ordered another. One night of excess would hardly turn her into an alcoholic.

At the next table two women smoked, gestured, and rolled their eyes over the absurdity of life. A group of American students just behind them gorged on pizza and gelato, while an older couple gazed at each other over thimble-size aperitifs.

“I want passion,” Michael had said.

The implication was too painful to contemplate, so she studied the statues on the other side of the piazza, copies of The Rape of the Sabines, Cellini’s Perseus, Michelangelo’s David. Then her eyes settled on the most amazing man she’d ever seen…

He sat three tables away, a portrait of Italian decadence in a rumpled black silk shirt with dark stubble on his jaw, long hair, and La Dolce Vita eyes. Two elegantly tapered fingers curled around the stem of the wineglass that dangled indolently from his hand. He looked rich, spoiled, bored-Marcello Mastroianni stripped of his clown face and chiseled into perfect male beauty for an avaricious new millennium.

There was something vaguely familiar about him, although she knew they’d never met. His face could have been painted by one of the masters-Michelangelo, Botticelli, Raphael. That must be why she felt as if she’d seen him before.

She studied him more closely, only to realize he was studying her in return…

Ren had been watching her ever since she arrived. She’d rejected two tables before she found one that pleased her, then rearranged the condiments as soon as she was seated. A discriminating woman. She wore the stamp of intelligence as visibly as her Italian shoes, and even from here she radiated a seriousness of purpose that he found as sexy as those overly lavish lips.

She looked to be in her early thirties, with understated makeup and the simple but expensive clothes favored by sophisticated European women. Her face was more intriguing than beautiful. She wasn’t Hollywood emaciated, but he liked her body-breasts in proportion to her hips, tapered waist, the promise of great legs underneath her black slacks. Her blond hair had highlights she hadn’t been born with, but he’d bet that was the only thing fake about her. No artificial fingernails or false eyelashes. And if those breasts were stuffed with silicone, she’d be showing them off instead of keeping them tucked away underneath that tidy black sweater.