The Bravos: Family Ties: The Bravo Family Way / Married in Haste / From Here to Paternity

Danny followed her into her office, but he didn’t sit down. The minute she shut the door, he set the box of candy on the credenza and said, “I think we really gotta talk.”

“Of course. Danny, I—”

He put up a hand. “Not here, okay?” She swallowed and nodded. “I’ll be over tonight. Eight o’clock.”

What could she say? Nothing. Except, “I’ll be there, Danny.”

“All right, then.” He left without another word.

She took the box of candy out to RaeAnne and told her to share it with the staff. Cleo didn’t eat a single piece herself. She couldn’t.

Her doorbell rang at eight exactly. Danny looked so somber when she let him in.

She offered, “Are you hungry? I could …” She didn’t know how to finish. His expression broke her heart. It was infinitely gentle and much too wise.

“I didn’t come here to eat and I think you know that.”

So she led him to the living room. He took the easy chair and she perched on the edge of the couch.

He got right down to it. “Since that night I came for dinner and saw that little blue box—the one you wouldn’t open—I been getting the picture, getting the feeling there was someone else. I kind of figured it might be the guy who sent you that box, might be Fletcher Bravo—and it is, isn’t it? I knew it today, when you two came out of your office….” He seemed to run out of words. In the silence he just looked at her, waiting for her to answer him.

She felt about two inches tall. “Danny, I swear to you, I never went behind your back. Not with anyone. I would never do something like that.”

“I know you wouldn’t.” He gave her the kindest, most tender little smile and she wanted to cry then, just bawl her eyes out. But she held the tears back. After all, she wasn’t the injured party here. “You’re not that kind of woman,” he said. “And I know that you loved me—or at least, you thought that you did.”

“Danny, no. I did love …” She cut herself off. She couldn’t go on, not with the way he was looking at her, both knowing and disbelieving at once.

He shook his head. “I always knew that you wanted to love me, that I’m the kind of guy you think will be good for you, the kind of guy you’re gonna feel safe with. The kind of guy who’s nothing like the high rollers and big shots who messed your mom over so many times. And you know what? That was enough for me, to be the one you could count on, to be the guy you could trust, until … well, until now. Until I saw you today with a guy you’re crazy for.”

She longed to argue, to stand up and say, No, Danny. I’m not crazy for Fletcher. Not in the least.

Too bad she couldn’t get her mouth around such an enormous lie.

Danny said, “You been pulling away from me for weeks. You been tired every time I touch you. You know that you have.”

“I know. I’m so sorry….” She felt like a total creep, too awful to look him straight in the eye. She dropped her gaze.

He got up from his chair and came to stand over her. “Hey.”

She tipped her head back and made herself meet those kind eyes and realized that it wouldn’t be right, wouldn’t be fair, to keep saying how sorry she was. Sorry just didn’t cut it. She swallowed and sat up a little bit straighter and said with real regret, “I’ll miss you, Danny.”

“And I’ll miss you. But Cleo, the way you looked at that guy …”

She swallowed. Hard. “Yeah. I know.”

He pointed at her wrist. “He give you that watch?”

“Yes. Today.”

“And you took it.”

“Yes, Danny. I did.”

“I think you’re in love with him. Are you?”

“Oh, Danny …”

“You know what? Don’t tell me. I don’t need to know.”

And that was it. There was nothing more to say except, “I’d better get your things….”

He shoved his hands in his pockets, lifted a shoulder in a half shrug. “Yeah. Okay.”

So she got up and went to collect his spare razor and toothbrush from the bathroom, his blue windbreaker from the hall closet. “I think this is all of it.” She handed everything over.

“Thanks.”

She opened the door for him and closed it quietly as soon as he had stepped through.

And then she returned to the living room and sat down on the sofa and couldn’t believe what she had just done. She’d said goodbye to Danny, her best friend, the man she had been so certain would one day be her husband and the father of her children. Danny, the exact right man for her, good and honest and true.

She sat there alone on her sofa and wondered which was worse: that she’d lost the sweetest guy she’d ever known, that she was actually relieved that Danny ended it—or that Danny was right. Somehow she’d gone and let herself fall for Fletcher Bravo, a man who was everything she’d sworn never to fall for.

It occurred to her that maybe she was more like her mother than she’d ever let herself admit. Now there was a seriously scary idea. It wasn’t as if all the hard lessons had faded from her mind. Uh-uh, they were with her, still fresh and vivid and full of pain.

She could close her eyes and see Lolita now—at three in the morning, standing in the doorway of the bedroom they’d always had to share since there was never money to “waste” on a two-bedroom place. Every spare penny had to go to headshots and building their portfolios, to hair and makeup and killer clothes and the endless series of dance lessons.

Oh, yeah. Cleo could still see her mother now: Lolita Bliss, standing in the bedroom doorway, the light from the hallway behind her falling on her platinum-blond hair, making a halo effect around her shadowed face….

“Baby, you up?” Lolita whispered—a stage whisper loud enough to wake Cleo if by chance she had been sleeping.

Cleo dragged herself to a sitting position, squinting against the bright hallway light. “Yeah, Mom. What?”

And her mother came dancing in, smelling of Joyperfume and Max Factor and something else—something musky and thick: sex, though Cleo hadn’t realized it then.

Lolita dropped with a happy giggle to the edge of the bed. “Oh, darling. It’s happened. It’s happened at last. I’ve met him. My own real-life Prince Charming. He’s rich and he’s so handsome and he can’t take his eyes off me—not to mention his hands.” Another throaty giggle escaped her, followed by along, dreamy sigh. “Oh, honey, he loves me already.” Lolita held out her arms, wiggling her fingers. “Come on. Come here.” And Cleo moved closer, into the warmth of her mother’s supple, sculpted body and those mingled smells of perfume and makeup and sex. Lolita hugged her so tight and whispered against her hair. “Cleopatra Bliss, our lives are about to change big-time. You’d better believe it.” Her mother’s long, lean dancer’s arm squeezed her harder. “Say you do.”

“I do, mom,” Cleo lied.

“Say it again. Please …”

“Mom, I do.”

Her mother’s lips brushed her hair. “Oh, sweetheart, he’ll make everything good for us. Just wait. You’ll see….”

But their lives didn’t change. And the men came and went, each of them breaking her mother’s heart when he left her.

And Cleo grew up dreaming of an ordinary life—a life where her kids ate three square meals a day, where they went to bed at a decent hour and woke up at daybreak and Cleo cooked them all a nutritious breakfast. In Cleo’s dreams, she lived in a real house and everybody had her own bedroom and Cleo’s husband was a good man, a regular, down-to-earth guy, both steady and true.