Bridge To Happiness (38 page)

On the walls were displays of the music awards and plaques, records and framed parchments; it was obvious he was an extremely successful and award winning music producer. I had no idea the number of multi gold and platinum selling albums he was responsible for, but I owned a number of them. In a game of what’s on your iPod? at least two of the albums would be at the top for the list for most people.

He took me down into the studio, which looked like the NASA Command Center, and then he playfully shoved me in a recording booth.

“Sit,” he said. “This’ll be fun.”

“Oh, yeah . . . fun like a root canal fun. You haven’t heard me sing.”

“Yes I have,” he said closing the door.

“You haven’t heard me sing into a microphone,” I yelled out to him. “My kids won’t let me near the karaoke machine.”

He was in the control room. Through the glass I saw him flicking switches and his low, sweet voice came in over a sound system. “Sing something.”

“You’ll be sorry,” I said and I could hear my voice in the depths of the mike system.

“Come on,
darlin
’.”

Sitting on a stool with a profession microphone hanging in front of me, I took a deep breath and launched into a breathy, a cappella vocal of
Happy Birthday, Mister President
and made him laugh. After I butchered the song as Phillip claimed I butchered all songs, Rio called me inside the control room so I could watch as he added background, manipulated and mixed the tracks until when he played the cut, and I didn’t recognize my own voice.

“Now that’s what I need for karaoke,” I said, spinning happily around in a large leather chair and examining the bells and whistles of all the dizzying amounts of electronic and digital equipment in the room. “I need something like this to keep me from embarrassing my kids and myself.”

We left and went down into the barn itself, a full working barn with stalls and tack rooms and its own equine veterinary medical and dental facility in the back. The pride in his voice as he showed me his place was something I recognized. After years of living with men, with Mike and my sons, and of being a large part of our family business and the understanding of it, I got it that most men defined themselves by their work, measured their success and failure in terms of their jobs and professions, very differently from how most women defined success.

I didn’t know if I was intimidated or impressed, but I think I was a little of both. There was no boastfulness or self-glorification in Rio’s attitude. More over, he was sharing his enthusiasm for his love of what he did, allowing me to look inside to the real Rio Paxton. That he was sharing all this, and himself, with me gave me a warm feeling I couldn’t explain, and frankly, didn’t want to think about for too long. I was merely lonely.

Ten minutes later, laughing like I hadn’t in so very long, I was on the back of a snowmobile, hat pulled down tightly on my head, my arms around Rio’s waist and my hands stuffed into his fleece-lined jacket pockets, as we sped across the wide open fields of untouched snow. He gave me the ride the my life, spinning and making tight circles and figure eights, revving up the engine and taking off so fast I had to bury my head in his shoulder and hang on for dear life.

We rode like crazy over a series of low hills, whoop-de-dos, he called them, up then down and down and skidding sideways down the steeper ones, before he turned around and took me back the way we had come, only faster, finally speeding toward the last hill so fast we crested it at full speed.

Without slowing at all we flew over the top, me shrieking and laughing and half frightened, not knowing what he was going to do next. I never knew a snowmobile could be so much fun: all the highs and lows and fast, unexpected spins of an amusement ride.

Coming nearer the house, he stopped where a wooden bench almost covered in snow had been built under a sprawling, lone heritage oak, on a rise, so land and hills and mountains were all there before my eyes. “This is amazingly lovely,” I said quietly.

“I built the bench exactly here, because this is my favorite spot. Before I ever built the buildings, this bench was here. When things get to me or I forget who I am, I can come here, to the last best place I can think of, the place where I can see all of the land and mountains and skies, the enormity of it all, and just sitting here reminds how small I am in the whole scheme of the world, and that my problems, whatever they are, are even smaller.”

I absorbed what he said and the view around me, understanding. “I could see how this could be inspiring. Does your music come to you here?”

He shook his head and said quietly, “The words come to me here.”

Neither of us said anything. I had the thought that we could both sit there for hours and never say a word to each other. It was one of those places where two people could just be together, a place you could share something beautiful in complete, companionable silence.

That same silence spilled over us on the ride back toward the barn. I felt wonderful, and I had nothing to say, nothing to be spoken aloud.

About a hundred feet from the barn, we stopped abruptly. The snowmobile had become stuck as he was trying to ride through a deeper snowdrift. He swore under his breath and put his foot down, as he was playing with the motor, and then it started moving again. Way too fast. Rio and the snowmobile flew forward.

I didn’t.

I was flat on my back sprawled in the snow, staring up at the thick gray snow clouds in the sky above me and the beginnings of snowflakes that were starting to fall and stick to my face.

“March!”

I could hear the crunch of his boots in the snow, running towards me. I blinked as his face came into my line of vision.

“Are you okay?” He was sincerely worried, and didn’t see the handful of snow I threw right in his face.

Laughing, I rolled away, but he was on me, shouting he was “gonna get me and make me pay” laughing and rubbing my face in the snow, me shoveling handfuls of it anywhere I could, mostly his face and ears, and we rolled around like two Labrador puppies until I cried “Uncle!” and gave up, pinned to the snowy ground by his long body on mine.

Our laughter faded, and I was in deep trouble, looking up at him, feeling things I didn’t think I should be feeling for him as our breathing beat the same fast tattoo. My gaze went from his eyes to his mouth and then I completely forgot to breathe. The silence was fast changing to something else altogether, a powerful emotion, taut as a guitar string there between the two of us.

I had forgotten how things passed between a man and a woman, how a man could look at you, making it clear he wanted you, and you melt away like snow under a warm body. I wanted this. I wanted him to look at me like he was, but something inside of me kept saying I was in trouble and this was wrong.

When he was looking at me that way, I couldn’t seem to think. I wanted to make a joke to break the moment, but I opened my mouth and all that came out was his name.

Rio all but dragged me into the house with him, through the front door, slamming it closed, pressing me back against it with his body. He cupped my face with his hands, turning it up toward his mouth, then he stopped, frozen, and his look changed, his eyes aware of what was happening and looking intently into mine.

“March . . . I’m sorry.” His hands fell away and he took a deep breath and stepped back, shaking his head slightly.

He was apologizing. I didn’t want an apology. I wanted him. Suddenly nothing else mattered, not age or time or anything. My breathing was fast and I felt this horrific emptiness without him close to me.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “I brought you here to keep you safe. Not for this. I’m not . . . ” he paused, searching awkwardly for words. “Look. I don’t want to scare you off.”

I reached out and grabbed two handfuls of his sheepskin jacket and pulled him back to me. “Who’s scared?”

He groaned my name and lowered his head until our mouths touched, his tongue licked my lips and he tasted like coffee and man and I was so terribly hungry for that taste.

“I wanted this. I wanted you so much I ache over you,” he said against my mouth, his hand cupping the back of my head possessively.

“Me, too,” I whispered on a sigh. “Me, too . . . ” My words drifted away.

We ignited together like a range fire, fast and furious and intense, our hands tearing at each other’s clothes, him half dragging me with him, undressing each other along the way.

A shirt flung here. A sweater there. Pants unbuttoned and unzipped. My bra disappeared. His hands were inside my jeans and cupping my bare buttocks; he lifted me up and against him, walking backwards and never breaking his kiss, and then we were on a bed, struggling to kick off boots and peal down jeans, touching each other, tasting our skin and mouths and bodies.

There was more awkwardness getting our clothes off than our bodies together—that was natural and instinctive and elemental.

To be touched again. To be held. To have this. It had been so long. I thought I could never feel again, a man’s mouth on me, a man inside of me, intimately, passion that was so powerful I wanted nothing else but for him to go on, for him to fill me deeply and move over me, rocking until I just let myself go up into the ecstasy we were making together, a ride that was more than any snowmobile or amusement park, as if all the stars in the whole universe were dancing in me and around me, and I was flying, and flying and clearly aware I was not with not the man I had loved this way for so long. It was Rio Paxton who was taking me there.

It snowed all night
and all the next day, then the storm moved on, the snowplows came out, and the roads were cleared. But I hadn’t gone home to Tahoe for three days. I was as comfortable in Rio’s house as I was in his arms and in his bed, in his spa tub and in his shower, and on the rug in front of the fireplace and against the kitchen counter.

I was not comfortable lying to my kids, my worrisome sons in particular, who I called from my cell phone regularly after calling the house to check the message machine and voicemail. I checked in with them, chatting casually to keep them unaware that my mountain life was really ranch life, and a newly active sex life, and to keep them from worrying about me, since Tahoe snow storms were all over the Bay Area news.

So far, so good.

On the other side of Rio’s master bedroom was his music room, the place where he worked on his songs. There was no place in his house I wasn’t welcome, he’d made that clear. He had gone to his barn office earlier and I was bored and wandered into the music room. There were a couple of soft overstuffed chairs, a huge imported Oriental rug and line of guitars in metal guitar stands and stacks of notebooks and along with beautiful ebony piano.

I sat at the keys, playing the notes scribbled in pencil across a music sheet. There was a notebook open on the bench. I picked it up and read the words written there, the verses of another song about souls broken and love lost and found, and the kind of man who had trouble finding love. Rio’s songs were like reading poetry, the depth and the fear in those words he had written.

Sometimes when I read a line, I had to stop and take a deep breath. My heart ached deeply for a man who knew that kind of pain, and understood it so clearly he could put his feelings into words, the dark emotions and sheer joys of falling in love.

I sensed he was there with me and looked up. He stood in the shadow of the doorway, leaning on the jamb, arms crossed, just watching me. I wasn’t certain how long he’d been there, and what I read in his eyes troubled me on some level.

This was all so new. I was caught up in all these feelings. I did not want to love a man again, and yet I was full of emotion. I had been here before. I knew he was beginning to fall in love with me and he wasn’t hiding it. He said it openly.

But what I felt wasn’t at stake. I read his lyrics and I thought about where I was a year ago—I was in a different place—and I knew I didn’t want to hurt this man who had been hurt before.