A Silken Thread - Brenda Jackson [29]
His gaze returned to Rita. She was sipping her coffee and appeared to be lost in her own thoughts. He couldn’t help wondering what they were. And, since she seemed preoccupied as he had been earlier, he allowed his gaze to travel over her. He liked what he saw too much and forced an image of Karen in his mind but it refused to come to the forefront where it belonged.
The best thing to do would be to finish off his coffee, stand up, bid her a safe trip back home and then go somewhere where he couldn’t see her, where he couldn’t think about her, where he couldn’t wonder…
“Was this a productive trip for you, Wilson?”
Her soft voice intruded into his thoughts and broke the silence surrounding them. Their gazes held, maybe for a second too long, because she then looked away, down into her coffee cup. And then it hit him. She had picked up on the same vibes that he had picked up on earlier. And like him she was trying to ignore them. Doing so made perfect sense, since they shouldn’t be having these feelings anyway. He wasn’t free to act on them. But she was a widow and free to do whatever she wanted with any other man, although not with him. He was taken. Why did that realization dampen his spirits?
He leaned back and forced his brain to formulate a response to her question. “Yes, I think it was productive, and my staff will agree since I clinched a million-dollar deal.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks. What about you? Was this trip productive for you?”
She laughed. “I didn’t clinch a million-dollar deal or anything close to that, but I did get a few members of the royal family to agree to consider my company when they landscape the palace grounds.”
For the next twenty minutes or so they continued talking, engaging in pleasant conversation about their work. He enjoyed being educated about something he didn’t know a lot about. Plants. His only excuse was that the Sanders Estates always had a gardener who knew what he was doing, which meant that Wilson didn’t necessarily have to learn.
The more Rita talked the more he kept thinking that it didn’t seem possible that a woman like her—smart, stylish and classy—who had a lot going for her, had remained single after her husband died.
When there was a pause in the conversation, he heard himself asking, “Why didn’t you ever remarry?”
She glanced up and looked stunned by his question. She could have said it wasn’t any of his business, and it would have been within her rights to do so. Instead she said, “Patrick and I were college sweethearts and I took his death extremely hard, mainly because I hadn’t seen it coming. He’d never been sick a day in his life.”
She paused a moment when a waitress came by and refilled their coffee cups. “I figured he would be here forever,” she then said. “I had assumed that he would always be my rock, my shining star, the man who was everything a husband and father should be. The pain of losing him was excruciating, but I had to endure it for Brian. Although I was hurting, I knew he was hurting just as much. He was very close to his father.”
She took a sip of her coffee. “It was important to me not to bring another man into Brian’s life that would take Patrick’s place because I thought no one could. So I filled the role of both mom and dad and was satisfied with doing that.”
Wilson nodded. “What about when Brian left for college?”
She shrugged what he thought were beautiful shoulders. “I dated but not often, and never let anyone think it was serious. Patrick’s parents tried encouraging me to go on with my life, saying that’s what he would have wanted, and I know that to be true, but I couldn’t date anyone else. To fill the void of Brian leaving home I decided to go back