Impossible

“I love him, too,” she sniffed, “but I'm not willing to lose my children for him.”

“You won't. She'll yell and scream and stomp around for a while. She'll be a diva. That's how she is. You have a right to this, if that's what you want. You have my support. And if you stick with it, and it works, you'll get hers, too. If not, chalk it up to experience and we'll all laugh about it one day.” But no one was laughing yet. Xavier was being incredibly mature and generous, far more so than his sister.

She thanked him profusely, they talked for a few more minutes, and then they hung up and she went out to find Liam on the porch. He was looking out to sea and thinking, and turned as she sat down on the swing next to him.

“I'm sorry, Sasha. I didn't mean to make a mess for you.” He looked genuinely sorry it had happened.

“You didn't make a mess. It just happened. They were bound to find out sooner or later.” Others would, too. This was just not the way she wanted their affair to come to light, to say the least. Neither did he.

They spent the rest of the weekend quietly, and went back to the city Sunday night. She had tried to get through to Tatianna several times on her cell phone, and it was always on voice mail. At her apartment, all Sasha got was the answering machine, and left several loving messages for her. Liam hated to hear her crawling, but he knew how much her daughter meant to her. He thought Tatianna should be spanked, but he said nothing to Sasha. How she handled it now was up to her.

Xavier left his sister several messages, and she called him back in London. But she was intransigent when he tried to reason with her, and furious with him for endorsing Liam.

“You're as nuts as they are. For chrissake, he's about twenty years younger than she is. How crazy is she?”

“She's not crazy, Tat. She's lonely. And he's only about eight or nine years younger than she is,” Xavier said quietly, trying in vain to reason with her.

“He looks like a kid.”

“In some ways, he is. He acts like one, but he isn't. He's an adult. He says he loves her. And I think she loves him. Whether we like it or not, she has a right to be with whoever she wants. And I'd rather it be him than some uptight prick we really hate, or some guy after her money.”

“This is sick, Zav. And he probably is after her money.”

“I don't think so. All he cares about is art. He's a decent guy who was married for twenty years and has three kids.” He didn't tell her that the marriage had broken up because he had slept with his wife's sister. “You just have to trust her on this one. Maybe they'll get over it. They're not hurting anyone.”

“She'll look like a fool, and so will we, if anyone finds out, or she goes out with him.”

“I've done a lot worse, believe me. And so have you.” He knew all her secrets, and there were a few affairs she wouldn't have wanted to publicize, either. And Sasha was certainly not making her relationship with Liam public. On the contrary, she was keeping it a secret, and hiding out in the Hamptons. But even if people found out, there was nothing disgraceful about Liam.

“She's our mother!” Tatianna raged at him again. She wasn't giving an inch on this one. And when Tatianna dug her heels in, as a rule wild horses couldn't budge her. Not for a while at least.

“That's the point here. Give her a break, Tat. Be decent to her. She needs it. She was miserable when Dad died. I want her to be happy.”

“Not with him.” Tatianna had declared war on both of them, and intended to keep it that way. She wanted to get Liam out of her mother's life, whatever it took. She was determined to save her mother from herself, for her father's sake if nothing else.

They argued about it for nearly an hour, and Tatianna never relented. She told Xavier that she wouldn't rest until Liam was gone. From the sound of what she said, Xavier believed her. He thought it was a shame. All he could do now was hope Liam was tougher and more tenacious than his sister. Tatianna was relentless once she set her sights on something. And she had.

Chapter 14

Sasha looked morbidly depressed when she got to the gallery on Monday. Karen, the manager, noticed it, and Marcie asked her gently if everything was all right, when she handed Sasha some more reviews from the show the week before.

“Are you okay?” she asked solicitously, as Sasha looked up at her with tears in her eyes. Tatianna hadn't returned a single call, and that morning at her office they had told Sasha she was out. She didn't want to stalk her, but Tatianna absolutely would not take her calls.

“I had a problem with Tatianna over the weekend,” she told her assistant cryptically. She couldn't have begun to describe the scene of Liam standing in the bedroom doorway naked with a fireplace poker, while Tatianna screamed insults at them both. Every time Sasha thought of it, she cringed, and started to cry again. It had been too awful.