Breathing Room by Susan Elizabeth Phillips Read Free Book Online Page A

cigarette in the corner of his mouth, shoved his hands into his pockets, hunched his shoulders, and kept walking. James-fucking-Dean on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
    The hell with it. Tomorrow he was leavingFlorenceand heading for the place that had drawn him here.

Chapter 5
    Isabel turned over in bed. Her travel clock said nine-thirty, so it should be morning, but the room was dark and gloomy. Disoriented, she gazed toward the windows and saw that the shutters were closed.
    She rolled to her back and studied the combination of flat red roof tiles and rough wooden beams above her head. Outside she heard something that might have been the distant rumble of a tractor. That was all. No reassuring clank of garbage trucks or musical shouts of taxi drivers cursing each other inThird Worldlanguages. She was inItaly, sleeping in a room that looked as if its last occupant had been a martyred saint.
    She tilted her head far enough back to see the crucifix hanging on the stucco wall behind her. The tears she hated started leaking out. Tears of loss for the life she'd lived, the man she'd thought she loved. Why hadn't she been smart enough, worked hard enough, been lucky enough to hold on to what she'd had? Even worse, why had she defiled herself with an Italian gigolo who looked like a psychopathic movie star? She tried to fight the tears with a morning prayer, but Mother God had turned a deaf ear to her delinquent daughter.
    The temptation to pull the covers over her head and never get up was so strong that it frightened her into dropping her legs over the side of the bed. Cold tile met the soles of her feet. She made her way across the dreary room into a narrow hallway with a utilitarian bathroom at one end. Although small, it had been modernized, so maybe this place wasn't quite the ruin she'd imagined it to be.
    She bathed, wrapped herself in a towel, and returned to her martyred saint's cell, where she slipped into a pair of gray slacks and matching sleeveless top. Then she walked over to the window, unlocked the shutters, and pushed them back.
    A shower of lemony light drenched her. It streamed through the window as if it had been poured from a bucket, the rays so intense she had to close her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she saw the rolling hills ofTuscanylying before her.
    "Oh, my..." She rested her arms on the stone ledge and took in the mosaic of buff-, honey-, and pewter-colored fields, broken here and there by rows of cypress, like pointed fingers against the sky. There were no fences. The boundaries between the harvested wheat fields, the groves of trees, and the vineyards were formed by a road here, a valley there, a simple curve of land somewhere else.
    She was gazing out overBethlehem. This was theHoly Landof the Renaissance artists.
    They'd painted the landscape they knew as the background for their Madonnas, angels, mangers, and shepherds. TheHoly Land...right outside her window.
    She took in the distant view, then studied the land closer to the house. A terraced vineyard extended off to the left, while a grove of gnarled olive trees grew beyond the garden. She wanted to see more, and she turned away from the window, then stopped as she saw how the light had changed the character of the room. Now the whitewashed walls and dark wooden beams were beautiful in their sparseness, and the simple furniture spoke more eloquently of the past than a volume of history books. This wasn't a ruin at all.
    She moved into the hallway and down the stone steps to the ground floor. The living room, which she'd barely glanced at the night before, had the rough walls and vaulted brick ceiling of an old European stable, something it had probably once been, since she seemed to recall reading that the tenants of Tuscan farmhouses had lived above their animals. The space had been beautifully converted into a small, comfortable living area without losing its rustic authenticity.
    Stone arches wide enough for farm animals to pass