Once in a Blue Moon Read Free Page A

pulling on her own jeans and a simple short-sleeved sweater. She strove to keep her tone light and uninvolved; she had to set the pattern right from the beginning. The show’s gossip was the best place to start, she supposed—as long as she managed to hide all traces of residual emotion.
    “We worked in the same summer theater—Shakespeare,” Isabelle went on. “He was one of the professionals who had come down from New York to work with Dr. Carlysle, and I was a mere intern. I was only eighteen. I hadn’t even started college yet.”
    She would not mention the afternoons of drinking coffee with Michael in the café across from the amphitheater or the evenings when he had walked her home, the long kisses on the porch of the big old house where the interns had roomed. She would not reveal how everything inside her had turned to Jell-O everytime Michael looked at her.
    “But he remembered you. Phil said he did.” Amanda gave her a conspiratorial smile. Her eyes were alight with the greedy flame of an inveterate gossip. “You must have made an impression on him.”
    Isabelle chuckled. “I was surprised he remembered me, truthfully. We did work together on a play, but he was Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, and I was one of the townspeople.”
    She pushed out of her mind the memories of lying beneath a tree with him, the sun dappling her legs and the branches rustling over their heads, the green summer grass a tangy scent in her nostrils and the heat of Michael’s body lying only inches from her as his smooth voice rolled out the lines of the play, the Shakespeare on his tongue as intoxicating as wine. There hadn’t been a time, before or since, when she had felt as alive as she had that summer.
    “Mercutio! I would have figured Romeo was more like it, the way he looks.” Amanda fetched up a grandiose sigh.
    “As I remember, he liked the part better. It suited him, anyway—charming and cynical.” There had been something dark and mysterious about him. It was intriguing that his charm had a slightly rough edge, that he was not the familiar Southern boy that she’d grown up with, but a Yankee, and one with a sad history, as well. He had been orphaned at thirteen and had been bounced from foster home to foster home for a few years. His love of acting had been the thing that had saved him from following some of his New Jersey friends into a criminal life.
    Isabelle had fallen for him hard. To give him credit, he had tried to ignore her, but she had been determined to reach him. She had arranged accidental meetings and flirted and schemed. It had been two weeks before he broke down and invited her out to coffee one afternoon. It had been even longer before he had finally kissed her. After that, though, they had become inseparable. Eventually, inevitably, they had come together in a cataclysmic night of lovemaking.
    Three weeks later, Michael had gotten a call from his agent in New York. There had been a part in an off-Broadway play for him. He had, of course, taken it, leaving the last week of playing Mercutio to his understudy. Isabelle had been away that weekend, visiting her parents at home, and she had returned to be told by her roommate, in a tone of mock sympathy, that Michael had gone back to New York. He had left her a letter.
    Isabelle would never forget the chill that invaded her being as she read that letter. He had told her of the part and said that he must leave. He loved her, the note had gone on to say, but there was no future for them. He was sure that before long she would forget all about him.
    Isabelle had been too numb for tears. Those had come later, as had the saving fury, the scorn at her own naiveté. She had played the fool, she had realized; she had given her heart to a man who had wanted nothing beyond a summer fling. His career was all that mattered to him; he wanted no entanglements. All the other girls at the theater were quick to agree; they had, they assured her, seen it coming. It had