“You will.”
“It hasn’t happened yet. I’m the only girl I know of who isn’t madly in love with someone and convinced he’s the one I want to marry.” Lifting her hand, she began counting off her friends on her fingers. “Corey is in love with Spencer—Haley is in love with Peter Mitchell—Denise is in love with Doug Hayward—Missy is in love with Michael Murchison—” With a disgusted wave of her hand, she finished, “I could go on and on forever.”
She sounded so despondent that Cole felt obliged to cheer her up before he could let the topic drop. “Come on, there must be at least one other girl your age with enough sense to look beyond the moment toward the future.” Although Cole privately regarded Barbara Hayward as an airhead, Diana hadn’t mentioned her name, so he seized on her as a possible illustration of his point. “How about Barb? Who is she hoping to marry?”
Diana rolled her eyes in disgust. “Harrison Ford.”
“That figures,” Cole said dryly.
“And then there’s you,” Diana continued, provoked into bringing up Valerie, even though she knew it would distract him completely from herself.
“What about me?”
He looked so bewildered that Diana’s heart soared with hope. During their many talks over the last two years, she’d heard all about the beautiful blond from Jeffersonville who went to school at UCLA. She knew they exchanged letters and phone calls several times a month and that he managed to see her occasionally, usually during summer vacations when she was home. “I was referring to Valerie.”
“Oh.” He nodded with emphasis, but that was uninformative enough to spur Diana’s curiosity and hope even higher. “Have you heard from her lately?”
“I saw her a few weeks ago during spring break.”
Diana had a vivid and unwanted picture of Cole and Valerie making wild, passionate love together in some scenic glade beneath a starlit sky. Somehow a primitive outdoor setting seemed better suited to his rugged good looks. In a moment of weakness Diana had requested a copy of the UCLA yearbook through Houston’s main library. From it, she’d discovered that Valerie was not only active in her sorority, she seemed to be dating the captain of the college’s soccer team. Besides that, she was tall and beautiful, as well as older and undoubtedly more worldly than Diana. She had the face and eyes of a Nordic princess and a smile straight out of a toothpaste ad. Diana had to make an effort not to hate her. In fact, the only thing Valerie didn’t have was good grades. That at least was something Diana had in common with Cole. He had a 3.9 grade-point average and so did Diana. “How were Valerie’s grades at the end of the semester?” she asked, descending to petty competitiveness and hating herself for it.
“She’s on scholastic probation.”
“That’s too bad,” Diana murmured. “Does that mean she’ll have to go to summer school and you won’t be able to see her when you go home?”
“I don’t go home unless it’s to see her,” Cole said.
Diana had assumed as much. Although she knew relatively little about his life before he came to Houston, she’d managed to discover that he was from a town in Texas called Kingdom City and he had no family except a great-uncle and a cousin who was five years older than he. She’d soon learned that any attempt to pry deeper into the details of his past gained her little beyond an offhand answer or a premature end to the camaraderie she treasured.
As he lifted his Coke to his mouth, Diana watched the golden lamplight flicker on the tanned column of his neck and gild the hard contours of his square chin and firm jaw, but the flame was too feeble to pierce the midnight darkness of his thick hair.
She hoped Valerie appreciated Cole’s loyalty and devotion; she hoped his girlfriend wasn’t going to try to make him into a tame, well-groomed Labrador retriever instead of the panther he resembled. There was something about the girl with the toothpaste smile that made her look all wrong for Cole. It was wrong to covet, but Diana just couldn’t help it!
Beside her, Cole lowered his soft drink can an inch and warily studied the ferocious, possessive scowl on Diana’s face. “By any chance, am I drinking your Coke?” he asked.
Diana snapped out of her fanciful dreams and quickly shook her head. It was time to leave . . . long past time to leave, because tonight her common sense, her logic and self-control weren’t operating very well. “I’ll help you clear all this away,” she said, already standing up and gathering plates and silverware.
“I have to study for finals,” he said as he blew out the two lamps and picked up the bowl of orange hibiscus, “but I have enough time for a hand of pinochle before you go.”
He flipped on the bright corridor lights as he made that offer, and the harsh light banished the last traces of her romantic fantasies. She’d taught him pinochle and hearts last year, during one of those rare and wonderful afternoons when Corey came to help exercise the horses, as she loved to do, and no one else was around. All that was over now, Diana realized. It had to end because she suddenly realized that she was no longer able to keep her fantasies about him in their proper place. They were getting completely out of control. Tonight, if he’d kissed her, she’d have ignored all the dangers and let him. Let him? If he’d given her just a little bit more encouragement, she would have kissed him! Somehow, during the last few weeks, she’d begun to truly risk her whole heart on him, and that made the stakes much too big for a sensible girl who already knew that the odds against her were so high she couldn’t possibly win.
“You’re too good now,” she said with a bright smile over her shoulder.
“Not for a cardshark like you, I’m not.”
“I really do have to go.”
“I understand.” He sounded a little disappointed, and Diana fought against the temptation to stay awhile longer. She was still wavering when he turned and disappeared into his room. By the time he emerged to walk her out to her car, she’d put the dishes in the sink and her friendly, impersonal facade firmly in place. She was congratulating herself for resisting the temptation to stay as he reached out with his right hand to open her car door. “By the way—” he said as she turned to him to say good night, “I heard some of the girls talking about the sweet sixteen party your parents threw for you a couple weeks ago.”
Diana was too preoccupied with the inexplicable smile hovering at the corner of his mouth to say anything intelligent. “It was my sixteenth birthday.”
“I know,” he said with a sudden grin at her flustered answer. “And where I come from it’s customary to give a girl something special on her sixteenth birthday—”
A kiss! He was going to kiss her, Diana realized, and all her defenses and fears collapsed beneath the weight of her joy and nervous anticipation. She dropped her gaze from his gleaming silver eyes to his sensual mout
h. “What do you give a girl back home,” she breathed shakily and closed her eyes, “when she turns sixteen?”
“A present!” he exclaimed triumphantly as he took his left hand from behind his back. Diana’s eyes snapped open, and she clutched the car door for balance as she stared in mortified surprise at his outstretched hand. In it was a large, oddly shaped item that he’d obviously wrapped himself in a sheet of newspaper and tied with what looked like a shoelace. Seemingly oblivious to her inner turmoil, he held it closer. “Go ahead, open it.”
Diana recovered her manners, gave him an overbright smile, and pulled on the end of the broken white shoelace.
“It isn’t much,” he warned, sounding suddenly uncertain.
The paper fell away to reveal a stuffed toy—a life-size white cat with a pink tongue, green eyes, and a tag around its neck that said, “My name is Pinkerton.”
“You’ve probably had dozens of really exotic stuffed animals,” he added uneasily when she didn’t immediately react. “In fact, you’re probably too old for stuffed animals, period.”
He was right on both counts, but none of that mattered to Diana. To save money, he did without all sorts of things, including good food, but he’d actually gone out and gotten her a present. Speechless, she lifted the ordinary, inexpensive toy from his hands as carefully as if it were priceless porcelain; then she held it in front of her to admire it.
Cole looked at the toy and realized how cheap it would look to someone like her. “It’s just something I picked up—a token—” he began defensively. He broke off in surprise as Diana shook her head to silence him, then clutched the stuffed animal to her chest and wrapped her arms tightly around it.
“Thank you, Cole,” she whispered, laying her cheek against its furry head. Smiling, she lifted her glowing gaze to his. “Thank you,” she said again.
You’re welcome, Cole thought, but the incredible warmth of her reaction seemed to have momentarily melted his ability to speak and his ability to think. In silence he closed the car door after she’d settled into her seat, and in silence he watched her taillights vanish around a curve in the long drive that wound through the trees and along the side of the house.