William ducked his head, but she could see that his face was as red as the fire. A man who blushes, she thought.
“All that daredevil stuff is for kids. I’ve had my fill of it.”
He came to sit by her again and looked at her earnestly. “I’m sure you could get your business established if you wanted it. There are ways to make that kind of thing happen.”
If you have as much money as the Montgomerys do, she thought, but of course she didn’t say that. “Even the very, very best pilot has to have an airplane, and the last time I saw mine, its nose was pressed against a three-ton boulder.” There was a patronizing tone to her voice.
“I see your point.” As he put his arm around her, he kept his eyes lowered. “Wish number two.”
“Nope. I want your wish number one.”
“I have only one wish. I wish I could accomplish something on my own, something that Montgomery money couldn’t buy for me.” He looked at her. “Your turn. Second wish.”
“Curly hair?” she asked, making him smile.
“Tell me the truth. There must be things in life you want besides a business.” He made it sound as though she had disappointed him by not wishing for a magic carpet or perhaps world peace. “What about another husband?”
There was so much hope in his voice that she laughed. “Are you volunteering?”
“Think you’d accept my offer?”
At the eager, almost-serious tone in his voice, she tried to pull away from him, but he held her fast. “All right, I’ll behave.”
“What’s your second wish?” she asked.
“Probably to be as good a man as my dad.”
“With your lying you’re not as good as the Beasley girls.”
He laughed, and the tension between them was gone. “So you won’t tell me your other wishes, your other wants out of life?”
“If I told you, you’d think I was ridiculous.”
“Try me.”
There was something earnest about him that made her want to tell the truth. If she’d been with some of Charley’s friends, she’d have made up something entertaining, like winning the Taggie, but now she just wanted to say what she really wanted. “All right, what I want most is normalcy. For the first twelve years of my life I had an ailing father and a hypochondriac mother. After my father’s death, I had an invalid mother. I longed to go to school dances and such, but I didn’t get to. One of my parents always needed me. For the last twenty years I have traveled and flown and had an enormously exciting life. Sometimes it seemed that every day brought some new and thrilling event. Charley was as unsettled, as fidgety, as my mother was unmovable. I’ve had lunch at the White House, been to about half the countries of the world, met an enormous number of famous people. After the…” She barely glanced at him. A few years ago she had performed a service that had to be done at the time, and afterward America had made a fuss about it. “I’ve had my photo in the newspapers,” she finished.
“An American heroine,” he said, his eyes glowing.
“Perhaps. Whatever I was, I loved it all.”
“But then Charley died and you changed,” he said, sounding almost jealous.
“No, it was before that. Somewhere in there I realized that people wanted my autograph for themselves, not for me. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it all. But one day after Charley and I, in separate planes, had spent three days with no sleep, on harrowing flights through a raging forest fire, I was told the president was calling to congratulate me. I sat there on a stiff chair in some dingy little office and thought, Not again.”
She smiled. “I think that when you get to the point where a call from the president of the United States elicits nothing but boredom, it’s time to do something else.”
William was silent for a moment. “Normal. You said you wanted normal. What is normal?”
She grinned at him. “How would I know? I’ve never even seen it, much less lived it. But I don’t think calls from the president, champagne in hot air balloons, living in hotels, and being rich one day and poor the next is normal. It’s exciting, but it’s also very tiring.”
He chuckled. “It’s true that we all want what we don’t have. I have had the most normal life in the world. I went to the right schools, studied business administration, and after college I came back to Chandler to help run the family businesses. The most exciting thing I ever did was spend three days in Mexico with one of my brothers.”
“Yes?”
“Yes what?”
“And what did you do in Mexico during those three days?”