Remember what I told you on the phone, that I found out the truth about the grant that was paying all my expenses?” she asked.
Leta nodded.
“Well, it wasn’t a grant that was paying for my education and living expenses.” She took a harsh breath. “It was Tate.”
Leta scowled. “Are you sure?”
“I’m very sure.” She glanced at the older woman. “I found out in the middle of Senator Matt Holden’s political fund-raiser, and I lost my temper. I poured crab bisque all over your son and there were television cameras covering the event.” She turned her wounded eyes toward the dancers. “I was devastated when I found out I’m nothing more than a charity case to him.”
“That isn’t true,” Leta said gently, but a little remotely. “You know Tate’s very fond of you.”
“Yes. Very fond, the way a guardian is fond of a ward. He owned me.
In this convoluted world where sex has become a party favor rather than a solemn, beautiful part of love between two people, I think virginity is sexy. I don't like promiscuity. Oddly, at the turn of the 20th century, even men were expected to wait until marriage to indulge. I think that's sexy, too. Okay, I'm a dinosaur, I admit it. I don't belong in the modern world.
Diana PalmerTags: virginity
I think small towns are the closest to heaven you can get on earth. I'm glad that some other people, my wonderful readers especially, feel the same way I do.
Diana PalmerTags: small-towns
College was an experience I'll always cherish. Now I fund a scholarship at my alma mater in my late father's name—he'd laugh to know that it's a science scholarship, when I can barely do math! I also fund a nursing scholarship at the Oglala Lakota College in Kyle, South Dakota, in the name of my mother, who was a nurse.
Diana PalmerTags: studies
Seen Tate lately?” Colby asked carelessly.
She stiffened. “No.”
He looked down at her with a wry grin. “It was a boring banquet, anyway. You made all the news shows that night, and I hear one of the bigger late-night television hosts did a monologue about it!”
“Go ahead,” she invited with a gesture. “Rub it in.”
“I can’t help myself,” he said with an involuntary chuckle. “I believe it’s the first time in American political history that an ex-CIA agent was baptized with a tureen of crab bisque right in the middle of a televised political affair.” Colby had to work hard not to crack a smile. He sipped his coffee instead. Before he met Cecily, he couldn’t have imagined any woman doing that to tall, handsome, elegant Tate Winthrop. “Matt Holden seems to have forgiven you,” he added.
She smiled wickedly. “He loved it,” she said. “Just between you and me, he thrives on publicity.”
Colby’s dark eyes went to Holden. “You might also have been invited because he likes embarrassing Tate,” he mused. “Talk about natural enemies!
You’ll get all dusty.”
He made a sound deep in his throat. “You can brush me off.”
She grinned wickedly. “Now that’s what I call incentive!”
He chuckled. “Cut it out. We’ve got a serious and sensitive situation here.”
“So you intimated on the phone.” She glanced around the airport. “Where’s baggage claim? I brought some tools and electronic equipment, too.”
“How about clothes?”
She stared at him blankly. “What do I need with a lot of clothes cluttering up my equipment case? These are wash-and-wear.”
He made another sound. “You can’t expect to go to a restaurant in that!”
“Why not? And who’s taking me to any restaurant?” she demanded. “You never do.”
He shrugged. “I’m going to do penance while we’re out here.”
Her eyes sparkled. “Great! Your bed or mine?”
He laughed in spite of himself. She was the only person in his life who’d ever been able to make him feel carefree, even briefly. She lit fires inside him, although he was careful not to let them show too much. “You never give up, do you?”
“Someday you’ll weaken,” she assured him. “And I’m prepared. I have a week’s supply of Trojans in my fanny pack…”
He managed to look shocked. “Cecily!”
She shrugged. “Women have to think about these things. I’m twenty-three, you know.” She added, “You came into my life at a formative time and rescued me from something terrible. Can I help it if you make other potential lovers look like fried sea bass by comparison?”
“I didn’t bring you out here to discuss your lack of lovers,” he pointed out.
“And here I hoped you were offering yourself up as an educational experience,” she sighed.
He glared down at her as they walked toward baggage claim.
“Okay,” she said glumly. “I’ll give up, for now.
She spotted Matt Holden and her eyes began to twinkle. He was a handsome devil, even at his age. His wife had died the year before, and the husky black-eyed politician with his glimmering silver hair and elegant broad-shouldered physique was now on every widow’s list of eligible. Even now, two lovely elderly society dames were attacking from both sides with expensive perfume and daring cleavage. At least one of them should have worn something high-necked, she mused, with her collarbone and skinny neck so prominent.
Another pair of eyes followed her amused gaze. “Doesn’t it remind you of shark attacks?” a pleasant voice murmured in her ear.
She jumped, and looked up at her companion for the evening. “Good grief, Colby, you scared me out of a year’s growth!” she burst out with a helpless laugh.
I know I said this before, but it bears repeating. You know Tate won’t like you staying with me.”
“I don’t care,” she said bitterly. “I don’t tell him where to sleep. It’s none of his business what I do anymore.”
He made a rough sound. “Would you like to guess what he’s going to assume if you stay the night in my apartment?”
She drew in a long breath. “Okay. I don’t want to cause problems between you, not after all the years you’ve been friends. Take me to a hotel instead.”
He hesitated uncharacteristically. “I can take the heat, if you can.”
“I don’t know that I can. I’ve got enough turmoil in my life right now. Besides, he’ll look for me at your place. I don’t want to be found for a couple of days, until I can get used to my new situation and make some decisions about my future. I want to see Senator Holden and find another apartment. I can do all that from a hotel.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Make it a moderately priced one,” she added with graveyard humor. “I’m no longer a woman of means. From now on, I’m going to have to be responsible for my own bills.”
“You should have poured the soup in the right lap,” he murmured.
“Which was?”
“Audrey Gannon’s,” he said curtly. “She had no right to tell you that Tate was your benefactor. She did it for pure spite, to drive a wedge between you and Tate. She’s nothing but trouble. One day Tate is going to be sorry that he ever met her.”
“She’s lasted longer than the others.”
“You haven’t spent enough time talking to her to know what she’ s like. I have,” he added darkly. “She has enemies, among them an ex-husband who’s living in a duplex because she got his house, his Mercedes, and his Swiss bank account in the divorce settlement.”
“So that’s where all those pretty diamonds came from,” she said wickedly.
“Her parents had money, too, but they spent most of it before they died in a plane crash. She likes unusual men, they say, and Tate’s unusual.”
“She won’t go to the reservation to see Leta,” she commented.
“Of course not.” He leaned toward her as he stopped at a traffic light. “It’s a Native American reservation!”
She stuck her tongue out at him. “Leta’s worth two of Audrey.”
“Three,” he returned. “Okay. I’ll find you a hotel. Then I’m leaving town before Tate comes looking for me!”
“You might hang a crab on your front door,” she said, tongue-in-cheek. “It just might ward him off.”
“Ha!”
She turned her eyes toward the bright lights of the city. She felt cold and alone and a little frightened. But everything would work out. She knew it would. She was a grown woman and she could take care of herself. This was her chance to prove it.
I hate beer,” she moaned.
“If you drink enough of it, you won’t care about the taste,” he assured her.
She gave the can a dubious stare, shrugged, closed her eyes, held her breath and drank heavily. “Yuck!” she said.
“Keep going.
It was raining and I had to walk on the grass. I’ve got mud all over my shoes. They’re brand-new, too.”
“I’ll carry you across the grass on the return trip, if you like,” Colby offered with twinkling eyes. “It would have to be over one shoulder, of course,” he added with a wry glance at his artificial arm.
She frowned at the bitterness in his tone. He was a little fuzzy because she needed glasses to see at distances.
“Listen, nobody in her right mind would ever take you for a cripple,” she said gently and with a warm smile. She laid a hand on his sleeve. “Anyway,” she added with a wicked grin, “I’ve already given the news media enough to gossip about just recently. I don’t need any more complications in my life. I’ve only just gotten rid of one big one.”
Colby studied her with an amused smile. She was the only woman he’d ever known that he genuinely liked. He was about to speak when he happened to glance over her shoulder at a man approaching them. “About that big complication, Cecily?”
“What about it?” she asked.
“I’d say it’s just reappeared with a vengeance. No, don’t turn around,” he said, suddenly jerking her close to him with the artificial arm that looked so real, a souvenir of one of his foreign assignments. “Just keep looking at me and pretend to be fascinated with my nose, and we’ll give him something to think about.”
She laughed in spite of the racing pulse that always accompanied Tate’s appearances in her life. She studied Colby’s lean, scarred face. He wasn’t anybody’s idea of a pinup, but he had style and guts and if it hadn’t been for Tate, she would have found him very attractive. “Your nose has been broken twice, I see,” she told Colby.
“Three times, but who’s counting?” He lifted his eyes and his eyebrows at someone behind her. “Well, hi, Tate! I didn’t expect to see you here tonight.”
“Obviously,” came a deep, gruff voice that cut like a knife.
Colby loosened his grip on Cecily and moved back a little. “I thought you weren’t coming,” he said.
Tate moved into Cecily’s line of view, half a head taller than Colby Lane. He was wearing evening clothes, like the other men present, but he had an elegance that made him stand apart. She never tired of gazing into his large black eyes which were deep-set in a dark, handsome face with a straight nose, and a wide, narrow, sexy mouth and faintly cleft chin. He was the most beautiful man. He looked as if all he needed was a breastplate and feathers in his hair to bring back the heyday of the Lakota warrior in the nineteenth century. Cecily remembered him that way from the ceremonial gatherings at Wapiti Ridge, and the image stuck stubbornly in her mind.
“Audrey likes to rub elbows with the rich and famous,” Tate returned. His dark eyes met Cecily’s fierce green ones. “I see you’re still in Holden’s good graces. Has he bought you a ring yet?”
“What’s the matter with you, Tate?” Cecily asked with a cold smile. “Feeling…crabby?”
His eyes smoldered as he glared at her. “What did you give Holden to get that job at the museum?” he asked with pure malice.
Anger at the vicious insinuation caused her to draw back her hand holding the half-full coffee cup, and Colby caught her wrist smoothly before she could sling the contents at the man towering over her.
Tate ignored Colby. “Don’t make that mistake again,” he said in a voice so quiet it was barely audible. He looked as if all his latent hostilities were waiting for an excuse to turn on her. “If you throw that cup at me, so help me, I’ll carry you over and put you down in the punch bowl!”
“You and the CIA, maybe!” Cecily hissed. “Go ahead and try…!”
Tate actually took a step toward her just as Colby managed to get between them. “Now, now,” he cautioned.
Cecily wasn’t backing down an inch. Neither was Tate.
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