Praise for the novels of

New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author DIANA PALMER

“Lots of passion, thrills, and plenty of suspense…a top-notch read!”

Romance Reviews Today

“Diana Palmer is a mesmerising storyteller who captures the essence of what a romance should be.”

Affaire de Coeur

“Diana Palmer is one of those authors whose books are always enjoyable. She throws in romance, suspense and a good story line.”

The Romance Reader on Before Sunrise

“A delightful romance with interesting new characters and many familiar faces.”

RT Book Reviews on Wyoming Tough

Also available by Diana Palmer

Wyoming Men

Wyoming Tough

Wyoming Fierce

Wyoming Bold

Wyoming Strong

Wyoming Rugged

Wyoming Brave

Undaunted

Untamed

A Husband for Christmas

Invincible

White Christmas

And in e-Book:

Hunter

To Have and to Hold

Miss Greenhorn

Reluctant Father

Betrayed by Love

His Girl Friday

Hoodwinked

Heart of Ice

Blind Promises

Diamond Spur

Eye of the Tiger

Champagne Girl

The Morcai Battalion

The Morcai Battalion: The Recruit

The Morcai Battalion: Invictus

The Season of Love

BelovedTexas Born

Diana Palmer

www.millsandboon.co.uk

The prolific author of more than one hundred books, DIANA PALMER got her start as a newspaper reporter. A multi–New York Times bestselling author and one of the top ten romance writers in America, she has a gift for telling the most sensual tales with charm and humour. Diana lives with her family in Cornelia, Georgia.

Visit her website at www.DianaPalmer.com.

Table of Contents

Cover

Praise

Booklist

Title Page

About the Author

Beloved

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Texas Born

Back Cover Text

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Copyright

Beloved

Diana Palmer

To Debbie and the staff at Books Galore in Watkinsville, GA, and to all my wonderful readers there and in Athens.

Prologue

Simon Hart sat alone in the second row of the seats reserved for family. He wasn’t really kin to John Beck, but the two had been best friends since college. John had been his only real friend. Now he was dead, and there she sat like a dark angel, her titian hair veiled in black, pretending to mourn the husband she’d cast off like a worn coat after only a month of marriage.

He crossed his long legs, shifting uncomfortably against the pew. He had an ache where his left arm ended just at the elbow. The sleeve was pinned, because he hated the prosthesis that disguised his handicap. He was handsome enough even with only one arm—he had thick, wavy black hair on a leonine head, with dark eyebrows and pale gray eyes. He was tall and well built, a dynamo of a man; former state attorney general of Texas and a nationally known trial lawyer, in addition to being one of the owners of the Hart Ranch Properties, which were worth millions. He and his brothers were as famous in cattle circles as Simon was in legal circles. He was filthy rich and looked it. But the money didn’t make up for the loneliness. His wife had died in the accident that took his arm. It had happened just after Tira’s marriage to John Beck.

Tira had nursed him in the hospital, and gossip had run rampant. Simon was alluded to as the cause of the divorce. Stupid idea, he thought angrily, because he wouldn’t have had Tira on a bun with ketchup. Only a week after the divorce, she was seen everywhere with playboy Charles Percy, who was still her closest companion. He was probably her lover, as well, Simon thought with suppressed fury. He liked Percy no better than he liked Tira. Strange that Percy hadn’t come to the funeral, but perhaps he did have some sense of decency, however small.

Simon wondered if Tira realized how he really felt about her. He had to be pleasant to her; anything else would have invited comment. But secretly, he despised her for what she’d done to John. Tira was cold inside—selfish and cold and unfeeling. Otherwise, how could she have turned John out after a month of marriage, and then let him go to work on a dangerous oil rig in the North Atlantic in an attempt to forget her? John had died there this week, in a tragic accident, having drowned in the freezing, churning waters before he could be rescued. Simon couldn’t help thinking that John wanted to die. The letters he’d had from his friend were full of his misery, his loneliness, his isolation from love and happiness.

He glared in her direction, wondering how John’s father could bear to sit beside her like that, holding her slender hand as if he felt as sorry for her as he felt for himself at the loss of his son, his only child. Putting on a show for the public, he concluded irritably. He was pretending, to keep people from gossiping.

Simon stared at the closed casket and winced. It was like the end of an era for him. First he’d lost Melia, his wife, and his arm; now he’d lost John, too. He had wealth and success, but no one to share it with. He wondered if Tira felt any guilt for what she’d done to John. He couldn’t imagine that she did. She was always flamboyant, vivacious, outgoing and mercurial. Simon had watched her without her knowing it, hating himself for what he felt when he looked at her. She was tall, beautiful, with long, glorious red-gold hair that went to her waist, pale green eyes and a figure right out of a fashion magazine. She could have been a model, but she was surprisingly shy for a pretty woman.

Simon had already been married when they met, and it had been at his prompting that John had taken Tira out for the first time. He’d thought they were compatible, both rich and pleasant people. It had seemed a marriage made in heaven; until the quick divorce. Simon would never have admitted that he threw Tira together with John to get her out of his own circle and out of the reach of temptation. He told himself that she was everything he despised in a woman, the sort of person he could never care for. It worked, sometimes. Except for the ache he felt every time he saw her; an ache that wasn’t completely physical….

When the funeral service was over, Tira went out with John’s father holding her elbow. The older man smiled sympathetically at Simon. Tira didn’t look at him. She was really crying; he could see it even through the veil.

Good, Simon thought with cold vengeance. Good, I’m glad it’s hurt you. You killed him, after all!

He didn’t look her way as he got into his black limousine and drove himself back to the office. He wasn’t going to the graveside service. He’d had all of Tira’s pathetic charade that he could stand. He wouldn’t think about those tears in her tragic eyes, or the genuine sadness in her white face. He wouldn’t think about her guilt or his own anger. It was better to put it all in the past and let it lie, forgotten. If he could. If he could….

Chapter One

The numbered lot of Hereford cattle at this San Antonio auction had been a real steal at the price, but Tira Beck had let it go without a murmur to the man beside her. She wouldn’t ever have admitted that she didn’t need to add to her substantial Montana cattle herd, which was managed by her foreman, since she lived in Texas. She’d only wanted to attend the auction because she knew Simon Hart was going to be there. Usually his four brothers in Jacobsville, Texas, handled cattle sales. But Simon, like Tira, lived in San Antonio where the auction was being held, so it seemed natural to let him make the bids.

He wasn’t a rancher anymore. He was still tall and well built, with broad shoulders and a leonine head topped by thick black wavy hair. But the empty sleeve on his left side attested to the fact that his days of working cattle were pretty much over. It didn’t affect his ability to make a living, at least. He was a former state attorney general and a nationally famous trial attorney who could pick and choose high-profile cases. He made a substantial wage. His voice was still his best asset, a deep velvety one that projected well in a courtroom. In addition to that was a dangerously deceptive manner that lulled witnesses into a false sense of security before he cut them to pieces on the stand. He had a verbal killer instinct, and he used it to good effect.

Tira, on the other hand, lived a hectic life doing charity work and was independently wealthy. She was a divorcée who had very little to do with men except on a platonic basis. There weren’t many friends, either. Simon Hart and Charles Percy were the lot, and Charles was hopelessly in love with his brother’s wife. She was the only person who knew that. Many people thought that she and Charles were lovers, which amused them both. She had her own secrets to keep. It suited her purposes to keep Simon in the dark about her emotional state.

“That was a hell of an anemic bid you made,” Simon remarked as the next lot of cattle were led into the sale ring. “What’s wrong with you today?”

“My heart’s not in it,” she replied. “I haven’t had a lot to do with the Montana ranch since Dad died. I’ve given some thought to selling the property. I’ll never live there again.”

“You’ll never sell. You have too many attachments to the ranch. Besides, you’ve got a good manager in place up there,” he said pointedly.

She shrugged, pushing away a wisp of glorious hair that had escaped from the elegant French twist at her nape. “So I have.”

“But you’d rather swan around San Antonio with Charles Percy,” he murmured, his chiseled mouth twisting into a mocking smile.

She glanced at him with lovely green eyes and hid a carefully concealed hope that he might be jealous. But his expression gave no hint of his feelings. Neither did those pale gray eyes under thick black eyebrows. It was the same old story. The wreck eight years ago that had cost him his arm had also cost him his beloved wife, Melia. Despite their differences, no one had doubted his love for her. He hadn’t been serious about a woman since her death, although he escorted his share of sophisticated women to local social events.

“What’s the matter?” he asked when his sharp eyes caught her disappointment.

She shrugged in her elegant black pantsuit. “Oh, nothing. I just thought that you might like to stand up and threaten to kill Charles if he came near me again.” She glanced at his shocked face and chuckled. “I’m kidding!” she chided.

His gaze cut into hers for a second and then they moved back to the sale ring. “You’re in an odd mood today.”

She sighed, returning her attention to the program in her beautifully manicured hands. “I’ve been in an odd mood for years. Not that I ever expect you to notice.”

He closed his own program with a snap and glared down at her. “That’s another thing that annoys me, those throwaway remarks you make. If you want to say something to me, just come out and say it.”

Typically blunt, she thought. She looked straight at him and she made a gesture of utter futility with one hand. “Why bother?” she asked. Her eyes searched his and for the first time, a hint of the pain she felt was visible. She averted her gaze and stood up. “I’ve done all the bidding I came to do. I’ll see you around, Simon.”

She picked up her long black leather coat and folded it over her arm as she made her way out of the row and up the aisle to the exit. Eyes followed her, and not only because she was one of only a handful of women present. Tira was beautiful, although she never paid the least attention to her appearance except with a critical scrutiny. She wasn’t vain.

Behind her, Simon sat scowling silently as she walked away. Her behavior piqued his curiousity. She was even more remote lately and hardly the same flamboyant, cheerful, friendly woman who’d been his secret solace since the accident that had cost Melia her life. His wife had been his whole heart, until that last night when she betrayed a secret that destroyed his pride and his love for her.

Fool that he was, he’d believed that Melia married him for love. In fact, she’d married him for money and kept a lover in the background. Her stark confession about her long-standing affair and the abortion of his child had shocked and wounded him. She’d even laughed at his consternation. Surely he didn’t think she wanted a child? It would have ruined her figure and her social life. Besides, she’d added with calculating cruelty, she hadn’t even been certain that it was Simon’s, since she’d been with her lover during the same period of time.

The truth had cut like a knife into his pride. He’d taken his eyes off the road as they argued, and hit a patch of black ice on that winter evening. The car had gone off the road into a gulley and Melia, who had always refused to wear a seat belt because they were uncomfortable to her, had been thrown into the windshield headfirst. She’d died instantly. Simon had been luckier, but the airbag on his side of the car hadn’t deployed, and the impact of the crash had driven the metal of the door right into his left arm. Amputation had been necessary to save his life.

He remembered that Tira had come to him in the hospital as soon as she’d heard about the wreck. She’d been in the process of divorcing John Beck, her husband, and her presence at Simon’s side had started some malicious rumors about infidelity.

Tira never spoke of her brief marriage. She never spoke of John. Simon had already been married when they’d met for the first time, and it had been Simon who played matchmaker with John for her. John was his best friend and very wealthy, like Tira herself, and they seemed to have much in common. But the marriage had been over in less than a month.

He’d never questioned why, except that it seemed unlike Tira to throw in the towel so soon. Her lack of commitment to her marriage and her cavalier attitude about the divorce had made him uneasy. In fact, it had kept him from letting her come closer after he was widowed. She’d turned out to be shallow, and he wasn’t risking his heart on a woman like that, even if she was a knockout to look at. As he knew firsthand, there was more to a marriage than having a beautiful wife.

John Beck, like Tira, had never said anything about the marriage. But John had avoided Simon ever since the divorce, and once when he’d had too much to drink at a party they’d both attended, he’d blurted out that Simon had destroyed his life, without explaining how.

The two men had been friends for several years until John had married Tira. Not too long after the divorce, John had moved out of Texas entirely and a year later that tragic oil rig accident had claimed his life. Tira had seemed devastated by John’s death and, for a time, she went into seclusion. When she came back into society, she was a changed woman. The vivacious, happy Tira of earlier days had become a dignified, elegant matron who seemed to have lost her fighting spirit. She went back to college and finished her degree in art. But three years after graduation, she seemed to have done little with her degree. Not that she skimped on charity work or political fundraising. She was a tireless worker. Simon wondered sometimes if she didn’t work to keep from thinking.

Perhaps she blamed herself for John’s death and couldn’t admit it. The loss of his former friend had hurt Simon, too. He and Tira had become casual friends, but nothing more, he made sure of it. Despite her attractions, he wasn’t getting caught by such a shallow woman. But if their lukewarm friendship had been satisfying once, in the past year, she’d become restless. She was forever mentioning Charles Percy to him and watching his reactions with strange, curious eyes. It made him uncomfortable, like that crack she’d made about kindling jealousy in him.

That remark hit him on the raw. Did she really think he could ever want a woman of her sort, who could discard a man she professed to love after only one month of marriage and then parade around openly with a philanderer like Charles Percy? He laughed coldly to himself. That really would be the day. His heart was safely encased in ice. Everyone thought he mourned Melia—no one knew how badly she’d hurt him, or that her memory disgusted him. It served as some protection against women like Tira. It kept him safe from any emotional involvement.

Unaware of Simon’s hostile thoughts, Tira went to her silver Jaguar and climbed in behind the wheel. She paused there for a few minutes, with her head against the cold steering wheel. When was she ever going to learn that Simon didn’t want her? It was like throwing herself at a stone wall, and it had to stop. Finally she admitted that nothing was going to change their shallow relationship. It was time she made a move to put herself out of Simon’s orbit for good. Tearing her emotions to pieces wasn’t going to help, and every time she saw him, she died a little more. All these years she’d waited and hoped and suffered, just to be around him occasionally. She’d lived too long on crumbs; she had to find some sort of life for herself without Simon, no matter how badly it hurt.

Her first step was to sell the Montana property. She put it on the market without a qualm, and her manager pooled his resources with a friend to buy it. With the ranch gone, she had no more reason to go to cattle auctions.

She moved out of her apartment that was only a couple of blocks from Simon’s, too, and bought an elegant house on the outskirts of town on Floresville Road. It was very Spanish, with graceful arches and black wrought-iron scrollwork on the fences that enclosed it. There was a cobblestone patio complete with a fountain and a nearby sitting area with a large goldfish pond and a waterfall cascading into it. The place was sheer magic. She thought she’d never seen anything quite so beautiful.

“It’s the sort of house that needs a family,” the real estate agent had remarked.

Tira hadn’t said a word.

She remembered the conversation as she looked around the empty living room that had yet to be furnished. There would never be a family now. There would only be Tira, putting one foot in front of the other and living like a zombie in a world that no longer contained Simon, or hope.

It took her several weeks to have the house decorated and furnished. She chose every fabric, every color, every design herself. And when the house was finished, it echoed her own personality. Her real personality, that was, not the face she showed to the world.

No one who was acquainted with her would recognize her from the decor. The living room was done in soft white with a pastel blue, patterned wallpaper. The carpet was gray. The furniture was Victorian, rosewood chairs and a velvet-covered sofa. The other rooms were equally antique. The master bedroom boasted a four-poster bed in cherrywood, with huge ball legs and a headboard and footboard resplendant with hand-carved floral motifs. The curtains were Priscillas, the center panels of rose patterns with faint pink and blue coloring. The rest of the house followed the same subdued elegance of style and color. It denoted a person who was introverted, sensitive and old-fashioned. Which, under the flamboyant camouflage, Tira really was.

If there was a flaw, and it was a small one, it was the mouse who lived in the kitchen. Once the house was finished, and she’d moved in, she noticed him her first night in residence, sitting brazenly on a cabinet clutching a piece of cracker that she’d missed when she was cleaning up.

She bought traps and set them, hoping that the evil things would do their horrible work correctly and that she wouldn’t be left nursing a wounded mouse. But the wily creature avoided the traps. She tried a cage and bait. That didn’t work, either. Either the mouse was like those in that cartoon she’d loved, altered by some secret lab and made intelligent, or he was a figment of her imagination and she was going mad.

She laughed almost hysterically at the thought that Simon had finally, after all those years, driven her crazy.

Despite the mouse, she loved her new home. But even though she led a hectic life, there were still the lonely nights to get through. The walls began to close around her, despite the fact that she involved herself in charity work committees and was a tireless worker for political action fundraisers. She worked long hours, and pushed herself unnecessarily hard. But she had no outside interests and too much money to work a daily job. What she needed was something interesting to do at home, to keep her mind occupied at night, when she was alone. But what?

It was a rainy Monday morning. She’d gone to the market for fresh vegetables and wasn’t really watching where she was walking when she turned a corner and went right into the path of Corrigan Hart and his new wife, Dorothy.

“Good Lord,” she gasped, catching her breath. “What are you two doing in San Antonio?”

Corrigan grinned. “Buying cattle,” he said, drawing a radiant Dorothy closer. “Which reminds me, I didn’t see you at the auction this time. I was standing in for Simon,” he added. “For some reason, he’s gone off sales lately.”

“So have I, coincidentally,” Tira remarked with a cool smile. It stung to think that Simon had given up those auctions that he loved so much to avoid her, but that was most certainly the reason. “I sold the Montana property.”

Corrigan scowled. “But you loved the ranch. It was your last link with your father.”

That was true, and it had made her sad for a time. She twisted the shopping basket in her hands. “I’d gotten into a rut,” she said. “I wanted to change my life.”

“So I noticed,” Corrigan said quietly. “We went by your apartment to say hello. You weren’t there.”

“I moved.” She colored a little at his probing glance. “I’ve bought a house across town.”

Corrigan’s eyes narrowed. “Someplace where you won’t see Simon occasionally,” he said gently.

The color in her cheeks intensified. “Where I won’t see Simon at all, if you want the truth,” she said bluntly. “I’ve given up all my connections with the past. There won’t be any more accidental meetings with him. I’ve decided that I’m tired of eating my heart out for a man who doesn’t want me. So I’ve stopped.”

Corrigan looked surprised. Dorie eyed the other woman with quiet sympathy.

“In the long run, that’s probably the best thing you could have done,” Dorie said quietly. “You’re still young and very pretty,” she added with a smile. “And the world is full of men.”

“Of course it is,” Tira replied. She returned Dorie’s smile. “I’m glad things worked out for you two, and I’m very sorry I almost split you up,” she added sincerely. “Believe me, it was unintentional.”

“Tira, I know that,” Dorie replied, remembering how a chance remark of Tira’s in a local boutique had sent Dorie running scared from Corrigan. That was all in the past, now. “Corrigan explained everything to me. I was uncertain of him then, that’s all it really was. I’m not anymore.” She hesitated. “I’m sorry about you and Simon.”

Tira’s face tautened. “You can’t make people love you,” she said with a poignant sadness in her eyes. She shrugged fatalistically. “He has a life that suits him. I’m trying to find one for myself.”

“Why don’t you do a collection of sculptures and have a show?” Corrigan suggested.

She chuckled. “I haven’t done sculpture in three years. Anyway, I’m not good enough for that.”

“You certainly are, and you’ve got an art degree. Use it.”

She considered that. After a minute, she smiled. “Well, I do enjoy sculpting. I used to sell some of it occasionally.”

“See?” Corrigan said. “An idea presents itself.” He paused. “Of course, there’s always a course in biscuit-making…?”

Knowing his other three brothers’ absolute mania for that particular bread, she held up both hands. “You can tell Leo and Cag and Rey that I have no plans to become a biscuit chef.”

“I’ll pass the message along. But Dorie’s dying for a replacement,” he added with a grin at his wife. “They’d chain her to the stove if I didn’t intervene.” He eyed Tira. “They like you.”

“God forbid,” she said with a mock shudder. “For years, people will be talking about how they arranged your marriage.”

“They meant well,” Dorie defended them.

“Baloney,” Tira returned. “They had to have their biscuits. Fatal error, Dorie, telling them you could bake.”

“It worked out well, though, don’t you think?” she asked with a radiant smile at her husband.

“It did, indeed.”

Tira fielded a few more comments about her withdrawal from the social scene, and then they were on their way to the checkout stand. She deliberately held back until they left, to avoid any more conversation. They were a lovely couple, and she was fond of Corrigan, but he reminded her too much of Simon.

In the following weeks, she signed up for a refresher sculpting course at her local community college, a course for no credit since she already had a degree. In no time, she was sculpting recognizable busts.

“You’ve got a gift for this,” her instructor murmured as he walked around a fired head of her favorite movie star. “There’s money in this sort of thing, you know. Big money.”

She almost groaned aloud. How could she tell this dear man that she had too much money already? She only smiled and thanked him for the compliment.

But he put her sculpture in a showing of his students’ work. It was seen by a local art gallery owner, who tracked Tira down and offered her an exclusive showing. She tried to dissuade him, but the offer was all too flattering to turn down. She agreed, with the proviso that the proceeds would go to an outreach program from the local hospital that worked in indigent neighborhoods.

After that, there was no stopping her. She spent hours at the task, building the strength in her hands and attuning her focus to more detailed pieces.

It wasn’t until she finished one of Simon that she even realized she’d been sculpting him. She stared at it with contained fury and was just about to bring both fists down on top of it when the doorbell rang.

Irritated at the interruption, she tossed a cloth over the work in progress and went to answer it, wiping the clay from her hands on the way. Her hair was in a neat bun, to keep it from becoming clotted with clay, but her pink smock was liberally smeared with it. She looked a total mess, without makeup, even without shoes, wearing faded jeans and a knit top.

She opened the door without questioning who her visitor might be, and froze in place when Simon came into view on the porch. She noticed that he was wearing the prosthesis he hated so much, and she noted with interest that the hand at the end of it looked amazingly real.

She lifted her eyes to his, but her face wasn’t welcoming. She didn’t open the door to admit him. She didn’t even smile.

“What do you want?” she asked.

He scowled. That was new. He’d visited Tira’s apartment infrequently in the past, and he’d always been greeted with warmth and even delight. This was a cold reception indeed.

“I came to see how you were,” he replied quietly. “You’ve been conspicuous by your absence around town lately.”

“I sold the ranch,” she said flatly.

He nodded. “Corrigan told me.” He looked around at the front yard and the porch of the house. “This is nice. Did you really need a whole house?”

She ignored the question. “What do you want?” she asked again.

He noted her clay-smeared hands, and the smock she was wearing. “Laying bricks, are you?” he mused.

She didn’t smile, as she might have once. “I’m sculpting.”

“Yes, I remember that you took courses in college. You were quite good.”

“I’m also quite busy,” she said pointedly.

His eyebrow arched. “No invitation to have coffee?”

She hardened her resolve, despite the frantic beat of her heart. “I don’t have time to entertain. I’m getting ready for an exhibit.”

“At Bob Henderson’s gallery,” he said knowledgeably. “Yes, I know. I have part ownership in it.” He held up his hand when she started to speak angrily. “I had no idea that he’d seen any of your work. I didn’t suggest the showing. But I’d like to see what you’ve done. I do have a vested interest.”

That put a new complexion on things. But she still didn’t want him in her house. She’d never rid herself of the memory of him in it. Her reluctant expression told him that whatever she was feeling, it wasn’t pleasure.

He sighed. “Tira, what’s wrong?” he asked.

She stared at the cloth in her hands instead of at him. “Why does anything have to be wrong?”

“Are you kidding?” He drew in a heavy breath and wondered why he should suddenly feel guilty. “You’ve sold the ranch, moved house and given up any committees that would bring you into contact with me….”

She looked up in carefully arranged surprise. “Oh, heavens, it wasn’t because of you,” she lied convincingly. “I was in a rut, that’s all. I decided that I needed to turn my life around. And I have.”

His eyes glittered down at her. “Did turning it around include keeping me out of it?”

Her expression was unreadable. “I suppose it did. I was never able to get past my marriage. The memories were killing me, and you were a constant reminder.”

His heavy eyebrows lifted. “Why should the memories bother you?” he asked with visible sarcasm. “You didn’t give a damn about John. You divorced him a month after the wedding and never seemed to care if you saw him again or not. Barely a week later, you were keeping company with Charles Percy.”

The bitterness in his voice opened her eyes to something she’d never seen. Why, he blamed her for John’s death. She didn’t seem to breathe as she looked up into those narrow, cold, accusing eyes. It had been three years since John’s death and she’d never known that Simon felt this way.

Her hands on the cloth stilled. It was the last straw. She’d loved this big, formidable man since the first time she’d seen him. There had never been anyone else in her heart, despite the fact that she’d let him push her into marrying John. And now, years too late, she discovered the reason that Simon had never let her come close to him. It was the last reason she’d ever have guessed.

She let out a harsh breath. “Well,” she said with forced lightness, “the things we learn about people we thought we knew!” She tucked the smeared cloth into a front pocket of her equally smeared smock. “So I killed John. Is that what you think, Simon?”

The frontal assault was unexpected. His guard was down and he didn’t think before he spoke. “You played at marriage,” he accused quietly. “He loved you, but you had nothing to give him. A month of marriage and you were having divorce papers served to him. You let him go without a word when he decided to work on oil rigs, despite the danger of it. You didn’t even try to stop him. Funny, but I never realized what a shallow, cold woman you were until then. Everything you are is on the outside,” he continued, blind to her white, drawn face. “Glorious hair, a pretty face, sparkling eyes, pretty figure…and nothing under it all. Not even a spark of compassion or love for anyone except yourself.”

She wasn’t breathing normally. Dear God, she thought, don’t let me faint at his feet! She swallowed once, then twice, trying to absorb the horror of what he was saying to her.

“You never said a word,” she said in a haunted tone. “In all these years.”

“I didn’t think it needed saying,” he said simply. “We’ve been friends, of a sort. I hope we still are.” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “As long as you realize that you’ll never be allowed within striking distance of my heart. I’m not a masochist, even if John was.”

Later, when she was alone, she was going to die. She knew it. But right now, pride spared her any further hurt.

She went past him, very calmly, and opened the front door, letting in a scent of dead leaves and cool October breeze. She didn’t speak. She didn’t look at him. She just stood there.

He walked past her, hesitating on the doorstep. His narrow eyes scanned what he could see of her face, and its whiteness shocked him. He wondered why she looked so torn up, when he was only speaking the truth.

Before he could say a thing, she closed the door, threw the dead bolt and put on the chain latch. She walked back toward her studio, vaguely aware that he was trying to call her back.

The next morning, the housekeeper she’d hired, Mrs. Lester, found her sprawled across her bed with a loaded pistol in her hands and an empty whiskey bottle lying on its side on the stained gray carpet. Mrs. Lester quickly looked in the bathroom and found an empty bottle that had contained tranquilizers. She jerked up the telephone and dialed the emergency services number with trembling hands. When the ambulance came screaming up to the front of the house, Tira still hadn’t moved at all.

Chapter Two

It took all of that day for Tira to come out of the stupor and discover where she was. It was a very nice hospital room, but she didn’t remember how she’d gotten there. She was foggy and disoriented and very sick to her stomach.

Dr. Ron Gaines, an old family friend, came in the door ahead of a nurse in neat white slacks and a multi-colored blouse with many pockets.

“Get her vitals,” the doctor directed.

“Yes, sir.”

While her temperature and blood pressure and pulse rate were taken, Dr. Gaines leaned against the wall quietly making notations on her chart. The nurse reported her findings, he charted them and he motioned her out of the room.

He moved to the bed and sat down in the chair beside Tira. “If anyone had asked me two weeks ago, I’d have said that you were the most levelheaded woman I knew. You’ve worked tirelessly for charities here, you’ve spear-headed fund drives… Good God, what’s the matter with you?”

“I had a bad blow,” she confessed in a subdued tone. “It was unexpected and I did something stupid. I got drunk.”

“Don’t hand me that! Your housekeeper found a loaded pistol in your hand.”

“Oh, that.” She started to tell him about the mouse, the one she’d tried unsuccessfully to catch for weeks. Last night, with half a bottle of whiskey in her, shooting the varmint had seemed perfectly logical. But her dizzy mind was slow to focus. “Well, you see—” she began.

He sighed heavily and cut her off. “Tira, if it wasn’t a suicide attempt, I’m not a doctor. Tell me the truth.”

She blinked. “I wouldn’t try to kill myself!” she said, outraged. She took a slow breath. “I was just a little depressed, that’s all. I found out yesterday that Simon holds me responsible for John’s death.”

There was a long, shocked pause. “He doesn’t know why the marriage broke up?”

She shook her head.

“Why didn’t you tell him, for God’s sake?” he exclaimed.

“It isn’t the sort of thing you tell a man about his best friend. I never dreamed that he blamed me. We’ve been friends. He never wanted it to be anything except friendship, and I assumed it was because of the way he felt about Melia. Apparently I’ve been five kinds of an idiot.” She looked up at him. “Six, if you count last night,” she added, flushing.

“I’m glad you agree that it was stupid.”

She frowned. “Did you pump my stomach?”

“Yes.”

“No wonder I feel so empty,” she said. “Why did you do that?” she asked. “I only had whiskey on an empty stomach!”

“Your housekeeper found an empty tranquilizer bottle in the bathroom,” he said sternly.

“Oh, that,” she murmured. “The bottle was empty. I never throw anything away. That prescription was years old. It’s one Dr. James gave me to get me through final exams in college three years ago. I was a nervous wreck!” She gave him another unblinking stare. “But you listen here, I’m not suicidal. I’m the least suicidal person I know. But everybody has a breaking point and I reached mine. So I got drunk. I never touch alcohol. Maybe that’s why it hit me so hard.”

He took her hand in his and held it gently. While he was trying to find the words, the door suddenly swung open and a wild-eyed Simon Hart entered the room. He looked as if he’d been in an accident, his face was so white. He stared at Tira without speaking.

It wasn’t his fault, really, but she hated him for what she’d done to herself. Her eyes told him so. There was no welcome in them, no affection, no coquettishness. She looked at him as if she wished she had a weapon in her hands.

“You get out of my room!” she raged at him, sitting straight up in bed.

The doctor’s eyebrows shot straight up. Tira had never raised her voice to Simon before. Her face was flaming red, like her wealth of hair, and her green eyes were shooting bolts of lightning in Simon’s direction.

“Tira,” Simon began uncertainly.

“Get out!” she repeated, ashamed of being accused of a suicide attempt in the first place. It was bad enough that she’d lost control of herself enough to get drunk. She glared at Simon as if he was the cause of it all—which he was. “Out!” she repeated, when he didn’t move, gesturing wildly with her arm.

He wouldn’t go, and she burst into tears of frustrated fury. Dr. Gaines got between Simon and Tira and hit the Call button. “Get in here, stat,” he said into the intercom, following the order with instructions for a narcotic. He glanced toward Simon, standing frozen in the doorway. “Out,” he said without preamble. “I’ll speak to you in a few minutes.”

Simon moved aside to let the scurrying nurse into the room with a hypodermic. He could hear Tira’s sobs even through the door. He moved a little way down the hall, to where his brother Corrigan was standing.

It had been Corrigan whom the housekeeper called when she discovered Tira. And he’d called Simon and told him only that Tira had been taken to the hospital in a bad way. He had no knowledge of what had pushed Tira over the edge or he might have thought twice about telling his older brother at all.

“I heard her. What happened?” Corrigan asked, jerking his head toward the room.

“I don’t know,” Simon said huskily. He leaned back against the wall beside his brother. His empty sleeve drew curious glances from a passerby, but he ignored it. “She saw me and started yelling.” He broke off. His eyes were filled with torment. “I’ve never seen her like this.”

“Nobody has,” Corrigan said flatly. “I never figured a woman like Tira for a suicide.”

Simon gaped at him. “A what?”

“What would you call combining alcohol and tranquilizers?” Corrigan demanded. “Good God, Mrs. Lester said she had a loaded pistol in her hands!”

“A pistol…?” Simon closed his eyes on a shudder and ran a hand over his drawn face. He couldn’t bear to think about what might have happened. He was certain that he’d prompted her actions. He couldn’t forget, even now, the look on her face when he’d almost flatly accused her of killing John. She hadn’t said a word to defend herself. She’d gone quiet; dangerously quiet. He should never have left her alone. Worse, he should never have said anything to her. He’d thought her a strong, self-centered woman who wouldn’t feel criticism. Now, almost too late, he knew better.

“I went to see her yesterday,” Simon confessed in a haunted tone. “She’d made some crazy remark at the last cattle auction about trying to make me jealous. She said she was only teasing, but it hit me the wrong way. I told her that she wasn’t the sort of woman I could be jealous about. Then, yesterday, I told her how I felt about her careless attitude toward the divorce only a month after she married John, and letting him go off to get himself killed on an oil rig.” His broad shoulders rose and fell defeatedly. “I shouldn’t have said it, but I was angry that she’d tried to make me jealous, as if she thought I might actually feel attracted to her.” He sighed. “I thought she was so hard that nothing I said would faze her.”

“And I thought I used to be blind,” Corrigan said.

Simon glanced at him, scowling. “What do you mean?”

Corrigan looked at his brother and tried to speak. Finally he just smiled faintly and turned away. “Forget it.”

The door to Tira’s room opened a minute later and Dr. Gaines came out. He spotted the two men down the hall and joined them.

“Don’t go back in there,” he told Simon flatly. “She’s too close to the edge already. She doesn’t need you to push her the rest of the way.”

“I didn’t do a damned thing,” Simon shot back, and now he looked dangerous, “except walk in the door!”

Dr. Gaines’s lips thinned. He glanced at Corrigan, who only shrugged and shook his head.

“I’m going to try to get her to go to a friend of mine, a therapist. She could use some counseling,” Gaines added.

“She’s not a nutcase,” Simon said, affronted.

Dr. Gaines looked into that cold, unaware face and frowned. “You were state attorney general for four years,” he said. “You’re still a well-known trial lawyer, an intelligent man. How can you be this stupid?”

“Will someone just tell me what’s going on?” Simon demanded.

Dr. Gaines looked at Corrigan, who held out a hand, palm up, inviting the doctor to do the dirty work.

“She’ll kill us both if she finds out we told him,” Gaines remarked to Corrigan.

“It’s better than letting her die.”

“Amen.” He looked at Simon, who was torn between puzzlement and fury. “Simon, she’s been in love with you for years,” Dr. Gaines said in a hushed, reluctant tone. “I tried to get her to give up the ranch and all that fundraising mania years ago, because they were only a way for her to keep near you. She wore herself out at it, hoping against hope that if you were in close contact, you might begin to feel something for her, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. All I had to do was see you together to realize she didn’t have a chance. Am I right?” he asked Corrigan, who nodded.

Simon leaned back against the wall. He felt as if someone had put a knife right through him. He couldn’t even speak.

“What you said to her was a kindness, although I don’t imagine you see it that way now,” Dr. Gaines continued doggedly. “She had to be made to see that she couldn’t go on living a lie, and the changes in her life recently are proof that she’s realized how you feel about her. She’ll accept it, in time, and get on with her life. It will be the very best thing for her. She’s trying to be all things to all people, until she was worn to a nub. She’s been headed for a nervous breakdown for weeks, the way she’s pushed herself, with this one-woman art show added to the load she was already carrying. But she’ll be all right.” He put a sympathetic hand on Simon’s good arm. “It’s not your fault. She’s levelheaded about everything except you. But if you want to help her, for old time’s sake, stay away from her. She’s got enough on her plate right now.”

He nodded politely to Corrigan and went on down the hall.

Simon still hadn’t moved, or spoken. He was pale and drawn, half crazy from the doctor’s revelation.

Corrigan got on the other side of him and took his arm, drawing him along. “We’ll get a cup of coffee somewhere on the way back to your office,” he told his older brother.

Simon allowed himself to be pulled out the door. He wasn’t sure he remembered how to walk. He felt shattered.

Minutes later, he was sitting in a small café with his brother, drinking strong coffee.

“She tried to kill herself over me,” Simon said finally.

“She missed. She won’t try again. They’ll make sure of it.” He leaned forward. “Simon, she’s been overextending for years, you know that. No one woman could have done as much as she has without risking her health, if not her sanity. If it hadn’t been what you said to her, it would have been something else…maybe even this showing at the gallery that she was working night and day to get ready for.”

Simon forced himself to breathe normally. He still couldn’t quite believe it all. He sipped his coffee and stared into space.

“Did you know how she felt?” he asked Corrigan.

“She didn’t tell me, if that’s what you mean,” his brother said. “But it was fairly obvious, the way she talked about you. I felt sorry for her. We all knew how much you loved Melia, that you’ve never let yourself get close to another woman since the wreck. Tira had to know that there was no hope in that direction.”

The coffee in Simon’s cup sloshed a little as he put it down. “It seems so clear now,” he remarked absently. “She was always around, even when there didn’t seem a reason for it. She worked on committees for organizations I belonged to, she did charity work for businesses where I was a trustee.” He shook his head. “But I never noticed.”

“I know.”

He looked up. “John knew,” he said suddenly.

Corrigan hesitated. Then he nodded.

Simon sucked in a harsh breath. “Good God, I broke up their marriage!”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Tira never talks about John.” His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “But haven’t you ever noticed that she and John’s father are still friends? He doesn’t blame her for his son’s death. Shouldn’t he, if it was all Tira’s fault?”

Simon didn’t want to think about it. He was sick to his stomach. “I pushed her at John,” he recalled.

“I remember. They seemed to have a lot in common.”

“They had me in common.” Simon laughed bitterly. “She loved me…” He took a long sip of coffee and burned his mouth. The pain was welcome; it took his mind off his conscience.

“She can’t ever know that we told you that,” Corrigan said firmly, looking as formidable as his brother. “She’s entitled to salvage a little of her pride. The newspapers got hold of the story, Simon. It’s in the morning edition. The headline’s really something—local socialite in suicide attempt. She’s going to have hell living it down. I don’t imagine they’ll let her see a newspaper, but someone will tell her, just the same.” His voice was harsh. “Some people love rubbing salt in wounds.”

Simon rested his forehead against his one hand. He was so drained that he could barely function. It had been the worst day of his life; in some ways, worse than the wreck that had cost him everything.

For years, Tira’s eyes had warmed at his approach, her mouth had smiled her welcome. She’d become radiant just because he was near her, and he hadn’t known how she felt, with all those blatant signs.

Now, this morning, she’d looked at him with such hatred that he still felt sick from the violence of it. Her eyes had flashed fire, her face had burned with rage. He’d never seen her like that.

Corrigan searched his brother’s worn face. “Don’t take it so hard, Simon. None of this is your fault. She put too much pressure on herself and now she’s paying the consequences. She’ll be all right.”

“She loved me,” he said again, speaking the words harshly, as if he still couldn’t believe them.

“You can’t make people love you back,” his brother replied. “Funny, Dorie and I saw her in the grocery store a few weeks ago, and she said that same thing. She had no illusions about the way you felt, regardless of how it looks.”

Simon’s eyes burned with anguish. “You don’t know what I said to her, though. I accused her of killing John, of being so unconcerned about his happiness that she let him go into a dangerous job that he didn’t have the experience to handle.” His face twisted. “I said that she was shallow and cold and selfish, that I had nothing but contempt for her and that I’d never let a woman like her get close to me….” His eyes closed. “Dear God, how it must have hurt her to hear that from me.”

Corrigan let out a savage breath. “Why didn’t you just load the gun for her?”

“Didn’t I?” the older man asked with tortured eyes.

Corrigan backed off. “Well, it’s water under the bridge now. She’s safely out of your life and she’ll learn to get along on her own, with a little help. You can go back to your law practice and consider yourself off the endangered species list.”

Simon didn’t say another word. He stared into his coffee with sightless eyes until it grew cold.

Tira slept for the rest of the day. When she opened her eyes, the room was empty. There was a faint light from the wall and she felt pleasantly drowsy.

The night nurse came in, smiling, to check her vital signs. She was given another dose of medicine. Minutes later, without having dared remember the state she was in that morning, she went back to sleep.

When she woke up, a tall, blond, handsome man with dark eyes was sitting by the bed, looking quite devastating in white slacks and a red pullover knit shirt.

“Charles,” she mumbled, and smiled. “How nice of you to come!”

“Who’ll I talk to if you kill yourself, you idiot?” he muttered, glowering at her. “What a stupid thing to do.”

She pushed herself up on an elbow, and pushed the mass of red-gold hair out of her eyes. She made a rough sound in her throat. “I wasn’t trying to commit suicide!” she grumbled. “I got drunk and Mrs. Lester found an old empty prescription bottle and went ballistic.” She shifted sleepily and yawned. “Well, I can’t blame her, I guess. I still had the pistol in my hand and there was a hole in the wall…”

“Pistol!?”

“Calm down,” she said, grimacing. “My head hurts. Yes, a pistol.” She grinned at him a little sheepishly. “I was going to shoot the mouse.”

His eyes widened. “Excuse me?”

“There’s a mouse,” she said. “I’ve set traps and put out bait, and he just keeps coming back into my kitchen. After a couple of drinks, I remembered a scene in True Grit, where John Wayne shot a rat, and when I got halfway through the whiskey bottle, it seemed perfectly logical that I should do that to my mouse.” She chuckled a little weakly. “You had to be there,” she added helplessly.

“I suppose so.” He searched her bloodshot eyes. “All those charity events, anybody calls and asks you to help, and you work day and night to organize things. You’re everybody’s helper. Now you’re working on a collection of sculpture and still trying to keep up with your social obligations. I’m surprised you didn’t fall out weeks ago. I tried to tell you. You know I did.”

She nodded and sighed. “I know. I just didn’t realize how hard I was working.”

“You never do. You need to get married and have kids. That would keep you busy.”

She lifted both eyebrows. “Are you offering to sacrifice yourself?”

He chuckled. “Maybe it would be the best thing for both of us,” he said wistfully. “We’re in love with people who don’t want us. At least we like each other.”

“Yes. But marriage should be more than that.”

He shrugged. “Just a thought.” He leaned over and patted her hand. “Get well. There’s a society ball next week and you have to go with me. She’s going to be there.”

Tira knew who she was—his sister-in-law, the woman that Percy would have died to marry. She’d never noticed him, despite his blazing good looks, before she married his half brother. In fact, she seemed to actually dislike him, and Charles’s half brother was twenty years her senior, a stiff-necked stuffed shirt whom nobody in their circle had any use for. The marriage was a complete mystery.

“I don’t have a dress.”

“Buy one,” he instructed. She hesitated.

“I’ll protect you from him,” he said after a minute, having realized that Simon would most likely be in attendance. “I swear on my glorious red Mark VIII that I won’t leave your side for an instant all evening.”

She gave him a wary glance. His mania about that car was well-known. He wouldn’t even entrust it to a car wash. He washed and waxed it lovingly, inch by inch, and called it “Big Red.”

“Well, if you’re willing to swear on your car,” she agreed.

He grinned. “You can ride in it.”

“I’m honored!”

“I brought you some flowers,” he added. “One of the nurses volunteered to put them in a vase for you.”

She gave him a cursory appraisal and smiled. “The way you look, I’m not surprised. Women fall over each other to get to you.”

“Not the one I wanted,” he said sadly. “And now it’s too late.”

She slid her hand into his and pressed it gently. “I’m sorry.”

“So am I.” He shrugged. “Isn’t it a damned shame? I mean, look what they’re missing!”

She knew he was talking about Simon and the woman Charles wanted, and she grinned in spite of herself. “It’s their loss. I’d love to go to the ball with you. He’ll let me out of here today. Like to take me home?”

“Sure!”

But when the doctor came into the room, he was reluctant to let her leave.

She was sitting on the side of the bed. She gave him a long, wise look. “I wasn’t lying,” she said. “Suicide was the very last thing on my mind.”

“With a loaded pistol, which had been fired.”

She pursed her lips. “Didn’t anyone notice where the shot landed? At a round hole in the baseboard?”

He frowned.

“The mouse!” she said. “I’ve been after him for weeks! Don’t you watch old John Wayne movies? It was in True Grit!”

All at once, realization dawned in his eyes. “The rat writ.”

“Exactly!”

He burst out laughing. “You were going to shoot the mouse?”

“I’m a good shot,” she protested. “Well, when I’m sober. I won’t miss him next time!”

“Get a trap.”

“He’s too wily,” she protested. “I’ve tried traps and baits.”

“Buy a cat.”

“I’m allergic to fur,” she confessed miserably.

“How about those electronic things you plug into the wall?”

She shook her head. “Tried it. He bit the electrical cord in half.”

“Didn’t it kill him?”

Her eyebrows arched. “No. Actually he seemed even healthier afterward. I’ll bet he’d enjoy arsenic. Nope, I have to shoot him.”

The doctor and Charles looked at each other. Then they both chuckled.

The doctor did see her alone later, for a few minutes while Charles was bringing the car around to the hospital entrance. “Just one more thing,” he said gently. “Regardless of what Simon said, you didn’t kill John. Nobody, no woman, could have stopped what happened. He should never have married you in the first place.”

“Simon kept throwing us together,” she said. “He thought we made the perfect couple,” she added bitterly.

“Simon never knew,” he said. “I’m sure John didn’t tell him, and you kept your own silence.”

She averted her eyes. “John was the best friend Simon had in the world. If he’d wanted Simon to know, he’d have told him. That being the case, I never felt that I had the right.” She looked at him. “I still don’t. And you’re not to tell him, either. He deserves to have a few unshattered illusions. His life hasn’t been a bed of roses so far. He’s missing an arm, and he’s still mourning Melia.”

“God knows why,” Dr. Gaines added, because he’d known all about the elegant Mrs. Hart, things that even Tira didn’t know.

“He loved her,” she said simply. “There’s no accounting for taste, is there?”

He smiled gently. “I guess not.”

“You know, you really are a nice man, Dr. Gaines,” she added.

He chuckled. “That’s what my wife says all the time.”

“She’s right,” she agreed.

“Don’t you have family?”

She shook her head. “My father died of a heart attack, and my mother died even before he did. She had cancer. It was hard to watch, especially for Dad. He loved her too much.”

“You can’t love people too much.”

She looked up at him with such sadness that her face seemed to radiate it. “Yes, you can,” she said solemnly. “But I’m going to learn how to stop.”

Charles pulled up at the curb and Dr. Gaines waved them off.

“Look at him,” Charles said with a grin. “He’s drooling! He wants my car.” He stepped down on the accelerator. “Everybody wants my car. But it’s mine. Mine!”

“Charles, you’re getting obsessed with this automobile,” she cautioned.

“I am not!” He glanced at her. “Careful, you’ll get fingerprints on the window. And I do hope you wiped your shoes before you got in.”

She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“I’m kidding!” he exclaimed.

She let out a sigh of relief. “And Dr. Gaines wanted me to have therapy,” she murmured.

He threw her a glare. “I do not need therapy. Men love their cars. One guy even wrote a song about how much he loved his truck.”

She glanced around the luxurious interior of the pretty car, leather coated with a wood-grained dash, and nodded. “Well, I could love Big Red,” she had to confess. She leaned back against the padded headrest and closed her eyes.

He patted the dash. “Hear that, guy? You’re getting to her!”

She opened one eye. “I’m calling the therapist the minute we get to my house.”

He lifted both blond eyebrows. “Does he like cars?”

“I give up!”

When she arrived home, she was met at the door by a hovering, worried Mrs. Lester.

“It was an old, empty prescription bottle!” Tira told the kindly older woman. “And the pistol wasn’t for me, it was for that mouse we can’t catch in the kitchen!”

“The mouse?”

“Well, we can’t trap him or drive him out, can we?” she queried.

The housekeeper blushed all the way to her white hairline and wrung her hands in the apron. “It was the way it looked…”

Tira went forward and hugged her. “You’re a doll and I love you. But I was only drunk.”

“You never drink,” Mrs. Lester stated.

“I was driven to it,” she replied.

Mrs. Lester looked at Charles. “By him?” she asked with a twinkle in her dark eyes. “You shouldn’t let him hang around here so much, if he’s driving you to drink.”

“See?” he murmured, leaning down. “She wants my car, that’s why she wants me to leave. She can’t stand having to look at it day after day. She’s obsessed with jealousy, eaten up with envy…”

“What’s he talking about?” Mrs. Lester asked curiously.

“He thinks you want his car.”

Mrs. Lester scoffed. “That long red fast flashy thing?” She sniffed. “Imagine me, riding around in something like that!”

Charles grinned. “Want to?” he asked, raising and lowering his eyebrows.

She chuckled. “You bet I do! But I’m much too old for sports cars, dear. Tira’s just right.”

“Yes, she is. And she needs coddling.”

“I’ll fatten her up and see that she gets her rest. I knew I should never have let her talk me into that vacation. The first time I leave her in a month, and look what happens! And the newspapers…!” She stopped so suddenly that she almost bit her tongue through.

Tira froze in place. “What newspapers?”

Mrs. Lester made a face and exchanged a helpless glance with Charles.

“You, uh, made the headlines,” he said reluctantly.

She groaned. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, there goes my one-woman show!”

“No, it doesn’t,” Charles replied. “I spoke to Bob this morning before I came after you. He said that the phone’s rung off the hook all morning with queries about the show. He figures you’ll make a fortune from the publicity.”

“I don’t need—”

“Yes, but the outreach program does,” he reminded her. He grinned. “They’ll be able to buy a new van!”

She smiled, but her heart wasn’t in it. She didn’t want to be notorious, whether or not she deserved to.

“Cheer up,” he said. “It’ll be old news tomorrow. Just don’t answer the phone for a day or two. It will blow over as soon as some new tragedy catches the editorial eye.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Next Saturday,” he reminded her. “I’ll pick you up at six.”

“Where will you be until then?” she asked, surprised, because he often came by for coffee in the afternoon.

“Memphis,” he said with a sigh. “A business deal that I have to conduct personally. I’ll be out of town for a week. Bad timing, too.”

“I’ll be fine,” she assured him. “Mrs. Lester’s right here.”

“I guess so. I do worry about you.” He smiled sheepishly. “I don’t have any family, either. You’re sort of the only relative I have, even though you aren’t.”

“Same here.”

He searched her eyes. “Two of a kind, aren’t we? We loved not wisely, and too well.”

“As you said, it’s their loss,” she said stubbornly. “Have a safe trip. Are you taking Big Red?”

He shook his head. “They won’t let me take him on the plane,” he said. “Walters is going to stand guard over him in the garage with a shotgun while I’m gone, though. Maybe he won’t pine.”

She burst out laughing. “I’m glad I have you for a friend,” she said sincerely.

He took her hand and held it gently. “That works both ways. Take care. I’ll phone you sometime during the week, just to make sure you’re okay. If you need me…”

“I have your mobile number,” she assured him. “But I’ll be fine.”

“See you next week, then.”

“Thanks for the ride home,” she said.

He shrugged and flashed her a white smile. “My pleasure.”

She watched him drive away with sad eyes. She was going to have to live down the bad publicity without telling her side of the story. Well, what did it matter, she reasoned. It could, after all, have been worse.

Chapter Three

The week passed slowly until the charity ball on Saturday evening. It was to be a lavish one, hosted by the Carlisles, a founding family in the area and large supporters of the local hospital’s charity work. Their huge brick mansion was just south of the perimeter of San Antonio, set in a grove of mesquite and pecan trees with its own duck pond and a huge formal garden. Tira had always loved coming to the house in the past for these gatherings, but she knew that Simon would be on the guest list. It was going to be hard facing him again after what had happened. It was going to be difficult appearing in public at all.

She did plan to go down with all flags flying, however, having poured her exquisite figure into a sleeveless, long black velvet evening gown with lace appliqués in entrancing places and a lace-up bodice that left little gaps from her diaphragm to her breasts. Her hair was in an elegant French twist with a diamond clip that matched her dangling earrings and delicate waterfall diamond necklace. She looked wealthy and sophisticated and Charles gave her a wicked grin when she came through to the living room with a black velvet-and-jewel wrap over one bare shoulder. It was November and the weather was unseasonably warm, so the wrap was just right.

Charles dressed up nicely, she thought, studying him. His tuxedo played up his extreme good looks and his fairness.

“Don’t we make a pair?” he mused, glancing in the hall mirror at them. “Pity it isn’t the right one.”

“We’ll both survive the evening,” she assured him.

“Only if we drink hard enough,” he said with graveyard humor. Then he noticed her expression and grimaced. “Sorry,” he said genuinely.

“No need to apologize,” she replied with a wry smile. “I did something stupid and had the misfortune to be found doing it. I’ll survive all the gossip. But whatever you do, don’t leave me alone with Simon, okay?”

“Count on it. What are friends for?”

She smiled at him. “To get us through rough times,” she said, and was suddenly very grateful that she had a friend as good as Charles.

Charles chided her gently for her growing and obvious nervousness as he drove rapidly down the road that led to the Carlisle estate. “Don’t worry so. You’re old news,” he reminded her. “There’s the local political scandal to latch on to now.”

“What political scandal?” she asked. “And how do you know about it when you’ve been out of town?”

“Because our lieutenant governor has been participating in a conference on the problems of inner cities in Memphis. I sat next to him on the flight home,” he said smugly. Keeping his eyes on the road, he leaned toward her. “It seems that the attorney general intervened in a criminal case for a friend. The criminal he got paroled was serving time for armed robbery, but when he got out, he went right home and killed his ex-wife for testifying against him and is now back in prison. But the wheels of political change are going to roll over the governor’s fair-haired boy.”

“Oh, my goodness,” she burst out. “But he was only doing a kindness. How could he know…?”

“He couldn’t, and he isn’t really to blame, but the opposition party is going to use it to crucify him. I understand his resignation is forthcoming momentarily.”

“What a shame,” Tira said honestly. “He’s done a wonderful job. I met him at one of the charity benefits earlier this year and thought how lucky we were to have elected someone so capable to the position! Now, if he resigns, I guess the governor will have to temporarily appoint someone to finish his term.”

“No doubt he will.”

“Maybe he’ll slide out of it. Lots of politicians do.”

“Not this time, I’m afraid,” Charles said. “He’s made some bitter enemies since he took office. They’ll love the opportunity to settle the score.”

She recalled that Simon had antagonized plenty of people when he held the office of state attorney general. But it would have taken more than a scandal to unseat him. He had a clever habit of turning weapons against their wielders.

She closed her eyes and ground her teeth as she realized how pitiful she was about him, still. Everything reminded her of Simon. She hadn’t wanted to come tonight, either, but the alternative was to stay home and let the whole city know what a coward she was. She had to hold her head up high and pretend that everything was fine, when her whole world was lying in shards around her feet.

She hadn’t tried to kill herself, but one particularly lurid newspaper account said she had, and added that it had been over former attorney general Simon Hart, who’d rejected her. It was in a newspaper published by a relative of Jill Sinclair, a woman who’d been a rival of Tira’s for Simon during the past few years. Tira had been even more humiliated at that particular story, but when she’d phoned the reporter who wrote it, he denied any knowledge of Jill Sinclair. Still, she was certain dear Jill had a hand in it.

Tira shuddered, realizing that Simon must have seen the story, too. He’d know what a fool she’d been over him, which was just one more humiliation. Living that down wasn’t going to be easy. But she did have Charles beside her. And he had his own ordeal to face, because his sister-in-law would certainly be present.

A valet came to park the car for Charles, who was torn between escorting Tira inside or accompanying the elegantly dressed young man assigned to the car placement to make sure he didn’t put a scratch on Big Red.

“Go ahead,” Tira said with amused resignation. “I’ll wait on the steps for you.”

“You’re such a doll,” he murmured and made a kissing motion toward her. “How many women in the world would understand a man’s passion for his car? Here, son, I’ll just ride down with you to the parking lot.”

The valet seemed torn between shock and indignation.

“He’s in love with it!” Tira called to the young man. “He can’t help himself. Just humor him!”

The valet broke into a wide grin and climbed under the steering wheel.

It was unfortunate that while she was waiting on the wide porch for Charles to return, Simon and his date got out of his elegant town car at the steps and let the valet drive it off. He looked devastating, as usual. He was wearing the prosthesis, she noticed, and wondered at how much he seemed to use it these days. Just after the wreck, he wouldn’t be caught dead wearing an artificial arm.

The woman with him was Jill Sinclair herself, a socialite, twice divorced and wealthy, with short black hair and dark eyes and a figure that drew plenty of interest. It would, Tira thought wickedly, considering that her red sequined dress must have been sprayed on and the paint ran out at midthigh. Advertising must pay, she mused, because Simon certainly seemed pleased as he smiled down at the small woman and held her elbow as they climbed up the steps.

He didn’t see Tira until they were almost at the top. When he did, he seemed to jerk, as if the sight of her was unexpected.

She didn’t let anything of her feelings show, despite the pain of seeing him now when her whole life had been laid bare in the press. She did her best not to let her embarrassment show, either. She smiled carelessly and nodded politely at the couple and deliberately turned away in the direction where Charles and the valet were just coming into view.

“Why, how brave she is,” Jill Sinclair purred to Simon, just loud enough for Tira to hear her. “I’d never have had the nerve to face all these people after that humiliating story in the—Simon!”

Her voice died completely. Tira didn’t look toward them. Her face was flaming and she knew her accelerated heartbeat was making her shake visibly. She and Jill had never liked each other, but the woman seemed to be looking for a way to hurt her. She was obviously exuding her power since she’d finally managed to get Simon to notice her and take her out. God knew, she’d been after him for years. Tira’s fall from grace had obviously benefitted her.

Charles bounded up the steps and took Tira’s arm. “Sorry about that,” he said sheepishly.

“You love your car,” she replied with a warm smile. “I understand.”

“You’re one in a million,” he mused. His hand fell to grasp hers, and when she looked inside the open doors she knew why. His half brother was there, and so was his sister-in-law, looking unhappy.

“Gene,” he called to his older half brother. “Nice to see you.” He shook the other man’s hand. Gene was tall and severe looking with thinning gray hair. The woman beside him was tiny and blonde and lovely, but she had the most tragic brown eyes Tira had ever seen.

“Hello, Nessa,” Charles said to the woman, his face guarded, a polite smile on his lips.

“Hello, Charles, Tira,” Nessa replied in her soft, sweet voice. “You both look very nice. Isn’t this a good turnout?” she added nervously. “They’ll make a lot of money at five hundred dollars a couple.”

“Yes,” Tira agreed with a broad smile. “The hospital outreach program will probably be able to afford two vans and the services of another nurse!”

“For indigents,” Gene Marlowe said huffily, “who won’t pay a penny of their own health care.”

The other three people looked at him as if he’d gone mad. He glared at them, reddening. “I have to see Todd Groves about a contract we’re pursuing. If you’ll excuse me? Nessa, don’t just stand there! Come along.”

Nessa ground her teeth together as Gene took her arm roughly. Charles looked as if he might attack his own brother right there. Tira caught his hand and tugged.

“I’m starving,” she told him quickly, exchanging speaking glances with a suddenly relieved Nessa. “Feed me!”

Charles hesitated for an instant, during which Gene dragged Nessa away toward a group of men.

“Damn him!” Charles bit off, his normally pleasant face contorted and threatening.

Tira shook his hand gently. “You’re broadcasting,” she murmured, bumping deliberately against his side to distract him. “Come on, before you cause her any more trouble than she’s already got.”

He let out a weary sigh. “Why did she marry him?” he groaned. “Why?”

“Whatever the reason doesn’t matter much now. Let’s go.”

She pulled until he let her lead him to the long buffet table, where expensive nibbles and champagne were elegantly arranged.

“This is going to eat up all the profits,” Tira murmured worriedly, noting the crystal flutes that were provided for the champagne, and the fact that caviar was furnished as well.

Charles leaned toward her. “It’s grocery store caviar, and the champagne is the sort they deliver in big round metal tractor trucks…”

“Charles!” She couldn’t repress a giggle at the insinuation, and just as she felt her face going red from glee, she looked up and saw Simon’s pale eyes glittering at her from across the room. She averted her eyes to the table and didn’t look in that direction again. His expression had been far different from the one he’d worn when he’d seen her in the hospital. Now it was indignant and outraged, as if he blamed her for the publicity that made him look guilty, too.

Charles did waltz divinely. Tira found herself on the floor with him time after time. People noticed her, and there were some obvious whispers, which probably concerned her “suicide attempt.” She was uncomfortable at first, but then she realized that the opinion of most of these people didn’t matter to her. She knew the truth about what had happened and so did Charles. If the others wanted to believe her to be so weak and helpless that she’d die rather than face up to her failures, let them.

“Doesn’t it worry you, being seen with such a notorious woman?” she chided when they were standing again at the buffet table with more champagne.

“Notorious women are fascinating,” he returned, and smiled. His eyes lifted to his half brother and Nessa and his jaw clenched. The two of them were going out the door and Nessa looked as if she were crying.

“You can’t,” she said, catching his arm when he looked as if he might follow them.

“She should leave him.”

“She’ll have to make that decision for herself.”

He glanced down at her with worried eyes. “She isn’t like you. She isn’t independent and spirited. She’s shy and gentle and people take advantage of her.”

“And you want to protect her. I understand. But you can’t, not tonight.”

He made a rough sound in his throat. “Damn it!”

She leaned against him affectionately for an instant. “I’m sorry. I really am.”

His arm slipped around her shoulders. “One day,” he promised himself.

She nodded. “One day.”

“Why, Charles, how handsome you look!” Jill Sinclair’s high-pitched, grating voice turned them around. “Are you enjoying yourself?”

“I’m having a great time,” Charles said through his teeth. “How about you?”

“Oh, Simon is just the most wonderful escort,” she sighed and glanced at Tira with half-closed eyes. “We’ve been everywhere together lately. There are so many charity dos this time of year. And how are you, Tira? I was so sorry to hear about your near tragedy!” She was almost purring, enjoying Tira’s stiff posture and cold face. She raised her voice, drawing attention from the couples hovering near the buffet table. “Isn’t it a pity that the newspapers made such a big thing of your suicide attempt? I mean, the humiliation of having your feelings made public must be awful. And for the gossips to say that you wanted to die just because Simon couldn’t love you back…why he was just shattered that you made him look like a coldhearted villain in the eyes of his friends. God knows, it isn’t his fault that he doesn’t love you!”

Tira was too shaken by the unexpected attack to reply. Charles wasn’t.

“Why, you prissy little cat,” Charles said with cold venom, making Jill actually catch her breath in surprise at the unexpected verbal jab. “Why don’t you go sharpen your claws on the curtains?”

He took Tira’s arm and led her away. She was so shocked and outraged that she couldn’t even manage words. She wanted to empty the punch bowl over the woman, but that was hardly the sort of thing to do at a benefit ball. Her proud spirit had all but been broken by recent events. She was still licking her wounds.

Simon was talking to a man near the door that Charles was urging her toward. He paused in midsentence and looked at Tira’s white face with curious concern.

Before he could speak, Charles did. “Never mind adding your two cents’ worth. Your girlfriend said it all for you.”

Charles prodded her forward and Tira didn’t look Simon’s way. She was barely able to see where she was going at all. Until Jill’s piece of mischief, she’d actually thought she could get through the evening unscathed.

“That cat!” Charles muttered as they made their way to the bottom of the steps.

“The world is full of them,” she breathed. “And how they love to claw you when you’re down!”

None of the valets were anywhere in sight. Charles grumbled. “I’ll have to go fetch the car. Stay right here. Will you be all right?”

“I’m fine, now that we’re outside,” she said.

He gave her a last, worried glance, and went around the house to the parking area.

She drew her wrap closer, because the air was chilly. Once, she’d have made Jill pay dearly for her nasty comments, but not anymore. Now, her proud spirit was dulled and she’d actually walked away from a fight. It wasn’t like her. Charles obviously knew that, or he wouldn’t have rushed her out the door so quickly.

She heard footsteps behind her and her heart jumped, because she knew the very sound of Simon’s feet. Her eyes closed as she wished him in China—anywhere but here!

“What did she say to you?” he asked shortly.

She wouldn’t turn; she wouldn’t look at him. She couldn’t bear to look at him. The humiliation of having him know how she felt about him was so horrible that it suffocated her. All those years of hiding it from him, cocooning her love in secrecy. And now he knew, the whole world knew. And worst of all, she loved him still. Just being near him was agony.

“I said, what did she say to you?” he repeated, moving directly in front of her so that she had to look at him.

She lifted her eyes to his black tie and no further. Her voice was choked, and stiff with wounded pride. “Go and ask her.”

There was a rough sigh and she saw his good hand go irritably into the pocket of his trousers. “This isn’t like you,” he said after a minute. “You don’t run and you don’t cry, regardless of what people say to you. You fight back. Why are you leaving?”

She lifted tired eyes to his and hated the sudden jolt of her heart at the sight of his beloved face. She clenched every muscle in her body to keep from sobbing out her rage and hurt. “I don’t care what anyone thinks of me,” she said huskily, “least of all your malicious girlfriend. Yes, I’ve spent most of my life fighting, one way or another, but I’m tired. I’m tired of everything.”

Her lack of animation disturbed him, along with the defeat in her voice, the cool poise. “You can’t be worried about what the newspapers said,” he said, his voice deep and slow and oddly tender.

“Can’t I? Why not? They believed every word.” She inclined her head toward the ballroom.

His features were unusually solemn. “I know you better than they do.”

She searched his pale eyes in the dim light from the house. Her heart clenched. “You don’t know me at all, Simon,” she said with painful realization. “You never did.”

He seemed to stiffen. “I thought I did. Until you divorced John.”

Her heart stilled at the reference. “And until he died.” Defeat was in every line of her elegant body. “Yes, I know, I’m a murderess.”

His face went taut. “I didn’t say that!”

“You might as well have!” she shot back, raising her voice, not caring if the whole world heard her. “If Melia had died in a similar manner, I’d never have believed you guilty of her death! I’d have known you well enough to be certain that you had no part in anything that would cause another human being harm. But then, I had a mad infatuation for you that I couldn’t cure.” She saw his sudden stillness. “Don’t pretend that you didn’t read all about it in the paper, Simon. Yes, it’s true, why shouldn’t I admit it? I was obsessed with you, desperate to be with you, in any way that I could. It didn’t even matter that you only tolerated me. I could have lived on crumbs for the rest of my life—” Her voice broke. She shifted on trembling legs and laughed with pure self-contempt. “What a fool I was! What a silly fool. I’m twenty-eight years old and I’ve only just realized how stupid I am!”

He frowned. “Tira…”

She moved back a step, her green eyes blazing with ruptured pride. “Jill told me what you said, that you blame me for making you look like a villain in public with my so-called suicide attempt, as well as for John’s death. Well, go ahead, hate me! I don’t give a damn anymore!” she spat, out of control and not caring. “I’m not even surprised to see you with Jill, Simon. She’s as opinionated and narrow-minded as you are, and she knows how to put the knife in, too. I daresay you’re a match made in heaven!”

His face clenched visibly. “And you don’t care that I’m with another woman tonight, instead of with you?” he chided, hitting back as hard as he could, with a mocking smile on his lips.

Her face went absolutely white. But if it killed her, he’d never hear from her how she did care. She smiled deliberately. “No,” she agreed softly. “Actually I don’t. All this notoriety accomplished one good thing. It made me see how I’d wasted the past few miserable years mooning over you! You did me a favor when you told me what you really thought of me. I’m free of you at last, Simon,” she lied with deliberation. “And I’ve never been quite so happy in all my life!”

And with that parting shot, she turned and walked slowly to the driveway where Charles was pulling up in front of the house, leaving Simon rigidly in place with an expression of shock that delighted her wounded pride.

After what she’d said, she didn’t expect Simon to follow her, and he didn’t. When Charles had installed her in the passenger seat, she caught just a glimpse of Simon’s straight back rapidly returning to the house. She even knew the posture. He was furious. Good! Let him be furious. She was not going to care. She wasn’t!

“Take it easy,” Charles said softly. “You’ll burst something.”

“I know how you felt earlier,” she returned, leaning her hot forehead against the glass of the window. “Damn him! And damn her, too!”

“What did he say to you?”

“He wanted to know what she said, and then he gave me his opinion of my character again. But this time, he didn’t know he’d hit me where it hurt. I made sure of it.”

Charles let out a long breath. “Why can’t we love to order?” he asked philosophically.

“I don’t know. If you ever find out, you can tell me.” She stared out the dark window at the flat landscape passing by. Her heart felt as if it might break all over again.

“He’s an idiot.”

“So is Jill. So is Gene. We’re all idiots. Maybe we’re certifiable and we can become a circus act.”

They drove in silence until they reached her house. He turned off the engine and stared at her worriedly. She was pale and she looked so miserable that he hurt for her.

“Go inside and change your clothes and pack a suitcase,” he said suddenly.

“What?”

“We’ll fly down to Nassau for a long weekend. It’s just Saturday. We’ll take a three-day vacation. I have a friend who owns a villa there. He and his wife love company. We’ll eat conch chowder and play at the casino and lay on the beach. How about it?”

She brightened. “Could we?”

“We could. You need a break and so do I. Be a gambler.”

It sounded like fun. She hadn’t been happy in such a long time. “Okay,” she said.

“Okay.” He grinned. “Maybe we’ll cheer up in foreign parts. Don’t take too long. I’ll run home and change and make a few phone calls. I should be back within an hour.”

“Great!”

It was great. The brief holiday made Tira feel as if she had a new lease on life. Charles was wonderful, undemanding company, much more like a beloved brother than a boyfriend. They padded all over Nassau, down West Bay Street to the docks and out on the pier to look at the ships in port, and all the way to the shopping district and the vast straw markets. Nassau was the most exciting, cosmopolitan city in the world to Tira. She never tired of going there. Just now, it was a godsend. She hated the memory of Jill’s taunting words and Simon’s angry accusations. It was good to have a breathing space from them, and the publicity.

They stretched their stay to five days instead of three and returned to San Antonio refreshed and rested, although Charles had confessed that he did miss his car. He proved it by rushing home as soon as the limousine he’d hired to meet them at the airport delivered Tira at her house.

“I’ll phone you in the morning. We might have a game of tennis Saturday, if you’re up to it,” he said.

“I will be. Thanks, Charles. Thanks so much!”

He chuckled. “I enjoyed it. So long.”

She watched the limousine pull away and walked slowly up to her front door. She hated homecomings. She had nothing here but Mrs. Lester and an otherwise empty house, and her work. It was cold compensation.

Mrs. Lester greeted her with enthusiasm. “I’m so glad you’re home!” she said. “The phone rang off the hook the day after you left and didn’t stop until three days ago.” She shook her head. “I can’t imagine why those newspaper people wanted to drag the whole subject up again, but I guess the shooting downtown Tuesday afternoon gave them something new to go after.”

“What shooting?”

“Well, that man the attorney general had paroled—you remember?—was in court to be arraigned and he went right over the table toward the judge and almost killed him. They managed to pull him away and he grabbed the bailiff’s gun. They had to shoot him! It’s been on all the television stations. They had the most awful photographs of it!”

Tira actually gasped. “For heaven’s sake!”

“Mr. Hart was right in the middle of it, too. He had a case and was waiting for it to be called when the prisoner got loose.”

“Simon? Was he…hurt?” Tira had to ask.

“No. He was the one who pulled the man off the judge. The man had that bailiff’s gun leveled right at him, they said, when a deputy sheriff shot the man. It was a close call for Mr. Hart. A real close call. But you’d never think it worried him to hear him talk on television. He was as cold as ice.”

She sat down on the edge of the sofa and thanked God for Simon’s life. She wished that they were still friends, even distant ones, so that she could phone him and tell him so. But there was a wall between them now.

“Mr. Hart wondered why you hadn’t gotten in touch with him, afterward,” Mrs. Lester said, hesitating.

Tira glanced at her breathlessly. “He called?”

She nodded and then grimaced. “He wanted to know if you heard about the shooting and if you’d been concerned. I had to tell him that you were away, and didn’t know a thing, and when he asked where, he got that out of me, too. I hope it was all right that I told him.”

Simon would think she went on a lover’s holiday with Charles. Well, why shouldn’t he? He believed she was a murderess and a flighty, shallow flirt and suicidal. Let him think whatever else he liked. She couldn’t be any worse in his eyes than she already was.

“Give a dog a bad name,” she murmured.

“What?” Mrs. Lester asked.

She dragged her mind back to the subject at hand. “Yes, of course, it’s perfectly all right that you told him, Mrs. Lester,” Tira said quietly. “I had a wonderful time in Nassau.”

“Did you good, I expect, and Mr. Percy is a nice man.”

“A very nice man,” Tira agreed. She got to her feet. “I’m tired. I think I’ll lie down for a while, so don’t fix anything to eat for another hour or so, will you?”

“Certainly, dear. You just rest. I’ll have some coffee and sandwiches ready when you want them.”

Would she ever want them? Tira wondered as she went slowly toward her bedroom. She was empty and cold and sick at heart. But that seemed to be her normal condition. At least for now.

Chapter Four

It was raining the day Tira began taking her sculptures to Bob Henderson’s “Illuminations” art gallery for her showing. She was so gloomy she hardly felt the mist on her face. Christmas was only two weeks away and she was miserable and lonely. Only months before, she’d have phoned Simon and asked him to meet her for lunch in town, or she’d have shown up at some committee meeting or benefit conference at which he was present, just to feed her hungry heart on the sight of him. Now, she had nothing. Only Charles and his infrequent, undemanding company. Charles was a sweetheart, but it was like having a brother over for coffee.

She carried the last box carefully in the back door, which Lillian Day, the gallery’s manager, was holding open for her.

“That’s the last of them, Lillian,” Tira told her, smiling as she surveyed the cluttered storage room. She shook her head. “I can’t believe I did all those myself.”

“It’s a lot of work,” Lillian agreed, smiling back. She bent to open one of the boxes and frowned slightly at what was inside. “Did you mean to include this?” she asked, indicating a bust of Simon that was painfully lifelike.

Tira’s face closed up. “Yes, I meant to,” she said curtly. “I don’t want it.”

Lillian wisely didn’t say another word. “I’ll place it with the others, then. The catalogs have been printed and they’re perfect, I checked them myself. Everything’s ready, including the caterer for the snack buffet and the media coverage. We’re doing a Christmas motif for the buffet.”

Media coverage. Tira ground her teeth. The last thing in the world she wanted to see now was a reporter.

Lillian, sensitive to moods, glanced at her reassuringly. “Don’t worry. These were handpicked, by me,” she added. “They won’t ask any embarrassing questions, and anything they write for print will be about the show. Period.”

Tira relaxed. “What would I do without you?” she asked, and meant it.

Lillian grinned. “Don’t even think about trying. We’re very glad to have your exhibit here.”

Tira had worried about Simon’s reaction to the showing, since he was a partner in Bob Henderson’s gallery. They hadn’t spoken since before his close call in the courtroom and she half expected him to cancel her exhibit. But he hadn’t. Perhaps Mrs. Lester had been mistaken and he hadn’t been angry that Tira hadn’t phoned to check on him. Just because she hadn’t called, it didn’t mean that she hadn’t worried. She’d had a few sleepless nights thinking about what could have happened to him. Despite her best efforts, her feelings for him hadn’t changed. She was just as much in love with him now as she had been. She was only better at concealing it.

The night of the exhibit arrived. She was all nerves, and she was secretly glad that Charles would be by her side. Not that she expected Simon to show up, with the media present. He wouldn’t want to give them any more ammunition to embarrass him with. But Charles would be a comfort to her.

Fate stepped in, however, to rob her of his presence. Charles phoned at the last minute, audibly upset, to tell her he couldn’t go with her to the show.

“I’m more sorry than I can tell you, but Gene’s had a heart attack,” he said curtly.

“Oh, Charles, I’m so sorry!”

“No need to be. You know there’s no love lost between us. But he’s my half brother, just the same, and there’s no one else to look after him. Nessa is in shock herself. I can’t let her cope alone.”

“How is he?”

“Stabilized, for the moment. I’m on my way to the hospital. Nessa’s with him and he’s giving her hell, as usual, even flat on his back,” he said curtly.

“If there’s anything I can do…”

“Thanks for your support. I’m sorry you have to go on your own. But it’s unlikely that Simon will be there, you know,” he added gently. “Just stick close to Lillian. She’ll look out for you.”

She smiled to herself. “I know she will. Let me know how it goes.”

“Of course I will. See you.”

He hung up. She stared at the phone blankly as she replaced the receiver. She looked good, she reasoned. Her black dress was a straight sheath, ankle length, with spaghetti straps and a diamond necklace and earrings to set it off. It was a perfect foil for her pale, flawless complexion and her red-gold hair, done in a complicated topknot with tendrils just brushing her neck. From her austere getup, she looked more like a widow in mourning than a woman looking forward to Christmas, and she felt insecure and nervous. It would be the first time she’d appeared alone in public since the scandal and she was still uncomfortable around most people.

Well, she comforted herself as she went outside and climbed into her Jaguar, at least she didn’t have to add Simon to her other complications tonight.

The gallery was packed full of interested customers, some of whom had probably only come for curiosity’s sake. It wasn’t hard to discern people who could afford the four-figure price tags on the sculptures from those who couldn’t. Tira pretended not to notice. She took a flute of expensive champagne and downed half of it before she went with Lillian to mingle with the guests.

It didn’t help that the first two people she saw were Simon and Jill.

“Oh, God,” she ground out through her teeth, only too aware of the reporters and their sudden interest in him. “Why did he have to come?!”

Lillian took her arm gently. “Don’t let him know that it bothers you. Smile, girl! We’ll get through this.”

“Do you think so?”

She plastered a cool smile to her lips as Simon pulled Jill along with him and came to a halt just in front of the two women.

“Nice crowd,” he told Tira, his eyes slowly going over her exquisite figure in the close-fitting dress with unusual interest.

“A few art fans and a lot of rubberneckers, hadn’t you noticed?” Tira said, sipping more champagne. Her fingers trembled a little and she held the flute with both hands, something Simon’s keen eyes picked up on at once.

“Nice of you to come by,” Lillian said quietly.

He glanced at her. “It would have been noticeable if I hadn’t, considering that I own half the gallery.” His attention turned back to Tira and his silvery eyes narrowed. “All alone? Where’s your fair-haired shadow?”

She knew he meant Charles. She smiled lazily. “He couldn’t make it.”

“On the first night of your first exhibition?” he chided.

She drew in a sharp breath. “His half brother had a heart attack, if you must know,” she said through her teeth. “He’s at the hospital.”

Simon’s eyes flickered strangely. “And you have to be here, instead of at his side. Pity.”

“He doesn’t need comforting. Nessa does.”

Jill, dressed in red again with a sprig of holly secured with a diamond clip in her black hair, moved closer to Simon. “We just stopped in for a peek at your work,” she said, almost purring as she looked up at the tall man beside her. “We’re on our way to the opera.”

Tira averted her eyes. She loved opera. Many times in the past, Simon had escorted her during the season. It hurt to remember how she’d looked forward to those chaste evenings with him.

“I don’t suppose you go anymore?” Simon asked coldly.

She shrugged. “Don’t have time,” she said tightly.

“I noticed. You couldn’t even be bothered to phone and check on me when that lunatic went wild in the courtroom.”

Tira wouldn’t look at him. “You can’t hurt someone who’s steel right through,” she said.

“And you were out of the country when it happened.”

She lifted her eyes to his hard face. “Yes. I was in Nassau with Charles, having a lovely time!”

His eyes seemed to blaze up at her.

Before the confrontation could escalate, Lillian diplomatically got between them. “Have you had time to look around?” she asked Simon.

“Oh, we’ve seen most everything,” Jill answered for him. “Even the bust of Simon that Tira did. I was surprised that she was willing to sell it,” she added in an innocent tone. “I wouldn’t part with something so personal, Simon being such an old friend and all. But I guess under the circumstances, it was too painful a reminder of…things, wasn’t it, dear?” she asked Tira.

Tira’s hand automatically drew back, with the remainder of the champagne, but before she could toss it, Simon caught her wrist with his good hand.

“No catfights,” he said through his teeth. “Jill, wait for me at the door, will you?”

“If you say so. My, she does look violent, doesn’t she?” Jill chided, but she walked away quickly just the same.

“Get a grip on yourself!” Simon shot at Tira under his breath. “Don’t you see the reporters staring at you?”

“I don’t give a damn about the reporters,” she flashed at him. “If she comes near me again, I swear I’ll empty the punch bowl over her vicious little head!”

He let go of her wrist and something kindled in his pale eyes as he looked at her animated face. “That’s more like you,” he said in a deep, soft tone.

Tira flushed, aware that Lillian was quietly deserting her, stranding her with Simon.

“Why did you come?” she asked furiously.

“So the gossips wouldn’t have a field day speculating about why I didn’t,” he explained. “It wouldn’t have done either of us much good, considering what’s been in print already.”

She lifted her face, staring at him with cold eyes at the reference to things she only wanted to forget. “You’ve done your duty,” she said. “You might as well go. And take the Wicked Witch of the West with you,” she added spitefully.

“Jealous?” he asked in a sensuous tone.

Her face hardened. “I once asked you the same question. You can give yourself the same answer that you gave me. Like hell I’m jealous!”

He was watching her curiously, his eyes acutely alive in a strangely taciturn face. “You’ve lost weight,” he remarked. “And you look more like a widow than a celebrity tonight. Why wear black?”

“I’ve decided that you were right. I should have mourned my husband. So now I’m in mourning,” she said icily and with an arctic smile. “I expect to be in mourning for him until I die, and I’ll never look at a man again. Doesn’t that make you happy?”

He frowned slightly. “Tira…”

“Tira!”

The sound of a familiar voice turned them both around. Harry Beck, Tira’s father-in-law, came forward, smiling, to embrace Tira. He turned to shake Simon’s hand. “Great to see you both!” he said enthusiastically. “Dollface, you’ve outdone yourself,” he told Tira, nodding toward two nearby sculptures. “I always knew you were talented, but this is sheer genius!”

Simon looked puzzled by Harry’s honest enthusiasm for Tira’s work, by his lack of hostility. She’d killed his only son, didn’t he care?

“I’m glad to see you, Simon,” Harry added with a smile. “It’s been a long time.”

“Simon was just leaving. Weren’t you?” Tira added meaningfully.

“Someone’s motioning to you,” Harry noted, indicating Lillian frantically waving from across the room.

“It’s Lillian. Will you excuse me?” Tira asked, smiling at Harry. “I won’t be a minute.” Simon, she ignored entirely.

The two men watched her go.

“I’m glad to see her looking so much better,” Harry said on a sigh, shoving his hands into his pockets. “I’ve been worried since she went to the hospital.”

“Do you really care what happens to her?” Simon asked curiously.

Harry was surprised. “Why wouldn’t I be? She was my daughter-in-law. I’ve always been fond of her.”

“She divorced John a month after they married and let him go off to work on a drill rig in the ocean,” Simon returned. “He died there.”

Harry stared at him blankly. “But that wasn’t her fault.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“Why are you so bitter?” Harry wanted to know. “For God’s sake, you can’t think she didn’t try to change him? He should have told her the truth before he married her, not let her find it out that way!”

Simon was puzzled. “Find what out?”

Jill glared at Simon, but he made a motion for her to wait another minute and turned back to Harry. “Find what out?” he repeated curtly.

“That John was homosexual, of course,” Harry said, puzzled.

The blood drained out of Simon’s face. He stared down at the older man with dawning comprehension.

“She didn’t tell you?” Harry asked gently. He sighed and shook his head. “That’s like her, though. She wanted to preserve your illusions about John, even if it meant sacrificing your respect for her. She couldn’t tell you, I guess. I can’t blame her. If he’d only been able to accept what he was…but he couldn’t. He tried so hard to be what he thought I wanted. And he never seemed to understand that I’d have loved him regardless of how he saw his place in the world.”

Simon turned away, his eyes finding Tira across the room. She wouldn’t meet his gaze. She turned her back. He felt the pain right through his body.

“Dear God!” he growled when he realized what he’d done.

“Don’t look like that,” Harry said gently. “John made his own choice. It was nobody’s fault. Maybe it was mine. I should have seen that he was distraught and done something.”

Simon let out a breath. He was sick right to his soul. What a fool he’d been.

“She should have told you,” Harry was saying. “You’re a grown man. You don’t need to be protected from the truth. She was always like that, even with John, trying to protect him. She’d have gone on with the marriage if he hadn’t insisted on a divorce.”

“I thought…she got the divorce.”

“He got it, in her name, and cited mental cruelty.” He shrugged. “I don’t think he considered how it might look to an outsider. It made things worse for him. He only did it to save her reputation. He thought it would hurt her publicly if he made it look like she was at fault.” He glanced at Simon. “That was right after your wreck and she was trying to take care of you. He thought it might appear as if she was having an affair with you and he found out. It might have damaged both of you in the public eye.”

His teeth clenched. “I never touched her.”

“Neither did John,” Harry murmured heavily. “He couldn’t. He cried in my arms about it, just before he saw an attorney. He wanted to love her. He did, in his way. But it wasn’t in a conventional way at all.”

Simon pushed back a strand of dark, wavy hair that had fallen on his brow. He was sweating because the gallery was overheated.

“Are you all right?” Harry asked with concern.

“I’m fine.” He wasn’t. He’d never be all right again. He glanced toward Tira with anguish in every line of his face. But she wouldn’t even look at him.

Jill, sensing some problem, came back to join him, sliding her hand into his arm. “Aren’t you ready? We’ll miss the curtain.”

“I’m ready,” he said. He looked down at her and realized that here was one more strike against him. He was giving aid and comfort to Tira’s worst enemy in the city. He’d done it deliberately, of course, to make her even more uncomfortable. But that was before he knew the whole truth. Now he felt guilty.

“Hello. I’m Jill Sinclair. Have we met?” she asked Harry, smiling.

“No, we haven’t. I’m—”

“We have to go,” Simon said abruptly. He didn’t want to add any more weapons to Jill’s already full arsenal by letting Harry tell her about John, too. “See you, Harry.”

“Sure. Good night.”

“Who was that?” Jill asked Simon as they went toward the door.

“An old friend. Just a minute. There’s something I have to do.”

“Simon…!”

“I won’t be a minute,” he promised, and caught one of the gallery’s salespeople alone long enough to make a request. She seemed puzzled, but she agreed. He went back to Jill and escorted her out of the gallery, casting one last regretful look toward Tira, who was speaking to a group of socialites at the back of the gallery.

“Half the works are sold already,” Jill murmured. “I guess she’ll make a fortune.”

“She’s donating it all to charity,” he replied absently.

“She can afford to. It will certainly help her image and, God knows, she needs that right now.”

He glanced at her. “That isn’t why.”

She shrugged. “Whatever you say, darling. Brrrr, I’m cold! Christmas is week after next, too.” She peered up at him. “I hope you got me something pretty.”

“I wouldn’t count on it. I probably won’t be in town for Christmas,” he said not quite truthfully.

She sighed. “Oh, well, I might go and spend the holidays with my aunt in Connecticut. I do love snow!”

She was welcome to all she could find of it, he thought. His heart already felt as if he were buried in snow and ice. He knew that Harry’s revelation would keep him awake all night.

Tira watched Simon leave with Jill. She was glad he’d gone. Perhaps now she could enjoy her show.

Lillian was giving her strange looks and when Harry came to say goodbye, he looked rather odd, too.

“What’s wrong?” she asked Harry.

He started to speak and thought better of it. Let Simon tell her what he wanted her to know. He was tired of talking about the past; it was too painful.

He smiled. “It’s a great show, kiddo, you’ll make a mint.”

“Thanks, Harry. I had fun doing it. Keep in touch, won’t you?”

He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. “You know I will. How’s Charlie?”

“His brother-in-law had a heart attack. He’s not doing well.”

“I’m really sorry. Always liked Charlie. Still do.”

“I’ll tell him you asked about him,” she promised.

He smiled at her. “You do that. Keep well.”

“You, too.”

By the end of the evening, Tira was calmer, despite the painful memory of her argument with Simon’s and Jill’s catty remarks. She could just picture the two of them in Simon’s lavish apartment, sprawled all over each other in an ardent tangle. It made her sick. Simon had never kissed her, never touched her in anything but an impersonal way. She’d lived like a religious recluse for part of her life and she had nothing to show for her reticence except a broken heart and shattered pride.

“What a great haul,” Lillian enthused, breaking into her thoughts. “You sold three-fourths of them. The rest we’ll keep on display for a few weeks and see how they do.”

“I’m delighted,” Tira said, and meant it. “It’s all going to benefit the outreach program at St. Mark’s.”

“They’ll be very happy with it, I’m sure.”

Tira was walking around the gallery with the manager. Most of the crowd had left and a few stragglers were making their way to the door. She noticed the bust of Simon had a Sold sign on it, and her heart jumped.

“Who bought it?” Tira asked curtly. “It wasn’t Jill Sinclair, was it?”

“No,” Lillian assured her. “I’m not sure who bought it, but I can check, if you like.”

“No, that’s not necessary,” Tira said, clamping down hard on her curiosity. “I don’t care who bought it. I only wanted it out of my sight. I don’t care if I never see Simon Hart again!”

Lillian sighed worriedly, but she smiled when Tira glanced toward her and offered coffee.

Simon watched the late-night news broadcast from his easy chair, nursing a whiskey sour, his second in half an hour. He’d taken Jill home and adroitly avoided her coquettish invitation to stay the night. After what he’d learned from Harry Beck, he had to be by himself to think things out.

There was a brief mention of Tira’s showing at the gallery and how much money had been raised for charity. He held his breath, but nothing was said about her suicide attempt. He only hoped the newspapers would be equally willing to put the matter aside.

He sipped his drink and remembered unwillingly all the horrible things he’d thought about and said to Tira over John. How she must have suffered through that mockery of a marriage, and how horrible if she’d loved John. She must have had her illusions shattered. She was the injured party. But Simon had taken John’s side and punished her as if she was guilty for John’s death. He’d deliberately put her out of his life, forbidding her to come close, even to touch him.

He closed his eyes in anguish. She would never let him near her again, no matter how he apologized. He’d said too much, done too much. She’d loved him, and he’d savaged her. And it had all been for nothing. She’d been innocent.

He finished his drink with dead eyes. Regrets seemed to pile up in the loneliness of the night. He glanced toward the Christmas tree his enthusiastic housekeeper had set up by the window, and dreaded the whole holiday season. He’d spend Christmas alone. Tira, at least, would have the despised Charles Percy for company.

He wondered why she didn’t marry the damned man. They seemed to live in each other’s pockets. He remembered that Charles had always been her champion, bolstering her up, protecting her. Charles had been her friend when Simon had turned his back on her, so how could he blame her for preferring the younger man?

He put his glass down and got to his feet. He felt every year of his age. He was almost forty and he had nothing to show for his own life. The child he might have had was gone, along with Melia, who’d never loved him. He’d lived on illusions of love for a long time, when the reality of love had ached for him and he’d turned his back.

If he’d let Tira love him…

He groaned aloud. He might as well put that hope to rest right now. She’d hate him forever and he had only himself to blame. Perhaps he deserved her hatred. God knew, he’d hurt her enough.

He went to bed, to lie awake all night with the memory of Tira’s wounded eyes and drawn face to haunt him.

Chapter Five

Simon was not in a good mood the next morning when he went into work. Mrs. Mackey, his middle-aged secretary, stopped him at the door of his office with an urgent message to call the governor’s office as soon as he came in. He knew what it was about and he groaned inwardly. He didn’t want to be attorney general, but he knew for a fact that Wally was going to offer it to him. Wallace Bingley was a hard man to refuse, and he was a very popular governor as well as a friend. Both Simon and Tira had been actively involved in his gubernatorial campaign.

“All right, Mrs. Mack,” he murmured, smiling as he used her nickname, “get him for me.”

She grinned, because she knew, too, what was going on.

Minutes later, the call was put through to his office.

“Hi, Wally,” Simon said. “What can I do for you?”

“You know the answer to that already,” came the wry response. “Will you or won’t you?”

“I’d like a week or so to think about it,” Simon said seriously. “It’s a part of my life I hadn’t planned to take up again. I don’t like living in a goldfish bowl and I hear it’s open season on attorneys general in Texas.”

Wallace chuckled. “You don’t have as many political enemies as he does, and you’re craftier, too. All right, think about it. Take the rest of the month. But two weeks is all you’ve got. After the holidays, his resignation takes effect, and I have to appoint someone.”

“I promise to let you know by then,” Simon assured him.

“Now, to better things. Are you coming to the Starks’s Christmas party?”

“I’d have liked to, but my brothers are throwing a party down in Jacobsville and I more or less promised to show up.”

“Speaking of the ‘fearsome four,’ how are they?”

“Desperate.” Simon chuckled. “Corrigan phoned day before yesterday and announced that Dorie thinks she’s pregnant. If she is, the boys are going to have to find a new victim to make biscuits for them.”

“Why don’t they hire a cook?”

“They can’t keep one. You know why,” Simon replied dryly.

“I guess I do. He hasn’t changed.”

“He never will,” Simon agreed, referring to his brother Leopold, who was mischievous and sometimes outrageous in his treatment of housekeepers. Unlike the other two of the three remaining Hart bachelor brothers, Callaghan and Reynard, Leopold was a live wire.

“How’s Tira?” Wallace asked unexpectedly. “I hear her showing was a huge success.”

The mention of it was uncomfortable. It reminded him all too vividly of the mistakes he’d made with Tira. “I suppose she’s fine,” Simon said through his teeth.

“Er, well, sorry, I forgot. The publicity must have been hard on both of you. Not that anybody takes it seriously. It certainly won’t hurt your political chances, if that’s why you’re hesitating to accept the position.”

“It wasn’t. I’ll talk to you soon, Wally, and thanks for the offer.”

“I hope you’ll accept. I could use you.”

“I’ll let you know.”

He said goodbye and hung up, glaring out the window as he recalled what he’d learned about Tira so unexpectedly. It hurt him to talk about her now. It would take a long time for her to forgive him, if she ever did.

If only there was some way that he could talk to her, persuade her to listen to him. He’d tried phoning from home early this very morning. As soon as she’d heard his voice, she’d hung up, and the answering machine had been turned on when he tried again. There was no point in leaving a message. She was determined to wipe him right out of her life, apparently. He felt so disheartened he didn’t know what to try next.

And then he remembered Sherry Walker, a mutual friend of his and Tira’s in the past who loved opera and had season tickets in the aisle right next to his, in the dress circle. He knew that Sherry had broken a leg skiing just recently and had said that she wasn’t leaving the house until it healed completely. Perhaps, he told himself, there was a way to get Tira to talk to him after all.

The letdown after the showing made Tira miserable. She had nothing to do just now, with the holiday season in full swing, and she had no one to buy a present for except Mrs. Lester and Charles. She went from store to colorfully decorated store and watched mothers and fathers with their children and choked on her own pain. She wouldn’t have children or the big family she’d always craved. She’d live and die alone.

As she stood at a toy store window, watching the electric train sets flashing around a display of papier mâché mountains and small buildings, she wondered what it would be like to have children to buy those trains for.

A lone, salty tear ran down her cold-flushed cheek and even as she caught it on her knuckles, she felt a sudden pervasive warmth at her back.

Her heart jumped even before she looked up. She always knew when Simon was anywhere nearby. It was a sort of unwanted radar and just lately it was more painful than ever.

“Nice, aren’t they?” he asked quietly. “When I was a boy, my father bought my brothers and me a set of ‘O’ scale Lionel trains. We used to sit and run them by the hour in the dark, with all the little buildings lighted, and imagine little people living there.” He turned, resplendant in a charcoal-gray cashmere overcoat over his navy blue suit. His white shirt was spotless, like the patterned navy-and-white tie he wore with it. He looked devastating. And he was still wearing the hated prosthesis.

“Isn’t this a little out of your way?” she asked tautly.

“I like toy stores. Apparently so do you.” He searched what he could see of her averted face. Her glorious hair was in a long braid today and she was wearing a green silk pantsuit several shades darker than her eyes under her long black leather coat.

“Toys are for children,” she said coldly.

He frowned slightly. “Don’t you like children?”

She clenched her teeth and stared at the train. “What would be the point?” she asked. “I won’t have any. If you’ll excuse me…”

He moved in front of her, blocking the way. “Doesn’t Charles want a family?”

It was a pointed question, and probably taunting. Charles’s brother was still in the hospital and no better, and from what Charles had been told, he might not get better. There was a lot of damage to Gene’s heart. Charles would be taking care of Nessa, whom he loved, but Simon knew nothing about that.

“I’ve never asked Charles how he feels about children,” she said carelessly.

“Shouldn’t you? It’s an issue that needs to be resolved before two people make a firm commitment to each other.”

Was he deliberately trying to lacerate her feelings? She wouldn’t put it past him now. “Simon, none of this is any of your business,” she said in a choked tone. “Now will you please let me go?” she asked on a nervous laugh. “I have shopping to do.”

His good hand reached out to lightly touch her shoulder, but she jerked back from him as if he had a communicable disease.

“Don’t!” she said sharply. “Don’t ever do that!”

He withdrew his hand, scowling down at her. She was white in the face and barely able to breathe from the look of her.

“Just…leave me alone, okay?” She choked, and darted past him and into the thick of the holiday crowd on the sidewalk. She couldn’t bear to let her weakness for him show. Every time he touched her, she felt vibrations all the way to her toes and she couldn’t hide it. Fortunately she was away before he noticed that it wasn’t revulsion that had torn her from his side. She was spared a little of her pride.

Simon watched her go with welling sadness. It could have been so different, he thought, if he’d been less judgmental, if he’d ever bothered to ask her side of her brief marriage. But he hadn’t. He’d condemned her on the spot, and kept pushing her away for years. How could he expect to get back on any sort of friendly footing with her easily? It was going to take a long time, and from what he’d just seen, his was an uphill climb all the way. He went back to his office so dejected that Mrs. Mack asked if he needed some aspirin.

Tira brushed off the chance meeting with Simon as a coincidence and was cheered by an unexpected call from an old friend, who offered her a ticket to Turandot, her favorite opera, the next evening.

She accepted with pure pleasure. It would do her good to get out of the house and do something she enjoyed.

She put on a pretty black designer dress with diamanté straps and covered it with her flashy velvet wrap. She didn’t look half bad for an old girl, she told her reflection in the mirror. But then, she had nobody to dress up for, so what did it matter?

She hired a cab to take her downtown because finding a parking space for the visiting opera performance would be a nightmare. She stepped out of the cab into a crowd of other music lovers and some of her painful loneliness drifted away in the excitement of the performance.

The seat she’d been given was in the dress circle. She remembered so many nights being here with Simon, but his reserved seat, thank God, was empty. If she’d thought there was a chance of his being here, she’d never have come. But she knew that Simon had taken Jill to see this performance already. It was unlikely that he’d want to sit through it again.

There was a drumroll. The theater went dark. The curtain started to rise. The orchestra began to play the overture. She relaxed with her small evening bag in her lap and smiled as she anticipated a joyful experience.

And then everything went suddenly wrong. There was a movement to her left and when she turned her head, there was Simon, dashing in dark evening clothes, sitting down right beside her.

He gave her a deliberately careless glance and a curt nod and then turned his attention back to the stage.

Tira’s hands clenched on the evening bag. Simon’s shoulder brushed against hers as he shifted in his seat and she felt the touch as if it were fire all the way down her body. It had never been so bad before. She’d walked with him, talked with him, shared seats at benefits and auctions and operas and plays with him, and even though his presence had been a bittersweet delight, it had never been so physically painful to her in the past. She wanted to turn and find his mouth with her lips, she wanted to press her body to his and feel his cheek against her own. The longing so was poignant that she shivered with it.

“Cold?” he whispered.

She clenched her jaw. “Not at all,” she muttered, sliding further into her velvet wrap.

His good arm went, unobtrusively, over the back of her seat and rested there. She froze in place, barely daring to move, to breathe. It was just like the afternoon in front of the toy store. Did he know that it was torture for her to be close to him? Probably he did. He’d found a new way to get to her, to make her pay for all the terrible things he thought she’d done. She closed her eyes and groaned silently.

The opera, beautiful as it was, was forgotten. She was so miserable that she sat stiffly and heard none of it. All she could think about was how to escape.

She started to get up and Simon’s big hand caught her shoulder a little too firmly.

“Stay where you are,” he said gruffly.

She hesitated, but only for an instant. She was desperate to escape now. “I have to go to the necessary room, if you don’t mind,” she bit off near his ear.

“Oh.”

He sighed heavily and moved his arm, turning to allow her to get past him. She apologized all the way down the row. Once she made it to the aisle, she felt safe. She didn’t look back as she made her way gracefully and quickly to the back of the theater and into the lobby.

It was easy to dart out the door and hail a cab. This time of night, they were always a few of them cruising nearby. She climbed into the first one that stopped, gave him her address, and sat back with a relieved sigh. She’d done it. She was safe.

She went home more miserable than ever, changed into her nightgown and a silky white robe and let her hair down with a long sigh. She couldn’t blame her friend, Sherry, for the fiasco. How could anyone have known that Simon would decide to see the opera a second time on this particular night? But it was a cruel blow of fate. Tira had looked forward to a performance that Simon’s presence had ruined for her.

She made coffee, despite the late hour, and was sitting down in the living room to drink it when the doorbell rang.

It might be Charles, she decided. She hadn’t heard from him today, and he could have stopped by to tell her about Gene. She went to the front door and opened it without thinking.

Simon was standing there with a furious expression on his face.

She tried to close the door, but one big well-shod foot was inside it before she could even move. He let himself in and closed the door behind him.

“Well, come in, then,” she said curtly, her green eyes sparkling with bad temper as she pulled her robe closer around her.

He stared at her with open curiosity. He’d never seen her in night clothing before. The white robe emphasized her creamy skin, and the lace of her gown came barely high enough to cover the soft mounds of her breasts. With her red-gold hair loose in a glorious tangle around her shoulders, she was a picture to take a man’s breath away.

“Why did you run?” he asked softly.

Her face colored gently. “I wasn’t expecting you to be there,” she said, and it came out almost as an accusation. “You’ve already seen the performance once.”

“Yes, with Jill,” he added deliberately, watching her face closely.

She averted her eyes. He looked so good in an evening jacket, she thought miserably. His dark, wavy hair was faintly damp, as if the threatening clouds had let some rain fall. His pale gray eyes were watchful, disturbing. He’d never looked at her this way before, like a predator with its prey. It made her nervous.

“Do you want some coffee?” she asked to break the tense silence.

“If you don’t put arsenic in it.”

She glanced at him. “Don’t tempt me.”

She led him into the kitchen, got down a cup and poured a cup of coffee for him. She didn’t offer cream and sugar, because she knew he took neither.

He turned a chair around and straddled it before he picked up the cup and sipped the hot coffee, staring at her disconcertingly over the rim.

With open curiosity, she glanced at the prosthesis hand, which was resting on the back of the chair.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

She shrugged and picked up her own cup. “You used to hate that.” She indicated the artificial arm.

“I hate pity even more,” he said flatly. “It looks real enough to keep people from staring.”

“Yes,” she said. “It does look real.”

He sipped coffee. “Even if it doesn’t feel it,” he murmured dryly. He glanced up at her face and saw it color from the faint insinuation in his deep voice. “Amazing, that you can still blush, at your age,” he remarked.

It wouldn’t have been if he knew how totally innocent she still was at her advanced age, but she wasn’t sharing her most closely guarded secret with the enemy. He thought she and Charles were lovers, and she was content to let him. But that insinuation about why he used the prosthesis was embarrassing and infuriating. She hated being jealous. She had to conceal it from him.

“I don’t care how it feels, or to whom,” she said stiffly. “In fact, I have no interest whatsoever in your personal life. Not anymore.”

He drew in a long breath and let it out. “Yes, I know.” He finished his coffee in two swallows. “I miss you,” he said simply. “Nothing is the same.”

Her heart jumped but she kept her eyes down so that he wouldn’t see how much pleasure the statement gave her. “We were friends. I’m sure you have plenty of others. Including Jill.”

His intake of breath was audible. “I didn’t realize how much you and Jill disliked each other.”

“What difference does it make?” She glanced at him with a mocking smile. “I’m not part of your life.”

“You were,” he returned solemnly. “I didn’t realize how much a part of it you were, until it was too late.”

“Some things are better left alone,” she said evasively. “More coffee?”

He shook his head. “It keeps me awake. Wally called and offered me the attorney general’s post,” he said. “I’ve got two weeks to think about it.”

“You were a good attorney general,” she recalled. “You got a lot of excellent legislation through the general assembly.”

He smiled faintly, studying his coffee cup. “I lived in a goldfish bowl. I didn’t like it.”

“You have to take the bad with the good.”

He looked at her closely. “Tell me what happened the night they took you to the hospital.”

She shrugged. “I got drunk and passed out.”

“And the pistol?”

“The mouse.” She nodded toward the refrigerator. “He’s under there, I can hear him. He can’t be trapped and he’s brazen. I got drunk and decided to take him out like John Wayne, with a six-shooter. I missed.”

He chuckled softly. “I thought it was something like that. You’re not suicidal.”

“You’re the only person who thinks so. Even Dr. Gaines didn’t believe me. He wanted me to have therapy,” she scoffed.

“The newspapers had a field day. I guess Jill helped feed the fire.”

She glanced up, surprised. “You knew?”

“Not until she commented on it, when it was too late to do anything. For what it’s worth,” he added quietly, “I don’t know many people who believed the accounts in her cousin’s paper.”

She leaned back in her chair and stared at him levelly. “That I did it for love of you?” she drawled with a poisonous smile. “You hurt my feelings when you accused me of killing my husband,” she said flatly. “I was already overworked and depressed and I did something stupid. But I hope you don’t believe that I sit around nights crying in my beer because of unrequited passion for you!”

Her tone hit him on the raw. He got slowly to his feet and his eyes narrowed as he stared down at her.

She felt at a distinct disadvantage. She’d only seen Simon lose his temper once. She’d never forgotten and she didn’t want to repeat the experience.

“It’s late,” she said quickly. “I’d like to go to bed.”

“Would you really?” His pale gaze slid over her body as he said it, his voice so sensuous that it made her bare toes curl up on the spotless linoleum floor.

She didn’t trust that look. She started past him and found one of her hands suddenly trapped by his big one. He moved in, easing her hand up onto the silky fabric of his vest, inside it against the silky warmth of his body under the thin cotton shirt. She could feel the springy hair under it as well, and the hard beat of his heart as his breath whispered out at her temple, stirring her hair. She’d never been so close to him. It was as if her senses, numb for years, all came to life at once and exploded in a shattering rush of physical sensation. It frightened her and she pushed at his chest.

“Simon, let go!” she said huskily, all in a rush.

He didn’t. He couldn’t. The feel of her in his arms exceeded his wildest imaginings. She was soft and warm and she smelled of flowers. He drank in the scent and felt her begin to tremble. It went right to his head. His hand left hers and slid into her hair at her nape, clenching, so that she was helpless against him. He fought for control. He mustn’t do this. It was too soon. Far too soon.

His breath came quickly. She could hear it, feel it. His cheek brushed against hers roughly, as if he wanted to feel the very texture of her skin there. He had a faint growth of beard and it rasped a little, but it was more sensual than uncomfortable.

Her heart raced as wildly as his. She wanted to draw back, to run, but that merciless hand wasn’t unclenching. If anything, it had an even tighter grip on her long hair.

She wasn’t protesting anymore. He felt her yield and his body clenched. His cheek drew slowly against hers. She felt his mouth at the corner of her own, felt his breath as his lips parted.

“Don’t…” The little cry was all but inaudible.

“It’s too late,” he said roughly. “Years too late. God, Tira, turn your mouth against mine!”

She heard the soft, gruff command with a sense of total unreality. Her cold hands pressed against his shirt-front, but it was, as he said, already too late.

He moved his head just a fraction of an inch, and his hard, hot mouth moved completely onto hers, parting her lips as it explored, settled, demanded. There was a faint hesitation, almost of shock, as sensual electricity flashed between them. He felt her mouth tremble, tasted it, savored it, devoured it.

He groaned as his mouth began to part her lips insistently. Then his arm was around her, the one with the prosthesis holding her waist firmly while the good one lifted and traced patterns from her cheek down to her soft, pulsing throat. He could hear the tortured sound of his own breath echoed by her own.

She whimpered as she felt the full force of his mouth, felt the kiss she’d dreamed of for so many years suddenly becoming reality. He tasted of coffee. His lips were hard and demanding on her mouth, sensual, insistent. She didn’t protest. She clung to him, savoring the most ecstatic few seconds of her life as if she never expected to feel anything so powerful again.

Her response puzzled him, because it wasn’t that of an experienced woman. She permitted him to kiss her, clung to him closely, even seemed to enjoy his rough ardor; but she gave nothing back. It was almost as if she didn’t know how…

He drew back slowly. His pale, fierce eyes looked down into hers with pure sensual arrogance and more than a little curiosity.

This was a Simon she’d never seen, never known, a sensual man with expert knowledge of women that was evident even in such a relatively chaste encounter. She was afraid of him because she had no defense against that kind of ardor, and fear made her push at his chest.

He put her away from him abruptly and his arms fell to his sides. She moved back, her eyes like saucers in a flushed, feverish face, until she was leaning against the counter.

Simon watched her hungrily, his eyes on the noticeable signs of her arousal in her body under the thin silk gown, in her swollen mouth and the faint redness on her cheek where his own had rubbed against it with his faint growth of beard. He’d never dreamed that he and Tira would kindle such fires together. In all their years of careless friendship, he’d never really approached her physically until tonight. He felt as if he were drowning in uncharted waters.

Tira went slowly to the back door and opened it, unnaturally calm. She still looked gloriously beautiful, even more so because she was emotionally aroused.

He took the hint, but he paused at the open door to stare down at her averted face. She was very flustered for a woman who had a lover. He found himself bristling with sudden and unexpected jealousy of the most important man in her life.

“Lucky Charles,” he said gruffly. “Is that what he gets?”

Her eyes flashed at him. “You get out of here!” she managed to say through her tight throat. She pulled her robe tight against her throat. “Go. Just, please, go!”

He walked past her, hesitating on the doorstep, but she closed the door after him and locked it. She went back through the kitchen and down the hall to her bedroom before she dared let the tears flow. She was too shaken to try to delve into his motives for that hungry kiss. But she knew it had to be some new sort of revenge for his friend John. Well, it wouldn’t work! He was never going to hurt her again, she vowed. She only wished she hadn’t been stupid enough to let him touch her in the first place.

Simon stood outside by his car in the misting rain, letting the coolness push away the flaring heat of his body. He shuddered as he leaned his forehead against the cold roof of the car and thanked God he’d managed to get out of there before he did something even more stupid than he already had.

Tira had submitted. He could have had her. He was barely able to draw back at all. What a revelation that had been, that a woman he’d known for years should be able to arouse such instant, sweeping passion in him. Even Melia hadn’t had such a profound effect on him, in the days when he’d thought he loved her.

He hadn’t meant to touch her. But her body, her exquisite body, in that thin robe and gown had driven him right over the edge. He still had the taste of her soft, sweet lips on his mouth, he could still feel her pressed completely to him. It was killing him!

He clenched his hand and forced himself to breathe slowly until he began to relax. At least she hadn’t seen him helpless like this. If she knew how vulnerable he was, she might feel like a little revenge. He couldn’t blame her, but his pride wouldn’t stand it. She might decide to seduce him and then keep him dangling. That would be the cruelest blow of all, when he knew she was Charles Percy’s lover. He had sick visions of Tira telling him everything Simon had done to her and laughing about how easily she’d knocked him off balance. Charles was Tira’s lover. Her lover. God, the thought of it made him sick!

He could see why Charles couldn’t keep away from her. It made him bitter to realize that he could probably have cut Charles out years ago if he hadn’t been so blind and prejudiced. Tira could have been his. But instead, she was Charles’s, and she could only hate Simon now for the treatment he’d dealt out to her. He couldn’t imagine her still loving him, even if he had taunted her with it to salvage what was left of his pride.

He got into his car finally and drove away in a roar of fury. Damn her for making him lose his head, he thought, refusing to remember that he’d started the whole damned thing. And damn him for letting her do it!

Chapter Six

After consuming far more whiskey than he should have the night before, Simon awoke with vivid memories of Tira in his arms and groaned heavily. He’d blown it, all over again. He didn’t know how he was going to smooth things over this time. Jill called and invited herself to lunch with him, fishing for clues to his unusual bad humor. He mumbled something about going to the opera and having an argument with Tira, but offered no details at all. She asked him if he’d expected Tira to be there, and he brushed off further questions, pleading work.

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