'Of course it is.' He leaned his elbows on the table edge and met her eyes directly. 'Nancy and Beth haven't gotten along well at all for a couple of years now. Nancy is what you might call an overprotective mother, unwilling to let her birdling out of the nest for the first time. They have terrible fights, and the result of the last one was that Beth ran away from home. She was gone for three days, and when we found her it was decided it'd be best if she tried living with me for a while. And so it seems, I've been granted a second chance to be a father.'
'You mean she might stay? Indefinitely?'
'If things work out right. If she's happier here. If I can keep her on the straight and narrow.'
Her dark eyes lifted to his. 'And can you?'
she asked in a near whisper. 279
He studied her with a loving expression in his eyes. 'At this moment, Rachel, I feel as if there's nothing in this world I can't do.'
The elation caused by his words lasted through the main course, which was beef Stroganoff. He ate his without any rice, and uncomplainingly drank lime water without so much as a grimace. The wine or champagne she'd expected was nowhere in evidence.
He talked some more about Beth, asked Rachel's advice on buying school clothes, which led to a discussion about her own store. She entertained him with humorous tales of the idiosyncrasies of her various customers, then asked him about his development corporation.
They ran out of things to talk about and found themselves staring at each other. Out of the blue Rachel blurted, 'I like your new glasses much better than the old ones.'
He grinned, but remained as before, bracing his jaw on one hand. 'Oh, do you?' And she knew without being told that he'd changed them because of her.
She felt color washing upward and knew a sense of expanding sexual awareness between them. She
dropped her eyes to the banana cream pie on her plate, but they wandered from it to his coffee cup and the cigarette crooked in dark tapered fingers that toyed with the cup handle while his unwavering gaze rested on her.
'Aren't you having any dessert?' she asked, letting her eyes skip up to his.
He answered simply, 'No, not tonight.'
And suddenly she realized how serious he was about his reform, and that he had not undertaken it solely because of Beth coming back to live with him. She, Rachel, had laid down parameters and he was striving to fit himself into them. And it was working. A rush of blood thrummed through her body, bringing again that sensual pounding deep in her vitals. As untamed as their longing for each other had been when they were teenagers, it seemed insipid compared to this mature reaction she was feeling for him. Yet he lounged in his chair with all the indolence of a sated maharaja, studying her closely while she fidgeted with the cloth of her skirt and grew hotter beneath his scrutiny.
Then Georgine took away their dessert plates and said if there wasn't anything more she was going to bed, and the gentle bump of her footsteps
sounded up the carpeted stairs before all was 281 still.
'She lives here, too?' Rachel asked, wide-eyed.
Tommy Lee fingered the rim of his coffee cup while studying her through the smoke that lifted between them. 'Yes, in one of the guest rooms.'
'Oh.' So, he could no longer bring his women to that sprawling sofa.
'Weekdays,' he added, then snuffed out his cigarette.
'Oh,' she said again inanely, and wondered if he would ever try to get her onto that sofa with him. She thanked her lucky stars it couldn't possibly happen tonight with Georgine asleep upstairs and Beth probably due back any minute.
'Would you like to take your coffee into the living room?' he asked, as if reading her mind and deciding to tease her.
Rachel twitched and her eyes grew rounder. 'Oh…' She glanced skittishly at a corner of the sofa visible beyond the fireplace. 'All right,' she added belatedly, but missed the grin on Tommy Lee's face as he watched
her peruse the field of ottomans fit for a harem.
But he pushed the ottomans back, and they took separate places on the sofa with a decorous space between them, and he was everything he'd promised to be: the perfect gentleman.
And Rachel was the slightest bit disappointed.
They headed back to town before Beth returned home, and all the way Tommy Lee smoked continuously, the only indication that he might be as tense as she. He had kept his promise all evening, never saying or doing anything untoward. By now it was driving her crazy. She turned to study his face, illuminated by the pale dash lights, which reflected from his lenses and lit his knuckles on the wheel. He glanced her way. Her eyes veered out the side window, then closed on the thought that it had been years and years since she had become this aroused by merely looking at a man.
There could be no question that the most sensible way to end the evening would be with a graceful, polite parting. But being sensible was far from her mind, as she was sure it was from Tommy Lee's. There was no denying he was
tempting, so tempting that these hours with him 283 had been a study in control.
They were wheeling slowly through the city streets when Rachel drew a deep breath to ask, 'Tommy Lee, who is Bitsy?'
It was some time before he answered, 'Bitsy is a woman I was seeing.'
'Was?' Afraid to look at him, she trained her eyes on the path of the headlights.
'Yes, was. She keeps calling and suggesting that we get together again, but I seem to have lost my taste for other women lately.' He drew deeply on his cigarette before going on. 'There's no use denying it, Rachel-there've been a lot of them. I suppose that bothers you.'
It did. It made her mentally step back a pace when she wanted to move nearer. But beneath her reservation a disturbing tingle of jealousy made her reply defensively, 'Should it?'
'Does it?' he shot back.
The moment sizzled with their acute absorption in each other as their eyes met and clashed; then she forced hers toward the windshield again. 'Yes, it does. But it's more a disappointment than anything else.'
'I didn't know I had the power to disappoint you.'
'Well, you do.'
'Why?'
'Because.' She searched for a way to express it. 'Because we were children together, good friends even before we became lovers, and I wanted you to remain that… that hero you'd always been for me. When rumors spread about you and yet another woman, I used to get so… so angry with you, I'd want to rap you on the skull and knock some sense into your head!' He laughed again and immediately she scolded, 'Don't you dare laugh. You don't know what you put me through. Somehow I always ended up in a position of having to either defend or blame, and I didn't want to do either.'
He grinned her way beguilingly. 'And which did you do?'
She turned a snooty nose in the air. 'None of your business.'
'All right. Fair enough. So, what about Marshall True?'
Her head snapped around. 'More-Marshall?' Her face burned at the memory of her last confrontation with Marshall.
'The town has the two of you linked 285 together. Surely you know that.'
'I'm not seeing Marshall anymore.'
'Oh?' His eyes flashed over her, but she looked straight ahead.
'Marshall made a pass at me that I didn't like at all.'
'You don't like it when a man makes a pass at you?' he questioned quietly.
She picked at her purse catch with a thumbnail. 'I didn't like it when Marshall made a pass at me.'
Just at that moment they reached Rachel's house and he drew up at the curb beneath the deep, shielding branches of the magnolia, eased the car into neutral, and turned on the parking lights, then sat back smoking. 'I take that to mean you never had an affair while you were married to Owen.'
She was shocked by his words, appalled that he might even think her capable of such a thing. 'No,
