Chapter 46


Here we are. Kingdom City on the left," Ernest said as he stuck his arm out the window, giving a hand signal for a left turn. "This is Main Street."
A thrill went through Diana. This was Cole's home, and she tried to absorb everything about it. The downtown district comprised ten blocks of businesses and stores, including the Capitol Theater in the center, which was flanked by a drugstore and a hardware store. Across the street was The Hard Luck Café, a Farmers Insurance agency, the Kingdom City Bank, a bakery, and three variety stores that seemed to carry everything from tape recorders to horse saddles.
Ernest let her off at The Hard Luck Café to use their pay phone, but to Diana's disappointment, Cal's line was still busy. She'd already ascertained that Kingdom City had a taxi service, so she resigned herself to that.
As they pulled up at a stop sign in front of Wilson's Feed and Grain, however, Ernest shifted his toothpick to the other side of his jaw. "You got any other ideas about how to get where you're going?"
"Yes, I'm going to take a taxi."
"It's busted." As proof, he nodded meaningfully toward the parking lot in front of Gus's Repair Shop, which was nearly blockaded by vehicles waiting to be repaired. In the front row, parked parallel to the curb, Diana saw a white Mercury sedan with its hood up and the word TAXI printed in black on the door.
Ernest had already made it clear that he wasn't available to take her to Jeffersonville, so at the moment, Diana's choices seemed to be limited to hitchhiking or standing on a corner with a fistful of money in her hand, asking passing vehicles to give her a ride. Neither one seemed safe. "Ernest," she said in a voice of helpless femininity, "I'm really desperate, and I just know you can think of something. Is there someone around here who would rent their car to me?"
"Nope."
"I'd be willing to pay very generously."
Until then, Ernest had not seemed to fully comprehend the magnitude of the problem or to be personally concerned with finding a solution, but at the words "pay" and "generously," his entire demeanor underwent a distinct change. "How much does a regular rented car cost you?" he asked, slanting her a speculative sideways glance.
Diana remembered signing a charge slip for a Lincoln Town Car she'd rented in Dallas for several days. "Two or three hundred dollars, I think. Why? Have you thought of a car I could rent?"
"I know just the ticket!" he announced with startling enthusiasm as he slammed down on the clutch and brake pedals, and swung the old truck into Gus's repair yard, stopping behind the taxi and blocking part of the driveway with his back fender. "I'll go see what kind of deal I can make for you."
Diana was so grateful she nearly patted his arm as he slid out of the truck, leaving the door swinging on its hinge.
In a gratifyingly short time, a man emerged from the cinder-block building. He was wearing a light blue shirt and dark blue work pants with a grimy rag dangling out of a back pocket. The oval patch on his shirt pocket proclaimed in red letters that he was "Gus." As he walked, he pulled the rag from his pants and began wiping his hands. "Pleased to meet you, miss," Gus said a little uneasily. "Ernest says you're interested in the Ford, and he's bringing it around."
From the rear of the building, Diana heard an engine crank followed by a mechanical cough and sputter, then silence. Another attempt to start it brought success, and Diana opened her purse, hoping Gus took credit cards. "There he is," Gus said.
Laughter and horror left Diana gaping at a rusted orange pickup truck that was, if possible, in even worse shape than the blue truck she'd ridden in to Kingdom City. It was coated in a thick layer of dirt, with the front bumper tied on with a rope and the passenger window held together with duct tape. Speechless, she watched Ernest climb out of the truck, his expression pleased. "You're joking," she told him. "What am I supposed to do with that?"
"You buy it!" Ernest exclaimed as if that should have been obvious as well as exciting. Stretching his arms out, he lifted his hands palms up in a gesture of absolute jubilation. "You buy it for five hundred bucks; then you keep it or sell it back when you leave."
Diana knew she was trapped, but she couldn't believe this was her only solution, and the idea of paying five hundred hard-earned dollars for a rusty, filthy, disreputable pile of orange junk was almost more than she could bear. "I can't believe that thing is worth five hundred dollars."
"She's solid as a rock," Ernest said, displaying a remarkable ability to overlook details such as loose bumpers, a headlight that was hanging by its electrical wires, and the taped-together glass.
Diana had no choice and she knew it. "I'll take it," she said in a small, miserable voice, reaching into her purse for her credit card. Still silent, Gus took the card and walked into the shop. He returned a few minutes later with a charge slip for her to sign and a handful of cash. While Diana signed the ticket, Ernest pitched her suitcases into the back of the orange derelict in the driveway; then he came around to make certain the proceedings were successfully concluded. "That does it, then," he said, and to Diana's confusion, she saw him hold out his hand to Gus, who then counted out $490 in bills into it.
"Where's my other ten bucks?" Ernest said, scowling.
"You still owed me for that tire."
Belatedly sensing a scam, Diana rounded on both men. Since Gus had never urged her to buy the damned truck in any way, she put the blame solely on Ernest and shifted her narrowed gaze to his impenitent, leathery face. "Do you mean to tell me," she said in a low, indignant voice, "that you just managed to foist your own car off on me?"
"Sure did," he said with a grin. Then he added insult to injury by nudging her in the side and confiding, "I'd have taken two hundred and fifty dollars and been glad to get it."
Inwardly humbled, Diana looked him straight in the eye and told the larcenous old man a lie she hoped would keep him awake nights. "Yes, but I'd have paid a thousand dollars." The expression of dismay on his face was so comical and so satisfying that Diana's temper cooled considerably even before she heard Gus's choked laugh.
Ernest followed her around to the driver's door and held it open while Diana climbed gingerly onto a filthy, torn, vinyl seat; then he closed the door for her. The steering wheel seemed enormous, but Diana got a good grip on it; then she felt for the brake pedal with her toe and the gearshift with her hand. Her foot encountered three pedals, not two, and when she looked at the gear lever, she saw a diagram instead of nice little letters indicating Drive, Park, and Reverse. A stick shift. Her heart sank.
"Betcha can't handle a standard transmission, can you?"
"Certainly," Diana lied, looking over her shoulder while her heart bumped nervously. The only way out of the crowded lot was to back down the driveway, which sloped downward to the street. Pretending to wait for two mothers carrying babies to walk behind and past her, Diana glanced at the diagram and tried to remember the trick associated with using the clutch and the brake that Doug had taught her when she was sixteen.
Satisfied that no one was behind her, she shoved at the clutch and yanked on the gearshift, wincing at the metallic screech of gears; then she released the clutch with a jolt that made the truck shake and she slammed down on the accelerator. As the truck careened backward and gathered speed, Diana steered frantically, and Gus yelled a warning over Ernest's roar of laughter, but somehow the truck landed safely on the street, pointed in the opposite direction. Pride and common sense made Diana decide to circle the block, rather than turn it around.

Chapter 47


When the truck actually held together for five full miles, Diana relaxed enough to take note of the scenery. This was a part of Texas she rarely saw but that everyone who watched westerns automatically identified with the state. Behind miles of fencing that separated vast pastures from winding county roads, newborn calves frolicked beside their mothers and gangly foals with flying tails scampered in short bursts on unsteady legs while watchful mares looked on.
She could imagine how it would look in springtime, when the bluebonnets and buttercups and Indian paintbrush would burst into bloom, spreading their blossoms like a fluffy patchwork quilt over the rumpled hills and shallow valleys.
She had to stop once at a filling station to make certain she hadn't passed the turnoff to Cal's house, because the addresses were usually painted on rural mailboxes that were partially covered by tall grass.
Up ahead, she saw what had to be the right place, and she gingerly slowed the truck, praying it wouldn't die when she navigated the turn. It backfired when she slowed down, and the gears screeched horribly when she tried to shift into a different gear, but she made the turn. Once she had done that, she was confronted with a new series of problems in the form of a hilly gravel drive a mile long that twisted in and out among trees that no one had wanted to cut down apparently, and then rose sharply again.
 
"She should be here any minute," Cole told Cal, glancing at his watch. "If she's not, I'm going to go look for her." He'd called his office, learned that Diana was on her way, armed only with Cal's address, and he'd phoned the airfield immediately. The woman who worked there said Diana had arrived and gotten a ride with a local man who, she assured Cole, was "pretty respectable."
"You should have gone after her," Cal told him worriedly. "You can't have a wife wandering over the countryside, lost and alone. That's no way to treat a wife."
"If I knew which road the man she's with had taken, I would try to intercept her," Cole explained patiently, surprised by the signs of unprecedented nervousness his uncle had been exhibiting ever since he realized Diana was on her way.
Cal's next words were interrupted by a loud boom that cracked like thunder from the direction of the driveway. "What the hell is that?" he said, following quickly after Cole, who was already heading for the front porch.
"I assume it's Diana's ride," Cole said, staring in disbelief at an orange pickup truck with a loose bumper and a drooping headlight that was slowly lurching its way toward them, accompanied by the rhythmic screech of grinding gears and deafening backfires.
Cal watched for a moment, but he was more concerned with making a good first impression on his new niece. He smoothed his hair back carefully at the temples with both hands, squared his shoulders, and checked his tie. "Cole," he said with a strange hesitation in his voice, "do you think Diana will like me?"
Surprised and touched by his uncle's unprecedented nervous uncertainty, Cole said with absolute certainty, "Diana will love you."
Satisfied, Cal directed his attention to the approaching vehicle just as it gave one more earsplitting screech and then shot forward in a burst of speed. "Looks like he finally found second gear." Squinting, he added, "Can you tell if Diana's with him?"
Cole was younger and his eyes were better. As the truck reached the level spot that led directly to the front door, Cole stared with widened eyes at the face of his wife. "It's Diana," he uttered, hurrying down the porch steps to the drive with Cal right at his heels.
When they stepped out in front of her, Diana was so glad to see them that she mixed up the clutch with the brake and stepped down on the accelerator.
"Look out!" Cole shouted, jumping out of her path and dragging Cal with him. The truck missed them by inches, rolled to a stop, backfired, and died.
Shaking with fear at having nearly run over both men, Diana dropped her forehead on the steering wheel while Cole ran around the truck to help her out. She straightened just as he grabbed the handle to open her door. "Who owns this pile of sh—junk?" Cole demanded. The door handle came off in his hand, and he reached through the open window, groping for the handle on the interior.
He got hold of it, yanked the door open, and held his hand out to Diana to help her down. Like the elegant young woman she was, his wife accepted his hand, daintily removed her derriere from a tear in the vinyl seat as deep as a canyon, and then gracefully alighted.
Pausing for a brief moment to brush the dirt off her clothes, she flashed a warm smile at Cal, who was standing at Cole's elbow; then she looked at Cole with a sheepish smile. "We do."
Cal gave a sharp bark of laughter.
 
"This is my house," Cal explained, ushering her in the front door and insisting that she sit on his chair because it was the most comfortable; then he rushed off to the kitchen to get her a glass of fresh lemonade. Neat stacks of magazines and books on a vast array of topics were everywhere, and on the coffee table, in plain view, he had carefully placed the latest copy of Foster's Beautiful Living.
Diana could hardly believe that the gallant, endearing man who beamed at her as if she were the sunshine of his life was the same ferociously determined man who had forced his powerful nephew into marriage by blackmailing him with half of his own corporation—albeit for "Cole's own good."
"We'll just stay here for a little while," he explained, handing her a glass of lemonade and then standing in front of her as if she might need help drinking it. Finally, apparently satisfied that she could handle it, he sat down across from her on the sofa beside Cole and continued with the schedule for the day. "In a little bit, we'll go over to the other house. We'll eat supper there, and then you and Cole will stay there and I'll come back here."
Diana had come to adore him in less than five minutes. "Oh, but I thought we were going to stay with you," she said, shooting a confused look at Cole, "so we could get to know each other while I'm here."
"The other house is right here on the ranch," Cal assured her, positively beaming with pleasure that she wanted to see more of him.
After showing her around his home, he decreed that it was time to leave.
 
Cal's house was on flat ground in a wide clearing, situated for convenience not the view, but the other house, a mile further down the road and around a sharp bend, was positioned for view and setting, and it had both. "How beautiful!" Diana exclaimed as she slid out of Cole's station wagon.
Perched on the edge of a wooded hilltop that faced out across a shallow valley was a cozy house of stone and rough-cut cedar surrounded on three sides by a huge cantilevered deck that hung suspended in midair over the edge of the hill. Inside, it was rustic, with a huge fireplace at one end and rows of sliding doors at the other that opened onto the deck. Two large bedrooms opened off the living room, and the kitchen looked out over the hills in the opposite direction from Cal's house.
"This is Letty," Cole said fondly, leading a plump woman with her hair pulled back in a bun out of the kitchen and into the living room. Letty seemed almost as happy to know Diana as Cal was.
"Supper will be at six," she said, already retreating back into the kitchen. "It is nothing fancy. And nothing like the beautiful pictures in your magazine, either."
"I'm not much of a cook," Diana admitted.
"Good," she replied with a twinkle in her eyes.
Diana turned around and through the doorway saw Cole putting her suitcases at the foot of a king-size bed. He turned and caught her watching him, and a bolt of electricity seemed to shoot from his body straight into hers. He'd put his arm around her shoulders in a casually possessive gesture when he'd introduced her to Cal. But nothing in that gesture, or anything else he'd done, indicated what he felt about whether this was going to be a honeymoon or not.
She wasn't certain if that meant he took for granted that it was, or that he wasn't overly concerned one way or another.
All that began to change when dinner was over.

Chapter 48


Sunset had painted the sky in wild streaks of lavender, purple, and red by the time they'd finished dinner and Letty had cleared away the plates.
The initial nervousness that Cal had displayed when she first got there had vanished. In its place was the assumption that she was part of the family and always would be. Besides making Diana feel like a fraud, it led to several questions about motherhood, such as how she would run her company and still have a baby. To make matters worse, she had the distinct feeling that Cal was aware that she'd not considered any of that and was suspicious about why not.
Annoyingly, Cole didn't seem to suffer any of her guilt or self-consciousness. In fact, he was making her uncomfortable, and she had a feeling he was doing it deliberately. While appearing to pay attention to the conversation, his heavy-lidded dark silver eyes were making a leisurely appraisal of her features that made Diana self-consciously reach up to lift a strand of hair off her cheek.
He was leaning back in his chair with his long legs stretched out in front of him and his feet crossed at the ankles, ignoring the sunset in favor of her. Without moving a muscle or saying a word, he was emanating an aura of predatory virility that was tangible enough to cut with a knife.
And to cap everything off, both men were completely unself-conscious about other things that made Diana acutely uneasy, things that seemed to creep into the conversation with nerve-racking regularity. Diana's simple compliment about the hand-wrought-iron table they were sitting at led Cal to provide her with the information that Cole had actually had a king-size bed shipped down four days ago to replace the double-size one that had been in the bedroom. And then he remarked that among other new furniture that had arrived by truck was the big L-shaped sofa in the living room, which had more pillows on it than any three beds he'd ever seen.
When she said that she thought the landscaping around the house was very pretty, she discovered that Cole had had an army of workmen up there manicuring the place until an hour before she arrived. "It wasn't fit to bring a bride to," Cal informed her. Then he tipped his head to a double chaise longue on the deck a few yards away. "Cole had that sent down from Dallas for your stay," he confided. "I've never seen the likes of it, have you?"
She turned and looked at the double chaise and nodded with a smile. "Once before."
"Shows you what I know. Looked to me like he was putting a bed right there on the front porch! I've seen beds on porches before," he joked, "but they usually have box springs tossed out beside them, along with an old wringer-washer."
Diana's heart jumped. Maybe it did look like a bed.
"Cal," Cole said mildly.
Diana thought his objection to the topic of beds too late and too little.
If she agreed to "honeymooning" here, which she had rather expected to do, she'd envisioned something that started a little later and progressed a little slower.
At exactly 8:30 Cole looked at Cal and Cal looked at his watch, quickly stood up, and announced, "Well, it's time I get back to work." Since he didn't have work, and since it was only now fully dark, Diana leapt to the obvious conclusion that Cole thought it was time to use one of the many new, fully padded, horizontal surfaces in the house, and Cal wanted them to get busy making him a great-great-nephew.
Diana stood up almost as abruptly as he did. "I think I'll take a shower and change into something… cleaner!"
Cole watched her back through the door, puzzled by her reaction to being alone with him. He was certain she intended to go to bed with him. He was fairly certain…
He wasn't certain at all.
A few minutes later, he went into the kitchen for a glass of iced tea and noticed his bedroom door was open. One of her suitcases was missing and the bathroom she was using was the one in the second bedroom. He tipped the pitcher up, considering the ramifications of that. Separate bathrooms in Diana's circle, and his own now, were a practical and convenient accoutrement. She was being civilized and sophisticated. Or shy. Or evasive.
Normally, Cole could size up the most complex situations in a matter of minutes. Tonight, he couldn't seem to second-guess the intentions of his own wife. Frowning, he went into his bedroom, intending to take a shower. He pulled off his shirt and belatedly remembered he'd taken a shower an hour before she got here. Now he was acting like a nervous bride.
He went back to the kitchen, dumped out the iced tea, and decided to have a drink instead. He carried it onto the porch and stretched out on the double chaise.
He knew damned well Diana wanted him.
They were attracted to each other. Wildly attracted.
He'd offered to let her make the decision. She was either having a hard time making one—or she'd made one he wasn't going to like and was trying to avoid telling him.
The stars came out, one by one, and the sky darkened until they twinkled like bright jeweled paths across the sky.
In the guest bedroom, Diana finished brushing her hair at the dresser and debated over what to wear. It was really too early to be in a robe, not to mention transparently suggestive. She decided to put on a pair of white shorts and a bright green silk shirt instead. Cole was probably expecting her to appear in something filmy and revealing. A negligee. Something fragile and lacy.
She put on a touch of lipstick and thought of Cole expecting a replay of their wedding night, only much more so, and her hand trembled so hard she dropped the lipstick tube. She'd been so intoxicated then that she hadn't known where, or who, she was, but she knew now, and her stomach cramped with nervous uncertainty.
What was she doing, letting herself in for this! She picked up the brush and brushed her hair again. Husband or not, Cole was a stranger. An unknown entity who stepped over barriers the size of mountains without qualm or difficulty and showed no concern for repercussions.
She was concerned enough for both of them. There was no point in denying that after he had left Houston, she had thought of him a thousand times a day, and every thought was sweeter than the last one. And there was no denying that the idea of "honeymooning" here with him had made her knees weak and still did. But now that she was here, there was something wrong with the picture. Although they were legally married, it was clearly understood between them that was temporary. So what Cole had actually suggested in Houston was that they compound and complicate the farce by indulging in an orgy of sex for a week.
When he presented the idea, he had offered it as a suggestion and left the decision to her. She had decided to do it.
Now that she was here, it was obvious he'd made assumptions, acted on them, and intended to have things his way. She decided not to do it. At least, certainly not tonight.
She was not going to relinquish control. She liked being in control of her life, her present, her future, and she normally handled it very well. Except when Cole got involved, and then he turned everything upside down. It was a pattern that needed to stop. It was a lesson he needed to learn.
Emboldened by that resolve, Diana put the hairbrush on the dresser and left the guest bedroom.
The rest of the house was dark, but the light was on in Cole's room, and she assumed he was showering, so she decided to wait for him on the porch.
She walked outside and closed the door behind her, then she walked over to the railing, looking out at the hills bathed in moonlight. She'd been standing there a full minute when a low-pitched, seductive voice said, "Would you like to join me?"
Diana whirled around. He was stretched out on the longue, wearing loafers and pants, but his chest was bare, and in her state of mind, the fact that he'd taken off his shirt struck Diana as a deliberately provocative maneuver.
Her gaze riveted on the bronzed skin that covered an acre of muscled chest and sinewed shoulders; then it shifted nervously to his eyes. He wanted her to join him on the chaise. He'd been out here waiting for her. Her treacherous heart began to beat a little faster.
Very firmly, Diana reminded herself of her decision. "I don't think so," she said with a smile that made her refusal seem, unintentionally but distinctly, flippant and blasé. Unable to fix that, she stayed with it. "I think I'll get a glass of lemonade, though."
As she walked past Cole's chaise, he caught her hand and forced her to stop and turn. In silence, he studied her face as if he were searching for an answer, and while she was distracted by that, he was slowly pulling her forward. His tone was so gentle that it disturbed her balance as much as his action. "Don't play games with me, Kitten." He took her other arm and tugged.
Diana landed on top of him, her forehead at his chin, his left hand on her upper arm. Bracing her palms beside his shoulders, she levered her chest off of his and stared at him in irate disbelief. His right hand lifted, and his knuckles stroked softly up her bare arm in a patient caress while his gaze held hers. The message in those compelling gray eyes was as clear as if he were whispering it: Make up your mind.
Diana gazed at the sensual mouth only inches from hers. Inviting mouth. Tender smile. Make up your mind.
Without volition, her lips moved closer to his, and her heart began to race with excitement. Decide.
Her eyes drifted closed, and her breath came out in a sigh. She kissed him softly and felt his lips answer, moving on hers, moving with them, while his hands slid up her arms and tightened. She broke the kiss, and he let her, but the body beneath hers was hardening and the gray eyes were beginning to smolder. He laid his palm against her cheek, slowing running it back, curving it around her nape, urging her closer. Again.
Her arms went weak, and her breasts flattened against his hard chest as his mouth opened on hers in a deep, hungry kiss. His fingers shoved into her hair, holding her mouth imprisoned, while his arm slanted over her hips and he rolled her onto her side, leaning over her.
His tongue tasted and urged and slowly drove into her mouth while his thighs pressed into her. Rigid thighs. Demanding.
Her hands pressed him closer; her body strained nearer. He tore his mouth from hers long enough to unbutton her shirt and spread it open, and what he saw nudged him another step closer to the edge. Pert nipples hardened to tight buds tipped two exquisite pale globes that were in perfect proportion to the rest of her.
He touched the nipple and it tightened more. He bent his head and kissed it, and she moaned aloud and arched her back in a burst of pleasure that startled him with its intensity. Trying to slow himself down, he kissed the other nipple, drawing it into his mouth, and her fingers tightened reflexively in his hair, her back arching higher.
Stimulated by the expression of her pleasure, his body surged in an urgent desire to do more. With an effort, he made himself slow down and rolled her back on top of him. To his surprise, she pulled her shirt closed and started to get up. He stopped her at the exact moment when she was straddling his erection.
Diana thought she knew exactly why he'd slowed down. She bent her head to avoid his gaze and self-consciously started to button her shirt over her small breasts.
A hoarse word stilled her fingers. "Don't!"
Her gaze snapped to his, her hands holding the edges of her shirt closed. Cole pulled her hands away so that he could see. "Beautiful," he whispered, spreading her shirt all the way off her shoulders. He cupped his palms over her breasts, caressing them.
Diana's heart began to thunder with a mixture of shock, embarrassment, and exquisite pleasure.
Cole was so attuned to her that his own heart began to hammer, and he suddenly realized that he was actually feeling her reactions in his body. He rubbed his thumbs over her nipples and his own nipples hardened. "Touch me," he whispered to her, half afraid of what would happen when she did.
The shaken sound of his voice made Diana's hands tremble as she bent low over him and covered his nipple with her lips, teasing it with her tongue. When he drew in his breath sharply, Diana felt the sudden jerk of his hips beneath her as if he were inside her, and suddenly she was yanked forward onto the chaise and immediately was pinned beneath him. Together they were caressing hands and eager mouths and urgent limbs shedding clothes to give more pleasure.
Her breasts were beautiful, his body a sculpture, he was master, he was enslaved. His groan was her music and her sigh his benediction. They clung together unmoving, while her body welcomed the slow thrusting heat of him, and what began as a gentle rocking became fierce, demanding thrusts. She strained toward him in trembling need and he drove into her again and again in a desperate desire to take her with him all the way. She cried out and held him when she found it, and he joined her there.
Afterward, as she lay crushed tightly in his arms, the tears falling softly on his chest were hers. He felt them there as he stared beyond, where stars once bright and clear wavered and shimmered before gray eyes now strangely blurry.
He closed his eyes and knelt beneath the heavens, head bowed.
He offered bargains, bribes, and promises.
And when no answer came, he whispered fiercely, "Please."
He laid his hand against her wet cheek; she turned her face into his palm. "I love you," she whispered. He was blessed.
 
Lying in the king-size bed with her head resting on his chest, Diana smiled in the darkness as she waited for Cole to say something. She had a very strong suspicion he was, at that very moment, calmly reinventing the rest of her life, and probably with the same forcefulness and speed he had handled matters thus far.
She was intensely curious as to how he would try to navigate around some of the obstacles to their fledgling marriage. He loved her and she loved him, which was all that truly mattered, but there were some little complications. She counted them off in her mind:
She lived in Houston and ran a big business there.
He lived in Dallas and ran an even bigger business there.
She wanted to bear his children.
He didn't want children.
Obviously, she decided as she traced the line of a hard muscle over his rib cage, this was going to take more than navigation; it was going to take a miracle.
Closing her eyes, she decided to count on one more of those. She dozed, and when she awoke a few minutes later, the little lamp on the night table was on. His fingers were threaded through hers and he was holding her hand. "I've been thinking," he said tenderly, "and I've arrived at some conclusions."
She smiled to herself at that unsurprising announcement. She could not seem to stop smiling. Turning her face up to his, she braced herself to find out how far he'd taken the decision-making process without consulting her.
"We have a logistics problem," Cole began. He saw her eyes begin to shine with laughter, and he cuddled her closer. He could not be close enough to her. "I think you'll have to move to Dallas, darling. I can't move Unified to Houston. It's a bad idea for several reasons, not to mention fiscally suicidal."
She feigned a sigh. "Under the terms of our original agreement, we're to maintain separate residences in the two cities. That was the deal."
Cole thought she was serious. "That's impossible."
"That was our agreement. We had an iron-clad verbal agreement."
He brushed that aside with amused male arrogance. "You can't have an iron-clad verbal agreement. It's a complete contradiction in terms."
"So all bets are off?"
Cole looked down sharply, studying the deceptive innocence of wide jade eyes fringed in long russet lashes beneath gracefully winged brows. "Diana," he whispered, "you are beautiful. And you are getting at something. What is it?"
"I would be willing to move the administrative and business divisions of Foster Enterprises to Dallas and leave the art and production staff in Houston under Corey."
"Then that settles everything," he said with satisfaction, bending his head to kiss her. His body was already thrilling to the idea of making love to her again.
She splayed her fingers and ran her hand down the plane of his stomach, her eyes turning hopeful and full of appeal.
"Whatever it is you're asking for with that look in your eyes," Cole said mildly, "the answer is yes."
"I'm asking for babies. Your babies."
He tipped his chin down, frowning warily. "How many?"
Her smile dawned like sunshine, her eyes sparkled like the eight-carat oval diamond he'd slipped on her finger while she dozed. He'd brought the ring here, hoping this would happen. No, he'd never dared to hope this would happen.
"I'd like three children," she replied.
"One," he countered sternly.
She looked at him. "I'll give you Park Place and Boardwalk and all my rental properties if I can have two."
"Done!" he said with a chuckle.

Chapter 49


Cal's front door was open, so Diana went on inside. Cole had let her sleep late and had left her a note to come down to Cal's when she was up. She could hear Cal talking to Cole in the kitchen while Letty served breakfast. "Was I wrong not to tell you before?"
"No," Cole said flatly. "And now that you've told me, I couldn't care less."
Cal sounded relieved. "Do you mind doing those errands for me? You could stop by the old place and see if there's anything you want. It's on your way."
Diana walked into the kitchen, just as Cole added in a chilly voice, "I remember where it is."
They were sitting at the table, and Cal gave her a quick smile of greeting; then he returned his full attention to the discussion under way. Diana moved around the table to help Letty carry plates of scrambled eggs and biscuits smothered with white country gravy to the table. "You remember where what is?" she asked.
"My ancestral home." There was a snide, toneless quality to his voice when he said that, and Diana noticed it as she put one hand on his shoulder and leaned around him with his plate. "I'll go with you. I'd love to see it."
"No!" he said so sharply that Diana paused as she put the plate in front of him. He apologized for his tone by reaching up and catching her hand, pressing it to his shoulder for a moment.
The two men waited until Diana slid into her chair, then Cal picked up his cause again, and Diana had a glimpse of where Cole had gotten his tenacity. "If you'd read something besides financial statements and stock prospectuses once in a while, you'd know about grieving and getting resolution after a loss. Deal with it now or deal with it later, that's what the psychologists say. It's right there in the living room in books and magazine articles written by the experts."
"Last year," Cole said wryly to Diana, "he was on a campaign to have me 'get in touch with my feminine side.' "
Diana choked on her coffee.
She had already gathered that someone who lived in the general area had died, but since Cole seemed completely indifferent to the person's death, she didn't pursue the subject. Moreover, when Cal tried to return to the topic again, Cole said tersely, "I do not want this subject discussed in front of Diana."
Cole left right after breakfast to do a series of errands for Cal in town that he expected to take two hours at most, but he insisted that Diana stay with Cal. When he got up from the table, he rumpled her hair, leaned down, and pressed a kiss to her cheek, then walked forward… without letting go of her wrist. Laughing, Diana was hauled out of the house onto the porch, soundly kissed, then sent back inside.
Cal observed the little vignette with an expression that struck Diana as somber at best and disapproving at worst. Feeling a little hurt and a little self-conscious, she walked over to the fireplace mantel, where framed pictures, mostly quite old, were lined up in rows. With her hands linked behind her back, she studied each one, while Cal's gaze bored through her from behind.
"Is this Cole?" She lifted a frame off the mantel, brought it over to the sofa, and sat down beside him.
He flicked a glance at the picture and then pinned her with a look that was disturbing and was meant to be. "Why don't you and I have a little talk about something besides pictures," he said in a no-nonsense tone that proved two things very clearly: Calvin Downing was far more astute than he seemed, and he was no pushover.
"What," Diana said warily, "do you want to talk about?"
"You and Cole. That all right with you?"
She nodded, and he said, "Good, because we were going to do it anyway."
Diana was not a pushover either. "Mr. Downing, maybe we'll wait until Cole comes back."
Oddly her tart retort did not offend him. "You got more than looks. You got spunk, too, and that's good. Now, do you have a heart?"
"What!"
"And if you do have one, who does it belong to?"
Diana stared at him, riveted by the topic if not his tone. "I don't understand."
"Well, I'll grant you, it's a little complicated to me, too. Because less than two weeks ago, I picked up the Enquirer, and there was your picture, smack dab on the front page, with a story that says you got jilted by your fancy beau. A week later, you're married to my nephew, Cole."
Five days ago, she'd have been humiliated by the mere mention of that article. Instead a wayward smile curved her lips. "Well, yes," she admitted, "I can see how that would look a little odd."
"That's the only part makes sense," he contradicted bluntly. "Cole was mad and I showed him the picture to make a point, and I figured he made a point right back by marrying you to get his stock back. But then he told me you're the little girl he used to talk about when he was in college, and I remembered your name was Diana Foster, so I know it's really you. Are you following me?"
"So far, yes."
"Okay. So I figured the two of you are old friends, and you just got jilted, and Cole needed a wife to get his stock back—so you two struck a deal. How am I doing so far?"
Diana eyed him askance. "Pretty well," she admitted with a trembling smile.
"Now, I also know Cole worries about my heart. So after he got over being boiling mad over the bargain I stuck him with, he decided it would be better, for my sake, if the two of you pretended you actually give a damn about each other. Are you with me?"
She nodded warily.
"Good, because now we're coming to the part that scares the hell out of me."
"What's that?"
"Yesterday he was up at the house driving everybody crazy about every little detail so it would be as nice for you as it could be. He was giving a damned good imitation of a man who thought a whole lot of his wife. I got real excited to meet you. Last night, he couldn't keep his eyes off you. But I've gotta tell you straight out, Diana, I didn't get the idea you shared his feelings. Yet, this morning, he's wearing his heart on his sleeve, so I figure you had something to do with that last night."
He paused for emphasis, his voice turning insistent as he reached the real issue: "Don't go playing around with his heart, girl. Either take all of it or leave it alone. Don't go taking little bits and pieces, when it suits you—and if it suits you. I don't think it's in you to be mean or cruel, but sometimes, if a woman doesn't know how a man feels, that could happen."
Diana collapsed back against the sofa, laughing softly, hugging Cole's picture to her chest. She turned her face to the elderly man who loved her husband, too, and said, without shame or pretense, "Cole isn't wearing his heart on his sleeve. That is my heart."
He looked fifteen years younger… and belatedly embarrassed. Looking around for some way out of the situation he'd brought on himself, he got up and went over to the fireplace. "That picture you have is Cole when he was sixteen. Here's two others."
He presented them to her with great care, and Diana held them that way, but her smile began to fade and her heart began to ache. She'd looked at enough photographs at the magazine to notice things quickly, and the dark-haired little boy with his fingers shoved into the heavy coat of a mixed-breed collie at his side was looking at the camera with a very solemn expression. Much too solemnly for a six- or seven-year-old. She took the other picture.
"He was nine there," Cal said. The collie was on one side of him, and another mixed-breed dog was on his left. Diana scarcely noticed the dogs; she noticed that although he was trying to smile, he didn't look happy. And his pants were several inches above his ankles in both pictures. He was standing beside an old tire swing in one shot and in front of a shack of some sort in the other.
She forgot about all that when she suddenly realized that Cal could give her tidbits of information about Cole. "Even when I knew him before," she confided with a smile, "he was frustratingly secretive about his past." She patted the seat beside her. "Tell me everything. Tell me what he was like when he was little and what his mother was like and— everything."
"What's he told you?" Cal asked warily.
"Nothing! I know he had a brother who was two years older than he and another brother who was three years older, and they both died in an accident right after Cole went to college. I know his mother died of cancer when he was in his first year of college. He never told me when his father died. He's had so much tragedy," she added quietly.
She waited for Cal to talk after he sat down, but he seemed deeply troubled and genuinely at a loss. He kept looking over at the piles of reading material. "I like psychology," he said, seemingly apropos of nothing. "Do you believe in it?"
"Of course."
"Do you believe it's good for a person to keep bad things bottled up inside of him, and to hide those things from the woman who loves him—And go on doing so for as long as he lives?"
Diana knew with absolute certainty and grave foreboding they were talking about Cole. She wanted to help, but she didn't want to pry.
"I—I wouldn't want him to feel I pried into anything."
"I'd call it lancing a wound, not prying."
"I don't like wounds that don't heal," Diana said. "The question is, can I help them heal?"
"You couldn't hurt."
She looked at the picture she was holding and thought about lying in Cole's arms last night. He had so much love to give, and she wanted it all. She didn't want to risk losing any of it. "If what you're going to tell me is really bad, then how will Cole feel if he knows I know it?"
"He won't have to worry that you'd change if you found out. He won't have to wonder how you really feel. Dr. Richenblau calls it 'cathartic' It won't take long to tell. What you do about it is up to you."
Diana drew a deep breath and nodded. "Tell me."
"Well, you said he's had a lot of tragedy in his life. The biggest tragedy was that he was born with the name Harrison."
That was the last thing Diana expected him to say. "Why?"
"Because in Kingdom City, where Cole grew up, that name is a curse. For as long as anyone can remember, the Harrisons have been wild and worthless. They're drunkards and cheats and hell-raisers, the whole worthless lot of 'em, and Cole grew up with that stigma. When Cole's mama eloped with Tom Harrison, my brother cried. He couldn't believe his baby girl had done it. Turned out Tom had gotten her pregnant, and in that day and age, in these parts, girls who got pregnant had to get married. No two ways about it."
Diana watched him bend down and straighten magazines and generally stall; then he straightened and said, "Cole's two brothers got killed the year after Cole went away to college. They were in Amarillo, and they were drunk, and they wanted to get even drunker, but they didn't have any money. So they beat an old lady half to death for her purse; then they jumped in their car and took off. They ran a red light, and the cops went after them. They were going over a hundred miles an hour when their car hit a lamppost. Good riddance to 'em, I said then and I say it now, too.
"Cole's daddy liked those two boys of his, though. They were chips off the old block."
When he paused, Diana said flatly, "But Cole wasn't."
"Never was. Never could be. He was smarter than all three of them put together, and they knew it. They hated him for it. About the only friends Cole had in those days were his dogs. Dogs and horses and cats—Animals just loved that boy and he loved them right back. They understood each other. Guess maybe it was because they all knew how it felt to be helpless with no one to turn to."
"So Cole was the only one who went to college," Diana said aloud.
Cal gave a mirthless laugh. "He was the only one to make it past the tenth grade." Tipping his head back, he said, "You know the collie that was with Cole in the picture?"
"Yes."
"About a week before Cole left for college, his brothers gave him a little going-away present."
Diana knew it wasn't going to be good, but she wasn't prepared for what she heard.
"They hung the dog in the barn."
Diana moaned and clamped her hand over her mouth, half rising from her seat; then she made herself sit back down.
"They disappeared afterward and didn't come back until after Cole left. If they had, I think he'd have killed them."
"Wasn't there somewhere else he could live?"

"He could have lived here, but his pa wanted him right there, doing a man's work. He said a thousand times that if Cole moved away from home, Cole's mama would pay for it. And Cole's mama—poor, weak soul that she was— wouldn't leave that bastard. By the time Cole left for college, she was so sick she didn't know where she was half the time, and she wasn't worth abusing for Tom."
Diana was still a little sick from the thought of the collie. "And what about Cole's father. How long ago did he die?"
"Last week."
Diana slowly made the connection between the conversation at breakfast and this piece of information.
"I told Cole he has to go back to the old place in case there's something of his mama's there for him. Truth is, I wanted him to see it as a man. In one of my books, it said that when adults confront the 'evils of their childhood,' they often feel better. I think, whether he's there or not, it would be a good idea if he knew you'd seen the place and it didn't matter. Personally, I think he'll go there."
"Will you draw me a map?" she said, pressing a kiss on his cheek and startling him. "I'll run up to the house and get the keys to the truck."
Cal started to offer her Letty's car since Cole had his, but Letty had left to do the grocery shopping.

Chapter 50


Cole stood near the front yard of the place of his birth, a four-room shack with rotting boards for a floor—an ugly scab on a piece of barren earth.
His birthplace. His heritage.
He wasn't certain why he had come. His mother hadn't survived this place, so there was no reason to think anything of hers would be here for him. Perhaps he'd come to confront its ghosts and then to burn it down…
There were no happy memories to preserve here; the only bearable ones were of his mother. She had died just after her forty-second birthday, while he was in his first year of college. He'd been with her for the birthday before that, though. He'd hitched a ride to town to buy her a birthday present, and he was late getting back. The house had been quiet, and for a minute, he'd harbored the false hope that his father was drunk in the barn or preferably further away than that. He'd almost reached his mother's room when his father's voice had uncoiled like a bullwhip from a darkened corner of the front room. "Where the hell you been, boy?"
He had reached for a light switch to dispel the gloom while mentally gauging his father's mood as ugly but not physically brutal. He'd been an expert at gauging his father's moods, because any mistakes in that regard would have dire results, not just for Cole, but for his mother.
"I had to go to town."
"You're a ****ing liar. You've been over to Jeffersonville with your asshole uncle, lettin' him fill your head with all his fancy notions. I told you what I'd do to you if I caught you hangin' around with him again. You're just askin' for a lesson, boy!" Cole downgraded his mood to potentially brutal. As a child, he'd thrown up from sheer terror at moments like these. Later, his primary fear was that someday, he'd kill the man and spend his life in prison for it.
His father's attention was diverted by the flower-printed gift wrap on the box Cole was holding. "What the hell is that?"
"It's a present for Ma. It's her birthday."
Amused by the sentiment, his father reached for it. "What'd you get her?"
Cole held it back, out of his reach. "Nothing you'd want—a fancy brush and mirror."
"You bought her a fancy brush and mirror?" he taunted. "A fancy brush and mirror for that skinny old crow? That's even funnier than you thinkin' you're gonna become a fancy ****ing college boy." His disposition improved by that, he picked up the bottle of whiskey from the table beside him, and Cole went into his mother's room.
She was dozing, propped up on pillows, her face turned away from him. On the scarred table beside her was a plate with a half-eaten sandwich. Cole turned on the lamp and sat down beside her hip. "Is this all you had for dinner?"
She twisted her head on the pillows and looked at him, blinking her eyes to adjust to the light. She smiled, but even her smile was somber. "I wasn't hungry. Was that your father yelling a few minutes ago, or did I dream it?"
"He was yelling."
"You shouldn't upset your father, Cole."
Her continual, lifelong submissiveness to his father's ugly disposition and vile temper was something that Cole had never understood. He hated the fact that she continually tried to placate the man, to make excuses for him. Sometimes he had to stop himself from berating her for not standing up for herself and defying him. She wouldn't leave him, and Cole wouldn't leave her there.
"I brought you a birthday present."
She brightened, and for a moment he could almost imagine the dark beauty that his Uncle Cal said had once been hers. She lifted the present and shook it a little, prolonging the excitement; then she carefully removed the wrapping paper and opened the box. "It's so beautiful!" Her gaze flew to his face. "How did you pay for it?"
"Why should I pay for it when I can steal it?"
"Oh, Cole, no!"
"I was joking! C'mon, Ma, if I stole it, do you think I'd wait around to get it gift-wrapped?"
She relaxed back onto the pillows and held the mirror up to study her face. With girlish embarrassment, she confessed, "I used to be very proud of how pretty I was, did you know that?"
"You're still pretty. Listen, Ma. Things are going to get a whole lot better in a couple years after I get out of college. I've got big plans, and Cal thinks they'll happen if I want them bad enough to work hard. In a few years, I'll build you a special house out at Cal's place—one that's made of stone and cedar with lots of windows—and I'll put it over on the side of that hill with big porches all around it, so you can sit up there and look out all day."
She seemed to press back into the pillows as if she were trying to hide, her fingers clutching at his arm. "Don't go dreaming dreams! When they don't come true, that's when you end up like your pa. That's why he's like he is. He used to have dreams."
"I'm not him!" Cole said, appalled by her reaction. "I'm nothing like him." The only time his father ever talked about "dreams" was when he was looking for an excuse to go on a drunken tirade and he couldn't think of any other reason.
 
The orange truck died when she turned off the road, and Diana left it there and walked, picking her way through deep ruts that constituted a driveway. She saw Cole ten minutes later when she rounded a sharp bend—a tall, solitary man standing with his shoulders squared, completely motionless except for a breeze that ruffled his hair. A few steps more and she had a clear view of her husband's birthplace, the home of his youth. What she saw made Diana feel like retching. She'd expected something unappealing; she hadn't been prepared for squalor. The house was a rotting wooden shanty that crouched at the base of a hill and was surrounded by broken fences and decades of accumulated litter. In blinding contrast to his surroundings, Cole was immaculately groomed, with brown loafers polished to a mirror shine, pressed khaki slacks, and a pristine white oxford shirt with the cuffs folded back on his tanned arms. He reached behind his neck to massage the muscles at his nape, and his shirt stretched taut across his broad shoulders. Shoulders that Diana wanted to put her arms around and lay her cheek against.
He didn't seem aware that she was there until she was right beside him, and then he said in a dead voice, "You shouldn't have come here." He looked at her then, and Diana swallowed in shock at the transformation. His face was completely expressionless; a face made of stone, with a jaw of iron and eyes of cold steel. And now she understood where that hard core had been forged. It had been here. It had given him the strength to break free of this place. "I had to come," she said simply, watching his face begin to relax as he broke free of the grip of this place. "You had to know I had been here and seen it."
"I see," he replied, his heart aching with tenderness. "And now that you've seen it," he added with an attempt to sound indifferent, "what do you think?" He turned to walk away, expecting her to come with him.
What did she think? In response, Diana did the only thing she could think of to vent her wrath and express her opinion. Looking around on the ground, she picked up a heavy rock and with all the force of her raging animosity, she hurled it. Cole turned to look at the exact moment the rock blasted through the front window. In open-mouthed shock, he stared at her beautiful, irate face and then at the broken window of the hellhole he had lived in. "That," she informed him, daintily dusting off her hands after having thrown a pitch that would have done credit to Sandy Koufax, "is what I think of it."
Cole's shout of laughter exploded louder than the window. In a sudden burst of exuberant freedom, he swooped her up into his arms and tossed her over his shoulder like a sack of flour. "Put me down," she laughed, wriggling.
"Not until you promise."
"Promise what?" she giggled, squirming.
"That you will never, ever, get mad enough to throw anything at me."
"I cannot make a promise I may not keep," she advised him solemnly.
He whacked her on the backside and continued down the road. He started to whistle. She started to laugh.
The merry sounds rolled backward to the hovel he had lived in. The only remaining piece of glass left in the window frame in the house crashed to the dirt floor inside it.
 
The lighthearted days and passionate nights became a routine during the rest of their stay at Cal's.
When the time to leave arrived, Cal drove them out to the airstrip and watched while the plane took off, his hand lifted in a wave. His heart felt heavy in his chest because they were leaving, but it did not feel weak. It felt very strong.
Diana's heart did not feel quite as strong when Cole left her at her apartment so that he could continue on to Washington. "I miss you already," she said. "This two-city living arrangement isn't going to work."
Cole tipped her chin up. "We'll work things out in a couple of days, as soon as I get things settled in Washington. The time in between will pass very quickly."
She furrowed her forehead. "How can you say that?"
"I'm trying to convince both of us."
"It isn't working."
Cole crushed her against his length. "I know."
"Don't forget to call me."
He smiled at that absurdity and held her tighter. "How could I possibly forget to call you, darling?"

Chapter 51


Sam Byers was sitting in his car with the engine idling and the windshield wipers running when the Gulfstream streaked out of the sky and touched down on the rainswept runway at Dulles International Airport. He watched the plane taxi to a stop at a junction of the runways, waiting for instructions from the tower, then it finally executed a ninety-degree turn and rolled right past him. When the pilots got off, he pulled his raincoat up around his ears and ran forward through the puddles.
"It's a damn shame we have to meet this way," Byers announced breathlessly as the heavy-set sixty-year-old trudged up the last step and nearly collapsed onto the sofa, "but I wanted to give you this stuff in person, and it's a bad idea for us to be seen together." He reached inside his raincoat and removed a large brown envelope.
Cole took it and handed him a glass with vodka, ice, and a lemon twist—Senator Byers's drink of preference, he knew.
The senator noted the brand of vodka his host had just served as he glanced around at the luxurious, pale gray leather interior with its chrome-and-brass-trimmed lamps and tables. "You've got style and you've got taste, Cole," he said. "Unfortunately," he added as Cole sat down on the sofa across from him, "you've also got yourself a powerful enemy."
"Who is it?" Cole snapped.
He lifted the glass in a parody of a toast and said, "The junior senator from the Great State of Texas—Douglas J. Hayward. He's taken a very personal interest in putting you out of business and into the penitentiary." Without rancor, he added, "That boy has serious presidential aspirations. He'll probably make it, too. He has the look and the charisma of a young Jack Kennedy." Belatedly realizing that his audience seemed to be in a state of angry shock, he said, "Did you do something to aggravate him, or is he just out to get you on principle?"
The only possible explanation Cole could think of involved Jessica Hayward and a long-ago night when her husband, Charles, came home unexpectedly; yet it seemed insane that young Hayward would go to all this trouble after more than a decade to defend his mother's nonexistent honor. "The only reason I can think of is lame as hell," Cole replied curtly.
"That's not likely to concern him," Sam said dryly. "Every presidential hopeful needs a cause, a dragon he can slay for the public good. That's what gets them publicity, and publicity is what gets them elected. Reagan had the Ayatollah, Kennedy had Hoffa—you get my meaning?"
"I get the meaning, but I don't like the analogies," Cole said icily.
"Hear me out before you act on your impulse to beat the shit out of me," Sam said with a chuckle. "I was about to say that when high-reaching politicians can't find a legitimate public enemy to slay, they frequently create their own. For some reason, Senator Hayward has singled you out for that honor."
He paused to sip his drink; then he continued, "Cushman's board of directors is right behind Senator Hayward, urging him on in this quest for 'justice,' and they have some political allies of their own on the team. Between them, they've managed to convince the New York Stock Exchange, the SEC, and themselves that you started those nasty rumors that their microprocessor was faulty so that the value of their stock would drop and you could buy their company for half its worth. You already know most of that. Here's the part you don't know: The Cushman people are going to file a class-action lawsuit. In addition to a few hundred million dollars in damages, Cushman wants the court to grant them the rights to all profits Unified makes on the processor when it's marketed—and—they are also demanding that you hand over all future profits resulting from any other device, design, or formula of theirs that you may eventually use. My sources tell me that Cushman is particularly emphatic about the last part of that."
He took another sip of his drink and studied Cole's unreadable expression; then he shrugged. "I thought that was a little odd, but then I'm just a country boy. But even a country boy like me can figure out the obvious—If you are found guilty of any of the criminal charges in federal court, then Cushman's class-action suit is as good as won in circuit court."
"What's in the envelope?" Cole said, his mind on solutions and countermeasures.
"Nothing that will enable you to neutralize him, if that's what you're hoping, but it will give you an idea of where you stand. William C. Gonnelli, the administrative judge for the SEC who's going to hear your case, is already so sure you're guilty of something that he's helping the federal prosecutor decide whether the next step should be to haul you up before the grand jury and get an indictment, or take the short route and ask the judge for a warrant for your arrest. There's a copy of an SEC subpoena in there. Your lawyer will be served with it the day after tomorrow. Naturally, it will be leaked to the press. They'll be waving microphones in your face when you walk out your front door from that day on, I'm afraid."
Cole hadn't expected this much information or cooperation from Byers, and he was strangely touched that he'd gone to as much effort as he had—particularly because it appeared unlikely that Cole would be sponsoring any more fund-raisers for anyone.
As if he knew what Cole was thinking, the politician stood up and shook Cole's hand. "I liked you when I met you, Cole, and I liked you better later." With a grin, he said, "Nobody's ever laid a check for three hundred thousand dollars in my hand and told me to my face that they'd have handed it to a gorilla if he were the Republican candidate."
"I apologize for that, Senator," Cole said formally, and he meant it. "And I also appreciate your help."
"I thought your blunt honesty was refreshing. I'm not used to it." He turned and squeezed between the sofas, then stopped again in the open doorway of the plane and pulled the collar of his raincoat up. "I also think you're innocent. Unfortunately," he finished, "I won't be able to talk to you anymore after this. You understand, don't you?"
"Perfectly," Cole said unemotionally.
He didn't feel unemotional, however. As he looked at the subpoena with his name on it, he felt a rage that was beyond anything he'd ever experienced. He wasn't afraid of subpoenas or trials or groundless accusations or the damage to his good name. The problem was that in two days, his name was going to be synonymous with fraud.
And by association, so would Diana's.
A laugh welled up inside of Cole, then turned to anguish. Diana had married him to save her pride and dignity. Now he was going to destroy all that, along with her reputation, in a way that Penworth never could have.
Last week, Diana loved him and believed in him.
Next week, she was going to despise him.
Cole leaned his head against the back of the sofa and closed his eyes, trying to think of a way to keep her safe… of a way to keep her at all. When he couldn't think of any, the unfamiliar constriction in his throat grew until it was painful.

Chapter 52


Diana looked at her watch and then at the telephone, willing it to ring. By now, Cole would surely be finished with his meeting in Washington and either home or nearly there, but he hadn't called her, and she knew instinctively the news wasn't good. She'd turned the television set on to banish the silence, but she couldn't concentrate on it or anything else.
"And now for business news. The stock market closed up today, with mixed trading on a volume of…"
Although she believed completely in Cole's innocence, her overwrought imagination continually presented her with pictures of Cole standing trial, being hounded by reporters and accused of vile crimes. He said that wasn't going to happen, but she had a horrible feeling that it was all beyond his control. He'd worked so hard to rid himself of the stigmas of his youth, and now he was facing the same fate his brothers had faced… only his would become a worldwide scandal.
"The biggest loser of the day was Unified Industries, whose stock closed at a fifty-two-week low. Analysts blame the plunge on rumors that Unified's president and CEO, Cole Harrison, is about to be subpoenaed to appear before an administrative judge of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Reliable sources say that the SEC hearing will be a mere formality and that Harrison will be called before a grand jury…"
She had a sudden, insane impulse to call Doug and ask him for advice. No, what she really wanted to do was beg him to intercede somehow. He wouldn't help either her or Cole now. On the subject of Cole, he was completely irrational. She thought about his incensed tirade… You have to unload him, now!… That bastard really has a way with females of all ages… even you! The remark about Cole's way with "females of all ages" made her wonder if years ago Cole had stolen some girl that Doug had imagined he was in love with. Whatever the reason, Doug's loathing for Cole went so deep that he even hated Diana by association. He wouldn't be sympathetic to any sort of appeal from her now, not after he'd warned her. He'd predicted exactly what was going to happen.
Slowly, Diana straightened, a possibility taking shape that was almost too obscene to consider. Doug had warned her… He had told her what was going to happen. He despised Cole with a virulence that was palpable.
She grabbed her purse and car keys and went to find the one person who was likely to know, and to tell her if he did know.
 
Corey opened the front door, and Diana realized from her dejected expression that she'd also heard the news. "Corey, I have to ask you something. It's terribly important. Has Spence ever told you that Doug hates Cole?"
"Yes. He told me that when you and Cole told us you'd gotten married the night before. You liked Cole and so did I, so I didn't think Doug's opinion mattered that much."
"I need to see Spence."
"He's out by the pool."
Spence was tightening the bolts on a ladder in the deep end of the pool. "Diana, what's wrong?"
"That's what I want to know from you. A few hours after the news conference to announce that Cole and I had married, Doug came to see me and he made it clear how he feels about Cole, but he wouldn't tell me why he feels the way he does. You two have been friends forever. You must know why he hates Cole."
"Honey, you have enough problems without worrying about Doug Hayward." He gave his wrench one last firm tug and stood up.
"I think Doug is the problem," Diana said.
"What are you talking about?"
She pulled him over to a chaise longue. "That day when Doug came to see me, he was furious because I'd married Cole. He ranted about how dishonest Cole's business practices are, but Doug wasn't just angry about principles, he took it personally!"
"What are you getting at?"
"I'm getting at something else he said. He told me that the stock exchange was investigating Cole. But, he also said the SEC would turn Cole over to the federal courts for prosecution."
For a split second, Diana thought Spence didn't realize what she was getting at, but then he said quietly, "He knew all that and it hadn't happened yet?"
"Exactly. He was completely certain of everything he said, and it's all coming true! Do you know why Doug feels the way he does about Cole?"
To her surprise and relief, Spence didn't try to tell her she was being ridiculous. "Charles Hayward is probably the only one outside of Doug who knows the real answer to that. Doug was drunk the one time he brought it up with me, but I got the feeling that somehow Barbara was involved in it."
"Barbara?"
"He wasn't making sense, so I'm not sure."
Diana got up. "Well, I intend to find out from Charles Hayward."
Spence stood up, too. "I'll go with you."
Diana bit her lip, considering whether Spence would be an asset or a liability. "I think I might get further with Charles if I am alone."

Chapter 53


Charles Hayward was in his study, sitting in a leather wing chair with the VCR's remote control in his hand— rewinding and playing the CNN news story about Cole when Jessica took Diana in to see him. "Diana would like to talk to you, Charles."
Charles looked round from his chair and nodded; then he pressed the rewind button on the remote again. "Hello," he said, beckoning to the sofa across from him. "Sit down." He pressed the play button as Diana sat on the sofa, and to her disbelief, he watched the news clip again right in front of her, smiling a little as he did.
There was something almost ghoulish about what he was doing, and it was made worse by Jessica hovering in the doorway. Diana drew a careful breath, knowing this would be her only chance to find out what she needed to know and to try to neutralize it. "I wonder if I could talk to you privately, Charles."
"Of course," Jessica said and backed out of the doorway.
"Certainly, my dear," Charles said, stopping the tape then laying the remote control on the coffee table. He looked at her in expectant silence, his face devoid of any of the cruel satisfaction she'd seen when he watched the television screen.
Diana felt her way forward very carefully. "Charles," she began quietly, "after my father died, it was you I always turned to for advice."
He nodded as if pleased by that.
"And when I decided to start the company, you were one of the people who loaned me money to do it."
"I invested in a promising venture," he said tactfully. It was what he'd always said whenever she tried to thank him.
"Now I need help again. Only this time it's much more important. It's about Cole."
His face turned as cold as his eyes. "In that case, I will give you the best advice I have ever given you. Get rid of him!"
"I won't do that."
He surged to his feet, towering over her until Diana stood up, too. "Right now, I'm trying to think of you as an innocent victim, Diana. But if you don't get rid of him and get out of the way, you're going to be covered with the same dirt he is. Congress has control over the SEC, and we have enough on Cole Harrison to hang him."
" 'We'?" Diana burst out. " 'We'? You've not involved with Congress, Doug is."
"We are going to hang him, and then we're going to bury him," Charles lashed back.
"Why are you doing this?" Diana cried. "What has Cole done to you to make you hate him so?" With an effort she forced herself to sound willing instead of combative. "Help me understand—then I can decide whether to do as you say."
The control Charles had been exerting over his temper suddenly snapped. "You want to know what he did to me?" he jeered in an awful voice. "I'll tell you what he did—He destroyed my family! That filthy son of a bitch was the real stud in my stable. God knows how many other of Barbara's little friends he molested—"
" 'Molested,' " Diana said weakly.
He grabbed her shoulders. "You wanted to know and now you're going to know all of it. Do you remember my beautiful little daughter? Do you?" he demanded with a shake.
Diana jerked free and stepped back, but she couldn't make herself leave without hearing it all. "Of—of course I remember," she said shakily.
"That animal got my little girl pregnant. I almost walked in on them at the stable one night, and I ran him off, but I never dreamed he'd actually had sex with that child."
Diana shook her head. "Oh, no, Charles, you're wrong—"
"I'm not wrong!" he shouted. "I'm the one who has been wronged. When Barbara realized she was pregnant—almost five months pregnant—she told her mother and Jessica took her to have an abortion. I'd have never known anything about it except for three things. Do you know what they are?" he bit out.
Diana swallowed and shook her head.
"I found out because Barbara almost died, and because she had to have a hysterectomy to prevent it, and because my little girl has spent the rest of her life in the care of one shrink after another because of it! And do you know what reminds me of it every day?"
"No."
"Grandchildren! I don't have any. That ****ing son of a bitch you married deprived me of a daughter and my daughter of children and me of grandchildren."
He pointed to the door and his voice shook with wrath. "Now, you get the hell out of my house and don't ever come back!"

Chapter 54


Diana drove home without any conscious effort or any awareness of doing so. At eleven, she was still sitting in the same chair, her legs tucked beneath her, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and spread over her lap to ward off a chill that had turned her hands to ice and made her shiver convulsively.
Corey was calling every fifteen minutes. Diana let the answering machine pick up because she could not move.
Cole was not calling at all.
She was incapable of shedding a single tear or of throwing up another time. She was completely empty.
Cole was not calling at all.
At eleven-fifteen, Corey called again, and this time she wasn't worried, she was frantic and angry. "Diana, if you don't pick up the phone right now, I'm coming over."
Diana actually made an effort to answer it, but Corey had already hung up. She arrived with Spence in record time and used her key to get into Diana's apartment.
"Diana?" Corey said soothingly, approaching her with great caution, Diana noticed—as if they both thought Diana had gone insane. Spence crouched down in front of her, handsome and caring. "Diana," he said gently.
"What did Charles Hayward say to you, honey?"
Corey crouched beside him, clutching his shoulder tightly, a brace against whatever hideous thing they were about to hear that had reduced Diana to such a mindless state.
Diana looked at both of them. "Oh," she said thoughtfully, "he said Cole molested Barbara and got her pregnant and Barbara had an abortion. Now she can't have any more children and that's why she's always been so unstable."
"Whaat!" Corey exploded, shooting to her feet.
Diana's gaze automatically followed her motion, and she tipped her head back. Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Isn't that amazing?"
"—'Amazing'?" Corey said, shooting a hesitant look at Spence as he slowly stood up beside her. "Is that what you think it is?"
It happened then, the thing that Diana had subconsciously feared for hours—she started to laugh and she couldn't stop. "Cole wouldn't have laid a hand on Barbara! He lived in daily fear of us coming on to him. Remember how hard we all worked to get him to notice us?"
"I remember," Corey admitted, but her brows remained pulled together in a watchful frown.
"It's so funny… so hideously funny."
"Is it? Funny?" Corey said cautiously, but she was beginning to believe Diana was thinking far more clearly than she'd first imagined when she saw her curled up in that chair.
"Yes, it is!" Diana said, nodding emphatically. "It's hilarious. I know, because I was the one who kept the bets."
"What bets?"
"The bets!" she laughed. "Everyone, including Barbara, put money into a box, and the first one to get Cole to kiss her was the winner." Diana laughed harder. "I was the treasurer. And no one won!" Suddenly she turned her face into the chair and the laughter turned to wrenching sobs. "No one won!" she sobbed. "They're destroying him… and no one ever won!"

Chapter 55


Diana tried to call Cole at home the next morning, but the man who answered his phone said that Mr. Harrison was at work. At his office Mr. Harrison's secretary said he wasn't in. Diana arrived at the obvious conclusion that she was a very dispensable commodity to men, and that Cole had just been amusing himself when they were together with Cal, playing with marriage. When other matters in his life became pressing, either he didn't want to be bothered with her or he forgot that she existed! Her brain accepted that, but her heart rejected it and went on aching.
Somehow she made it through the day at work. In keeping with her resolution to delegate more responsibility, she spent most of the afternoon working closely with two of her executives, to be certain they were all thinking alike. No matter where she went or whom she saw in the building, she maintained a cheerful and pleasant face. Cole's name and his current predicament actually came up several times in her presence, but it was simply a thoughtful effort by the people who worked for her to avoid acting as if he had either done something wrong or else died.
In retrospect, it was comical that she'd thought Dan's defection such a disaster. This was a disaster.
She left the office at five-thirty and, at her family's insistence, she drove to their house for dinner. Being there was even harder than being at the office. Unlike her employees, her family didn't hesitate to voice their opinions about Cole's situation or to insist that Diana talk about it, although Corey and Spence remained silent and supportive. Even Glenna had an opinion to express, but she, too, was part of the family. Besides, she was a flagrant eavesdropper. Everyone was sitting outside by the pool before dinner, when Glenna came out to tell Diana that she had an urgent call. The entire family brightened, thinking it was Cole.
"It's a reporter," Glenna said, holding a cordless phone in her hand with the hold light flashing.
"I don't want to talk to any reporters," Diana replied, and added to her family, "I don't know how they're getting this number, but we're probably going to have to change it."
"He wants to ask you about your divorce."
Everyone stopped talking and stared at the housekeeper. "My what?"
"He says he wants a comment from you on the 'grounds' you're going to use."
Diana took the phone, said hello, and then listened for a moment. "Where did you hear that?" she demanded. "Well, I don't think it's actually 'public knowledge,' Mr. Godfrey," Diana replied, slowly standing up, "because I don't know anything about it. Good-bye," she said, but a small feeling of hope was slowly dawning in Diana's heart. She turned and ran to the nearest television set with her family in close pursuit. The screen lit up just in time for a local Houston newscast team to confirm what the newspaper reporter had just told Diana.
"There's been a side development in the Cole Harrison-Unified Industries uproar," the woman on the screen told her male counterpart. "Diana Foster, his wife of less than two weeks, is filing for divorce on unspecified grounds."
"That didn't last very long," he said to the camera.
His coanchor nodded. "Sources close to Cole Harrison confirmed the rumor less than an hour ago. It seems that Diana Foster has chosen to disassociate herself and her company from the scandal brewing in Washington over Harrison's takeover of Cushman Electronics."
Henry Britton looked almost accusingly at Diana. "Is that what you're going to do, Diana?"
Diana slowly shook her head, her eyes glowing with relief and happiness. "That's what Cole wants me to do. Charles and Doug Hayward warned me to get rid of Cole so the scandal won't spill over onto me. Now Cole is trying to make sure it won't."
Corey looked at her husband and quietly pointed out, "So much for the theory that Cole married her to help his public image. He just blew it to pieces for her."
Diana didn't hear that; she was thinking and planning.
"What are you going to do?" Gram asked, but Mary Foster already knew the answer to that. Putting her arm around Diana's shoulders, she said with a soft laugh, "Diana is going to Dallas."
Diana was definitely going to Dallas, and for a woman who once couldn't function without a detailed schedule or leave on a short trip without lining every article of clothing with tissue paper, she accomplished that feat with amazing expediency. With Corey and her grandmother helplessly standing by, she stuffed whatever clothes she had at the house into two suitcases she owned; then she threw all her toiletries in on top of them. "That's that," she said, closing the last piece of luggage. After that she phoned her two top executives and told them they were in charge and to call her at Cole's numbers if they had questions or problems.
She took care of the items on her filled calendar by turning to Corey and saying, "Tell Sally to cancel all my appointments."
"What reason should she give everyone?"
"Tell everyone," Diana said as she dragged the two heavy cases off her bed, "that I'm in Dallas. With my husband."
By seven forty-five, Corey had dropped her off at the airport and Diana was in line to board her eight o'clock flight when she realized that the man who was sprinting past the rows of gates toward her was Spence. "Give this to Cole," he said, taking an envelope out of his pocket. "Tell him I said it's a belated wedding present and to use it if he absolutely has to as an equalizer."
"What is it?" Diana asked, moving forward as the boarding process continued.
"It is the end of Doug's political career," Spence said somberly.

Chapter 56


The man who answered the intercom and looked at her through a tiny camera located at the gate of Cole's estate was surprisingly easy to convince that Mrs. Harrison should be allowed to surprise her husband by being admitted without advance notice. In fact, the middle-aged man was positively beaming with delight as he showed her through the silent house to the back door that opened onto the patio surrounding the mammoth free-form swimming pool.
Cole was standing alone in the dark, his hands shoved deep into his trouser pockets, his head tipped back as if he were looking up at the stars. Diana opened the door and silently slipped outside, watching him, trying to think where to begin when all she wanted to do was fling herself into his arms. She'd rehearsed a dozen opening speeches on the flight there, all of them designed to let her stay and face his trouble together with him. She'd thought of pleading, of reasoning, of demanding. She'd considered trying tears to weaken his resistance. But when the moment was finally upon her, she couldn't seem to begin. She took a step forward and saw him stiffen with resistance the instant she spoke. "Cole?" He didn't even turn his head or look at her. "What are you doing out here?"
"Praying."
Tears stung her eyes when she remembered the way he had dismissed the idea as the last resort of fools—dreamers who won't face the fact that they cannot have something. "What are you praying for?"
"I've been praying for you," he said in a hoarse whisper.
Diana walked into his arms. They closed around her, yanking her against him, while he buried his lips in hers. When he finally ended the kiss, he kept her crushed against his length, his jaw resting against her head, as if he were afraid to let her go for fear she would vanish. Content to stay there, she rubbed her cheek against his hard chest. "I love you."
His hand slid up her back in a caress, and he brushed a kiss against her temple. "I know you do. The proof is in my arms."
"I know why you're having so much trouble with the SEC. Charles Hayward told me."
He went very still. "He told you what?"
"I went to see him last night. He told me you got Barbara pregnant and she had to have an abortion. She can't have children because of complications from it. She's been in and out of intensive therapy programs for years."
"He told you all that," Cole said, leaning back and studying her with puzzlement and disbelief, "and you came here, to me?"
She smiled at him in the moonlight and nodded; then she cuddled closer in his arms again. "I know it isn't true."
"Because you believe in me?" he speculated, confused.
"Yes. And because back then we all had bets about who would get you to kiss them."
A low chuckle rumbled in Cole's chest beneath her ear. "And no one won," he stated, understanding at once where she was going with that. With a smile in his voice, he whispered, "How much did you bet?"
His wife opened his shirt button and pressed a playful kiss on his chest. "Nothing. I only make idiotic bets in Las Vegas."
They were on their way to the bedroom when Diana remembered what she'd brought to give him. "What's this?" Cole asked, setting her suitcases at the foot of his bed. She handed him an envelope and a hand-decorated sack. He opened the envelope first and then the sack. Spencer Addison had sent him a brief history of Doug Hayward's drunk-driving arrests, the last of which was while he was in law school and had resulted in serious injury to the face of the female passenger with him at the time.
Rose Britton had sent him a bag of homemade chocolate chip cookies.
 
Even after they had made love, Diana couldn't sleep. With her head resting in the crook of his arm, she stared out at the colorful waterfall beyond the bedroom's glass wall.
"I used to wear you out," Cole teased gently. "Now you lie awake pretending to sleep. That doesn't bode well for the next fifty years."
"What's going to happen at the SEC hearing?"
She sounded wide awake and very worried. "Would it do any good to tell you not to worry?" he asked.
"None at all."
He hesitated, hating to talk to her about the details of the snare that held him powerless right now, but she had a right to know and to understand. Based on his recollection of her camping trip stories and the way she ran her business, she had a greater fear of the unknown than of a visible threat.
"I know how stupid this sounds," she murmured in the darkness, "but you had a thriving company without the Cushman microprocessor. After everything that's happened, I wish you could just give it back to them along with their whole company."
"I didn't buy Cushman to get their chip. Intel is the leader at the high end. The low-end market is already being carved up into smaller and smaller pieces by a lot of foreign producers. In my opinion, the world doesn't need another computer-chip provider."
Diana rolled over onto her side and propped her head on her hand, facing him. 'Then why in God's name did you go to all that trouble to buy them?"
"I wanted some patents they held and didn't know how to use. They owned a tiny piece of a puzzle that we needed in order to produce the most desired commodity in the world right now. We had everything else put together."
"Which is?"
"Which is an ultra-long-life battery that would power laptop computers and cellular phones for days instead of hours. Everyone is working on one, and everyone is getting closer, including us, but whoever brings that battery to market first wins the game—and the stakes are almost beyond comprehension. The scientist who's heading the project for me used to work for Cushman and he knew about the patent. He works off-site, in secret, in a lab he runs with a few assistants who don't completely understand what he's doing. Neither do I, for that matter. His assistants think he's working on a super-thin computer monitor/television set, which he is—in his spare time."
"Could you possibly sell Cushman back their chip and keep the patents?" she asked helpfully.
"Not a chance," Cole said sardonically. "They don't want that chip. Based on what I learned from a friend the other night, Cushman wants the profits we'll make from that battery. The only chance they have of getting their hands on those profits is if they can convince the court that I cheated them by forcing the value of their stock down before I bought it.
"The patents were and are a matter of public record, so they can't accuse me of having insider information or anything like that."
Diana smoothed her fingers over the muscles of his stomach and chest. "What do you need to get out from under this right now?"
"I have a team of lawyers working on it. We'll find a way," Cole said with absolute conviction.
Satisfied that he would, Diana curled up against him and promptly fell asleep.
Cole was awake until dawn, because he already knew there wasn't going to be "a way." His lawyers had already told him to expect to be charged with fraud and to stand trial. Nothing short of a miracle would keep that from happening, he thought grimly. But then, Diana was lying in his arms, in his bed… and that was a miracle. She had come to be with him when everything she heard and saw should have made her run like hell. That was a bigger miracle.

Chapter 57


At noon the next day—two days before Cole was to leave for his hearing in front of the SEC administrator—he made certain he wasn't being followed and took Diana with him to see Willard Bretling's laboratory.
Located in an old part of the city, it looked like a derelict warehouse surrounded by old Cyclone fencing and guarded by snarling dogs. The few cars that were parked outside looked older than the building.
Inside, it was antiseptically clean with every kind of state-of-the-art electronics equipment.
"This is right out of—of a James Bond movie," Diana exclaimed excitedly. Willard Bretling was thin and tall with slightly bent narrow shoulders, wire-rimmed glasses, and a perpetual, absentminded frown. He was standing at a table in a corner of the lab, arguing with his two assistants about how to use their new toaster oven.
"Ah, Cole!" he exclaimed. "Do you know how these damned things work?" He apologized to Diana, who was trying not to show her reaction to his dilemma. "Such knowledge is limited to those with lesser minds than ours," he said. He smiled at her, and it was the first time Cole had ever seen the eccentric old man grin.
"If that's the case," Diana said, downplaying her own excellent mind, "it should be right up my alley." The most important scientific brain in the world stood back and watched—his Pop-Tart in hand—in tense expectation as she fiddled with a knob and pressed a lever. Nothing happened.
"Useless gadget," Bretling stated.
"There we go," Diana declared. She pressed down all the way on the lever, and the smell of a new electric appliance being put into use emanated from it.
"What did you do?" Bretling demanded, looking a little affronted.
Diana leaned very close to him and put her hand on his sleeve; then she whispered in his ear as if she had sensed how sensitive he was about being made to look foolish.
He'd left Cushman Electronics because they'd made him look foolish by refusing to let him work on his patents and ultimately assigning him to work under a younger, less gifted scientist. Diana's simple action made the temperamental Bretling into a teddy bear, right before Cole's amused eyes.
While Bretling wandered around the lab, he chatted endlessly with her. Cole couldn't imagine what they had to talk about. He could barely spend an hour with the man without feeling as if his brain were overloaded with scientific mumbo jumbo.
On a table off to their left was another of Bretling's pet projects, an ultrathin television set with a perfect picture that Cole was determined to announce very soon and thus put to shame Mitsubishi's latest introduction. At the moment, Unified Industries' candidate for Television of the Century was a flickering, white screen.
Tables at the far end of the gigantic room were cluttered with rows of would-be ultra-long-life rechargeable batteries.
Willard Bretling watched Cole's restless movements from the corner of his eye; then he looked at Diana as he said, "Your husband is not a patient man. He is a man of vision, though."
Diana nodded, watching Bretling's arthritic fingers handle a wire as fine as a human hair. "He thinks very highly of you, too."
The fingers stilled, faded blue eyes stared sharply over the rim of his glasses. "Why do you say that?"
Diana told him all the things Cole had told her on the way there, and he seemed genuinely astonished. "He thinks you are going to 'save the universe' with that battery someday very soon," Diana said.
"The thin television first, then the battery," the old man announced stubbornly. "The Japanese already have one out, but the picture is not the same as a regular set. Ours will be."
Diana had the oddest impression that the scientist, and not Cole, was determining the order in which the two products were developed. "He needs the battery very badly."
Without replying, Bretling bent over a microscope, examining something Diana couldn't see or imagine. "Every entrepreneur has his favorite thing to want. Cushman wanted their stupid computer chip and took the people I needed to work on my projects to work on it. They put me in charge of testing. I am a creative genius, and they put me in a testing lab."
Diana had been around a few people with genius IQs before, and like Willard Bretling, they had seemed exceptionally sensitive to any kind of opposition. She answered with the answer she would have used to calm a frustrated child. "That must have been very embarrassing for you."
He changed slides without looking up. "I told them it was not reliable. So they fired me. The founder was a good man, but his sons, they are pigs. I had worked for them for forty years, and they fired me. They escorted me out of the building as if they thought I would steal something if I stayed longer."
Diana slid off the stool beside him and clutched his sleeve, unable to draw breath through her lungs. "You tested their chip and it's no good?"
"Yes."
It was all she could do not to scream or shout. "Did you tell my husband that?"
"I told him it was no good, yes."
"But did you tell him you had tested it?"
"Why would I boast at being reduced to a—a flunky? I told him it was no good."
"Mr. Bretling, don't you read the newspapers or watch television or listen to the radio?"
"No. I prefer classical music on disk. It is soothing to the creative spirit." He lifted his head and glanced at her; then he looked at her again, and his mouth fell open. "Why do you have tears on your face?"

Chapter 58


For the next two days, Cole stayed home, but Diana hardly saw him when he wasn't on the telephone or meeting with people. The visitors arrived and departed from the house under the watchful eye of a new security guard posted at the gate to keep reporters and everyone else out.
Cole was a man with a mission now; he was mobilizing his own forces and he was awe-inspiring to see in action. She watched him sitting behind his desk in the library, his fingers steepled in front of him, as he listened to advice from his Dallas lawyers, discarded most of it, and issued orders of his own. He worked out strategies with attorneys from Washington, made plans with Murray, the chief of security, and simultaneously ran his company from his home. When she least expected it, he would suddenly materialize at her side, pull her into his arms for a long kiss, and then go back to the next meeting, the next phone call.
Diana loved to watch him, and she hadn't been entirely idle either. She had made some phone calls of her own, and she had finally located Barbara Hayward in Vermont and spoken to her. Diana spent the rest of her time talking to her own office and reassuring Spence and Corey, her grandparents and mother, that all was well. And then reassuring them again. She even called Willard Bretling twice on a wild hunch that he was lonely and that with a little gentle urging and sincere compliments he could be hurried up with his projects.
Diana and Cole were to leave for Washington the following morning, and they expected to be there for two days at the most.

Chapter 59


Willard Bretling, Joe Murray, Travis, Cole, and Diana flew to Dulles in Cole's private plane; he made the attorneys fly commercial. It was a funny little quirk of his, Diana had discovered. Cole didn't like lawyers. Even his own. Also on board were four well-dressed men whose fashion accessories included concealed weapons, for which they had licenses.
Cole told her it was just a whim of Joe's, but Diana knew better. Joe was certain that Cushman had hired people to find Bretling, and within the next forty-eight hours, Cole was determined to give the Cushman brothers a reason to want him dead.
The Washington law firm that specialized in SEC matters met with Cole in his hotel suite at eight the next morning, before they went to his eleven o'clock hearing. They argued with each other, and with Cole, about Cole's nonnegotiable request for a hearing that would be open to members of Congress and the SEC.
 
Twenty miles away from the hotel, Barbara Hayward was walking into her brother's town house in Washington, D.C. Her father opened the door. "Barbara!" he exclaimed. "Honey, what are you doing here?"
She looked around him for Doug and saw him walking into the room, buttoning the cuffs of his shirt. He stopped cold, his pleasure in her visit shaking her resolve a little. "Is Mother here?" she asked, looking about the spacious town house.
"I'm here, darling," Jessica said as she floated downstairs in one of the silky, clingy peignoirs she always preferred. "The more important question is, why are you here?"
Barbara had the horrible feeling that of the three other people in the room, Jessica was already arriving at the correct conclusion. Barbara was sure of it when her mother began talking to her in a way that was calculated to make her sound feebleminded, even now, when she'd finally put her life together and built a good marriage with a husband who loved her.
"Why aren't you at your beautiful, peaceful place in Vermont?" Jessica said, rushing over to pour her a cup of tea. "You know how the big cities always upset you. Why are you in Washington?"
Barbara sat on the sofa and realized she'd finally arrived at the moment she had dreaded since she was fifteen years old. Her mother was going to despise her and make her sound like a maniac or a liar. Doug and her father were going to lose faith in her, no one was going to love her, she'd be abandoned— With an angry shake of her head, Barbara silenced that panicky inner voice that had chanted that same chant until she was nearly crazy with it.
"I'm here to have some tea," Barbara said with a calm smile as she took the cup and saucer and patted the seat on the sofa beside her. Doug sat down there. Her father and mother sat down in chairs facing them. "And I'm here to right a wrong that I helped Mother commit fifteen years ago."
Jessica shot to her feet. "You're having one of your spells again. I have some tranquilizers in my purse."
"Take one by all means if you need it," Barbara said, deliberately misunderstanding her. "Daddy," she said firmly. "Cole Harrison never, ever laid a finger on me. Mother was at the stable that night, and she ran up to my room and begged me to change clothes with her."
"Can you believe this!" Jessica shrieked. "You're completely insane!"
Her father wearily rubbed his forehead. "Barbara, don't do this to yourself. It happened, honey. That bastard got you pregnant."
Perhaps it was Barbara's calm that chipped away at her father's and brother's disbelief. Perhaps it was her sad smile. "The father of that baby was a boy I met at a rock concert, Daddy. I never even knew his name. I just wanted to see if I could seduce him. I just"—she transferred her gaze to her mother's white face—"wanted to be like you."

Chapter 60


‘’How did it go?" Diana asked when he returned alone, late in the afternoon.
Cole pulled her into his arms. "It was a trade-off," he said with a grin. "We gave a little and we won a little. And then we insisted the actual hearing be postponed until tomorrow morning at eleven."
"What did you win?"
"We persuaded the judge that since the SEC reports to Congress, I should have the right to request that members of Congress and members of the SEC be allowed at the proceedings if they wish to attend. I will also be allowed to make a brief opening statement."
She reached up and straightened the knot of the tie she'd given him.
"I just don't understand why an open hearing like that is so important to you."
"It's important because my name and my company's name have been dragged through the dirt over the Cushman deal." Steel threaded his voice as he added, "I don't like the reasons for it. I don't like the methods that were used. And I don't like the participants."
Making an effort to soften his voice, he said, "The Cushmans are an old and powerful American family, and they've used enormous political pressure and social influence to make certain I take a fall on this. The IRS has already been nudged to get into the act. I'm being tried by politicians and the media, and I don't like it. Most of all, I despise the hypocrisy behind it."
If there was one thing she had learned about her husband in the last few days, it was that, for a man who was supposedly ruthless and unscrupulous, Cole Harrison had some very strong personal convictions about which he was not willing to negotiate.
"And somehow," she speculated with a twinge of fear, "you think you can do something about all that tomorrow?"
"I may be able to demonstrate all that."
Diana didn't know how, and she was afraid to find out for fear it would worry her even more.
Instead she said, "You told me what you won this morning; what did you give up?"
"If I insist on making an opening statement, I have to give up my right to plead the Fifth Amendment."
"'Plead the Fifth Amendment,'" Diana said with a shudder. "It makes you sound like some mobster."
That made him grin. "I've been treated like a mobster. And that," he whispered, nipping her ear, "is what happens when nobodies from nowhere make it into the major leagues and start playing with the guys in the Brooks Brothers suits."
"You don't wear Brooks Brothers suits," she chided with a giggle as he continued to tease her ear.
"I know," he said with an unabashed grin. "And that's what pisses them off. They don't know how to deal with us. We're unpredictable. We're out of uniform."
In his place, Diana would have been frantic at the possibility of a trial and of being wrongfully convicted on some sort of circumstantial evidence and sent to prison. But Cole had such strength of purpose that it empowered him. He generated his own force and it swept people along with it.
Diana smoothed her fingers over his hard jaw. "Do you really know what's going to happen tomorrow?"
"No. I only know what can happen, and what I want to happen."
"What do you want to happen?"
He turned her face up for a kiss and said with a somber smile, "What I want to happen is this: I want to see your face on the pillow beside mine when I go to sleep and when I wake up. And more than anything else in the world right now, I want to give you everything you want."
"You?" she suggested and watched his gray eyes darken with tenderness.
"That, too," he whispered.
The phone rang and Diana reluctantly pulled out of his arms and reached out to answer it. Still in a lighthearted mood, she said, "You're the expert on human nature, tonight. Use your powers and tell me who this is."
Cole threw out the first name that came to mind. "Hayward," he guessed; then he had to hide his shock when he turned out to be right.
Diana covered the mouthpiece with her hand. "He wants to come up."
In answer, Cole shoved his hands in his pockets and nodded curtly.