CHAPTER THIRTEEN

SHE HAD FORGOTTEN what it was like to get ready for a date. She had forgotten how nerve-racking and how evocative it really was. A long bath in the deep spa tub left her warm and fragrant, almost lethargic, and she slipped on a thick terry robe provided by the lodge. She applied makeup, using plenty of color, and smoothed lotion on her arms, tinged pink from riding in the sun today. Her hands forgot all their years of experience doing hair, and it took at least six tries to get the French twist just right.

Standing in front of the mirror in her room, she untied the robe and studied herself with a critical eye, something she never did at home.

She looked her age. She had the body of a twenty-eight-year-old mother of one. Which was not the end of the world, she reminded herself. Still, it wasn’t quite the same muscular little body that had vaulted into the air at pep rallies, to be caught on one arm by a male cheerleader.

She put on a pair of panty hose priced well into the double-digit range. On their shopping excursion through the Neiman Marcus catalog, Mrs. Spinelli had insisted on the hose, imported from Italy. They were made of pure silk and had a discreet and excruciatingly fashionable diamond pattern.

Once Twyla had them on, she decided they were worth the splurge. The sheer silk had a peculiar strength that held in things that needed holding in and played up shapes that were still shaped right. She pulled on the tiny red slip, the scarlet silk dress and the ruby high-heeled pumps. Picking up the red satin evening bag, she looked in the mirror and panicked.

The woman in the mirror was a stranger. She was chic and dangerous-looking, resembling a walk-on in a James Bond film. She didn’t look anything like Brian’s mom at all. She looked like a…phony.

Of course, that was exactly what she had come here for. To fool people.

She took a deep breath, checked her makeup one last time, and went to find Rob.

He stood waiting on the front porch, and when he turned, the appreciative look on his face made her glad for the couture panty hose.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his face expressionless. “I was waiting for Twyla. Did you happen to see her?”

She burst out laughing. “Amazing what a little makeup and hair spray can do.”

“Amazing. That’s exactly how you look.” He bowed from the waist with mock formality, holding out a single red rosebud he’d plucked from the hedge in front of the lodge.

“You wore the tux,” she said, her skin flushing warm with pleasure. She took the rose and caressed the delicate bud with her fingertips. “The one from the bachelor auction brochure.”

“Think it’s too much?”

“Probably. But who cares? This whole situation is too much. I’ll deal with reality tomorrow.”

“Good plan.” Without warning, his arm came out and curved around her, fingers draping dangerously low on her hips.

Flustered, she stepped back quickly. “What are you doing?”

“Don’t jump when I touch you like that.” A wicked intent glinted in his eyes. “You can’t keep acting like I’m a stranger, or people will know we’re faking it.”

She was speechless, tingling shamefully where he had touched her.

Reaching inside his coat, he took out a box. The slender, oblong shape and size were unmistakable—as was the rush of pleasure Twyla felt as he handed it to her. She had absolutely no idea how long it had been since a man had given her a gift.

She allowed herself to rub her thumb over the smooth, hard velvet of the case. There was nothing quite so enticing as a hinged jewelry box with gold lettering.

She glanced up at Rob. Well, almost nothing. With heavy reluctance, she held it out to him. “I can’t take this.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too…too much. A rose is one thing. Jewelry would move us to another level entirely.”

“Who says?”

“I say. A woman knows these things. A beautician knows them better than anyone.”

“Well.” He flipped open the lid of the box, and she had to force herself not to crane her neck to see. “I say I’d look pretty damned silly wearing this myself, since it matches your dress.”

He lifted the necklace, and in spite of herself, Twyla couldn’t suppress a gasp. The facets of the diamonds and rubies—she prayed they weren’t real—caught sparkles of light from the lowering sun. The necklace was extravagant and beautiful, and for one unguarded moment she wanted it with a fierce purity that frightened her with its intensity.

“Honestly, Rob—”

“Stop talking, Twyla.” With a firm hand he spun her around and looped the necklace around her neck. The coolness of precious metal and stone warmed as soon as it contacted her skin. She felt hypersensitive, every nerve ending reacting to the brush of his fingers at the nape of her neck as he fastened the clasp. When he finished, he turned her around and held her at arm’s length.

“Damn,” he said, gazing at her throat. “I’m good.”

“You are, huh?” Her fingers came up and touched the stones. “You are. And thank you. But I want you to know, when this weekend’s over, you’re taking this back with you.”

“We’ll argue about that some other time.”

He held the car door open for her, smiling as she got in the passenger side. She smiled back, but inside, she was a wreck. Please God, she thought. Please don’t let me like this too much.

Please don’t let me like him too much.

Her gaze tracked him as he went around the front of the car. She forced herself to look down at her feet, clicking the ruby slippers together three times. It’s not real, she told herself. It’s all make-believe. At midnight he’ll turn into a fry cook at McDonald’s. Or his longtime companion will show up. Or he’s got his first wife buried in the backyard.

He got in and started toward the main road. “What?” he asked when she turned to him. “You’re staring at me.”

“Have you ever been married?”

“No. I already told you—”

“Were you and your college roommate close?”

“What—”

“Ever worked in a food service establishment?”

“No. Twyla, what is this about? Why the third degree?”

She flipped down the visor mirror. “Nerves.” The fading daylight glinted off the dazzling necklace. It looked even prettier than it felt against her throat.

“Hey, don’t be nervous. You faced these people every day for twelve years,” he pointed out, annoyingly manlike in his logic. “One more evening won’t kill you.”

She knew there had to be some flaw, somewhere, in his reasoning, but she couldn’t put her finger on exactly where.

“It’s about a ten-minute drive to the Grange Hall,” she said. “Maybe we should rehearse our story one more time.”

He looked straight ahead at the road, grinning. “It’s a great story.”

“A lot of fiction is.”

“Okay, so where do we start? With the ‘Hey, Twyla, what’ve you been up to?’ bit?”

* * *

“WHY, TWYLA MCCABE, what on earth have you been up to?”

Rob tried not to laugh when the woman behind the registration table asked the question.

“I’ve been incredibly busy,” Twyla said, hugging the beaming woman across the table. “You look wonderful, Carol. Let’s have a drink later and compare notes.”

Rob watched her with admiration. She was a natural at meeting and greeting, looking people in the eye with an honest smile. He had no idea why she’d been so apprehensive about coming to this.

Completely at ease, she put her hand lightly on his arm. “Carol, this is my…fiancé, Rob Carter.” Her face glowed with such pride and warmth that it would take a polygraph to know it was false.

He greeted Carol and handed her a credit card. “Robert Carter, M.D.,” she said, giving a low whistle.

Twyla’s name tag showed her senior picture from the yearbook. She had changed very little, he observed, yet the changes were profound. Naïveté had given way to a womanly maturity that only enhanced her looks.

“So far so good,” Twyla whispered as they moved into the main hall. “She’s a huge gossip, and she knows everyone.”

“Your hand is ice-cold,” he commented, rubbing her fingers. To her credit, it was the only symptom of nerves. The rest of her—damn, but he liked the color red—the rest of her would make a blind man see again.

And it was funny—her beauty was so extravagant and over-the-top that he never would have pegged her as his type. Normally he was drawn to understated, elegant women who wore neutral colors and didn’t show every emotion they had on their faces.

But nothing about this situation was normal, he reminded himself. He was a hired escort and she was a woman with something to prove.

So why did it feel as if something more were going on?

A good-size crowd had gathered in the hall, a huge, creaky place with a high-timbered ceiling. The decor consisted of paper lanterns, sports memorabilia and a photo booth against a backdrop of pictures from a decade earlier. There was an open bar and buffet tables lining the walls, tables grouped near the bar area and a big dance floor. A bored-looking DJ played ten-year-old tunes from his booth on the stage.

Rob played his part with ease, a bland social smile fixed on his face and his hand resting, with more pleasure than he should be feeling, at the small of Twyla’s back. Moving up through the ranks in the Denver medical world had trained him well for making small talk and acting interested in complete strangers.

They made the rounds, and each time he felt the muscles of her back tense, he gently massaged her there until she relaxed again. People came and went in a blur: the class clown who had become a pharmacist. The disillusioned three-time divorcée. The weary-looking retired teachers. The gay guy and his partner. The couples who seemed genuinely, enviably happy. Photos of kids, homes, pets and farm equipment changed hands to a chorus of admiring oohs and aahs.

Everyone wore a tag bearing their yearbook picture and a name in bold letters, with maiden names in parentheses. Spouses and dates had a smaller version of the yearbook picture, so people would know who they were with.

Rob observed the proceedings with more interest than he thought he’d feel. He had never been to a class reunion before, filing all the invitations to Lightning Creek in the trash. Now he wondered if he should have attended his tenth, just to check in.

These were people who were building their lives. A reunion was a chance for them to compare notes, to check their progress against those who had started out at the same spot. The measuring was as ruthless as Twyla had warned him it would be, and he was glad she had brought him along for support.

“So where are you from?” asked a short, plump woman with kind eyes and a sizable diamond ring. Her name tag read Agnes (Schwed) Early.

“Denver.”

“That’s nice. I’m so glad for Twyla,” Agnes continued. “Everybody wondered—” She let her voice trail off and took a sip of her punch.

Twyla remained deep in conversation with a guy who couldn’t keep his eyes off her cleavage.

“Everybody wondered what?” he asked.

“Well, you know. After the way things turned out with her marriage and her father practically on the same day…” She took another nervous sip. “I’m just glad she learned to trust a man again.”

The DJ put on an old dance tune and Agnes smiled apologetically. “If you’ll excuse me, I should go bust a move with my better half.”

He was completely intrigued by the hint of Twyla’s past. She had told him a lot of things, but she hadn’t told him everything.

The music switched to a trendy blues tune. Rob took Twyla’s hand. “Sweetheart,” he said to her, playing his role of fiancé with ease, “let’s dance.”

Without apology to the cleavage-gawker, he took her by the hand and led her out to the dance floor. The slow tune enveloped them, and it was no effort to hug her close, to bend and inhale the fragrance of her neck. He had never met a woman so redolent of alluring female scent as Twyla McCabe. She wore perfume, no doubt, but what he smelled was the mysterious alchemy of that scent mingled with her body.

“How’s it going?” he asked, speaking so close to her that when she inadvertently moved her head, his lips grazed her ear. She shivered, and he could feel her quick intake of breath. An answering tightness seized him.

“Sorry.” She spoke directly into his ear, as well. “I forgot what you just said.”

He shook with laughter and hugged her closer still. He laughed a lot with Twyla. More than he did with—

He choked off the thought. “I was asking you how it’s going.”

“Oh! Great,” she said. “Better than great. This turned out to be a lot easier than I thought it would be.”

“You mean you might actually be having a good time?”

She put a hand against his chest and leaned back to look at him. The ruby necklace sparkled in the candlelight. “I am,” she said with a smile that outshone the rubies. “I am.”

The smile and her words hit him like a blow to the solar plexus. He was in trouble. He was in big trouble. He wanted Twyla. Bad.

The thought must have brought a funny look to his face.

“I guess this must be pretty awful for you,” she said sympathetically.

Awful? Falling for Twyla? It was a disaster.

“I get to dance with you.” He pulled her closer.

By ten o’clock, she was glowing. The emcee, a woman named Mamie, made announcements about who had done what. She read excerpts from the yearbook that made people squirm, and she told long-buried stories about people who had forgotten how foolish they’d been. But it was all in fun.

“And then,” Mamie said with a dramatic pause, “there’s Twyla McCabe.” She fluttered her notes in Twyla’s direction.

Beside him, Rob felt her stiffen like a lodgepole pine.

“Long time no see, Twyla!” Mamie called, then consulted her notes. “Let’s see, we had French club. Four years, booster club. Two years, cheerleading. Debate society. National honor society…” She rattled off an impressive list. It was the school career of a top-notch student. Rob glanced at Twyla, hoping to see pride in her face. Instead, he saw a look of regret.

As soon as Mamie moved on to her next victim, he grabbed Twyla by the hand and hurried her outside. Under a whitish blaze of stars and moonlight, he faced her. “So what?” he said, surprised to hear anger in his voice. “So what if you didn’t go to college? So what if you don’t have some busy, rat-race career? So what if some jerk used you? You’ve got a great kid and your own business, and you could do a hell of a lot worse than that.”

She lowered her head, and he held his breath. Don’t cry, damn it, he thought. He just wasn’t good with weepers. She’d nearly slain him this morning with her crying. He couldn’t take it another time.

When she lifted her face to the light, she was smiling. “You left out one thing.”

Rob stifled an explosive sigh of relief. Without even thinking about it, he drew her close, liking the way she felt next to him. “What’s that?”

“I’m marrying a handsome doctor.”

The moment froze and crystallized in his mind. Were they still pretending, or was this real? The growing intimacy between them was definitely real, as tangible as the starry sparkle of the ruby necklace around her throat. As substantial as his physical reaction to her nearness.

He eased away from her. “Then you have nothing to worry about, ma’am. Now, can we go get a beer?”

She seemed a lot more relaxed when they went back inside. If anyone had told him he’d actually have fun going to a strange town for a high school reunion, he would have thought they were crazy. Yet after Twyla survived her moment of crisis, she made it fun. He liked the way she put her head back to laugh, the way eyes followed her through the crowded room.

Watching her animated face, Rob felt a rush reminiscent of the feeling he got from nailing a tricky diagnosis. He had made her happy. And it occurred to him that it was a rare thing in his life. It further occurred to him that the way he made Lauren happy was an entirely different process.

“You’re a lucky man,” someone said.

Dominic Hunt, Rob read on his name tag. “I feel pretty lucky.”

“Didn’t expect to see her here,” Dominic said, rocking back on his heels.

“Why is everyone so surprised to see Twyla?”

Dominic studied his feet. “You don’t come back after your father kills himself for the money.”

With that one sentence, the world turned to ice. Suddenly things came into sharp focus. If it was true, or if people even thought it was true, then it explained so much about Twyla.

Rob felt as if someone had ripped away a veil and he could see Twyla clearly now—daughter of the town failure. The shame was sunk deep into the center of her. He could only imagine the courage it had taken her to come back.

“She’s got nothing to be ashamed of,” he snapped.

“‘Course not. You can’t help who you’re related to, can you?”

“Not unless you’re related to no one at all.”

Dominic frowned, not understanding, and moved on. Rob felt a stab of guilt. They all spoke to him as if he knew the intimate details of her life—as if he had a lover’s right to them.

It’s none of your business, he told himself as he crossed the room to rejoin Twyla. She introduced him to a teacher and to the class treasurer, but he barely listened. She offered him another beer, but he shook his head no. What he wanted, whether or not it was wise, was to know just what had happened with her father, why he’d killed himself and why it made her reluctant to return to this town. She clearly had no inkling of his thoughts as she talked to friends and acquaintances, and he couldn’t let on that he knew.

His hands were quicker than his brain as they slid to either side of her waist and drew her back against him. She caught her breath but didn’t move away. Bending his head—that fragrant neck again—he said, “Feel like dancing some more?”

With cold self-contempt, he knew exactly why he wanted to dance with her. It was the only way he could legitimately touch her. And Lord, he wanted to touch her.

“Excuse us,” she said to the teacher and the class treasurer. Then she turned in his arms, smiling up at him. “You’re being an awfully good sport about this.”

“Am I?”

“Uh-huh. I don’t think anyone could ever guess it’s a mercy date.”

It’s not.

He hoped he wouldn’t break out into a sweat as he held her in his arms. The song was a vintage tango, the rhythm cool and slow. Twyla swayed against him, a good dancer, having fun in her ruby slippers. Halfway through the song, he lowered his head and whispered to her, “Let’s try a dip.”

“Right. You have no idea how to do that.”

“The hell I don’t. Ballroom dancing was a PE requirement at Lost Springs.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Scout’s honor. The Duncans were big on teaching us the social graces. Wanted to prepare us for anything life throws at us. I took dancing between karate and calf roping. What do you say?”

“You’ll drop me on my behind.”

“I can’t believe you don’t trust me. Listen. Here it comes.”

“Here what comes?”

“The dip music. It’s made for this kind of move. Ready?”

“No.”

“Too bad.” Rob hoped memory would serve him correctly as the music slid dramatically to a high chord. Holding a forearm against the back of her waist, he planted his foot and leaned swiftly downward.

Startled, she gripped his shoulders and gave a little cry, though no one but him could hear it over the music. But she shouldn’t have worried. The move worked out perfectly, and the feel of her in his arms was unexpectedly gratifying. She was laughing by the time he brought her upright and swung her around.

“Very funny, Valentino,” she said.

“See? You should have trusted me.”

“I should have—” She stopped so suddenly he thought she was choking on something. She stood frozen on the dance floor, her stare fixed at some point over his shoulder, her face a stiff, white mask.

Rob steered her by the elbow to the sidelines. Following her gaze, he spotted a couple he had not seen earlier. They appeared in a dazzle of light from the foyer, a tall man and a slender woman, both of them extravagantly dressed and good-looking. Even before they made it all the way into the room, people flocked around them, hands waving in greeting, mouths smiling and speaking animatedly. The woman’s jewelry shimmered with an expensive gleam, and the man’s smile was practiced, sharp and sincere.

Twyla watched it all with the stiff-lipped shock he recalled seeing on patients when he had done his emergency medicine rotation.

“Don’t tell me,” Rob said to her. “Let me guess. Your ex-husband.”